Analyzing the Pagan Pilgrimage Narrative

By Wayne Keysor, originally published in Oak Leaves #90

The figure of the religious traveler has been a recurring image within the western literary tradition. Assigned the distinctive title of pilgrim, this figure has walked, ridden, or sailed across the pages of countless works of literature, history, philosophy, and travel writing. The ubiquity of this figure and the pilgrim’s liminal status as simultaneously a societal insider and outsider has challenged scholars to attempt to understand the nature and significance of pilgrimage within multiple disciplines. This study has primarily focused on what has become the paradigmatic example of the pilgrim in the West, the Christian pilgrim traveling to Christian religious sites, particularly the Holy Land. However, some recent scholarly work has been done also on non- Christian traditions, both ancient and modern.

This paper will build on both streams of inquiry to analyze an important, but idiosyncratic, Pagan pilgrimage account from the period of the Roman high empire, the account of the second century Greek rhetorician Aelius Aristides. By examining this narrative, this paper will illuminate certain aspects of sacred place in Greco-Roman Paganism and argue that the Pagan pilgrimage can be understood through Mircea Eliade’s concept of a movement towards a sacred center. Eliade’s view posits a consistent pre-modern view about how the sacred interacts with the mundane world, and argues that this view depends on deeply held assumptions arising from pre-historic religious thought.

Pilgrimage scholar Jas Elsner characterizes recent work on the subject as falling within three distinctive and often conflicting outlooks: the historical, the anthropological, and the theological. The historical outlook tends to see pilgrimage as a recognizable, bounded phenomenon that is susceptible to analysis on the individual scale. Historians attempt to explore the precise characteristics of particular examples of pilgrimage in order to reconstruct the historical moment. Anthropologists, on the other hand, attempt to analyze pilgrimage as an expression of social processes, such as the formation of group identity or the operations of the state. As Elsner observes, this approach tends almost to “dissolve” the phenomenon of pilgrimage into its social, political, and cultural contexts; thus, effectively dismantling it as a useful category. Finally, contrary to the approaches of the two other groups, theologians tend to see pilgrimage from the inside of religious experience, and usually from within a particular faith tradition.1

The approach taken by this paper will be to attempt to combine the best features of both the historical and the theological viewpoints. It will take seriously the notion that at the heart of pilgrimage is an individual, religious experience, while attempting not to work from within any particular religious tradition. To discount the spiritual dimension is to impoverish our understanding of pilgrimage and to ignore fundamental aspects of human experience. At the same time, this individual, religious experience occurs at a distinct time and place and is characterized by unique attitudes and beliefs. To ignore this reality would be to fall into a-historical error. An appreciation of both viewpoints is required.

Therefore, this paper will begin by positioning Aristides in time and place and briefly introducing his signature work, The Sacred Tales. Publius Aelius Aristides was born in 118 CE in Asia Minor. He was the son of a provincial elite, and based on his aristocratic birth was able to obtain the best education available within his society. His life coincided with the height of the Roman Empire; an empire internally at peace and prosperous.

Intellectually, he participated in the second century movement known as the second sophistic; a period where educated Greek and Roman elites sought to revive earlier classical forms of language and literature, while simultaneously cultivating a scholarly interest in the past.2 Aristides achieved considerable fame in his lifetime as an orator, even declaiming in front of the emperor, a singular honor in the highly hierarchical Greco-Roman society of his age. Juxtaposed against this worldly success, however, was Aristides’ life-long struggle against chronic illness that left him in agony for years on end and rendered him unable to participate in public life.3

In an effort to find relief from his repeated bouts of serious illness, he turned to the physician-savior god Asclepius, who had an important temple center in Roman Asia at the city of Pergamum. Aristides’ devotion resulted in a series of profound dreams and waking visions in which Asclepius appeared to him, and provided a series of cures and encouragements. In gratitude for the god’s aid, Aristides penned a very personal, highly idiosyncratic work he titled The Sacred Tales, in which he records the actions of the god in his life over a 26-year period, from 143 to 171 CE, in order to thank and glorify Asclepius.4 This account provides extensive detail on Aristides’ journeys to Asclepius’ cult centers and his physical, emotional, and spiritual responses to them.

