Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  J. G. R. Forlong was especially clear on the barbarity of primitive sex worship—just as he had been especially clear on the inappropriateness of women learning anything about it. “We know enough of African religions,” he observed, “to assert that here Fetish, Tree, Phal[l]us, and Yoni worship exist in their grossest forms . . . bestial in the extreme.” In alarmed tones Forlong even warned of a sprawling British empire in which “PURE PHALLIC-worshippers” vastly outnumbered Queen Victoria’s Christian subjects and claimed that “far more than half the population of the whole world” was devoted to “phallic faiths.” Ruling over an empire of Priapic ritualists—from South Asia to Africa—was a tall order. Fortunately, Forlong and other like-minded inquirers had created the intellectual diagrams to fit all those devotees of trees, serpents, pillars, and fetishes onto a neat evolutionary ladder—with Victorian science and civilization snugly ensconced at the top. There were certainly more important resources for managing an empire, but an ethnological chart, displaying a tidy religious and cultural hierarchy, was not an inconsequential tool.59

  Now Craddock, for her part, was hardly a progressive on race and imperial issues. As with most white liberals of the day, she expended none of her reform energies on the civil rights of black Americans, and this during a nadir in race relations, including lynching’s reign of terror. Likewise, she displayed no interest in anti-imperial protests during and after the Spanish-American War as the United States extended its territories from Puerto Rico to the Philippines. Run-of-the-mill racial, ethnic, and class chauvinism blinkered her vision; she surprised herself, for example, when her daily walk to work through “the Chinese quarter” in Philadelphia aroused in her “fellow-feeling and sympathy” rather than indifference or incomprehension. Though she claimed at another point that “many a white woman” had much to learn from the “untutored” Pueblo Indians of the Southwest, she nonetheless retained an underlying clarity about the privileged importance of the “civilized white woman.” Yet, for all the usual limitations, her interest in religion’s elementary forms showed little of the colonial and civilizing compulsion that drove Forlong and his compatriots to their evolutionary conclusions. Craddock’s concern with comparative mythology was never about lifting the Aryan over the Semitic race or the Anglo-Saxon over the African—that is, Christian over Jew or white over black.60

  The politics of gender and sexuality, not those of race and empire, drew Craddock to the literature on phallic worship. That learning, she thought, provided her with a choice opportunity to think about the connections among religion, women’s equality, and sexual expression. At first blush, phallicism seemed like a less than promising subject for Craddock’s feminist purposes. The penis, after all, was the measuring rod of all religious symbolism in this line of inquiry; it stood for all the reproductive powers, subsuming the female into the male and marking the latter with transcendent supremacy. “By phallic religion in this book,” one American inquirer explained in typical fashion, “is meant any cult in which the human generative organs (male or female), their use, realistic images representing them, or symbols indicating them, form an essential or important factor in the dogmas or ceremonies.” A good portion of this literature, moreover, seemed no more than a transparent male fantasy about how desperate women were to procreate with men. As Hodder Westropp remarked in his paper before the (all-male) gathering of the London Anthropological Society, one of the chief sources of phallic worship was “the natural desire of women among all races, barbarous as well as civilized, to be the fruitful mother of children.” Hence it was, Westropp concluded, that “the phallus became an object of reverence and especial worship among women.”61

  Despite the apparent obstacles, Craddock surmised that the studies of phallic worship worked quite well for her purposes. She knew no better place to begin in order to deflate a man’s presumption of power and control—in a word, his cockiness. “As masculine deities began to gradually crowd out the ancient worship accorded to motherhood,” Craddock suggested, “masculine egotism naturally hastened to erect its round towers, obelisks, steeples and other symbols of its own generative power—the higher the tower or obelisk erected, the better.” Like other freethinking women of her day, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage, Craddock embraced current archaeological speculations that powerful matriarchies and forceful goddesses had once flourished in the ancient world. Only belatedly, the conjecture went, had patriarchy and the Father-God triumphed. With those primeval struggles in mind, Craddock drew attention to the “ancient Yonic deities” and thereby challenged the reverence for male potency she found pervading prior studies of phallicism. Especially leery of the way all fertility rituals got treated as phallic worship, Craddock criticized the virile rhetoric for “having swept everything before it, and, with true masculine egoism, to have appropriated all or nearly all the sacred feminine symbols to its own typology.” In challenging the scholarly projection of the phallus into the heavens as a universal symbol of power and productivity, Craddock sought to prioritize instead feminine or “yonic” symbolism in the study of religion. 62

