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Paper short abstract

The Shakers, a US monastic community, tell stories about their interactions with ancestors. I consider the types of interactions remembered and retold and instances so unremarkable that they do not bear repeating, complicating the distinctions between natural and supernatural, PEN and memorate.

Paper long abstract

“They are all around,” Brother Arnold Hadd says of the Shaker ancestors. “They want you to know they’re there.” The Sabbathday Lake Shakers are a Protestant monastic sect in New Gloucester, Maine. Shakerism is “faith as practiced,” learned through experience and refined through the struggle to overcome self in community. It is not only the living who aid Shakers in their attempts to become more Christ-like: ancestors leave signs to encourage, bless, and admonish contemporary Shakers.

Some interactions with ancestors are remembered, retold, and made sharable. These anecdotes might be divided into two categories: guidance and reassurances, and signs of death.

But interactions with ancestors rarely become narratives circulated beyond the moment. Intimate knowledge of Shakers past, achieved through the passed down stories told about their character traits and idiosyncrasies, allows living Shakers to interpret signs left by ancestors. Shakers connect strings of occurrences to discern who is communicating what message. At issue for Shakers is not the believability of a supernatural experience, characteristic of memorate or legend, but the meaning making of a natural one. It is this difference that may account for the relative lack of memorates circulated in the Shaker community.

The lack of reality testing in Shaker memorates as well as in stories about religious experiences told within a person’s worldview suggests that traits folklorists have identified as foundational to the genre may indeed be products of modern rationalism. For some groups, there may be less of a distinction between personal experience narrative and memorate.