Presumed Immanent: The Raëlians, UFO Religions, and The Postmodern Condition

Nova Religio
Presumed Immanent: the Raëlians,

UFO Religions, and the
Postmodern Condition
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Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/nr/article-pdf/4/1/86/317818/nr_2000_4_1_86.pdf by guest on 28 June 2020

Bryan Sentes and Susan Palmer
I
n 1974, Claude Vorilhon (later Raël), a French race-car driver, pop
singer, and journalist, published Le Livre Qui Dit La Verité (sic) (The
Book Which Tells the Truth), his first book describing his meeting with
extraterrestrials and their revelations concerning humankind and the
cosmos. Today, the Raëlian religion is the largest “flying saucer religion”
in the world, claiming a membership of 35,000 in eighty-five countries.1
It is millenarian and evangelistic in its goals, yet world-affirming in its
orientation towards society. Raëlians do not fit the anti-cult movement’s
stereotype of a cult (which new religious movement does?), nor do they
correspond neatly to Roy Wallis’s tripartite typology of “world rejecting/
affirming/accommodating” new religious movements (NRMs).2 Thus,
Raëlians present an enigma: they are fundamentalists but also
modernists. Their actions are based on the belief in the literal and
infallible truth embodied in their sacred texts, Raël’s accounts of his
meetings and communications with his extraterrestrials, the Elohim,
“those who come from the sky.” These texts bear at least a prima facie
consistency with Robert S. Ellwood’s suggestion that the appeal of “UFO
cults” might reside in their offering “classic religious eschatologies
revamped to meet the fears and dramas of the modern world.”3 In this
study, we will explore the Raëlian eschatology within the context of the
“fears and dramas of the modern world” and the historical horizon within
which the modern world and Raëlianism both find their context. Briefly,
Raëlianism replaces the supernatural with the extraterrestrial and
technological in order to demystify and demythologize primarily the
Abrahamic religions, simultaneously (if unconsciously) mythologizing
and ideologizing science and technology. The Raëlian hermeneutic and
attendant worldview ground their unique—if somewhat extreme—
solutions to some of the most troubling topics of the late twentieth
century, such as ecology, sexuality, and globalization, concerns shared
by many other UFO religions.
Despite its explicit protestation that its members are not ufologists,4
the Raëlian religion would not exist if it were not for the historical advent
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of the UFO phenomenon. In his Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things

Seen in the Skies, Carl Jung proposes that flying saucers
are manifestations of psychic changes which always appear at the end of one
Platonic month and at the beginning of another. Apparently they are changes
in the constellation of psychic dominants, or the archetypes, or ”gods” as they
used to be called, which bring about . . . long-lasting transformations of the
collective psyche.5
The historical developments accompanying or marking Jung’s ”changes

in the constellation of psychic dominants” are the advent of a global
culture and its simultaneous division into two mortally-adversarial camps
armed with the newly-discovered and harnessed energies at the nucleus
of the atom. Regarding this transformation, Jung insightfully points out
that “the whole collective psychological problem that has been opened
up by the Saucer epidemic stands in compensatory antithesis to our
scientific picture of the world.”6 Where Jung, perhaps, would see this
compensation relative only to the historical developments following
World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, a bolder and more far-
reaching thesis would propose that the appearance of UFOs on our
historical horizon as objects inspiring religious behavior ”stands in
compensatory antithesis” to the scientific worldview as such and its
practical, social, and spiritual effects since the Scientific and Industrial
Revolutions, and that this standing “in compensatory antithesis” is
ambivalent, being simultaneously an affirmation, critique, and
transcendence of science and technology and the mortal threats they
are seen as presenting, e.g., the environmental crisis and the danger of
nuclear war. New religious movements arising within the context of the
contemporary developed world, whose sources of revelation are
extraterrestrial, spontaneously take their space age deities to be merely
natural or immanent rather than supernatural or transcendent, precisely
because they exist within the horizon of our postmodern condition, i.e.,
within the horizon of the death of God.
THE DEATH OF GOD AND THE POSTMODERN CONDITION AS

THE ASCENDANCY OF THE NATURAL SCIENTIFIC
INTERPRETATION OF THE WORLD
Both the death of God and postmodernity are admittedly ambivalent

notions. Philosophically, the postmodern condition has been articulated
as an “incredulity toward metanarratives” (overarching, universal
explanations, e.g., the Christian eschatological version of human
history)7 or the death of the Cartesian subject as the epistemological
and metaphysical foundation of the modern, scientific worldview.8 Less
philosophically, however, the death of God signifies the replacement of
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a theological interpretation of the world by a natural scientific

interpretation. The death of God is, then, the withdrawal or dispersion
or disappearance of the metaphysical, the supernatural, or the
supersensuous world upon which hitherto the sensuous, natural, physical
world relied for its substance, meaning, and value.9 Contemporary
science and technology do not need to include God, the Absolute, or
Being in their theories, measurements, calculations, or planning; the
discourse of science and technology that dominates our practical affairs
devalues the ideas of God, the Absolute, and Being. The social effects of
this change in dominant worldviews are well-known. Existing religions

were increasingly required to justify themselves against the theoretical
and practical worlds articulated and constructed during the Scientific
and Industrial Revolutions, often fighting a losing battle, so that today
secular consciousness understands the earth to be but one planet orbiting
one of billions of stars, it and its sun billions of years old, this planet the
home of Homo sapiens who are only one of millions of species, each but
a momentary genetic variation proper to the momentary environment
within which it lives.
NRMS WITHIN THE HORIZON OF THE DEATH OF GOD
New religious movements arising within the context of the

