Step Five

Consider Religious Pilgrimage.
I want a button made up that says that. OR A T-SHIRT.

So I've been reading "Silk and Religion in Eurasia, C. AD 600-1200" by Liu Xinru. And in it she talks about the connection between religious traffic and silk traffic in the years stated. I have to say <criticism> that she doesn't extrapolate enough to effectively tie the two phenomena together </criticism>, but I will say that if she had, I think her argument might've been incredibly convincing.

The idea here is that silk has prized by at least Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism, so by tracking silk trade figures, we can track religious movement as well. I'm honestly not sure how successful that was, but what I DID get from this article was a great sense of the mobility of religion in the past - how Christians in Byzantium very quickly started buying Islamic silk, for instance - and the links between silk and politics or silk and religion - usually in the form of luxury laws or strict dress codes.

Silk was a massively huge part of the Big Three Religions of Afro-Eurasia (although let's not get carried away - various Chinese religions, things like Bon, Judaism...they were around, too, and I don't have the stats to pick a Big Three), which connects back to Christian's argument about how there was sort of a pervasive Afro-Eurasian culture. In this sense, I think he would be right: it seems like EVERYONE had use for silk, especially for their religious ceremonies.

Also for their political hierarchies, but that feels like a major tangent in her article, so I'm not really going to deal with it, fascinating thought it may be.

The silk routes, though - and this is awesome - were not, at the beginning, much populated by traders. The first Silk Road Navigators were pilgrims travelling in one of three cycles (Sino-Indian, Byzantine-European, Islamic World) and carrying silk for devotional purposes, for donational purposes, or to provide safe passage for themselves on behalf of higher religious officials who were using them as envoys (sometimes). So it seems as though one of the big things you need to do to be successful on the Silk Road is to be a religious pilgrim.

Although carrying that much wealth must've made you a target for bandits who were not of your religion, I suspect. The main point stands, though: silk was HUGE with religion, and the reason the silk trade started was because the different religious institutions wanted that to happen.

It makes me think: what would the world be like today if none of the religious traditions in the Afro-Eurasian area cared at all about silk? Would trade still have begun? If it did, would it continue as briskly for so long? Would silk have entered into our lives in the modern Western world? What far-reaching affects would the ripples in Time caused by THAT major of a difference have? I think we need to thank our lucky stars that we have some ancestors/distant cousins/people not even related to us, really that braved the terrors of the Road(s) for the love of god(s) or  a desire to devote part of their life/time/wealth to their religious practice.

What could WE do if we cared that much about the things that shape our society? What could WE do if we had something like religion that bound us together? (Because, let's face it: religion just isn't cutting it anymore.)

The answer to these questions will doubtless come upon the completion of Step Five: Consider Religious Pilgrimage