by Erik Davis
The gnostic dimension of such signal fetishism comes to the fore in the material churned out by New Age channelers, especially those who give voice to extraterrestrial teachers. Though skeptics tend to discount all channeled entities as fraudulent, some of these beings are no less psychologically “real” than the myriad of daemons that have possessed the human psyche, in rites both religious and occult, over the millennia. Well before the UFO invaded the drive-in mindscape, the magickal rascal Aleister Crowley telepathically contacted a Sirian named Lam (eerily, Crowley’s 1919 sketch of Lam reveals the familiar cranial physiognomy of the Gray: a hairless head shaped like a upside-down pear, with slanted eyes, narrow mouth, and barely any nose). The term channeling itself is simply electromagnetic jargon for the old Spiritualist trance, and like the celestial telegraphers of the nineteenth century, New Ager channeling buffs are as thrilled with the medium as they are with the message. The culture critic Andrew Ross points out that New Agers celebrate channeling not just for its wisdom, but for its “ability to resolve the technical problems of communication.”7
Most channeled ET materials have all the literary or spiritual sustenance of a box of tissue, but as techgnostic allegories of the information age, they can sometimes soar. In Barbara Marciniak’s best-selling Bringers of the Dawn, the enlightened Pleiadians inform us that the Prime Creator delegated the task of cosmic creation to lower-order creator gods. Originally, these savvy demiurges designed human beings with twelve strands of DNA, chunks of which were contributed by races from around the galaxy. This DNA gave us enough wisdom and spunk to build complex and nifty civilizations of love and light. But around three hundred thousand years ago, some wayward cabal took over this power structure in an act the Pleiadians compare to “corporate raiding on Wall Street.” Like the Gnostic archons of Valentinus, these beings were not so much evil as “uninformed.” Nonetheless, they redesigned us with double-helix DNA that locks in our propensity to generate psychic frequencies of chaos and confusion, energies that the dark forces literally feed upon. The miracles of ancient religions are actually simulacra, “holographic inserts” generated by these cosmic creeps to manipulate and program our psyches—a function that, Marciniak notes, television and corporate computers now fulfill. Luckily, the “Family of Light” is here to coax us into a new round of mutation, at which time we will rebundle our twelve fibers of DNA, beef up the bandwidth of our psychic frequencies, and become active creators of our reality.
Even more overtly apocalyptic sentiments inform The Starseed Transmissions, a channeled text transcribed onto a clunky manual typewriter in the 1970s by a rural New England carpenter named Ken Carey. The entities who write the book through Carey, who seem to be at once extraterrestrials and the angels of Western monotheism, claim that they took over the poor carpenter’s brain to alert us to the imminent collapse of history, thought, and matter. As with the Extropian event-horizon of the same name, the coming “singularity” is brought about partly through the technologies and economies of the information age. Restrained from actually intervening in terrestrial affairs by something like Star Trek’s Prime Directive, the angels hope to show us how to individually and intuitively achieve “direct contact with the source of all information.” Because human languages were “designed to facilitate commerce,” they are insufficient for this new Word, which Carey’s angels call, in an echo of genetic engineering, “Living Information.” This organic alien database not only will provide instructions to us during the hair-raising chaos of the apocalypse, but will also awaken memories of our own stellar origins, buried beneath the “spell of matter” induced when we chose to incarnate as human individuals.
Unlike most channeled texts, The Starseed Transmissions is unusually self-conscious about its own status as a media signal. As Carey writes in his introduction, “Regardless of one’s opinion on the plausibility of extraterrestrial or angelic communion, it might be pointed out that the simple act of structuring information in this manner opens up communicative possibilities that are virtually nonexistent in a conventional mode.”8 Moreover, Carey’s aliens are quite frank about their roles as cosmic spin doctors, stealthily spreading their infectious data through terrestrial media webs in order to catalyze change subliminally in human minds. As such, the Transmissions read more like a set of trigger signals than a collection of beliefs. Like many human potential self-help books, the Transmissions are delivered in a first-person voice (“we”) directed toward a second-person reader (“you”), a technique of invasive immediacy that actively seeks both to penetrate and reprogram the reader as she’s reading: “It is critical that you remember your origin and purpose. Your descent into Matter has reached its low point. If all that you identify with is not to be annihilated in entropic collapse, you must begin waking up.”9 By alternately addressing the “you” that is an ordinary human personality, and the “you” that is awakening to its cosmic destiny, the Transmissions attempt literally to alienate the reader from conventional reality while providing a mystical focus for a new otherworldly identity. As Carey’s numinous corporate deity explains, “This new information is not additional data that you will act upon. It is, rather, the very reality of your new nature. You are not to act upon my information in the future, you are to be my information yourselves.”10
Needless to say, the apocalyptic information myths woven by Carey and Marciniak drip with gnostic motifs. After all, the ancient Gnostics also held that our spirits are born in a galaxy far, far away; that the world’s pain and suffering are due to dark forces that keep us imprisoned in material delusion; and that an incorporeal blast of cosmic knowledge will alchemically transmute the self into a godlike intelligence. Some Gnostics conceived of the agent of salvation as the incandescent code of the Logos, others as “the Alien man.” Mandaean compositions typically began by invoking “the great first alien Life from the worlds of light,” while one myth described how “Adam felt love for the Alien Man whose speech is alien, estranged from the world.”11
In his classic book The Gnostic Religion, Hans Jonas notes that the gnostic conviction that we are strangers in a strange land creates a cosmological framework for the existential feelings of homesickness and longing that so many humans experience. Besides giving voice to this primal sense of estrangement, which may very well be programmed into consciousness itself, the gnostic lends this alienation mythic power, transforming the feeling of cosmic remove into “a mark of excellence, a source of power and of a secret life unknown to the environment and in the last resort impregnable to it.”12 Many philosophies and religious traditions, especially the more existentially savvy ones, both acknowledge this offworld impulse and temper it, working the desire for transcendence into a balanced engagement with both the real limits of embodied life and the real possibilities of self-development. But in the chaos of postmodern life, whose accelerated tempo and media storms cut loose whatever natural ballast once kept the self intact, this transcendental impulse can easily go awry, shooting off into techno-utopian fantasies or New Age delusions or, in the worst case scenario, into the pit of collective suicide.
