Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  31 WTS, If Christ Came to Chicago! (Chicago: Laird and Lee, 1894), 445; “A Visitor’s Criticism of Philadelphia,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 6, 1894, 4. On Stead’s career, including his trip to Chicago and his spiritualist inquiries, see Frederic Whyte, The Life of W. T. Stead, 2 vols. (New York; Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 1: 324-340, 2: 39-53, 63-64. For a biography organized largely around his fascination with mediumistic phenomena, see Estelle W. Stead, My Father: Personal and Spiritual Reminiscences (London: Heinemann, 1913). On his American campaign, see Joseph O. Baylen, “A Victorian’s ‘Crusade’ in Chicago, 1893-1894,” Journal of American History 51 (1964): 418-434.

  32 IC, “Miscellaneous Notes.” On their meeting through an unnamed editorial friend, see WTS to Knox, Sept. 24, 1902. It is possible they were introduced to each other in Chicago in the wake of the World’s Fair, but a Philadelphia introduction appears much more likely. Stead initially published some of his communications from Julia Ames in Borderland and then later collected them in Letters from Julia (1897), which, in turn, was expanded into After Death: A Personal Narrative (1914).

  33 IC, “Miscellaneous Notes.”

  34 DPE, 19.

  35 Ibid., 19-20, 49. Craddock highlights her dress-reform efforts in IC, “The Marriage Relation,” 35-38, box 3, f. 3, ICP.

  36 DPE, 19-20, 33; Irene Sophia Roberts to the Principal Librarian, April 13, 1894, Reading Room Records, Reader’s Ticket/A51154, Central Archives, the British Museum.

  37 DPE, 112. On Freer’s colorful career, see Trevor H. Hall, The Strange Story of Ada Goodrich Freer (London: Duckworth, 1980). For the holdings of “The Borderland Library,” see Borderland 1 (1894): 582-584. The other intellectual companion that Craddock noted making in London was Richard Harte, a solidly accomplished writer on marriage customs as well as the “new theology” of liberal universalism. See DPE, 11, 115, 123, and Richard Harte, The New Theology Being Some Outspoken Letters to a Lady (London: Allen, 1894).

  38 DPE, 20, 37, 47, 60, 145, 176.

  39 Ibid., 93, 99, 104-105, 131.

  40 Ibid., 144, 156, 172-174. Alma Gillen’s American network can be seen in her very scarce journal called Expression; the lone surviving issue—one from the third volume and dated October 1900—is housed in the Special Collections of the Syracuse University Library. Her metaphysical principles were set out especially in Alma Gillen, The Law of Expression, Or, The Order of Creation (London: n.p., 1895). For a superb history of the gendered dimensions of New Thought, see Beryl Satter, Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

  41 DPE, 174.

  42 Ibid., 156, 187; Alma Gillen, The Passion of Passions (London: n.p., 1896), 88. For an express example of Craddock’s positioning herself in relation to New Thought or Divine Science, see her handbill “The Mental Scientists Versus Marriage,” n.d., box 2, f. 2, RGP.

  43 DPE, 116-117, 187.

  44 Ibid., 207-208. Her firing from the Highway Bureau was picked up in the Philadelphia newspapers. See the clippings in box 20, f. 15, RGP.

  45 DPE, 222.

  46 IC, The Heaven of the Bible (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1897), 56-57, 66; “Religious,” Literary World, April 17, 1897, 132; “Books of the Week,” Outlook, April 17, 1897, 1044; “The Heaven of the Bible,” Borderland 4 (1897): 212-213.

  47 IC, “Heavenly Bridegrooms,” 73.

  48 DPE, 35-36, 108, 187, 191. The correspondence with Dharmapala apparently does not survive but is mentioned in her diary.

  49 IC, “Heavenly Bridegrooms,” 56-57.

  50 DPE, 209.

  51 IC, “The Marriage Relation,” 129.

  52 Vivekananda’s renunciations, including his inclination to bowdlerize Ramakrishna’s biography and teachings, have been the subject of a growing body of scholarship. Jeffrey J. Kripal’s controversial work—despised by many devotees of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, lauded by many scholars—has been especially significant in this regard. See Jeffrey J. Kripal, Kālī’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 8-9, 25-27. Also see Hugh B. Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), and Carrie Tirado Bramen, “Christian Maidens and Heathen Monks: Oratorical Seduction at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions,” in Tracy Fessenden, Nicholas F. Radel, and Magdalena J. Zaborowska, eds., The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature (New York: Routledge, 2001), 191-212. For broader background on the movement, see Carl T. Jackson, Vedanta for the West: The Ramakrishna Movement in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). For the particular importance of Vivekananda’s Râja Yoga, see Elizabeth de Michelis, A History of Modern Yoga (London: Continuum, 2004), 149-180, and for wider American appropriations of yoga since the turn of the twentieth century, see Catherine L. Albanese, “Sacred (and Secular) Self-Fashioning: Esalen and the American Transformation of Yoga,” in Jeffrey J. Kripal and Glenn W. Shuck, eds., On the Edge of the Future: Esalen and the Evolution of American Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 45-79.

