Pilgrimage Without Religion: Walking Ancient Routes for Secular Reasons

On the twenty-third day of walking the Camino de Santiago, somewhere between Astorga and Ponferrada on the meseta of northwestern Spain, a German management consultant named Markus told me something that I have thought about every day since. "I am not religious," he said, adjusting the straps of his pack as we climbed a long, gentle hill through fields of sunflowers. "I do not believe in God. I do not believe in saints. I do not believe that walking to a cathedral will save my soul. But I believe" — and here he paused, searching for the word — "in the walking. I believe in what the walking does." He could not say what the walking did, exactly. He had been trying for twenty-three days, and the closest he had come was a phrase he repeated several times: "It removes the unnecessary." This is contemplative travel at its most distilled, and the pilgrimage route is its oldest and most tested vehicle.

The secular pilgrimage is one of the defining travel phenomena of our time. The Camino de Santiago — the medieval route to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, where the bones of the apostle James are said to rest — attracted over 446,000 walkers in 2023, the vast majority of whom identified as non-religious or "spiritual but not religious" on the credencial, the pilgrim passport that is stamped at each stage. Japan's Shikoku Henro — the 1,200-kilometer circuit of 88 Buddhist temples on the island of Shikoku — has seen a similar surge in secular walkers, as has the Via Francigena from Canterbury to Rome, the Abraham Path through the Middle East, and the Kumano Kodo network of ancient trails through the mountains of the Kii Peninsula. Pilgrimage routes travel is booming, and the pilgrims are not, in any conventional sense, pilgrims.

What draws them is not faith but form. The pilgrimage route offers a structure — a beginning, an end, a prescribed path, a daily rhythm of walking and resting — that secular life has largely abandoned. The modern world is formless by design: we choose our own schedules, our own routes, our own destinations, our own meanings. This freedom is exhilarating and exhausting in roughly equal measure. The pilgrimage route offers a temporary reprieve: for the duration of the walk, the choices are made for you. You walk the path. You sleep where the path tells you to sleep. You eat what is available. You carry what you need and nothing more. The simplicity is the point. And within that simplicity, something happens that is difficult to achieve in any other context — the mind, freed from the tyranny of choice, begins to do the work it was designed for.

The Camino: Thirty-Three Days of Subtraction

The Camino Frances, the most popular of the Camino routes, runs approximately 800 kilometers from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port on the French side of the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela. Most walkers complete it in thirty to thirty-five days, averaging twenty to twenty-five kilometers per day. The terrain varies — mountain passes in the first week, the industrial outskirts of Burgos and Leon in the middle weeks, the green, rain-soaked hills of Galicia in the final week — but the daily rhythm does not. Wake at dawn. Walk. Eat. Walk. Arrive at the albergue. Shower. Eat. Sleep. Repeat.

The repetition is the mechanism. For the first week, the walking is purely physical — blisters, sore muscles, the continuous negotiation between the body's complaints and the mind's determination. By the second week, the body has adapted, and the physical difficulty recedes. The mind, no longer occupied by pain, begins to wander. Memories surface. Problems that seemed intractable before departure begin to reconfigure. Emotions that were suppressed by the busyness of daily life arrive without warning, sometimes in the middle of a field, sometimes in the middle of a conversation with a stranger, sometimes in the silence of a Romanesque church at 6 a.m.

By the third week, the process that Markus called "removing the unnecessary" is well advanced. The walker has shed not just physical weight — most Camino walkers post home at least one parcel of items they packed and discovered they did not need — but psychological weight. The concerns that dominated the first days of walking — career anxieties, relationship conflicts, financial worries — have not been resolved, but they have been right-sized. Seen from the perspective of thirty-three days of walking through a landscape, they occupy their proper proportion: real, but not all-consuming. The walking meditation travel experience of the Camino does not solve problems. It adjusts the scale at which you perceive them.

Shikoku: The Circle and the Temple

Japan's Shikoku Henro is structurally different from the Camino in ways that produce a different kind of contemplative experience. Where the Camino is linear — a journey from A to B — the Henro is circular, a 1,200-kilometer loop around the coast and through the mountains of Shikoku that visits 88 temples associated with the ninth-century monk Kukai, founder of the Shingon sect of Japanese Buddhism. There is no beginning and no end. Walkers traditionally start at Temple 1, but some begin at whatever temple is nearest to where they arrive on the island. The circuit takes approximately forty-five to sixty days on foot.

The circular structure changes the psychology of the walk. On the Camino, there is always a destination — Santiago, the great cathedral, the satisfaction of arrival. On the Henro, there is no such destination. The walker visits temple after temple, each one a small milestone, but the final temple is simply the one before the first — the circle closes, and you are back where you started. The absence of a grand arrival strips the walk of its narrative arc and replaces it with something more meditative: a pattern, a rhythm, a continuous return.

