Newsgroups: alt.magick.tyagi
Subject: Re: pedantic query - Karezza etc
Date: 11 Mar 1995 00:39:41 -0800

[from alt.magick.sex: rjb@u.washington.edu (LeGrand Cinq-Mars)]

Thanks for your extensive response to my query.

You confirmed much of what I thought I knew (about Stockham), but raised
some other queries.


In article <3ik2o6$kep@newsbf02.news.aol.com>,
Cyronwode <cyronwode@aol.com> wrote:

>. . . .
>HARRIS
>
>. . . .
>
>Fountaingrove became a popular place for single and widowed women to visit
>while touring California as Harris believed in free love and sexual
>satisfaction for women.

This doesn't quite fit with what I've gathered about Harris, though he
may have been very effective at covering his tracks.  First, he seems to
have been very strict with his followers, and (following his Swedenborgian
understanding of the evils of "proprium" or self-will) been rather interested
in putting followers through a long purificatory regimen designed to root
out self-will.

He was interested in "counterpartal marriage" -- something that
seems to have been a hot topic in esoteric circles in the 19th century,
perhaps due in part to Swedenborg and perhaps also due to the increasing
awareness of the often-missed possibilities in marital relationships.

His system, as I see it, involce three stages:  purification, establishment
of contact with the non-embodied counterpart (most people were held to
have proper mates - counterparts- who were spirits rather than
corporeal human beings), and (rarely) alignment of counterparts with
some embodied person.  It was in this last stage that something like
sex could occur - but access to this depended on Harris' certification
of one's state of being.

My understanding of Harris comes through _A Prophet and a Pilgrim_ and
several biographies of Lawrence Oliphant (who eventually took Harris
to court to get back his property).  

Oliphant and his second wife wrote _Sympneumata_, their own take on
Harris' system.

>. . . .
>. . . . He lived well but simply and seems not to have stolen
>his disciples' money or done anything rash

There seem to have been conflicting views about this.

. He and the other 
men at
>Fountaingrove simply fucked the brains out of any willing woman who
>chanced to visit the place. 

This sounds more like local rumor than anything that agrees too closely
with what is reported eg in _Prophet & Pilgrim_ or other accounts.  Of
course, local rumor may cut closer to the bone.  I'll have to look
intoi Markham (the library here has a copy, but in special
collections, so I'll have to wait till I have free time to put in
an afternoon or so).

I don't think, by the way, that Noyes had any notion of counterpartal
marriages - and Harris denounced Noyes in various places as an
immoralist because (it would seem) because of a lack of eradication
of personal desire - or a demand for the eradication of personal
desire in his disciples.
I am waiting to get a chance to read Stockham's things, and things about her.

Thanks again.

LeGrand
rjb@u.washington.edu