  Craddock identified herself as a “comparative mythologist” not as a show of pedantry, but for the political implications she saw in such learning. To see the history of religion as a deep-seated battle of the sexes was to turn ancient religion into a crucible for testing Victorian Protestant assumptions about gender and sexuality. Like Helen Gardener, Craddock imagined such study as a way of exposing deep sources of women’s disempowerment and subservience, the process by which women were reduced to “a thing, a slave, the mere chattel of the man.” Like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Craddock thought that ultimate success in advancing women’s equality would require a hard-hitting reinterpretation of prevailing religious authorities: namely, an enfolding of scripture and church history within a larger emancipationist framework. To rediscover a form of worship that was “both a safeguard and a consolation to Woman, as well as an ever-present assertion of her equality with Man,” Craddock stressed that Christianity, as the embodiment of “a male religion,” had to be squarely confronted, not sidestepped.63

  The specific politics laid bare through Craddock’s study of phallic worship were those of married sexual relations. That husbands viewed their wives as “a sexual convenience,” that they subjected their spouses to the “incessant demands of brutal masculinity,” and that, even under decently respectful circumstances, they were selfishly hurried during intercourse—all were well-attested social facts in Craddock’s view. Such concerns, commonplace among nineteenth-century marriage reformers, were initially illuminated for Craddock through her freethinking, scholarly study of phallic worship: Divine commandment was everywhere still being used to subordinate women to men; God-mandated subjection was, she observed, employed “in our own day to keep hundreds of devout and pure-minded women subject to the brutality of their husbands.” Through her “extended resumé of Sex Worship and its survivals in modern Christianity,” through the subject matter of the lecture she first took on tour in 1893 and 1894, Craddock began to imagine herself as a free-speaking marriage reformer.64

  The particular sex reforms that flowed from Craddock’s engagement with “Phallic antiquities” were matched by fantastic religious potentialities, and those were nothing if not soaring. Underlying the apparent “grossness” of ancient forms of sex worship, Craddock insisted, had been “a primitive wonderment, a delight, and finally a veneration of the attributes which distinguish man and woman from one another.” That primeval consecration of sexuality signaled a “reverent and joyous aspiration toward a perfect life,” a longing for an “ecstatic bliss” that was achieved “not by asceticism” but through the “thrills of sense.” That carnal wisdom had lingered on despite “centuries of repression” aimed at crushing the “free, natural, joyous outpourings . . . of love between man and woman.” The “ancient Phallicism” had enshrined, Craddock concluded, “the true religion of the heart.” At one point in Leaves of Grass, Walt Whi
tman had exulted in a faith that would enclose “all worship ancient and modern”—a faith in which devotees would be “dancing yet through the streets in phallic procession.” By the end of her long book on sex worship, “the scholarly Miss Craddock” looked ready to dance in her own festival of sensuous awakening and full-bodied enlightenment.65

  Craddock, like Whitman, imagined herself to be part of an outré band of intellectuals and free spirits. She expressly joined her inquiries to those of “our moralists among the ultra-Liberals,” “those brave ones” who were “mapping out” a new ethical, religious, and literary landscape. These daring souls were impugned, she said, as “diggers among the muck and wreckage of what is best unknown or forgot.” “Bah!” she imagined their adversaries exclaiming, “we despise you—nay, more if you will not keep silence, we will imprison you, burn your literature, and set the seal of the law upon your insane lips forever!” Perhaps, with this imagined tirade, Craddock already had her own obscenity battles in view or perhaps she was calling to mind prior attempts to suppress the work of such marriage reformers as Victoria Woodhull, Ezra Heywood, and Moses Harman, to say nothing of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Certainly, as she labored on her book manuscript on ancient phallic worship, she knew that her scholarly preoccupations were deeply entwined with her religious aspirations and political commitments and that a threat of enforced silence hung over the whole bundle. Her inquiries might well be kept from view as a species of obscenity, blasphemy, or madness, but, as she bravely insisted, “the digging and exploring go on just the same.”66