Level Above
In the spring of 1997, as Christians celebrated Christ’s resurrection and the comet Hale-Bopp blazed across the heavens, thirty-nine monks and nuns of the Heaven’s Gate cult dispatched themselves with a deadly mixture of vodka and phenobarbital in the hopes of beaming up to a spacecraft they believed was surfing the dusty spray of the comet. Their science-fiction faith notwithstanding, the cult’s most striking conviction was their gnostic denial of the flesh: their buzz-cut couture and quest for asexual androgyny, their belief that their bodies were dispensable “vehicles” or “containers” for their cosmic souls, and their (sometimes literally) self-castrating rejection of physical intimacy. With their rigorous vows of chastity and self-denial, and the sharp metaphysical wedge they drove between mind and body, the Heaven’s Gate cult recalled nothing so much as a New Age incarnation of some ancient clutch of crabbed and driven cenobites, yearning
for release.
Heaven’s Gate began in the early 1970s, when a wave of flying saucer cults zoomed into the frazzled spiritual vacuum that followed the collapse of countercultural utopia. Going under the names Bo and Peep, or simply the Two, Marshall Applewhite and his platonic mate, Bonnie Nettles, attracted a number of followers, some of whom stayed on until the end. Insisting on strict discipline and the rejection of emotions and most desires, the Two encouraged the cult members to cease identifying with their ordinary personality traits, and to shift their attention to “the level above human.” Neither these militant wake-up tactics nor the Two’s promise of an imminent mothership landing was unique for the times. But in 1997, Applewhite and a core crew of his followers chose to boldly go where no UFO cultists had gone before: through the gates of collective annihilation, and into the deliverance of a wandering star.
Along the way, the cult also hurtled themselves into the heart of the collective pop consciousness that now broadcasts its babble across the globe twenty-four hours a day. Within this new psychic geography of infotainment, nothing is as desirable as a media event: a news spectacle that resonates in the mass mind, that draws attention from all quarters, that dominates all channels with the power of a blockbuster film. The cult’s collective suicide was definitely such an event, and it grabbed people because it reflected a kaleidoscopic cluster of the culture’s own obsessions and media fixations, circa spring of 1997: UFOs, gender meltdown, Hale-Bopp, computers, the right to suicide, Star Trek, the cult of efficiency, affluent digs. Even the fresh black Nikes that appeared so prominently in police videos of the aftermath seemed like one of those product placements that infest Hollywood movies.
The suicides also gave the mass media the chance to hallucinate about the Internet, its brash young rival for the public’s attention. Because the cult built websites for themselves and for commercial clients, and included some computer professionals in their ranks, they were almost instantaneously branded “an Internet cult”—hardly a just appellation, given that the Internet played no apparent role in their cosmology and that the vast majority of the cultists signed up long before the group turned to the World Wide Web as a source of income and evangelical opportunity. But this didn’t stop the talking heads from shoveling up dubious assertions about rampant online cult activity and the ease of “recruitment” on Usenet and IRC. For people already worried or ignorant about online life, the Heaven’s Gate coverage transformed the Net into a spiritual threat, rather than the simply moral or political one constructed by conservative groups fixated on Web porn and bomb recipes.
Faced with this attack, and recognizing that the open structure of the Net erodes the kind of information control that true cults depend on, many digital activists went on the offensive, arguing that the Net cannot be blamed because the Net is “just a tool.” Their instincts were commendable, but this mealy chestnut has got to go. The Net is not a tool; it is, pace McLuhan, an environment, a resonating psychic amplifier that, among other things, erodes the barriers that separate center and margin, news and rumor, opinion and advertisement, truth and delusion. This makes it a great breeding ground for alternative accounts of reality, for subculture, and for those infectious mind viruses some call “memes.” Detached from a common vision of public space and shared intellectual culture, online society becomes a hive of interest groups, fandoms, data junkies, manufactured marketing niches, and virtual communities made up of solitary souls. In the words of Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, the Web allows people to “develop a pothole of culture out of which they can’t climb.”13 In this sense, the Web incarnates the strange intuition that Henry Adams, looking into a future ruled by the dynamo, articulated almost a century ago: that we do not inhabit a universe after all, but a multiverse.
