Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  By 1900 Craddock had moved a long way from the evangelical revivalism of Ocean Grove, but that drift, however much an expression of her own individuality, was an epitome of a wider religious and cultural transformation. Putting a single occultist label on her religious trek would create a safe pigeonhole, but it would miss the larger challenge Craddock embodied, the very blurring of identities that was straining the culture’s Protestant focus. The teeming variety of liberal religious dissent—all those “Miscellaneous” options that the Chicago Tribune was publicizing in its “Religious Announcements” by the 1890s—had not yet dimmed the evangelical vision of a Christian America, but the proliferation of choices had certainly begun to befuddle that proposition. No single drifter captured the fullness of that dynamic unrest, but a few came close, and Craddock was without a doubt one of them.63

  Perhaps the pièce de résistance of Craddock’s spiritual eclecticism was her association with Otoman Zar-Adusht Hanish, the self-proclaimed Zoroastrian priest who briefly joined forces with Craddock in Chicago in her Church of Yoga meetings. To naysayers, Hanish was simply one more con man and imposter. The muckraker Upton Sinclair found him easy to dismiss as the ne’er-do-well son of an immigrant German family in Milwaukee who had put together “a farrago” of Persian, Hindu, Christian, and New Thought sources and had thus become part of the “plague of Eastern cults” afflicting the country. The founder of the Mazdaznan Temple in Chicago, Hanish presented himself as the genuine article, an Oriental mystic of Persian background, a princely bearer of “the Sun-Worship Philosophy.” Like Craddock’s yoga, however, Hanish’s Zoroastrian wisdom was an American pastiche. It entailed a mélange of breathing rituals, bodily exercises, concentration techniques, fasting guidelines, and dietary recommendations. Among his more distinctive teachings was the importance he accorded sunbathing, preferably nude, as a vitalizing and healing practice: “You will soon learn to appreciate these sun-baths,” Hanish counseled. “Follow them as a foremost religious duty that you owe to your own self, your own well-being.” 64

  If nude sunbaths and other physical-culture fads were all that this faux Persian magus had to offer, Craddock would probably not have teamed up with him. What made them a likelier pair was that most of Hanish’s inspiration had actually come from the same yogic and occultist materials that Craddock had been reading, not from any particular Zoroastrian sources. Mazdaznan sun worship was an angle that Hanish played with dramatic flair to draw attention to his lectures and to set his lessons apart from other self-made magi and gurus. Inside his Inner Studies (1902) were the same religious curiosities that had characterized Craddock’s inquiries, including the point that behind yogic professions of celibacy and asceticism lay secrets of sexual knowledge and satisfaction.

  Hanish very much mirrored Craddock on the topic of sexuality; on that subject, she seems indeed to have been his guru. He followed her on a number of points, including the need for greater anatomical knowledge in preparation for the wedding night and the importance of the husband being able to prolong sexual intercourse in order for his wife to reach orgasm. “What is there in the ordinary method,” Hanish asked, “which usually takes less than five minutes and consists only of premature orgasm, as compared with the continuous enjoyment for one or more hours?” For Hanish, like Craddock, “Oriental mysticism” was a vehicle—or, even a front—for broaching the supercharged subject of “the marital embrace.” As Craddock readily acknowledged, the Church of Yoga’s name was in part tactical; it made the “religious aspect” of her mission “the prominent feature,” so that the “sexual teaching” could be brought in “edgeways.”65

  Craddock’s association with Hanish did not last long, but the difficulties facing their religious projects continued to echo one another. The Mazdaznan Temple was itself soon the site of ongoing legal battles: In 1904, Hanish was arrested for practicing medicine without a license and was also blamed for driving one of his followers mad through his fasting regimen. The accusations of cultic fanaticism cascaded from there, and sensationalized press accounts of sexual depravity followed him from Chicago to Denver to Los Angeles. The line between legal finding and journalistic fiction was rarely drawn clearly: “HANISH IN JAIL; U.S. RANSACKS TEMPLE OF SUN,” screamed one headline; “JURORS THRILLED BY HANISH BOOK . . . HEAR OF NUDE SUN BATHS,” bellowed another. The media had gotten hold of Hanish, and it did not intend to let him go.