disappearance of the supersensuous world articulate themselves, often
with a popular fluency, in the discourses of the natural sciences and
seek to justify their beliefs by means of para- or pseudoscientific
investigation or argument. For example, Sir Oliver Lodge dedicates The
Survival of Man (1915) (a work on life-after-death) to “the founders of
the Society for Psychical Research, the truest and most patient workers
in an unpopular religion of science.”10 The researches of the society
were attempts to reinvent, transform, or translate beliefs about the
unseen or invisible world into the discourse (and truth conditions) of
the natural sciences. As J. Gordon Melton observes, since 1750, many
of those who claim contact with otherworldly beings articulate themselves
relative to the scientific discourse of the day.11 Something new has
appeared in the past five hundred years to which religions old and new
have felt required to react either by attacking or conversing. Simply put,
the present takes as given the scientific worldview; so, new religious
intuitions that seek to articulate themselves often take for granted the
truth of that worldview and seek to harmonize it with religious
sentiments. Thus NRMs whose theology is centered around otherworldly
beings paradoxically attempt to articulate a religious worldview within a
purely immanent horizon wherein the gods no longer hail from a region
outside of space and time (i.e., outside nature) but from some distant
planet, star, or dimension.
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Not only are these UFO religions’ gods now only extraterrestrial or
interdimensional beings, but, because of their miraculous technology,
their immanence is ambivalent and marginal to the immanence of nature
the natural sciences assume. However, since these beings must coexist
with the laws of nature that the natural sciences propound and
technology exploits, the peripherality of these beings is interpreted as a
paranormality, an existing within a realm yet-to-be-understood by science.
The technology of the flying saucer is miraculous not in terms of
transcending the laws of nature, but in terms of our present (“primitive”)
understanding of these laws. John Saliba’s solid and comprehensive study

confirms this collapsing of the miraculous into the super-technological,
especially in the case of Christian interpretations of UFO phenomena.12
These two ideas—that in time our science will come to understand
paranormal phenomena (and thereby acquire new technologies of
paranormal power) and that the ufonauts are technologically and
spiritually more advanced or superior to us—orbit an affirmation of
science and technology that takes them to be natural to all forms of
intelligent life, on and off the earth, thereby ideologizing the First World’s
dominant cultural practice. Furthermore, these two absolutely
contingent (and perhaps profoundly short-lived) cultural accidents (i.e.,
science and technology) are understood not only as natural but as
progressing or evolving. Alongside or bound up with this assumption of
science as a naturally evolving universal tendency of life is the belief that
the way out of the profound problems the industrialization of the earth
has presented is technological ingenuity itself. Indeed, the argument
often offered for funding a search for extraterrestrial intelligence (well-
known by its acronym, SETI) is that any race advanced enough for
interstellar communication will have undergone the crises we ourselves
presently face and, therefore, may share their solutions to our most
pressing ecological problems. Thus, an optimism is part and parcel of
the mere appearance of flying saucers as extraterrestrial spaceships
(whether “nuts-and-bolts” or of a “higher etheric vibratory plane”) and
of the revelations and admonitions of their pilots. Within the context of
the developed world, whose development is taken as the product of a
natural tendency of intelligence, the flying saucer appears, furthermore,
as both critique (as existing at and thereby showing the limits of a
particular viewpoint) and transcendence (as ultimate and assured goal)
of the present.
Those NRMs for whom the UFO is a vehicle of enlightenment occur
not only within the horizon of the death of God, but, more narrowly,
within that of the UFO phenomenon as such. More specifically, their
membership belongs to that social group which affirms what in ufological
circles is called the extra-terrestrial hypothesis (ETH), which proposes
that “real” UFOs (i.e., those that are not misidentifications or
hallucinations) are spaceships manufactured and piloted by intelligent,
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extraterrestrial creatures. Some proponents of the ETH are “contactees”

who claim to have had communication, whether face-to-face or
telepathic, with the ufonauts and to have received from them religious
messages or missions. Around some of these contactees, NRMs have
formed, such as George King’s Aetherius Society,13 Ruth Norman’s
Unarius,14 and Marshall Herff Applewhite’s and Bonnie Lu Nettles’
Human Individual Metamorphosis15 (later to become Heaven’s Gate),
among many others.

THE RAELIAN RELIGION: INTRODUCTION AND HISTORY
While a passing familiarity with the discourses of UFO religions

suggests they all address the same family of concerns, each has evolved
its own answers and solutions. Those of Raël are strikingly original.
They offer, on the one hand, a critical view of society, politics, morals,
and the environment, while, on the other hand, outlining an optimistic
vision of the transcendence of these quandaries. Raël’s creative theology
corresponds closely to the characteristics noted by Jung in his study of
the psychological significance of the flying saucer, characteristics which
Jung felt accounted for our deep fascination for this phenomenon.
Raël addresses the profound trepidation evoked by the threat of a global
nuclear holocaust by criticizing our aggressive abuse of the fruits of
science and technology, and by encouraging our corresponding
aspirations to become equal to our creators, who are “25,000 years ahead
of us.”
The “truth” communicated to Raël by his extraterrestrial teachers is
essentially an interpretation of the Bible analogous to that of proponents
of the ancient astronaut hypothesis. Saliba sums up the ancient astronaut
Biblical hermeneutic as follows:
God becomes an astronaut, a superior being who lives in a more advanced

civilization in some other faraway galaxy. Divine revelations are nothing but
teachings from space creatures and miracles are awesome interventions by
intelligences who are technologically superior to the human race. The
supernatural, in this view, is reduced to the super-technological. God is a superior
humanoid creature living on another planet. He has made himself immortal
through technology and has created the human race . . . . 16
This view (always marked by reading Ezekiel’s vision as a UFO sighting

report) has found popular expression for some decades now. The year
1968 is a watershed for the widespread paperback publication of this
genre of ufological literature: Erick Von Däniken’s first two books were
published in German; in England, W. Raymond Drake’s theosophically-
inclined Gods and Spacemen in the Ancient East; in America, Otto Binder’s
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Unsolved Mysteries of the Past; and most significantly Jean Sendy’s quasi-
cabalistic La Lune: Clé de la Bible. This last book, along with Sendy’s two
others (all published in French before 1970), essay an ancient-astronaut
reading of Genesis and the Bible at points identical to Raël’s. Similar
views are expressed in Jacques Bergier’s Extraterrestrial Visitations from
Prehistoric Times to the Present and Serge Hutin’s Alien Races and Fantastic
Civilizations, both published in French in 1970. That views strikingly
similar to Raël’s precede the publication of his own does not necessarily
entail any plagiarism on his part, but their presence and popularity
certainly aids in understanding the appeal of Raël’s overtly religious

articulation of these views.17
RAEL’S FIRST ENCOUNTER AND THE FOUNDING OF MADECH
The story of the Raëlian religion (first known as MADECH, then,

