England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia. Philip Hoare

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СКАЧАТЬ target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">a white, obscure, moving body in the air … which, as it approached, assumed the form and mien of an angel’ before receding ‘into the shadows of the forest …’

      Back in Manchester, the woods also beckoned to Ann Lee. One night the Shakers were resting at the roadside when James Whittaker saw ‘a large tree, and every leaf thereof shone with such brightness as made it appear like a burning torch’. Like the burning bush from which Moses was commanded to lead his people out of slavery, this ‘Tree of Life’ was a sign of their new order; and so, in the words of their chroniclers, the Shakers ‘fled to the wilderness of America, from the face of the “fiery flying serpent”’ – the church and state which they saw as the Image of the Beast. During their voyage – financed by a wealthy supporter, John Hocknell – the captain threatened to throw his human cargo overboard when they persisted in their strange rites, but a tempest blew up, and as waves sprang a plank in the hull, Ann saw two bright angels standing by the mast. At this another wave pounded the plank back into place.

      On their arrival in New York, the Shakers strode up Pearl Street and stopped outside the house of Mrs Cunningham, whose name Ann seemed to know. ‘I am commissioned of the Almighty God to preach the everlasting Gospel to America, and an Angel commanded me to come to this house, and to make a home for me and my people,’ she declared, whereupon they were immediately taken inside. There they stayed until the spring of 1776 when they established a new Albion at Niskeyuna, on land bought by Hocknell in upstate New York, a place reached through ‘the immense pines and hemlock trees’ of ‘that dreary forest, which blackens so large a portion of North America’. Around them raged the battle for the new nation, a revolution which, their visions had assured them, would ‘terminate successfully, and that a Civil Government would be founded, protecting all people in their liberty of conscience, person, and press’. Indeed, they had come to save Americans ‘all sunk in their pollutions’.

      It was a mission rooted in the virgin forest. Ann Lee was the woman living unknown in the woods of the Apocalypse, asking the trees to pray for her followers, who ran wild, hooting like owls. Witnesses claimed to have seen them dancing naked, in the belief that ‘they were angels, and invisible, and could go out among men and not be seen’. There was a precedent for such behaviour: the Ranters had preached unclothed, and the Quakers went ‘naked for a sign’. These were symbolic states, just as Blake and his wife would sit naked in their Lambeth garden, reciting from Paradise Lost and greeting a visitor, ‘Come in! it’s only Adam and Eve, you know!’

      The Blakes’ back garden represented the perfection of paradise, ‘to the scandal of wondering neighbours’. Neighbours of the Shakers’ Eden were also suspicious – not least of the sect’s claims to commune with the dead: ‘Sometimes while eating at the table, they say their dead parents and brethren come on the table and set on a pyre and they see them.’ The Shakers had inherited the early Quakers’ belief in ‘a certain efflux or effluvium of animal volatile spirits … that flow from their bodies by the command of their will into the bodies of … new proselytes’, while Ann saw God’s power ‘visible on the faces of the believers and even on their clothing … It looked perfectly white and run in veins’. At other times a ‘strange milky substance … seemed to run over the skin and clothes of converts’. Such phenomena recalled the breath that had protected Ann like balsalm and foreshadowed spiritualistic ectoplasm – the mysterious cloudy matter which possessed its own methods of bodily extrusion as it was brought forth from mediums’ mouths and even their vaginas.

      In fact, in the New World their rituals had become even more extreme. The Shakers struck grotesque shapes – ‘shaking their heads, in a violent manner, turning their heads half round, so that their face looks over each shoulder, their eyes being shut’ – as if God was fighting the Devil for control of their bodies. To some, such contortions were indistinguishable from the possessed victims of witchcraft. As the ritual rose to fever-pitch, worshippers would be ‘groaning most dismally; some trembling extremely; others acting as though all their nerves were convulsed; others swinging their arms, with all vigour, as though they were turning a wheel, etc. Then all break off, and have a spell of smoaking, and some times great fits of laughter … this they call the worship of God’.

      Sometimes the dancing grew so intense that the entire company would jump up and down, making the house tremble ‘as if there were an earthquake’. Nor were these convulsions confined to indoors. They could happen while travelling by foot or horseback, digging in the fields, or cutting trees; their subjects would not interrupt their chores, but carried on working as their heads turned from left to right, ‘with eyes closed or raised towards the sky, with an expression which proclaims ecstasy, anguish, and pain’. Such scenes must have been truly disturbing for passersby, and perhaps even for the Shakers themselves. Yet they had been licensed to act in this way by the freedom of America, as though their removal to a new world had liberated them from England’s little ease and allowed their ranks to swell. The American colonies had already witnessed George Whitefield’s Great Awakening and the revival known as the New Light Stir. Now, with the Dark Day of 10 May 1780, when candles had to be lit at noon – in fact, the clouds were the carbonised remains of the forest itself, burnt in clearings and suspended in the air like great trails of incense – hundreds came over to Shakerism, drawn by this apocalyptic sign.

      It seemed the Shakers were summoning spirits, or were possessed by them, sometimes to be purged by Mother Ann. After all, was not Christ an exorcist? But in New England, these were dangerous ideas in the lee of Salem, the harbour town due east of Niskeyuna. Only eighty years previously, in 1692, several girls of the town had begun to display strange symptoms. ‘Their motions in their fits are preternatural, both as to the manner, which is so strange as a well person could not screw their body into,’ wrote Reverend Lawson, while Reverend Hale noted: ‘Their arms, necks, and backs were turned this way and that, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of any epileptic fits, or natural disease to effect.’ Others spoke in voices which were not their own; some felt bitten or pinched, and even had actual marks on their skin. Later explanations for these phenomena would include multiple personality, an extreme form of ‘hysterical fugue’, or even ergotism, St Antony’s Fire, in which the victim contorts their body in pain, shaking and suffering delusions. But such pathology was not available to those who witnessed the Shakers’ strange convulsions; and as Matthew Hopkins’ campaign would haunt Mary Ann Girling, so Salem’s memory cast these forest rites as a kind of Goyaesque coven.

      For the Shakers, who saw time in heaven-directed dispensations which extended beyond human measure, it was the beginning of a new age. To seal the success of their ‘federated communal order’, an echo of the new states of America, they set off to tour New England. Travelling by night, they sang to keep their spirits up in the pitch-black darkness of the forest, and carried their faith as far north as Maine and the plantation by Sabbathday Lake. Yet in these shadowy sorties they were accused of unAmerican activities, of harbouring weapons and ‘being unfriendly to the patriotic cause, from the fact of their bearing a testimony against war in general’. Their pacifism was in itself an offence, and Mother Ann was abducted by vigilantes with blackened faces like the ‘Red Indian’ protesters of the Boston Tea Party, and her dress torn off to reveal ‘a British emissary СКАЧАТЬ