PILGRIMAGE AND ARCHAIC ONTOLOGIES 

It is helpful in examining The Sacred Tales to have a structure with which to investigate the underlying elements of Pagan pilgrimage. To provide the theoretical basis to do this, this paper will employ the work of the historian of religion Mircea Eliade. Eliade provides a cross-cultural reading of pre-modern theology that provides a useful vocabulary with which to discuss experiences within different religious traditions in a comparative way.

Eliade argues that pre-modern societies viewed time and history as cyclical. Humans participated in history by engaging in behavior designed to imitate original sacred acts that occurred in mythic time, whether they be the creation of the cosmos or the introduction of important cultural practices or social structures. Effectively, all significant human acts were imitative. Reality was a function of the imitation of celestial archetypes or patterns. These celestial paradigms were reproduced in earthly ways in the construction of temples, palaces, or cities, or assigned to preexisting natural features like mountains or rivers.5

He called these sacred places “centers of the world,” by which Eliade meant that within a cultural and religious context, they symbolize most completely the celestial paradigm from which they derive their meaning. They are considered the “center of the world” because it is at these places that humans once again experience mythic time and space. From the perspective of the believers, these are “zones of absolute reality”, sites where the sacred has created a rupture into the profane world and has permanently set it apart. These places take part in a reality greater than the apparent or profane reality. They embody most completely the perennial, celestial pattern and because of this, they are more intensely real in a Platonic sense.6 This additional ontological weight within these zones of absolute reality make the miraculous possible. Such sacred centers, in the words of Eliade, are consecrated,

“…in a space qualitatively different from profane space. Through the paradox of rite, every consecrated space coincides with the center of the world, just as the time of any ritual coincides with the mythical time of the ‘beginning’. Through representation of the cosmogonic act, concrete time, in which the construction takes place, is projected into mythical time, in ille tempore when foundation of the world occurred. Thus the reality and enduringness of a construction are assured not only by the transformation of profane space into transcendent space (the center) but also by the transformation of concrete time into mythical time.”7

In ille tempore refers back to the time when the ritual was first practiced by a god, ancestor, or culture hero, and which is now being repeated by the contemporary human. Applied to the concept of pilgrimage, these ideas suggest that a pilgrimage is a journey to a center of the world in which the pilgrim travels from the profane towards the sacred, simultaneously recreating and taking part in the original sacred act that sanctified the pilgrimage site. Eliade characterizes such a journey in this way:

“The road is arduous, fraught with perils, because it is, in fact, a rite of passage from the profane to the sacred, from the ephemeral and illusory to reality and eternity, from death to life, from man to divinity. Attaining the center is equivalent to a consecration, an initiation; yesterday’s profane and illusory existence gives place to a new [sic], to a life that is real, enduring, and effective.”8

The rituals in which the pilgrim engages on the way to the sacred center and the practices he undertakes upon arriving have meaning because they partake in and imitate the original sacred act, drawing on that first act for their power. Seen from this perspective, the driving impulse towards pilgrimage arises from the desire to experience the sacred in its most concentrated and real form, which can only happen at a center of the world.

This religious impulse also can be manifested in a diminished form, experienced as the desire simply to witness the miraculous or the wondrous at a pilgrimage site. However, beneath this tourist impulse lies a tacit recognition, perhaps not coherently expressed, that the sacred center is a place where the wondrous might occur precisely because it partakes of this original divine energy in such a privileged way.9

AELIUS ARISTIDES: SACRED GEOGRAPHY AND MYTHIC NARRATIVE

To begin to apply these concepts to the pilgrimages of Aristides, both the parameters of Aristides’ individual pilgrimages and a broader sense of Greco-Roman Pagan pilgrimage must first be established. One essential fact about Aristides’ pilgrimages that must be immediately grappled with is their inherently local character. This local character can be jarring if one immediately thinks of the Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land or the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca as the paradigmatic examples of pilgrimage. For most pre-modern people taking a pilgrimage to Jerusalem or Mecca, such trips were massive investments in time and impressive logistical problems. Aristides, on the other hand, limited his religious activities to essentially his home province, the Roman province of Asia, which was situated in today’s western Turkey, giving them a whole other quality.

