Ever a woman in pursuit of cultural elevation, Craddock drew inspiration primarily from the fine arts for the pictorial framing of her experience. She often gained a visual sense of Edenic innocence or heavenly splendor in the “picture galleries” of London and elsewhere. In one painting, for example, the look of “a youthful monk,” whose gaze was rapt on the Madonna and Child, reminded her of Soph’s worshipful eyes during their earthly courtship. “I stood and looked and looked at the picture,” she marveled, “because it brought back so vividly the way Soph used to look at me.” Soph was the monk, and she was the Virgin; Craddock always wanted her love life to be marked by purity and transcendence.43
Just as she took Du Maurier as a favored novelist, Craddock also had a beloved artist for her romantic imaginings: William Bouguereau, an acclaimed French salon painter of the period. Popular among American audiences from the 1870s through the 1890s, Bouguereau had staked his reputation on a scorn for the avant-garde, including the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. By the time of his death in 1905, that was proving an increasingly bad wager. His works, the New York Times obituary sniffed, “possessed that prettiness which attracts the plutocratic merchant and the stock broker.” The popularity of his art with “the American public of a couple of decades ago,” the critic sniped, suggested a cultural “philistinism” only recently outgrown through a belated awakening to the contemporary.44
Philistine or not, Craddock would have stood by Bouguereau as a fine-art lens on her own erotic and religious intuitions—and as a fellow sufferer of persecution by Comstockian censors. For American audiences especially, Bouguereau personified the glorification of the nude in art and, as such, became another nemesis of Christian modesty. When, for example, Bouguereau’s Return of Spring (1886) was exhibited in Omaha in 1890, a young Presbyterian man had felt a flash of righteous horror as he looked on the naked nymph. Fighting the “impure thoughts and desires” that the painting aroused, he asked himself “whether I should want my mother or sister to see that picture. And then I wondered what Christ would think of the picture if He stood before it. I felt that I ought to destroy it.” So, this local Comstock seized a chair and smote “the canvas with all his might,” leaving about a thirty-inch rent in the central figure and two of the cherubs who fluttered around her.45
The young evangelical’s sudden iconoclasm epitomized the repressiveness that made Craddock despair for America’s cultural and religious scene. The visual arts, as was the case with dance as well, seemed hopelessly impaired by the country’s devotion to sexual reticence. In Craddock’s view of the problem, Protestant tastemakers remained the chief culprits:The Church people are still the foremost opposers of the nude in art. This loathing for the sight of the human form divine, and the habit of thought which connects the naked body with sexual impurity, has had a most unfortunate effect upon art in America. . . . In statuary, men and women alike are adorned with a ridiculous fig-leaf, stuck like a postage stamp over where their genitals should be. Thus every exhibition of nude statuary becomes an object lesson to the rising generation in the idea that the sexual organs are something to be ashamed of, instead of something to rejoice in and glorify.
