The Amazing Ida Craddock

As I finish up the biography of Aleister Crowley – I ran across Vere Chappell’s Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock. Craddock had written a number of books and pamphlets, although the only one I could find in Google Books was Heavenly Bridegrooms: An Unintentional Contribution to the Erotogenetic Interpretation of Religion, by Ida C. (Ida Craddock), Bibliography, with an Introduction by Theodore Schroeder, 1918. Schroeder, by the way, was a Freudian, who basically held her up like a psychological specimen and peered at her curiously. Unfortunately, Freudian men in 1918 were just about as bad as the Comstockian pastors. Nonetheless, one does what one can with what’s available.

Heavenly Bridegrooms is fascinating. Although, I would suppose that you’d need to know something of Ida Craddock to appreciate it. Basically, she researched the topic of spirit lovers, and provided a huge wealth of bibliographic detail on the subject. Surprisingly – or perhaps not surprisingly, as she was raised by a strict evangelical christian mother, a lot of the examples she used were biblical. And yes, she brought in the Book of Enoch and the wonderful angels already mentioned here.

What made Ida unusual was the time period in which she lived and worked: any woman who displayed even a remote interest in sex could be tossed into an insane asylum, or in jail for running afoul of the evil Anthony Comstock’s obscenity laws. (And Ida was.) Both Ida and Margaret Sanger, among others, came up against Anthony Comstock, who as the Postal Inspector and self-proclaimed vice squad, was the perverted christian right’s spyglass into everyone’s bedrooms; women, of course, always being the ones punished for anything odd taking place in the bedroom.

What made Ida even more unusual – and what caught my attention immediately! – was that she had a spirit husband. She identified him as "Soph", and their sexual unions were so passionate and so loud, that even the neighbors noticed. Why should anyone find this unusual, she wondered, when Jesus himself was the offspring of such a union? Human mother, spirit father.

"Am I not right in saying that to impugn the possibility of marital relations between earthly women and heavenly bridegrooms is to strike at the very foundations of Christianity?"
Ida Craddock, Heavenly Bridegrooms: An Unintentional Contribution to the Erotogenetic Interpretation of Religion, by Ida C. (Ida Craddock), Bibliography, with an Introduction by Theodore Schroeder, 1918

I grinned from ear to ear when I read this! The conclusion of her life? Tragic. Anthony Comstock and his christian supporters had her arrested for sending "smut" though the mail, the said "smut" being marital advice for women, none of whom had been told what "sex" was, before they were tossed into the marital bed. Rather than die in prison, she committed suicide, already fully aware that she would NOT be punished for it, the way christians insisted she would. She’d be with her spirit husband, and death held no fear for her. Her suicide letters, one to her mother, the other to the public, are some of the most powerful letters you’ll ever read.

For those interested in a brief but very interesting biographical sketch of the amazing Ida Craddock:
http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blogland/2012/may/17/sexy-ghost-story/