RADICAL ROAD TRIP SEEKS HEAVEN ON EARTH
Great Awakenings was an 8 day pilgrimage taken in July 2023, led by Maria Molteni and Melissa Nierman, including Shay/Sherman Curran, Laura Campagna and Lauren Van Mullem- a dream built upon several years of traveling a similar route with friends, mystics, intuitives and psychic practitioners + 15 years of my own research into visionary movements in New England- particularly the Shakers and Spiritualists.
The Great Awakenings invitation as it appeared on Now Age Travel’s booking site:
Join Melissa Nierman ( DIY educator + occult tour guide), Maria Molteni (queer artist, mystic, educator, Shaker researcher), along with guest researchers/ spiritual practitioners and an intimate caravan of inspiring peers on a road-trip-style pilgrimage. Great Awakenings will travel through potent sites of historic and contemporary Spiritualist, Shaker and 19th century abolitionist communities in Massachusetts and New York State.
Beginning in “Witch City” (Salem, MA) and ending in “The Town That Talks to the Dead” (Lily Dale, NY) for the annual 2-day symposium *The Science of Things Spiritual, this roving retreat - in the year of the Chariot - will touch down in spaces integral to spiritual and communal paradigm shifts referred to as “Great Awakenings” in (so-called) American history.
With a focus on parts of the Second + Third Great Awakenings (1820s-1850s), we seek to reconnect with historic visionary movements by immersion in the land and structures that hosted them - often labeled as “Utopian”. Through critical dialogue, psychic exploration, and creative engagement, we’ll co-create refreshed notions of Heaven on Earth (Shaker communal ideal). Facilitating reading circles, movement workshops, ceremonial hikes, intuitive development, collective dreaming, guided tours (see below), our adventurous pursuits will lead up to Molteni’s symposium lecture (described below):
Sojourner Truth statue, Florence, MA
Spiritual Spectacles: Mother’s Work and the Shaker Era of Manifestations
The Shakers arrived from England in 1766, seeking to build organized, egalitarian religious communes. While widely known for their fervent worship styles, strict celibacy and excellent design, a brief period of their history known as “The Era of Manifestations” brought forth exceptionally fruitful spirit communication. From roughly 1837-1857 first-generation Shakers, such as early leader Mother Ann Lee (believed to be the Second Coming of Christ as Holy Mother Wisdom), appeared to young Shaker “instruments” who channeled their messages. Visual recordings of these correspondences are now known as the Gift Drawings or Mother’s Work. This lecture will contextualize the Era of Manifestations, its overlap with Spiritualism, and some of Molteni’s responsive artwork as artist and researcher-in-residence at Hancock, Canterbury, and Harvard Shaker Villages.
^ Description of Molteni’s Lecture
To view more of Molteni’s Shaker-related artwork, continue to Unseen Hours/ Sacred Sheets or Shaker Work-Out
*Science of Things Spiritual is organized by contemporary artist and spirit photographer Shannon Taggart
