A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

centrally inform Spiritualism was his rather homely vision of Heaven. The sense that the dead
maintained much of their humanity in their heavenly existence did much to demystify and
desanctify traditional ideas of the afterlife—an integral dynamic in the crafting of a “new”
enchantment for a rational age. It also minimized the gap between humanity’s current state and
its hoped for perfection. Angels residing in the utopian afterlife were wholly recognizable and
comprehensible in Swedenborg’s scheme. “After the dissolution of the body, a man’s spirit
appears in the spiritual world in the human form altogether as in the natural world.” 45
This sense
of the dead’s humanity closed the gap between this world and the next, putting one in
communication with the other. Swedenborg bypassed God in his explorations of the afterlife.
His line of communication led directly to the dead, or as he called them, the angels. Unlike
prayer, a unidirectional mode of communication, with no promise of return, Swedenborg’s
inquiries were subject to the receipt of direct reply—a shift that anticipated the replacement of
the uncertainty of written correspondence and its twin displacements of time and space with the
near and actual simultaneity of telegraphy and telephony. This strong sense of the close
continuity of life and life after death and the familiarity of the dead, the immediacy of the
exchange between living and dead and the fact that one could readily recognize oneself in the
dead’s comportment, would be both key to Spiritualism’s popular success and instrumental in its
demise. All the aforementioned traits also contributed to aligning the world of spirit and the
world of the observable.
Furthermore, Swedenborg’s status as a man of science, his presentation of his findings in
ponderous Latin prose and the quotidian nature of his descriptions of the afterlife all lent a patina
of scientific respectability to his spectral perambulations. His assessment of the afterlife was
based not upon faith, or wisdom received by holy writ, but rather via experimentation, direct
observation and experience—all aligning with sound empirical practice. In this sense,
Swedenborg’s was a Modern faith and constituted an early moment of neo-enchantment. The
45 Epes Sargent, The Scientific Basis of Spiritualism (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1881) 370.
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