Extraterrestrials In American Spiritualism
Extraterrestrials In American Spiritualism
An essay on the history of the idea of people living on other planets
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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Indeed, talking to ghosts was the primary attraction of this new American religion. The Spiritual Telegraph was the nation’s “longest-lived and most widely-circulated of the antebellum Spiritualist periodicals,” Carroll says. Like an adolescent individuating from their parents, the new religion had a complex relationship to its inspiration. One writer for the magazine “denied the authority of Swedenborg’s writings and pointed out that ‘Spiritualists go directly to the fountain of spiritual wisdom, as Swedenborg did; they talk with spirits.’” Spiritual Telegraph editor S. B. Brittan referred to Andrew Jackson Davis as “the youthful Swedenborg of our day;” Davis wrote in his 1857 book The Magic Staff that Swedenborg was in fact his spiritual mentor, appearing to him as a being of pure spirit with lessons from beyond the grave.
Davis “was attracted more to the Swedish mystic’s example, than to his writings” and told “readers to study Swedenborg’s seership but cautioned that his theology was in many ways too orthodox to be relevant to the modern religious world,” Carroll writes. His revisions of Swedenborg “typified the increasing tendency in antebellum America to locate experiential piety, and in some circles of religious thinkers religious authority, within the self.” Intuition and experience were trusted over institutions or doctrines in the flourishing new democracy. Spiritualist John Shoebridge Williams “boasted to his son in October 1852 that he had ceased consulting [Swedenborg’s writings] since his discovery of his own mediumistic powers eight months before.”
Late in 1845, Davis became the Seer to Dr. Silas S. Lyon, the Operator, and Rev. William Fishbaugh, the Scribe, at their clairvoyant medical clinic in New York City. This trio published The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind in 1847. Carroll calls it “a Swedenborgian description of the spirit world.” The book describes seven “spheres” of the spirit world populated by seven classes of spirit. It also describes five other planets in the solar system, their inhabitants, and their spiritual lives, for like Swedenborg, Davis had visited them all and seen them for himself.
His reports of the humans living on the surfaces of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are like Swedenborg’s, though Davis has made some changes. Principles of Nature is an update of Swedenborg for a modern audience, passing on the expressly religious belief in extraterrestrial worlds teeming with people, a belief that was itself meant as proof of the existence of heaven and God at first, that has transformed into faith in the aliens themselves.
Swedenborg had published millions of words trying to establish a complete system of thought. Finding his work inapplicable in parts, or incomplete, the Spiritualists blended his ideas with new ones.
Mesmerism was a “comparable” source to Swedenborg, Carroll says. “According to the mesmerist ideology, the universe was a harmonious physical and spiritual unity in which an invisible, universal, and all-pervasive fluid acted as the crucial integrating agent,” rather like the force in the Star Wars universe of George Lucas.
This “fluid” could be manipulated through mesmerism, also known as animal magnetism. “Mesmerisim also contributed to Spiritualism the belief that the body and soul could be affected by means of a magnetic force transmitted from one person to another in the trance state,” for example through hypnosis or telepathy. Franz Mesmer intended to create a therapeutic system but invented a new kind of public performance. Mesmeric trances for physical or spiritual healing were “something of a popular fad in America during the two decades before Spiritualism emerged and became a key element in the Spiritualist religion.”
Swedenborgianism was further combined with the utopianism of Charles Fourier, which produced “a religious ideology called ‘harmonialism’ by its adherents,” a movement among educated middle class men in the Northeast and Midwest. It was fully absorbed into Spiritualism by 1848.
Still, most of the writers in the early periodicals of Spiritualism were Swedenborgers, according to Carroll. Spiritualist author George T. Dexter held séances with the ghost of Swedenborg, not Mesmer or Fourier.
Nor was Spiritualism the only new American religion defining itself in relation to Swedenborg. Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a lecture, “Swedenborg; or the Mystic” in 1845. Published in 1850, the essay compares its subject to Shakespeare, Aritstotle, Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and other great philosophers, noting that “he begins to spread himself into the minds of thousands” (emphasis added).2 “I own with some regret that his printed works amount to about fifty stout octavos, his scientific works being about half of the whole number; and it appears that a mass of manuscript still unedited remains in the royal library at Stockholm,” Emerson wrote by way of a review. “The scientific works have just now been translated into English, in an excellent edition” that Emerson was happy to recommend. Swedenborg, he said, had written his book Economy of the Animal Kingdom “with the highest end, to put science and the soul, long estranged from each other, at one again.”
