Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  Prudence and inconspicuousness did not suit Craddock in her spiritual life any more than in her literary endeavors. As a liberal Unitarian, a New Thought minister, or a spiritualist medium, she could have positioned herself quite to the left of center and still remained within the recognizable miscellany of American religious life. The twist that placed her among the alien and the exotic was when she started imagining herself as more in line with “Oriental psychics” than “Occidental mediums.” Specifically, it was an enduring infatuation with India that called her short-lived Church of Yoga into being—a fantasy that she shared with many other occultists, mystics, and reformers of the era.47

  Craddock’s enthrallment with South Asia took many forms. She imagined that her spirit guide (and brother-in-law) Iases, a Brahmin from India, was training her “in conformity with the yogic life lived by the Oriental yogis.” Less fabulously perhaps, she dreamed of becoming a student of the Buddhist monk Anagarika Dharmapala, a well-traveled guru, who had made a compelling appearance at the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893. She corresponded with him and entertained high hopes that he would “open the way for me in India”; Dharmapala’s eyes, she claimed in underlining her attraction, were “good and clear,” and he possessed “a spiritual face, possibly the face of a mystic.” Craddock pined as well for a new technological gadget to take with her to India to enhance her “folklore work,” a Kodak with which she could photograph “the ceremonies in temples.” While she had to admit that her hope of actually traveling there for yogic training or folklore study felt more like “a romance” than “a possible reality,” that hardly stopped her from endless daydreaming of India.48

  Craddock’s romance with India had far less to do with the religions and peoples of Britain’s distant colonial domain than it did with her desire to escape the stifling strictures of her own society. While Christian missionaries often imagined the heathen as sexually depraved and dangerously libidinous, Craddock and a vanguard of fellow occultists fantasized an India of erotic wisdom and consecrated intercourse. In both cases the Orient was a screen for sexual projections, but what was Original Sin for one became primordial purity in the other. As Craddock observed, India “is a nation whose religions, for the most part, recognize the truth that sex is holy; and in this it is in strong contrast with our Western ‘civilization’ where the most sacred function of humanity is looked upon as vile. We occidentals have a whole life’s teaching to unlearn.”49

  Craddock’s elevated view of Hindu and Buddhist teachings clearly derived more from her disenchantment with American sexual politics than it did from any first-hand experience with the religious practices of India. Sometimes she came close to acknowledging as much; not long after Philadelphia’s postal inspector had reissued his warning in late 1896, she felt like she was “being gradually closed in”—“stifled, gagged, prevented from preaching”—and so again she turned in her imagination to India. “Sometimes,” she confided in a diary entry that December, “I think I will try to get to India, where the sexual relation is not universally abhorred as something nasty, but is reverenced by the wisest of Brahmins as pure.”50

  Anagarika Dharmapala, a Buddhist monk from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) who had taken part in the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893, especially inspired Craddock. She dreamed of going abroad to study mysticism with him. John Henry Barrows, ed., The World’s Parliament of Religions, 2 vols. (Chicago: Parliament Publishing, 1893), 2: 860.

  Not that Craddock’s vision of India and Oriental yogis arose entirely from her fertile imagination. She was well aware of Swami Vivekananda’s mission to America, his triumphal visit to the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893, and his published expositions of Vedanta philosophy. Prior to announcing herself pastor of the Church of Yoga in Chicago in late 1899, she had familiarized herself with his work on Râja-Yoga: Or, Conquering the Internal Nature (1896), a manual of Hindu spiritual disciplines, yogic methods of purifying mind and body. Vivekananda had delivered his lectures on Râja-Yoga during his American sojourn to large classes in New York City in 1895 and 1896, but Craddock had not been able to attend any of them. “I have never had the pleasure of meeting that cultured and highly gifted man,” she noted with regret. With yoga, as in most matters, books were her guru.51

  The inspiration that Râja-Yoga provided Craddock was indirect more than explicit. Vivekananda’s meditative techniques certainly meshed well with the New Thought forms of mental concentration that Craddock had imbibed through Gillen’s Divine Science. The swami well knew that a large part of his success in reaching American audiences in the mid-1890s was the wider ascendancy of such mind-over-matter teachings: How else was he to interest Americans in sitting still for a half hour each day in an erect posture, while concentrating the mind through repeating a mantra as they methodically inhaled and exhaled?

  While the swami’s emphasis on focused meditation connected nicely with Craddock’s New Thought leanings, his body talk was hardly conducive to her sex-reform gospel. A proponent of chastity and renunciation, Vivekananda characterized his relationship to women in desexualized, child-like terms and consistently glossed over the eroticized mysticism of his own sainted guru, Ramakrishna, in favor of a more abstractly universalistic philosophy. In many ways Vivekananda actually stood as something of a Comstockian censor of Hindu traditions, hiding the bodily concerns and anxieties of his own teacher behind a veil of pure spirituality.52 That meditative version of yoga—no body-twisting postures, no openly erotic content—certainly helped Vivekananda make his Vedanta Society a relatively palatable offering in the American religious marketplace. More than any other figure, Vivekananda gave yoga its initial cachet among spiritual seekers and made it an identifiable idiom in the American religious vernacular. That cultural recognition clearly played an important part in Craddock’s decision to label her own enterprise the Church of Yoga. Aside from that particular marker, however, she showed no sign of connecting deeply with any of Vivekananda’s published lectures on the subject, whether Râja Yoga or other forms.

  Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu representative at the World’s Parliament, introduced various forms of yoga to American audiences. Craddock had studied his Râja-Yoga but found her main inspiration for claiming the yogic mantle in the hand-to-hand circulation of a Tantric treatise. Eliot Bahá’í Archives, Eliot, Maine.

  Craddock’s disengagement from Vivekananda’s bodily asceticism was starkly revealed in one steamy and impetuous episode that she reported in her diary in September 1899 around the very time she was starting up her Chicago-based congregation. Propping herself up with pillows on her bed one night to read a chapter of Vivekananda’s Râja-Yoga, she “gradually nodded over it and drowsed off, woke, and drowsed again, and woke again, bracing myself with a determined attempt to finish that chapter before I again fell asleep, or perish in the attempt.” Her self-discipline did not work—or, at least, it did not work as planned. As Craddock dutifully pushed herself to sustain attention on her reading, her mind drifted away to thoughts of Soph, her spirit husband, and marital intimacies with him. Dreamily imagining his head nestled “in the hollow of my shoulder, just above my bosom,” she gave up on reading anymore of Vivekananda’s book that night. Lapsing further and further into erotic fantasy, she soon lost “control of myself, or, rather of my passion.” Craddock was perfectly willing to follow Vivekananda’s advice—that is, to “turn the light of the mind backward and inward to explore the recesses of itself.” It was just that when she went into those depths she found not “austerity,” “self-surrender,” “restraint of the senses,” and “superconsciousness,” but “a thrilling sexual struggle” of mad desires, satisfying fantasies, and phantom feelings. Like other far more famous moderns and bohemians, she was ripping away the mask of female desirelessness—and she was leaving herself dangerously exposed in the process.53

  Safe to say, Craddock’s Church of Yoga was not merely a homegrown offshoot of Swami Vivekananda’s Vedanta philosophy, an idiosyncratic vari
ant on the sundry societies that were sprouting up around the country to promote his teachings and meditative practices. She was not looking for venerable methods for subjugating the body, overcoming desire, and forgetting individuality. If the “pernicious doctrines of celibacy and asceticism” were all Vivekananda and his fellow Hindu teachers had to offer, then Craddock was not interested. Instead, she took her cues from other sources that cast India as a sanctuary for the erotic. Foremost among this reading was her old favorite: the literature on the history of sex worship and the ancient devotion to fertility. “India, beyond all other countries on the face of the earth, is preeminently the home of the worship of the Phallus,” so began Hargrave Jennings’s Phallic Miscellanies (1891) in typical fashion. “It has been so for ages and remains so still.”54

  Never mind that Craddock did not agree with Vivekananda’s teachings about celibacy and asceticism—she did not believe that he agreed with them himself. She suspected the swami and his associates of keeping secrets. While Vivekananda had consistently proclaimed celibacy as a spiritual ideal to his American audiences, Craddock heard that he had offered a select few a glimpse of “the higher truth.” “I have been shown a book,” she noted in 1900, “which he was said to have circulated privately among his more advanced disciples in Chicago. It is a small book, but, I am informed, it costs about ten dollars in India. It is called The Esoteric Science and Philosophy of the Tantras, Shiva Sanhita.”

  India became a leading source for imagining the entanglement of religion and sexuality in both comparative scholarly projects and occultist enterprises of the nineteenth century. Richard Payne Knight had already helped point the way in his late eighteenth-century Discourse on the Worship of Priapus. He included this plate depicting the lingam as an object of female devotion. The Library Company of Philadelphia.

  It is unclear how long Craddock had this little volume from Calcutta in her hands or by whom she was shown it—but she was certainly pleased to have beheld it.55

  The fugitive text that Craddock glimpsed contained some teachings about yoga that she had already learned, and others that would surely have raised Anthony Comstock’s eyebrows, had he seen the volume. An English translation of a classic Sanskrit treatise on yoga, it mostly focused on the very disciplines and attainments that Craddock had already shelved in reading Vivekananda’s Râja-Yoga: the cultivation of right posture, the regulation of breath, the subjection of the senses, and the breakthrough into superconsciousness. Yet, Craddock read right past those already familiar instructions to the good part, the section entitled the Vajroli-Mudra, which contained “the most secret among all the secrets,” the possibility of spiritual emancipation through proper methods of copulation.56

  The Esoteric Science and Philosophy of the Tantras made it clear to Craddock that the religious traditions of India had much more to teach than meditative stillness and hermit-like withdrawal from the world. Amid the text’s “circumlocutions,” this much Craddock found clear: Would-be American yogis need not dedicate themselves to the “avoidance of sex expression,” but instead could discover the “inaccessible glory” of the divine through rightly performed sexual intercourse. Reading the treatise with the selective vision of a late nineteenth-century marriage reformer, Craddock glimpsed in Tantrism a specific validation of her own body-spirit connections. Out of multilayered Hindu and Buddhist traditions, crossing more than a millennium of South Asian history, Craddock’s glancing recognition of Tantra made it singularly about spiritualized sex.57