  53 DPE, second part, 15, 17-18; Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 8 vols. (Calcutta: Advaita, 1989), 1: 122, 137. Vivekananda later subsumed his New York lectures on Râja Yoga, initially published separately, into his broader work on Vedanta Philosophy (1899).

  54 IC, “Marriage Relation,” 129-130; [Hargrave Jennings], Phallic Miscellanies; Facts and Phases of Ancient and Modern Sex Worship (n.p.: n.p., 1891), 1. This singular association of Hinduism with sexuality, picked up especially from the late eighteenth-century work of William Jones, was widespread in the nineteenth-century literature on phallic worship. For another paradigmatic instance, see Edward Sellon, Annotations on the Sacred Writings of the Hindüs, Being an Epitome of Some of the Most Remarkable and Leading Tenets in the Faith of that People Illustrating their Priapic Rites and Phallic Principles, 2nd ed. (London: n.p., 1902), 12, 59.

  55 IC, “Marriage Reform,” 129, 136-137.

  56 Srischandra Basu, trans., The Esoteric Science and Philosophy of the Tantras, Shiva Sanhita (Calcutta: Prakas, 1893), 35-37.

  57 IC, “Marriage Relation,” 129, 136-137; Basu, Esoteric Science, 35-37. Craddock singled out the ninth section of chapter four as the one that most attracted her attention and picked up the “inaccessible glory” phrase from the translated text itself.

  58 Basu, Esoteric Science, 28-29, 35-37; DPE, 115, 127; second part, 56; IC, “Marriage Relation,” 136-137. On subsequent appropriations, see Urban, Tantra, 203-263, and Hugh B. Urban, Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 81-108.

  59 DPE, second part, 22, 56. It is impossible to reconstruct Craddock’s Sunday meetings in any detail. A few titles of her talks survive: “Man and Woman as They Were, As They Are, as They Ought to Be”; “Object of the Church of Yoga”; “How to Take a Spiritual Bath,” and “The Apple Mythos,” but little more than that is available. See Chicago Tribune, Dec. 17, 1899, 30; Jan. 14, 1900, 31; Jan. 21, 1900, 46; Jan. 28, 1900, 36; Feb. 25, 1900, 31. It is also impossible to know the size or composition of her audience. Several of those whom she advised on marriage relations were attendees of her church. She did mention that Lillian and Virna Harman, daughter and granddaughter of the sex radical Moses Harman, attended at least one of her Sunday meetings at this time. See DPE, second part, 19.

  60 Basu, Esoteric Science, 12, 35-37.

  61 Ibid.; IC, “Yoga Applied to the Married Life: A Course of Instruction,” circular, n.d., box 2, f. 2, RGP.

  62 On Bernard, see Urban, Tantra, 209-215; Hugh B. Urban, “The Omnipotent Oom: Tantra and Its Impact on Modern Western Esotericism,” Esoterica 3 (2001): 218-259: and Robert Love, The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America (New York: Viking, 2010). Craddock’s designa
tion as “high priestess and pastor of the Church of Yoga” was picked up across the country at the peak of her legal travails in 1902. See, for example, Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), Oct. 18, 1902, 1; Columbus Enquirer-Sun (Columbus, GA), Oct. 18, 1902, 1, plus the newspaper clippings in box 2, f. 2, RGP. Another religious character in Chicago, William Walker Atkinson, who was also known as Yogi Ramacharaka, represented a similar New Thought/yoga hybrid, but again he pursued his experiments in the wake of Craddock’s venture, not before. See William Walker Atkinson, Law of the New Thought (Chicago: Psychic Research, 1902), and Yogi Ramacharaka, Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism (Chicago: Yogi Publication Society, 1908). It is certainly possible, though, to read Craddock’s Tantric turn retrospectively in terms of previous occultist explorations of divine androgyny and erotic mysteries during the second half of the nineteenth century. See, for example, the varied sources collected in Joscelyn Godwin, Christian Chanel, and John P. Deveney, eds., The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor: Initiatic and Historical Documents of an Order of Practical Occultism ( York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1995).

