A failed attempt at ‘Bible Communism’

In Oneida—a runner-up for WORLD’s 2016 Book of the Year in the Understanding America category—Ellen Wayland-Smith, a descendant of Oneida commune founder John Humphrey Noyes, describes vividly the theory and practice of “Bible Communism” pioneered in Oneida, N.Y., beginning in 1848. Residents established community ownership of both property and bodies, but neither approach proved successful. Some people didn’t work very hard, and many people fell prey to “sticky love,” the desire to pair off permanently. They then had to go before a “Criticism Committee” for confession and correction. From anarchy to dictatorship to demise—that’s the repeated pattern not only politically but socially. At least some of the Oneidans eventually made good silverware.

In the excerpt below, courtesy of Picador, Wayland-Smith explains how Noyes, while he and his followers lived in Putney, Vt., during the mid-1840s, tried to “link sex to immortality through the little-understood, apparently magical workings of electricity.” —Marvin Olasky

Chapter 4: Electric Sex; or, How to Live Forever

In establishing the society of inquiry as a communal economic unit, Noyes was no doubt influenced by the tradition of Christian socialism, as well as by the more general fad for associationist models in forward-thinking reform circles of the 1840s. But what Noyes was after was a much more radical and, ultimately, more mystical state of union than anything imagined by early apostolic Christianity or Fourier’s acolytes. To grasp his intentions we must go back to the Christian mystics and their vision of the godhead as one and indivisible, a unity in which all partial or surface identities are dissolved.

In the mystical tradition, the union between Christ and his church, or between God and the individual believer, was often expressed by analogy with sexual union. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul seizes upon the metaphor of marriage as a fitting image for the relationship between Christ and his followers: just as man and wife “become one flesh” in marriage, so too Christ is a bridegroom espousing the church as the body of all His faithful. The twelfth-century Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux elaborated on Paul’s metaphor, claiming that the overtly sexual Song of Songs was a perfect allegory for the relationship between Christ and the individual soul: “No sweeter names can be found to embody that sweet interflow of affections between [Christ] and the soul, than bridegroom and bride. Between these all things are equally shared, there are no selfish reservations, nothing that causes division. They share the same inheritance, the same table, the same home, the same marriage-bed, they are flesh of each other’s flesh.” Bernard’s sermons are stuffed with “mouth-kisses,” fertile wombs, life-giving breasts (“filled with a milky richness”), and, in general, all manner of fecund flows that bind Father, Son, and church into an indissoluble union.

Noyes had the audacity (or perhaps simply the honesty) to take the mystics at their word: far from falling outside the divine orbit, the sexual organs were, in fact, “the medium of the noblest worship of God.” Not just a metaphor, sexual union was a practical way for souls to bind themselves to one another in the common medium of Christ’s body. The marriage law that held sway in the world, then, and the nuclear family that attended it, worked to constrict and diminish love, which in its fullness and by its very nature was expansive, rippling out in ever more inclusive circles. As the logical consequence of reading Christ’s gospel to “love thy neighbor” in the most literal way imaginable, Noyes’s theology quite simply refused to exclude eros as a viable channel for union with the godhead. “Love in all its forms is simply attraction, or the tendency of congenial elements to approach and become one,” he mused, and sexual love was no exception.

During his time in Putney, Noyes would develop an elaborate theological and biological argument that placed sexual intercourse at the very heart of Christian community. More ingeniously, he made sex the linchpin in what he theorized was humanity’s progressive march to conquer death. For when the invisible world of the saints came to annex the earthly saints— that is to say, Noyes’s followers—to Christ’s heavenly kingdom, all of its members would enjoy everlasting life as promised in the Book of Revelations. One might believe the Old Testament God who drew forth the cosmos from the void capable of endowing His chosen creatures with eternal life by simple fiat. Yet in the spirit of Yankee self-reliance, Noyes was taking no chances: he wagered that there was a physiological mechanism involved in immortality, discoverable through patient scientific inquiry, which humans could perfect on their end in order to meet God halfway to Resurrection. Drawing on current debates within the fields of biology, chemistry, and physiology, Noyes was able to link sex to immortality through the little-understood, apparently magical workings of electricity.