In some sense, Craddock and the chair-throwing Nebraskan saw Bouguereau’s nudes the very same way—as a potent disturbance of Protestant mores and Victorian inhibitions. The visual power that she discerned in Bouguereau’s artwork was the obverse of the overwhelming temptation that the twenty-five-year-old Presbyterian saw in the Return of Spring. The artist, in effect, offered a measure of both Comstockian and anti-Comstockian impulses, the danger and the appeal of unclothed desires.46
Craddock was intensely drawn to Bouguereau’s vision of the mythic pair Cupid and Psyche. The artist had reprised their celebrated relationship in a number of canvasses and had produced two particularly provocative images of a youthful Cupid carrying an ecstatic and half-nude Psyche off into the heavens. To Craddock, Bouguereau’s representation of the twosome brilliantly captured the rapturous tangle of body and spirit in which she and her angel husband were engulfed. Soph, Craddock analogized, “is like Bouguereau’s Cupid . . . just that ethereal, heavenward-pointing direction of my entire being,” while she was “like Psyche in that picture, still weighted down by this earthly body.” At another point, she noted in her diary that Soph “seems to have the same feeling for me that is manifest in the face of the Cupid of Bouguereau’s ‘Cupid and Psyche’—a feeling which, although sexual, is unearthly, ethereal, transcendently fine and soft and pure.” Bouguereau’s artwork helped Craddock make sense of the dreams that had seized her, a pictorial embodiment of her fraught negotiations of the erotic and the spiritual. Bouguereau’s entranced Psyche offered Craddock an archetypal myth through which to view her own experience; such fabled imagery allowed her to frame her disorienting visions apart from the familiar diagnoses—erotomania, theomania, and nymphomania—current in clinical psychiatry. Craddock thus imagined herself as a latter-day Psyche whose own longing, despair, and torment had ended in divine deliverance. Like her mythic double, Craddock felt that she too had been “carried into the realms of bliss on the bosom of Love.”47
Craddock viewed one French artist in particular, William Bouguereau, as having the imaginative power to evoke the ravishing ecstasy of her religious experience. His Cupid and Psyche (1889) captured the simultaneity of erotic passion and heavenly ascent that Craddock so prized. Private Collection, by permission of The Bridgeman Art Library International.
Bouguereau’s The Abduction of Psyche (1895) combined wafting transcendence and blissful intimacy to even grander effect than his previous rendition had. From the collection of Frederick R. Koch.
Craddock’s fondness for the myth of Psyche and Eros pointed in the direction of her main project of self-explanation: That is, she turned again to scholarly inquiry, including folklore, comparative religion, and biblical interpretation. “The passion of the bookworm has always been strong within me,” she noted in her diary after she had a dream in which a large “papier maché head” had shown forth, filled with “the goodies of learning.” Those were certainly the sorts of sweets that Craddock was after when she began writing a “monograph” on the history of “Heavenly Bridegrooms” in May 1894, while conducting research at the British Museum. That book, she hoped, would prove that her own experience as a heavenly bride was not hopelessly crazy and unintelligible.
As with her large manuscript on phallic worship, Craddock’s labor on “Heavenly Bridegrooms” was arduous. She pored over scriptural texts and patristic commentaries before making her way down to such books as Emanuel Swedenborg’s Conjugial Love (1768), Walter Scott’s Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), and E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871). A routine observation in her diary about one of her trips to the library provides some sense of how she was proceeding: “I had that day been collating quotations from Tertullian about angelic husbands, the last being taken from his treatise on The Veiling of Virgins. His insistence on veiling women perpetually, because, he said, it was through their beauty that the angels had fallen from heaven, had roused my indignation.” Perhaps she was simply delusional—or, perhaps her contemporaries did not know the history of religion like she knew it. She pursued the delights of learning in order to lift her experiences out of isolated lunacy into comparative perspective.48
Through her research, she came to see the idea of divine betrothal as quite prevalent—within Christianity and well beyond it. “Every religion and folklore under the sun,” she surmised, contained suggestive material on such intimate exchanges between heaven and earth. She wanted to craft “a sort of rough guidebook” to these angelic pathways, which, she was quick to note, led into the mythic core of Christianity itself through the Annunciation, the Holy Spirit’s impregnation of the Virgin Mary, an event made manifest through the Angel Gabriel. As she remarked at the opening of her study, “The celestial being, who, whether God or angel, becomes the Heavenly Bridegroom of an earthly woman, is better known to the
literature of the Christian Church than most people who are not theologians are aware.” How easily, Craddock thought, Christians neglected those portions of the Bible, like the erotic poetry of the Song of Songs, that they found tricky or problematic.
