Director Mona Fastvold’s recent film, “The Testament of Ann Lee,” features actor Amanda Seyfried within the titular role: the English spiritual seeker who brought the Shaker movement to America. The trailer literally writhes with snakes intercut amid scenes of emotional turmoil, religious ecstasy, orderly and disorderly dancing – and sex. Intense and sometimes menacing music underpins all of it: the sounds of the enraptured, singing their approach to a implausible and unimaginable ceremony.
The trailer is riveting and unsettling – just because the celibate Shakers were to the common observer during their American emergence within the 1780s.
I sit on the Board of Trustees of Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts, where a few of the film was shot, though I even have not seen the film, which is as a consequence of be released on Christmas Day. I used to be the curator at Hancock from 2001 to 2009 and have studied the Shakers for greater than 25 years, publishing quite a few books and articles on the sect.
Fascination with the Shakers is enduring, as are they. The sect once had several thousand members; today, three Shakers remain, practicing the religion at their village in Sabbathday Lake, Maine, as they’ve since 1783.
Many characteristics of Shaker life and belief set them aside from other Protestant Christians, but their name derives from probably the most obvious. Early Shakers manifested the holy spirit that they believed dwelled inside them by shaking violently in worship. While they called themselves “Believers,” observers dubbed them “Shakers.” Members eventually adopted the name, although officially they’re the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing.
The Shakers developed unique worship practices in each music and dance that expressed their faith. Until the 1870s, Shaker music was monophonic, with a single melodic line sung in unison and without instrumental accompaniment. Many of their melodies, Shakers said, got to them by spirits. Some of those charmed and haunting strains have permeated through broader American musical culture.
New type of family
The Shakers first began to arrange in Manchester, England, in 1747. By 1770, they got here to imagine that the spirit of Christ had returned through their leader, “Mother” Ann Lee. However, “Mother Ann was not Christ, nor did she claim to be,” the Shakers state. “She was simply the primary of many Believers wholly embued by His spirit, wholly consumed by His love.”
In 1774, Lee led eight followers to North America, settling near what’s now Albany, New York. As continues to be true today, Shakers held their property in common, following the model of the earliest Christians that’s recorded in the Bible’s Book of Acts. At its height, the movement had 19 major communities.
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Shakers work out their salvation every day by physical and spiritual labor. They don’t subscribe to the common Christian doctrine that Jesus’ death atoned for the sins of mankind. And Shakers are celibate – one among the practices that the majority startled their neighbors in 18th- and Nineteenth-century America. Lee taught that humanity couldn’t follow Christ within the work of spiritual regeneration, or salvation, “while living within the works of natural generation, and wallowing of their lusts.” For Shakers, celibacy is a technique people can reunite their spirits with God, who they imagine is dually female and male.
Almost every Shaker, due to this fact, joined the religion as a convert, or the kid of converts. Families who joined their communities were effectively dissolved: Husbands and wives became brothers and sisters; parents and kids the identical. Early accounts report that, in extreme instances, children publicly denounced their parents and pummeled their genitals in an effort to subdue the flesh and its earthly ties.
Shaking with the spirit
The Shakers of Lee’s day – now seen as American as apple pie – were thought to be a fundamental threat to society. In part, that stemmed from their perceived dissolution of families. But many outsiders were also alarmed by their ritual dances, whose intensity and emotion demonstrated a physicality seemingly incongruous with their celibacy.
In the early years, Shaker worship was an unbridled individual expression of spiritual enthusiasm. Eventually, it transformed into highly choreographed dances. At first, these were agonizingly slow and laborious series of movements designed to mortify the flesh – to assist the spiritual overcome the physical – and instill discipline and union among the many members.
What type of music accompanied such striking movements? The earliest Shaker songs, including ones attributed to Lee, don’t have any intelligible language. Rather, they were sung using vocalized syllables or “vocables,” equivalent to lo-de-lo or la-la-la or vi-vo-vum. Shakers invented a recent type of notation to record their songs, using letters adorned with quite a lot of hashmarks to indicate pitch and rhythm.
Early observers of the Shakers noted the consequences of their unique musical practice:
They begin by sitting down and shaking their heads in a violent manner, … one will begin to sing some odd tune, without words or rule; after some time one other will strike in; … after some time all of them fall in and make an odd charm … The mother, so called, minds to strike such notes as makes a concord, and so form the charm.
The Shakers were meticulous recordkeepers regarding every aspect of community life. Music was no exception. More than 1,000 volumes of Shaker music survive in manuscript: tens of hundreds of songs dating from Lee’s day to the mid-Twentieth century.
Scholars, musicians and researchers have extracted treasures from this repertoire. Most notably, composer Aaron Copland adapted Elder Joseph Brackett’s famous 1848 tune “Simple Gifts” for “Appalachian Spring”: the ballet that won Copland a Pulitzer in 1945. Hidden gems must still abound within the remaining unplumbed depths of Shaker manuscript songbooks.
In contrast, the Shakers left few detailed instructions for his or her dance. But eyewitness accounts abound, and students have made careful and respectful reconstructions.
Living faith
Fastvold’s film evokes the chaotic, violent world of the primary Shakers in America, who converted farm families along the New York-Massachusetts border in the course of the Revolutionary War. Some outsiders regarded the sect as an English plot to neutralize the populace with religious fervor, opening the best way for a British reconquest of New England.
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The director’s vision, incarnated by Seyfried’s bewitching presence and voice, invokes the uncanny atmosphere of early Shakerism. However, Shakerism is a living, ever-changing faith, whose presence in America is older than the country itself. The fact is, Shakers haven’t frequently danced in worship for the reason that Eighteen Eighties – or lower than half of the overall time the sect has endured.
Outsiders judged and named the Shakers in response to their external qualities in worship. The movement’s endurance and core, nevertheless, lies in its spiritual teachings. As the Believers asserted in their 1813 hymn “The Shakers,” “Shaking isn’t any silly play.”
