QI The Book of the Dead

their prayers had soothed the torments of those who had died unshriven. This led many of her followers to believe she was indeed the second incarnation of Christ. As one young Shakerwrote: ‘Every trew believer believes that Christ has made his second appearance in the world clothed in flesh & blood in the form of a woman by name Ann Lee.’
    Ann died of leukaemia at Waterlievt in 1784. She was only forty-eight. Worn out by the frequent confrontations and beatings, she ended her life peacefully, after several weeks of sitting in her rocking chair ‘singing in unknown tongues … and wholly divested of any attention to material things’. Her passage to the spirit realm was helped on its way by a lively Shaker funeral but, for many years, rumours of her impending return persisted. She herself had never claimed any such thing. Her consistent view was: ‘The second appearing of Christ is in His Church.’ She never expected the ‘personal’ return of Christ as ‘He’ had already turned up in the establishment of the Shaker faith.
    By the time Ann’s skeletal remains were exhumed fifty-six years later to see if she was actually inside her coffin or not, the Shaker community had over 6,000 members living in nineteen different settlements. This was to be the movement’s high-water mark. At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1865, President Lincoln, in recognition of their pacifist views, exempted them from combat, making them history’s first official conscientious objectors. But gradually, what many people saw as the big drawback of Shakerism – the insistence on celibacy – led to a slow decline in converts. In 1965 they voted to accept no new members. Today there are only three Shakers left, in the last Shaker settlement at Sabbathday Lake, near New Gloucester in Maine. They have the distinction of being America’s smallest religious or ethnic minority.
    For all Ann Lee’s strangeness, her emphasis on equality for all – particularly women – and a democracy based on social justiceand religious tolerance were well ahead of their time. Her view of life after death, like everything else, was bracingly clear: give up sex – the curse that had afflicted humanity since Adam and Eve – and you would be saved. As she had seen hell and could describe it in detail, who would dare risk not believing her?

     
    Another regular visitor to hell was the English poet and painter, William Blake (1757–1827). Unlike Ann Lee’s hideous vale of torments, Blake’s hell, though the opposite of heaven, was its equal – and every bit as necessary:
    Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell .
     
    These insights are from his visionary work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , published in 1790. Unlike Ann Lee, Blake didn’t descend into hell like an eagle, he sauntered around it like a tourist: ‘As I was walking among the fires of hell … I collected some of their Proverbs …’ Just as the proverbs of different countries give a clue to their character, so the ‘Proverbs of Hell’ would provide a better idea of the place than describing what the locals were wearing, if anything. The bits of ‘infernal wisdom’ he collected there would have appalled Ann Lee:
    The nakedness of woman is the work of God
     
     
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires
     
     

Damn braces: Bless relaxes
     
     
‘ The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom .’
     
    Blake was a favourite of the Beat poets of the 1950s and the hippy movement of the 1960s. For him, full expression of sexuality – for both men and women – was an essential part of worship. The spirit and flesh were one; Blake had no time for the concept of sin, or for the denial of passion. In his notes on his (now lost) painting A Vision of the Last Judgement (1810) he writes:
    Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern’d their Passions or have No Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings .
     
    To Blake, the afterlife was neither remote nor frightening. In a letter to his patron and collaborator (the wealthy and popular writer William Hayley) in 1800, Blake comforted him on the loss of his young son:
    I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when