A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

political registers as well.
This chapter will first treat the emergence of Spiritualism from the earlier precedents of
vitalism, hypnotism, Swedenborgianism and the Shakers, the latter two of which are centrally
concerned with communing with spiritual intelligences. These are the most obvious formal
precedents for Spiritualism, though of course there are other earlier instances of the communing
of humans with the spirit world. Spiritualism “has a nebulous ancestry of magnetic
somnambules, witch ridden children, and ecstatic nuns.” 27
While the chapter does directly
address the first element of this list in its discussion of Mesmerism, it does not address the latter
two. Podmore’s characterization of Spiritualism’s ancestry as nebulous captures a recurring
characteristic of all of the movements examined in this project. The word nebulous derives from
the astronomical term for a cluster of stars that when seen from a distance has the appearance of
a cloud or mist—defying articulation. At any given historical point there are myriad ways that
one might trace the antecedents and consequents of Mesmerism or Spiritualism or Space Brother
religions. The roots and fruits of communication between humans and Otherworldly beings are
in a word, over determined. Any narrative that attempts to track the course of this line of
communication over time will be by necessity partial and in most ways a function of the story
that the writer wishes to tell.
After examining some of the precedents of Spiritualism, the chapter will then examine
the rise of Spiritualism proper and the interface between the contemporary politics of reform and
Spiritualism, both in general and in the specific case of feminism. The final section on the
movement will interrogate the ways in which the dead are imagined as actors in the discourse of
Spiritualism. Lastly, I will briefly discuss the rise of the so-called “western guru” in Theosophy
and the advent of the “ascended master” as a central trope in the nexus of alien-human
communication. Through this series of investigations, we will both observe the emergence of a
peculiar sort of utopian politics, one that exhibits desires consonant with rational reform while
27 Frank Podmore, Modern Spiritualism: A History and a Criticism (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1902) 361.
26