Multiverses are cool in comic books, but they are also dangerous and difficult places to navigate. As the Net increasingly mediates our perception of the world, as well as our social and economic activity, we may come to learn this dizzying condition firsthand. For even as the Web builds links between different worldviews, and encourages us to channel-surf the tangled noodles of the collective mind, the technology may wind up producing a rent in the fabric of consensus reality as wide as the ozone hole over Antarctica. Already we can see the runs: hoaxes and rumors breed true believers, worldviews become worlds, and bad ideas find like minds. No longer held in check by editors or lawyers or the snail’s pace of the mail, anonymous and unsubstantiated claims, both spontaneous and engineered, now run like wildfire through the information environment, forcing institutions to issue official reactions and mainstream journalists to treat the rumors themselves as news. The Web is by nature a kind of conspiracy-machine, a mechanism that encourages an ever-broadening network of speculative leaps, synchronistic links, and curious juxtapositions of the latest signs and portents.
So it is hardly accidental that at least one member of Heaven’s Gate, Yvonne McCurdy-Hill, first climbed aboard the Hale-Bopp express through the portals of her Internet browser. Not that the cult restricted its media evangelism to the online marketplace. Convinced that Luciferic forces were on the rise and the planet was about to be spaded over, the group spent their last few years attempting to squeeze their memes through as many delivery channels as possible. They bought a full-page ad in USA Today, dabbled with satellite broadcasts, churned out pamphlets and handbills, distributed videotapes, spammed Usenet, and jazzed up their own data-dense website with the latest Java applets. But their savviest stunt was hijacking the mass media from beyond the grave. The still-believing survivor Rio DiAngelo told Newsweek that his comrades would be “proud” of all the hoopla their suicide generated: “They really wanted the whole world to know this information but couldn’t get it out. No one would listen. I think they would be happy.”14
The most intense advertisements for the cult’s parallel worldview were their final dispatches: the handful of farewell messages videotaped just days before departure. Knowing that these documents would find their way onto television, the cultists faced the cameras and addressed us, the media-saturated members of a civilization they had abandoned as a lost cause. As Darwin Lee Johnson explained in one of them: “We know that the spin doctors, the people who make a profession out of debunking everybody, will attack what we’re doing.… They will say that we’re crazy, that we’re mesmerized.… We know it isn’t true, but how can you know that?” That’s the million-dollar question, of course, but compared to the smug psychobabble about mind control that most of the “cult experts” trundled out on the TV news, the tapes succeeded in destabilizing the usual routine. They provided a very human, if thoroughly disturbing, picture of what one former member called “the most extraordinary sociological experiment you could imagine.”
The tapes also suggested what later reporting confirmed: that Heaven’s Gate included some pretty hard-core science-fiction fans, at least of the variety obsessed with the products of Hollywood’s dream factory. Sitting in assigned seats before their communal 72-inch TV, the cultists drank up The X-Files and the various Star Trek shows, and rounded out their fare with videos like Cocoon, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the Star Wars trilogy. Alongside their Nike sneakers, the most notable aspect of the group’s suicide uniforms was the triangular shoulder patch emblazoned with the phrase “Away Team”—Trek jargon for the small patrols who beam down planet-side. Particularly eerie was the presence among the dead of Thomas Nichols, the brother of Nichelle Nichols, who played the communications officer Lieutenant Uhura on the original Star Trek series and who once hawked a psychic hotline on TV.
Captain Applewhite and Away Team didn’t take their genre clichés quite as literally as many supposed. The group admitted ignorance about whether or not they would wind up in heaven, in another dimension, or on the bridge of a starship. One of their online screeds also suggests that the cult self-consciously employed “the Star Trek vernacular” to communicate their apocalyptic religious convictions to mundane minds steeped
in popular culture. After all, science fiction’s allegiance to science is often pared or overshadowed by the genre’s exploration of humanity’s lingering desire for mythology, cosmology, and cognitive breakthrough. Even middle-of-the-road SF can express mystical, if not gnostic, sentiments at times; in The Empire Strikes Back the wizened Jedi guru Yoda gurgles to Luke Skywalker, “Luminous beings are we; not this crude matter.” Hearing this line, it’s hard not to imagine the acolytes of Heaven’s Gate huddled around their TV set just weeks before their suicide run, silently cheering the old Muppet’s confirmation of their most deeply held beliefs.
A most remarkable use of gnostic SF metaphors occurs in Dennis Johnson’s farewell videotape, which was aired on Nightline soon after the suicides. In it, the forty-two-year-old ex–rock guitarist claims that “laying down these human bodies that we borrowed for this task” will be just as simple as stepping out of the holodeck on Star Trek: The Next Generation—a holographic virtual reality room where the crew while away the hours in fabricated worlds or training exercises. Johnson then goes on:
