A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

This turn to the “East” as well as the ancient past, for inspiration, was a centrally
important impulse of Theosophy and the many religious movements that followed it (J. Gordon
Melton’s Encyclopedia of American Religions lists no less than 46 organizations emerging
directly from the original society). 130
As Edward Said has famously argued, while Orientalism
has consistently consigned the Oriental Other to an inferior position, there has also existed an
ongoing line of argument within Orientalism that imagines the East as a source of regeneration.
Said notes that Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, for example, urged upon their countrymen, and
upon Europeans in general, a detailed study of India because, they said, it was Indian culture and
religion that could defeat the materialism and mechanism (and republicanism) of Occidental
culture. 131
Theosophy, like Spiritualism, argued the compatibility of science and spirit. Annie
Besant writes that “Theosophy accepts the method of Science—observation, experiment,
arrangement of ascertained facts, induction, hypothesis, deduction, verification, assertion of the
discovered truth—but immensely increases its area.” 132 Unlike Spiritualism, Theosophy held
that Western Science in and of itself was insufficient to the task of plumbing the truths of the
metaphysical. “Her [nature] more hidden workings, those workings of life without which form
could not be, have received no attention, not being susceptible of physical observation, and this
gap can only be filled by the teachings of the Ancient Wisdom.” 133 The Ancient wisdom in
question was to be sought and found in Theosophy’s central figure of alterity—the mahatma or
ascended master.
The figure of the ascended master depends upon two assumptions central to Theosophy
and most of the alternative religious movements that would come to make up the “new age.”
130 J. Gordon Melton, The Encyclopedia of American Religions (Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research Co., 1987).
131 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1977) 115.
132 Annie Besant, Theosophy (New York: Dodge Publishing, 1912) 21.
133 Annie Besant, The Ancient Wisdom (Adyar, Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1977) 201.
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