The Henro is also distinguished by the Japanese concept of osettai — the tradition of hospitality toward pilgrims. Local residents offer food, drink, shelter, and encouragement to walkers, not as a commercial transaction but as a spiritual practice: by helping the pilgrim, the host accumulates merit. The result is a journey in which the walker is continuously received — a stranger made welcome, again and again, by people who expect nothing in return except the continuation of a tradition that has been maintained for twelve centuries. The contemplative travel experience of the Henro is not just about walking. It is about being held by a culture that has organized itself, over a millennium, around the care of those who walk.

The Abraham Path: Walking Through the Story

The Abraham Path is the youngest of the great pilgrimage routes and the most politically ambitious. Conceived in 2007 by a group of conflict-resolution scholars at Harvard, the path traces a route through the landscapes associated with the biblical patriarch Abraham — from Harran in southeastern Turkey through Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel — crossing some of the most contested territory on earth. The path is not continuous (the Syrian section has been impassable since 2011), but the segments in Turkey, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel are walkable, and together they offer a pilgrimage experience unlike any other: a walk through a landscape where three of the world's great religions share a common origin story, and where the contradictions between that shared origin and the present-day reality are inescapable.

Walking the Abraham Path in Palestine — through the hills south of Hebron, past Bedouin camps and olive groves and the separation wall — is contemplative travel in its most confrontational form. The landscape is beautiful. The history is layered and complex. And the political reality is ever-present: the checkpoints, the settlements, the restricted roads that determine who can walk where. The path does not pretend that walking can solve these conflicts. But it proposes that walking through them — physically, at the pace of the human body, encountering the people who live in the landscape rather than the abstractions that dominate the news — produces a kind of understanding that is not available at any other speed or through any other medium.

The Kumano Kodo: Where Every Step Is Sacred

The Kumano Kodo, the ancient pilgrimage network in the mountains of the Kii Peninsula south of Osaka, is the only pilgrimage route in the world to share UNESCO World Heritage status with the Camino de Santiago. The routes — there are several, linking three grand shrines through some of Japan's most densely forested mountains — have been walked for over a thousand years, by emperors and peasants, monks and merchants. The trails are steep, narrow, and paved with hand-laid stone that has been polished by centuries of footsteps to a dark, mirror-like sheen.

Walking the Kumano Kodo is a fundamentally different experience from walking the Camino or the Henro because the landscape is the shrine. In Shinto belief, the mountains, rivers, and forests of the Kii Peninsula are themselves sacred — inhabited by kami, the spirits or gods that reside in natural features. The trail is not a route to a sacred place. The trail is the sacred place. Every tree, every waterfall, every moss-covered stone along the path is imbued with spiritual significance, and the walk through the forest is understood not as transit but as ceremony — a passage through a living temple whose roof is the canopy and whose walls are the mountains.

For the secular walker, the Kumano Kodo's animist theology need not be taken literally to be felt. The forest is old growth — cryptomeria cedars and hinoki cypress that in some cases exceed a thousand years of age — and its atmosphere is tangible: cool, humid, profoundly quiet, saturated with the green light that filters through the canopy. Walking meditation travel on the Kumano Kodo is not an exercise in spiritual belief. It is an exercise in sensory immersion so deep that the distinction between walker and forest begins, after several hours, to blur. You do not walk through the forest. The forest walks through you.

What the Walking Does

Markus was right: it removes the unnecessary. But the mechanism is worth understanding. Long-distance walking, sustained over days and weeks, produces neurological effects that are well documented but poorly understood. The rhythmic, repetitive motion of walking stimulates the production of serotonin and endorphins, producing a sustained elevation of mood that is distinct from the endorphin spike of intense exercise. The bilateral stimulation of alternating footsteps activates both hemispheres of the brain in a pattern similar to EMDR therapy, which is used to process trauma. And the continuous engagement with a changing but undemanding visual environment — the path ahead, the landscape around — creates the same "soft fascination" state that environmental psychologists associate with nature's restorative effects on attention.

The combined effect of these neurological processes, sustained over thirty or forty or sixty days, is a gradual but profound shift in the walker's relationship to their own mind. The mental chatter — the continuous, self-referential narration that occupies most of our waking hours — does not stop, but it quiets. The worries do not vanish, but they lose their urgency. The walker arrives at Santiago, or at Temple 88, or at the Kumano Hongu Taisha, not enlightened but clarified — as though a filter has been removed and the world, for a brief period, is seen without distortion.