between 1975 and 1995, as the Raëlian Movement International) begins
on 13 December 1973, in the Clermont-Ferrand region of France.
Vorilhon relates in his first book, Le Livre Qui Dit La Verité (The Book
Which Tells theTruth), how, on this date, he witnessed a flying saucer land
and met its small, greenish, humanoid occupant, who identified himself
as one of the Elohim of Genesis.18 Vorilhon boarded the flying saucer,
and the extraterrestrial explained over the course of six days the “true”
meaning of the Bible, the essence of which constitutes the majority of
Raël’s “Message.” Broadly, the message is that all life on earth is neither
the end product of divine creation nor that of continuing evolution,
but the creation of extraterrestrial biotechnologists who made all life
“from scratch” by means of their complete knowledge of—and ability to
synthesize and manipulate—DNA. Homo sapiens is “created in their own
image.” The Elohim’s revelation is, essentially, a reading of the Bible as
the story of an extraterrestrial biotechnological research project, whose
drama bears a curious resemblance to present-day research and debate.
The reason the Elohim created life on Earth is that the population of
their own planet feared the consequences of experiments in
biotechnology and the creation of artificial life forms. The Elohim
scientists were required to remove their research to a distant planet for
safety’s sake.19 Their creation of creatures in their own image, as well as
their revealing to their creations their true artificial nature (and thereby
the newly-made human beings’ power to create new life, in turn, by
technological means), were both surreptitious and illegal acts, whose
consequences were the expulsion from Eden and the Flood, i.e., the
termination of the experiment and the sterilization of laboratory Earth.
In this reading of Genesis, Yahweh becomes the leader of the scientists
who created all life on Earth; the Serpent, those Elohim who gave to
humankind the knowledge of good and evil, i.e., the awareness of their
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being artificial life forms; and Satan, the leader of the faction on the
Elohim’s home planet critical of the scientists’ research and its results.20
That this scenario bears on present anxieties concerning biotechnology
needs little explanation. In fact, the Raëlian religion pointed to the
widely-publicized cloning of Dolly as confirmation of the Elohim’s
revelations, i.e., that humanity is attaining a level of technology already
reached by the Elohim in Earth’s distant past.21
The message given to Vorilhon by his extraterrestrial teacher is
comprised not only of this ancient-astronaut interpretation of the Bible,
but also of a set of “New Commandments” founded upon this vision of

humanity as an artificial and purely material creation of a technologically
advanced and spiritually enlightened race of extraterrestrial scientists.
With this prescriptive portion of the message, Vorilhon was given a new,
charismatic name, “Raël” (“light of God,” “light” or “Ambassador of the
Elohim,” “messenger”).22 Raël is told to promote world government by
“the most intelligent,” a system called “Geniocracy,” wherein “[o]nly those
who have an intellectual coefficient of at least 50% above the average
will be eligible for a public post, and those who will be able to vote will
have an intellectual coefficient of at least 10% above the average.”23 This
one-world government also includes the institution of a single, world-
wide currency and an international, artificial language.24 In addition to
the global unification of currencies, the Elohim’s prescribed economic
reforms also include an economic system they call “Humanitarianism,”
based primarily upon the abolition of inheritance.25 The condition for
this one-world economy and government is the elimination of military
conscription.26 Raël is then given the mission to spread the message of
humankind’s true origins and destiny and to build an embassy “on neutral
territory” where the Elohim will land and meet the representatives of all
nations if a sufficient number of human beings come to believe in them
and humanity abandons its warlike ways.27 In this case, the Elohim will
share their advanced scientific knowledge with humanity, ushering in a
“Golden Age” of peace and prosperity. The practical implementation of
the message began with the founding of MADECH (Mouvement pour
Accueil des Elohim Createurs de l’Humanité) in 1974 and the publication of
Raël’s first book.
RAEL’S SECOND ENCOUNTER
Raël’s second close encounter and contact allegedly occurred on 7

October 1975 and is recounted in his second book, published in French
the same year, Les Extra-terrestres M‘Ont Emmené Sur Leur Planète
(Extraterrestrials Took Me to Their Planet).28 As the title attests, this book
recounts a twenty-four-hour visit to a paradisal planet “relatively close to
the Earth,” where Raël is further enlightened as to the nature of
humankind and its creators. His Elohim teacher now identifies himself
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as Yahweh, “president of the council of eternals.” Raël is introduced to

Jesus, Moses, Elijah, Buddha, and Muhammad, now immortal by means
of serial cloning. Not only does a 700-member Elohim council of eternals
inhabit the planet, but 8,400 “people from Earth . . . who, during their
lives, reached a sufficient level of open-mindedness on the infinite, or
who enabled humanity to progress from its primitive level by their
discoveries, their writings, their way of organizing society, their exemplary
acts of fraternity, of love or of unselfishness.”29 Raël is shown the machine
that instantaneously manufactures the clones whereby the Elohim and
deserving human beings maintain their immortality. A temporary clone

of Raël himself is produced from a cell sample taken from between his
eyes. Not only are the deserving rewarded with immortality by means of
cloning, but “[a]ll those on Earth who preached violence, wickedness,
aggressiveness, and obscurantism . . . will be recreated to undergo the
punishment which they deserve after being judged by those whom they
made suffer or by their ancestors or descendants.”30 This technology,
together with extensive automatization, accomplishes “all the dirty work
[and] all the work that is uninteresting [i.e.,] all the maintenance work”
by means of “biological robots.”31 Not only do these robots perform all
the onerous and tiresome labor, but they also provide erotic pleasure, as
six female robots, one of each human race, demonstrate during Raël’s
first and only night on the Elohim’s planet.32 Later, back on Earth, Raël
is telepathically given supplementary commandments and sixteen ”Keys”
which highlight and expand the original message. Humanitarianism and
geniocracy are reaffirmed and explained in somewhat greater detail.
“The transmission of the cellular plan” is introduced, whereby a Raëlian’s
genetic code is transmitted to the Elohim and a square centimeter of
bone tissue from between the eyes is secured to facilitate being cloned
on the planet of eternals after death. A system of tithing is advocated, to
help Raël, “the Guide of Guides . . . devote himself full time to his
mission.”33 A relatively detailed code of behavior is presented, covering
diet (e.g., prohibiting stimulants and recreational drugs), sexual
behavior, child rearing and education, and meditative practices.
THE SCHISM WITHIN MADECH, THE FOUNDING AND