Craddock especially wanted to draw attention to Genesis 6:2 in which the sons of God were said to have taken the daughters of men as wives. In the long history of biblical exegesis, Jewish and Christian, the passage had provoked endless controversy, but many expositors nevertheless took it to be an acknowledgment of sexual congress between angels and humans. Craddock, following that tack, traced the idea forward from the Book of Genesis to the commentaries of the early church fathers—Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Augustine. Not that most of the early Christian interpretations of this angelic commerce impressed her, since the emphasis was placed on the vulnerability of the angels to corruption, the polluting enticements of women, the necessity of female modesty in dress, and the primacy of rigorous asceticism. This much, though, Craddock did like about the ancient commentaries: The confirmation that such divine-human encounter had for centuries been a serious theological preoccupation.49
After considering the history of early Christianity, Craddock went global: India, Mexico, China, Egypt, medieval Europe, and ancient Greece (the last, a chance to call to mind Psyche and Eros again). She pointed as well to “the Mohammedan Paradise,” which “abounds in love-making,” and pronounced it a vast improvement on the Christian heaven. That slant of vision dramatically reversed the received wisdom in which Christians were associated with sexual purity and Muslims with debased sensuality. As the German clinician Richard von Krafft-Ebing had observed in sharply contrasting the two religious traditions in his foundational work on sexual pathologies, “The picture of eternity seen by the faith of the Christian is that of a paradise freed from all earthly sensuality, promising the purest of intellectual happiness; the fancy of the Mussulman fills the future life with the delights of a harem full of houris.” Upending the familiar Christian-Muslim hierarchy, Craddock was delighted to find voluptuous imaginings of paradise wherever she could.50
That Craddock turned to Islam for a positive example would hardly have been a winning argument in Protestant America. She had an answer, though, to the objection that her evidence came only from antiquated mythologies, Oriental superstitions, or Roman Catholic errors. Namely, she replied with contemporary evangelical examples—a woman from Rockford, Illinois; another from Wichita, Kansas; and a minister from Philadelphia, all of whom had a quite tangible sense of the divine-human relationship. Craddock even had a letter from an American convert who had come to know of such religious intimacies through the divine-healing movement, a faith-cure enterprise of decidedly evangelical character. The woman, as a newly betrothed bride of Christ, had written to another church sister to compare notes on their overlapping experiences, and that woman had, in turn, handed the letter over to Craddock. This “devout and pure-minded Christian” realized now that Jesus was Lord over her body as well as her soul: “The life abundant must flow into every part of His purchased possession, ere we are fully redeemed.” Lest anyone think that her testimonial was merely figurative (admittedly, this was not likely to be a problem for Craddock), the woman insisted that her spiritual experiences were inseparable from the corporeal: “It should be plainly understood that the union [with Jesus] is as the sexual intercourse of husband and wife.”51
Even as Craddock blithely multiplied her American Protestant examples, she knew that the notion of heavenly brides and bridegrooms was hard to make sound sensible. No matter how rich the historical record, the fact remained that it was “easy to dismiss all these stories, ancient, mediaeval, and modern, with contempt, as so many falsehoods, or, at best, self-delusions.” Nevertheless, she maintained, “this mass of folklore belief is too overwhelming in quantity and too widely diffused to be dismissed lightly. Back of it all there must be some objective realities and some fire for all this smoke.” In contrast to Schroeder’s psychosexual theory in which secular science thoroughly supplanted religious experience, Craddock offered a mystical history of religion, a history with the angels left in. She was convinced that all this smoke pointed to the fire of the real—that something true about the divine world was actually being revealed in all these myths, epiphanies, and unions.52
