Christian Tantra

John Humphrey Noyes: Complex Marriage and Male Continence

"The Shakers, and most revivalists, had been content to permit the
maximum amount of license that was compatible with absolute chastity. 
The complement of this license was a rigid system of taboo, which was
observed with a ritualistic attention to detail.... The students of both
sexes who attended [Oberlin Theological Seminary] prided themselves upon
their ability to withstand all sexual temptation.  But since their
spiritual muscles were in such fine trim, the desire to exercise them
was corres- pondingly great.  How could they be certain of their stamina
and resistance -- how, indeed, could they even keep in training --
without regular practice in jumping the hurdles and leaping the ditches
of sexual temptation?  Some means must be found of arousing passion in
order that it might be resisted -- some means, of course, that would
have the blessing of religious sanction.

"What better method could be found than that ancient custom of taking
'spiritual wives' -- a tradition handed down from the Agapetae of early
Christian days? ... [Lucinia] Umphreville stated that perfection could
be derived from passionate love, provided the lovers lived together
without indulging their carnal desires.  Should they be so weak as to
submit to temptation, the spiritual couples would prove that they were
unworthy and ill-assorted.  They would have to look for new partners,
and go on experimenting and searching until the ideal partner was found. 
Umphreville  Perfectionism, in fact, by making provision for lapses from
grace, slyly admitted erotic possibilities by a side door....  In the
middle 'thirties  [that's *1830s*] there appeared among these
Perfectionists an earnest and eager young man who was to give the
doctrine a revolutionary twist of his own by actually establishing a
colony of Perfectionists who would openly practise a completely new
system of sexual relations.

"John Humphrey Noyes, unlike the founders of most religious communities,
came of a well-established family.  His father had represented Vermont
in Congress, and his mother was a great-aunt of Rutherford Birchard
Hayes, nineteenth President of the United States.  Noyes was born a
rebel, and was happily endowed with the temerity that such men require
in order to achieve success.  He was converted at a revival in 1831, at
the age of twenty, having previously shown little interest in theology
or, indeed, in the studies he had been pursuing at Dartmouth.  Moving
now to Andover and Yale Divinity Schools, he prepared to enter the
ministry, but to enter it on his terms: 'If you are to be a minister,'
said his father, 'you must think and preach as the rest of the ministers
do; if you get out of the traces, they will whip you in.'  'Never!'
replied Noyes, 'never will I be whipped by ministers or anybody else
into views that do not commend themselves to my understanding as guided
by the Bible and enlightened by the Spirit.'  This animated reply was a
prophetic utterance, for Noyes very soon got out of the traces.  His
trouble was that he simply couldn't believe he was a sinner.  Try as he
might, he couldn't summon up any feelings of deep guilt or despair.  Yet
this very waywardness was itself a sin in the eyes of the orthodox; and
Noyes, being unable to admit it, somehow had to devise a means of
abolishing sin altogether.  His solution to this problem was so
astoundingly simple that it amounted to a stroke of genius.  In the
summer of 1833, while reading the last words of the Fourth Gospel, Noyes
received a sudden illumination concerning Christ's words, 'If I will
that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?'  'I knew', wrote
Noyes, 'that the time appointed for the Second Advent was within one
generation from the time of Christ's personal ministry' -- in A.D. 70,
to be precise.  The Second Coming had taken place centuries ago -- so
long ago, in fact, that no record of the event had been preserved.  The
sinners had been divided from the saved, and he that sinned now, so
Noyes preached, was of the devil.  Noyes himself had the courage to
proclaim that he did not sin, and the grace to confess that Christ had
absolved him....

"The implications of a Second Advent that has already taken place are
bound to be far-reaching.  The Shakers and the Noyesian Perfectionists,
both of whom thought they were living in a state of regeneration,
believed that if they were not quite in heaven itself, they were at
least close enough to it to order their lives upon heavenly conventions.
One such convention for which Biblical authority existed was the absence
of marriage in Heaven -- where 'they neither marry nor are given in
marriage'.  The Shakers, who wanted to be celibate, used this text in
order to justify their desires: the followers of Noyes, who did not want
celibacy, used the same text to support a form of regulated promiscuity.
In 1837 'The Battle Axe' published a letter from Noyes explaining his
conception of the sexual relations that ought to exist between men and
women.  In his letter, he stated uncompromisingly that when the will of
God is done on earth as it is in Heaven '*there will be no marriage*.
The marriage supper of the Lamb is a feast at which *every dish is free
to every guest*.  Exclusiveness, jealousy, quarrelling have no place
there, for the same reason as that which forbids a guest at a
thanksgiving dinner to claim each his separate dish, and quarrel with
the rest for his rights.  In a holy community, there is no more reason
why sexual intercourse should be restrained by law, than why eating and
drinking should be -- and there is as little occasion for shame in the
one case as in the other.'

