**1. Introduction**

Pilgrimage destinations have benefitted massively from the global expansion of the travel and tourism sector. These are not just those organised by religious institutions, such as Mecca, Amritsar, Varanasi, and Lourdes but also destinations associated with alternative cults usually categorised as "New Age", "alternative" or "spiritual" (see Bowman 1993; Ivakhiv 2001; Rountree 2006; Fedele 2013), as well as with death and suffering, such as military cemeteries in Flanders and Gallipoli or the death camps in Poland (Walter 1993; Lloyd 1998; Feldman 2014) and with celebrities, such as Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison (King 1993; Margry 2008). The intimate relationship between pilgrimage and tourism has been analysed in terms of such hybrid categories as pilgrimage tourism, tourist pilgrimage, and religious tourism (see Nolan and Nolan 1989; Eade 1992; Vukonic 2002; Badone and Roseman 2004; Collins-Kreiner 2010, 2016).

This expansion has involved not only long-established religious pilgrimage centres but also the emergence of new religious and non-religious sites, the revival of traditional routes such as the *camino* to Santiago de Compostela (Post 2011) and the invention of new routes (see Frey 1998; Sanchez y Sanchez and Hesp 2006; Steil 2017). These developments have gone hand in hand with the adaptation of traditional rituals and the invention of new ones. Analysis of pilgrimage ritual has been deeply influenced by the pioneering *Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture* (1978) written by Victor and Edith Turner, who argued that ritual celebrated the temporary, liminal commonality of its participants (normative *communitas*). Subsequent debate focused on the contested and diverse meanings evident in such ritual (Wikan 1990; Eade and Sallnow 1991), whereas research has also demonstrated the manifold ways in which religious and non-religious rituals are invented and constantly change (Abélès 1988; Grimes 1992; Karant-Nunn 1997; Coleman and Eade 2004), as well as "the uncertain and open-ended nature of ritual practices and processes" (Stern 2012, p. 77, see also Gordon-Lennox 2017a, 2017b).

At the same time, the study of people's engagement with material culture and landscape has also expanded. Thomas Tweed, for example, has explored the dwellings and crossings involved in pilgrimage flows across landscapes to places and sacred objects by reflecting on his own positionality and engagement with religion (Tweed 2006). Pilgrimage has been interpreted as a kinetic ritual where people engage with a landscape's immanent features and aura. Such an approach can lead to an analysis of how "mobile practices help construct apparently sacredly charged places", the "power of place", and the "role of landscape aesthetics in the 'spiritual magnetism' of pilgrimage sites" (Maddrell et al. 2015, pp. 6–7; see also O'Brien 2008; Mantsinen 2020).

This attention to mobile practices, flows and the relationship between people and places has helped pilgrimage studies to explore new avenues but careful attention still needs to be paid to the role played by power and authority in ritual invention and performance. The rituals performed by groups journeying to shrines and at the shrines themselves are typically orchestrated by leaders, such as priests or experienced laity, who draw on specialist knowledge and their ascribed or achieved status as "experts" (Bajc 2007). Their role as leaders is very similar to that performed by tourist guides (Feldman 2007; Kormina 2010; Mesaritou et al. 2016) and pilgrimage journeys may involve both pastors and tour guides (see Bajc 2006, 2007). These leaders play an integral part in the global expansion of the travel and tourism industry (see Kaell 2010; Reader 2014) where the interweaving of pilgrimage and tourism has been analysed in terms of the hybrid category 'pilgrimage tourism' (Collins-Kreiner and Kliot 2000; Bar and Cohen-Hattab 2003; Schramm 2004; Shuo et al. 2009; Lopez 2013).

## **2. Research Question and Methodology**

To explore the role played by leadership, power, and authority in ritual invention and performance, I will bring together two contrasting case studies—rituals observed at the Roman Catholic shrine of Lourdes, France, and those performed during a pilgrimage to the prehistoric Avebury Ring in South West England. The research is based on document study (both offline and online) of my personal involvement in travelling to both destinations and being involved in ritual activities along the route and at the two destinations. From a methodological viewpoint, this research can be considered as a form of ethnography (Blommaert and Jie 2010; Blommaert 2018) and even, at least partly, auto-ethnography. Both ethnography and auto-ethnography "[use] a researcher's personal experience to describe and critique cultural beliefs, practices, and experiences" (Adams et al. 2014, p. 1). In the comparison of the two cases described in this article, I will focus on (1) the role of institutions and leaders or guides and (2) the relationship of the people involved in the pilgrimage and the landscape. The first issue is directly related to the main research question regarding leadership, power, and authority in ritual invention and is the result of a deductive way of analysing the materials and experiences I gathered during the fieldwork. The second point of interest came to the surface through the comparison of the two cases as a result of an open, inductive way of coding the gathered data (Miles et al. 2013).