For “in effect, he is the last Father in the Church, and is not likely to have a successor.”
It is the high point of Emerson’s praise for Swedenborg. The rest of Emerson’s lecture is a critique of the mystic, whom he considers imperfect and inferior to the scientist that Swedenborg had been prior to his religious revelation. Religions have struggled to integrate science, the objective finder of epistemological fact, throughout the modern era, and Swedenborg the scientist had taken up that struggle through a “higher method than by experience,” Emerson believed, admiring the attempt. “This path is difficult, secret and beset with terror. The ancients called it ecstasy or absence, a getting out of their bodies to think.” Disembodiment, which the Spiritualists called astral projection, had been Swedenborg’s scientific method of the soul, his way of studying heaven and hell, both located in the literal heavens. Such insight drives men mad, Emerson says. “It is hard to carry a full cup; and this man, profusely endowed in heart and mind, early fell into dangerous discord with himself.” Emerson is enthusiastic for Swedenborg’s Doctrine of Correspondences, but rejects the mystic’s rigid belief that symbolic forms seen in nature hold singular meanings, because nature “is no literalist.”
“His theological bias thus fatally narrowed his interpretation of nature, and the dictionary of symbols is yet to be written. But the interpreter whom mankind must still expect, will find no predecessor who has approached so near to the true problem,” Emerson writes. “He almost justifies his claim to preternatural vision, by strange insights of the structure of the human body and mind.”
Carroll writes that “the differences between Spiritualists and Transcendentalists consisted largely of diverging interpretations of Swedenborg and different understandings of the religious order he inspired.” Both new denominations “denied that Swedenborg was an authoritative theologian and rejected substantial components of his religious system,” keeping the invisible spirit realm. Transcendentalists were skeptical Swedenborg had really been there, while Spiritualists were sure he had, and that they could visit there, too. “Convinced that their notion of democratic contact with a hierarchy of spirit mediators permitted an ideal blend of freedom and order, Spiritualists situated themselves between what they consider the anarchy of transcendentalism and the authoritarianism of the New Church.”
Loyal American believers in Swedenborg rejected the ‘rappings’ at the home of the Fox sisters in Hydesville, New York. Davis and Fishbaugh endorsed the girls’ public performances of communion with ghosts in Rochester during 1848. Maggie confessed the hoax to the New York World in 1888, discrediting the ‘science’ of Spiritualism without deterring the masses from belief in spirits one bit.
It was the claim to have visited with angels that gave Emerson pause. Swedenborg “carries his controversial memory with him in his visits to the souls,” and once there, becomes a scientist again. “Strange, scholastic, didactic, passionless, bloodless man, who denotes classes of souls as a botanist disposes of a carex, and visits doleful hells as a stratum of chalk or hornblende!” Such was “the anomalous pretension of Revelations of the other world” that “only his probity and genius can entitle it to any serious regard. His revelations destroy their credit by running into detail,” Emerson wrote, while the beings he meets are not individual characters at all, for they “speak one speech. All his interlocutors Swedenborgize. Be they who they may, to this complexion must they come at last.”
“Swedenborg is disagreeably wise, and with all his accumulated gifts, paralyzes and repels,” Emerson thought. Davis, whose own ecstatic experiences “had precedent in the life of Swedenborg” according to his colleague George Bush, also had urgent incentives to update the mystic’s ideas, especially his cosmology.
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“Their organization is of the most perfect kind, both mental and physical; and their intellect being expansive and powerful, judgment controls them entirely, insomuch that weakness and disease are not existing” among the residents of Saturn, according to Davis.3 “The cranium not being composed of a heavy, thick substance, gives great activity to the senses in respect to external objects.” This explains why Saturnians have psychic science, which is superior to human science, Davis opines.
“With a telescopic mind they familiarize themselves with earths existing between them and the Sun, and also with the inhabitants upon them existing. They contemplate the planets of space [i.e. extrasolar planets] with no more curiosity than we do those of the Solar System,” Davis writes. “Their minds being free from imperfection — from all that is opposed to righteousness, they associate with that which is pure and good. They connect their minds with first principles, and with the internal of all things.” Humans, then, but superhuman: “The perfection of their internal principle far exceeds that of any class of human beings in our Solar System,” because there are humans living throughout the solar system.
