Nikola Hollmann was editor-in-chief of a monthly magazine and had always loved her job. But in 2017, her colleague and best friend Barbara died. In addition to the shock and deep grief over the loss of the loved one, there were now also problems at work. After almost 20 years of good cooperation with the management, Hollmann suddenly felt hostile and bullied. In this crisis, the 50-year-old decided to take a drastic step: she quit her job, packed her backpack and went on pilgrimage. "I just felt like I had to get going," she recalls. »I had to empty myself before I knew how my life would continue.«
Like Nikola Hollmann, hundreds of thousands of people leave their home for a while to go on a long, arduous pilgrimage path with a minimum of luggage. While the ecclesiastical bond is rapidly waning among the population and the services are becoming increasingly empty, the ancient religious practice of pilgrimage is experiencing a renaissance.
This is most visible on the Camino de Santiago to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Already in the 1990s, the number of pilgrims there increased continuously. When the entertainer Hape Kerkeling reported on his pilgrimage in a book in 2006 ("Ich bin dann mal weg"), the Way of St. James became the scene of a mass spiritual movement. In 2019, a record of almost 270,000 officially registered pilgrims was recorded.
In addition to a network of St. James routes that run through the whole of Europe and end in Santiago, other pilgrimage routes are also becoming increasingly popular in Europe, such as the Olav Route from Oslo to Trondheim or the St. Francis Route, which leads through Tuscany and Umbria to Rome. In addition, new pilgrimage routes are being created everywhere, such as the one from Loccum in Lower Saxony to Volkenroda in Thuringia, which was officially opened by the Evangelical Church of Germany in 2005.
The seven types of pilgrimage
How is this to be explained? In order to investigate this, the sociologist Christian Kurrat laced the hiking boots himself in 2010. He conducted fieldwork on the Spanish Way of St. James about the biographical significance of the pilgrimage and reported about it in a book in 2015. He found his test persons along the way, in the hostels between Pamplona and Finisterre, where he addressed pilgrims at the reception or had the hostel parents arrange for guests. He interviewed them using the "narrative interview" method, which encourages the respondents to tell their life story on the fly.
Based on the interviews with 24 international pilgrims between the ages of 24 and 93, a spa created a "pilgrimage typology". He distinguishes seven guys: "Pilgrims balance their lives, process a crisis, take a break, make a transition between two phases of life, initiate a restart, pilgrimage for someone or interpret pilgrimage as a calling." As a central result of his study, the sociologist is determined: "Pilgrims is a kind of status passage that is founded in the old social environment and is exerted for a new environment."
For Nikola Hollmann, her pilgrimage also became such a status passage. For a while she also considered walking on the Way of St. James, "but it was too crowded and organized for me". She preferred to go alone and on more unknown paths. So she decided on the long-distance hiking trail from Salzburg to Trieste, which leads over the Alps for 375 kilometers. Although this path is not specifically advertised for this purpose, she designed this hike as a pilgrimage.
According to the theologian Hollmann, the difference between hiking and pilgrimage is not in the track, but in the attitude: »The pilgrimage is not so much about proving yourself physically, but about dealing with yourself and also about experiences of God in the Nature, ”she says. "This is spiritual, I do not need churches for this." However, the boundaries between pilgrims and hiking are fluid, because the spiritual experience of nature and the confrontation with themselves often occurred in long long -distance hikes, "so when people are on a certain route alone for at least two weeks.
For the religious psychologist Michael Utsch of the Evangelische Zentralstelle für Weltanschauungsfragen, the pilgrim movement is a "new social form of the religious" and a sign of the rediscovery of spirituality in postmodern society. You don't want to hear wordy religious explanations from the pulpit, but you want to make your own, even very physical experiences," he says. The pilgrimage movement is only one of the signs of the change "from a cognitive to an experiential spirituality". And at a time when physical fitness is considered almost a panacea for all physical and mental illnesses, pilgrimage also has a reputation in non-religious circles. Thus, pilgrimage becomes an unsuspicious and socially recognized form of modern spiritual practice.
