Ida Craddock:  Outrider in the Borderlands of Body and Spirit

Columbia University Religion and the Sexual Body Religion W4828 Fall 2013 Professor Katherine Pratt Ewing

Riley Kellogg 646-413-3749 [email protected] [email protected]

Ida Craddock Outrider in the Borderlands of Body and Spirit

Introduction

The story of Ida Craddock presents a rich field in which to explore a number of issues surrounding subject formation and the construction of self; sexual desire and the morality of sexual practice; spiritual experience and aspiration; and the ways in which these may be embodied and intertwined in one person's life. Her life story further illuminates the role that the social and political climate plays as the medium through which a subject lives and moves, and as the matrix in which subject-construction occurs. Her life embodies many of the transformations that American society was undergoing at the end of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth, especially in the areas of spiritual experience, sexual practice, and gender relations. Born in Philadelphia in 1857, Craddock was raised by her widowed mother (her father died when she was an infant), home-schooled in a conservative and religiously observant home. Her early education was as a Quaker, but her mother became an Evangelical. Ida was reform-minded even in her youth, and before finishing high school had begun to work for educational equality for women. After pressing her case for several years, she was allowed to take the entrance exam at the University of Pennsylvania in 1882; four days of demanding tests on all manner of subjects, including history, geography, mathematics, philosophy, Latin, and Greek. She was the first woman to take the exam, and she passed. But the administration decided that they should not allow women to enroll after all, and she was denied admission. She embarked on a path of self-education, becoming a scholar and teacher; counselor and therapist; a student of comparative

religion, mysticism, and spirituality. Most important for this paper's exploration, she was an outspoken advocate for social reform of marriage and sexual rights and the importance of these for spiritual advancement. She taught and promoted sexual techniques, which she developed for spiritual improvement and the social improvement of the marital state for both men and women. The principal focus of her work was the special role of sexual relations of heterosexual married couples as a tool to assist in reaching the most exalted spiritual experience available to humanity. Men and women should be equal partners in marriage, she taught; for her, this meant an equal partnership in sexual pleasure and agency, as well as in domestic arrangements. Such an equal partnership was a radical idea, and met with much opposition. The explicit treatment of marital sex in her writings was scandalous enough coming from a woman; it would have been impossibly improper for an unmarried woman to speak knowledgeably and authoritatively on sexual matters. Craddock was an unmarried woman. Even if she had been willing to endure the condemnation of society for speaking of sexual knowledge gained out of wedlock, the level of scandal would certainly have made the audience for her work even smaller than it was. She eventually acknowledged that she did indeed have a husband, Soph, who was, she explained, a non-corporeal entity, or spirit. Her work ran afoul of the far-reaching anti-vice laws of the day, which forbade the dissemination of any sexually explicit materials, whether they were intended as titillation or as medical or spiritual education. She was repeatedly hounded and arrested, and her writing confiscated and burned. Her mother attempted to have her involuntarily institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital. She served three months in the New York City Workhouse for Women. Eventually, facing an almost certain conviction and a five-year prison term, she took her own life at the age of forty-five.

The Existing Literature

Craddock's life has not been much examined until recently. Before her death, she took precautions to preserve some of h er writing from t he intent of the vice-law enforcement authorities aut horities to destroy des troy it, lodging lodgi ng manuscripts and copies of her published work with friends. Her surviving work includes diaries, pamphlets printed in lim ited quantities for distribution distributi on to a sympathetic sympat hetic circle of friends and supporters, and to those who wrote requesting them; correspondence with friends and family, and a letter to the public written before her suicide. Her teachings have not been championed and continued in any direct line of transmission that I

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have been able to locate, but she has been garnering some interest in the past few years. Marie Griffith

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includes a brief discussion of Craddock in her 1999 study of imaginaries of embodied spirituality, Born 2

Again Bodies. Bodies . Vere Chappell’s 2010 Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock is a fairly straight-forward biographical history of Craddock’s life and times with excerpts from her work. And Leigh Eric Schmidt's Heaven’s Schmidt's Heaven’s Bride: Th e Unprintable Li fe of Ida C. Craddock, C raddock, Americ an Mystic, Scholar, Schol ar, Sexologist, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman is Madwoman is a more theoretically wide-ranging work, placing Craddock’s life and ideas in the context of other threads of religious and social history to which her work has relevance, also published in 2010. I will fo cus here on a few of th e issues raised: situating Craddock's Crad dock's work in a discussion of the gender issues of her day, social reforms, and the challenge of her work to the spiritual-material binary view of human nature.

Craddock's beliefs

Craddock's beliefs and work can be divided into two main themes: reform of earthly marital and sexual mores and law, and the spiritual potential of sexual action. These were most often interwoven in her writing, but occasionall y addressed indi vidually. Craddock Cradd ock began her stu dies of spiritual ity, spiritualism, spiritual ism, the occult, occult , and comparative religion with the Theosophical Society at the age of thirty. Through the theosophists she was introduced to many concepts which would influence her own philosophy, including reincarnation, tantric practice, and a monistic philosophy that troubles the simplistic spirit-matter binary and posits instead a spectrum of refinement of materiality. While she did not articulate this aspect of her thinking in great detail, it was a key element grounding her views on intimate physical relations between a spiritual being and a human. In developing her philosophy and on sexuality and religion, she earnestly sought to serve the development of the moral life, seeking the elevation of the individual, of the married couple and their united state, and of the social body as well. She addressed her advice on sexual practice exclusively to monogamous married couples, rather than professing Free Love and the irrelevance of monogamous marriage, as some of her contemporary social reformers did. Either she believed that sex had its proper place only in the context of marriage, or else she was strategically smart, and aimed to make her work more

Griffith, R. Marie. 2004. Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity. Series Title: California 1 Studies in Food and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2 Chappell, Vere. 2010. Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock . San Francisco: Red Wheel / Reiser.