Ever since the day when, in 1780, Luigi Galvani first made an amputated frog’s leg jump by connecting it to the pole of a battery (a feat his nephew had, even more spectacularly, if perhaps less tastefully, surpassed in causing the corpse of an executed convict to flinch by the same method), the mysterious link between electricity and animal energy, or what was called “animal magnetism,” had become a matter of intense debate for scientists and the literate public alike. Seeking an animating force uniting the cosmos, Romantic scientists were quick to see in electricity a life force pulsing throughout creation, uniting organic and inorganic nature. Perhaps the most famous period expression of this current of thought was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Haunted by Galvani’s experiment, she penned this dark romance as the story of a medical student who imparts the “spark of life” to dead matter and later discovers the jerky, lurching creature hanging over his bed, gazing at him “with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.”

In opposition to the Romantics, Alessandro Volta and other scientists in the materialist camp sought to reduce electricity to a mechanical force at work in the universe, stripped of any mystical life-giving properties. Still, despite Volta’s counterdemonstrations discrediting Galvani, the debate over animal magnetism would live on well into the nineteenth century, with magnetizing hypnotic treatments, healing magnets, and other electrical devices (belts, bracelets, and vests) gaining a foothold in mainstream American medical practice by the 1840s and 1850s. “The human system may be looked upon as a voltaic pile, with positive and negative polarity,” commented one medical treatise from 1863, chalking disease up to a disturbance in the life force that needed to be reequilibrated. Artificial electricity—the application to the body of magnets or electric shocks—was capable of rechanneling, reorganizing, and even augmenting the human vital fluid.

Noyes took contemporary science, gave it a theological twist, and—like Victor Frankenstein—tinkered with the occult pathways linking matter to spirit, hoping to strike the spark of eternal life into his gathered faithful.

Toiling away in his Putney laboratory, Noyes took contemporary science, gave it a theological twist, and—like Victor Frankenstein—tinkered with the occult pathways linking matter to spirit, hoping to strike the spark of eternal life into his gathered faithful. According to Noyes, Christ possessed an “invisible energy, a battery of nervous power,” and the healing power of Jesus Christ was “a fluid which passed from him, as electricity passes from the machine that generates it.” “Our life can become charged with the life of Christ, till it is magnetic like his life,” Noyes elaborated. When we are open to being plugged into Christ, we receive the equivalent of “the shocks of the galvanic fluid … accumulating chronic magnetic power in our life, and assimilation to Christ.”

This life force could be passed from person to person through the exchange of words, ideas, and healing touches. But the highest form of “spiritual interchange” in the resurrected state, according to Noyes’s magnetic theory, would be sexual intercourse. Man and woman, like “magnet and steel,” were attracted to each other and naturally advanced to “interlocked contact.” Freed from the artificial restrictions of the worldly fashion of chaining one man to one woman, the union of male and female would fold into the original God-Jesus battery, intensifying its effect. Energy begat energy, according to Noyes, and in the fullness of time, when God’s kingdom was extended to earth, each individual life would be enfolded within every other, and the whole of human life enfolded into God and Christ, in a kind of nesting-doll configuration forming “one glowing sphere” and a battery of inconceivable power.

Thus fused into one gigantic divine sex battery, humans would accumulate enough electrical force, according to Noyes’s theory, to overcome death itself: “Victory over death,” he theorized, “will be the result of an action of an extensive battery of this kind.” The heat and light generated by this condensed sexual energy chain would produce a kind of temperate microclimate that would go a long way toward improving the chilling effects of disease and death. “When life shall accumulate in unity, by the centripetal force of love, till all hearts shall radiate and receive a perpetual sunshine of joy, it is not unphilosophical to believe that the substantial physical results (at least as far as health is concerned) of an actual amelioration of climate, shall be achieved.” Warmed from the inside out by this megabattery, life would become independent of external elements and “death will lose its prey.”

Once these concentric nesting effects came into play, no longer would we have to eat such coarse foods as meat; light fruits and vegetables would suffice to power our energy-rich systems. Citing the work of German chemist Justus von Liebig, who postulated that food is fuel, Noyes wrote that “the more perfectly men are in communication with the source of vital heat, and the more they are enveloped in the genial magnetism of social life, the less food, raiment, and shelter they will need. … [T]he grosser kinds of food, and especially animal food, will go out of use.”