Davis understood the solar system as increasing in density the closer planets were to the sun. Saturn was the outermost of the classical planets, therefore the least dense, therefore its inhabitants had transparent skulls that allowed them to observe us, as well as people across the galaxy living on countless worlds. “Their minds are sufficiently expansive to comprehend at a single glance, the whole surface of their country. Hence they are conscious of the movements of the whole nation. All are united as one brotherhood, harmonizing in all their interests, though existing in different locations on the planet.” Saturn has achieved world peace, why can’t we?
Saturnians “inhabit buildings of an ingenious and peculiar structure, which are also beautiful and convenient,” Davis writes. His generalizations of the architecture are downright Swedenborgian: “These are very large and extensive, covering immense areas of land, like an extensive city among us. There are, however, but few of these large and united buildings upon the surface of the planet, these being near the equator, where light and heat, which correspond to interior truth and love, are most perfectly enjoyed.” This is not scientific observation. It is a fantasy born of astrology and wearing science for a hat.
Being closest to the sun, Mercury is a harsher world, where the animals “manifest a combative and retaliating disposition toward all things they meet, and a constant preying upon each other, insomuch that their very active temperaments are sometimes destroyed, the loss of which results in the destruction of their lives.” The humans living on Mercury have total recall, “a most powerfully retentive memory” that is “the strongest faculty belonging to them.”
Davis describes a kind of autism, or perhaps narcissism, universal to Mercurians. “Each one has a great desire to be thought more enlightened than any other beings in existence: and having this self-persuasion, they presume upon their memory to profess the intelligence that no other beings possess.” They do not rely on their senses, but their memories of the past, and “dislike to have their ears addressed instead of their understanding.” This fortune-cookie ethnography explains why Mercury, which “has not been inhabited longer than about eight thousand years; while the other habitable planets have been peopled for innumerable ages,” exists in a Hobbesian state of nature. “War and persecution have prevailed among them to an extreme extent; and strife, and malice, and all things that result from ignorance and folly, have obstructed their progress for many ages.”
“And at this moment, one of those destructive battles is about being consummated,” Davis wrote, adding a note of vaguely operatic drama. Primitive because they are a young race, the Mercurians are “covered with a kind of hair, and their countenances are very full and dark; and the whole appearance of the body would be to us no more pleasing than that of the orang-outang.” If it sounds racist, then it probably is, for Davis wrote in the antebellum decade, when racial slavery was endemic to the United States and supposedly-scientific people were explaining it through the invention of so-called scientific racism.
Yet the residents of Mercury were still “rudimental materials that are gradually ascending to higher stages of refinement,” a planetary transmigration. Being an older race, on a world orbiting farther from the sun, the humans on Venus are much more advanced than Mercurians. For “all our most exalted conceptions can not possibly transcend the unspeakable beauty, purity, and refinement, that exist among the inhabitants of this planet.” Venusians emit a “glowing radiation” from their faces as they talk. “Their eyes are blue and of a soft expression, are very full and expressive, and are their most powerful agents in conversation. When one conceives a thought, and desires to express it, he casts his beaming eyes upon the eyes of another; and his sentiments instantly become known.” Telepathic conversation is the most honest kind of all, for one cannot possibly lie except by using words.
This both is, and is not, Swedenborg’s solar system. Davis has written Swedenborg fan fiction, swapping narrative elements as he pleases. Swedenborg had said that telepathy was the purest form of communication, that spoken words were the fall from innocence for humans on earth because they enable us to lie. However, he wrote of peaceful, deeply spiritual Mercurians that could read his memories of places and peoples, exhibiting curiosity. Swedenborg’s Venusians, on the other hand, were “two kinds of people” being “of quite opposite dispositions,” a “gentle and humane” tribe versus “people who are savage and almost feral.”4 The blood-tribe took “great delight in pillage, and the greatest delight in eating plundered food. The pleasure they feel when they think about eating plundered food was communicated to me; I could tell that it was their supreme joy.”
