fiat_knox | Ida Craddock

Ida Craddock

The Weiser Books blog has an entry titled Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic & the Wickedest Woman in the Victorian World. Its topic is Ida Craddock, a woman who lived and died before everyone I know who is alive today was even born.

"Ida Craddock was an occultist and mystic who claimed sexual congress with angelic beings. Educated, ambitious, and widely read on all esoteric subjects, she wrote about her divine relations in a pamphlet entitled Heavenly Bridegrooms."

And that isn't all. She "advocated women’s rights and made it a personal mission to educate her Victorian peers on the particularities of the marriage bed – explicit in detail and a little shocking even now. Her work, carried out largely by correspondence and subscription, garnered praise from the socially enlightened (and the women who benefited from the information), and damnation – even prosecution- from an outraged patriarchy."

The patriarchy lied, connived, perjured themselves and moved fencepost after fencepost, revelling in perverse and perverted sexual sadism as they maltreated and hounded this woman to suicide. It was the turn of the old century. They knew no better.

Nowadays, of course, we do know better - well enough to be able to see the wool being pulled over the public's eyes. Well enough to be able to find people to advocate our rebellions and to back us up against persecution and sadism disguised as Puritanism.

Well enough to think about how Ida Craddock died, and to be able to stand up when somebody else is persecuting someone else and "making an example of them." Well enough, in fact, to be able to call shenanigans, and to point the fingers at the accusers and expose them as sexual sadists and demagogues on a power kick, rather than "upholders of justice and morality."

So here's to Ida Craddock. When Samuel Weiser does release the book on her life, I shall be very interested in acquiring a copy. I will let you know if and when I do.