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acceptable to a broader swath of the American public than would be the case it if she were to couch it in terms of Free Love. Influences on her thought included the physician Alice B. Stockham, an obstetrician and gynecologist (among the first women to be a medical doctor in the United States), who was both “a marital adviser and 3

metaphysical speculator.” Stockham advocated a system of sex within marriage in which the spiritual and physical merge. In her Karezza her Karezza system , the , the creative and spiritual energies are stimulated in sexual practice, 4

but conserved by foregoing orgasm except when procreation procreatio n is desired. The practice was not one of repression of sexual drives but conservation of the nervous energies, a process in which “spiritual exaltation increases”, and which aimed to focus on “a process of 'spiritual unfoldment'” which would replenish the 5

nervous energy stores of both parties. Stockham's system was an adaptation of tantric practices in which she hoped to promote gender equality and mutual respect in married partners. The system also aimed at providing a no n-mechanical, non -intrusive method metho d of contraception ; one that woul d not interfere wit h the “magnetic interchange” of energy, which she and other thinkers addressing spiritual-sexual practices at the time believed were necessary to the spiritual union of the partners. Many sexual reform movements were in the air: social movements advocating reform of sexual techniques, of reproductive planning and technologies, and of cultural and psychological approaches to the roles of the sexes in marriage; and those advocating for women's suffrage and gender equality. These were seen as being interdependent and mutually determined by some of the era’s activists, including Stockham and Craddock. The overall reformation they aimed to bring about was, on their view, a part of the inevitable march toward the betterment of the human condition, along the road paved with education, technology, and reason which so many in the late nineteenth century saw themselves as traveling. The social and psychological concerns of the era about nervous and energetic dissipation dovetail and overlap with the spiritual concern of estrangement from God or depletion of spiritual resources. The ways in which these are connected point up the porous curtains separating the religious from the secular, as well as the individual from the social, perhaps at all times but particularly in the late-nineteenth century era. The age was especially susceptible to the transgressing of those boundaries. Scientific experimentation and discovery was accelerating at a great pace. Old ways of defining the self faced new challenges and found new tools for 3 Schmidt, Leigh Eric. 2010. Heaven' s Bride . New York: Basic Books. p. 149. 4 Griffith 2004, p. 52. 52. The Karezza System retains adherents adherents today. See http://collectivelyconscious.net/articles/karezza-another-way-to-make-love/. 5 Griffith 2004, p. 92–93. Kellogg


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building self-definition. sel f-definition. Wil liam James and others were develop ing new understan dings of the ways w ays in which all experience and spiritual experience particularly are embodied. Craddock's insistence on the inextricable link between sexual performativity and the embodied experience of spiritual truth was unique, or at least uniquely expressed, in her time. The entwinement was total; the highest spiritual experience could only be reached, she believed, through focused and properly trained sexual practice. Of course Craddock’s experiences, beliefs, and voice did not spring out of nowhere. And although her particular philosophy was distinctive, she had, as a female mystic, many antecedents. While Craddock’s import is not only, or even necessarily primarily, as a mystic, her reception by her contemporaries was in part guided by the gender-biased reception of female mystics historically. If a man had claimed knowledge of both the spirit world and practical techniques for making marriage a happy state for both parties, would he have met with the same difficulties? Then again, could a man have had, and expressed, such experiences and such a system of thought? While a full consideration of Craddock as a mystic is not the aim of this paper, a few points Amy Hollywood makes regarding female mystics are not out of place here. Hollywood notes that “Women mystics were often leaders and innovators not only within women’s religious communities, but also within 6

larger communities that included men.” She notes that philosophers “Bataille, Lacan, and Irigaray … read these women … as unique in their ability to bring together action and contemplation, emotion and reason, 7

body and soul.” soul .” And this integration was precisely the signal characteristic of Craddock’s philosophy and practice. Craddock' s first controvers ial writings were w ere a consideration o f the symbolic import i mport and social soci al function of the Danse the Danse du Ventr e, the belly-dance performed by women in the Cairo Street exhibit at the Columbian Exhibition of 1893 in Chicago. She analyzed the performance in all its aspects from movement to costume as symbolizing a fully controlled and fully realized marital sexuality, and the refinement of the psychological and spiritual state s tate of the partners at tainable through throug h such a practice. In h er diaries and pamphlets, Craddock C raddock wrote of th e entwinement of o f sexual and spiri tual relations wi th her husband: “My husband … is in the world beyond the grave, and had been for many years previous to our union, which took place in October, 1892. In accordance with angelic laws, he can come clearly to me when I keep the way of right living and clear thinking. Since right living cannot coexist with a sexual intercourse which is

6 Hollywood, Amy. 2002. Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 7. 7 Hollywood 2002, p. 6. Kellogg


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uncontrolled—as I have endeavored to show throughout this pamphlet—we are both of us compelled to carry out those principles of ideal marital relations which we are taught by the symbolism of the Danse du 8

Ventre.” Ventre .” The concerns of spiritual skeptics are addressed by her statement that whether her marriage is “a fact or hallucination,” she has “gained from it a knowledge of sexual relations which many years of reading and discussions with other people never brought” her.

