A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

ongoing attempts to achieve full mastery over the vagaries of nature. Establishing an ongoing
communication between the “living” and those in the afterlife constitutes a bid for an
immortality that serves the immediate interests of the living. The “scientifically” established
existence of an afterlife does provide a salve for mortal dread but the afterlife is only useful to
the present if the abyss between living and dead is bridged. With that bridge in place, humans
still in their mortal coil can learn from the dead and extract services from them. The dead
become a resource, used to locate lost objects and as a comfort to the bereaved. J.M. Peebles’
pamphlet entitled The Practical of Spiritualism: a Biographical Sketch of Abraham Jones, and
Historical Description of his Oil-Well Discoveries in Pleasantville, Pa., through Spirit Direction
apparently consisted, according to his biographer, of a happy blending of the spiritual with the
practical, demonstration that the spiritual philosophy is destined to open up the hidden wealth of
earth in mines, oils, gases, plants, jewels, and be, in the hands of inventors and mechanics, the
science and rule of new improvements in human industries. 123
Communications from the dead varied. Along with messages from the beyond that spoke
to the distant past and the life to come after death, spirits offered more banal observations.
James Russell Lowell referred to spirit rapping (in which sitters or the medium would cycle
through the alphabet and spirits would respond in negation or affirmation with raps, thus slowly
spelling out messages) as an ungainly “system of cryptography the pains of which resulted only
in messages such as ‘my coat is brown, or that I had an egg with my breakfast’.” 124
The standard
request for visitors to early séance-rooms was for the identification of the number and ages of the
visitors’ progeny, an exchange that smacks of the boardwalk (guess your weight and age) and the
“mitt camp” (home to the itinerant palm reader). At the height of Spiritualism’s popularity, the
123 J.O.Barrett, The Spiritual Pilgrim: A Biography of James M. Peebles (Boston: William White and Co., 1871)
157.
124 Kerr, 29.
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