Aristides was born in northwest Asia Minor, in Mysia, on ancestral estates situated in the tribal region of the Olympeni.10 While he did travel outside of the Province of Asia, most notably to Egypt, Rome, and Athens, he retained these ancestral estates throughout his life and eventually died there. He spent most of his life in Roman Asia, splitting his time between the Smyrna, of which he was a citizen; Pergamum; and his family estates in Mysia. It was at the temple of Asclepius at Pergamum that he was to have his most profound religious experiences, which deeply affected his entire life. Roman Asia during Aristides’ life was one of the wealthiest, most urbanized, most densely populated provinces in the empire. It hosted several internationally known Pagan shrines, as well as innumerable regional and local shrines.

In this, Roman Asia was not unique. The Greco-Roman world was filled with Pagan religious shrines of every sort, from the strictly local to the internationally famous and everything in between.11 Ted Kaizer, in his work on Near Eastern shrines in the Greco-Roman world, comments on this diversity by noting that recent work suggests that the empire as a whole lacked, “an articulated religious system that integrated both ritual and belief.” For Kaizer and others, this explains why the Romans “were apparently quite content to accept that things worked differently in cult from how they did in myth even if that meant that a god could simultaneously be multiple and singular, local and universal.”12 This willingness to embrace the local within Greco-Roman Paganism, at the cost of some narrative coherence within myth, meant that pilgrimage to holy sites was available to nearly all people, even if only to their local sacred spring.

This diversity and the local character of shrines was built on certain theological assumptions. From the perspective of Greco-Roman Paganism, the qualities of shrines varied not in kind, but rather in magnitude, in a way that is not the case for the monotheistic religions of Christianity or Islam. Jerusalem or Mecca as sacred places are qualitatively different in character for Christians or Muslims than other Christian or Islamic sacred places. In Greco-Roman Paganism, some shrines might host more powerful gods or spirits than others, some might be older, or have more miracles to their record, but they were all essentially of the same character, just more or less.

Based on modern, anthropological research, J.J. Preston argues that four variables govern the prominence of a shrine: the appearance of divine beings, miraculous cures, sacred geography, and difficulty of access; variables whose cumulative affect he characterizes as spiritual magnetism.13 Preston’s selection of sacred geography as a key element of spiritual magnetism is important to highlight in the context of Greco-Roman Pagan pilgrimage because it is easy in the West, at a time when the sacred tends to be localized in a few discrete places, to underestimate the ubiquity of sacred geography in Greco-Roman Paganism.

Each city had its own tutelary deity who watched over it. Each had its own divine spirit embodying the life of the polis; the genius of the city in Roman terms.14 These gods and spirits were taken so seriously by the Romans that:

“Before the sack of a city, the numina are called forth from the enemy out of respect for religious scruple. That is why the Romans wished to keep secret the identity of that god in whose protection lays the city of Rome. Thus pontifical law forbids anyone from naming the Dii Romani, lest anyone should augur them away. And there is on the Capitol a consecrated shield, on which the inscription runs, ‘To the Genius of the City of Rome, whether male or female.’ And for the same reason, the pontifices pray, ‘Jupiter Optimus Maximus, or by whatever other name you wish to be called.’ ”15

Additionally, there were multiple spaces dedicated to the gods inside cities; cult centers of all sizes from the monumental to the strictly domestic. From the Roman perspective, these cult centers were properties that had been transferred literally from human ownership to the ownership of the gods. Outside of urban centers, there were numerous natural places that were considered claimed by the gods who dwelled within them. These included groves, caverns, pools, springs, and locations struck by lightning. Finally, tombs and burial grounds were also considered sacred.16

Each sacred site, whether city, temple, or grove, had its own mythic history and its own ritual order that celebrated and referred back to this history. Each history, while loosely tied into the larger structure of Greco-Roman myth, remained largely independent and as previously noted was not part of a completely coherent narrative as might be expected in the monotheistic, textual religions of Christianity or Islam. Greco-Roman Paganism developed as a religion of independent city states and continued that tradition long after Rome had transformed the political order.

Such a diversity of sacred places meant that pilgrimage as a concept was readily available to almost everyone, regardless of social or economic status, and underlines Eliade’s argument that in pre-modern, pre-Christian traditions, sacred centers of the world were multiple and represented places where the sacred has entered the profane world and marked it through the act of some ancestor, hero, or god, a figure often associated only with local traditions.

