Extraterrestrials In American Spiritualism

An essay on the history of the idea of people living on other planets

Sep 18, 2024

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During the late 1840s, the Church of the New Jerusalem was torn apart by schism. Less than a century had passed since Emanuel Swedenborg had inspired the Protestant movement when “renegade members…claimed to have replicated Swedenborg’s practice of spirit communication and showed a strong interest in Spiritualism,” Bret Carroll writes.1 This was expressly against the strong admonitions of Swedenborg, who counseled that spirits could deceive the unwary soul. It was not the last change they made to the ideas of the Swedish prophet. “The Spiritualists…incorporated important elements of Swedenborg’s doctrines and experiences into their religion. They echoed his ideas of interaction and interpenetration between the material and spiritual worlds and an inner core of divinity within each individual” — as above, so below; as below, so above, the hallmark of modern religious revisionism.

“Above all, they combined his spirit-centered cosmic order and his practice of spirit communication to form the heart of their religion,” Carroll says. “Swedenborg gave to the Spiritualist ideology the bulk of its defining features and was therefore its most important source.” Short-lived, this American ancestor of the New Age was subsumed into the new religion of Theosophy by the end of the 19th century. It has evolved into latter-day alternative religion. For example, UFO religion thrives in our day because Spiritualism transmitted to us the Swedenborgian faith-element of extraterrestrial beings as proof of God’s existence.

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