Songlines.

The best-known connection between footfall, knowledge and memory is the Aboriginal Australian vision of the Songlines. According to this cosmogony, the world was created in an epoch known as the Dreamtime, when the Ancestors emerged to find the earth a black, flat, featureless terrain. They began to walk out across this non-place, and as they walked they broke through the crust of the earth and released the sleeping life beneath it, so that the landscape sprang up into being with each pace. As Bruce Chatwin explained in his flawed but influential account, ‘each totemic ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints'. Depending on where they fell, these foot-notes became linked with particular features of the landscape. Thus the world was covered by ‘Dreaming-tracks’ that ‘lay over the land as “ways” of communication’, each track having its corresponding Song.  To sing out was–-and still is, just about, for the Songs survive, though more and more of them slip away with each generation–-therefore to find one’s way, and storytelling was indivisible from wayfaring.

Robert MacFarlane

Leveller.

Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians, with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds, project onto the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.  

As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less aggressive than sedentary ones.  There is one obvious reason why this should be so. The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey: a "leveller" on which the "fit" survive and stragglers fall by the wayside.  The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The "dictators" of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the "gentlemen of the road."

Bruce Chatwin