CONSOLIDATION OF THE RAELIAN MOVEMENT
INTERNATIONAL, AND THE PRESENT-DAY RAELIAN RELIGION
In 1976 the Raëlian Movement International emerged out of a schism

within MADECH. The membership of the new movement was divided
into two levels: the more committed “Guides” who composed the
“Structure” and the more loosely affiliated “Raëlians” who received the
bulletin Apocalypse. This restructuring and the articulation of social and
ethical values combined to create a relatively stable structure of
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organization and beliefs that continues to this day. Following this

consolidation, Raël was to devote an entire volume to his teachers’
political philosophy,34 as well as to the practice of “sensual meditation.”
In this meditative method, the practitioner aims at attaining telepathic
communication with the Elohim, activates his or her psychic potential,
and grows new neural pathways.35 In 1979, Raël published Accueillier Les
Extra-Terrestres (later translated and published in English as Let’s Welcome
Our Fathers from Space: They Created Humanity in Their Laboratories (1986)),
wherein his charismatic claims are amplified.36 It is revealed to him that
the Eloha Yahweh is his father and Jesus his half-brother; he is the “last

of forty prophets,” being born in “the Age of Apocalypse,” i.e., in the
era following the detonation of the first atomic bomb, the discovery of
DNA, and the revelation of humankind’s true nature, through Raël, by
the Elohim. Despite these amplifications, this latter book is essentially a
reformulation and repetition of earlier material. Though there have
been some additions to the message since the mid-1980s, none are so
radical as to substantially alter the basic character of the religion. Indeed,
the development of and the debate around biotechnology, and the
popularization of the idea of “terraforming” serve—admittedly, to a
limited extent—to harmonize the religion’s concerns with more
mainstream society.
Today, the message continues to be spread according to annual
instructions Raël receives telepathically from the Eloha Yahweh, his
father. These instructions name a particular nation which is to be the
special focus of the movement for that coming year. The movement’s
own version of its history is organized according to year and country in
this way. Furthermore, in 1985, the movement instituted Planetary Week,
to be held commencing each April 5, focused around a different theme
each year. Each national branch of the religion is encouraged to hold a
conference to publicize the message. To court the press, often an
outrageous or controversial act is performed. Actions considered
outrageous by more mainstream society are not restricted to the
branches’ conferences. As the Toronto Star reported on 11 November
1992, the Raëlians distributed 10,000 condoms to Roman Catholic high
school students in Montreal, Canada, putatively to protest the Montreal
Catholic School Commission’s decision against installing condom
dispensers in its high schools. Consistent with the goal of one-world
government and planetary political unity is the movement’s advocation
of racial integration—not through intermarriage and procreation, but
through interracial sexual relationships. In photographs, Raël is
sometimes depicted as surrounded by a racially mixed circle of bikini-
clad young women, reminiscent of promotional photographs for a Miss
World Beauty Pageant.37 In addition, as the Montreal Gazette reported on
30 September 1997, the religion opened UFO Land near Valcourt,
Quebec, as a theme park presenting the message by means of multimedia
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displays. Most recently, on 18 June 1999, the religion organized a bilingual

“conference-debate” entitled “Yes to Human Cloning” in Montreal.38
THE RAELIAN RELIGION: BELIEFS, VALUES, AND POLITICS
Beliefs

The Raëlian religion, from its inception, rigorously excises all residue
of the transcendent in its rereading of the Bible according to its own
version of the ancient astronaut hypothesis. Cosmologically, any
supernatural realm where a First Cause, for life or the cosmos, might
reside is excluded by positing an infinite regression of causes in answer
to the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The
cosmos extends infinitely into the past and future.39 Likewise, the material
(i.e., atomic) order extends into the infinitely small and large. The atom
is depicted as a microcosmic solar system; the solar system, a macrocosmic
atom, and so on. As Raël explains it:
Once we have attained sufficient open-mindedness we can understand that in

space the Earth is but a particle of the atom of the atoms of the hand of a
gigantic being, who himself contemplates a starlit sky which composes the hand,
the stomach or the foot of a being even more gigantic, who finds himself under
a sky, etc., etc. and this ad infinitum. The same process applies for the infinitely
small. On the atom of the atoms of our hands, there exist intelligent beings for
whom these particles are planets and stars, and these beings are composed of
atoms of which the particles are the stars and the planets on which there are
intelligent beings, etc., etc. . . . also to Infinity.40
It is no exaggeration, then, to characterize the Raëlian cosmology as

being one of absolute immanence. That this immanence is, furthermore,
exclusively material is reinforced not only by the identical atomistic
structures of the micro- and macrocosmos (“as above, so below” in
Raëlian terms), but by the derision terms such as “immaterial” or
“impalpable” receive, especially when predicated of more orthodox
depictions of God. Already in his first book, Raël’s Elohim teacher speaks
in a manner which echoes the more popular understanding of the death
of God:
In scientifically developed countries . . . [n]o one can believe any longer in

a “heavenly God” with a white beard, perched upon a cloud, omniscient
and omnipotent, which is what the Church wants us to believe in. Neither
can they believe in delightful little guardian angels, nor in a devil with horns
and hooves. . . . 41
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In its views concerning the origins of humanity, the Raëlian religion

is no less consistent in its insistent monistic materialism. Where almost
all other proponents of the ancient-astronaut biblical hermeneutic
interpret Homo sapiens to be a hybrid of “those who come from the
heavens” (in Genesis “Sons of God”) and protohuman females
(“Daughters of Men”) (Genesis 6:2), Raël is more radical: his Elohim
reveal that humankind is literally made in their image by means of
biotechnology. Indeed, the Elohim are responsible for all life on earth.
Furthermore, Raël explains in a section of his Let’s Welcome Our Fathers
from Space entitled “Questions Which Are Most Often Asked” that the

