Extraterrestrials Are An Old Time Religion In America: Your Free Weekend Listening
Reuploaded audio versions of essays on the spiritual biography of the flying saucer
On Wednesday, I published my latest essay on the history of people believing in aliens on other planets. Inventing Space Jesus: The Urantia Book And Extraterrestrials In American Religion is exclusively available to premium subscribers right now. If you are not already a premium subscriber, consider upgrading to learn this forgotten story of the American spiritual frontier.
Here are five essays that I have recorded as audio versions and uploaded to YouTube. I have included links to the text versions. The Swedenborg essay is free reading, while the others remain locked for premium subscribers. If you are already a premium subscriber, thank you for your support! Chances are that you missed these essays earlier, so here is a digest post. If you are a free subscriber, then enjoy a weekend of free listening.
Emanuel Swedenborg was the most prominent person of his century to popularize the idea of contacting extraterrestrial beings through spirit-communication and describe his own visits to alien planets through astral travel. The printing press popularized his ideas in the American colonies before the Declaration of Independence; Benjamin Franklin was a reader. Swedenborg inspired the ‘New Church of Jerusalem’, which appeared on the frontier of the new American nation from the beginning.
New religions were born in America during the decades that followed. All of them responded to Swedenborg’s writings. Some parts of Swedenborg did not fit the character of a new, young country. Americans wanted a more egalitarian heaven to match their Jeffersonian principles. They also wanted a myth that included the New World in their creation-story of the world, a narrative that squared with America’s manifest destiny on the continent. Right away, prophets answered this need with new revelations that explained the earth as one of many worlds in the universe, all teeming with human multitudes. Heresies such as polytheism and reincarnation mixed freely with Christian apocalyptic expectations.
American readers of Swedenborg ignored his strict warning against attempts to replicate his methods of spirit-communication. Channeling, automatic writing, and other forms of spiritualism became very popular, so that Spiritualism very nearly constituted a whole new religion in America over four decades. The writings of the spititualists are replete with Swedenborgian descriptions of human life on other planets, and exhibit great concern with the progress of the human soul in a heavenly afterlife, visiting many worlds.
Spiritualism was however subsumed into Theosophy. These writers, including Helena P. Blavatsky, Alice Bailey, and Charles Leadbeater, inspired the Christian Theosophist movements of the interwar period to believe in Ascended Masters on other planets, occasionally visiting earth in ethereal spirit-ships to aid the spiritual progress of mankind. After the Second World War, psychotherapy adopted this ‘New Age’ belief system for its own purposes, with Carl Jung authoring the seminal work on UFOs as a spiritual phenonenon heralding the Aquarian Age. Hypnotic suggestion during ‘recovered memory therapy’ and New Age beliefs played undeniable roles in shaping our shared archetype of the alien ‘grays’.
I have been uploading these videos at YouTube audio in historical order as opposed to the frenetic non-order in which I have published the essay series. There are just a few more essays for me to write before this vein of inquiry is exhausted and I must consider a book proposal. Thanks to all my subscribers, free and premium, who stick with me all the way to the end of this project. Have a great weekend, and keep your eyes on the heavens.
Inventing Space Jesus: The Urantia Book And Extraterrestrials In American Religion
During the 18th century, Emanuel Swedenborg published a series of volumes about the progress of the human soul in the afterlife through a universe filled with worlds covered in people. Swedenborg claimed that, by means of spirit-communication and astral travel, he had visited with extraterrestrial beings, living and dead. He described Mercury, Venus, the moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and extrasolar worlds as well as their humanoid inhabitants.