This diversity is evidenced by Aristides himself, who in spite of the importance that Asclepius’ temple at Pergamum had in his spiritual life, also conducted pilgrimage activities in the cities of Smyrna, Elaea, Caicus, Aliani, Chius, Aesepus, and Epidaurus.17 Additionally, in spite of his obvious and genuine devotion to Asclepius, he also dedicated offerings to other gods at other sanctuaries. These included Athena, Apollo, Zeus, and the Greco-Egyptian gods Isis and Sarapis, causing Behr to characterize Aristides as an eclectic Pagan.18 Based on this pattern, it is evident that Aristides was more than willing to participate in this expansive local diversity that was available to the Greco-Roman Pagan pilgrim of the time.

Having established the essentially local nature of Greco-Roman Paganism, it is now important to understand how the sacred geography of these local cult centers was created and in what manner it was experienced by pilgrims. Eade and Sallnow suggest that the pilgrimage practices of Christianity, and possibly all scriptural religions, “can be examined as combining co-ordinates of ‘persons,’ ‘texts,’ and ‘places.’”19 Coleman and Elsner, however, point out that these elements are present in many other forms of ritual and emphasize that what Eade and Sallnow’s coordinates do not include is the element of movement, a vital component of the pilgrimage experience.20 This paper will argue that for non-scriptural religions, the term “texts” might be replaced with the more general term, “narratives.” It is the travelers’ movements through and interaction with locations that obtain special significance by being part of a mythic or religious narrative that makes travel a pilgrimage. Mere geography is transformed into sacred geography by the power of these narratives.

Such narratives might be textual in the case of scriptural religions, but for non-scriptural religions, like Greco-Roman Paganism, they take the form of oral traditions; cultural customs, including the pilgrimage rituals themselves; and the visual arts. These narratives demarcate the sacred from the profane by telling a story that defines clearly, in Eliade’s terms, what is the specific center of the world, as opposed to the profane zone around it, how it was separated from the profane, and what the pilgrim might expect from immersing oneself into the unfolding narrative of the place. By performing the pilgrimage and doing the prescribed rituals, the pilgrim becomes part of the larger mythic narrative, placing him or herself in contact with the immensity which inhabits the locale. As Eliade noted, these rituals reproduce or recount the story of the original consecration, and by performing them, the pilgrim attempts to appropriate a share of that power accrued from the original act of the god, ancestor, or culture hero.

For a devotee of Asclepius like Aristides, the narrative of Asclepius is the story of a savior-healing god who is concerned about the well-being of humans and will listen to their pleas for relief. The myth of Asclepius, originally transmitted orally, recounts the story of a human son of Apollo, god of healing and plague, who because of his divine parentage and supernatural training gains the power to heal the sick and raise the dead. After his death, he is resurrected as an immortal and dwells, ever-present, in Asclepian temples answering the prayers of his devotees. 21 Asclepius’ mythic history at major cult centers in Pergamum and Epidaurus created a narrative for the pilgrims traveling to these sites that allowed them to engage emotionally and spiritually with the landscape.

Clifford Ando, in exploring the views of the fifth century Pagan intellectual Macrobius, captures the essence of this Greco-Roman Pagan perspective on the interaction between the narrative of mythic history and sacred geography:

“Mythic history thus concretized the actions of the divine and located them within a material and historical landscape that remained visible and numinous even in the fifth century. The consecration of particular loci by Roman priests thus did no more, and no less, than circumscribe, respect, and order the presence of the holy in the Roman landscape. For Macrobius, the materiality of the landscape did not divorce it from the divine; rather, it was for humans through ritually correct speech and action to understand and respect the divine in the world.”22

This mythic narrative and its connection to the “materiality of the landscape” was further reinforced by the employment of particular rituals and the testimonials of previous pilgrims. These two elements served a didactic function, which intensified the experience of the pilgrim as she moved through the sacred landscape. These two elements can be seen operating at the Temple of Asclepius at Pergamum. A consultation with Asclepius was composed of a series of precisely regulated steps that followed a specific order: abstinence, ritual bathing, payment of a fee, sacrifice, incubation, faith, healing, and thanksgiving.23

This process began with the pilgrim purifying himself by abstaining from sexual activity for three days before the consultation, as well as by not consuming goat’s meat and cheese. On the day of the incubation, the pilgrim was required to be ritually purified by bathing. She was then dressed in white, just as the god dressed in white; a point that underscores Eliade’s argument that the ritual seeks to copy or recreate an original sacred act.24 What happens next is reconstructed by Dillon from a partial inscription, the Lex Sacra, discovered at Pergamum:

“With the consultant dressed in white and wearing a wreath, an animal sacrifice would be made, then cakes decorated with olive sprigs were sacrificed to various gods; the consultant was commanded to put on another wreath when commencing the sacrifice of the cakes. A pig was sacrificed to Asclepius on the altar, and three obols placed into the thesaurus. This procedure must have occurred during the day, for the next injunction is to make sacrifices in the evening, that is immediately prior to incubation. Three cakes decorated as before were sacrificed on the altar: two to Tyche and Mnemosyne, the third to Themis. The incubant then entered the shrine, having abstained from all things previously described in the inscription.”25

The culmination of this entire process of ritual is the incubation wherein the pilgrim sleeps in the incubation chamber inside the temple hoping to receive healing from the god through a dream. Such carefully prescribed rituals tell the story of the relationship between the god and the pilgrims; they prepare the pilgrim emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually to enter sacred space, bringing him or her back to in ille tempore, that mythic time when the god first manifested his power; and they offer the possibility of receiving the benefits of that power.

Beyond the communal rituals of the temple, there were also what might be called personal rituals. These were ritual acts given to the pilgrims to perform by the god directly through incubation. They were intended to affect the cures that the god promised, and Aristides provides a record of some of these often-idiosyncratic rites. Here is one example from 146 CE when he was staying in Pergamum and received direction from the god personally through incubation:

“First having mounted a wagon, to go to the river which flows through the city, and when I was at the place where it is outside the city, to make sacrifices ‘at the trench’ – for so he called them. Therefore it was necessary to dig a trench and make sacrifices in it to whomever of the Gods it was necessary. Next upon turning back to take some small coins, to cross the river and cast them away. And he ordered some things, I think, in addition to this. After this to go to the Temple and make a full sacrifice to Asclepius, and to have sacred bowls set up, and distribute the sacred portions of the sacrifice to all my fellow pilgrims. Also it was necessary to cut off some part of my body for the sake of the well being of the whole. But since this was difficult, he remitted it for me. Instead of this, he ordered me to remove the ring which I wore and dedicate it to Telephorus – for this had the same effect, as if I should give up my finger – and to inscribe on the band of the ring, ‘O son of Cronus.’ And if I did this, I would be saved. After this it is impossible to imagine our condition, and into what kind of harmony the God again brought us. For we engaged in all this, almost as if in an initiation, since there was great hope together with fear.26”

In this account is contained a combination of both the personal and the communal. In the casting of the coins into the river, the digging of a trench for sacrifice outside the city, and the removal of the ring, we see a series of personal rituals. In the direction to go to the temple and make a full sacrifice to Asclepius having the sacred bowls set up and distributing the sacred portions to his fellow pilgrims, we see the communal element.

In other instances, the personal rituals occurred completely outside any communal context. Aristides relates that, “… he commanded me to use the mud by the Sacred Well and to bathe there.” “On the following night, he commanded me again to use the mud in the same way, and to run in a circle about the Temples three times.” Aristides recounts that he followed the god’s commands even in the face of a frigid north wind, “I smeared myself with mud and ran around, and permitted the north wind to card me well and fair, and finally going to the Well, I bathed.” Later that year, Aristides records that the god, “ordered me to take some mud pour it on myself, and sit in the courtyard of the Sacred Gymnasium, calling on Zeus, the highest and best God.”27 Such personal rites are at once the direct expression of the results of the communal rites, the proof that those rites remain powerful and effective, and the vehicle through which the miraculous cures are delivered.