Elohim in turn are themselves the creation of another, superior race,
who in turn are themselves created in the same manner.42 This regress
of artifice, Raël is told, is infinite: there is no original life whose source
is evolution or some supernatural Creator. Evolution is refuted by the
Elohim on the grounds that chance mutation coupled to natural
selection is incapable of developing higher organisms. As Raël writes:
As Einstein said, there can not be a watch without a watch-maker. All those people
who believe that we come from the monkey through a slow evolutionary process,
believe that the beautiful watch which we are, has built itself, by accident. It is a
bit like saying that if we put all the components of a watch together in a bag and
shook it around for a while, we would eventually get a perfect working watch.43
The Raëlian religion’s thoroughgoing atomistic materialism erases

not only the distinction between God and Nature but between soul and
body; just as there is only material nature, so there is only a physical
body. Nonetheless, the traditional promise of immortality for true
believers is maintained, as remarked above: immortality by means of
cloning. The initiatory rite of the Raëlian religion is the “transmission
of the cellular plan,” whereby a new member’s genetic code is
telepathically transmitted to the Elohim by a Guide, insuring the
practicing member’s recreation after death on the planet of eternals, as
well as formalizing that member’s recognition of the Elohim as his or
her creator. Furthermore, the new member is encouraged to sign a
contract permitting a mortician, upon the member’s demise, to excise
one square centimeter of the “frontal bone” (near the pineal gland or
“third eye”), which is then sent to a bank in Geneva, Switzerland to be
stored, awaiting collection by the Elohim. According to Raël:
The cellular plan, or genetic code, of each individual, is registered in an

enormous computer which records all our actions during our life, from the
time of our conception, from the meeting of the ovule and the spermatozoon,
the moment when a new genetic code is registered, hence, a new individual.
The individual will be followed through his lifetime, and at the end of his life,
the computer will know if he has the right to eternal life on the planet where
the Elohim accept in their midst, only the most worthy of men and women.44
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This characterization of human beings as “nothing more than self-

programming, self-reproducing biological computors (sic)”45 grounds
the Raëlian promise of immortality for the deserving. In the Raëlian
view, the person is identical to his or her genetic code. During his first
encounter, Raël’s Elohim teacher explains the means by which an
individual gains immortality technologically:
When we are in full possession of our abilities and our brain is at its maximum
efficiency and knowledge, we surgically remove a tiny part of the body which is
conserved. When we die, from a minute particle of our body which had already

been preserved, we fully recreate the body, as it was at that time. I say as it was at
that time, meaning with all its scientific knowledge, and of course, its personality.46
This version of the serial recreation of the individual is later modified,

in that an actual, physical particle is not necessary, as “the enormous
computer which records all our actions” also records our genetic codes,
whereby those deserving are “recreated young, with a body in full
possession of its force and its resources.”47 Where the Raëlian belief
concerning immortality by means of cloning may well appear
questionable to those familiar with the arguments of identity theory
and functionalism in the philosophy of mind, there is no denying that a
version of science and technology is being used here to articulate a new
religious intuition in terms immediately familiar to a populace for whom
the science of genetics and biotechnology and their consequences for
how we conceive of life and the person have become quotidian.
Values
Given the centrality of the technology of cloning to the Raëlian

religion’s worldview, it comes as no surprise that the religion gives its
whole-hearted support to developments in biotechnology. The Raëlian
religion has come out explicitly in favor of genetically-altered foods,
vegetable and animal, on the grounds that since all living matter is
originally artificial, the more genetically artificial an organism, the more
“natural” it is.48 The Raëlian support for the development of cloning
technology, on the other hand, has been more than merely rhetorical.
In a press conference held 11 March 1997 in the Las Vegas Flamingo
Hilton, Raël announced he had created Valiant Venture Ltd. with a group
of investors. The company offers “Cloneaid” for parents wishing to clone,
rather than procreate, a child—at a cost of US$200,000. The venture
also offers “insuraclone” that for $50,000 will store a client’s child’s cells
so the child may be cloned in the event of an untimely death. This
company was founded in the Bahamas, where cloning is not illegal.49
Furthermore, on 13 January 1998, the religion announced its support,
moral and financial, for the research of Chicago-based scientist Dr.
Richard Seed, who claimed that he will have cloned a baby by mid-1999.
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Nova Religio
Though no Raëlian himself, Dr. Seed’s own words, as reported in an

article in the Ottawa Citizen, express sentiments not dissimilar to Raël’s:
“Cloning and the reprogramming of DNA is the first serious step in
becoming one with God.” That such activities have generated controversy
is no surprise. The Bahamian government froze the assets of Valiant
Venture Ltd. Dr. Brigitte Boisellier was fired from her position as director
of a research project for a chemical company in Lyons, France, reportedly
for speaking publicly in favor of cloning and admitting to being a Raëlian
on television. Dr. Boisellier has said, “Why do people always think about
the bad things scientific advances can bring? Why not assume that people

are good and will use this knowledge in a responsible way?”50 Her
optimism is matched by a kind of “happy positivism”: she has remarked
that what can be done, will be done, and it is better to do it openly and
legally so as to prevent exploitation. Such amor fati relative to technology
is characteristically Raëlian.
The Raëlian enthusiasm for cloning is only one aspect of its general
approval of all reproductive technology. The Raëlian affirmation of
reproductive technologies finds its context in relation to the religion’s
approach to individual sexual behavior. Since “life was made to be
enjoyed,”51 heterosexual sex is to be emancipated by artificial means
from procreation. The use of contraception, including abortion, is
prescribed as a means to accomplish this emancipation, as well as a means
to solve problems of overpopulation.52 All manner of polymorphous
consensual sexual activity, hetero-, bi-, or homosexual, is likewise
affirmed. Indeed, Cloneaid explicitly offers its services to homosexual
couples wanting children. As Raël himself succinctly phrases it in Let’s
Welcome Our Fathers from Space, “each individual has the right to do with
their body as he or she sees fit.”53 The extreme value placed on sexuality
is best exemplified by the practice of directed hedonistic sensuousness
(“sensual meditation”), which is perceived as means to altered states of
consciousness, mystical panenhenic states of oneness with the universe,
and telepathic communication with the Elohim. Sexual activity in
particular and sensuality in general are said to produce brain cells and
to improve neural links.54 As Raël writes in the Keys:
the moment you approach closest to perfect harmony with infinity is when this
takes place in your room of sensual meditation with someone you love, by
physically uniting with him, and placing yourselves in harmony with infinity
during your union.55
Politics
Where the Raëlian approach to sexuality and reproduction would

exploit and intensify the possibilities presented by recent biomedical
98
developments and social changes, likewise the religion’s social and

