The Book of the Dead

by John Mitchinson

  Cuthbert was fifty-three years old. He had always wanted to be buried where he lay, by his little stone house on his lonely island, near his friends the otters, eagles, and seabirds, but shortly before he died, he gave the monks permission to bury him at Lindisfarne. His grave became the site of a miraculous cure. A boy, possessed by demonic fits, was brought to the holy place. The monks located the spot where the water used to wash Cuthbert’s body had been poured into the ground and gave the boy some of the soil to eat. At once the demons left him and the boy was calmed.

  The monks decided to honor the saint by building him a proper shrine. In 698, eleven years after he had died, his coffin was disinterred and opened for the first time. The miraculous discovery was made that his body had not decayed. Not only that, but his limbs were flexible and his clothing had not faded. Those who saw his body reported that he appeared to be not dead but sleeping, a sure sign of sainthood. The new Abbot, Eadfrith, commissioned a copy of the Gospels to be made in Cuthbert’s honor. The Lindisfarne Gospels are regarded as the supreme fusion of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic religious art.

  The years that followed were precarious ones for the monastery. Viking raids began in earnest in 793 and a major attack in 875 prompted the monks to shift Cuthbert’s coffin and his Gospels to the mainland. For more than a century, they were venerated at the parish church of Chester-le-Street, a small town eight miles inland from Sunderland. In 995 further Danish raids forced a move farther south to Ripon Abbey. During the journey, the cart carrying St. Cuthbert’s coffin became stuck in the mud. The monks prayed for help and the saint appeared to them in person, asking to be buried somewhere called Dunholme. Shortly afterward, by pure chance, they overheard a milkmaid mention the name as the place where she had lost her cow. She led them to a steep, rocky peninsula on a bend in the River Wear and the monks laid the saint to rest. This was the origin of the city of Durham.

  By the eleventh century, the tomb of St. Cuthbert had become the most popular pilgrim destination in northern England. The sacrist (or keeper) of the shrine was one Elfrid Westoue. He opened the saint’s coffin regularly to trim his hair and nails with a pair of silver scissors and traveled up and down the north scooping up the relics of other local saints and placing them in bags in St. Cuthbert’s tomb for safekeeping. One of the bags contained the remains of the saint’s biographer, the Venerable Bede. In 1020 Elfrid had shamelessly stolen his skeleton from the monks at Jarrow. In 1027 the Viking king Cnut, on his way back from a pilgrimage to Rome, paid reverence to the saint, covering the last six miles of the journey in his bare feet.

  In 1069 William the Conqueror began his bloody suppression of the north. As he worked his way up from York, burning every house and murdering every person in his path, the monks at Durham hurriedly tried to move Cuthbert’s coffin back to Lindisfarne. Caught out by the tide, they were intercepted by King William, who commanded them to open the casket. No sooner had he done so than he was seized by a violent fever. Taking this as a sign of the saint’s displeasure, he countermanded his order and left Durham, never to return. The monks put Cuthbert back where he’d come from.

  In 1104, more than four hundred years after Cuthbert’s death, the magnificent new cathedral at Durham (begun in 1093) was ready to receive his remains. The decision was made that his body should be inspected once more. They found the saint lying on his side as if in a deep sleep, accompanied by “an odor of the sweetest fragrance.” Next to him was a tiny, exquisitely lettered version of St. John’s Gospel, the oldest known leather-bound book to have survived in Britain. Any spare space was taken up with the linen bags parked there by Elfrid, in which were found the relics of eight local saints and the bones of Bede. (Bede wasn’t a saint in those days, although he had been declared venerable in 836. He had to wait until 1899 before being canonized by Pope Leo XIII, who made up for the oversight by appointing him a “Doctor of the Church,” the only native of Great Britain ever to be so honored.) On the outside of the coffin was a painting, later identified as the first recorded representation of the Virgin and Child in Western art. At some point over the years, an unknown artist of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria had been keeping the flame of Western civilization alight.

