A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

masculine traits), the figure of the guru was considerably more masculine than its Spiritualist
counterpart. As a “mannish” woman, Blavatsky muddied clear gender boundaries just as the
Spiritualist mediums before her. Basham argues that she “took on Jehovah himself. In place of
the forbidding father, she offered a gender-free Occult Mother whose only principle was the
capacity for change.” 128
Blavatsky and her fellow travelers distanced themselves from the
earlier spiritualist mediums in a variety of ways, two of which are key to the current discussion.
While the medium served as passive conduit, the western guru entered into conscious and active
communication with her spectral interlocutors - one of the clearly gendered elements in the shift
from the feminized Spiritualist medium. Secondly, the interlocutors of choice for the guru were
no longer the dead, but rather so-called “ascended masters.”
Prior to entering into a discussion of the nature of mediumship and the Masters within
Theosophical tradition, we should first take note of the Romantic impulse that informed the
movement’s inception and popularity. In his introduction to the collection of Spiritualist
pamphlets entitled Spiritualist Thought Gary L. Ward proposes a typology of Spiritualism. The
terminal mode consists of a Spiritualism in which
the proposed cosmologies have developed beyond traditional Christian confines, or even
beyond demythologized explanations such as those of Lockwood [The Molecular
Hypothesis of Nature], which have naturalistic language but are still based on a Christian
worldview. In this kind, Spiritualism is interpreted with the aid of occult notions of astral
planes or eastern belief in reincarnation, etc…Deep spiritual truths are not to be found in
biblical personages or in church leaders of the past or present, but rather in the masters
from the east, wherein lies all hidden wisdom (no number). 129
Ward’s “type 5” Spiritualism captures both the sense of how later Spiritualism turned toward the
East and how Spiritualism was influenced by Theosophy, a movement to which it had given
birth.
128 Basham, 195.
129 Gary Ward, “Introduction,” in Spiritualism I: Spiritualist Thought, ed. Gary L. Ward (New York: Garland Press,
1990).
74