A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

narrative attached to this racial mythos is that earth has passed through a number of ages. Each
of these ages sees a particular race in ascendancy and others in decline – races which in a
national socialist parlance would be understood as “degenerate.” In Pelley’s view, as well as that
of his anti-Semitic contemporaries, the Anglo-Saxon race was in ascendancy and the Jews, along
with other “ancient” races, were in decline. This notion of world ages placed racist politics on a
cosmic scale and invested them with a sense of inevitability. When the struggle between racial
groups was revealed as cosmically ordained, to resist that struggle was to resist the cosmos. As
we have seen, in the harmonial tradition the key to enlightenment was to let go and allow oneself
to be buoyed and carried by the forces of the cosmos. So if the cosmos revealed, through a
chosen medium, that the struggle against degenerate races (or homosexuals or secular humanists)
was the order of the day, a harmonialist could only accede to the program.
Arguably, the utopian vision in-and-of itself contains the seeds of fascism. Any vision of
perfection precludes all elements that would disturb said perfection. Perfection calls for the
replication of the same and the eradication of difference as do both the historical model attacked
by Foucault in his discussion of genealogy and the struggle to sustain the fiction of self. The
particular vision of perfection desired by the traditions discussed herein, one that draws on the
biblical heaven as its model, is especially afflicted with the problems of homogeneity. The
surcease of struggle, when attached to the maintenance of individual personalities, as it is in
biblical visions of heaven as well as in Spiritualism and the philosophy espoused by Pelley,
presented a peculiar set of challenges. For all struggle to subside, all desires must be met, which
is another way of saying, if struggle is to cease than so must desire. This disappearance of desire
is reflected in the sloughing off of the body—by the whiteness of heaven and its strange
sexlessness. The centrifugal force of the movements thus far discussed is undone by their
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