  Unlike so many American appropriators in recent decades, though, Craddock was not turning to Tantrism for its supposed blessing of orgiastic expression and countercultural license. She had no more interest in Tantric practice as a toolkit for ritualized transgression than she did in yoga as a regimen for ascetic renunciation. Craddock had a very limited—and quite negative—sense of “the left-hand path,” an element of Tantric traditions that employed the intentional violation of food, sex, and caste taboos as a means of spiritual initiation and awakening. Some Western occultists eagerly exploited that notion (Aleister Crowley most infamously), but Craddock maintained only a dim view of those “profligate” Tantric practitioners who thought themselves incapable of being “polluted by sin,” so that they could drink wine, steal, or violate the marriage bed and not be held accountable “for any of these transgressions.” She wanted nothing to do with powers gained through taboo-breaking excess; she concerned herself only with the “self-controlled voluptuousness” of wedded bliss. Heterosexual monogamy, not bohemian experimentation or transgressive magic, remained her singular reference point.58

  Within the monogamous bounds she had set for herself, Craddock gladly found inspiration for her sex radicalism in The Esoteric Science and Philosophy of the Tantras. In its pages, however narrowly perused, Craddock saw a joining of sexual union with divine realization and doubtless took that as another opportunity to visualize “the Masculinity” and “the Femininity of the Universe” in concretely physical terms. In the same months that the Sunday meetings of her Church of Yoga unfolded in Chicago in late 1899 and early 1900, she was uttering nighttime prayers to the “Penis of God” and the “Vagina and Uterus of God” and expressly imagining “God’s infinite love” in terms of sexual intercourse. Clearly, Craddock was trying to practice what she preached: she had made an erotic spirituality, Tantric and otherwise, part and parcel of her own devotional experiments.59

  Adapting her Tantric discoveries for private meditation was one thing; broadcasting them, however, quite another. The text that had fallen into her hands was intended only for a small circle of initiates, who were forbidden from revealing the book’s secrets to those outside their own closely guarded sphere of knowledge. “It is the most secret of all secrets that ever were or shall be;” the Vajroli-Mudra warned, “therefore let the prudent Yogi keep it with the greatest secrecy possible.” Concealment, silence, and inscrutability—those were essential elements of an esoteric tradition like Tantra.60

  The mysterious veiling commanded in The Esoteric Science and Philosophy of the Tantras was lost on Craddock. If these teachings were “hidden and kept secret in all the TANTRAS,” that was not a confidence she was at all interested in preserving. Such tight-lipped rules were utterly contrary to the frankness of speech and freedom of expression for which American marriage reformers were fighting. Craddock, after all, had already experienced more than enough of the hush-hush operations of Comstock and company, so she fully intended to share her discoveries with anyone who sought marital advice from her or who happened to visit her Sunday gatherings. She saw herself, after all, as a religious teacher and public educator, not a privileged initiate. Esoteric secrecy did not sit well with either her testifying spirit or her freethinking temper. Craddock was not one to hide her light under a bushel.61

  Getting her hands on this scarce book on the esoteric philosophy of the Tantras was a brief, yet dramatic episode for Craddock. It marked her as a rather startling innovator within the broader American religious scene. Her congregational experiment with the Church of Yoga came several years before Pierre Arnold Bernard, a notorious self-made guru from San Francisco, set up the Tantrik Order of America in 1906 and then established his “Oriental Sanctum” in New York City in 1910. Bernard, known in the media as the Omnipotent Oom, was a more accomplished huckster and showman than Craddock—and hence far more successful at sustaining his fellowship and making it work for him financially. A scandalous figure in his own right, Bernard nonetheless found ways to weather Anthony Comstock’s vigilance as well as police harassment; by the 1920s and 1930s, the authorities mostly winked at his manly transgressions as the leader of a “love cult.” Craddock was not so lucky and paid a heavier price for her eccentricity. The Omnipotent Oom eventually became a successful businessman in Nyack, New York, with something of a sporting reputation for his special abilities at pleasuring women. Scoffed at in newspapers across the country as the High Priestess of the Church of Yoga, Craddock never escaped Comstock�
�s charge of obscenity and blasphemy. Secrets like those contained in the Tantras were obviously still safer for a man to possess than for a woman to proclaim.62

  Far more important than who appropriated what first was the exuberant religious experimentation that made Craddock’s endeavor (as much as Bernard’s) possible. Craddock was not an American Tantrika, but a composite of the religious inquiries, yearnings, and serendipitous encounters that unsettled the nation’s Protestant establishment over the course of the 1890s. In declaring herself pastor of the Church of Yoga, she remained just as much a Divine Science teacher, a spiritualist medium, a liberal Unitarian, a Quaker reformer, a dabbling Theosophist, and a freethinking sex radical, as she was the exponent of recognizable yogic practices.