political values affirm contemporary trends, namely global industrial
and technological development. The Eloha Yahweh not only advocates
universal automation of the means of production, but also criticizes
organized labor’s resistance to it.56 As remarked above, the social system
that would manifest humankind’s moral maturity is that of a one-world,
geniocratic government, having one global currency and one global
language, a vision consistent, in part, with recent world economic trends,
e.g., the formation of the European Economic Union and its adoption
of the Euro. Already in Raël’s second book, the Eloha Yahweh says, “Once

the European military is unified, so can the European economy be by
creating a single European currency.”57 However, where recent history
has proven amenable to the Raëlian valorization of development, it has
been less so in regards to geniocracy. Despite writing a book-length
manifesto and the subsequent founding of a short-lived political party,
Raël writes in Let’s Welcome Our Fathers from Space that a
political ideology does not weigh very much when compared to the Messages of
the Elohim. . . . The priority of priorities is the building of the Embassy asked
for by our Creators so that we can welcome them in the company of the ancient
Messengers, Moses, Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed. This is my only reason for
being on this Earth. This must become the only reason for living of all those
people who wish to help me.58
The belief that the relative intelligence of a citizen is unproblematically

determinable through “scientific” testing again highlights the religion’s
faith in the absolute truth available to the scientific method. Perhaps
not unsurprisingly, the Raëlian religion’s political ideology has not
escaped criticism, particularly in Europe. Because of its overtly elitist
dimensions, geniocracy was denounced as “fascist” by the Guyard Report
on Sects in France. In its own defense, the Raëlian religion explicitly
argues that it is neither a cult nor a sect.59 Furthermore, in more recent
articulations of its politics, the Raëlian religion has emphasized tolerance
and human rights. That all religions ultimately spring from
pretechnological humanity’s misinterpretations of supertechnological
phenomena is offered as grounds for religious, cultural, and racial
pluralism.60 Indeed, the Raëlian religion has gone as far as to post the
United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights on its website,
stating that the Declaration
is the text written by Man which applies the best to the Message transmitted by
the Elohim. This charter which is already contained in the Message, invites the
individual to adopt a panoramic, non-sectarian, and non-fanatic vision of our
world. It brings him/her to naturally respect and better yet, to love each other’s
differences.61
99
Nova Religio
The utopia to be brought about by the technological developments

and social values the Raëlians so affirm is portrayed most concretely in
Raël’s description of his visit to the Elohim’s planet of the eternals. The
lifestyle on the Elohim’s planet and in the Golden Age promised by
technology is characterized as one of material ease due to sufficient
means of production supplied by automated mechanical means and a
workforce of “biological robots,” artificial human beings identical to
ourselves in every way except their intellect, which is designed solely for
a single practical purpose. Automation and mechanization are explicitly
advocated by the Eloha Yahweh; he explains to Raël that

[y]ou could very soon live in a genuine terrestrial paradise if only the technology
which you have was actually put into service for the well-being of people instead
of serving violence, the army, or the personal profit of a few. Science and
technology can totally liberate humanity not only from the anxiety of hunger in
the world, but also from the obligation to work to live. Thanks to automation
machines can quite easily look after the daily chores. Already, in some of your
most modern factories, only one person is needed now to simply oversee a
computer which commands and carries out all the operations for the building
of a car for which not so long ago several hundred people were needed. In the
future, even that one person will be unnecessary.62
The “biological robots” who comprise the labor force of this “terrestrial
paradise” are
created in the same way we [the Elohim] created people on Earth, in a one
hundred percent scientific way, but they are voluntarily limited and absolutely
submissive to us. They are also incapable of acting without any order, and are
very specialized. They don’t have any aspirations of their own, and have no
pleasure, except the ones that their specialization requires. They grow old and
die like us but the machine which makes them can make far more than we really
need. Besides, they are incapable of suffering, of feelings and cannot reproduce
themselves. Their life span is similar to ours, that is to say, with the help of a
small surgical intervention, about seven hundred years. When one of them must
be destroyed because of old age, the machine which created them produces
one or several others depending on our needs. They come out of the machine
ready for functioning and with their normal height for they have neither growth
nor childhood. They know how to do only one thing, to obey people and Elohim
and are incapable of the slightest violence.63
One is reminded of the eugenic social engineering in Huxley’s Brave

New World, where artificially inseminated ova are altered in utero to the
minimal physical and mental demands of their future careers. This life
of ease, security, and pleasure (by means of plentiful and readily-available
sex “robots”) can be enjoyed endlessly, by means of immortality through
cloning.
Despite the intense value Raëlians place on science and technology,
their belief that all life is synthetic inspires an admiration and respect
100
for living organisms. The variety of plant and animal life on earth is
attributed to the artistic faculties of the Elohim biotechnologists. The
beauty and variety of nature is held forth not only for appreciation, but
also as further evidence against evolution:
You yourself could have realized that an accidental evolution would have little
chance of producing such a large variety of forms of life, of colors of birds and
their amorous demonstrations, of the shape of the horns of certain antelope
. . . . The evolution of the forms of life on Earth is the evolution of the techniques
of creation and the sophistication of the brilliant work realized by the creators

which led eventually to the creation of people similar to them.64
In fact, the Raëlian Genesis states that teams of scientists held competitions
over whose creations were most beautiful. Each race is said to have
been the creation of one particular team, each in one location on earth’s
protocontinent, Gondwanaland. Accordingly, the Raëlians have
cultivated an appreciation for the beauty of nature; the awe they express
over nature’s wonders, in their videos and other media, is however not
that of the Romantic before the Sublime, but that of an appreciator of
an artist’s abilities. As Raël writes: “Respect nature for as long as you
are not capable of recreating it, and for as long as you are not capable
of becoming a creator yourself. By respecting nature, you respect those
who created it, our parents, the Elohim.”65 Interestingly, this conception
of organic life as an artificial creation grounds an empathy for all
organisms, vegetable and animal, while not leading to the extremes of
biocentricism. As Raël writes:
Never make animals suffer. You may kill them to feed on their flesh but without
making them suffer. For although death is nothing, suffering is an abomination
and you must avoid animals suffering as you must prevent human beings from
suffering. . . . Plants, too, are alive and suffer in the same way as you do. So do
not cause plants to suffer. They are alive just as you are.66
This approach to nature and the advocacy of the use of reproductive