  The excavation of religion’s sexual history did indeed continue apace. Just a few years after Craddock’s defense of the Danse du Ventre and her lecture for the Ladies’ Liberal League, a Michigan suffragist, Eliza Burt Gamble, entered the intellectual fray with The God-Idea of the Ancients: Or, Sex in Religion (1897). Like Gardener, Gage, Stanton, and Craddock, Gamble was an amateur scholar of religion with deep roots in the women’s rights movement. Like them, too, she wanted to understand the history behind “our present God-idea,” how it was the divine had become so entwined with male prerogatives. Not shying away from the topic of “phallic worship,” Gamble was intent on exploring any religious symbols—even those involving “the organs of generation”—that cast light on the inequitable differentiation of men from women. Hers was another history in which a golden age of maternal fecundity and affection lost out to the eventual deification of male power and pleasure. In presenting women as essentially passionless nurturers and self-giving altruists, free of the brute desires and competitive drives of men, Gamble played more safely with gender norms than Craddock did. That moderation paid off: Unlike Craddock, Gamble got her manuscript on “Sex in Religion” into print. In doing so, Gamble effectively served public notice that phallicism, the favored domain of antiquarians and ethnologists from Knight to Forlong, would no longer serve the social, religious, and erotic imaginations of men only. Women, too, would have their say on the sexual history of religion. 67

  Women’s archaeological digging into ancient religion soon received much more academic respect than it had managed in the hands of such amateurs as Craddock and Gamble. Jane Ellen Harrison was a scholar at Cambridge University, one so prominent that Virginia Woolf would conjure up her ghost in A Room of One’s Own. The peer of the great classicists Francis Cornford and Gilbert Murray, Harrison herself was interested in the ritualistic, festive, and erotic dimensions of Greek religion—a set of concerns that left her open to critique and suspicion. “My interest, I am told, is unduly focused on ghosts, bogies, fetiches, pillar-cults,” she observed at a meeting of the Classical Association in 1907. Her peculiar interest in “savage disorders” and “Dionysiac orgies,” it was charged, had distracted her from a properly Olympian vantage point, a dispassionate recognition of the stately gods of ancient Greece. Yet, in the next moment, she was defending her self-described heresy, riffing on a visit to Chartres the previous summer during which images of “pillar-cults” and “primitive festivals” had surged “up from my archaeological subconscious” as she was gazing at the north façade. Harrison’s account of the earthy fertility of ancient religion was more matriarchal than overtly sexual in inspiration; indeed, any “healthy” religion, she said, would purge itself of “elements exclusively phallic.” Harrison, prim by comparison to Craddock, nonetheless discovered in religion’s ancient history alternatives to male dominion and social repressiveness.68

  For the sake of reputation and intellectual solidity, Harrison had the good fortune of winding up on the professional side of the scholarly divide—at Cambridge no less—and did not have to make her way as a local Midwestern suffragist like Gamble or a displaced sex reformer like Craddock. In that academic achievement she stood far apart from freethinking amateurs and served instead more as a British parallel to the American sociologist and folklorist Elsie Clews Parsons, likewise a woman of genteel advantage and learned accomplishment. Earning her PhD from Columbia University in 1899 under the tutelage of Franklin Giddings, a founding father of American social science, Parsons effectively moved between dual roles as feminist critic and empiricist ethnographer. In such books as Religious Chastity: An Ethnological Study and Old-Fashioned Woman: Primitive Fancies about the Sex, Parsons achieved what Craddock would have liked to accomplish: namely, she combined a scholarly mien with sharp-eyed criticism of the social conventions that hemmed in women in her own culture. All too clearly the distance that separated Craddock, whose admission had been blocked at Penn, from Harrison, whose presence at Cambridge became legendary, and from Parsons, whose fieldwork gained her national acclaim in the academy, was enormous, perhaps unbridgeable. Parsons rose to the presidency of the American Folklore Society in 1919; Craddock, a regular member of that learned society in the 1890s, never made it off the far periphery.69

