A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

simultaneously in the world of the living and the world of the dead, creating reciprocity between
two realms that the rational imagination holds to be mutually exclusive. The communication of
spirits described a figure that is both dead and alive. Knowledge obtained from the spirit world
indicated an intelligence residing simultaneously in both the past and the present. The faculty of
traveling clairvoyance presented the impossible state of bilocality—the medium existed not only
simultaneously in the world of the living and the world of the dead, but simultaneously in
Poughkeepsie and Cleveland (one would be hard-pressed to say which is more shocking).
Clearly Spiritualism was, among other things, a discourse of the mythic. So what of Spiritualism
as an unconscious futurology? What are the emergent socio-cultural fears and desires expressed
through Spiritualism? One way of addressing this question is through an examination of the
relation between Spiritualism and the reform politics of its day.
American culture of the mid-nineteenth century was broadly concerned with questions of
progress—mastery over the social and natural worlds. In terms of the discourse around
technology, the trope of mastery is apparent in contemporary discussions of both the telegraph
and the railroad. Also contemporary to the official arrival of Spiritualism on the American scene
was the increasing circulation of the term Manifest Destiny. Coined in the July-August 1845
issue of the Democratic Review by editor John L. O’ Sullivan, the term clearly spoke to a desire
to populate and tame the American continent. 60
Discoveries in basic physics, the emergent
institutionalization of medicine, revolutions against the old order in Western Europe, the
emergence of a militant abolitionist movement and the beginnings of the first wave of American
feminism all supported a sense that mastery over the physical and social world was imminent
and the result of this mastery would be perfection. The dead spoke of the perfectibility of
60 “Manifest Destiny” in Concise Dictionary of American History, ed. Wayne Andrews (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1962). Of course the doctrine of Manifest Destiny was later extended beyond American shores,
perhaps most notably in the annexations of Hawaii and the Philippines.
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