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In addition to her “Heavenly Bridegroom” and teacher, Soph, Craddock wrote of other spirit counselors and advisors, the chief of whom was Iases. Iases played the role of a literary editor as well as spiritual counselor, advising in detail on the writing of her pamphlets; which ideas and examples to include and which to omit, how to couch the ideas in language that would appeal to the public while attempting to shield her from prosecution and persecution by those hostile to her teachings.

Practice as an Educator

Craddock moved to Chicago in the late 1880s, and began her practice as a marriage counselor, giving spiritual and sexual guidance both in person and by mail. She gave lectures in major cities across the country with titles such as “Survivals of Sex Worship in Christianity and in Paganism” and “What Christianity has done for Marital Relation.” She worked as the secretary of the National Liberal League, and also wrote instructional books on shorthand, as the teaching to which she felt most strongly called did not always provide a living wage for her. A series of pamphlets addressed to educating married couples in sexual relations included “The Wedding Night,” “The Marriage Relation,” and “Right Marital Living.” In these pamphlets, she gives explicit instructions about how the husband should arouse the wife, instructs him to restrain himself from frightening or disgusting her by pressing for genital contact before she is aroused, and instructs the husband that if he does this correctly his wife will welcome further sexual contact in the future. At the time, the presumptive popular p opular perception of sex was of marit al privilege for th e man and marital marit al duty for the wo man, with no thought given to the idea that she might have sexual desires or be entitled to have them respected. At the turn of the twentieth century in America, rape was an act that was defined legally as occurring only outside of wedlock, but not within its bounds. Once married, the woman gave up any legal rights over her

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Chappell 2010, p. 20. Chappell 2010, p. 20.

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body. This was w as a matter calling for social reform as well as spiritual spiritu al and psycholo gical reeducation. Craddock's commitment to the social side of the marital sex question was as intense as to the spiritual side.

Opposition to Craddock’s Teachings: Anthony Comstock

Anthony Comstock was an anti-pornography activist and something of a self-appointed national sexual Inquisitor General. In 1873, he founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and remained its leader until his death over four decades later. The Society had the authority under New York State law to identify materials that it deemed obscene, and to confiscate the materials and charge those who possessed or distributed them. The “obscene” explicitly included materials related to contraception, abortion, and sexual education, which were all suspected of leading to promiscuous behavior. In the year the Society was founded, Comstock's influence pushed a bill through the United States Congress with similar provisions, and making it a federal crime to distribute such materials across state lines. Comstock became a U.S. Postal Inspector, which granted him and his appointees greater authority to pursue their agenda on the national scene. He was the legal and symbolic representative of the ethos and morality of his time; and wielded the power of authorit y to compel conformity. con formity.

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Craddock’s promotion of techniques for achieving sexual pleasure for both men and women, although presented for a target ed audience of married couples in the co ntext of spiritual spirit ual devotion, earn ed her Comstock's designation as a pornographer and a threat to the morals of America. Comstock set his sights on Craddock in 1898, and she was subjected to repeated raids of her premises, destruction of her manuscripts, arrests, and threats of psychiatric commitment. He appears to have had no opinion on or concern with the factuality of Craddock’s claim that she was married to a spirit; he did not care whether she came by her knowledge and opinions through illicit sexual relations with a human male outside the institution of marriage, or with a ghost or an angel within it. Her explicit discussion of sexual acts, whether with human or spirit was, to his mind, pornography, and his concern was with halting her dissemination of it. As Foucault notes, the extreme condemnation and suppression of sex in this age was a manifestation of extreme preoccupation with sex. On this view Comstock’s sexual obsessions may be educed from his

10 The Comstock Laws were behind many cases of prosecution and persecution of expression. Among the more notable cases besides that of Ida Craddock were prosecutions of a production of George Bernard Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession (1905); publication of Theodore Dreiser's book Genius (1916); serialization of James Joyce's book Ulysses (1920); Margaret Sanger's activities promoting contraception on numerous occasions from 1916 through the 1920's; Mae West's production of her play Sex (1927). Kellogg


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dedication to the eradication of sexual expression. His constant exposure to the materials he condemned would have caused a heightened awareness of and sensitivity to the sexual element of any media or behavior he encountered. An imagining of such an influence on his psyche is one focus of the poem by Julianna Baggott, Margaret Baggott, Margaret Sanger San ger Addresses t he Ghost of Ida Craddock , to be found at the end of this paper. The public's recepti on of Comstock Comst ock was mixed. T he more liberal Am ericans derided hi m as a prude and as out of step with the modern age; he was the butt of jokes and political cartoons. George Bernard Shaw coined the term “comstockery” to refer to censorship of imagined immorality. Yet Comstock represented a large portion of the populace, and was p olitically popular po pular and powerful. His views both bot h reflected and shaped those of the country for decades in a mutually-reinforcing circuit. In addition to the hostility Craddock faced as a proponent of sexual education and reform, there was also the question of her status as a person relating her spiritual experience; her status as a mystic. Amy Hollywood, in the introduction to Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History, History , discusses the gendered perceptions of mystic experience and its expressions throughout history. Although the female mystics she discusses are on the whole medieval, her discussion of the philosophical treatment of them can inform an understanding of some of the hostile context in which Craddock was received by mainstream popular society, as well as by orthodox religious practitioners. Hollywood argues that historically, “mysticism tends to be gendered in one of two ways. Either mysticism … is simply associated with femininity and so denigrated, or a distinction is made between good and bad, acceptable and unacceptable, pathological and non-pathological forms of mysticism, with the first category in each case 11

associated with masculinity and men and the second with femininity and women.” While this has not been universally the case—there have been female mystics embraced and respected in their time by their traditions—it has historically been the dominant strain of reception. A further facet of the shock and scandal occasioned by Craddock's frank teachings and open discussion of sex was connected to the unacknowledged and even unconsciously integrated nature of much sexual behavior and thi nking. The sexu al habitus of the t he culture encompas sed the embodied embodi ed practice, of course, but this was deeply entangled with inherited and learned attitudes. The actions and the thoughts in such a situation become mutually determined; inseparable, and often resistant to self-analysis. The moral foundations of the objections to transgressive actions and teachings that are given by those making the

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Hollywood 2002, p. 8.

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objections may be constructed after the fact to support or justify a structure built on older and more deeply hidden foundations. Craddock’s mother also disapproved of her endeavors, and when the first legal case was brought against Ida in Chicago in 1893, her mother demanded that Ida allow herself to be committed to a psychiatric hospital. When Craddock refused, her mother attempted to have her involuntarily committed. Ida fled and, using a cunning trick of misdirection in which her baggage went on a train to one destination while she slipped off and boarded a train to another, she eventually made her way to New York City, and onto a ship to England. She worked in London for some time, as assistant to the social reformer William T. Stead, while researching ancient mythology on her free time in the collections and library of the British museum, and developing a knowledge of comparative mythology impressive for her time. Despite her mother's antagonism to her work and spiritual commitments, their relationship remained a touchstone in her life. On the day of her suicide, Ida wrote two letters: One to the public, and one to her mother.

Craddock's Writing: The Danse du Ventre

With the Columbian Exhibition of 1893 in Chicago, many new and foreign ideas were introduced to the American public. The Parliament of Religions brought representatives of the world's religious traditions a public forum and an d wide visibility visibi lity or the first time in this thi s country. Moving Mov ing pictures were d emonstrated. Many M any wonders were on display for a rapt audience. The Exposition would prove to be a watershed moment in the introduction of the American people, and the West in general, to world cultures and religions; it formed the matrix out of which developed the taproot of the comparative study of religions. The Danse du Ventr e was among the most heavily-attended exhibits at the Exposition, despite—or, more likely, because of—the intense controversy and vehement condemnation it occasioned. The Victorian sensibility saw the movements and costumes of the dancers as sexually suggestive—despite the fact that the costumes worn for these performances were far more modest than the authentic costumes traditionally used in the performers’ home cultures. Comstock and many others condemned the dance as lewd and morally reprehensible. Craddock, however, found it fascinating and instructive. She challenged the would-be censors, and declared in an article that it was not obscene, but highly moral. Rather than deny the charges that it was a sexual performance, Craddo ck chose instead t o highlight the dance's sexual character and to elabo rate in great

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detail on the moral teachings that it was intended to impart. It is not at all clear whether her confident assertions about the nature and symbolism of the dance were informed by particular knowledge of its traditional uses and significations, or by her own interpretations based upon her detailed knowledge of a variety of mythologies and her thinking about spiritual practices and symbolism. However she came to her understanding of the Danse the Danse,, she saw it as a means of training the body in controlled expression of sexual desire, and recommended that it be taught to all married women as an aid in a healthy and pleasurable sexual life for both partners. Her defense of the Danse the Danse was was published in the New the New York World Wor ld and and the Chicago Clinic. Clinic. This article was the occasion of Comstock's first interest in Craddock. His attempts to shut down the Danse failed, Danse failed, and, frustrated, he began a program of surveillance of Craddock's work. She was arrested in Chicago in 1889 on charges of distributing obscenity through the mail: her pamphlet on Right Marital Marit al Living. Her defender was Clarence Darrow, who posted her bail and helped to clear her of charges. Darrow was an unknown young corporate lawyer at the time, only a few months older than Craddock herself, and decades away from his famous defense of John Scopes for teaching evolution in the 1925 “Monkey Trial”. He was a free-thinker, and had experimented with attending séances; he was willing to support a serious thinker marginalized by normative social attitudes.

Craddock's Writing: Heavenly Writing: Heavenly Bridegrooms Bridegroo ms and and Psychic Psychic Wedlock

In Heavenly In Heavenly Bridegro oms, oms, Craddock addressed the issue of how she, an unmarried woman, could claim respectability while at the same time writing with knowledgeable authority about sexual behavior. It was in this work that she disclosed and discussed her marriage to Soph, a non-corporeal entity; a spirit. He came to her at night, they shared sexual intercourse, and he instructed her on spiritual matters. She claimed that their nightly couplings were often noisy enough to disturb the neighbors. The essay begins: “It has been my high privilege to have some practical experience as the earthly wife of an angel from the unseen world.” She described her marriage as one at “the Borderlands”, between earth and the unseen spiritual realm. There had been many such unions known, she claimed, citing Jesus's mother Mary and many others. This was a special form of marriage which aided the earthly partner in attaining the highest possible level of sexual and spiritual practice. In her philosophy, spiritual sexual practice consisted of three stages, or degrees, as she called them: Alphaism, Alphaism , Diana, Diana , and a third degree, unnamed but consisting

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of opening the sexual relation to embrace its highest spiritual level. As Craddock describes them in Psychic Wedlock: “1. Sex union forbidden, except for the distinct purpose of creating a child at that particular time. 2. Sex union enjoined in absolute self-control and aspiration to the highest. 12 3. Communion with Deity as the third partner in the marital union.” On the writing of Heavenly of Heavenly Bridegr ooms, ooms , Craddock wrote in her diary on January 3, 1895: “Certainly I, by myself, should never have been able to concoct it as it now stands. … the great wonder of it all to me is that an outside intelligence [her spirit guide Iases] seems to be running the machine, so to speak, and I am little more than an amanuensis for him,—or it, or whatever one may call that intelligence. I am, I trust, a fairly intelligent amanuensis, so that I have no hesitation about making corrections … when such corrections seem to be needed. But oftener it is the other way around, and Iases corrects my work. Many of the theories and explanations which I have put into Heavenly Bridegrooms I never, to the best of my belief and knowledge, had thought until the command came from him to write soand-so at just that point in the treatise. But, when they were written, they commended themselves to my reason and common sense, and so I allowed them to stand … Iases has arranged … quotations in such order as suited him best … many quotations which I had laid aside for this work, he emphatically rejected, as … being calculated to shock the public and bring me into danger of legal su ppression by th e obscenists. Fro m first to last, last , his great insistence has been that the book should be ‘suited to the general public,’ and that it must not contain anything upon which the obscenists could lay a finger.” Her experience of the writing and direction of her work coming from spiritual beings outside herself, from Iases and from the training she received from Soph, may be taken at face value as a mystic's experience with heavenly beings. Or it may be seen as a curious splitting of her subjectivity into multiple subjectivities acting together in intimate entwined relationship, in a way intended to protect her from the judgment of a society to which her convictions ran counter. Her traini ng came from male mal e personalities, an d not only from her own extensive and self-directed reading. She married one of these male personalities, rather than claiming to have gained her sexual knowledge from experiences outside of socially sanctioned structures. In an eccentric way, she was conforming to some of the requirements of the society that would have rejected even more thoroughly a single woman, self-taught.

The Borderlands

As a bride of a “Heavenly Bridegroom,” Craddock saw herself as a pioneer at the frontier of human agency in relation to the spirit, occupying a liminal space between the land of everyday earthly humanity and a transcendent realm of communion with a higher reality and power. In that liminal space, communion with that higher reality could be achieved, with a resulting improvement in understanding and managing 12

Chappell 2010, p 153.

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earthly life as well. Locating oneself in this space is a dangerous practice on many levels. On the level of everyday reality there was the danger of being misinterpreted, as Craddock knew well; and of being subjected to the judgment and authority of those not in sympathy with her goals and techniques. On the spiritual level there is the risk of disintegration of the subject identity, of the sense of self, in the intimate entanglement with another spirit. Craddock repeatedly references the Borderlands between the embodied spirit in the living human and the non-corporeal or dis-embodied spirit of other beings. Her guidebooks to crossing the Borderlands are analogous to maps, with the dangerous powers that Anne McClintock points to in Imperial Leather : Leather : “The map is a liminal thing, associated with thresholds and marginal zones, burdened with dangerous powers. As an exemplary icon of imperial 'truth', the map, like the compass and the mirror, is what Hulme aptly calls a 'magic technology,' a potent fetish.” McClintock discusses inherent dangers of the liminal zones between worlds, and depicts the maps that we use to negotiate these crossings as “burdened with dangerous powers,” “helping [travelers] negotiate the perils of margins and thresholds in a world of terrifying ambiguities."

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“Mary Douglas points out that margins are dangerous. Societies are most vulnerable at their edges along the tattered fringes of the known world. … a liminal condition is ambiguous, eluding 'the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space.' … as Douglas writes: 'Danger lies in transitional states … The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others.”

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Yet in this dangerous transitional state is also where the possibility of breakthrough, of transformation and transcendence, is to be found. For Craddock, this was the only place to be. The possibility that the world “beyond” is, in the mystic's case, an interior landscape diminishes neither the perils nor the rewards of the journey.

Some Further Notes on Sex and Spirit

For millennia, philosophers have discussed the ways in which sex and spirit, and sex and morality, interact. Clement of Alexandria devoted a chapter of The Pedagogue to Pedagogue to elucidating his position on sex in marriage in the context of Christian teachings. This chapter sets the paradigm for a Christian position on the subject that has persisted. Foucault points out that “One already notes [in this early treatise] a certain 13 14

McCintock 1995, p 28. McClintock 1995, p. 24–25.

