Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  The shifting of the academic terrain toward fully accredited experts was apparent in Craddock’s own backyard. Morris Jastrow, the son of an immigrant Polish rabbi, had studied in the liberal arts college at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1881 just shy of his twentieth birthday. He soon headed to Europe for doctoral work in Assyrian, Arabic, and Hebrew; while there, he quickly gained access to the leading Dutch scholar of religion, C. P. Tiele, at the University of Leiden. Going on to receive his PhD from the University of Leipzig in 1884, Jastrow then returned to Philadelphia and to his alma mater as an expert on Assyrian and Babylonian religion. Highly regarded as a professor of Semitic languages, Jastrow helped pioneer the formal graduate study of religion at Penn and in the larger world of the American research university. By 1901 he had produced a standard handbook on the field, a volume he simply called The Study of Religion, a testimony—as he saw it—to the formation of a newly bounded discipline with carefully honed methods and with ever improving “systems of classification.” As Jastrow claimed, “The study of religion has taken its place among contemporary sciences, and the importance of the study can be denied by no one who appreciates the part that religion has played in the history of mankind, and still plays at the present time.” That area of inquiry, once “so frequently invaded by the dilettante,” was being redefined by “properly-trained scholars,” who, in order to solidify their own authority, found it necessary to drive the amateur “out of the field.”46

  The dilemma for Craddock was clear and intractable. Just as Jastrow sailed through Penn as a nineteen-year-old Jewish immigrant, Craddock at age twenty-five was still trying to figure out how to leverage her way into the college at all. By the time Jastrow was finishing his PhD at Leipzig, Craddock had despaired of ever entering her class at Penn. By the early 1890s, when Jastrow was laying plans for a formalized university curriculum in the history of religion, Craddock was stuck again at a charity school teaching shorthand to orphaned boys and finding it hard to line up lectures, even in the most liberal venues. In the European mold of C. P. Tiele and Max Müller, Jastrow’s professional life as a scholar of religion flourished, while as a woman Craddock’s amateur endeavors went nowhere. “Miss Craddock is a scholar of no ordinary attainments,” the Freethinkers’ Magazine had declared in puffing her talents to its readership in 1890, and yet the compliment’s phrasing proved an inadvertently appropriate estimate of her academic standing. An uncertified amateur, Craddock forever lacked the “ordinary attainments” of doctorate-holding professionals like Jastrow. When credentialed specialists congratulated themselves on keeping unqualified novices out of this advancing science, “the scholarly Miss Craddock” was among the sort that got swept aside. 47

  Craddock and her freethinking companions watched this academic fence building from outside the gates, but its effects were noticed by those on the inside as well. In a caustic essay in the Harvard Monthly in 1903 entitled “The Ph.D. Octopus,” William James blasted this rising professionalism in American universities, the “academic snobbery” and intellectual hollowness of scholarly credentialing. It had become, he warned, “a tyrannical Machine with unforeseen powers of exclusion,” and yet the primary exclusion he had in mind was how stilted titles and degrees—outward badges—threatened the “bare manhood” of American intellectual life. James’s desire to sever the tentacles of professionalism for the sake of manly autonomy was an insider’s luxury. James offered a rebuff to the university’s new academic breed, including hard-charging specialists like Jastrow, but he registered no qualms about how the PhD octopus affected amateur women like Craddock.48

  Except for the early essay on Alaskan mythology, virtually all of Craddock’s investigations into religion went unpublished. If not for the Ladies’ Liberal League and a few other patrons, her learned efforts would have been little acknowledged at all. So fragile were her scholarly endeavors that the manuscript for her first book in the field, a treatise on the origin of the devil, has been lost in its entirety. Demonology, offering a grand display of religious credulity and priestly fear-mongering, was a popular topic with freethinkers, and at least two of Craddock’s fellow liberals, Moncure Conway and Henry Frank, produced their own histories of the devil. She likely followed the freethinking script on Satan closely enough, including the emphasis on the long history of demonizing women as witches. Liberals often displayed a perverse love for Lucifer—not least because they saw his age-old shenanigans and hell-fire threats as a terrible embarrassment to Christian orthodoxy.

  If Craddock’s history of the devil is nowhere to be found, her extensive typescripts on the history of sex worship have been largely preserved. Beginning to work in earnest on this subject for her public lectures in 1893 and 1894, Craddock returned to it often over the next several years and ended up having a big book manuscript on her hands. While at least two chapters of this project have also gone missing—one on the “Pagan Rootage of Christianity” and another on the “Worship of Mother and Child”—a hefty draft, 352 legal-size pages in all, has survived. Divided into three parts—“Sun and Dawn Myths” (43 pp.), “Lunar and Sex Worship” (102 pp.), and “Sex Worship (Continued)” (207 pp.)—Craddock’s manuscript provides ample material for plumbing her unnoticed labors as a student of comparative religion and mythology.49

