Pilgrimage

Pilgrimages have been going on for a long time in the Western World, ever since, what’s her name, Helena, the mother of the Roman emperor Constantine set the style in AD 330. Later a nice nun named, Ethrea wrote a diary of her pilgrimage in the fourth century and described a system of guides, guidebooks and guesthouses for pilgrims. Pilgrims were also advised to travel in groups with armed escorts. It was hazardous business being a pilgrim then. By the thirteenth century they were considered penances for wrong doing, or an occasion to visit a holy shrine for fun and frolic or a serious life long profession. Pilgrimages also were an opportunity to make money.

In the Middle Ages, amidst the left-overs of The Holy Roman Empire, known as the feudal period, the average pilgrim was a common sight on the road.

Then a guy named Urban II, the Pope of the Catholic Church, got the idea of turning pilgrimages into Christian Military Expeditions called Crusades, which had very little to do with Christianity and a lot to do with economy. Closer to the past ‘reality’ of Christianity and Peter’s interpretation of his apprenticeship with Jesus of Jerusalem, was Basil of Caesarea (c. 330-379) during his ascetic phase in 356 in search of philosophical exemplers.ie., seeking answers to life now, not here after, now after or the eternally after. Just like the Greeks beginning in the 6th century BC.

But Urb, baby, had the knack of turning a Biblical messenger of peace and symbol of sacrifice, a Dove and a Lamb, into a Hawk and a Soldier of Christ. Amen into murder and mayhem. How did he do it? Urban II changed the ‘cause’. Now causation and causes are not covered in the Pilgrim’s Handbook, but inevitably every pilgrim runs or walks or stumbles onto them.

These particular pilgrimages or crusades was rule number 9, put your affairs in order in case you don’t come back. Soldiers of Christ either didn’t come back or if they did they often found everything that they had left behind gone or confiscated. The other change was that they didn’t come back soldiers but converted pilgrims.

Now, I could relate this period to you quoted from ten or twenty scholarly secondary sources but I would prefer to give you my first hand experience of the Knights of the Cross form the 11th to 12th centuries in an allegory.

As I recall, it hurt. I was pretty uncomfortable encased in metal and in pain for several hundred years. I was later reminded of Urban II’s Crusades during the Vietnamese Crusade. Same feeling and the same out come, costing a lot of human lives and damage, like my first Vietnamese girlfriend.

I was aquatinted with Pope Urban the Second, a second rate intellect in an age of first rate thinkers. He was a good salesman. He was fat. A bit jowly with reddish cheeks and an alcoholic addicted to the bottom line of the Church’s coffers. He had these cliche’, shrew looking, little un-piggy eyes and a real hunger.

Some people thought he was a real visionary, but he masturbated a lot when he didn’t have an alterboy at hand. Sacra-religious stuff, but the Church was pretty decadent in 1075. Urban II launched the first Crusade in a public speech at the Council of Clairmont, France, nine days after my 19th birthday on November 27th, with the slogan, ‘`Deus vult!’, ( God wills it!) Good copy. Hard to argue with and definitely a call to action if you were a Christian and had money problems. Imagine all that loot just waiting to be liberated in the East.

I also new Peter, The Hermit. He wasn’t a hermit at all, he rode all over the place recruiting peasants and was just another guy without a purpose in life until Urban fired him up along with Walter, the penniless. Walter wasn’t penniless either, both guys were pretty good sinners and needed money. Urban promised to wipe their ecclesiastical records clean and a fat bonus if they led the first lot of idiots to their slaughter. Which they did like good Christians and bagged a few Jews along the way until their karma, which they never heard of, caught up with them in Anatolia and the good Muslims delivered Islamic justice on the spot. No one returned. The good news was that there were no pilgrims amongst them, hims or hers, because every good pilgrim knows rule number eight. ‘ Always travel alone or with other pilgrims.’


