#oneida community

[designobjectory]

Oneida Community Tudor Plate "Friendship" pattern, 1932

[emma-dennehy-presents]

Sooooo...probably shouldn't have but found a well priced Trench Pilgrim army on ebay. Probably going to base my lil zealots around a gnostic tradition, the Brethen of the Free Spirit, Euchites, or Oneida Community. Yea we ridin that heretical line hard. New Antioch can suck our stigmata.

[polyamorousmisanthrope]

The Polyamorous Misanthrope at the Summer House at the Oneida Community Mansion House

[scaarebabe]

Advertisements for Oneida Silverware, made by members of the polyamorous Victorian Oneida Community. The Oneida Community “was designed for the pursuit of love and the encouragement of sexual pleasure. Intercourse, according to Noyes, should be an ‘innocent and useful communion,’ a ‘joyful act of fellowship,’ and a ‘purely social affair,’ comparable to a stroll in the park, a conversation, or a dance, differing from these pursuits only in its superior intensity and beauty. In a society trained to Noyes’ principles, intercourse would take its place among the fine arts. Indeed, it would rank above music, painting, and sculpture, for it combined ‘the charms and benefits of them all.’” (https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/flesh/reinventing-sex)

[catapultbooks]

“The first time I had cause to reflect critically on my heritage was in graduate school. Chatting with my German language instructor one day, the topic of Oneida came up by chance; I explained the original Oneida Community’s vision and their attempt to communize property and persons. He raised a quizzical eyebrow: “Wie David Koresh, nein?” (Just like David Koresh, no?) It was 1993 and the Branch Davidian “cult” debacle in Waco, Texas was still fresh in the nation’s consciousness.”

A fascinating new essay by Ellen Wayland-Smith about cults, family history, and the limits of secularism.

(via Catapult | Cult Confessions: Faith and the Limits of Liberalism | Ellen Wayland-Smith)

[designobjectory]

Oneida Community Tudor Plate fruit spoon in 1923 "Duchess" pattern

[designobjectory]

Oneida Community Tudor Plate "Friendship" pattern forks, 1930s

[tattooed-alchemist]

The Polyamorous Christian Socialist Utopia That Made Silverware for Proper Americans

Oneida Limited actually emerged from a 19th-century polyamorous communist Christian utopia known as the Oneida Community.

Founded in 1848, and in operation for just over three decades, the Oneida Community was profoundly revolutionary for its time, paving the way for advances in women’s and workers’ rights. At the commune headquartered on the Oneida River in upstate New York, women cut their hair short, ditched the corset, and did the same work as the men. Everyone worked four to six hours a day, and no one accumulated any material possessions—not furniture, not fine clothing, and certainly not silverware.

Most scandalously, commune members engaged in a system of “complex marriage,” believing that loving, open sexual relationships could bring them closer to God. They believed the liquid electricity of Jesus Christ’s spirit flowed through words and touch, and that a chain of sexual intercourse would create a spiritual battery so charged with God’s energy that the community would transcend into immortality, creating heaven on earth.