QI The Book of the Dead

trolloping, and there is nothing to mark the waist. They are, however, most scrupulously clean .
     
    After two years in New York, the Shakers moved out to the countryside near Albany, where their community began slowly to grow and develop its special character. The centre of their devotions was the meeting-room where they kept at their spiritual labours around the clock, operating a shift system for meals. As one group ate and drank, the other brethren sang and danced in front of them. An eyewitness recorded that, when they were spinning, the women’s skirts would become ‘full of wind to form a shape like a tea cup bottom up’. There was also a regular programme of intensive exorcisms. One man was spun round off his feet for more than three hours, while all about him there was ‘yelling, yawing, snarling, pushing, elbowing, singing, dancing’. The observer concluded that ‘the worst drunken club you ever see could not cut up a higher dash of ill behaviour’.

    In the middle of it all, though rarely participating in the ‘shaking’ was Mother Ann herself. She ruled with a rod of iron; making sure that there was no backsliding. Like St Cuthbert she hardly ate at all, scraping the ‘driblets’ off other people’s finished plates, but upbraiding others for not eating enough. She was also obsessive about cleanliness, claiming ‘there is no dirt in heaven’. At the merest hint of familiarity between men and women she would regale them with her vivid visions of hell, where molten lead was poured on the genitals of the lustful. After a time, this all proved too much for her husband Abraham. Driven from the marital bed by her spiritual ‘moanings and weepings’, he one day turned up with a prostitute, saying that either Ann performed her wifely duties or he would have to find someone else who did. She threw him out, declaring he had ‘lost all sense of the gospel’. He was never heard of again.
    Ann was equally ruthless with her spiritual rivals. The eccentric cult-leader Shadrack Ireland had invented and preached the cult of Perfectionism, the idea that heaven was achievable on earth and that, as a result, he would never die. When the inevitable happened – in 1778 – his followers left him sitting in his chair until the smell became so bad they had no choice but to bury him. Ann, quick to spot an opportunity, castigated him as an agent from hell and converted many of his flock to the Shaker faith. On another occasion, when smoke from a prairie fire in upstate New York blotted out the sun, Ann used it as a powerful recruitment tool: a clear sign that the Last Days were nigh.
    As the community settled in, many of the more attractive things we now associate with the Shakers began to take shape. Their aesthetic teaching was as plain as their morality – ‘Beauty rests on utility’ – and their elegant furniture, buildings and musicbecame renowned. Their early melodies were simple and wordless, but over time these developed into beautiful three-part harmonies. By the early twentieth century, over 12,000 Shaker songs had been written, so many that a unique shorthand musical notation was devised to record them all, using letters of the alphabet rather than the familiar notes on staves.
    Ironically, given their commitment to pacifism, the Shakers were continually at war with neighbouring communities. When the War of Independence broke out, they were subjected to frequent violence. Ann was accused of being a British spy and a man in disguise. She was arrested, beaten and forced to strip to prove she was telling the truth. In 1782 James Whittaker, from whose pipe Ann had drunk in prison, was whipped by a mob ‘till his back was all in a gore of blood and the flesh bruised to a jelly’. Apparently, he sang Shaker songs all the way through his ordeal.
    As Ann grew older and her health began to fail, her visions intensified. She paid personal visits to those suffering in hell, imagining herself as ‘the woman clothed with the sun’ from the Book of Revelation who sprouts the wings ‘of a great eagle’:
    I felt the power of God come upon me, which moved my hands up and down like the motion of wings; and soon I felt as if I had wings on both hands … and they appeared as bright as gold. And I let my hands go as the power directed, and these wings parted the darkness to where souls lay, in the ditch of hell, & I saw their lost state .
     
    She reported back to the living relatives of the damned how much