Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  11 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; New York: Penguin, 1982), 419; James S. Van Teslaar, Sex and the Senses (Boston: Badger, 1922), 249, 253; Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 7 vols. (Philadelphia: Davis, 1921-1928), 1: 310-311, 315. Ellis quotes Iwan Bloch’s 1908 work, Sexualleben unserer Zeit, on p. 315. For an insightful examination of the psychological literature on mysticism in the context of European religious and intellectual history, see Cristina Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Mysticism, and Gender in European Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

  12 James, Varieties, 10-12; Josiah Moses, Pathological Aspects of Religions (Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1906), 18-19, 22; James H. Leuba, The Psychology of Religious Mysticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925), 151.

  13 James Bissett Pratt, The Religious Consciousness: A Psychological Study (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 111; TS, “Evolution of a Psychologist of Religion,” box 1, f. 2, TSP. Schroeder’s career as free-speech lawyer has received a lot more attention than his role as psychoanalyst of religion. See especially David M. Rabban, Free Speech in its Forgotten Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 47- 55, 198-200. For an overarching biographical perspective, see David Brudnoy, “Liberty’s Bugler: The Seven Ages of Theodore Schroeder,” PhD diss., Brandeis University, 1971. For an early appreciation of his labors as a psychologist, see Maynard Shipley, “A Maverick Psychologist,” New Humanist 6 (1933): 37-40. For subsequent notice of him as one of America’s most insistent Freudian critics of religion, see Nathan G. Hale Jr., Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876-1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 270-271, and Jon H. Roberts, “Psychoanalysis and American Christianity, 1900-1945,” in David C. Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, eds., When Science and Christianity Meet: From Augustine to Intelligent Design (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 234.

  14 Steffens quoted in Hutchins Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), 279; TS to G. Stanley Hall, July 2, 1906, box 7, f. 1, TSP. Schroeder was moving between Redfield, South Dakota, and Madison, Wisconsin, in late 1902 (trying to settle his father’s estate). Though he had visited New York on prior business, it appears that he did not relocate there until January 1903. He was definitely not involved in the agitation surrounding Craddock’s final round of trials in 1902.

  15 TS, ‘Obscene’ Literature and Constitutional Law (New York: n.p., 1911), 58-61.

  16 TS, “Ida’s Theomania,” box 5, f. 29, ICP; TS, “Puritanism through Erotomania to Nymphomania”; TS, “Philosophy and Moral Theology of an Erotomaniac,” box 5, f. 32; TS, “The Philosophy of an Erotomaniac,” box 5, f. 22, ICP; TS, Outlines for Volumes on Religion and Sex, box 6, f. 1-3, ICP and box 60, f. 2, TSP. For the mistaken byline, see Alienist and Neurologist 38 (1917): 288.

  17 TS, “Phallic Worship to a Secularized Sex,” Journal of Sexology and Psych-analysis 1 (1923): 73-75; TS, “Revivals, Sex and Holy Ghost,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 14 (1919): 34-47; TS, “The Erotogenesis of Religion,” Alienist and Neurologist 28 (1907): 338-339. For broad statements of his theory, see TS, “Outline for a Study of the Erotogenesis of Religion,” Journal of Religious Psychology 5 (1912): 394-401; TS, “The Erotogenesis of Religion: Developing a Working Hypothesis,” Alienist and Neurologist 34 (1913): 444-476; and TS, “The Psychoanalytic Approach to Religious Experience,” Psychoanalytic Review 16 (1929): 361-376.

  18 TS, “Revivals, Sex and Holy Ghost,” 46-47; TS, “Phallic Worship,” 75-78, 83-86.

  19 “Is Sex the Basis of Religion?” New York Times Magazine, April 4, 1915, box 4, f. 2, TSP. Van Teslaar directly credits Schroeder in the Times article itself, but see also J. S. Van Teslaar, “Religion and Sex: An Account of the Erotogenetic Theory of Religion as Formulated by Theodore Schroeder,” Psychoanalytic Review 2 (1915): 81-92. The critics could say what they wanted about his scientific naturalism, but Schroeder thought that all too many American psychologists, including William James and George Coe, displayed a failure of scientific nerve when it came to religion. See TS, “Some Difficulties and Problems of the Psychologists of Religion,” Psyche and Eros 3 (1922): 159-168.

