Traveling is not simply going from place A to place B. Moving has been part of human nature from the very beginning, as Bruce Chatwin explained to us in “Le vie dei canti”. However, from a certain moment on, men and women felt they also had to rationally justify their movements. Maybe what they wanted was to just travel, yet they explained to themselves and to others that they were going overseas to trade, or on pilgrimage, or to war. Why am I, Marco Polo, going to the East? Because we Venetians are merchants and so we do. Why do I, a Flemish or Castilian peasant of the Middle Ages, take on the fatigue and danger of walking to Rome? Because I am a pilgrim. And why then do I extend the journey to Jerusalem? For the same reason, because I am a pilgrim, or perhaps a crusader. There are those who even said that Alexander the Great went as far as India not because he really hoped, at the time of his departure from little Macedonia, to conquer in a few years the largest empire that had ever been seen, but because he was burning from desire to travel, and the only plausible reason for a king to satisfy his desire to travel is to wage war in foreign countries. In medieval Christianized Scandinavia the boys, no longer able to give themselves up to piracy as Vikings, went to discover the world by being mercenaries for 5 or 10 years in the Variaga Guard of the very remote Constantinople. We note in passing that almost all these experiences (trade and war) were denied to women, and that for them the only opportunity at hand to travel was the pilgrimage.
Current tourism, without the need for reasons, is a historically recent discovery; perhaps it can be traced back to the first Englishmen who came on holiday to the Côte d’Azur in the nineteenth century. It is a playful derivation of another experience, the Grand Tour of Europe that the young aristocrats of the time took to complete their social and cultural training. Even if for most it was just an opportunity for free alcohol and unbridled sex, The Grand Tour had (in theory) a utilitarian, educational purpose: we left boys and returned men. It was therefore an initiatory journey, which transformed people. But compared to the original conception of the initiatory journey it was only a very pale derivation.
That of the initiatory journey is an ancestral experience, which all ancient societies practiced. If you have ever visited the Australian Museum in Sydney, in one of the rooms you have seen the reconstruction (in dim light, so that it does not look like Disneyland) of an aboriginal village, with a hut full of frightening surprises, which to the virgin mind of a little boy must have looked shocking. Initiation, not only here but among all archaic peoples, involved a psychological trauma, and then a physical separation: the individual destined for transformation had to get away from everything he had known until then, his mother, the village, and wander the Earth alone for a while, to meet real or imaginary monsters and survive the test. When he came home (or rather, if he came back) he was another person, and (vice versa) the house in his eyes was no longer the same, and his mother and other relatives and acquaintances were no longer the same.
“One of the characteristics of the modern world is the disappearance of initiation” writes the anthropologist and philosopher Mircea Eliade. Some initiation rites survive only in secret societies, but even there it has lost almost all its pathos (unless it is a criminal organization …) and in any case does not involve the temporary removal, the journey outside the universe known before. But is it possible to still live in our time, in some form, the experience of the initiatory journey?
In the book “Initiatory journeys. Routes, pilgrimages, rituals and books “just published for Utet, the author Manuele Trevi sets very strict limits: referring again to Eliade, Trevi explains that the concept of initiation is based on the” insufficiency of natural birth “and on the” need to re-establish the individual “. Even extremely significant literary or scientific experiences, even world-class, such as Goethe’s “Journey to Italy” or Darwin’s around the world, do not meet the requirements of the initiatory journey, because neither Goethe nor Darwin returned home transfigured .
What are the cases that meet this rigorous requirement? Trevi cites names of people and analyzes the books that collect their testimony; we do not make the list, but it ranges from Greenland to Mali, and from Mexico to Siberia. In some cases the physical journey also involves a psychedelic trip, but those who stop at the hallucinogenic aspect would not grasp the substance of the speech.
PS: on the sidelines, having quoted Mircea Eliade, we would like to point out one of her notes on the Bhagavad Gītā, although it has nothing to do with Trevi’s book. Among other things, the god Krishna explains to Arjuna that he must follow his destiny as a prince and a warrior, even if the war that is being fought makes little sense, between consanguineous noble families, and even if millions of innocents will die there. Arjuna is consumed with doubts, he hesitates, but Krishna tells him that if he escaped the battle he would not only give up defending his rights as a prince and lose his honor as a warrior, but he would also do it without purpose, because his gesture would be inane respect. to the cosmos. In one passage, Eliade states that Krishna indicates to Arjuna the duty to fight, as long as this falls within a transcendent design. We hesitate to correct Eliade, but this condition seems his to us, not Krishna’s. Krishna points the way to a far more radical detachment from the world than a Westerner can conceive; he tells him to follow his path as a prince and a warrior without being distracted by millions of innocents, who will go to meet their fate as Arjuna goes to meet his. Krishna does not require and does not propose transcendent justifications. He says: do what you have to do, without being held back by marginal considerations. Detachment from the world much more radical than what a Westerner can conceive, who always seeks rationalizations to justify his actions. Even when he wants to go on a journey.
Manuele Trevi, “Initiatory journeys. Routes, pilgrimages, rites and books ”, Utet, 115 pages, 14 euros