A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

chapters is the effort to frame spiritual matters in materialist terms. Shakerism is a notable
element in the field of influences that spawned American Spiritualism because the former had no
pretense to scientific validity. In fact, with its recurrence of visions, spirit possession, ecstatic
dance and xenoglossy, Shakerism more squarely captures the forces that threaten to dissolve the
promised stability of the scientific ethos.
The practice of mesmerism in the Anglo and European contexts was pursued as science.
Medical mesmerism in Great Britain had come under sustained attack by the medical community
and thus its practitioners had been forced to refine their methods, both of practice and research,
and the arguments they proffered in defense of mesmerism. In the U.S. context, there was
considerably less resistance and mesmerism developed simultaneously as an applied “science”
and as an entertainment, spawning a generation of itinerant mesmerists, beginning with the 1836
Boston lectures of Charles Poyen, who served to popularize the method. Medicine in the United
States was still relatively disorganized both as profession and science. Mesmerism and the
nascent Spiritualism of Swedenborg and the Shakers were ultimately to come together as
Spiritualism, a “spiritual science” peculiarly American in its combination of science, religion,
commerce and popular entertainment.
This combination was far from unprecedented in American culture. The revivalist
culture that spread across America beginning in the first two decades of the nineteenth century
was nothing if not theatrical. Revivalism’s traveling tent show, dramatic tales of conversion and
fire and brimstone preaching appealed to what sociologist Colin Campbell refers to as “the other
Protestant Ethic,” in which strong emotion is understood as a form of grace. As Jackson Lears
notes, Calvinism bequeathed to American culture a religious sensibility that imagined the gap
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