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association of sexual activity with evil, along with the rule of procreative monogamy, a condemnation of 15

relations between individuals of the same sex, and a glorification of self-restraint.” Foucault further notes that this indicated not a break from the past, but “direct borrowing and strict continuities [with] the moral 16

philosophy of antiquity.” The long history of moral judgement of and constraint on sexual practices, and a hegemonic negation of the embodiment of sexual affect was, however, mirrored by a parallel history of valuation of sexual pleasure, and the association of sexual ecstasy with spiritual elevation. The latter philosophical path has been a l ess widely follo wed one. But es oteric sects and in dividuals both bot h within some som e religious traditions, and outside any organized orthodoxy, have long practiced sexual techniques for accessing spiritual experience. Not only in es oteric sects, but within Christian Chris tian orthodoxy and orthopraxy, can also be found some structures supportive of this path. As Carolyn Walker Bynum notes in her discussion of the eucharist, “reverence for the host was reverence for the divine in the material.”

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In the medieval Catholic theological

tradition, the particular milieu that Bynum addresses, “Women were … told that, allegorically speaking, woman was to man what matter is to spirit—that is, they symbolized the physical, lustful, material, appetitive part of human nature, whereas man symbolized the spiritual or mental. …women drew from the traditional notion of the female as physical a special emphasis on their own redemption by a Christ who was 18

supremely physical because supremely human.” Although sexual activity and enjoyment were severely proscribed, they could be celebrated i f seen as aspects of d ivine joy manifest man ifest through human h uman identification identificat ion with Christ's humanity, his nature as embodied spirit. Bynum states that an argument was advanced by Hildegarde of Bingen and Mechtilde of Magdeburg that “all of Christ's humanity had to come from Mary since Christ had no human father.” Woman is, on this view, the source of Christ's humanity; that which is redeemed by his crucifixion; the ecclesial body body of Christ; and the reliquary that houses Christ's body. Mary “was explicitly the tunica humanitas, tunica humanitas, the clothing 19

of humanity which God put on in the incarnation.” In other traditions a similar approach can be found as well, as in Boyarin’s writings on rabbinic Judaic tradition. The woman is seen in other spheres as the house into which the man enters. Here, woman is symbolically the materiality that clothes the human spiritual and

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Foucault, Michel. 1985. The History of Sexuality, Vol. II: The Use of Pleasure. New York: Vintage Books. p. 15. ibid. Redem ption. New York: Zone Books., p. 144. Bynum, Carolyn Walker. 1992. Fragme ntation an d Redemption Bynum 1992, p 147. Bynum 1992, pp 148–149.

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mental essence that is symbolized by man. Of course the discourses of mysticism and of gender were greatly changed by the nineteenth century in America, but these attitudes were still present as a substratum, an undertone still subtly influencing the ways in which women's nature and roles were perceived and determined. This prepares an interesting philosophical and social-psychological background for Ida Craddock. Her embrace of the carnality of her own love of the divine was manifested in literally transforming the object of her love and of her sexual agency into pure spirit, with herself as the material counterpart, redeemed and made whole by the sexual union with her spirit husband, her other half. Her own experience seems to have found support in the ideas she was exposed to through her involvement with Theosophy and in Stockham's work, and in her further readings on Hinduism and other traditions. Ida Craddock reflects particular historical interpretations and representations of reality in her role as the human partner in a marriage of matter and spirit, of human with non-corporeal entity. There was a recursive element in this spirituality, of course, as Craddock was also a spirit who wore her own physicality as a vehicle for the expression of her spiritual self. And in the process of the expression, the clothing and the inner self mingled and became one. Her marriage to Soph was a perfectly formed symbolic expression and pedagogic example of that which she taught could be experienced by any two individuals in a marriage of like-minded spirits. There was also something different in Craddock's interpretation of this spirit–matter binary: she held the spiritual realm, that “beyond the grave,” to be material, though material of a texture different from that of the earthly realm. This was likely informed by a line of Hindu monistic thinking that the spiritual and material aspects of the person are different more in the fineness of their textural form than in the nature of their substance. As Sarah Lamb notes, among some Hindus, “All things are constituted of fluid substances. In perpetual flux, these substances have an inherent capacity to … mix with other substances. Thus it is possible—indeed, possible—in deed, inevitable— for persons to es tablish intersubstantial intersu bstantial relationships relatio nships with other o ther people [including] sexual partners …” She notes that there are also “notions of the fluid and substantially interpenetrative nature of persons, gods, places, and things in Ayurvedic texts and practices.” In this lineage of thought, the self flows into and among the other selves with which it forms relationships; the spirit and the body are both fluid and constantly in flux. The ability of the self to have such an interpenetrative relation with a being that is lacking the earthly form of most others is not hindered by this lack; indeed, it may be

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enhanced. On this view, the subject is formed, in part, in relation to the others into and through which it flows.

20

In the letter written to her mother just prior to her suicide, Craddock assured her mother that “the world beyond the grave, believe me, is far m ore real and subst antial than is this t his world in which w hich we to-day li ve. This earth life which the Hindoos have for centuries termed 'Maya,' that is illusion. My people assure me that theirs is the real, the objective, the material world. Ours is the lopsided, the incomplete world.”