  By 1913, Hanish had learned the same painful lesson that Craddock had more than a decade earlier. Claiming a religious mantle was no protection from Comstock’s obscenity laws. Lured by decoy letters into sending his Inner Studies to “Julia B. Gardner,” a stand-in for Chicago’s snooping postal inspector, Hanish was arrested for circulating obscene literature. During the trial the prosecuting attorney blasted Inner Studies as a “mess of unspeakable filth”—one made worse because it had been diabolically packaged as a “book of faith.” Hanish’s tome was “so full of immorality as to be a menace” to public decency, the prosecutor continued, before closing with a psychological flourish. “It was conceived and written by a sex neurotic.” To no one’s surprise, Hanish was convicted, fined, and sentenced to six months in prison. The Mazdaznan Temple survived this legal blow in 1913, but its founder never lived down the charges of obscenity and immorality. 66

  Craddock’s Church of Yoga was, by the time of Hanish’s imprisonment, a distant memory. Having hoped “to settle down to Church of Yoga work” in Chicago for the long haul, she nonetheless felt compelled to migrate to Denver by the summer of 1900. There she had planned to set up an office for marital advising and to hold a new round of Church of Yoga meetings, but, with fresh financial support coming in from her old patron William T. Stead in London, she decided to turn her attention to “writing a big book” on marriage and sexuality. (She was not kidding about its size—it ran to 437 double-spaced, type-written, legal-sized pages and was intended to be her definitive statement on marriage reform, though by then there was little reason for her to think that she could actually get it published under the current obscenity regulations.) After holing up in Denver to work on her latest unprintable book, Craddock returned to the East Coast the next year and landed in New York City. There she dreamed of launching a quarterly publication called the Church of Yoga Messenger and starting up a new congregation for regular Sunday meetings. Neither hope materialized. Caught up ever more tightly in the legal system’s grip, she was unable to produce her planned journal or to resurrect her Church of Yoga in Manhattan. Her congregational experiment had died aborning in Chicago.67

  Craddock was never able to separate her work as a marriage reformer from her religious labors. The two roles were inextricably entwined, often to her own detriment. The hyped epithet, High Priestess of the Church of Yoga, followed her through her legal showdown with Anthony Comstock in the state and federal courts. In those proceedings and the news reports upon them, that title would be attached to her only with contempt. “The Pastor of the Holy Church of Yoga,” Comstock scoffed to reporters after her arrest in February 1902. “I believe she herself is pastor, congregation, Yoga, and everything else.”68

  Given how much energy Craddock had poured into remaking her religious identity, it was perhaps only fitting that she had to defend her sex reform work under yoga’s spiritual banner. “I feel pretty much as Moses did when the Lord told him to go and deliver the Israelites from Pharaoh; I’d rather beg off,” she wrote William T. Stead from New York in the fall of 1901:I should a whole lot rather not stand sponsor for a new religion. I am kind of afraid of the thing; I don’t know whether to shoot it off or not; the recoil may kick in a mortifying and wholly unexpected way. On the other hand, I know that my private pupils are touched by me religiously and emotionally . . . I know—if ever I knew anything—that the proper way to teach what I have to give, is to put it forth as a religion. There is absolutely no other way which is so rounded, so satisfying to my sense of the intellectual fitness of things as just this.

  The spiritualist
Stead may have understood Craddock’s prophetic urge to “stand sponsor for a new religion,” but, for most people, her view of the sex educator as sibyl was hard to fathom. That mystical proposition could make her liberal allies cringe—almost as much as it did Comstock, and yet Craddock was hardly in a position to relinquish her visionary status. That sensibility was, after all, essential to her bravest and most self-endangering claim: namely, that she had the authority to speak as a sexologist and to serve as a knowledgeable guide for married couples.69