  20 SML, 1-4.

  21 Ibid., 4; DPE, second part, 12. She did mention a dream about their time together as friends in San Francisco, but it was not a sex dream (DPE, second part, 12).

  22 SML, 3-4; Richard B. Westbrook to EBF, Feb. 14, 1894; Henrietta Westbrook to IC, Feb. 15, 1902, box 1, f. 1, ICP.

  23 IC, “Miscellaneous Notes,” box 6, f. 7, ICP; SML, 3.

  24 WTS to Philander Knox, Sept. 24, 1902, box 2, f. 2, RGP; WTS to TS, March 10, 1906; TS to WTS, March 24, 1906; WTS to TS, Nov. 12, 1907; TS to Estelle Stead, Sept. 26, 1913; Estelle Stead to TS, July 28, 1914; TS to Estelle Stead, Dec. 17, 1918, box 1, f. 4, ICP. Schroeder had been collecting Craddock materials— pamphlets, letters, and manuscripts—from any and all sources. He already had a lot of material by 1915, but the Stead collection was the lodestone.

  25 TS, “One Religio-Sexual Maniac,” 26-28.

  26 Ibid., 30-31; SML, 3.

  27 TS, “One Religio-Sexual Maniac,” 31-32; IC to Katie Wood, Dec. 8, 1887, box 1, f. 1, ICP.

  28 TS, “One Religio-Sexual Maniac,” 32. Westbrook shared some of Craddock’s interests in marriage reform. That was particularly true when it came to the liberalization of divorce laws, but he made the case less on the grounds of the idealized love of soul mates than on the secularist principle that the churches should not set the terms of a civil contract. See Richard B. Westbrook, Marriage and Divorce (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1883).

  29 TS, “One Religio-Sexual Maniac,” 33-35; TS, “Ida’s Theomania,” 3-4.

  30 TS, “One Religio-Sexual Maniac,” 34, 45.

  31 SML, 5-7; DPE, second part, 16.

  32 DPE, 33, 39, 118, 207, 225. I have put an emphasis on the ordinary dimensions of Craddock’s fantasized relationship with Soph in order to indicate that her experiences were not exclusively sexual but complexly imaginative—autoerotic in the broadest sense of Havelock Ellis’s term. At times, I have left somewhat more to the reader’s imagination than Craddock’s private diary did. These experiences with Soph were sacred intimacies to her, and it seems crucial—as Stead also intuited in trying to keep the journal out of Schroeder’s hands—to handle her diary with great care. Where that interpretive discretion becomes its own form of censorship is not at all a simple line to draw. My aim has been to give a full sense of Craddock’s psychical love life without lapsing into voyeuristic detail.

  33 Ibid., 182; second part, 29.

  34 Ibid., 44, 68.

  35 Ibid., 74, 77-78, 199, 210; second part, 35, 52, 54.

  36 Ibid., 52-54, 64, 74, 77, 140-141, 189, 202.

  37 TS, “‘Spiritualizing’ Sexual Insanity: Diary of Ida C.,” box 6, f. 2 ICP; DPE, 140.

  38 DPE, second part, 46.

  39 WTS to IC, Sept. 24, 1902; WTS to Knox, Sept. 24, 1902, box 2, f. 2, RGP.

  40 DPE, second part, 24; WTS to IC, Sept. 24, 1902; George Du Maurier, Peter Ibbetson (New York: Harper, 1891), 233, 366-367, 417.

  41 IC to Katie Wood, Dec. 9, 1898, box 1, f. 1, ICP; DPE, second part, 8, 11- 12. In her diary Craddock occasionally spelled Ibbetson as Ibbetsen; I have silently corrected it in those cases.

  42 DPE, 61, 81, 89. For a superb commentary and exhibition on spirit photographs, see Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, and Sophie Schmit, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

  43 DPE, 48, 57.

  44 “Bouguereau Dead at 80,” New York Times, Aug. 21, 1905, 7.

  45 “Work of a Crazy Censor,” Omaha World Herald, Dec. 16, 1890, 2.

  46 IC, “Marriage Relation,” 44-45, box 3, f.3, ICP. The cultural politics surrounding Bouguereau’s nudes, especially his Nymphs and Satyr (1873), are well analyzed in David Scobey, “Nymphs and Satyrs: Sex and the Bourgeois Public Sphere i
n Victorian New York,” Winterthur Portfolio 37 (2002): 43-66.