21

Clearly the idea of Maya of Maya,, of all of this world being vanity and illusion, is not unique to Craddock's views. But her insistence that the “world beyond the grave” is not only real but materially so is certainly unusual. To touch upon another tradition, Hugh Urban’s discussion of Tantra is informed by Foucault’s point that the Victorian West was not so much repressed regarding sex but obsessed by it. Urban cites Miranda Shaw’s statement that “scholarly characterizations of Tantric Buddhist yoginis as ‘lewd,’ ‘sluts,’ ‘depraved and debauched’ betray a vestige of Victorian indignation not only at non-marital sexual activity of women but 22

also at the religious exaltation of women.” The judgmental side of Victorian sensibility was conspicuous in the ways it confronted many cultures, which had only recently been opened to its disapproving gaze. One wonders, in this context, whether the dancers on Cairo Street at the Columbian Exposition, in the Danse du Ventre, Ventre , were consciously performing a religio-sexual ritual, or a traditional custom, a theatrical presentation for the tourists, or some amalgam of these three? And did their conscious intent affect the work that Craddock asserted that their performance did on a symbolic level?

Craddock's Supporters and Followers

In late-nineteenth century America, the societal norm that disallowed women to speak with authority on matters relating to religion, politics, and family and social power structures faced the challenges of various movements that sought to empower women. Although hegemonic views eventually gave way to new and plural ways of d efining and practi cing self and sexu ality, they were on ly the more entren ched while they attempted to retain the field. Despite a general climate of disapproval and frequent legal troubles, Craddock's teachings were in demand by women, couples, doctors, and other counselors, who wrote requesting copies of her pamphlets, 20 21 22

Lamb, Sarah. 2000. White Saris and Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender, and Body in North India. p. 30–31. Mot her on th e Day of her Suic ide. http://www.idacraddock.com/mother.html Craddock, Ida. 1902, Letter to her Mother Urban, Hugh B. 2003. Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion. , pp. 9–10.

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attended her lectures, or sought her out for private counseling sessions. Her views were esteemed and supported by a collection of friends and colleagues, drawn from the circles of social reformers, freethinkers, spiritualists, and occultists. Alastair Crowley was an admirer of Craddock’s work; he reviewed her Heavenly Bridegr ooms for The Equinox, Equinox, writing enthusiastically that “No Magick library is complete without it!” The Free Speech League of New York formed by the Manhattan Liberal Club in 1902, included many prominent New York Liberal thinkers. Their first official gathering was a dinner in support of Craddock, and in celebration of her brief release from jail in 1902. Emma Goldman, later affiliated with the 23

League, called Craddock “one of the bravest champions of women’s emancipation.” One activist whose work benefitted from the work that Craddock had earlier done was Margaret Sanger. Sanger was of the next generation; it was a decade after Craddock died that Sanger began her work as an activist for sex education and reproductive rights. Her own pamphlets on contraceptive information ran afoul of the Comstock laws as obscenity, as Craddock’s pamphlets had done, and Sanger followed Craddock’s footsteps to self-imposed exile in England to avoid prosecution on these charges. Sanger later became acquainted with Craddock’s work, and Sanger’s supporters cited Craddock as a forerunner in the advocacy of sexual reform. Sanger was concerned with Craddock’s writings on marital sexual relations, and not with the spiritual aspect of Craddock’s writing. Although she was not directly familiar with Craddock’s work during the formative period of her own project, Craddock had blazed some o f the trails that Sanger followed. 24

As Schmidt notes in the epilogue to Heaven's to Heaven's Bride, Bride , some of the activists who stood on the shoulders of Craddock, and some of her contemporaries who championed a revolution in sexual mores, turned their backs on the fact t hat this revolution revolu tion was religio usly-inspired an d religiously-justified, religiously-j ustified, and amputated am putated their social and behavioral prescriptions from the religious foundations which were their basis. Liberation theology notwithstanding, in the present day, the thought of associating religion with social reform causes is anathema to many if not most liberal social activists in America, who cling to a secular model and identity … well, religiously. The late twentieth-century rise of the religious right in politics seems to have made liberals wary of the involvement of spiritual motivations in politics, regardless of the goal or cause, even more than they had become in the earlier secularizing trend through the twentieth century.

23 24

Quoted in Schmidt 2010, p. x. Schmidt 2010, pp. 269–274.

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It seems ironic that the “sexual revolution” of the twentieth century and the wholesale changes in public as well as private morality in America had at least some of their roots in a spiritual and religious soil that many of the current heirs of the movement see as so alien to their nature and their cause.

Craddock's Final Chapter: Arrest, Prison, Suicide

Having fought Comstock and the Society for the Suppression of Vice for the entirety of her career, Craddock had managed to remain a free woman. But in 1902 she was arrested on charges related to New York's “Little Comstock” laws, and jailed for three months. On her release, she endured another raid on her home, confiscation of her writings, and another arrest. It was virtually certain during her trial that conviction and long imprisonment was assured. She declined the judge's offer to plead insanity, which would require her commission to an asylum for an indefinite period, perhaps for the rest of her life. On her final morning of freedom, she committed suicide by cutting her wrists and turning on the gas oven. Before doing so, she wrote two letters, one to the public and one to her mother. The letter to her mother included the statement of her determination that “I maintain my right to die as I have lived, a free woman, not cowed into silence by 25

any other human being.” This would seem to refer mainly to Anthony Comstock, but also perhaps to her mother. Despite their strained relationship, Ida loved her mother deeply and wrote of her firm belief and promise that they t hey would meet again “on the ot her side.” In the letter Craddock wrote to the public before her suicide, she stated that a long prison term would be for her: “a death-warrant. The judge must surely know this; and since he is evidently determined to not only totally suppress my work, but to place me where only death can release me, I consider myself justified in choosing for myself, as did Socrates, the manner of my death. I prefer to die comfo rtably and peacefull y, on my own little bed in my m y own room, instead of on a prison cot. “I am making this statement to the public because I wish to call attention to some of the salient features of Comstockism, in the hope that the public may be led to put down this 26 growing menace to the liberties of the people.”

