A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

alien gained access to the status of initiate. The sense of initiation, of being a privileged insider,
constituted a key element in the pleasures of belief, a pleasure that is both integrative and
disintegrative. It constitutes a source of integration in the group identity created around those “in
the know.” Initiation also offered a centripetal sense of cohesion in its offering of a still center
of belief. The message from the cosmos—from the space brothers, from the ascended masters,
from the dead—offered a series of credos that serve as anchors to the aspirant: human
personality survives beyond death; the world beyond is one of illimitable movement toward
perfection; the Others watch over us and shepherd us toward our own innate potential.
Variations of these credos had long been on offer within the context of traditional Christianity.
The moments herein discussed offer the consolations of Christianity and the excitement of
radical politics, both read through a peculiar set of modifications: the “scientifically” established
truth of life after death (the bourgeois subject projected into infinity), the presence of a host of
Others who speak from the other side and the continuing efforts to render matters of spirit in
terms more conversant with a positivist ethos. Elements of traditional Christianity were only
fitfully present in the cases examined here. The traditional hierarchies of the Church are all but
absent in the case of Spiritualism, focused into a single primary tier of leadership in the cases of
Theosophy and the Great I AM, with Pelley following the form of a military chain of command.
Christ was present as one avatar among many or as an elder brother.
Information provided by ascended masters promised the goods of the Christian afterlife
in the here-and-now. This promise was most clearly conveyed by the claim that followers will
gain the ability to “raise their bodies into ascension” without dying - a promise of heaven without
death. This promise of ascension points to one of the key distinctions between the otherworldly
interlocutors of Spiritualism and those of the space brother religions. The reason that figures
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