In 2025, two scholars of religion decided to make a multiday pilgrimage along the Kumano Kodō trail – an ancient route in Japan connecting Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples – guided by an artificial intelligence assistant.
The two – Wayne E. Arnold and John A. Shultz – trained an AI companion on a smartphone to suit their travel needs, including translation. But they were also curious to see how AI would shape their pilgrimage experience.
“Our hike became a test case for how pilgrimage might evolve in the digital age – not being diminished by AI, but reimagined through it,” they wrote later in the International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage.
AI tools are moving quickly into the realm of religion, including going on a pilgrimage. I have studied trails both ancient and modern and undertaken significant journeys on foot in the Middle East. What happens when an ancient and meaningful practice, often rooted in sacred texts, is affected by interaction with machines? From my perspective, AI is changing pilgrimages in ways that echo earlier disruptive technologies, from printing presses to steamships.
Ancient pilgrimage practice
Pilgrimages have always been an evolving practice, varying from place to place. In the Hebrew Bible, for example, God commands believers to go on pilgrimages in bare outlines: journeys to Jerusalem three times a year, coinciding with agricultural festivals, and highlighted by sacrifices at the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. In the New Testament, Jesus and his disciples take part in those pilgrimages. Later, after the destruction of the Jewish Temple, Christians under Roman persecution quietly undertook spiritual journeys to places mentioned in the Gospels.
By the medieval period, Christianity was the dominant religion of Europe, but long-distance travel was extremely difficult, and embarking upon a pilgrimage to Jerusalem was often regarded as a death sentence.
Meanwhile, after the rise of Islam in the seventh century C.E., Muslims began undertaking the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, creating major pilgrimage and trade routes crisscrossing North Africa and Southwest Asia.
Modern transportation transformed pilgrimages. Steamship travel in the 19th century and air travel in the 20th century all but erased the old overland Hajj routes and turned the long journey to Mecca into a much shorter experience, focused much more on visiting the sites and shrines at the heart of the pilgrimage than the journey itself.
Printing press and changes
Even before transportation technologies made pilgrimages faster, information technologies made it easier for pilgrims to find the places they hoped to reach and to arrive at those places safely.
Information technologies began shaping Christian pilgrimages quite early, with the first travel itineraries – written guides describing routes and holy places – appearing shortly after Christianity was legalized in fourth-century Rome.
Early works by a female pilgrim named Egeria and an anonymous traveler called the “Bordeaux Pilgrim” functioned as guidebooks for travelers to the Holy Land and helped transform Christian pilgrimage from an informal practice into something more church-sanctioned and popular. Helena, the mother of the Byzantine emperor Constantine, aided this process by commissioning shrines such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where Christians still memorialize important events in Jesus’ life and ministry.
In 1486, only a few decades after the invention of the printing press, Bernhard von Breydenback published his “Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam,” the first widely available guide to Holy Land pilgrimage. Complete with woodcut maps and illustrations, the Latin guidebook was quickly translated into German, French, Dutch and Spanish.
Von Breydenback’s book made it possible for aspiring pilgrims to follow his footsteps to Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Mount Sinai. But perhaps more importantly, for those who would never be able to make such a journey, the book exported the Holy Land to a curious European Christian audience through its illustrations and descriptive text. By 1500, it had been reprinted at least a dozen times.
The printing press made pilgrimages an even more fascinating topic for Europeans than it previously had been. Journeys to places like Santiago de Compostela in Spain had already gained enormous popularity, starting in the ninth century C.E. The first printing of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales” in the 15th century shows how pilgrimage was something people wanted to read about for fun. In that collection of stories, pilgrims are not holy travelers, but everyday people, often engaging in decidedly nonsacred behavior as they travel to a shrine in England.
Indeed, during the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther famously wrote that pilgrimage was no longer a sacred activity. “All pilgrimages should be done away with,” he said in 1520. “For there is no good in them, no commandment, but countless causes of sin and of contempt of God’s commandments.”
Making pilgrims safe and comfortable
But pilgrimages did not go away, nor did the profusion of information surrounding them. Each new information technology, from photography to film to the internet, changed how pilgrims experienced or shared their journeys.
They streamlined planning processes, highlighted popular routes, eliminated uncertainties and often added safety and security to the journey. The earliest guidebooks had included descriptions of places, but with the march of modernity, travelers could see photos of sites, contact guides and reserve accommodations in advance, and share information in online forums. The pilgrim journey, in short, involved fewer surprises.
Today, smartphone apps are available for many major pilgrimages, enabling greater communication with fellow travelers and sometimes adding layers of augmented reality to the experience.
In online app stores, one can find Hajj apps that enable travelers to use their phone cameras to see pop-up information as they move around Mecca. And at least one online platform built for Jewish and Christian visitors to Israel uses AI to generate custom itineraries for potential pilgrims.
Walking and talking with an AI fellow pilgrim
Which brings me back to the Kumano Kodo in Japan, where contemplation is a key element of the traditional experience. In contrast to the busy and sometimes urbanized pilgrimage routes of Europe, or the crowded processions of the Hajj, the ancient path runs mostly through quiet forests.
For Arnold and Shultz, carrying an AI companion did not interrupt the mood of the journey. As they write, “Rather than replacing reflection, it frequently initiated it, transforming moments of rest, curiosity, or uncertainty into opportunities for deeper engagement with the landscape.”
As the hikers asked questions along the trail, their AI partner translated signs and offered historical information that enriched the pilgrims’ overall experience. “Unlike many of our previous hikes, where we typically bypassed the historical markers, we gained a more meaningful comprehension of the realities and the myths connected with the land we were traversing … we were moving through a curated poetic landscape that stretched centuries back, and more profoundly understanding its significance to Japanese culture.”
In summary, Arnold and Shultz wrote that “AI, when deployed with instructions concerning personality and adaptability, can play a surprisingly human role in easing fatigue, boosting morale, and bringing levity to a journey. It was not just a tool or a translator but a conversational partner, one that made the lonely stretches of the trail less solitary.”
What stayed with me was the qualifier in the quote above – “when deployed with instructions concerning personality and adaptability” – a reminder that travel-related technologies work best when used with care and intention.
Hikers once had to remind themselves not to refer too often to guidebooks, lest they lose the real-life experience of being on the trail. Drivers have learned to be wary of instructions from mapping apps. As AI becomes ever more pervasive and portable, pilgrims must now choose the degree to which they allow it to shape their journeys.
Shay Rabineau does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
By Shay Rabineau, Associate Professor of Israel Studies, Binghamton University, State University of New York. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