Of particular importance to Asclepieia, was the second method of creating and reinforcing the god’s sacred narrative: the display of healing testimonials or iamata and their accompanying thank-offerings. These were essential because most Asclepieia did not have a rich mythic history as compared to other sacred centers in the Greco-Roman world, having only been established in the fourth and fifth centuries BCE.28 “Whereas myths suggested an initial association of a god with a particular locality, the display of votive offerings asserted his or her continued presence at the sanctuary.”29 Asclepius’ prestige and worship was based precisely on his ability to cure sickness, therefore these testimonials and resulting thanks-offerings were central to his narrative. The thank-offerings of past pilgrims, which were extremely extensive, provided visual and sometimes textual evidence of the “unbroken line of divine manifestation” in the temple.30

The power of religious narrative applied successfully to place can be seen in Aristides account of an incubation he experienced while at the Temple of Asclepius in Pergamum:

“I dreamed that I stood at the propylaea [entrance] of the Temple. And many others were also gathered together, as whenever there is a purificatory ceremony. And they wore white garments, and the rest was of an appropriate form. Here I cried out other things to the God and called him ‘the arbiter of fate,’ since he assigned men their fates. And my words began with my own circumstances. And after this there was wormwood, made clear in some way. It was made clear as possible, just as countless other things clearly contained the presence of the God. For there was a seeming, as it were, to touch him and to perceive that he himself had come, and to be between sleep and waking, and to wish to look up and to be in anguish that he might depart too soon, and to strain ears and to hear some things as in a dream, some as in a waking state. Hair stood straight, and there were tears with joy, and the pride of the heart was inoffensive. And what man could describe these things in words? If any man has been initiated, he knows and understands.” 31

The above passage illustrates beautifully the profound affect that this entire process of narrative, place, and movement could have on a pilgrim. Narrative, in particular, has the ability to intensify the experiences of pilgrims within sacred geography and direct their perceptions and observations. William Hutton, in his discussion of another famous pilgrim from antiquity, Pausanias, notes that travelers tend to select and organize their remembrances based on the subjective perceptions of those places that they visited. Thus a travel account is an “intersection between the physical landscape and the cognitive landscape of personal and cultural preconceptions that reside in the observer’s mind.”32

A traveler tends to make special note of those things toward which he has a predisposition, and these things are better retained in the memory. Such predispositions can be formed even before the traveler experiences the landscape if he is familiar with the landscape from narrative accounts ingested before the actual travel.33

Hutton goes on to suggest that what makes a pilgrim’s account different from that of other types of travelers is that the author’s commitment to her motivating ideology causes a pilgrim’s mental topography to become more tangible and rigid. These narratives allow the pilgrim to map very distinctly cognitive experiences onto religious models and symbols. “Thus pilgrims tend to approach their destinations with deeply held expectations, and their accounts are suffused with the tension between these expectations and their on-site experiences.”34 The power of expectation as well as the resulting tension can be seen in Aristides’ reactions to a pilgrimage to the springs at Aesepus:

“Then we set out, in high spirits, as on a pilgrimage. The weather was marvelous and the road inviting. Poemanenon is a place in Mysia, and in it is a sacred and famous temple of Asclepius. Here we completed about one hundred and sixty stades, and nearly sixty of these at night, as we started when the day was advanced. And about this place we also met with some mud, from earlier rains, which was easy to cross. The journey was made by torch light. Here I was completely consecrated, as it were, and possessed. And I composed many lyrics to the Savior [Asclepius] himself, while I was sitting in the carriage, and many to the Aesepus, the Nymphs, and Artemis Thermaea, who keeps the warm springs, to free me from all my troubles, and return me to my original state.

“When I was at Poemanenon, the God gave me oracles and kept me there for some days, and he purged my upper intestinal tract and not quite for the last time. And a farmer, who did not know me, except by reputation, had a dream. He dreamed that someone said to him that Aristides had vomited up the head of a viper. Having seen this vision, he told one of my people and he told me. So much for this.

“When he sent me to the Aesepus, he ordered me to abstain from the baths there, but he prescribed other regimens every day. And there were purifications at the river by libation, and purgations at home through vomiting. And when three or four days had passed, there was a voice in a dream that it was over and it was necessary to return. It was all not only like an initiation into a mystery, since the rituals were so divine and strange, but there was also coincidentally something marvelous and unaccustomed. For at the same time there was a gladness, and joy and a cheerfulness of spirit and body, and again, as it were an incredulity if it will ever be possible to see the day when one will see himself free from such great troubles, and in addition, a fear that some one of the usual things will again befall and harm one’s hopes about the whole.”35