Swedenborg died before William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781, so it is notably absent from his solar system travelogue. Davis does not attempt to describe the inhabitants of Uranus either. Neptune, discovered just six years before Davis published The Principles of Nature, is also missing from his planetary ethnographic sketches. He does however acknowledge the discoveries, starting in 1801, of Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta, asteroids located “between Jupiter and Mars” and “ very similar in their orbits and revolutions around the sun.” Uninhabited, they are the pieces of what “will ultimately be, a perfect planet,” Davis predicts. Planets transmigrate just like souls.
Martians closely resemble humans with “more perfect symmetry.” They “exhibit a peculiar dignity and a peculiar air of exaltation in all their motions.” While “the upper part of the face has a lively, yellowish cast,” the bottom of the Martian face “is of a different color, being rather dark.” Their craniums feature “a peculiar prominence of the top of the head, indicative of high veneration.” Racially diverse in their own right, “the inhabitants appear joined in perfect agreement and consociality.” Mars, the planet named for the god of war, has achieved world peace. Why can’t we?
Jupiterians “do not walk erect, but assume an inclined position, frequently using their hands and arms in walking, the lower extremities being rather shorter than the arms according to our standard of proportion.” This evolutionary turn is the result of their “modest desire to be seen only in an inclined position.” Davis describes “a peculiar prominence of the upper lip, this consisting of a complex and interwoven mass of fibres, the action of which gives great expression to inward thoughts and feelings; which expression among them constitutes the peculiar mode of conversation.” This lip-communication equals telepathy, for “they can not think one thing and speak another.”
As perfect beings, the people of Jupiter “do not die, but rather sink into repose by an expansion of their interiors which seek more agreeable spheres” of existence, per the seven-layer cake of Davis’s esoteric cosmology. And if some beings could ascend directly to the next plane of existence as whole beings, then potentially any being could achieve the necessary state of holiness.
Jupiterians do not live long, for heaven is so enticing and so easy to reach. Davis says their average lifespan is just thirty years. Shelter is temporary on Jupiter. The people live in “well-constructed edifices, whose form corresponds to that of a tent, rather than a house, on Earth. These are lined with a bluish bark … and they are thus rendered impervious to cold, water, and light.” Best of all, Jupiter has achieved global peace, so why can’t we?
It’s so simple! Just “by conceiving of the indestructible relation which exists between purity and truth, the minds of the inhabitants of the Earth will be led to recognise their institutions, and to spurn with the utmost abhorrence all things that are opposed to righteousness,” Davis assures us. “Thus efforts will be made to bring about a better state of things; and this will be the unfolding of interior truths and principles that are at this moment considered as imaginary and chimerical. And by properly conceiving of the celestial peace and purity that flow spontaneously from interior truths, the minds of the Earth will become relieved from their external bonds of corruption, into the inexpressible light and liberty of celestial love and peace!”
This tour of the solar system is just 27 pages out of 816, per the original edition of Principles of Nature. Like Swedenborg, Davis treats outer space as a proof that heaven can be reached from earth. Life on other planets is not the main event in their expressly spiritual writings. It is simply one element of the larger scheme of the universe. In comparison, social reform and poverty reduction — progressive utopian idealism, per Charles Fourier — takes up the bulk of the third section of the book. Davis has revised Swedenborg for the 19th century American reform projects of transformative millenarian Protestants.
The impetus towards unity and peace on earth is intrinsic to the project. Earth must model itself on the other planets, where people are more sensible and have figured out that wars are bad. Emanuel Swedenborg promulgated his Other Planets in the midst of the Seven Years’ War, considered by present-day historians to be the first global war, and the work reflected his contempt for violence. Davis revised Swedenborg’s planets in an atmosphere of tension two years before ‘Bloody Kansas’ began the spiral of violence that led to the catastrophe of the American Civil War. In the grief of war’s aftermath, Spiritualist writers influenced by Swedenborg, such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, became more popular than ever, for they had swung the gates of heaven open to all. She was endorsed by Spiritualist leader George Bush, who also endorsed Davis.
It was to be the pattern of development going forward. George Adamski, their spiritual descendant, met an alien from Venus in the desert 100 years after Davis et al published Principles of Nature and one month after the United States had just tested the first hydrogen bomb. Peace was the spiritual prerequisite to Solving All The Problems on earth. The other planets all have peace. Why can’t we have peace?