  To authenticate the evidence, the coffin and its contents were examined by a gathering of forty-seven senior clerics. The abbot of Sées, in northern France, even went as far as touching the corpse, moving its arms and legs about and tweaking its ears to show that rigor mortis had still not set in. The miracle was confirmed and, for the next four hundred years, Cuthbert’s corpse lay undisturbed.

  In 1534, as part of Henry VIII’s reforms of the Church of England, the church commissioners were instructed to destroy Cuthbert’s tomb, removing any treasures that might have been buried with him. Opening it up, they took out his golden staff and other jewelry, but once again, to their amazement, they found St. Cuthbert “fresh, safe and not consumed” and sporting what looked like a fortnight’s growth of beard. The monks were then allowed to rebury his physical remains—and those of his eight saintly companions—in the floor of the cathedral, where the shrine had once stood.

  Somewhere along the line, a legend grew up that Cuthbert hated women, so none was allowed to approach his tomb too closely. Given his regular and apparently cordial dealings with abbesses during his lifetime, this feels like an unjustified slur invented by misogynistic monks. A second legend was that at some point in the late seventeenth century, his body had been stolen and replaced. In 1827 the dean and chapter decided to see if they could locate the body under the cathedral floor. After a long search they eventually came across a coffin whose exterior closely resembled the one described in the 1104 account. They lifted the lid. Inside, wrapped in five layers of silk, was an ordinary skeleton, an ivory comb, a portable silver altar, and, lying on the skeleton’s ribcage, a beautiful square Anglo-Saxon gold cross, inlaid with garnet, which has now become the emblem of Durham University.

  In 1899–1,212 years after Cuthbert had died and the year Bede finally got his sainthood and his doctorate—the coffin was opened for the last time and medical tests were made on Cuthbert’s bones. These matched the known details of his life—such as they were—and they suggested that the body had been mummified for a long period after death. More recent scholarship has speculated that the combination of Cuthbert’s emaciated state at the time of his death and the high sand-and-salt content in the Lindisfarne soil might well have resulted in mummification. In any event, his legend started a trend and there are now more than a hundred Christian saints who have been reported as “incorrupt” at some time after burial, although few have endured such a busy posthumous schedule as Cuthbert.

  In 1835 the remains of an expatriate Englishwoman were exhumed from the cemetery in the hamlet of Watervliet in upstate New York. In this case, the reason for the exhumation wasn’t to see if the corpse was “incorrupt,” but to check that it was there at all. Ann Lee (1736–84), known to her followers as Mother Ann, or “Ann the Word,” was the leader of the Shaker movement in North America. Her personality was so dominant that even though she was a woman, many of her followers believed she was the resurrected Christ and simply refused to accept that she could ever die.

  Ann Lee was born in Toad Lane, Manchester. The illiterate daughter of a blacksmith, she came from a large, poor family who sent her out to work as a velvet cutter when she was only five years old. The job involved hours of walking backward and forward with a special knife, slitting open the tightly woven loops of silk to create a velvet pile. In the course of a day, a velvet cutter might expect to cover twenty miles. By the age of eighteen Ann was working as a cook at the new Manchester Infirmary. She was a strong, big-boned girl with light chestnut hair and intense blue eyes. Despite her good looks, she conceived a deep hatred of sex from an early age, and most of the visions she witnessed (from her early teens onward) focused on the depravity of human nature and the evils of lust. As second youngest of eight children, she had grown up in a tiny house with her elder si
blings, several of whom were cohabiting with their spouses. It may have been this exposure to sexual activity at close quarters and at an early age that was the source of Ann’s revulsion. She had such a compelling gift for persuasion, however, that she managed to get her own mother to take up celibacy. This infuriated her father, who threatened Ann with a whip.