  CHAPTER FOUR

  An Expert in Sexology

  EUNICE PARSONS, A YOUNG NURSE newly engaged in the summer of 1902, was worried about her fiancé, a piano tuner. The couple had recently had “some frank talks,” and it turned out Eunice’s betrothed, “a very pure-minded man,” was of the opinion that “people should have intercourse only for childbearing.” Parsons, taken aback, objected, “Suppose I don’t want any children; what then? Are we never to have intercourse?” As their discussion turned into a quarrel, her fiancé reproached her for being too passionate, and now she wondered if their apparent sexual incompatibility made it necessary for them to call off the wedding. “I have made up my mind never to marry any man until he can look at the sex relation as a pure act and a sacred act,” Eunice vowed. Her would-be husband, however prudish he sounded, held the stronger hand in this dispute: Most marital advice literature of the period, religious or not, refused to disjoin the pleasure of sex from the purpose of procreation and would have seen this particular stand-off as a worrying reversal of the usual relation of male desire and female modesty.

  Parsons had no effective recourse against her fiancé’s convictions—until she discovered the counseling services of Ida C. Craddock. With her Church of Yoga abandoned, Craddock was now operating out of an apartment in New York City on West 23rd Street. There, in a very snug office space, she pursued a lively, face-to-face program of instruction: advising clients who were struggling with bodily, spiritual, and relational issues. Parsons learned of Craddock’s lessons on married sexual relations through a physician to whom she had complained of her troubles and soon, fortified by Craddock’s teachings, she pressed her fiancé to reconsider his views. Improbably, Eunice even convinced him to go in for a lesson himself.

  Meeting with Craddock could not have been comfortable for a resolute virgin like Eunice’s fiancé. For her pedagogy to be effective, Craddock thought it essential to explore the sexual history of her clients with a battery of diagnostic questions, including blunt inquiries about masturbation (yes, he had done that “to some extent when a boy”) and erotic dreams (yes, he had experienced a few). The piano tuner, no doubt uncomfortable with the frankness of Craddock’s inquiry, tried to shift the tenor of the exchange through religious argument and scriptural citation: “Quoted the Bible very earnestly,” Craddock wrote in her case notes, “about there being a war between the spirit and the flesh, to prove his contention that coition should take place only for child-bearing; say once every few years.” The young man argued that sex within marriage was divinely sanctioned only for the procreative end of replenishing the earth.

  Unfortunately for the Bible-quoting piano tuner, Craddock wanted nothing more than to have their sex talk turn spiritual. Soon she was explaining how in her understanding of the divine, “God was feminine as well as masculine”—a concept that in itself would have sounded foreign to anyone used to intoning the most routine Christian prayer: “Our Father, who art in heaven.” But Craddock’s theories about God were not nearly as radical—or as shocking—as her philosophy about the female body. “I told him to think of his wife’s yoni as containing a chapel, into which he was to enter to worship—not worship the woman, but worship God,” Craddock instructed. That lesson left Eunice’s fiancé red-faced; he kept sputtering “his one idea of no coition except for child-bearing” and even insisted that his fiancée’s physical affections were supposed to be purely maternal in expression. Eunice need only dote on their prospective children, not satisfy (let alone incite) his sexual desires. “Well, well,” Craddock concluded, “if he doesn’t manage to rid himself of his idée fixe, he’ll find himself minus his sweetheart before long.”

  Only at the insistence of his betrothed did the piano tuner return for three more lessons. He bristled at his fiancée’s newly acquired “independence of thought and action” in pushing him into this highly disagreeable situation, but criticizing a woman for “thinking for herself ” was a non-starter with Craddock, who greeted this male presumption only with barbs. Forced quickly into retreat on that point, the piano tuner found himself losing ground on the main argument as well, finally acknowledging that sex for non-procreative purposes could be “pure and holy and perhaps ‘normal’ after all.” By the close of the fourth session Craddock had gone a long way toward saving the engagement—not just by normalizing the idea of regular intercourse between spouses, but also by explaining to the would-be husband that he needed to embrace his wife’s passion and be considerate of her pleasure. If the piano tuner remained wary of Eunice’s alliance with Ida, he at least had begun displaying a new appreciation for his lover’s sexual appetites and was ready to reconsider his own asceticism. The physician who had made the initial referral was so impressed with the change Craddock’s instruction had wrought that she immediately sought to sign up her own son and daughter for guidance in their respective relationships.1