In the spring of 1846, as the days got longer and the weather balmier, the Putney group began to detect an ambient amorous energy humming in their midst.

BY ALL ACCOUNTS, the Putney group had not yet passed over into the higher order of a fruit-and-nut-gathering existence as of the spring of 1846; they still had recourse to woolens and animal meat to fight off the lingering New England cold. Yet the sense that a warming trend—an electric “condensation of life,” as Noyes referred to it—was continually knitting them closer as a prelude to God’s reign on earth was certainly a factor in the Putney group’s first explorations into sexual “condensation.” And so, in the spring of 1846, as the days got longer and the weather balmier, the Putney group began to detect an ambient amorous energy humming in their midst.

The initial forays into multiple sexual partners were tentative and, surprisingly, did not originate in Noyes’s quarter. It was George Cragin who wrote a letter to Harriet Noyes declaring his love for her as a sister in Christ; Harriet, divulging the letter to Noyes, admitted her attraction to Cragin. Noyes called a meeting of the two couples, during which not only did Harriet and George Cragin avow their love for each other, but Mary Cragin and John Humphrey Noyes did likewise. As recorded in Mary Cragin’s journal, “After these avowals we considered ourselves engaged to each other, expecting to live in all conformity to the laws of this world until the time arrives for the consummation of our union.”

Noyes had been attracted to Mary Cragin from the time of her first arrival in Putney; later diary entries would reveal that he considered her, in the absence of Abigail Merwin, a kind of surrogate spiritual bride. A portrait of Mary Cragin that survives from the Community period shows a rather desiccated-looking woman with a tense, angular face; thin lips; deep-set eyes; and the closely combed, short-cropped hair later adopted by Noyes’s female followers as a sign of their emancipation from the fashion of the world. One of her contemporaries observed of Mary that, while not conventionally beautiful, her “soft eye” and “ready smile” guaranteed that “every man who came near her fell beneath her sway.” Noyes was certainly enraptured by her, imagining her, after her ill-fated dalliance with Abram C. Smith, as a Mary Magdalene figure; given Noyes’s own struggles with the flesh, such an association undoubtedly marked her out as a kindred spirit.

The time for the consummation of the Noyeses and the Cragins’ four-square agreement would arrive sooner than expected. One day in May 1846, as Mary and Noyes were strolling in the woods together, they were overcome by the desire to proceed to a “full consummation” of their engagement. As Noyes wrestled with his overwhelming magnetic attraction to Mary, he suddenly had a revelation about the timing of the coming Resurrection. Instead of waiting for a signal from the heavens that the merging of the invisible and visible kingdoms had commenced and that the time to break with “the laws of this world” had come, might not God be expecting the earthly saints to initiate the condensing action by which the final union would be achieved? Noyes called a meeting of the two couples to seek their collective opinion. “The upshot of the conference was, that we gave each other full liberty all round, and so entered into complex marriage in the quartette form. The last part of the interview was as amicable and happy as a wedding, and a full consummation soon followed.”

In November of the same year, Complex Marriage in the “quartette form” was extended to include Noyes’s sisters and their husbands, along with another couple, Mary and Stephen Leonard, when all five couples signed a “Statement of Principles” stating that, specifically, “All individual proprietorship either of persons or things is surrendered, and absolute community of interests takes the place of the … property and family relations in the world.” The signatories promised to be guided by God as “the director of our combinations,” with a swiftly appended clause clarifying that “John H. Noyes is the father and overseer whom the Holy Ghost has set over the family thus constituted.”

On November 4, immediately following their solemn pledge, the couples consolidated their households, with Noyes and Harriet moving in with the Cragins in the “Lower House,” and the Skinners, Millers, and Leonards taking possession of the Noyes homestead—a move clearly aimed at facilitating the smooth functioning of Complex Marriage. Mary Cragin penned a well-turned, if sycophantic, poem on the occasion of the Noyes’s move:

Thou art our lover! From thy heart A tide of living healthful love Rolls o’er us, and makes us part Of the blest family above … ’Tis the same spirit brings you here Brought the Redeemer from the skies. His image doth in you appear And this is His self-sacrifice.

From Oneida by Ellen Wayland-Smith. Copyright © 2016. Published by Picador, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers, New York. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.