Heavenly Visions: Shaker Gift Drawings and Gift Songs

Rating:
Summary: Easy to understand, many never-before-seen pictures
Review: "Heavenly Visions: Shaker Gift Drawings and Gift Songs" is a most impressive explanation and study of Shaker spirituality and the role of prophecy and gender within it.

Frances Moran manages in a simple and easily understood manner to see Shaker visions as a source of spiritual leadership and power for younger women within a community that was being increasingly hierarchical and bound up by the standards of "the world" (as Shakers referred to it). Frances explains easliy that gift drawings and gift songs gave Shaker women direct contact with the Spirit, which was characteristic of the earliest Believers but was lost during the early nineteenth century when Shakerism expanded. It is also show that the type of mediumship found in Shakerism is actually seen even today in ntive religions of the world.

The majority of "Heavenly Visions: Shaker Gift Drawings and Gift Songs", however, consists of some most beautiful pictures that show Shaker art of the period known as "Mother Ann's Work". The pictures are often much more beautiful and much more clearly laid out than those in less detailed studies of Shakerism and the book is made into an important purchase.

The actual pictures show there to be a great deal of structure and reason behind the gifts given to Shaker mediums during the 1840s and 1850s, as well as illustrating Shakerism's unique spiritual character. We find that there were many pictures of key Shaker leaders from the early period, and also a strong emphasis on the basic necessities of the natural world in the content of Shaker gift drawings. The written words on these drawings are beautifully written but I have not been able to read them.

A most important resource for the understanding of Shakerism.