  63 There were many other fine candidates for the rank of quintessential seeker at the turn of the century. For another good example, see Thomas A. Tweed, “Inclusivism and the Spiritual Journey of Marie de Souza Canavarro (1849-1933),” Religion 24 (1994): 43-58.

  64 Upton Sinclair, The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic Interpretation (Pasadena: n.p., 1918), 250-253, 255; Otoman Zar-Adusht Hanish, Inner Studies: A Course of Twelve Lessons (Chicago: Sun-Worshiper Publishing Co., 1902), 68, 72, 91. See also Otoman Zar-Adusht Hanish, Health and Breath Culture According to Mazdaznan Philosophy (Sun-Worship) (Chicago: Sun-Worshiper Publishing Co., 1902). Exposure of his German background came a decade after Craddock’s association with him. See “Father Exposes Dr. Hanish,” Chicago Tribune, May 18, 1912, 3.

  65 Hanish, Inner Studies, 157, 163-165, 172-173; IC, “Telepathy between the Sexes,” Feb. 27, 1900, 17, box 5, f. 1, ICP. For Craddock’s specific concurrence with Hanish, see IC to S. L. Krebs, Oct. 19, 1901, box 1, f. 1, ICP. That Hanish had been a consumer of Craddock’s Right Marital Living before publishing his own advice is evident from his appearance in April 1900 in her “Address Book of Customers for Books and Pupils of Divine Science,” box 7, f. 4, ICP.

  66 “‘Dr.’ Hanish on Trial,” Chicago Tribune, June 5, 1904, 7; “Fanatic Leaves Maniac Trail,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 16, 1907, 12; “Hanish in Jail,” Chicago Tribune, March 5, 1912, 1; “Seek Jurors for Sun Cult Trial,” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 22, 1913, 13; “Hanish Loses on Decoy Letters,” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 25, 1913, 8; “Expose Secrets of Hanish Cult,” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 26, 1913, 3; “Jurors Thrilled by Hanish Book,” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 27, 1913, 3; “Sun Cult Jurors Get Case Today,” Chicago Tribune , Nov. 28, 1913, 3; “Convicts Hanish of Immorality,” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 29, 1913, 3; “Six Months for Hanish,” Washington Post, Dec. 16, 1913, 4. The charges against Hanish, which came to include “statutory offenses” against children, only got more damning in later years. See “Law’s Fierce Light upon Sun-Worshippers,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 11, 1920, II, 1.

  67 IC to WTS, Sept. 10, 1901, box 1, f. 1; IC, “The Marriage Relation,” box 3, f.6, ICP. That she continued to offer her Tantric-inspired lessons once in New York City is evident from the circular produced there to advertise her services. See IC, “Yoga Applied to the Married Life,” but this handbill promised private classes and individual instruction, not regular Sunday meetings. By then, she had a congregation of readers, not hearers. But, as she put it, “Does either law or custom prohibit one from being the pastor of a congregation of readers?” See IC to Editor Sun, Feb. 21, 1902, box 2, f. 2, RGP.

  68 “Alleged Misuse of Mails: Woman Held on Charge of Circulating Forbidden Literature,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 19, 1902, 1; “Chose Death Before Prison,” New York Times, Oct. 18, 1902, 2.

  69 IC to WTS, Sept. 10, 1901.

  Chapter 4: An Expert in Sexology

  1 IC, “Record of Cases in Oral Instruction,” 22, 26-29, 35, box 4, f. 8; Eunice O. Parsons to IC, Sept. 3,1902, box 1. f. 2, ICP. In the case notes the nurse is identified simply as Miss E. O. P., but, judging from Craddock’s correspondence for September 1902, this case is identifiable as Eunice O. Parsons; five letters from Parsons to Craddock survive from that month and line up closely with the case record. Craddock’s long list of questions for her clients are preserved in “Regeneration and Rejuvenation of Men and Women, through the Right Use of the Sex Function,” box 4, f. 5, ICP.

  2 “The Wedding Night and Right Marital Living,” advertising circular, n.d., box 7, f. 5, ICP; IC, “Regeneration and Rejuvenation,” 6; IC, “Records of Cases of Marital Reform Work,” 24, box 5, f. 12, ICP.

  3 “Ida Craddock’s Letter to Her Mother,” Truth Seeker, Oct. 25, 1902, 680. For indications of the cover (and coverage) that sympathetic physicians provided her, see Medical World 15 (1897): 440; Massachusetts Medical Journal 20 (1900): 557-558; and Minneapolis Homœpathic Magazine 9 (1900): 284-285.

