A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

sense that Swedenborg’s researches were a form of natural science was carried through into
Mesmerism and Spiritualism and was key in how the latter practices were understood as in
keeping with their time rather than wholly as anachronisms. Myers draws our attention to this
rapprochement and its incipient links to the utopian in a passage from Human Personality.
Bacon foresaw the gradual victory of observation and experiment –the triumph of actual
analysed fact—in every department of human study;—in every department save one.
The realm of ‘Divine things’ he left to Authority and Faith. I here urge that that great
exemption need no longer be made. I claim that there now exists an incipient method of
getting this Divine knowledge also, with the same certainty, the same calm assurance,
with which we make our steady progress in the knowledge of terrene things. The
authority of creeds and Churches will thus be replaced by the authority of observation
and experiment. The impulse of faith will resolve itself into a reasoned and resolute
imagination, bent upon raising even higher than now the highest ideals of man. 46
The religious concerns of Mesmerism, Swedenborgianism and Spiritualism were understood not
as supernatural but as part of the progressive revelation of the natural world to human
understanding. The Swede’s writings and its consequents promised nothing less than a rational
comprehension of the Spirit.
THE SHAKING QUAKERS AND MESMERISM IN AMERICA
Through the nineteenth century, American culture was, in many ways, a European culture. The
advent of Spiritualism proper (generally understood as beginning with the 1848 public debut of
the Fox sisters) had one American precursor: the “Shakers.” Founded in Manchester, England in
the mid-eighteenth century by Ann Lee, the United Society of Believers was derisively referred
to as the “shaking Quakers” in reference to the ecstatic dancing that was a central part of their
worship. Following years of harassment in Manchester, the group moved to America and settled
in Niskayuna (later called Watervliet), near Albany, New York, in 1776. Their commitment to
pacifism, their abhorrence of sexual union as the source of humans’ estrangement from God,
46 Frederic W. H. Myers, Volume two of Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (New York:
Longmans, Green and Co., 1904) 279.
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