A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

ongoing communication between terrestrial and spiritual existence, a goal abetted in part by his
contention that the step from one to the other was not so precipitous as was generally understood.
Humans changed very little in their passage from this world to the next. Within heaven one
found houses, communities and governments. One encountered people going about their day-today
business. The first plane of the afterlife was so similar to earth that decedents often found it
hard to believe that they were dead. 40
Swedenborg’s philosophy also accounted for a hell. Once
entering the vestibular area that comprised the first phase of life after death, each of the dearly
departed was called upon to assess his or her own character and then assign themselves to heaven
or hell, a rational procedure versus becoming subject to the judgment of an all-knowing God. As
in the Swedenborgian heaven, hell constituted a sort of extension of earthly existence, where one
was free to pursue whatever vices one had cultivated previously with the sole caveat that if a
resident’s licentiousness exceeded that which she had practiced on earth, she was subject to a
beating from her fellow hellions. Upon entering the afterlife, one continued to strive toward
perfection, unless you had chosen hell, in which case perfection was out of question. The heaven
one passed into after death was but the first of seven. The seventh heaven consisted of absorption
into God. Thus the spirit of progress continued on after death, a conceit with clear appeal to
practitioners of nineteenth century Spiritualism in America, and dovetailing neatly with other
narratives of progress such as Social Darwinism and Manifest Destiny, narratives with the
utmost faith in an inevitable historical progress toward perfection. That faith in coming
perfection was extended to the spiritual as well as material world. “There is a march of progress
in spiritual unfolding.” 41
Communication with the dead would come to be understood in the
context of Spiritualism as evidence of that progress.
Swedenborg occupied a central place in the pantheon of Spiritualism. As Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle put it in the first volume of his History of Spiritualism (a document which, as
40 Rosemary Ellen Guiley, Harper’s Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience (New York: Harper
Collins, 1991).
41 Lucy McDowell Milburn, The Classic of Spiritism (New York: The Dacrow Company, 1922) 2.
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