  4 The presumed norms of liberal privatization—Protestant Christianity in the domain of religion and heterosexual marriage in the domain of sexuality—have now been the subject of considerable critique. For that debate and for the recognition of the interconnections between the freedoms of religion and sexuality, see Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (New York: New York University Press, 2003), esp. 103-126. It is worth underlining that Protestant Christianity was not necessarily the norm being drawn upon by those marriage reformers most tenacious for liberal freedoms and privacy.

  5 Moses Harman and his circle are at the center of Hal D. Sears, The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977). Harman’s explanation of his journal’s title is quoted on p. 55. See also William Lemore West, “The Moses Harman Story,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 37 (1971): 41-63. For the prior generation upon which Harman’s group built, see John C. Spurlock, Free Love: Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in America, 1825- 1860 (New York: New York University Press, 1988).

  6 Sears, Sex Radicals, 74-76, 88; Moses Harman, “A Free Man’s Creed,” LLB, April 7, 1897, 106.

  7 “The Danse du Ventre” and “Sex Modesty—The True and the False,” LLB, Dec. 22, 1893, 2; “Letter to a Prospective Bride,” LLB, Aug. 18, 1897, 259; “Two New Books by Ida C. Craddock,” LLB, Sept. 22, 1897, 299; “Mrs. Craddock,” LLB, Oct. 30, 1902, 331; DPE, second part, 19. For her ongoing support in the journal, see “Ida C. Craddock,” LLB, Jan. 28, 1899, 28; “Right Marital Living,” LLB, Aug. 19, 1899, 252; “Right Marital Living,” LLB, Feb. 17, 1900, 43; “The Wedding Night,” LLB, Aug. 11, 1900, 245.

  8 For broad analysis of the communitarian intersection with sexual innovation, see Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford, 1981).

  9 John Humphrey Noyes, Male Continence (Oneida, NY: Oneida Circular, 1872), 8, 11-12; “Sex Modesty,” 2. Craddock’s early debt to Noyes is especially evident in her Helps to Happy Wedlock: No. 1 for Husbands (Philadelphia: n.p., 1896), 5-9, and IC, “Male Continence,” May 1895, box 6, f. 7, ICP.

  10 The works of Miller and Chavannes are both anthologized in Taylor Stoehr, ed., Free Love in America: A Documentary History (New York: AMS, 1979), 588-618.

  11 IC, Helps, 16; IC, “To Wives and Mothers,” circular, [1897], box 2, f. 2, RGP; Alice B. Stockham, Karezza: Ethics of Marriage (Chicago: Stockham, 1903), 24, 27. For Stockham’s career in its New Thought context, see Beryl Satter, Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875- 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 134-149, 230-231, and R. Marie Griffith, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 91-94. On Stockham’s free-speech travails, see the file on her in box 22, f. 16, RGP, and Alice B. Stockham to TS
, August 27, 1906, box 5, f. 17, RGP. Especially at issue was a small, fifteen-page booklet of hers on The Wedding Night, which was suppressed. No copy has survived. For Stockham’s wider publishing program, see Catalogue of the Publications of the Stockham Publishing Company (Chicago: Stockham, n.d.).

  12 Stockham, Karezza, vii, 64-65, 129-130.

  13 Ibid., 69; IC, Helps, t.p., 16. For Craddock’s overlap with Social Purity activism, see Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 268-269, 277-278, 281, 288-289.

  14 Stockham, Karezza, 16-18, 20; Lois Waisbrooker, Bible Truth Bursting its Shell (n.p.: n.p., n.d), 24; Lois Waisbrooker, A Sex Revolution (Topeka: Independent Publishing Co., 1894). Waisbrooker, a spiritualist and a sometime collaborator with Moses Harman, was also a target for Comstock, and that has helped make her pamphlets scarce. See the file on her in box 6, f. 2, RGP; the holdings in the Labadie Collection, University of Michigan; and also Joanne E. Passet, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 113-121. Victoria Woodhull, one of Comstock’s most notorious foils, had also made this spiritualizing move a recurrent plea in her controversial lectures of the 1870s: “Let the sexual act become the holiest act of life, and then the world will begin to be regenerated, and not before” (p. 51). See Victoria Claflin Woodhull and Tennessee C. Claflin, The Human Body the Temple of God; Or, The Philosophy of Sociology (London: Hyde Park Gate, 1890), 1-2, 51-53, 500, 529, 548-549, 555-556, 567.

  15 Edward Carpenter, Love’s Coming-of-Age: A Series of Papers on the Relations of the Sexes (Chicago: Kerr, 19 12), 14, 62. This copied passage from Carpenter is in IC, “Miscellaneous Notes,” box 6, f. 7, ICP. See also IC, “The Marriage Relation,” 86-87, 117, 119, 124, 196, box 3, f. 3, ICP.