Great centres of pilgrimage attract visitors from widely dispersed cultural backgrounds and geographic locations, often enabling them to commemorate the origins of their particular faith. Since the 2nd or 3rd century CE, Christians have traced the events of the Bible, including the life of Jesus Christ himself, through visits to the Holy Land. Mecca is revered by Muslims as the dwelling place of Adam (Adam and Eve) after his expulsion from paradise and as the birthplace of Muhammad (570–632), the prophet of Islam (Islām). According to Hindu (Hinduism) tradition, Varanasi (Benares) was founded at the dawn of creation and is the earthly home of Lord Shiva.

The Christian New Testament does not specifically enjoin believers to go on pilgrimage, but sacred texts in other religious faiths do. A hajj (formal pilgrimage) to Mecca is one of the five Pillars of Islam (Islam, Pillars of). According to the Bible, immediately after he was given the Ten Commandments, the Hebrew prophet Moses received instructions on Mount Sinai (Sinai, Mount) that required the Jewish people to appear before the Lord three times a year. The Mahabharata, an important Hindu epic dating from the 1st millennium BCE, recommends visits to many holy places in India, mentioning shrines in an order corresponding to the Sun's movement across the sky. The Buddha himself prescribed certain places of pilgrimage, choosing sites linked with key events in his life.

Apart from involving movement across physical and cultural landscapes toward a sacred goal, pilgrimages frequently involve ritual movements at the site itself. Performing the Stations of the Cross (Cross, Stations of the), which reenact the events of Jesus' Passion, is a frequent activity at Roman Catholic shrines. Muslims walk seven times around the Kaʿbah, or central cube-shaped shrine, at Mecca. Buddhists (Buddhism) circumambulate dome-shaped reliquaries called stupas (stupa). Among Hindus, perhaps the ideal pilgrimage would involve a journey around the four most sacred sites in India (the dhamas), covering the country in an auspicious clockwise direction.

A further common feature of pilgrimages is the availability of small souvenirs—relics, containers of holy water, icons, and so on—that allow the sacredness of a shrine to be transported back to the pilgrim's home. Finally, pilgrimage sites tend to have a material focus, even though the nature of that focus varies according to the assumptions of the religion. Muslim and Jewish sites avoid iconic representations of divinity, but images are important in Catholic and Orthodox Christian sites. Statues of gods are central to Hindu worship and necessary for darshan, the beneficial gaze that passes between pilgrim and deity.

A factor that unites pilgrimage locations across different religions is the sense, variously expressed, that a given place can provide privileged access to a divine or transcendent sphere. This idea is well expressed in the Hindu concept of the tirtha, a Sanskrit term encompassing the notion of a ford or intersection between two realms. The same word is used by Jains (Jainism) for any site where a prophet was born or died.

In all religious traditions, hierarchies of sites are evident, as some places are regarded as more sacred than others. For Hindus, Varanasi, one of seven especially holy cities, has the power to bestow moksha, or freedom from the cycle of reincarnation. For the medieval Catholic, a visit to Jerusalem or Rome would have gained more remission of sin (through the granting of indulgences (indulgence)) than a journey to a lesser place. In North Africa, marabout shrines, consisting of the tomb of a holy man, lack the pan-Islamic status of Mecca or Medina but provide access to sacred figures, living or dead, who mediate God's grace (baraka) to clients.

Motivations for pilgrimage vary, within as well as between traditions. Sacred travel is frequently linked to a pious search for ultimate salvation but can also be prompted by more earthly aims, such as gaining miraculous cures, fulfilling vows, or doing penance for wrongdoing. In medieval times the English shrine of Walsingham, associated with the Virgin Mary and the Annunciation, attracted women seeking solutions to problems of lactation and infertility and may have encouraged self-identification with the Holy Mother. In addition, pilgrimage has frequently been linked to, and sometimes explicitly combined with, travel for overtly secular purposes. From the earliest times, the hajj was an annual fair as well as a religious activity, and it had important commercial functions under the rulers of the Ottoman dynasty (Ottoman Empire). A Muslim pilgrim might well have financed the journey to Mecca through trade, and over many centuries annual caravans to the city benefited from the relative security available to large groups of travelers. The cultures of ancient Greece and Rome did not establish boundaries between religious ritual and the secular world in ways evident in the modern West, and festivals easily combined celebration of the gods with urban commercial activities. The Crusades initiated by Pope Urban II in 1095 allied elements of pilgrimage with chivalry and the gaining of booty. Before the final armed assault on Muslim-controlled Jerusalem in July 1099, the crusaders fasted and walked barefoot around the city. Priests carried relics and preached to the military pilgrims on the Mount of Olives (Olives, Mount of).

Many important sites are sacred to more than one denomination or even religion, with competition and conflict arising as much as cooperation. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem was constructed by Muslims on the site of the Jewish Temple (Jerusalem, Temple of) in the 7th century. It could thus be interpreted either as expressing Islam's continuities with its Jewish roots or as physically effacing Judaism from a sacred centre. Also in Jerusalem is the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, enclosing the traditional sites of Christ's crucifixion and burial. Even today, different Christian denominations look after separate parts of the church and maintain different areas of worship.

Pilgrimage has had its opponents in all of the world religions. Pilgrims have been accused of placing too much faith in images and particular places (as opposed to trusting in the omnipresence of God), of becoming distracted by the temptations of travel, and of seeking purely material blessings rather than spiritual enlightenment. Within Islam, some mystical Sufi (Ṣūfism) traditions have emphasized the importance of inner inspiration over that of journeying to Mecca itself. In the 16th century, the Protestant reformers Martin Luther (Luther, Martin) and John Calvin (Calvin, John) argued that papal granting of indulgences (indulgence) and credulous belief in miracles reflected the corruption of the Roman Catholic (Roman Catholicism) Church. The emergence of Protestantism in Europe saw attacks on many pilgrimage shrines and images. Guru Nanak (Nānak) (1469–1539), the founder of Sikhism, maintained somewhat ambivalent attitudes toward pilgrimage. He traveled extensively and visited many sacred sites during his life but remained opposed to the use of images in worship as well as to empty formalism in religion.

Yet the power of pilgrimage as a metaphor may be retained even in contexts apparently unfavourable to its practice. In The Pilgrim's Progress (Pilgrim's Progress) (1678), the Puritan John Bunyan (Bunyan, John) (1628–88) translated the physical act of journeying and the search for salvation into an allegorical struggle with the self. His central character, Christian, moves through many travails from the City of Destruction toward the Celestial City.

As populations continue to move around the globe, pilgrimage to newly founded sites has provided a way for migrant communities to retain contact with their homelands. For instance, the proliferation of new Hindu pilgrimage sites in North America and Europe demonstrates the flexibility of pilgrimage as an institution. Pittsburgh, Toronto, Houston, and other major cities contain important temples that indicate the enduring ability of an ancient religious landscape to be translated into new social and cultural territories.