  Her own marriage confirmed Ann’s worst suspicions. She had avoided it until she was twenty-six, when her father forced her to marry one of his employees, Abraham Standerin, a junior blacksmith. He was also illiterate and the couple each signed their marriage certificate with a cross. Ann and Abraham would go on to have eight children in quick succession, though four of them were stillborn and none made it past the age of six.

  In the meantime, Ann had joined a fledgling religious sect called the Wardley Society. Started by James and Jane Wardley, two married tailors from Bolton, it was colloquially known as the Shaking Quakers (or Shakers for short). The Wardleys had developed the belief that the soul could be purified of its lusts only by the action of the Holy Spirit, which manifested itself by violently shaking the physical body of the sinner. The greater the sin, the more extreme the shaking—and thus the more noise produced in the supplicant. As a result, Shaker meetings were deafening: They could sometimes be heard several miles away:

  One will fall prostrate on the floor, another on his knees and his head on his hands, on the floor; another will be muttering articulate sounds which neither they nor any body else can understand… others will be shooing and hissing evil spirits out of the house; all in different tunes, groaning, jumping, dancing, drumming, singing, laughing, talking and stuttering, shooing and hissing makes a perfect bedlam; this they call the worship.

  Ann’s reports of her visions entranced the group, and the moral leadership of the sect passed to her from the Wardleys. To be a Shaker meant plain and simple living, common ownership of property, and most important of all, complete rejection of sexual activity—even for married couples. Men and women were expected to live and work apart to avoid the temptations of lust, and children were separated from their parents and fostered by other believers. This liberated Shaker women from their roles as wives and mothers and made them the equals of men. The Shaker god was male and female, both father and mother, and not “a trinity of three men.” Since no one had sex, they rapidly ran out of children to pass the faith on to: Shakerism could grow only by making converts.

  By the early 1770s the Manchester Shakers had grown in number to about sixty and their odd behavior and unsettling social practices made them deeply unpopular with regular churchgoers. Their meetings were disrupted by mobs and they were pelted with dung on the street. Ann was arrested for disturbing the peace and imprisoned in a small stone cell. She later claimed she survived only because another leading Shaker, James Whittaker, fed her a mixture of wine and milk smuggled inside in his clay pipe. While in jail Ann had her most powerful vision, which she called “a special manifestation of Divine Light,” showing her that the second coming of Christ was imminent.

  Ann’s imprisonment enhanced her authority, and when she emerged, the other Shakers (including the Wardleys) began to refer to her as their “Mother in spiritual things.” In 1774 she had a new vision where she saw that she must take the most faithful followers and set up a new community in America. Only nine of the sixty made the voyage. At one point their singing and dancing were so annoying that the other passengers threatened to throw them overboard. However, the weather turned rough, and the captain later claimed it was only the Shakers’ faith that kept the vessel afloat. The community of less faithful Shakers, left behind in Manchester and without the sustaining intensity of Ann to lead them, rapidly disintegrated.

  In her vision, Ann had seen, in precise detail, the place that was destined to be the home of the new community. Once in New York, the tiny Shaker group wasted no time in finding the house that Ann had described and presenting themselves to the family living there. The family listened patiently to Ann’s tale of how she had been directed there by an angel and invited the whole group in. The unexpected arrangement worked, perhaps because Abraham brought his skills as a blacksmith and Ann was an excellent housekeeper. As a female journalist reported at the time:

  The women are the ugliest set of females I ever saw gathered together, perhaps their particularly unbecoming dress added to the plainness of their appearance; it seems to be adapted to make them look as ugly as art can possibly devise… their petticoats are long and 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 center of their devotions was the meeting room, where they kept at their spiritual labors 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 program of intensive exorcisms. One man was spun around 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 behavior.”

  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 music became renowned. Their early melodies were simple and wordless, but over time these developed into beautiful three-part harmonies. By the early twentieth century, more than twelve thousand 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 neighboring 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 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 Shaker wrote: “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 leukemia 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, rumors 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 because she believed he had already turned up in the establishment of the Shaker faith.