A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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science” was based on empirical evidence. It was the observable phenomena that emerged via the medium that constituted the only proofs in the Spiritualist religion. While there was some level of concordance between Christianity and various branches of the Spiritualist movement—Robert Dale Owen, founder of New Harmony, understood it as his mission to “establish Spiritualism as an intellectually and socially respectable adjunct of Protestant Christianity”— the anti-supernatural doctrine of Spiritualism sometimes lent itself to an anti-Christian stance. 68 Such is clearly the case with Lockwood. There’s a new day of dawn coming, ushered in by scientific research. It will demonstrate that life continues beyond the changing phenomena of plasmatic existence …And when it comes—as it will—the theories and speculations of theism will be crushed beneath the weight of accumulated scientific testimony, that demonstrates the pernicious character of these ancient platitudes, which exist only by constant abuse of the imagination. In that day of dawn the idols of the garden of Eden, the gods incestuous and incarnate, the sacrificial atonement, the cannibalistic and pagan ceremony of drinking a fetich Savior’s blood and eating his body, will disappear with the advancement of a higher mental civilization. 69 Spiritualists were often specifically opposed to the perceived stifling of spiritual exploration by the Church, which had nothing to offer but “a lot of stale phrases from the dark ages.” 70 Clearly there was more than a hint of anti-Catholicism and anti-clericism to all of these misgivings. Lucy Milburn wrote of how “the teachings of Jesus have been hedged about with dogmas and theological treatises, and the theologians have raised a mighty wall about the Garden of God, so that many of his dear loving children do not as yet see the far country.” 71 So often the target of attack was the obscurantist effect of orthodoxy rather than religion or Christianity per se. Nonetheless, Spiritualism was often derided as resolutely anti-religious. Oliver Wendell Holmes 68 Kerr, 113. 69 Lockwood, 16. 70 Danmar, n.p. 71 Milburn, vii. 53
assessed the Fox sisters as the “Nemeses of the pulpit.” 72 Spiritualism was further disparaged as a debasement and literalization of the spiritual world, what Emerson referred to as “the rat hole of revelation.” 73 The New York Times condemned Spiritualism for its “subversion of all respect and devotion to the only true faith,” while Washington’s National Intelligencer said of it that However absurd and despicable it may appear to men of sound reason and resolute conviction, it is spreading itself like a pestilence through our borders, carrying with it the madness of infidelity [Spiritualism was often associated and even equated with Free Love], of sensuous materialism if not actual atheism, and distracting the minds of the nervous, the feeble-witted, and the timid into actual insanity. 74 Note the language of dissipation, boundary crossing and madness, all pointing to Spiritualism as a force of disintegration. We see here again the fundamental tension of Spiritualist practice. At the same time as it promises a new integration—of science and religion, of the dead and the living, of past and future—it threatens dissipation by that very integration of mutually exclusive spheres. In Ghostwriting Modernity, Helen Sword writes of ways “in which mediums and communicating spirits unsettle seemingly stable ontological—or, as Jacques Derrida would have it, ‘hauntological’—boundaries between self and other, absence and presence, materiality and spirituality, life and death.” 75 Sword’s basic argument is that one can see the seeds of a postmodern/poststructural sensibility in the communication between humans and spirits—what Basham refers to as “these Victorian psychic puzzles, with their intricate clues and endless mirrorings.” 76 This is another way of imagining the fundamental tension or dialectic present throughout the genealogy drawn by this project. The ascendancy of positivism and its efforts to 72 Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Professor at the Breakfast Table” Atlantic Monthly 3 (January 1859): 90. 73 Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University, 2000) 5. 74 Moore, 28. 75 Sword, xi. 76 Diana Basham, The Trial of Women: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in Victorian Literature and Society (New York: New York University, 1992) 119. 54
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The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
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The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
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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
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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 and 44: sense that Swedenborg’s researche
Page 45 and 46: Spiritualist movement, whose medium
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: which God has revealed to them and
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
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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
Page 97 and 98: harmony with the universe (“if yo
Page 99 and 100: world were still struggling to asce
Page 101 and 102: hermetic credo as above, so below,
Page 103 and 104: insistence on the survival of the i
Page 105 and 106: evolutionary nomenclature of the co
Page 107 and 108: Pelley exhibited a variety of trait
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Chelas, which in the Hindu traditio
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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
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the space brother narrative further
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Adamski—the UFO was effortlessly
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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
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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
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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
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_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan
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_____. Something about Soulcraft. N
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Streiber, Whitley and Anne, ed. The
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