Pagan Pilgrimage: New Religious Movements Research on Sacred Travel within Pagan and New Age Communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Burgeoning literature on sacred travel among contemporary Pagan and New Age communities draws on previous anthropological categories, but also offers new perspectives on important theoretical debates within pilgrimage studies. New religious movements’ adherents often travel for spiritual purposes to places traditionally held as sacred by other, more established religious traditions or to places popularly understood as secular tourist sites. This offers opportunities to think through theoretical debates in the field, including distinctions between tourists and pilgrims, and whether the pilgrimage experience is one mainly comprised of shared feelings of togetherness and community, or alternatively, one fraught with competition to define the ultimate meaning of the journey. C ommunitas theories, based on Victor Turner and Edith Turner’s argument that pilgrimage creates community and cooperation among fellow religious travelers, contrast with conflict theories, first offered by John Eade and Michael Sallnow, who argue that pilgrimages are grounded in competing discourses, both among pilgrims and between them and institutional religious authorities. By defining spaces in new ways and offering alternative explanations for the sacredness of particular sites, religiously motivated Pagan and New Age travelers highlight the contention, emphasized by ethnographers of more traditional sacred travel, that pilgrimages are the sites of contested meanings, in which not only different theological interpretations and values, but even different religions and cosmologies, coexist.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".