Nikola Hollmann stayed in mountain huts, inns and small boarding houses. At first she still had pain in her feet, but the longer she walked, the more her body adjusted to the new way of life. "When you walk alone, the body finds its own rhythm by itself," she describes her experience. "I felt that I became a part of nature, which also comforts me. When walking for a long time, a harmonization of body, mind and soul can occur. And at some point I realized: Now I'm at peace with myself again.«
In view of such experiences, it is obvious to attribute a healing effect to the pilgrims in life crises. In pilgrimage forums, the demand for the costs of the costs of the costs. "However, it is too early to speak of a therapeutic effect of the pilgrimage," says psychologist Tatjana Schnell, who teaches as a professor at the University of Innsbruck and at the MF Specialized University in Oslo. "Research is not that far yet."
Pilgrims means to get involved in a transformation
The fact that psychology has so far hardly dealt with the mass phenomenon could be due to a traditional fear of contact with religious topics. When Tatjana Schnell began establishing "empirical meaning" research within psychology two decades ago, she was warned that this could jeopardize her scientific credibility and career. In the meantime, empirical research on meaning has been internationally recognized.
Schnell conducted the first longitudinal psychological study on pilgrimage together with her student Sarah Pali at her institute in Innsbruck. Via pilgrim forums on social media, they recruited 85 aspiring pilgrims between the ages of 17 and 70 and interviewed them beforehand, immediately afterwards and four months after their return home. On average, they had walked 646 kilometers on the Way of St. James to Santiago.
Before the pilgrimage started, more than half described itself as little or no religious. "But even if I am not religious, I have the opportunity to deliberately go into a religious ritual," explains Tatjana Schnell, "as a tried and tested form that is always there and which I can leave." The difference to one In the willingness of the pilgrims, she recognizes hiking tour to get involved in an inner transformation: "I am ready that something else happens to me in this way."
The results of their longitudinal study suggest that this transformation is indeed occurring. 59 percent of respondents stated that they had gained clarity about themselves on the Camino de Santiago. "The main effect of the pilgrimage was the fulfillment of meaning," says Schnell. This occurs when people can experience their lives as "coherent, meaningful, oriented and belonging". After the pilgrims returned home, this experience of meaning diminished significantly, but was still far above the level they had stated before the pilgrimage. This effect was particularly evident among the seven percent of respondents who were in a full-blown crisis of meaning before the start of the journey and felt depressed or anxious, sometimes even had suicidal thoughts. After the pilgrimage, they all stated that they had come out of the crisis of meaning.
The psychologist Tatjana Schnell sees a perfect example of a transitional rite in the pilgrimage. It stretches over three phases: threshold, purification, integration. In the threshold phase, the pilgrims separated from their apartments, their chic clothes and their cars and equipped themselves with hiking shoes, backpack and staff as a pilgrim: "You put on a different identity." On the way, the purification is carried out: under There is no social hierarchy for the pilgrims, so that they often have existential conversations and could detach themselves from their social status. This is followed by the integration phase. "At the end of this transition rite, people have the experience: I am a different person!"
The rite of passage is initiated during the pilgrimage mainly by "stimulus deprivation", says Schnell. In the monotony of walking, attention turns more inward. As a result, difficult memories and unresolved conflicts could come up and be gradually processed. Schnell suspects that in addition to the relative irritation deprivation, physical activity and the permanent opposite movement of both halves of the body could also help to process conflicts. But there is still no scientific evidence for this either. "That would be the next thing we would have to investigate," says the psychologist.
One should not expect that the pilgrimage will bring a great knowledge, says the pilgrim Nikola Hollmann. "But the experience that despite all the uncertainties have reached the goal, something like a new flexibility and fearlessness can do." After her return, she decided not to work again as an editor. Although she always tried for financial security beforehand, she was now able to imagine working freelancers for the first time. So she soon grabbed her backpack again, explored various paths through Germany and wrote several hiking and pilgrimage drivers.
Together with a colleague, Nikola Hollmann is now organizing long-distance and pilgrimage hikes for groups. She not only sets the route, but also accompanies the participants as a theologian and coach in their personal development. In the meantime, she has developed a pilgrimage route for women, the Irmengardweg. It follows the life path of the medieval saint Irmengard over 350 kilometers from Bad Buchau to Lake Chiemsee.
