Pilgrimage to sacred sites in the Eastern Free State

English: There are many pilgrimages and revered forms of travel in South Africa. However, no systematic anthropological studies have been conducted into these journeys. Filling this void, this is a multisite ethnographic study of pilgrimages to the sacred sites of the eastern Free State province. Following a qualitative methodology, the purpose of this combination inductive-deductive study was to explore the pilgrimage phenomenon, describe pilgrimages to Mantsopa, Mautse and Motouleng, and explain the reasons pilgrims have for undertaking pilgrimages. Situated in the Mohokare (Caledon) River Valley, the sacred sites of the eastern Free State attract visitation from a range of site users. Predominantly Sesotho-speaking, but also coming from across the country and neighbouring countries as well, groups of mostly Apostolic, ZCC, Roman Catholic and more recently Protestant congregants or lone journeyers travel to the sites, mainly over weekends. Seeking to commune with the divine, pilgrims come to report and make prayer requests. Important motives for their pilgrimages are to search for and solidify ancestor connections, and to secure blessings. Further incentives comprise complying with the commission and instruction to visit the sites, and the healing implications of these pilgrimages. Some visitors to the sites make the trip but once, whereas other site users periodically return a number of times a year and yet others reside permanently at the sites for years. The beautifully vibrant, colourful and complex pilgrimages to the sacred sites of the eastern Free State call for a rethinking and broadening of the pilgrimage lens. The mainly Anglophone and Western conception of classic pilgrimage is too narrow to accommodate the range and complexity of motivations, traditions, people and behaviours associated with pilgrimages to the sacred sites of the eastern Free State. This heterogeneity further leads to jostling and vying for favour, clientele, narrative dominion and overall legitimisation among the pilgrim communities. Being journeys and places of substance required an acknowledgement of the significant role that the immaterial plays in all that is pilgrimage. This meant that culturalistic and hylomorphic models proved inadequate in capturing a more complete pilgrimage story. Instead, within a relational epistemology and ontology, the entwinement, enmeshment, entanglement and entrapment of the material and immaterial, the animate and inanimate, the present and absent things, bring the sacred sites, the pilgrimages and the pilgrims into existence.