  In Craddock’s ever-troubled role as a sex educator, this couple’s case was a success story. Even in this moment of victory, however, it is impossible to gauge whether her intervention proved lasting: Did her advice get the pair through their wedding night, and, even if it did, would Eunice come to regret her decision to go through with the marriage? Or, would her husband prove a lasting convert to Craddock’s way of thinking? After learning how important it was for his spouse to achieve orgasm and how devoted he had to be to her unhurried arousal, would he succeed at mastering the requisite techniques or end up feeling inept in the bedroom? And what if the couple did indeed decide to have children? Would the husband then lose interest in his wife, and prefer to exalt her as a mother rather than attend to her as a lover? Even with the best of sources—and the case records that Craddock left from her pioneering efforts are unusually vivid—so many relational intimacies and struggles slip entirely from view. Sex and marriage were too muddled with failure and frustration, too laced with manipulation and resentment, for anyone to serve simply as a heroic liberator. Craddock, however bold, could not free herself or her students from recurrent fears of impurity, perversion, abnormality, and lost self-control.

  No matter the challenges she faced, Craddock remained alertly focused on developing this new therapeutic role for herself. In her other incarnations of specialized expertise—as scholar and pastor—she was playing off well-established professions, but the craft of sexual consultant was, quite obviously, less recognized than those. In describing that new vocation, she variously presented herself as an “instructor and counselor upon the right way to live as husband and wife”; “an expert in sexology”; or, in a particularly evocative moment of self-description, “a physician of the emotions.” No title, it seemed, was too specific—or too opaque—for Craddock’s purposes.2

  A fancy calling card was not enough to make Craddock a credible professional. She was not a trained physician, even though the sort of physiological knowledge she pursued was widely seen as the particular domain of medical doctors. She relied instead on alliances with supportive physicians, such as Henrietta Westbrook and Edward Bond Foote, to provide some cover for her own therapeutic venture. Having a handful of sympathetic doctors in her camp was always crucial; they gave her a tincture of medical trustworthiness—as well as referrals. Likewise, Craddock did not possess the professional bona fides of a psychologist or a sexologist, new scientific roles that had gained identifiable authority by the end of the nineteenth century and that would become increasingly entwined in the early twentieth century in the figure of the psychoanalys
t. While she lacked the standing of physicians and scientists, Craddock also shared little with the fortuneteller, potion peddler, or amulet-producing conjurer—canny figures who had long boasted uncanny powers in the ways of love and fertility. Neither a medical doctor nor a folk healer, Craddock was something in between the two. A self-educated anatomical guide and metaphysical teacher, she was a makeshift therapist who sought to improve marriages through helping couples understand both their sexual functions and their spiritual needs. As she wrote of the new path she was on, “I have had to carve out my own road without any predecessors to guide me.”3

  Craddock’s need to improvise the role of sex educator as she went along did not mean her labors were entirely a product of creative isolation and idiosyncrasy. Her marriage reforms were a patchwork of cultural scraps drawn from multiple sources—medical, religious, legal, and freethinking. She stitched these materials together in an enterprise that combined a perilous publishing agenda with a program of personal instruction. While it was Craddock’s pamphleteering that would land her in court, her face-to-face tutoring carried its own risks. Prime among these were male clients who repeatedly pestered her to demonstrate her teachings in the flesh; they saw her less as an educator than as a showgirl or prostitute and treated her accordingly. Hassled by both her male customers and Anthony Comstock’s vice-fighting agents, Craddock was stuck between the booming market for sexual commodities and the Protestant effort to suppress those very obscenities. In her frankness about sexuality Craddock could sound almost bohemian, yet she was hardly carefree. She inevitably remained tethered to various social conventions and moral fears, including the dangers of masturbation and same-sex love. Exalting married heterosexual intercourse to the heavens, as Craddock did, necessarily served to reemphasize a host of taboos. She often wound up the mouthpiece for familiar prohibitions rather than the visionary of new freedoms.