Put What Where? (14 page)

The karezza method is remarkably similar to the secrets found in ancient Oriental sex guides: first you prepare by reading and meditating on the divine power. Then, you start having slow, orgasmless sex. Before (or during) ‘complete, quiet union of the sexual organs’, couples should dedicate themselves, with the words: ‘We are living spiritual beings; our bodies symbolize soul union, and in closest contact each receives strength to be more to the other and more to all the world.’ Don’t you love it when your partner talks holy in bed?

The ultimate goal was soul union: ‘During a lengthy period of perfect control, the whole being of each is merged into the other, and an exquisite exaltation experienced,’ promised Stockham. ‘This may be accompanied by a quiet motion, entirely under subordination of the will, so that the thrill of passion for either may not go beyond a pleasurable exchange ... In the course of an hour the physical tension subsides, the spiritual exaltation increases, and not uncommonly visions of a transcendent life are seen and consciousness of new powers experienced.’ It
should, she added, be performed fortnightly, or monthly, or even less frequently, ‘Scores of married men and women attest that such self-control is perfectly and easily possible.’

Not everyone was convinced. One contemporary reviewer, a Dr Sperry, wrote: ‘Perhaps a few old and sexually decayed men and women can employ it quite satisfactorily. I am forced to the conclusion that average men and women, who possess fullness of sexual vigour, alert minds and live nerves, cannot indulge in sexual connection and experience a satisfactory play of the affections without passing on to coition, sexual spasm and discharge of semen. When starving men learn to hold pleasant and nutritious food in their mouths for an hour without swallowing it, then we may expect passionate men and women to adopt karezza as a practical method of healthfully enjoying the mental and physical pleasures of sexual embrace.’

Nor did karezza provoke unbridled joy among those in authority. It was effectively illegal, because at the time promoting contraception was against the law. And while the Vatican allows the rhythm method, non-orgasmic sex was beyond the pale. Forty years after Stockham’s death in 1912, the papacy issued a ‘solemn warning’ forbidding priests and spiritual directors ever to recommend the idea. It is not, apparently, part of ‘Christ’s Law’.

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 1893, when she publicly defended a belly-dance act at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago against calls from Anthony Comstock, America’s self-appointed arch-censor, for it to be banned. Comstock was a religious fanatic who worked for the U.S. Post Office and 20 years previously had persuaded Congress to pass the Comstock Act, which made it illegal to send ‘obscene material’ such as sex advice through the mail. At the end of his career, Comstock claimed to have ‘convicted persons enough to fill a passenger train of 61 coaches, 60 containing sixty passengers each, and the 61st almost full’. Craddock wrote an article in the journal
The World
about how the belly dancers’ undulations were an expression of sexual self-control and should be taught to married women to enhance their sex lives. Comstock declared the article obscene and banned it from being sent through the post.

Craddock had other enemies who, with the help of her mother, had her admitted to the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane in 1898. She was released after three months without ever being judged legally insane by a court. She did not help her case by forcing a showdown with Comstock. In 1899, she was charged with sending
Right Marital Living
through the mail and only stayed out of prison because the famed lawyer and free-speech advocate Clarence Darrow paid her bail. Then she headed for York City, Comstock’s base, where she carried on her sex advice and pamphleteering. ‘I
have an inward feeling that I am really divinely led here to face this wicked and depraved man Comstock in open court,’ she wrote.

She got her wish. In 1902, Craddock was arrested under New York’s local anti-obscenity law for posting out copies of
The Wedding Night.
The judge refused to allow the jury to see the ‘indescribably obscene’ document. The jury found Craddock guilty and she was sentenced to three months in the harsh city workhouse. On her release, she was immediately re-arrested under another piece of Comstock legislation, the national anti-obscenity law. On the morning she was to be sentenced again, she killed herself by slashing her wrists and inhaling natural gas. In her suicide note, she launched a final counter-attack, writing, ‘Perhaps it may be that in my death, more than in my life, the American people may be shocked into investigating the dreadful state of affairs which permits that unctuous sexual hypocrite Anthony Comstock to wax fat and arrogant and to trample upon the liberties of the people.’ Ultimately, hers was the final victory: the negative publicity generated by Comstock’s merciless hounding turned public opinion against him. Contributions to his Society for the Suppression of Vice fell sharply and his influence began to ebb.

Craddock’s life and work lie buried somewhere amid history’s dust heap of eccentric ideas. But her writing lives on in one odd realm. When Aleister Crowley, the devil worshipper and self-styled ‘world’s wickedest man’, visited America ten years after Craddock’s death, he read and admired her
Psychic Wedlock
enough to recommend it to followers. Her ideas steadily became adopted and adapted by satanic writers, and still turn up in books of ‘Sex Magick’ spells today. Somehow, practising the dark arts through exotic intercourse doesn’t seem the same when you know that a woman called Ida Craddock is behind much of it.

Craddock was not the only sex advisor to influence Crowley’s sex magicians. Another was the enigmatic figure of Paschal Beverly Randolph, an African-American who was born in Virginia in 1825, qualified as a medical doctor and became a well-known spiritualist who travelled through Turkey, Egypt and Syria in search of esoteric wisdom. Crowley seems to have derived his catchphrase ‘Love is the Law, Love under Will’ from him.

The best known of Randolph’s three sex-magic manuals was the 1874 title
Eulis! The history of love: its wondrous magic, chemistry, rules, laws, modes, moods and rationale; being the third revelation of soul and sex.
At the centre of Randolph’s theories were the sex rituals of the Syrian Nusairi tribe, which he transformed into his ‘Anseiratic Mysteries’. These required a man and woman to practise 49 days’ worth of tantra-style sexual meditation, at the end of which they would orgasm so powerfully that bursts of electro-magnetic energy would shoot between them at seven points on their
bodies. This energy burst would put them in telepathic touch with divine beings from other dimensions and thus give them the power to become very rich by predicting the outcomes of future business deals. Or at least, that was the theory. It also promised that they would be able to control other people’s actions and read minds, as well as stop spouses’ adultery by rendering them ‘sexively cold’ to others. Nice.

Despite all these powers, and although his lifelong motto was ‘Try!’, sex-magic did not always work for Randolph. In 1875 he succumbed to chronic depression and ended his life by suicide at the age of 50, leaving a wife and infant son.