  47 IC to WTS, Sept. 10, 1901; DPE, second part, 25; “Psyche and Love, by Bouguereau,” in Paris Exposition Reproduced from the Official Photographs (New York: Peale, 1900), n.p. Bouguereau took up Cupid and Psyche as subjects a number of times, including a rendering of them as infants. See the catalogue William Bouguereau, 1825-1905 (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1984), 246- 248, 252. In addition to the 1889 and 1895 paintings, Bouguereau also displayed another version of the pair, similarly posed in flight, at the Paris Exposition of 1900 (see the photographic volume on that exposition cited above). Which of the renderings Craddock had in mind is unclear: The Abduction of Psyche was described under the title “Psyche and Cupid” in contemporary accounts, which matches up with Craddock’s usage (see “American Art in Paris,” New York Times, April 29, 1895, 5), but the heavenward pointing arm of Eros in the 1889 version better connects with her description of Bouguereau’s figure. The artist, including his American reception, has received a modest amount of renewed attention in the last two decades. See Fronia E. Wissman, Bouguereau (San Francisco: Pomegranate Art-books, 1996); Eric M. Zafran, “William Bouguereau in America: A Roller-Coaster Reputation,” in James F. Peck, ed., In the Studios of Paris: William Bouguereau and his American Students (Tulsa: Philbrook Museum of Art, 2006), 17-44.

  48 DPE, 48, 91; second part, 11. For her miscellaneous research notes for the project, see box 6, f. 7 and box 7, f. 5, ICP. Craddock highlighted this longer history of heavenly conjugality rather than the work of more recent visionaries such as An-drew Jackson Davis, Thomas Lake Harris, and Paschal Beverly Randolph. Their own religio-sexual absorptions make clear that Craddock had significant occultist company in her explorations of angelic unions, though their immediate influence on her appears negligible. See John Patrick Deveney, Paschal Beverly Randolph: A Nineteenth-Century Black American Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), esp. 28-29, 224-225, 304-305, 382, 393, 484-491, 541-543.

  49 TS, ed., “Heavenly Bridegrooms,” Alienist and Neurologist 36 (1915): 435, 439. Craddock was right about the substantial concern in Christian commentary with the question of such divine-human congress. On the widespread theological theorizing of the problem of whether (and how) angels and demons, as spirits, could copulate, see Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

  50 TS, ed., “Heavenly Bridegrooms,” Alienist and Neurologist 38 (1917): 123; Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, trans. Charles Gilbert Chaddock (Philadelphia: Davis, 1893), 5.

  51 TS, ed., “Heavenly Bridegrooms,” Alienist and Neurologist 37 (1916): 219; 38 (1917): 295-301. Craddock’s monograph survives in two typescripts in box 4, f. 1 and f. 4 in ICP.

  52 Ibid., 37 (1916): 220.

  53 IC, “Marriage Relation,” 26.

  54 Baphomet [Aleister Crowley], Review of “Heavenly Bridegrooms,” Equinox 3 (1919): 280-281; [Michaels Whitty], Review of “Heavenly Bridegrooms,” Azoth 3 (1918): 300-301. Not surprisingly, a review in the Truth Seeker took the opposite position and heralded Schroeder’s discoveries. See H. Tullsen, “Sex in Religious Origins,” Truth Seeker, Nov. 23, 1918, 740. Crowley’s notice of Craddock in 1919 has led in the last decade to a freshet of interest in her work in occult circles. She has now been inducted posthumously into the Order of the Eagle within the U.S. Grand Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a group that has set up a Web site in her honor (www.idacraddock.org). See Vere Chappell, “Ida Craddock: Sexual Mystic and Martyr for Freedom,” in Richard Metzger, ed., Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult (Being an Alchemical Formula to Rip a Hole in the Fabric of Reality) (New York: Disinformation, 2003), 212-217, and, for this group’s place in the sexual history of occultism, see Hugh Urban, “The Yoga of Sex: Tantra, Orientalism, and Sex Magic in the Ordo Templi Orientis,” in Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Jeffrey J. Kripal, eds., Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 401-443. As suggested by the date on the Crowley review, Craddock’s adoption is a posthumous repositioning. While she clearly breathed the occultist air of her day, she was during her lifetime outside the organizational matrices of fraternal lodges, hermetic orders, and secret societies. Crowley himself came to learn of her only belatedly through Schroeder’s edited volume of 1918. For esoteric fascinations within the history of religions as a field of inquiry, see especially Steven M. Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). For the particular uses that women could put this form of “higher learning,” see Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 36- 37, 90-91.

