The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine has filed briefs with the Supreme Court of the United States, looking to have them uphold a lower court order that’d limit women’s access to mifepristone.
The lower court’s ruling is based on an 1873 law banning the shipment of abortifacients through the U.S. mail, a law commonly known as the Comstock Act, named after its architect and major proponent Anthony Comstock. Comstock is known to occultists as the man who relentlessly persecuted Order of the Lion and the Eagle member Ida Craddock to the point of suicide. Here is the introduction to her Order of the Lion and Eagle induction:
In Volume III Number 1 of the Equinox (published in 1919), Aleister Crowley reviewed a paper called “Heavenly Bridegrooms“. In this work, a woman identified only as “Ida C—–” claimed to be the wife of an angel. A scholar named Theodore Schroeder edited the manuscript and published it in a psychological journal, where it apparently attracted the attention of Crowley. In the review, Crowley states that Heavenly Bridegrooms “is one of the most remarkable human documents ever produced.” He goes on to say:
“I am very far from agreeing with all that this most talented woman sets forth in her paper, but she certainly obtained initiated knowledge of extraordinary depth. She seems to have had access to certain most concealed sanctuaries…. She has put down statements in plain English which are positively staggering. This book is of incalculable value to every student of occult matters. No Magick library is complete without it.”
This is quite an endorsement from Crowley, and perhaps even more significant in that he signed the review “Baphomet,” using his magical name as Tenth Degree of O.T.O.
Roughly fifty years later, in his unauthorized Volume V of the Equinox, Marcelo Motta published Heavenly Bridegrooms along with another work by “Ida C—–” called Psychic Wedlock. This latter paper outlines a three-degree system of mystical initiation through sexual techniques. It was written around 1895, shortly before the founding of the O.T.O. based on a similar model involving three degrees of initiation into sexual mysteries. Motta also included a brief biography of the author, in which we learn that her full name is Ida Craddock. But except for these references by Motta and Crowley, not much more about Ms. Craddock and her work has appeared in print, especially in Thelemic circles where it certainly seems to have a great deal of relevance.
Read the entire essay:
https://www.idacraddock.org/intro.html.
