Put What Where? by John Naish

Author:John Naish
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Ida Craddock: Hounded to Death

Ida Craddock is hardly a name to conjure visions of long nights of exotic sex and supernatural couplings with heavenly paramours. Nor does she sound the sort of Victorian woman whose writings on love would either inspire generations of Satan-worshippers or get her jailed and ultimately persecuted to her death by a notoriously vindictive censor. But that indeed is our Ms Craddock.

Her life started in a puritanical enough fashion. She was born in Philadelphia in 1857 to a mother who had been interested in spiritualism but became a fundamentalist Christian after her husband died, leaving her with two-year-old Ida. The girl was brought up in a strict disciplinarian regime and learnt to read the Bible at a very early age. The result, naturally, was that in her adult years she turned to a life of occultism and promiscuous sex. At the age of 32, and a rather lumpen-looking 32 at that, she was juggling two male lovers. The first was younger, but sexually callow, the second older but reportedly an expert in Alice Stockham’s tantric-sex karezza technique. This sent Craddock into unheralded ecstasies and struck her as a divine revelation. The fact that Mr Red-Hot Lover was also an ex-clergyman and a mystic helped to set her future direction. She had already joined the Unitarian faith and encountered the world of strange ideas by attending lectures by the Theosophists, who believed in astral projection, among other esoteric weirdnesses. Craddock became a priestess and pastor of the Church of Yoga and a student of religious eroticism.

She travelled America lecturing on topics such as ‘What Christianity has done for the marital relation’ and offered sex counselling from a small office in Chicago. Those too shy to attend in person could send off for her mail-order sex guides – pamphlets such as The Wedding Night and Right Marital Living. These emphasized sexual self-control and warned that forcing intercourse on one’s wife was effectively rape. Orders poured in from wives, progressive couples and family doctors. Today it sounds pretty straight and staid. But it clashed headlong with the convention that husbands should enjoy complete sexual power over their wives. Any open discussion of sex by a woman was bound to provoke the legion of moralists who believed such talk served only to feed monstrous vices that were eating at the heart of American society.

Several critics questioned how Ida had acquired all this sexual wisdom when she was unmarried and thus, if respectable, a virgin. Her 1894 tract Heavenly Bridegrooms provided a straightforward explanation. She claimed that she was in fact wedded to an angel called Soph who visited at night, when he would make love to her in all the ways a demi-god should. He also taught her a system of divine and rather difficult sexual acts, most of which involve non-ejaculatory intercourse that would bring esoteric enlightenment to whoever practised them. She explained it all in a later pamphlet, called Psychic Wedlock.

Craddock’s inevitable clash with the authorities started in

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