Spiritual tourism

Just fyi, really. Quite a good article from the NY Times on new spirituality tourism. Nothing new, but the fact that it's big enough to make it onto the weekend pages of such a 'paper.

New Age-style sacred travel, or metaphysical touring, is a growing branch of tourism, particularly in countries like Egypt with strong ancient-civilization pedigrees. Tourists with an adventuresome spiritual focus — predominantly middle-aged, upper middle class and female — come together to improve themselves and the world, as Ms. Billger’s group intended. Their ideas are best understood as an extreme on the continuum that includes yoga, tarot and astrology, and the rituals they perform at sites deemed sacred can vary widely.
“Other groups will be in there with bells and candles, jumping up and down like somebody’s going through their bodies,” Wael Khattab, this group’s Egyptian guide, commented as he observed their ritual from close by. “This is actually quite tame.”

Of course, the interesting thing is to name the Christian equivalents. Is there a way of outreach in this somewhere? It's actually quite disturbing sometimes, though again there are Christian equivalents citable.

MR. KHATTAB, the guide, was apparently not exaggerating when he called Ms. Billger’s tour tame. He recalled a Dutch group — touring in the early ’90s, he said — whose members each incarnated as a different Egyptian deity each day. This extended to sleeping arrangements, so if one tourist was possessed by the god Osiris, and another by the goddess Isis, Osiris’s wife, those two tourists would spend the night together. The only problems Mr. Khattab had with this were logistical. “You had bills signed with ‘Seth’ and ‘Osiris’ and ‘Horus,’ ” he said. “You had to sort out which person was who on which day. It was a hassle.”

Metaphysical Tourism - Travel - New York Times

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