A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

umor - and irony - would have it, was largely ghost-written) “In point of fact, every spiritualist
should honour Swedenborg, and his bust should be in every Spiritualist temple, as being the first
and greatest of modern mediums.” 42
John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Colony,
went so far as to call Spiritualism “Swedenborgianism americanized.” 43
Swedenborg’s role in
Spiritualism is explained in part by his capacity as medium and his claim to the knowledge that
humanity did in fact persist after death and was eager to communicate information about the
nature and status of the afterlife. In addition to exhibiting the ability to commune with the dead,
a key “higher phenomenon,” Swedenborg was also famed for his “traveling clairvoyance.” As
well as traveling throughout the solar system and the halls of heaven, he was also known to
extend his consciousness across terrestrial space. A particularly celebrated case, which was
related by philosopher Immanuel Kant, involved the Stockholm fire of 1759. While attending a
dinner in Göteborg, Swedenborg several times retired to the garden returning with reports of the
fire that was taking place some 280 miles away. 44
This is one among many stories illustrating
the seer’s ostensible abilities in “remote viewing.”
Swedenborg thus established, via his practice and writings, some of the basic tenets of
Spiritualism. The first of these was that the world of the living and the world thereafter were
always already in communication and that such communication rightly constituted a central
concern of spiritual practice. To access said communication, one had merely too enter into a
trance state. This trance state allowed not only for communication with spiritual entities but also
for astral travel and a heightened capacity for healing. The trance state as received via
Swedenborg and mesmeric practice, especially in its implications of passivity, was to be of
central importance to Spiritualism as well as to the variants of human-alien communication that
followed in its wake. To commune with the world of Spirit one had to open oneself to it—a
fundamentally feminine posture. A further element of Swedenborg’s philosophy that would
42 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, History of Spiritualism (New York: Arno Press, 1975) 21.
43 Howard Kerr, Mediums, and Spirit Rappers and Roaring Radicals: Spiritualism in American Literature, 1850-
1900 (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1972) 10.
44 Brown.
36