The Blessing of the Hounds

I feel an intense connection to the Shakers. I’m not sure why, exactly, except that the first time I visited a Shaker village I felt like I was coming home. I guess much like the Amish, I’m fascinated by tight-knit communities, particularly ones that are so driven by religious fervor. In the case of the Shakers, I find it particularly of interest that they could get so swept up in a spiritual frenzy that they would think adopting culture-wide celibacy was a good idea. (Fact: one of the founding “mothers” of the faith—the Shakers were early proponents of gender equality—was a divorced woman. I’m reading between the historical lines here, but maybe she just hated men so much she decided to punish them with this concept of celibacy. HA!)

(If you know nothing of the Shakers, they were a religious sect in the 1800s. When you joined their community, you sold everything you had and gave it to them. You also quit being married—it wasn’t uncommon for a wife or husband to join and leave a spouse in “the world” or both to join the faith and become “brother and sister.” The Shakers were known for their beautiful craftsmanship, but they also worked the land and worked toward their goal of a utopian society sold out for God. The last of the Shakers died in the mid-1900s.)

I recently took the kids to see an event at the Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill—the Blessing of the Hounds. Obviously, the Shakers didn’t hunt foxes on horseback, but the event is held there and sounded like fun to me. (I know, I know… there’s a whole lot of moral issues here—the wealth of people who can afford to do things like recreational fox hunting, the stress/harm to the fox, etc. Just enjoy the blog post without overthinking it, okay?)

It was so beautiful! To see all the riders in their traditional hunt garb on their gorgeous horses was terribly fun. Hearing the hounds howling was oddly musical. It was like stepping back in time… except for the GPS collars on the necks of the dogs! A local minister prayed a blessing over the hounds and then they were off for the hunt. I think every amateur photographer in the state of Kentucky was there, so it was insanely crowded, but I managed to snap a few shots. (In other words… don’t mock the crummy photos. You just had to be there, okay?)

I could spend hours just walking around the village. I don’t even feel the need to go into the buildings, although the craftsmanship is beautiful. (The staircases are worth the drive alone. Really.) There are dozens of other preserved Shaker villages up and down the East coast and I would like to visit them all.

It’s just so serene. If you are going to have a failed religious experiment, at least pick a really darn good place to do it, right?

(I’m also a sucker for all the heritage animal breeds!)

There are so many things I want to know about the Shakers. You know there just had to be some very tragic but fabulous love stories here. Whilst I am not a romance novelist by trade, it just all seems too Romeo and Juliet-ish to pass up. Bound by some seriously whacked out religion, the whole forbidden love thing would take on new and epic proportions.

At any rate, my writer brain finds something so mystical about the Shakers as many have before me. I was already plotting a pretty wildly awesome novel in my head until I happened across some Shaker photographs in a museum exhibit.

YIKES. Let’s just say that really beautiful people apparently don’t sign up for the celibate lifestyle. The Shakers (at least in the photos I saw) looked pretty darn miserable. Nothing like the pictures of other communes that I’ve perused, where everyone looks really really happy and barely clothed.

There are so many funny jokes and comparisons I can make about the Shakers vs. more modern communes, but my mother has advised me that they are all inappropriate. So… I’ll just close with more photos.

Is there any particular period in history that you feel especially attracted to?