A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

time, and space. It promised the extension of science into arenas Bacon had consigned to
Authority and Faith. It held forth the oxymoronic vision of a faith built on fact and observable
phenomenon—“a glimpse of an ultimate incandescence where science and religion fuse into
one.” 138
Spiritualist practice put irreconcilable realms into communication—present and past,
living and dead—an optimistic hyperbole offered partially in response to the lingering question
of communication’s sheer possibility—as “an answer to the dread that separate centres of
consciousness must always be strangers.” 139
Most fundamentally, communion with spirits
brought the assurance that one need not fear the alienation from self that death threatens. The
mortal and immortal selves were fused as one by promises from beyond the grave.
Communion with the Other simultaneously functioned centrifugally. Spiritualism
injected strains of indeterminacy into the very transparency it promised. The lines of
communication it opened were as suggestive of collapse as they were of progress. If one could
be simultaneously in Poughkeepsie and Cleveland, and speak to the dead about the future, the
basic coordinates of being begin to shudder. If one can speak scientifically of such things, than
what of the science that proclaims their impossibility? At the level of the Self it was the capacity
of mediumship that most directly threatens integrity. The links between the understood
instability of the feminine and the capacity to bridge the worlds of the living and the dead were
legion. 140 The medium hovered between the slackness of neurasthenia and the fraught tensions
of hysteria. One Frederick R. Marvin went so far as to discuss the pathology of “mediomania,”
afflicting “women, especially at puberty or the menopauses, or at some period between puberty
138 Myers, 290.
139 Myers, 282.
140 See Basham.
119 Frederick R. Marvin, The Philosophy of Spiritualism and The Pathology and Treatment of Mediomania (New
York: Asa K. Butts and Company, 1874).
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