technology are the religion’s primary points of engagement with
ecological concerns.
CONCLUSION
The thorough-going centrality of “science” for the Raëlian worldview

is the feature of the Raëlian religion that most marks it as the kind of
NRM characterized and argued for in this study. The Raëlian
“demythologization” of the Bible is simultaneously a mythologization
or mystification of science. Indeed, Raël echoes Sir Oliver Lodge:
“Science should be your religion for the Elohim your creators created
101
Nova Religio
you scientifically.”67 Not only should science replace religion, but being
scientific is claimed to be the very essence of human being; as the Eloha
Yahweh says during Raël’s first encounter: “Humanity’s objective is
scientific progress.”68 Scientific progress is the objective not only of
humanity, but of all intelligent, humanoid races. Though the Elohim
cannot travel in time or foresee the future, they explain that just as the
life cycle of a biological organism can be studied, known, and predicted,
the same is true for the technological and moral development of any
society of intelligent beings.69 Within this Raëlian view, technological

societies experience either a harmony or disharmony of technological
and moral development. In the latter case, the society self-destructs, as
our own threatens to do. However, should the society mature morally,
its use of technology results in a Golden Age where the problems
development and industrialization engender, such as pollution,
overpopulation, hunger, and the energy crisis, are themselves solved by
“the wise use of science.” This ideologization of science and technology
(hardly restricted to the Raëlian religion) grounds the sense of the claim
that the Elohim are “25,000 years ahead” of humanity’s present scientific
and technological development. Science and technology are repeatedly
characterized as a natural pursuit of intelligent beings. In this way, a
social and cultural phenomenon is portrayed as if it were natural,
necessary, uniform, and universal, i.e., the phenomenon is ideologized.
Despite being primarily a transformation of the Bible, Raëlianism
appears more immediately relevant to our most urgent concerns. While
religions originating before the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions
have sought ways to accommodate to a changing environment and to
answer new concerns, the Raëlian Religion might be said to be inspired
precisely by the selfsame issues which characterize the present moment
in world history. The Raëlian view, then, affirms existing, traditional
theological structures (e.g., the narrative of Genesis), while performing
a kind of Hegelian Aufhebung (sublation) identical in its logic to that
performed on the notion of technology itself by the class of NRMs here
studied.
In summary, the advent of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions
usher in today’s dominant discourse and practices within which religions,
orthodox and otherwise, must define themselves. The present stands
within the horizon of the death of God, understood as the domination
of the assumption of the immanence of the world and the consequent
disappearance of the metaphysical, the supernatural, and the
supersensuous (at least overtly) or their fall into the merely paranormal.
The paranormal or paraphysical is that realm of nature yet to be
understood (and so ultimately controlled) by science. This assumption
that science will continue along the path of discovery, knowledge, and
power naturalizes or ideologizes science and technology. When our
102
science and technology poison the biosphere, split the atom to release
potentially species-suicidal energies and manipulate the genetic code
of living organisms, humanity has taken upon itself powers and
potentialities hitherto exclusively the domain of superhuman deities.
That science and technology, whose worldview determines how things
are, bring us to an unprecedented impasse demands they must in some
way be transcended (i.e., survived). The flying saucer appears within
this horizon as a symbol of just such transcendence, promising that
precisely the causes of our quandary will be our means of salvation.

ENDNOTES
1
<http://www.rael.net/web/amouv.html>, accessed 23 June 1999.
2
Roy Wallis, The Elementary Forms of the New Religious Life (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1984).
3
Robert S. Ellwood, Religious and Spiritual Groups in America (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-
Hall, 1973), 334.
4
5
C. G. Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, trans. R. F. C. Hall
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 5.
6
Jung, 135.
7
Aho’s analysis of the postmodern condition is both more sociologically oriented and
pointed than Lyotard’s now-classic presentation though certainly consistent with the latter’s
basic thesis. See James A. Aho, “The Apocalypse of Modernity,” in Millennium, Messiahs,
and Mayhem, ed. Thomas Robbins and Susan J. Palmer (New York: Routledge, 1997), 61-
72; J.-F. Lyotard, “The Postmodern Condition,” trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian
Massumi, in Philosophy: End or Transformation?, ed. Kenneth Baynes, et. al. (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1987). Likewise, Heidegger’s characterization of the metanarrative as place-
holder for God is both relatively early and germane . See Martin Heidegger, The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977),
64:
Into the position of the vanished authority of God and of the teaching office of the
Church steps the authority of conscience, obtrudes the authority of reason. Against
these the social instinct rises up. The flight from the world into the suprasensory is
replaced by historical progress. The otherworldy goal of everlasting bliss is transformed
into the earthly happiness of the greatest number. The careful maintenance of the cult
of religion is relaxed through enthusiasm for the creating of a culture or the spreading
of civilization. Creativity, previously the unique property of the biblical god, becomes
the distinctive mark of human activity. Human creativity finally passes over into business
enterprise.
8
The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer succinctly articulates this version in Reason in the
Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 103-4:
Self-understanding can no longer be integrally related to a complete self-transparency in
the sense of a full self-presence of ourselves to ourselves. Self-understanding is always on-
the-way; it is on a path whose completion is a clear impossibility. If there is an entire
dimension of unilluminated unconscious; if all our actions, wishes, drives, decisions, and
models of conduct (and so the totality of our human social existence) are based on the
obscure and veiled dimension of the connotations of our animality, if all our conscious
representations can be masks, pretexts, under which our vital energy or our social interests
pursue their own goals in an unconscious way; if all the insights we have, as obvious and
103
Nova Religio
self-evident as they may be, are threatened by such doubt; then self-understanding cannot
designate patent self-transparency of our human existence. We have to repudiate the
illusion of completely illuminating the darkness of our motivations and tendencies.
9
Heidegger, 54-55.
10
Sir Oliver Lodge, The Survival of Man (London: Methuen, 1909).
11
J. Gordon Melton, “The Contactees: A Survey,” in The Gods Have Landed: New Religions
from Other Worlds, ed. James R. Lewis (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995),
4.
12
John A. Saliba, ”Religious Dimensions of UFO Phenomena,” in Lewis, The Gods Have
Landed, 35.
13
Roy Wallis, “The Aetherius Society: A Case Study in the Formation of a Mystagogic