25 26

Quoted in Chappell, 2010, p. 232. Pub lic on the Day of h er Suicid e. http://www.idacraddock.com/public.html Craddock, Ida. 1902, Letter to the Public

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An appendix: Poems

I have found two poems that are interesting to think about in relation to Ida Craddock’s story. The first, published in 1905, is titled tit led The Bride of Heaven and Heaven and may be the source for Lee Eric Schmidt’s book title. The second is by Julianna Baggott, published in 2006, and is in the form of a speech addressed to Craddock by Margaret Sanger, activist act ivist and organizer organ izer for women’s rig hts, reproductiv e rights, and sex ual freedom.

27

They are included here, below, as a coda to this discussion of Ida Craddock's life and ideas.

Poe ms in Women's W omen's V oices. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University 27 Baggott, Julianna. 2006. Lizzie Bo rden in L ove: Poems Press, pp. 41–42.

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Margaret Sanger Sang er Addresses th e Ghost of Ida Craddock Ida, is it you? Gauzy as a bride, at long last. Do you instruct the virgins of heaven with pamphlets? Sit here, on the edge of my bed. Oh, Ida, Comstock is dead !is that why I see you now? ! the angry man full of piss, fat on the fat of his wrongheadedness, his brain a pink lard ham. Why did you breathe poison for him? When I feel bereft, I think of you and girls on wedding nights, white gowns damp with blood !and I am often bereft these days; my daughter is dead, pneumonia. Women, sometimes we cannot breathe. I'm tired. I admit I've imagined Comstock in the tub, his cheeks flushed in shame, his defiant cock grotesquely swollen, a naughty soldier, his own criminal in a meaty cap. You'll be happy to know he caught cold at my husband's trial, then died. A certain justice. And I hope they plant old Comstock beneath the Virgi n Mary ! you were no virgin, Ida, so be it, and, for me, there will be many, a promise my William, my Havelock, lovers. lovers. I take as many as I want. Why did you let yourself slip away? Revive me. Comstock is dead, but there are women dying everywhere. Ida, tell me again how much we cannot speak of. Oh, these Gods and Masters! Will roots sift through his coffin and find Comstock's shrunken soul, a useless gland in him, a goldfish, flipping, breathless if not long dead? And there on his grave, season after season, I hope the lewd flowers rise, a riotous orgy of fornication ! the earth ashamed to embrace our enemy after all; Imagine, Ida, gladiolus, birds of paradise, rearing an abundant perverse blush.

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WORKS CITED

Baggott, Julianna. 2006. Lizzie 2006. Lizzie Borden i n Love: Poems in W omen's Voices. Voices . Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Boyarin, Daniel. 1995. Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture, Culture , chapter 4: Engendering 4: Engendering Des ire: Husbands, Wives, W ives, and Sexual Intercourse. Intercourse . Berkeley: University of California Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies 1993. Bodies That Mat ter: On the Dis cursive Limits of “Sex”, “Sex” , chapter 3: Phantasmic 3: Phantasmic Identification Identificatio n and the Assumption Assu mption of Sex. New Sex. New york: Routledge. Ro utledge. Bynum, Carolyn Walker. 1992. Fragmentati 1992. Fragmentation on and Redempti on. on. New York: Zone Books. Chappell, Vere. 2010. Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock . San Francisco: Red Wheel / Reiser. Clarke, Taverner. 1905. The Bride of Heaven. Heaven . In Good Words, Words, Vol. 46, p. 224. London: Sir Isaac Pittman & Co. Craddock, Ida. 1902, Letter 1902, Letter to her Mother M other on the Da y of her Suicide. Suicide . http://www.idacraddock.com/mother.html Craddock, Ida. 1902, Letter 1902, Letter to the Pu blic on the Day Da y of her Suicide. Suicide . http://www.idacraddock.com/public.html Foucault, Michel. 1985. The History of Sexuality Vol. II: The Use of Pleasure. Pleasure . New York: Vintage Books. Griffith, R. Marie. 2004. Born 2004. Born Again Bo dies: Flesh and Spirit in American Am erican Christianity Christ ianity.. Series Title: California Studies in Food and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hollywood, Amy. 2002. Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of Lamb, Sarah. 2000. White Saris and Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender, and Body in North India. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial 1995. Imperial Leather : Race,Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. C ontest. New New York: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible, Invisible , chapter 4: The 4: The Intertwining—The Intertwining—The Chiasm. Chiasm. Pages 130–155. Series title: Northwestern University studies in phenomenology & existential philosophy. philosophy . Evanston: No rthwestern Univers ity Press. Schmidt, Leigh Eric. 2010. Heaven's 2010. Heaven's Bride. Bride . New York: Basic Books. Urban, Hugh B. 2003. Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion. Religion . Berkeley: University of California Press. White, Christopher. 2008. Unsettled Minds. Minds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ida Craddock: Outrider in the Borderlands of Body and Spirit

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