  Craddock’s attempt to write a history of phallic worship was no mere eccentricity; rather, it actually put her in an intellectual company both substantial and subversive. Nineteenth-century inquirers (and Craddock was no exception) looked back to Richard Payne Knight’s Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786) as an especially path-breaking work. An heir of an early industrialist fortune in ironworks, Knight schooled himself as a young man through extensive travels in France and Italy in the 1770s and through the gentlemanly collecting of fine art and antiquities. A freethinking enemy of priestcraft with a typical relish for documenting Roman Catholic “superstitions,” Knight began his treatise with a lengthy account of penis-shaped votive offerings. A likeminded inquirer, the British envoy William Hamilton, had recently discovered “ex-voti of wax, representing the male parts of generation” being used at local saints’ shrines in Italy by supplicants who were seeking to promote conception or cure impotence. Those waxen phalluses and the prayers that accompanied them became the inspiration for Knight’s first book, his account of the worship of Priapus, the god of male procreative power.50

  Knight’s Discourse quickly became infamous for its pagan infidelity and libertinism, despite the fact that the Society of Dilettanti to which Knight belonged had published the work only for private circulation among other male connoisseurs. Knight was himself unnerved by the controversy that erupted over his seminal work. A freethinker, he was deeply committed to the cause of civil liberty and to the critique of church power, but he nonetheless quickly backed away from the religious scandal that his inquiry had generated. Suppressing as many copies of the book as possible, he thereafter hid his continuing interest in phallic symbolism within safer discussions of ancient art, mythology, sculpture, and coins.

  Richard Payne Knight’s Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786) was the gold standard among the forbidden books for studying religion and sexuality. The frontispiece to the volume pictured waxen phalluses that were used at a Roman Catholic shrine in supplications to conceive a child or cure impotence. The plate that followed showed ancient phallic amulets that Knight, a devoted collector of antiquities, saw as the archaeological font of these contemporary Christian practices. The Library Company of Philadelphia.

  However much Knight would have liked the world to forget his controversial discourse, he could not make it disappear. Possessing the frisson of forbidden learning, Knight’s treatise enjoyed long-lasting powers of reproduction. Its graphic images of phallic amulets, representing “the organ of generation in that state of tension and rigidity which is necessary to the due performance of its functions,” became legendary in a netherworld somewhere between sexology and erotica. Its incorporation of
Christian motifs—from the cross to church spires to the kiss of peace—into the phallic cult became a routine gibe at the faithful among later freethinkers. Its insistence that “symbolical representations” of the sex organs were, from time immemorial, employed as meaningful religious emblems was also compelling to those who imagined a radical reevaluation of Victorian notions of modesty and propriety. As Knight jousted, the ancient worship of procreation no doubt appeared indecent to well-bred English Protestants—“a mockery of all piety and devotion”—but it was actually “a very natural and philosophical system of religion.” Christians, it could only be concluded, did not know what they were missing.51

  If Knight’s Discourse remained infamous, that did not mean it was easy for subsequent researchers—including Craddock—to find the actual book. The British Library had retained a copy of the first edition, but it was carefully locked away and kept purposely inaccessible because of its graphic content. A second version, privately circulated in 1865, had only negligibly increased the availability of Knight’s book. By then, the British Museum had actually created a special cabinet, known as the “Secretum,” to keep their phallic antiquities and erotic books closeted from public access. As Craddock noted in her unpublished treatise, “The book is very rare but can be found in the Ridgway Library, South Broad Street, Philadelphia, and in a few other large libraries.” But, since American curators followed the cagey practices of their British counterparts, knowing the book was there did not automatically make it accessible. Indeed, after passing through the Ridgway’s imposing Doric colonnade, Craddock had to do extra sleuthing once inside; the Discourse had been left out of the catalogue and “can be seen only by special request.” Then the primary home of the Library Company of Philadelphia, the great subscription library inaugurated by Benjamin Franklin, the Ridgway was a quintessential cultural legacy of the American Enlightenment. Craddock had its holdings to draw upon in order to join the still shadowy enterprise of investigating the sexual history of religion, but, as Knight’s carefully hidden treatise suggests, it required an almost perverse determination to explore the subject in any detail.52

  For poking fun at Christian orthodoxy, the notion of the phallic origins of religious symbolism proved especially useful to enlightened critics. The evolutionary view of religion’s long history is neatly encapsulated in another of Watson Heston’s cartoons, this one on “The Uses of the Cross—Its Evolution” in which humankind rises from primitive phallicism through Christian priestcraft to scientific triumph. Watson Heston, The Freethinkers’ Pictorial Text-Book (New York: Truth Seeker Co., 1890), facing p. 288. WHi-65506, Wisconsin Historical Society.