Congregation,” Sociological Review 22 (1974): 27-44.
14
Diana Tumminia, “How Prophecy Never Fails: Interpretive Reason in a Flying Saucer
Group,” Sociology of Religion 59, no. 2 (1998): 157-70.
15
Robert W. Balch, “Waiting for the Ships: Disillusionment and the Revitalization of Faith
in Bo and Peep’s UFO Cult,” in Lewis, The Gods Have Landed, 137-66.
16
Saliba, 34.
17
Von Däniken’s relevant books in German are Erinnerungen in der Zukunft (Germany:
Econ Verlag, 1968) and Zurück an den Sternen (Germany: Econ Verlag, 1968), translated
respectively as Chariots of the Gods, trans. Michael Heron (New York: Putnam, 1970) and
Gods from Outer Space, trans. Michael Heron (New York: Putnam, 1971). The English-
language books remarked are W. Raymond Drake, Gods and Spacemen in the Ancient East
(London: Sphere, 1968) and Otto Binder, Unsolved Mysteries of the Past (New York: Tower,
1968). In French, see Jean Sendy, La lune: Clé de la Bible (France: Editions René Juillard,
1968); translated as The Moon: Outpost of the Gods, trans. Lowell Blair (New York: Berkeley
Medallion, 1975). Sendy’s other relevant books are Those Gods Who Made Heaven and Earth,
trans. Lowell Blair (New York: Berkeley Medallion, 1972) and The Coming of the Gods, trans.
Lowell Blair (New York: Berkeley Medallion, 1973), both published in French by Robert
Lafront (Paris) 1969 and 1970 respectively. See also Jacques Bergier, Les Extra-Terrestres
dans l’Histoire (Paris: Editions J’ai Lu, 1970), translated as Extraterrestrial Visitations from
Prehistoric Times to the Present, trans. Henry Regnery Company (Chicago: Henry Regnery
Company, 1973); and Serge Hutin, Alien Races and Fantastic Civilizations (New York: Berkeley
Medallion, 1975), published in French by Editions J’ai Lu in 1970.
18
Raël’s first book in translation is the first half of Claude Vorilhon (“Raël”), The Message
Given to Me by Extra-terrestrials: They Took Me to Their Planet (Tokyo: AOM Corporation,
1986).
19
Vorilhon, Message, 14.
20
Vorilhon, Message, 20-30.
21
<http://www.rael.net/web/ascience5.html>, accessed 24 June 1999.
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
Vorilhon, Message.
29
30
31
32
33
104
34
Claude Vorilhon (“Raël”), La Geniocratie (Brantome: l’Edition du Message, 1977).
35
Claude Vorilhon (“Raël”), Sensual Meditation (Tokyo: AOM Corporation, 1986).
36
Claude Vorilhon (“Raël”), Let’s Welcome our Fathers from Space: They Created Humanity in
Their Laboratories (Tokyo: AOM Corporation, 1986).
37
Susan Palmer, “The Raëlian Movement International” in New Religions and the New Europe,
ed. Robert Towler (Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1995), 194-210.
38
<http://www.netside.net/~valiant/PRO61499.html>, accessed 23 June 1999.
39
Vorilhon, Let’s Welcome our Fathers from Space, 52.
40
41
42

43
44
Vorilhon, Let’s Welcome our Fathers from Space, 29-30.
45
46
47
48
<http://www.rael.net/web/genetics.html>, accessed 24 June 1999.
49
<http://www.rael.net/aclone.html>, accessed 23 June 1999.
50
Personal communication from Dr. Bridgette Boisellier.
51
52
53
54
Vorilhon, Let’s Welcome our Fathers from Space, 61-70.
55
56
57
58
59
60
<http://www.rael.net/web/avaleur1.html>, accessed 24 June 1999.
61
<http://www.rael.net/web/avaleur1.html>, accessed 24 June 1999.
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
105

Presumed Immanent: The Raëlians, UFO Religions, and The Postmodern Condition

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Nova Religio

Presumed Immanent: the Raëlians,

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of the UFO phenomenon. In his Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things

The historical developments accompanying or marking Jung’s ”changes

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THE DEATH OF GOD AND THE POSTMODERN CONDITION AS

Both the death of God and postmodernity are admittedly ambivalent

a theological interpretation of the world by a natural scientific

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NRMS WITHIN THE HORIZON OF THE DEATH OF GOD

New religious movements arising within the context of the

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extraterrestrial creatures. Some proponents of the ETH are “contactees”

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While a passing familiarity with the discourses of UFO religions

God becomes an astronaut, a superior being who lives in a more advanced

This view (always marked by reading Ezekiel’s vision as a UFO sighting

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RAEL’S FIRST ENCOUNTER AND THE FOUNDING OF MADECH

The story of the Raëlian religion (first known as MADECH, then,

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RAEL’S SECOND ENCOUNTER

Raël’s second close encounter and contact allegedly occurred on 7

as Yahweh, “president of the council of eternals.” Raël is introduced to

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THE SCHISM WITHIN MADECH, THE FOUNDING AND

In 1976 the Raëlian Movement International emerged out of a schism

organization and beliefs that continues to this day. Following this

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displays. Most recently, on 18 June 1999, the religion organized a bilingual

THE RAELIAN RELIGION: BELIEFS, VALUES, AND POLITICS

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Once we have attained sufficient open-mindedness we can understand that in

It is no exaggeration, then, to characterize the Raëlian cosmology as

In scientifically developed countries . . . [n]o one can believe any longer in

In its views concerning the origins of humanity, the Raëlian religion

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The Raëlian religion’s thoroughgoing atomistic materialism erases

The cellular plan, or genetic code, of each individual, is registered in an

This characterization of human beings as “nothing more than self-

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This version of the serial recreation of the individual is later modified,

Given the centrality of the technology of cloning to the Raëlian

Though no Raëlian himself, Dr. Seed’s own words, as reported in an

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Where the Raëlian approach to sexuality and reproduction would

developments and social changes, likewise the religion’s social and

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The belief that the relative intelligence of a citizen is unproblematically

The utopia to be brought about by the technological developments

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One is reminded of the eugenic social engineering in Huxley’s Brave

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This approach to nature and the advocacy of the use of reproductive

The thorough-going centrality of “science” for the Raëlian worldview

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