"... in 1840 the Putney Association came into being -- as a purely
religious body, thus described in 'The Witness':

          'Our establishment, such as it is, exists in the midst of
           an ordinary village, and differs not in its relation to the
           community around from a manufacturing corporation or any
           other ordinary association.  A few familes of the same
           religious faith, without any formal scheme or written laws,
           have agreed to regard themselves as one family, and their
           relations to one another are regulated as far as possible
           by this idea.  The special object of the association is not
           to make money, nor to exemplify the perfection of social
           life, but to support the publication of the gospel of
           salvation from sin, by papers, books, tracts, etc.  Formal
           community of property is not regarded by us as obligatory
           on principle, but as expedient with reference to our present
           circumstances and objects.  We are attempting no scientific
           experiments in political economy nor in social science, and
           beg to be excused from association in the public mind with
           those who are making such experiments.  Our highest ambition
           is to be able to preach Christ without being burdensome to
           any, and to act out as far as possible the family spirit of
           of the gospel.  When we find a better way than our present
           plan to attain these objects we shall freely change our mode
           of living.'

"They soon found 'a better way than their present plan' of living, and
in 1844 adopted communism, in which change Noyes had been influenced by
the example of the Shakers.... it was at Putney... that Noyes first 
formulated his ideas of Male Continence and Complex Marriage, which were 
adopted by the community in 1846.

"These latter practices were more than the inquisitive neighbors were
prepared to tolerate.  In the following year the persecution of the
community culminated in the indictment of Noyes on the grounds of
adultery.  Noyes... purchased... land in another state.... at Oneida....
In 1847... it was unaninimously adopted by the forty or fifty members at
Putney 'that the Kingdom of God had come'....

"The birth of Oneida Community was preceded by the conceptions of Male
Continence and Complex Marriage.  Both systems, although given religious
justification, were invented by Noyes in order to overcome the suffering
which was then the common experience of women in childbirth. Mrs. Noyes
had given birth to five babies in six years, and four of them had been
stillborn.  Her husband could see no religious reason for permitting
such pain and disappointment; but, since he disapproved of
contraceptives, he advocated the practice of 'self-control', or *coitus
reservatus*.  At the same time Noyes the organiser, the lover of
scientific method and order, was shocked by haphazard procreation, which
often resulted in the birth of deformed or mentally deficient children.
'We are opposed', he wrote in 'Bible Communism', 'to random procreation,
which is unavoidable in the marriage system.  But we are in favour of
intelligent, well-ordered procreation.  The physiologists say that the
race cannot be raised from ruin till propagation is made a matter of
science; but they point out no way of making it so.  Procreation is
controlled and reduced to a science in the case of valuable domestic
brutes; but marriage and fashion forbid any such system among human
beings. We believe the time will come when involuntary and random
propagation will cease, and when scientific combination will be applied
to human generation as freely and successfully as it is to that of other
animals.  The way will be open for this when amativeness can have its
proper gratification without drawing after it procreation as a necessary
sequence.  And at all events, we believe that good sense and benevolence
will very soon sanction and enforce the rule that women shall bear
children only when they choose....'

"But 'amativeness' was seldom satisfied by monogamy, which 'gives to
sexual appetite only a scanty and monotonous allowance, and so produces
the natural vices of poverty, contraction of taste, and stinginess or
jealousy.  It makes no provision for the sexual appetite at the very
time when that appetite is the strongest.  By the custom of the world,
marriage, in the average of cases, takes place at about the age of
twenty-four; whereas puberty commences at the age of fourteen.  For ten
years, therefore, and that in the very flush of life, the sexual
appetite is starved.  This law of society bears hardest on females,
because they have less opportunity of choosing their time of marriage
than men.'

"The obvious remedy for these abuses was male continence combined with
complete freedom of intercourse.  Such a system would also remove that
discrepancy between community of goods and private possession of persons
that must always be obnoxious to a logical individual like Noyes; for
was it not absurd that man 'should be allowed and required to love in
all directions, and yet forbidden to express love except in one
direction'?

"Complex marriage meant, in theory, that any man and woman might freely
cohabit within the limits of the community.  In practice, however, there
was less freedom than might have been expected.  The partners in this
new form of relationship were obliged to obtain each other's consent,
'not by private conversation or courtship, but through the intervention
of some third person or persons'.  The exclusive attachment of two
persons was regarded as selfish and 'idolatrous' and was strongly
discouraged.  It was usually broken up by means of 'mutual criticism' --
and so were the innocent 'partialities' of one child for another.  While
no one was obliged, under any circumstances, to receive the attentions
of someone whom he or she did not like, the propagation of children was
controlled by the elder members of the community.  They advised that the
young of one sex should be paired off with the aged of the other sex;
and at one time twenty-four men and women were specially selected in
order to conduct a eugenic experiment designed 'to produce the usual
number of offspring to which people in the middle classes are able to
afford judicious moral and spiritual care, with the advantage of a
liberal education'.

"On the whole the system was remarkably successful.  Apart from a few
sorrows due to the breaking-up of an exclusive attachment, the sexual
relations of the members inspired them with a lively interest in each
other, and Pierrepont Noyes -- one of the sons of John Humphrey --
believes 'that the opportunity for romantic friendships also played a
part in rendering life more colourful than elsewhere.  Even elderly
people, whose physical passions had burned low, preserved the fine
essence of earlier associations.'

"It is likely that Noyes's attention was first drawn towards the
religious justification of Complex Marriage at Andover Theological
Seminary, where Professor Moses Stuart taught that the description of
the marriage relations in Rom. vii applied to carnal man before
conversion, and was not a matter of Christian experience."

_Heavens on Earth_, by Mark Holloway, Dover Pubs., 1966; pp. 180-7.