  And yet certain threads connected Craddock’s amateur endeavors to later professional projects like those of Harrison and Parsons. Not least was the very notion that women should share in the masculine privilege of something “called a ‘study’—a place inviolate, guarded by immemorial taboos,” as Harrison phrased it in an essay in 1914. “There man thinks, and learns, and knows. . . . Well, that study stands for man’s insularity; he wants to be by himself,” she suggested, then jabbing: “One of the most ominous signs of the times is that woman is beginning to demand a study.” An office was no mere desk and storage area; it was breathing room; it was the spatial marking of intellectual autonomy.70

  Craddock definitely needed that room to breathe. “The slimy subject of sex,” her mother once told her, was not something Ida could work on anywhere in the family’s house—at least not as long as Lizzie was “above ground.” When Craddock did manage to carve out study spaces for herself, they were invariably small and cramped. One of her offices in Philadelphia, for example, was no more than a converted bathroom with the fixtures removed; another in Chicago was so tiny that she had “no room to spread my papers”; in still another the talking of a chatty roommate often made for “an interruption to the work of quiet, brooding scholarship.” To persist in creating intellectual space for herself under such marginal conditions was, in many ways, a feat more remarkable than persevering in the favorable climes of Cambridge or Columbia. Craddock’s heap of unpublished materials—“my huge mass of Phallic Worship manuscripts,” as she called her would-be book—was certainly a sign of thwarted achievement, but it was also a testimony to a persistent and perhaps even emancipating curiosity. “The scholarly Miss Craddock,” always a dangerous amalgam, had remained unfazed by her own oddity—free of shame and reticence in breaching a supremely male preserve of learning. Her flagrancy would become only more conspicuous when she next claimed the mantle of pastor alongside those of freethinker and scholar.71

  CHAPTER THREE

  Pastor of the Church of Yoga

  LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA, for all its religious diversity, still possessed a distinct Protestant power bloc—one no less commanding for being
a denominational patchwork. The “Religious Announcements” section in the Chicago Tribune in the 1870s offered one index of that Protestant federation’s prominence. An orderly catalog of church services, the announcements closely adhered to the mainstream Protestant map: Episcopal, Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregational, and Christian (Disciples of Christ). The Tribune, the city’s premier daily and a journalistic bastion of both the Republican Party and the Protestant elite, rarely publicized any Roman Catholic services. In a city increasingly dominated by Irish and German immigrants, the paper preferred to minimize that obvious source of competition. Even so, it would not have been particularly hard for the Tribune to justify its native Protestant focus without resorting to blatant xenophobia; there were at least five Methodist churches for every Catholic one in Illinois at the time. Throughout the era, the membership of the big six Protestant denominations, taken together, constituted a safe majority among religious adherents in the United States.

  Loath to broadcast non-Protestant gatherings, the Chicago Tribune nonetheless allowed room at the tail end of its religious announcements for a mixed, yet miniscule “Miscellaneous” category of alternative services. A typical column in July 1874, for example, included a group of spiritualists who were getting together to discuss “The Social Problem” and a band of freethinkers who were congregating to hear (yet again) about “The Life of Thomas Paine.” These liberal-minded dissidents, though, were more than counterbalanced in the miscellaneous category itself by a gathering of English Lutherans, another of Seventh-day Adventists, and a tabernacle meeting that featured an itinerant preacher from Kansas. Adding to the prevailing Protestant picture was the hefty and favorable coverage the Tribune accorded to the revival campaigns of evangelist Dwight L. Moody, the Billy Graham of his day, then at the height of his national and international fame. Judging by this snapshot from the Tribune, a small handful of peripheral upstarts posed little danger to the Protestant center in 1870s America.1