By the third Crusade, 1188-92, Sultan Saladin had a monopoly on Palestine, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt. Richard I of England got the historical glory, Frederick I drowned in Cilicia, only Acre was captured, Philip returned to France and Richard took a few more hills. After the Children’s Crusade, and by the eighth crusade in 1270, it was getting more and more unprofitable to Crusade, so the old notion of peace returned.

Where did I come in? I never really left for long at any one time for over five hundred years. I kept getting called back. Blame my karmic resume’. In fact I really haven’t had a good vacation from this dimension since I screwed with Amenhotep III’s wife, Neph, and started the whole One god RA business in Egypt. I’m still spirit non grata in northern Africa and persona non grata in Mexico, Germany and Singapore. I think its time to go back to China where this all started.

My problem is girls. Particularly Eastern girls. It still is and I don’t mean New York or Chelsea. It started in China. So did this handbook. I have contributed to several under different names, times and titles, The Tao Teh Ching, Bhagavadgita, I Ching, The Bible, Teachings of Buddha, Book of the Dead and a few cave painting texts. It’s a habitual thing. I had nothing to do with the Koran, that was an independents’ work.

The cock calls, the Hens come and I get in trouble for centuries, even millennia. During the Crusades I was working off a little Karmic penance for about five hundred years with a few coffee breaks in Japan, the British Colonies in The Americas, and in SE Asia. I’m always involved in the same messy warring business, only the weapons change , swords to microchips.

Anyway, on the third Crusade in 1188, I met up with a fellow future pilgrim named Saladin. We shared the same sword occupation occupying other peoples’ occupancy. This time we were on opposite sides both occupying Miss Fahtiah’s territory which was sacred ground and breaking the Pilgrim’s Handbook’s tenth rule, ‘ Practice safe sex.’

Fahtiah ben Amad was a Northern Yemenese woman of exceptional sexual talents and appetites. Our meeting was an accident of double booking, actually triple, because Fahtiah was in her bedchamber making it with a woman named Lylla, and Saladin and I were waiting it out together sitting on silk cushions in Fahtiah’s waiting room. The waiting room was decorated in the latest Baghdad post-neo Damascus Decor with abstract florals and too many colors. I couldn’t miss he was a Muslim and my red cross on my tunic was a dead give away. I said, Asalam Alechem and he replied, Pax be on to you.

A good opening, normally we’d be hacking away at each other, but we were on Fahtiah’s sacred grounds and to start fighting would result in losing Fahtiah’s favors, which were worth a thousand and one nights.

We talked shop and the art of swordsmanship. One of Fahtiah’s slaves served us coffee and we exchanged our personal reason for being addicted to Fahtiah. Saladin turned out to be a very chivalrous gentleman and even had sent a horse out to Richard when his was shot from under him by a Saracen arrow during last week’s battle which Saladin had lost inspite of overwhelming numbers to Richard’s tactics. Eventually we both came to the agreement that this present business interfered with enjoying life and not to do each other in on the battlefield until we were the only ones left and we would negotiate a peace that would allow the pilgrims to come back and visit Jerusalem. After all, it was really the Ottoman Turks who started this shit in the first place by molesting honest pilgrims.

The Crusades were primarily motivated by greed and economics anyway and the Turk Toughs roughing up a few pilgrims were a good excuse. A familiar story. Regardless of the currency, barter, geographic and human capital some closet King always wants to get more and rule the world. An impossible notion, but ignorance thrives on ignorance, and idiots keep on trying to own patches of earth and the people that live there. The Internet would change all that in a thousand years. But then, as now, countries are currencies in men’s minds. They don’t exist except for force of arms, inspite of all the maps, boundaries, ideas and ideologies that have been created to delude the average and exceptional in serving their systems, causes, and laying down their lives for someone’s collective delusion over the illusion of the world and gain. Few wars are really about good versus evil.

That’s why I was rather less than enthusiastic about wearing chainmesh and armour which totaled over a third of my body weight and trying to stay alive in Pope Innocents recent war on the infidels. The relevance of all this to the pilgrim is avoid someone else’s causes, even your own.

Relevance is what pilgrimages are all about.