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Swedenborg’s ideas were carrying on without Swedenborg. At the end of his life, he had “contributed to the efforts of a group of radical Rosicrucians in Hamburg and Kabbalistic Jews in Amsterdam and London to develop a new syncretic religion, which would merge Christian, Jewish, and Muslim mystical themes,” Jonathan Rose and Ollie Hjern write in their biography of the mystic.5 “This rather bizarre and secretive project had significant political ramifications in Sweden, Denmark, and Europe.”
During the 19th century, his writings exerted a profound influence on the formation of “Illuminist” Freemasonry, and still accounts for lingering public interest in Rosicrucianism and the esoteric spirituality of his own time. His ecumenical approach was to be amplified in the American context, transforming his lower-case-t theosophy into Helena Blavatsky’s capital-T Church of Theosophy.
Emerson’s essay on Swedenborg quotes the Qur’an and “hindoo” writings. Already present in American religious thinking, eastern mysticism became more popular after the Civil War. Davis’s image of Jupiterians walking on all fours to humble themselves before heaven already seems very much like Buddhist monks walking the long kowtow to the holy mountain, prostrating themselves with each step. Cultural blending was normal in American alternative religion, challenging the uniquely Christian nature of the Christ. Adamski, the man who “met” a man from Venus in the desert southwest in 1952, spent the Prohibition era teaching “scientific lamaism” and serving holy wine to paying members of his “temple.” He was Polish Romany by birth, and like many occult prophets, he made spurious claims of spiritual education in Tibet. Blavatsky had set this course by formalizing the inclusion of Vedic texts, a topic we shall return to in a future essay.
Syncretism — the blob-like absorption of any and all spiritual systems into a single, mystical, squishy concept — was both an inheritance from Swedenborg and a spiritual force which made him fade from the scene, slowly, like a literary ghost. His occultism was his most interesting quality to Spiritualists and so their occultism outgrew him, and they outshined his brilliance in the intellectual-spiritual firmament.
Democracy was extended to the afterlife. They “enhanced the status of spirits as desirable religious teachers by blurring the distinction between angels, who in standard Christian theology had never been human, and spirits, who had passed from an earthly existence to the afterlife.” Now, angels could also be the “purified spirits” of those with divine knowledge (gnosis) of heaven. God was remote, so spirit communication was “a way to infuse personality into their universe,” developing a personal relationship with creation instead of the creator, or the son, or the holy spirit.
Likewise, Swedenborg had imagined a hierarchy of spirits that mediated God’s will (the “mediate influx”), a universal structure of divine authority that Spiritualism borrowed, stripped, and recycled. “The product of a social aristocracy, Swedenborg harbored decidedly undemocratic notions of spirit communication and religious authority,” warning that the spirits attracted to communicate with the spiritual seeker would be of a kind with themselves, reflecting and reinforcing their biases, Carroll explains. To become dependent on spirits for guidance was dangerous. He had used his own reason to fact-check what he had been told, Swedenborg said, and he had found the authority of priests could be relied upon. His spirit world was “socially static, involving fixed status rather than upward mobility.” His hierarchy of spirit did not allow those below to learn from those above.
“Spiritualists, by contrast, added fluidity and open communication to their socio-spiritual order, making growth and upward mobility possible.” Americans of the burgeoning progressive era wanted a progressive heaven. As one rose through the seven spheres of the afterlife, coming ever nearer to God, they were responsible to fewer and fewer divine spirits for understanding of the divine will. “This understanding of the afterlife reflected both the entreprenurial effects of a commercial economy and the democratization of religious authority in the early republic,” Carroll writes. “Spiritualists imagined an Americanized spirit world, remarkably like the fluid society in which they lived.” They denied hell, or split with New Church over the idea that souls could be condemned there eternally.
Individuality mattered to the new religion. “Souls initially assumed a position in the spheres corresponding to the level of development attained on earth — a position which was not pleasant for those whose terrestrial behavior warranted some period of contrition,” Carroll explains. “They not only humanized the spirits but made them familiar and accessible, emphasizing interpersonal relationships between spirits and mortals (as well as among spirits themselves) in a new and distinctive way that Swedenborg had positively discouraged.” The ministers of the Spiritualist church were invisible spirits known to the mediums by name, “specifically chosen by them for consultation,” that “could be contacted virtually at will by the medium.”