When Schroeder serialized Craddock’s book on heavenly bridegrooms in the Alienist and Neurologist, he thought that his own psychosexual schema fully absorbed her mystical history. For Schroeder, the sooner all talk of mystical union was recognized for what it was—a mislabeled sex ecstasy—the better; such experiences provided no special religious knowledge, only camouflage for bare sexual drives. The secular sophistication of Schroeder’s posture was not necessarily an improvement on the mystifying blend of Craddock’s position. Having penetrated the illusion, Schroeder had little else to say—as if the secularization of sex would take care of everything, as if nothing would be lost in the separation of body and spirit. Craddock seemed to come closer to the truth, to the reality, when she insisted that there was willynilly an open-ended exchange between religious and sexual experience, a fluidity of human emotions and sensations in which mixture was the rule: “Religion and sex-love, indeed, are but two reservoirs of emotion, which, standing side by side in every one’s life, not only tend to frequently overflow into one another, but are also connected with one another below the surface by subtle and as yet not wholly discovered channels.” In contrast to Schroeder’s singular focus, Craddock multiplied the possibilities—including the arts and humanistic scholarship—for approaching the over-brimming relationship between Psyche and Eros. In her range of curiosity and allusion, in her refusal of the foregone conclusion and the light dismissal, the madwoman outshone the psychoanalyst.53
Even at the time, a few commentators thought that Craddock had gotten the better of her posthumous editor. When Schroeder turned his series of articles into a stand-alone reprint in 1918, two reviewers of the volume looked at analyst and analysand side by side and decided sharply in the latter’s favor. Rather than providing unintended support for Schroeder’s psychosexual theory of religion’s origins, Craddock’s monograph had exposed the dullness of his editorial gloss. One of the reviewers was the notorious British magus Aleister Crowley, the extolled and excoriated genius of modern occultism. He had no trouble declaring a victor in this composite treatise: While Craddock’s learning was “enormous” and her manuscript “remarkable,” Schroeder’s own reasoning displayed “exquisite nonchalance.” Disallowing the tenacious American litigator the authority of scientific psychology, Crowley jabbed: “Only a lawyer could be so shameless. . . . One does not have even to disagree with him to see how worthless is his reasoning.” Crowley embraced Craddock, “this most talented woman,” as a fellow traveler pursuing the arcana of sex magic, but he also accorded her the scholarly palm she had so long sought. Craddock, by Crowley’s lights, had become an adept practitioner of a go-between learning—one that moved back and forth between academic study and mystical retrieval.54
Perhaps the book on heavenly bridegrooms revealed Craddock’s distinct voice—the scholar turned mystic, the mystic turned scholar. Yet, she always struggled with the question of her own agency and expressive freedom, and that was true with “Heavenly Bridegrooms” as in other aspects of her life: How much of its inspiration came from spirits and how much of it was a product of her hard work in the library? Was she once again a secretary rather than a scholar—as had been the case when she was forced to relinquish her college ambitions and turn to shorthand for a living instead? In working on this project she admitted feeling at times like whole paragraphs were being “dictated” by some outside intelligence. She almost resigned herself to a scribal rather than creative role, confiding in her journal: “I always did like to be a secretary.” The desire, though, for her own authorship would soon rise again, and Craddock would reassert herself as a self-cultivated inquirer: These typescripts represented her intellectual labor;
they were reflective of “my own standpoint,” and nothing would have meant more to her than to get her research into print. “I could say good-bye to my husband with a far less aching heart, than to have my manuscripts perish out of the world, unpublished,” she observed when contemplating the threatened destruction of her writings. She was ready to let “all this spook business go to the dogs” for the sake of her books. “I must live just to publish those manuscripts,” she concluded. “The rest could go.”55
Near the end of her life Craddock’s self-resolve faltered once more. Feeling sick and downtrodden from her time in prison and on the cusp of a final court appearance, she worried anew that her experiences with Soph had been “a delusion, a lie.” What if her spiritual life was “only hallucinative, through and through,” she asked herself in despair? What if her mother—and the lawyers, doctors, and judges who agreed with her mother—were right, after all? “Oh God, to know only the truth, the truth!” she prayed in her next-to-last diary entry in late July 1902. “Truth, Truth, Truth is what I want.” The ordeals of sensory confusion had started plaguing her again, and she was struggling hard to sort out illusion from reality, tormenting disease from spiritual training. Moments of coolness and clarity were few for her during that last summer in New York City; she often felt “desperate,” like she “could endure no more.”56
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