  55 DPE, 129-130, 202-203.

  56 Ibid., second part, 55-56.

  57 Ibid. One more indication of just how complicated questions of voice are: This final diary entry asserting her “queen of myself ” autonomy actually echoed a passage that Craddock had excerpted in her research notes from Robert Greer, Lecture Delivered before the West Chicago Philosophical Society July 12, 1880, at Castle Hall, Chicago, on the Horrors of Modern Matrimony as Viewed from a Moral and Sanitary Standpoint (Chicago: n.p., 1892), 11-12. Craddock’s extract from Greer’s lecture includes a quotation from an unmarried woman to this effect: “I do not wish to lose my identity in others. I wish to be independent and to retain my own individuality and to reign as queen over my own person.” Any individuality of voice remains within an echo chamber of voices—internal, textual, and spoken. See IC, “Miscellaneous Notes,” box 5, f. 14, ICP.

  Epilogue

  1 Julianna Baggott, Lizzie Borden in Love: Poems in Women’s Voices (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 41-42.

  2 Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography (New York: Cooper Square Press, 1999), 111-12, 171; William J. Robinson, “Pioneer of the Birth Control Movement in America,” Medico-Pharmaceutical Critic and Guide 18 (1915): 321-323.

  3 Raymond A Sokolov, “Nonfiction in Brief,” New York Times, Oct. 28, 1979, Book Review, 4. Twentieth-century sexology, despite the conservative polemics against it, was not a uniformly secular, anti-religious enterprise; Alfred Kinsey, for example, actively courted religious liberals. See R. Marie Griffith, “The Religious Encounters of Alfred C. Kinsey,” Journal of American History 95 (2008): 349-377. On the ways in which religion has often been cut out of the history of women’s rights, see Ann Braude’s introduction to the new edition of Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), xx-xxiv, and Kathi Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 10-13.

  4 Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Random House, 1994), 74, 83.

  5 On the recent growth of an evangelical sex-manual industry, see Amy DeRogatis, “What Would Jesus Do? Sexuality and Salvation in Protestant Evangelical Sex Manuals, 1950s to the Present,” Church History 74 (2005): 97-137.

  6 For the contemporary debate on pornography, feminism, and censorship, see Catharine A. MacKinnon, Only Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Catharine A. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, eds., In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), and Nadine Strossen, Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2000). Craddock’s case has been invoked on the Strossen side of this contemporary free-expression debate about pornography (mostly for its symbolic value for dramatizing the evils of censorship). See especially Edward de Grazia’s use of Craddock’s story in his Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (New York: Random House, 1992), 3-6. The focal concerns of MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin with misogyny, harassment, and sexual violence are clearly echoe
d in Craddock’s case as well, though. Nineteenth-century marriage reformers shared many of Comstock’s concerns about the commercialization of sex, even as they argued against the censorship of frank works on human sexuality that aimed at educational uplift and women’s emancipation.

  7 “Sex and Yoga: They’re Good for the Soul,” Yoga Journal, Aug. 2006, cover. The Christian adaptation of yoga is rapidly becoming its own niche in the fitness industry. See, for example, Susan Bordenkircher, Yoga for Christians (Nashville: Nelson, 2006).

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Books are written in the gloom of the failings and doubts of their authors. Why don’t chapters, or even mere paragraphs and sentences, come together more easily or eloquently? Will the patient search of sources be rewarded with unexpected disclosures or founder on evidential gaps? Will the book actually be read, should it ever get done in the first place? Will it matter? To the usual specters, I have added this time the failure of others. Would my efforts be as unrequited as those of my predecessors?

  The lawyer and psychoanalyst Theodore Schroeder was the first inquirer to plot out a book on Craddock, and by 1920 he had amassed a remarkable archive of her materials. Over the next two decades Schroeder shuffled around chapter outlines, drafted and redrafted various sections, and sent out numerous feelers to different editors, but he never finished his multi-volume study on religion and sex in which Craddock was slated to play the leading role. Despite Schroeder’s failure to bring his own work to closure, he remained a free-speech advocate to the last: More than a century after her death, Craddock can still have her say in large part because of Schroeder’s resolve to preserve her writings from oblivion. Without his labor as the self-appointed curator of Craddock’s papers, this book could not have been written.