Pilgrimages to the northern lights? Actually, in premodern Europe, it seems to have been the opposite.

To give a little context first: some medieval Europeans absolutely made long, arduous, dangerous, deadly pilgrimages. Margery Kempe of 15th century England even made it to Jerusalem as part of an organized tour group of sorts! But the vast, vast majority of "pilgrimage" in medieval Europe was local. The Canterbury Tales is a group of travelers crossing part of England. The people of one town might form a Corpus Christi feast day procession to the church in an outlying village that had a miraculous bleeding Host (communion wafer).

Most people with knowledge of the northern lights are already living in an area where they can see them; people elsewhere are not that likely to travel that far.

Still, medieval texts seem to rule out the possibility of pilgrimage either to the northern lights, or to see them. However, they do it in different ways.

6th century bishop-writer Gregory of Tours treats the aurora borealis several times in his writing rather nonchalantly, likely on account of what he says is its frequent appearance. He calls it a "sign in the heavens," but doesn't really apply portentous meaning to it. This seems like a fairly normal reaction, at least to me, for someone very familiar with the phenomenon.

In the 12th century, a very tiny portion of Europe's intellectual elite--who are all clergy, reading and writing in a religious context--might have read Seneca's take on the aurora (which cribs Aristotle right down to the use of Greek terms). Seneca classifies the different shapes that the "celestial fires" might take and posits a natural cause (as you might expect from a text called Quaestiones Naturales): wind and heat in the upper atmosphere.

What emerges from Gregory and Seneca, I think, is a pattern that the aurora was common, celestial, not something special that marked a holy site.

The first reference to the aurora in northern medieval sources, the 13th century Speculum regale (Mirror of Kings, a common medieval genre of instructional literature), is my favorite. The text explains the phenomenon seen in Greenland and Iceland, again wholly with natural causes. The first interesting thing is that these possible causes are not celestial but earthly!

The men who have thought about and discussed these lights have guessed three sources, one of which, it seems, ought to be the true one.

Since Greenland lies on the outermost edge of the earth to the north, some think it possible that these lights shine forth from the fires that encircle the outer ocean.

Others have suggested that during the hours of night, when the sun's course is beneath the earth, an occasional gleam of its light may shoot up into the sky; for they insist that Greenland lies so far out on the earth's edge that the curved surface which shuts out the sunlight must be less prominent there.

But there are still others who believe...that the frost and the glaciers have become so powerful there that they are able to radiate forth these flames.

The Speculum regale then makes a very interesting point: the role of the aurora, in God's world, is to *mark the boundaries of where people must not tread. This is reinforced by the second reason I love this text: the author devotes quite a bit of space to delineating all the ways that Iceland is exactly like hell.

So the Speculum regale explicitly rules out the idea of pilgrimage, even though it believes the aurora issues forth from an earthly location that could be visited.

Late medieval western Europeans could not get enough of travel narratives. Marco Polo, John Mandeville, a bunch of people who were much more boring--these were major bestsellers, translated into numerous vernaculars, copied into books with lavish (expensive) illuminations. Travel lit is not my specialty, so it's possible that somewhere in the archives, there is a traveler from the Mediterranean who sought out the aurora that he had heard about. But I have never come across it. (This is not a religious context, I know, but I still think it's interesting, since traveling to see the aurora is not an uncommon bucket list item for southerners today, or I suppose antipodean northerners.)

However, with this interest in the "wider world" evidenced by the travel narratives came another intellectual-religious phenomenon: obsession (that's the right world) with apocalyptic prophecy in all forms, including meteorology and astrology. 15th-16th century people couldn't get enough of pamphlets teaching them how to read the weather and stars to prove God's wrath was about to fall, the Antichrist was about to come, no the Antichrist was coming far in the future, no he had already been born, no he was the pope, no he was Luther.

And in this franctic apocalypticism, interpretations of the aurora turned darker. Much darker. Whereas Aristotle and Seneca had seen wells and caves amidst the swirling lights, 16th century Europeans saw constellations of war. Lances, swords, entire armies, decapitated bodies. It was God's wrath writ across the firey sky: a warning to repent now, or this would be their fate.

And so in autumn 1583, according to Pierre de L'estoile, thousands of pilgrims descended on Paris in 6 waves of penitential pilgrimage. They were not there to seek out the aurora as a holy 'site'. They were there to say prayers, make offerings, and swear lifetimes of repentance so God would rescind his looming judgment.

I just want to add to this by giving a non chrisitan view. but from the saamis of northern scandinavia.

A traditional saami belief is that the northern lights brings the dead to the afterlife, to safeguard the deads passage in to the afterlife on a clear night with northern lights saamis would gather around a hill and sing a jojk this would guide the dead to the afterlife.

I would like to piggy back and ask a question about the Northern Lights.

How far south can I be latitude wise to see the Northern Lights with a high certainty? Would I only need to be in Germany? Or further North? How about North America approximation? I know you can see them in Alaska, but I don't really want to travel that far north. I currently live in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. How far north would I have to go with the shortest driving distance? Or would I have to fly?

Thanks and sorry if this ends up hijacking.