A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

the cosmos is restored, and Israel is redeemed.” 190 The Apocalypse was the end of time in the
sense that it signified a shift from profane time to a divine space that both transcended and
embodied all time. It represented both the alpha and omega of the human species in that it
represented a return to our divine point of origin, a return that was encoded as the sole and final
goal of human existence and clearly embodied the Lacanian desire for a return to the Real. From
a Judeo-Christian perspective, the apocalypse was the historical money-shot, the release and
seeding of the final phase of humanity.
Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the apocalyptic underwent a
transformation in which the divinely ordained and human aspiration were conflated. The central
concern of the lineage discussed in this dissertation was and is to bring about the next phase in
human evolution. This next big step is both preordained and contingent upon the efforts of
“enlightened” groups and individuals. I will again note, however, that said effort is not expended
along lines of traditional political action but rather in reconfiguring the relation between self and
cosmos. It is not the power or activity of the believers themselves that will bring about the
hoped for ascension but rather the power of the cosmos that their practice taps into. The
evolutionary referent in such thinking has been variously construed as the development of such
supposedly latent human powers as telekinesis, telepathy, astral projection and other magical
faculties; as a mass embarkation to our new home in the stars; or some more ineffable shift, such
as contact and union with the overmind.
The Great I AM and groups that followed in its lineage promised their followers a
position in the avant-garde. You can bootstrap yourself to the next level now! The promised
benefits functioned as asymptotic objects of desire—always promised, never arriving. The
190 D.S. Russell, “Apocalyptic Literature” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. Bruce M. Metzger & Michael
D. Coogan (New York: Oxford University Press) 34.
113