In Aristides, we see the religious ecstasy of a pilgrim who has a successful encounter with the divine. The landscape through which he moved transported him into a religious experience, which ended with a feeling of “gladness, and joy and a cheerfulness of spirit and body.” His torch-lit journey to the springs, shaped by his raised expectations, is taken in “high spirits” and this optimistic frame causes him to characterize the weather as “marvelous” and the road “inviting.” While on the trip, he receives direct communication from the god through oracles. The personal rituals in which he engages throughout his journey are “divine and strange,” akin to an “initiation into a mystery.” The rituals allow him access to the god’s power by virtue of their connection to the god’s narrative, and Aristides mention of initiation recalls Eliade’s observation that, “attaining the center is equivalent to a consecration, an initiation [italics mine]; yesterday’s profane and illusory existence gives place to a new [sic], to a life that is real, enduring, and effective.”36

Evidence of Hutton’s tension between expectations and on-site experiences is also contained in the account. Based on the sacred narrative in which he takes part, Aristides expects to receive relief from his sickness, and he does, but once cured, he also experiences fear about the continued efficacy of the cure. What happened at the site raises further expectations and creates tensions about whether these new expectations might be realized or disappointed.

CONCLUSION

Aristides’ account gives us a rare glimpse into the inner, spiritual life of an ancient Pagan. Furthermore, his pilgrimage experience illuminates some of the underlying characteristics of Pagan pilgrimage, and gives us insight into the intensely local nature of Pagan pilgrimage in the Greco- Roman world. Through The Sacred Tales, we see the complexity and variability of ancient belief and how it interacted with the physical space through the medium of narrative. Aristides remains a valuable source for modern Pagans in understanding how ancient Pagans conceived of religious space and their relationship to it.

Footnotes:

1. Simon Coleman and Jas Elsner, Pilgrimage Past and Present in World Religions (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), 198- 200.

2. For more on the influence of the second sophistic on Greco-Roman pilgrimage, see Marco Galli, “Pilgrimage as Elite Habitus: Educated Pilgrims in Sacred Landscape During the Second Sophistic,” in Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Antiquity, Jas Elsner and Ian Rutherford, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 253-290.

3. C.A. Behr, Aelius Aristides (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert – Publisher, 1968), 1-14.

4. Ibid., 23.
5. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 4-6. 6. Ibid., 14-17.

7. Ibid., 20-21.
8. Ibid., 18.
9. For a discussion of the relationship between pilgrimage and tourism in the Roman world, see George Williamson, “Mucianus and a Touch of the Miraculous: Pilgrimage and Tourism in Roman Asia Minor” in Pilgrimage in Graeco- Roman and Early Christian Antiquity, Jas Elsner and Ian Rutherford, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 219-252.

10. Behr, 1-3.
11. Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis, “Visual Dynamics in Healing Pilgrimage,” in Pilgrimage in Graeco- Roman and Early Christian Antiquity, Jas Elsner and Ian Rutherford, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 186.

12. Ted Kaizer, “In Search of Oriental Cults. Methodological Problems Concerning ‘the Particular’ and ‘the General’ in Near Eastern Religion in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods,” Historia: Zeitschrift fur Alte Geschichte Bd 55 H. 1 (2006): 39.

13. Ibid., 38-39.
14. Clifford Ando, “The Palladium and the Pentateuch: Towards a Sacred Topography of the Later Roman Empire” Phoenix Vol. 55 No. 3 / 4 (Autumn-Winter 2001): 394-397.

15. Ibid, 400.
16. John Scheid, An Introduction to Roman Religion (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2003), 63-76.
17. Behr, 121-128.
18. Ibid., 148-161.
19. Coleman and Elsner, 202.
20. Ibid, 202-204.
21. James E. Bailey, “Asklepios: Ancient Hero of Medical Caring,” Annals of Internal Medicine Vol. 124 No. 2 (15 January 1996): 259. 22. Ando, 391.

23. M.P.J Dillon, “The Didactic Nature of the Epidaurian Iamata,” Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Bd. 101 (1994): 255.

24. Ibid, 244-247.
25. Ibid., 246.
26. Sacred Tales II 27-29.
27. Sacred Tales II 77.
28. Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis, 187.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 187-188; Dillon, 257-260.
31. Sacred Tales II 31-34.
32. William Hutton, “Religious Space in Pausanius,” in Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Antiquity, in Jas Elsner and Ian Rutherford, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 297-298.33. Ibid., 298.
34. Ibid.
35. Sacred Tales IV 3-8.
36. For a discussion of the nature of Greek mysteries and their psychological and cultural underpinnings, see Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985), 276-278.