A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

up the process of thinking”. 38
Swedenborg did not simply speak with the spirits but was taken by them to other planes
of existence and to other planets (the latter travels being recorded most notably in a treatise with
the typically ungainly eighteenth century title - Concerning Earths in the Solar World, Which
Are Called Planets; and Concerning Earths in the Starry Heavens; and Concerning Their
Inhabitants; and Likewise Concerning the Spirits and Angels There from Things Seen and
Heard). During his travels, Swedenborg was to gather the knowledge which he would expound
upon through thousands of pages of Latin prose - prose which profoundly influenced a variety of
movements and individuals (including Baudelaire, Coleridge, Emerson, Blake, Henry James and
C.S. Pierce). On these journeys in which he not merely spoke with spirits but moved among
them, Swedenborg would enter into a deeper trance state, sometimes for days at a time. The
messages Swedenborg returned with are centrally concerned with the potential redemption of
humanity and its forward movement toward a utopian society. As Melton points out,
Swedenborg’s works appeared in the midst of a century heavily populated by narratives of the
“fantastic voyage.” 39
Such narratives used the conceit of a journey to some remote land to set up
a comparison wherein the traveler's homeland is held up against some discovered ideal society.
Swedenborg departs from this tradition in that his utopian ideals are ostensibly drawn not from
his imagination but from the worlds that in “fact” exist beyond our own—a precedent repeated
throughout the various moments detailed within these pages, displacing imagination and faith
with direct observation.
Central to Swedenborgian doctrine was the assertion that humans were created to exist
simultaneously on the spiritual and material planes, a conception central to Spiritualist belief.
While many, if not most, humans had lost their ability to recognize and articulate their existence
on the spiritual plane, this did not change the fundamental fact that the two levels of existence
were and are inextricably intertwined and recursive. Swedenborg’s goal was to establish
38 Brown, 55.
39 Melton.
34