The heavens above were populated with “finite spiritual beings who embraced a virtually infinite number of degrees of development.” Spirits were believed to be busy raising the human race at all times. Carroll discerns “a popular and persistent theme in American religious culture, one that found expression far beyond the boundaries of the Swedenborgian subculture: namely, the existence and role of advanced but subdivine human beings and their relationship with those on earth.” It was a heaven for the emerging professional and bureacratic administrative elites of the industrial age.
Swedenborg’s literary trope of “male wisdom” vs “female love” was also borrowed, but then debated, trending away from his intentions. His “ideology of gender hierarchy pervaded their descriptions of the functioning of the cosmic institution,” Carroll writes. Higher levels of divinity were masculine, lower levels were feminine, and the spirit “penetrated” or “impregnated” the natural world via this hierarchy in submission to a patriarchal God. The Shakers, another early American religious movement reacting to Swedenborg, influenced John Murray Spear’s suggestion of “an androgynous universe but a bisexual God; ‘the Mind of all things,’ said Spear, ‘is both feminine and masculine.’”
Feminism had arrived in American theology. Spritualists were frequently supportive of women’s suffrage and Temperance, even placing women in positions of religious authority like the radical Shakers did. Not everyone joined in declaring a “fathermother” deity, however. “Andrew Jackson Davis, among others, distinguished ‘FatherGod,’ the final source of causation, from ‘Mother-Nature,’ the body of the universe and the object of divine causation,” Carroll writes. Spiritualism thus enforced “Victorian notions of social order” rather than liberating women from their cultural corsets, as they “combined liberal and conservative notions of the gender of deity, notions of cosmic androgyny and of masculine dominance, in their search for cosmic order.” This debate has played out more recently in the Heaven’s Gate UFO cult.
“I think, sometimes, he will not be read longer,” Emerson lectured at the apparent height of Swedenborg’s literary fame. All the attention was bound to backfire. “His great name will turn a sentence. His books have become a monument. His laurel so largely mixed with cypress, a charnel-breath so mingles with the temple incense, that boys and maids will shun the spot.” Praising Swedenborg’s “slow but commanding influence which he has acquired, like that of other religious geniuses,” Emerson expected that it “must be excessive also, and have its tides, before it subsides into a permanent amount.”
Indeed, Swedenborg was being torn apart like some ancient planet, with some bits to be absorbed by newer planets harboring spiritual life and much of the rest scattered into the darkness. “An ardent and contemplative young man, at eighteen or twenty years, might read once these books of Swedenborg, these mysteries of love and conscience, and then throw them aside for ever,” Emerson thought.
Emerson lived long enough to hear that Giovanni Schiaparelli had observed “canals” on Mars during the opposition of 1877. He was dead before astronomer Percival Lowell proposed that Mars harbored life. But the idea that people lived on Mars had been planted in America for over a century by that point, so speculation was widespread, and statements of belief hardly uncommon, before there was an inkling of scientific evidence. The spiritual great-grandchildren of Emanuel Swedenborg were already primed to believe in Martians, even if they had not read his works. When Richard Hoagland announced his supposed discovery of a “face” on Mars in 1997, Americans were ready to believe in Martians because they always had, even though almost no Americans knew Swedenborg’s name anymore.
By then, Spiritualism and Theosophy had followed him into the dustbin of faith history, their contents revised and recycled as the New Age and the flying saucer religions. Today, the mystic is unrecognizable, and unrecognized, having faded from the popular culture just as Emerson had prophesied.
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Carroll, Bret E. Spiritualism in Antebellum America. Indiana University Press, 1997.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Spiritualism; or, the Mystic.” The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. IV. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1904.
Davis, Andrew Jackson. The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Relations, and a Voice to Mankind. By and through Andrew Jackson Davis. S. S. Lyon and W. Fishbough, 1852.
Swedenborg, Emanuel. The Earthlike Bodies Called Planets in Our Solar System and in Deep Space, Their Inhabitants, and the Spirits and Angels There Drawn from Things Heard and Seen. 1758.
Rose, Jonathan and Hjern, Ollie. Scribe of Heaven: Swedenborg's Life, Work, and Impact, Jonathan S. Rose, et al. editors, Swedenborg Foundation, Incorporated, 2005.