Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  40 IC, “How to Make Freethinkers,” 389-394. The details of Craddock’s curriculum in the ensuing paragraphs all come from this essay.

  41 IC, “Some Notes on Alaskan Myths,” Truth Seeker Annual and Freethinkers’ Almanac for 1891 (New York: Truth Seeker, 1891), 38-47 (quotation on p. 42).

  42 Helen H. Gardener, Men, Women, and Gods, and Other Lectures (New York: Truth Seeker, 1885), 52-53.

  43 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 1: 10; 2:8.

  44 See Alexander Wilder, introduction in F. Max Müller, India: What Can It Teach Us? (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1883), xiii-xviii.

  45 Louis Henry Jordan, Comparative Religion: Its Genesis and Growth (Edinburgh: Clark, 1905), xiii, 10, 166-169. Jordan makes a long list of the “tangible achievements” of the new science (pp. 369-414) from which I have gathered the examples used in this paragraph.

  46 Morris Jastrow, The Study of Religion (New York: Scribner’s, 1901), vi, 56. For curricular developments at Penn and elsewhere, see Morris Jastrow, “Recent Movements in the Historical Study of Religions in America,” Biblical World 1 (1893): 24- 32. On Jastrow’s intellectual journey, see Harold S. Wechsler, “Pulpit or Professoriate: The Case of Morris Jastrow,” American Jewish History 74 (1985): 338-355.

  47 “Ida C. Craddock,” 53. For the relationship among gender, amateurism, and professionalization, see especially Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). Religion is tangential to Smith’s purposes, but her remarks on Gage, Stanton, and Jane Ellen Harrison are relevant (see pp. 180-181, 191-192, 202-205, 209-210).

  48 William James, “The Ph.D. Octopus,” Harvard Monthly 36 (1903): 1-9.

  49 Evidence for the two missing chapters comes from internal references to them within these three parts. See IC, “Sun and Dawn Myths,” 28, 35-36, 40, box 3, f. 2, ICP; IC, “Lunar and Sex Worship,” 90, box 1, f. 6, ICP. The surviving typescript for “Lunar and Sex Worship” is signed and dated September 25, 1902; the other two sections are undated. It is clear that she was working on this topic from at least the early 1890s and parts of the surviving manuscript would appear to be directly connected to the public lectures she gave on the subject in 1893 and 1894. In short, she worked on this book over a long period.

  50 Richard Payne Knight, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786) reprinted in Ashley Montagu, ed., Sexual Symbolism: A History of Phallic Worship (New York: Julian, 1957), 21.

  51 Ibid., 27, 50. For Knight’s slipping of sex worship into ostensibly safer topics, see Richard Payne Knight, The Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology (New York: Bouton, 1876), 12-13, 98, 141-142. For the world of antiquarian collectors and anticlerical radicals that Knight inhabited, see Giancarlo Carabelli, In the Image of Priapus (London: Duckworth, 1996), and G.S. Rousseau, “The Sorrows of Priapus: Anticlericalism, Homosocial Desire, and Richard Payne Knight,” in G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, eds., Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 101-153. For attention to Knight’s work on “phallicism” in the context of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century occultism, see Bradford Verter, “Dark Star Rising: The Emergence of Modern Occultism, 1800-1950,” PhD diss., Princeton University, 1997, 71-87, and Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 1-25.

  52 SWC, 124-125. For the closeted copy at the British Library as of 1836, see George Ryley Scott, Phallic Worship: A History of Sex and Sexual Rites in Relation to the Religions of All Races from Antiquity to the Present Day (London: Luxor, 1966), xix. On the history of the British Museum’s “Secretum,” see Carabelli, In the Image of Priapus, esp. 1-11; Peter Fryer, Private Case—Public Scandal: Secrets of the British Museum Revealed (London: Secker and Warburg, 1966); David Gaimster, “Sex and Sensibility at the British Museum,” History Today 50 (2000): 10-15; and Dominic Janes, “The Rites of Man: The British Museum and the Sexual Imagination in Victorian Britain,” Journal of the History of Collections 20 (2008): 101-112. In addition to the curatorial practices at the British Museum, those at the National Museum in Naples were crucial to developing restricted collections of “phallic antiquities” (in this case, excavated artifacts from Pompeii). Indeed, the ostensibly “secret” antiquities in Naples were crucial in the very creation of the category of “pornography” in the nineteenth century. See Michael Grant, Eros in Pompeii: The Erotic Art Collection of the Museum of Naples (New York: Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1997), and Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 2-32. Curator Wendy Woloson at the Library Company of Philadelphia looked for records on secret cases and special requests from the period for me, but she found no official notice of Craddock’s application. Indeed, she reported that shelf lists and accession records from the period make no mention of the Ridgway ever owning a copy of Knight’s Discourse. However, on further inspection, Woloson found the volume “conveniently” misidentified. Hence, more than a century later, the secret copy that Craddock somehow identified has finally been made an accessible part of the collection. It is highly unlikely that Craddock gained access to the carefully restricted holdings at the British Museum. There is record of an American graduate student, Edmund Buckley, then working on his PhD in comparative religion at the University of Chicago, applying for and obtaining access to Richard Payne Knight’s collection in 1893, but no similar record exists for Craddock. Her admission materials mention only a desire to do “research work in books on occultism and mysticism.” She avoided any mention of sex worship in her application letters of April 13, 1894 and Nov. 30, 1898 (the first letter was under the pseudonym Irene Sophia Roberts and the second under her given name; William Stead endorsed both applications). See Reading Room Records, Reader’s Tickets/A51154 and A63473, Central Archives, the British Museum; Edmund Buckley to Principal Librarian, Aug. 24, 1893, Pre-1896 In-Letters, Department of Prehistory and Europe, the British Museum. For Buckley’s work, which includes an account of the extensive “precautions” he had to overcome to get access to the British Museum’s collection, see Edmund Buckley, Phallicism in Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1895), 7-9. Buckley, in turn, showed his own caution in emphasizing that his study was for limited circulation as “an academic monograph”; the “general reader,” he feared, might find its frank discussion of phallicism “unduly stimulating,” which was, he insisted, wholly contrary to his “scientific purpose” (p. 4).

  53 Thomas Wright, The Worship of the Generative Powers during the Middles Ages of Western Europe reprinted in Montagu, ed., Sexual Symbolism, 7.

  54 J. G. R. Forlong, Rivers of Life, Or, Sources and Streams of the Faiths of Man in All Lands, 3 vols. (London: Quaritch, 1883), 1: 93; 3: “Synchronological Chart.”

  55 Robert Allen Campbell, Phallic Worship (St. Louis, 1887; London: Kegan Paul, 2002), 16. Campbell was an American elaborator of the British sources.

  56 Forlong, Rivers of Life, 1: 3; J. G. R. Forlong, introduction in Hodder M. Westropp, Primitive Symbolism as Illustrated in Phallic Worship or the Reproductive Principle (London: Redway, 1885), iii; Hargrave Jennings, Phallism: A Description of the Worship of the Lingam-Yoni in Various Parts of the World, and in Different Ages (London: n.p., 1892), iv. Providing a space for men only to discuss taboo subjects—including phallic worship—had been one of the main reasons the Anthropological Society of London had set itself up in opposition to the Ethnological Society of London in 1863. The latter group had decided to admit women. See George W. Stocking Jr., “What’s in a Name? The Origins of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1837-1871),” Man 6 (1971): 380. To the extent that Craddock had female company at all in this domain of inquiry, it was a very sparse group. Elizabeth Evans mentioned fertility worship in passing in her History of Religion in 1892; the seer Madame Blavatsky alluded to phallic symbolism in a few spots in Isis Unveiled in 18
77 and wrote a very critical review essay on Hargrave Jennings’ studies of the subject in 1896. In a company of amateurs and scholars that boasted dozens of male authorities by 1900, Craddock is the only woman of the period that I have found who wrote an entire treatise on “phallicism” and “sex worship.” Also of note, though, is the work of Eliza Burt Gamble on ancient religion, which is discussed below. For a massive survey of the relevant literature, see Roger Goodland, A Bibliography of Sex Rites and Customs: An Annotated Record of Books, Articles, and Illustrations in All Languages (London: Routledge, 1931).

  57 SWC, 8-9, 19-20, 27, 37.

  58 Westropp and Wake, Ancient Symbol Worship, 32.

  59 Forlong, Rivers of Life, 1: 280, 450; 3: “Synchronological Chart.”

  60 DPE, 191; IC, “Marriage Relation,” 185. See also IC, “Sun and Dawn Myths,” 37-38; IC, “Lunar and Sex Worship,” 85. The joining of such mythological observations to a rigid race hierarchy—based on the philological divisions of Aryan, Semitic, and Turanian—was especially evident in James Fergusson’s Tree and Serpent Worship, which, in turn, was strongly critiqued as a philological and anthropological pipedream in [ John McLennan], “Tree and Serpent Worship,” Corn-hill Magazine 19 (1869): 626-640. On this point, Craddock was more in line with McLennan’s stand than Fergusson’s.

  61 Campbell, Phallic Worship, 16; Westropp and Wake, Ancient Symbol Worship, 31.

  62 SWC, 104, 116, 125; IC, “Lunar and Sex Worship,” 23-24, 80. Cynthia Eller has scrutinized most fully the ongoing feminist fascination with a matriarchal past. See her The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Will Not Give Women a Future (Boston: Beacon, 2000), along with her forthcoming project focused on the nineteenth-century background.

  63 IC, “Lunar and Sex Worship,” 23-25, 32, 76; SWC, 63, 99, 168.

  64 IC, “Lunar and Sex Worship,” 62, 89-90; SWC, 95.

  65 SWC, 193-195, 206-207; Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1996), 236.

  66 SWC, 162.

  67 Eliza Burt Gamble, The God-Idea of the Ancients: Or, Sex In Religion (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897), iii-v, 206-216. Gamble’s labors have not received much attention, especially her work on religion, but see Rosemary Jann, “Revising the Descent of Woman: Eliza Burt Gamble,” in Barbara T. Gates and Ann B. Shtier, eds., Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 147-163, and Penelope Deutscher, “The Descent of Man and the Evolution of Woman,” Hypatia 19 (2004): 35-55.

  68 J. E. Harrison, “The Pillar and the Maiden,” Proceedings of the Classical Association 5 (1907): 65-67, 77; Sandra J. Peacock, Jane Ellen Harrison: The Mask and the Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 204-212, with Harrison’s critique of phallic elements quoted on p. 205.

  69 For an illuminating example of Parsons’s early work on religion and gender, see Elsie Clews Parsons, “The Religious Dedication of Women,” American Journal of Sociology 11 (1906): 610-622. For Craddock’s membership in the American Folklore Society, see the Journal of American Folklore 9 (1896): 317; 10 (1897): 340; 11(1898): 313. During that time she made only one very modest contribution to the journal’s “Notes and Queries” section. See IC, “The Tale of the Wild Cat: A Child’s Game,” Journal of American Folklore 10 (1897): 322-324.

  70 Jane Ellen Harrison, Alpha and Omega (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1915), 128.

  71 IC to Katie Wood, July 5, 1901; IC to WTS, Sept. 10, 1901; IC to unidentified correspondent, Nov. 1, 1901, box 1, f. 1, ICP; DPE, 215.

  Chapter 3: Pastor of the Church of Yoga

  1 “Religious News” and “Religious Announcements,” Chicago Tribune, July 12, 1874, 6. See the same columns in Chicago Tribune, Aug. 16, 1874, 6; Sept. 6, 1874, 6; Jan. 10, 1875, 6; Jan. 17, 1875, 6. The best source for the country’s religious demographics remains Edwin Scott Gaustad and Philip L. Barlow, New Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  2 “Religious Announcements,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 17, 1899, 30. Likewise, see “Religious Announcements,” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 26, 1899, 32; Sept. 21, 1890, 34; Sept. 10, 1893, 36; Dec. 10, 1893, 39; March 7, 1897, 38; June 17, 1900, 14.

  3 Ibid., Dec. 17, 1899, 30; Feb. 25, 1900, 31.

  4 IC to Katie Wood, Aug. 19, 1877, box 1, f. 1, ICP.

  5 E. H. Stokes, ed., Ocean Grove, Its Origin and Progress, as Shown in the Annual Reports Presented by the President (Philadelphia: Haddock and Son, 1874), 67, 73-74.

  6 Ibid., 10-11, 62-63. For a history of Ocean Grove, see Troy Messenger, Holy Leisure: Recreation and Religion in God’s Square Mile (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000).

  7 IC to Katie Wood, June 5, 1879, box 1, f. 1, ICP.

  8 IC, “Heavenly Bridegrooms,” 6-7, box 4, f. 1, ICP.

  9 Ibid.

  10 “News of Friends,” Friends’ Intelligencer and Journal 45 (1888): 396; DPE, second part, 7.

  11 For Quaker divisions and denominational history in the period, see Hugh Barbour and J. William Frost, The Quakers (New York: Greenwood, 1988), 203-229. For the broader Quaker influences on Whitman and company, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper, 2005), esp. 233-236.

  12 DPE, 19-20, 43, 177; “Ashamed of Being Called ‘Infidel,’” BI, April 22, 1891, 3. For additional testimony to the Quaker influence on Craddock’s spiritual temper, see WTS to Philander Knox, Sept. 24, 1902, box 2, f. 2, RGP.

  13 SWC, 19-20. The Spring Garden Unitarian Society subsequently closed, and its records have apparently been lost, but a small cache of the church’s newsletters from the period have survived at Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University. One of these offers a directory of members and affiliates, and Craddock appears on that list of members (as do her allies, Richard and Henrietta Westbrook). See Spring Garden Unitarian Church, The Message 1 (March 1898): n.p. The congregation’s representation of itself as a model for the “Liberal Church” is on full view in the Year Book of the Spring Garden Unitarian Society (Philadelphia: Buchanan, 1887), 5-6, 21-22.

  14 “‘Freethought’ and Free Thought,” American Sentinel, Dec. 27, 1890, 379.

  15 Frederic A. Hinckley, Beckonings of the Spirit (Philadelphia: n.p., 1890), 18; Frederic A. Hinckley, “What Do Unitarians Believe?” The Message 1 (March 1898): n.p.

  16 Frederic A. Hinckley, The Relation of the Sexes (Washington, D.C.: Society for Moral Education, 1887), 7, 10; Frederic A. Hinckley, The Deeper Meanings (Boston: Ellis, 1894), 46. The church’s role as host to various reformers can be tracked in the pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 20, 1883, 3; Dec. 10, 1883, 2; May 25, 1885, 2; Nov. 19, 1885, 3; Oct. 25, 1886, 3; Feb. 15, 1888, 3; April 5, 1888, 3; Jan. 26, 1889, 2; March 3, 1890, 3; March 28, 1891, 5; March 7, 1892, 5; Nov. 7, 1896, 1. Sessions on the “Study of Emerson,” led by Hinckley, are noted each month in Spring Garden Unitarian Church, The Message 1 (Dec. 1897-July 1898): n.p. Two other noteworthy liberals, Charles Ames and William L. Nichols, successively led the church prior to Hinckley taking over in 1896.

  17 “Ida C. Craddock,” Freethinkers’ Magazine 8 (1890): 53-54; “A Few Words from Miss Craddock,” Truth Seeker, Feb. 14, 1891, 100. Details of Craddock’s ongoing involvement as “an active member” of the Unitarian church come from one of her mother’s letters. See Lizzie Decker to EBF, Oct. 21, 1902, box 2, f. 2, RGP.

  18 See H. H. Furness Jr., ed., Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University of Pennsylvania to Investigate Modern Spiritualism in Accordance with the Bequest of the Late Henry Seybert (1887; Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1920). For broader background on spiritualism and psychical research in the period, see Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research (New York: Schocken, 19 6 8), and R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

  19 DPE, 120-121; IC to Katie Wood, March 15, 1887; Oct. 1, 1889. Specifically, C
raddock mentions reading Margaret Oliphant, Two Stories of the Seen and Unseen (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1885); William Denton and Elizabeth M. F. Denton, The Soul of Things; Or, Psychometric Researches and Discoveries (Boston: Walker, Wise, and Co., 1863), and Edmund Gurney, Frederic W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore, Phantasms of the Living, 2 vols. (London: Society for Psychical Research, 1886).

  20 SML, 4; IC to Wood, March 15, 1887.

  21 William James, Essays in Psychical Research (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 362.

  22 DPE, 17. For experiments with various spirit-writing machines, see Paul Carus, “Spirit or Ghost: Comments upon Spiritism and Spiritistic Interpretations of Psychical Phenomena,” Monist 12 (1902): 397-398. Despite receiving “innumerable most remarkable answers” through these devises, Carus was skeptical of the results that he and a professor of physics obtained, seeing instead subliminal influences and wishfulness at work. The point is the currency and respectability of such experiments—respectable at least in so far as one remained disbelieving.

  23 Columbus Enquirer-Sun, July 31, 1892, 6.

  24 SML, 4.

  25 Ibid., 4-5. “Our Gallery of Borderlanders” was a regular feature of the spiritualist journal Borderland (1893-1897).

  26 SML, 4-7; DPE, 213.

  27 SML, 5-7; DPE, second part, 16.

  28 SML, 4-7; DPE, 213.

  29 SML, 5.

  30 IC to James B. Elliott, July 14, 1894, box 1, f. 1; IC, “Miscellaneous Notes,” box 6, f. 7, ICP. Within these assorted notes is a three-page fragment of a longer document (now apparently lost) in which Craddock describes how she eluded her mother’s “plan to abduct me by force” and place her in an asylum. The long spiral of shame and anger in her mother’s relationship with her was given especially full review in a letter from IC to Katie Wood, July 5, 1901, box 1, f. 1, ICP.