  The damage that the Discourse had done to Knight’s reputation was enough to slow other antiquarians from taking up Priapic symbolism, but after the mid-nineteenth century more and more of them dared to broach the subject. British travelers, adventurers, and amateurs led the way: Edward Sellon, a freelance anthropologist who became notorious as a hack writer of erotica, offered 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 (1865); Thomas Wright, a prolific historian and respected folklorist, ventured to extend Knight’s “great learning” with The Worship of the Generative Powers during the Middle Ages of Western Europe (1865); James Fergusson, a Scottish trader who spent years in India, produced Tree and Serpent Worship: Illustrations of Mythology and Art in India (1868); and J. G. R. Forlong, a military officer turned promoter of the science of comparative religions, tendered Rivers of Life, Or, Sources and Streams of the Faiths of Man in All Lands (1883).53

  These new inquirers in the second half of the nineteenth century massively extended the reach of Knight’s claims. “Phallicism” was now said to be important for understanding the whole of religion’s evolutionary history. Alongside other “primitive” forms of religious observance—including fetishism and animism—the “phallic faiths” came to stand in Victorian anthropology as an elemental part of religion’s origins and development. Dozens of British and European inquirers had come to see fertility broadly and human sexuality particularly as at the root of religious symbolism across vast stretches of geography and time. Phallicism provided, in short, the key to unlocking the hitherto little-known sexual history of religion.54

  American inquirers were followers, more than leaders, in this particular excavation of religion’s unseemly origins, but after the mid-nineteenth century they contributed their own share in making “phallic religion” a recognizable category in the study of the “primitive ages.” The journalist and diplomat E. G. Squier had included a chapter on “Phallic Worship in the Old and New Worlds” in his extended investigation of serpent symbolism in 1851. John G. Bourke, a military officer, made use of the idea in his ethnographic observations on The Snake-Dance of the Moquis of Arizona (1884) as well as in his comparative examination of the Scatologic Rites of All Nations (1891). Before the physician Alexander Wilder introduced his countrymen to Max Müller’s India: What Can It Teach Us? (1883), he had already edited an American edition of Ancient Symbol Worship: Influence of the Phallic Idea in the Religions of Antiquity (1874), a work by the British scholars Hodder M. Westropp and C. Staniland Wake. Subsequently migrating to Chicago after the Columbian Exposition, Wake conducted research at the fledgling Field Museum—a move that indicated the growing American role in the study of religion’s long history.55

  Even as the Anglo-American literature on phallic worship proliferated in the second half of the nineteenth century, one demographic column remained blank: This was not an area of learning proper for women. J. G. R. Forlong, an authority Craddock cited often, introduced his massive Rivers of Life with the caveat that, while he wanted “to enlighten the ordinary reading public,” he needed to limit that education to “the male sex, for to our sisters, the origin of Faiths and of the various rites they continually see around them, must long remain mysterious.” “This work, then, is for men,” Forlong continued, “and indeed only for that class of my brothers who venture on strong food, and have permitted themselves to look beyond the swaddling bands of youth. . . . No maudlin sentiment of false delicacy must in this case keep us from calling a spade a spade.” When Forlong subsequently wrote the introduction to one of Hodder Westropp’s works on “the growth and spread of Phallicism,” he made another telling note: Westropp had first taken up the subject in a paper read before the Anthropological Society of London in 1870, an impressive performance, Forlong reminisced, “in the days when such subjects” could still be addressed before that learned body, “as they are not now, owing to [the] admission of lady members.” Simply put, women were obstructions to those ethnologists who, otherwise eager to study the subject of religion’s sexual history, felt the need to shy away from it in mixed company. More than any other topic in the study of religion, phallicism was a subject deemed appropriate for “men of mature judgments” only. Not to be overly subtle, but the study of phallic worship required balls.56

  Noticeably alone as a woman in this scholarly arena, Craddock nonetheless kept writing her book, hopeful that her fellow liberals would come around to seeing the worthiness of both the topic and her perspective on it. That expectation was not entirely naïve, given how much her work shared with the wider inquiries of the period. Like most freethinkers fascinated by this topic, she placed Christianity on the same plane with other religious mythologies and repeatedly linked Christian symbols to an underlying primeval devotion to reproduction, the elemental mystification of sexual desire and procreation. From Easter eggs to the Christmas tree to upward-thrusting church architecture, Christianity contained, so the argument went, a hodgepodge of survivals from more ancient forms of sex worship. “The eggs offered to the cross on Good Friday and eaten on our modern Easter Sunday,” Craddock argued, “were types, not of the female reproductive power in nature, as is generally supposed, but of the testicles of the male phallic triad. . . . The
boy who pits his Easter egg against that of another boy, trying to see whose egg is the hardest, unconsciously memorializes a phallic symbolism.” Everywhere Craddock and her fellow freethinkers looked, they found new evidence for the sexual underpinning of Christian symbols and rites.57

  Craddock was, though, as likely to diverge from the phallic script as she was to repeat it. That was especially true when it came to the question of what value these archaic symbols and customs possessed, the lessons to be learned from Victorian scholarship about the primitive and the civilized. Invested in the forward march of social evolution as well as the advance of the “accurate sciences,” nineteenth-century ethnologists regularly dwelled on religion’s primitive origins in order to discredit surviving “superstitions.” Phallic worshippers, along with fetishists, were generally thought to be among the lowest of the low, and hence one of the major social payoffs of this learning was the opportunity it provided for a hearty celebration of modern civilization’s ascendancy over dark savagery. As Hodder M. Westropp informed the Anthropological Society of London in 1870, among “rude and barbarous people of the present day,” particularly in West Africa, phallic worship was still “uncomfortably prominent.”58