Meet the Turn-of-the-Century Sex Worshipper Who ‘Married’ an Angel

“Mrs.”—not Miss—Ida Craddock preserved her virginal virtues despite being an unmarried and graphic “sex reformer” in the early 1900s… by having “a husband in the other world,” the angel Seroph.

On October 17, 1902, the three—or four—times-married Mrs. Elizabeth Decker of Philadelphia, awaited her high-spirited, controversial daughter Ida in a restaurant on 23rd Street in Manhattan. “Mrs.” Craddock was outrageously late, Lizzie Decker was agitated, as usual. After all, she had an unmarried daughter publishing detailed advice about the subject no Victorian lady was even supposed to know about.

A member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Mrs. Decker already had tried committing her crazy daughter in 1894. Now, this self-styled “High Priestess of the Church of Yoga,” teaching the “gospel of marriage” was in deeper trouble. Craddock had foolishly confronted Anthony Comstock, the moralizing postal inspector who headed the Society for the Suppression of Vice. After lunch Craddock was due in court to be sentenced to five years in jail for mailing obscene material....

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