A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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their obedience to a female leader and their highly demonstrative style of worship - involving ecstatic dance, xenoglossy and divine revelation - did not endear them to their neighbors. The Shakers were no strangers to communication with the spirit world. “Mother Ann” was subject to visionary communication with Christ (of whom she claimed to be the female embodiment) as well as angels and earlier Shaker founders who had passed on and she often communicated with her followers after her own death in 1784. As further evidence of the precedence of such spectral communication, the congregation as a whole was subject to ecstatic behaviors that bore all the earmarks of possession. But it was the period of 1837-1847, alternately known as the New Era, Mother Ann’s Second Appearing or Mother’s Work that led Shaker Elder Frederick W. Evans (who converted after experiencing a fiery vision which showed him emerging whole but for the loss of his genitals) to claim that Spiritualism had begun with the Shakers. 47 It was during this period that the group experienced a highly intense period of spiritual communication. On August 16, 1837, a group of three young girls in Watervliet fell trembling to the ground - singing songs in unknown languages (more recalling the crise of Mesmer than the somnambulism of Puységur). Upon emerging from their trance, the three claimed to have been visited by the Spirit of Mother Ann, following which visitation they undertook a heavenly journey guided by angels. Following this incident the Society of Believers entered into a ten year period of intensive communication with the spirit world during which Believers in all the Shaker communities became “instruments” (werkzeugen), communicating with, aside from Mother Ann, “Jesus, Mary Magdalene, St. Paul, Columbus, George Washington, Napoleon, Queens Isabella and Elizabeth I, Alexander the Great, William Penn, The Marquis de Lafayette, martyred saints, biblical figures, Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Negroes and Mohammed. Native American Spirit controls were especially popular, causing the medium to whoop, dance and smoke the peace pipe.” 48 This cohort of celebrity dead was soon to make itself known to the 47 Guiley. 48 Guiley, 539. 39
Spiritualist movement, whose mediums often spoke with great figures of the past (Swedenborg and Benjamin Franklin were especially vocal) as well as the spirits of various exoticised Others. The messages carried to the Shakers by the dead were generally of two kinds, a typology later reflected within Spiritualism with some minor variations. The spirits generally conveyed words of comfort and concern to individuals or provided broader moral exhortations and a general prodding to return to stricter Shaker ideals. Spiritual communiqués became a standard element of Shaker practice, a fact made emblematic by the establishment of “Holy Hills of Zion” or “Sacred Squares” within Shaker communities. These squares were to be placed atop the highest hill within a given community and it was there that twice a year, spring and fall, the Shakers were to commune and feast with the spirits in what were called “Mountain Meetings.” The Shakers also anticipated Spiritualism via the importance of women to their creed and mission. The Shakers held that God was both mother and father—an androgynous figure nicely captured by Frederick W. Evan’s emergence from the holy fire sans genitalia. The structure of the church itself called for both male and female leaders and Ann Lee was believed to be the "Second Appearing of Christ in female form". 49 You will also recall that the period of Mother Ann's Second Appearance was inaugurated by three young girls in Watervliet, illustrating the precept that it would be a feminine force that would lead the world into the “new era”. As we shall see, women played a central role in the discourse and practices of Spiritualism as well. Feminine leadership is a commonplace throughout the cases examined herein. Even when female leadership is absent, the feminine maintains a strong presence in the prevalence of non-rational modes of perception and the generally passive ethos of giving oneself over to the cosmos. Though the situation is not as simple as a displacement of the masculine by the feminine. In communication with the Other, gender is often troubled as a category. The female Christ of the Shakers, Evans shorn of his genitals by holy fire, young girls as key spiritual interlocutors—all 49 For a full discussion of the role of women in Shakerism, see Marjorie Proctor-Smith, “’In the Line of the Female’: Shakerism and Feminism,” in Women’s Leadership in Marginal Religions: Explorations Outside the Mainstream, ed. Catherine Wessinger (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). 40
Page 1 and 2: The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
Page 3 and 4: The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
Page 5 and 6: III. Chapter 2: Contact…………
Page 7 and 8: oth in their rich and bizarre detai
Page 9 and 10: Fukuyama also describes the histori
Page 11 and 12: and belonging that are native to th
Page 13 and 14: modernity, Weber stressed over and
Page 15 and 16: While positivism would emerge as th
Page 17 and 18: figure that serves as a medium betw
Page 19 and 20: sources of Spiritualism, Swedenborg
Page 21 and 22: The series of moments and discourse
Page 23 and 24: estful comprehension. It straddles
Page 25 and 26: The second chapter examines the eme
Page 27 and 28: Ch.1 The Dead INTRODUCTION Since th
Page 29 and 30: sense this dream of perfected commu
Page 31 and 32: political registers as well. This c
Page 33 and 34: In the late eighteenth century, Mes
Page 35 and 36: inverted form) along which the unde
Page 37 and 38: consciousness that is highly mobile
Page 39 and 40: up the process of thinking”. 38 S
Page 41 and 42: umor - and irony - would have it, w
Page 43: sense that Swedenborg’s researche
Page 47 and 48: minded, loves to roam in the woods
Page 49 and 50: etween humans and God as unthinkabl
Page 51 and 52: esearches was a tailor by the name
Page 53 and 54: concerns and from the fact that the
Page 55 and 56: simultaneously in the world of the
Page 57 and 58: which God has revealed to them and
Page 59 and 60: assessed the Fox sisters as the “
Page 61 and 62: each in turn Lockwood elaborated hi
Page 63 and 64: as miraculous or supernatural? 85 T
Page 65 and 66: hearts of men to help their brother
Page 67 and 68: the corrupting influence of the wor
Page 69 and 70: All manner of proscribed activities
Page 71 and 72: dawn of a new era, and you must not
Page 73 and 74: qualities the coarser and heavier t
Page 75 and 76: full of mischief as any child in th
Page 77 and 78: keynote in public (and much of the
Page 79 and 80: masculine traits), the figure of th
Page 81 and 82: The first was that all world religi
Page 83 and 84: space brother religion, The Great I
Page 85 and 86: and the menopauses.” 141 A genera
