A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

keynote in public (and much of the private) performance was on physical manifestations and on
providing verifiable information—information that the medium could or should not have had
prior knowledge of. Alternately, mediums were called upon to contact the dead beloved of their
clients—the message: all’s well in the afterlife. The dispatch sent by one Mrs. H to her little boy
Jimmie serves well to illustrate the banality of such messages. Little Jimmy conveyed it to his
uncle as follows:
Mamma ain’t dead, uncle. That wasn’t her they put in the ground. That was just
something she lived in. I saw her last night. She came to me while I was in the bed
cryin’. She was all white an’ beautiful. First she kinda floated over the bed, and then she
came closer to me, and put her hand over my head and kissed me. I ain’t goin’ to cry no
more. There ain’t no use, because she ain’t in the ground. She’s around me all the time,
helpin’ me study and be good. Gee, I don’t see why anybody should cry at funerals!” 125
In short, the emphasis was on the provision of proof as to the origin of the ostensibly celestial
communiqués and on the receipt of messages of personal consolation. As Emerson archly
remarked, “these adepts have mistaken flatulency for inspiration.” 126
Thus the séance was often
reduced to guessing games and proto-therapy.
This consistent banality presaged a change in the fortunes of Spiritualism. Over the
course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American and European culture
underwent a shift from the medium as the central figure in the popular occult to what Peter
Washington has called the “western guru.” As we shall see, the western guru directly presages
the contactee. As Washington argues in Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon,
by 1875 the spiritualist revival was faltering and it was becoming clear that the
movement’s original promise would never be fulfilled. Its limitations were apparent to
all but the most committed. While musical dancing ghosts might be an amusement, they
didn’t have much light to throw on the life after death. Séances provide spectacle,
125 Cook, 74.
126 Ruth Brandon, The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New
York: Knopf, 1983) 48.
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