Page 87 and 88: Ch.2 Contact INTRODUCTION Contact w
Page 89 and 90: as spiritual aspirations embodied.
Page 91 and 92: magazine, the latter edited by icon
Page 93 and 94: featured female characters who were
Page 95 and 96:
keeping with the recurring integrat
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harmony with the universe (“if yo
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world were still struggling to asce
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hermetic credo as above, so below,
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insistence on the survival of the i
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evolutionary nomenclature of the co
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Pelley exhibited a variety of trait
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Chelas, which in the Hindu traditio
Page 111 and 112:
the Theosophical Society along with
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Ballard was told during his initial
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Masters. Members of the I Am Ascend
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operative in most later “space-br
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promises of evolutionary progress h
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such as St. Germain could make thei
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Ch. 3 The Saucer INTRODUCTION The t
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The arrival of the saucer promised
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salvation through the union of oppo
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potential public responses to the f
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as rationally comprehensible and a
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attached to cultivating a following
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percentage of unidentifieds to the
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extraterrestrial communicant suppli
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perpetrators of willful deception i
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signing.” 210 Gill’s amused res
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practicing theoretical astrophysici
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DOROTHY MARTIN While ufology began
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attention. Without knowing why, I p
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One message from an assistant of Sa
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Dr. Laughead first encountered Doro
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In the case of Dorothy Martin and h
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II space brother religions to large
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he could think of to obtain permiss
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other myth. You will recall that in
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and a Saturnian named “Ramu.” 2
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ecome small, self-sufficient commun
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paranoia in another context but in
Page 167 and 168:
the space brother narrative further
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Adamski—the UFO was effortlessly
Page 171 and 172:
communism. The connection between t
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The shift from contact to abduction
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science. 256 The Hill case was the
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abduction scenario in a variety of
Page 179 and 180:
In September of 1963, some two year
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car and gone into a field with bino
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The cadences of Barney’s recollec
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And he said it was a pregnancy test
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motif also speaks to a relationship
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on a human is smooth and rounded. S
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seems to have suggested that humans
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The mesmerist and hypnotherapist bo
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communiqués emerge not from the la
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David E. Mack, a Harvard trained an
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dystopian, or in the language of No
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In the space brother scenario, the
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Everything is now. The past is now;
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effectively cut off from that possi
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eaching our innate potential. The h
Page 209 and 210:
It is in this desire for dissolutio
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abductees feeling like guinea pigs.
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attack. Nietzsche writes of the blo
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Hill. Barney recalled his first gli
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The Gaze as philosophical and psych
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constituted modes of visuality. To
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traum or dream further indicates th
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educed not in the relatively benign
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will of the abductee—all speak to
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esultant exposure to the Real. The
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understood moorings, left to drift
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desired utopian state. The Others c
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were, more or less, ascended master
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Reports back from the spirit realm
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generally silent, but when they do
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to narrative structural positionali
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sensibilities, though one that woul
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of full transparency between interl
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Aber, W.W. “A Guide
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_____. “Adamski, George (1891-196
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_____. Discipline and Punish: the B
Page 251 and 252:
_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan
Page 253 and 254:
_____. Something about Soulcraft. N
Page 255:
Streiber, Whitley and Anne, ed. The
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