Many such Sheilaists joined Heaven’s Gate, but of course not all Sheilaists did so. The founders of Heaven’s Gate made an ironic religious offer: they appealed to spiritually individualistic seekers, but they also declared that they offered the single best religious system and that one no longer needed to continue one’s search. Nettles and Applewhite’s system promised definitive spiritual results in exchange for leaving behind all other spiritual pursuits and following their approach exclusively. Candidates must “walk out the doors” of their lives, abandoning possessions, families, and attachments. They must abandon even the spiritual quest itself, as Nettles and Applewhite explained, “the ‘walking out the door’ formula should not be confused with a seeming similar experience that so many have tried, the search for ‘self.’”12 Elsewhere they made similar statements about the apparent similarity of their approaches to other forms of spiritual development, but again stressing that one must leave behind such alternatives and follow their approach alone.13 This marked the religious system of Heaven’s Gate as quite dissimilar to the diffuse spiritual practices and groups of the New Age out of which Applewhite and Nettles emerged, and much more akin to other new religious movements such as the Unification Church, Scientology, or Hare Krishnas who insisted on exclusive religious commitment. It also marked them as akin to the many new forms of Evangelical Christianity emerging at this time that marketed themselves to spiritual seekers but insisted on offering exclusive truths and not mere spiritual options.14
Yet Nettles and Applewhite also explicitly invoked the theme of individualism so as to appeal to spiritual seekers. They closed each of their initial three statements—the ones they widely distributed in the early days of the movement to potential converts—with clarion calls aimed at individualistic spiritual seekers. “If this speaks to you—respond—according to your capabilities or needs. For your sake—give this opportunity your best,” declared the closing words of the First Statement.15 “Why not you?” asked the Second.16 The Third Statement blended a sense of fate with free will, one of the hallmarks of the New Age movement that emphasizes the ideas of both destiny and choice:
If YOU are ready for YOUR “final exam,” leaving behind your “nest” and trying your “wings,” the “two” here to demonstrate can help prepare you for that “exam.” FIND THEM! Take that step NOW. You are probably one of those who is incarnate at this time for that express purpose. Don’t miss your chance. Don’t waste a moment. Let’s work toward your Easter now!17
Such an approach encapsulated the individualistic approach of the spiritual seekers to whom Nettles and Applewhite appealed. It invoked three metaphors—that of the bird leaving its nest, of a student graduating, and of Christ’s Easter resurrection. The first two emphasize positive transitions wherein an individual takes charge of its existence and becomes more independent and intentional. The last focuses on a profound transformation and transition in status from worldly existence to an eternal one. Of course, the Two required that converts accept their particular mandate of spiritual practices. Their rhetoric skillfully combined appeals to individualistic spiritual seeking and the sort of exclusivist religious message one expects in a high-demand religious group.
Table 2.1: Members of Heaven’s Gate at the time of the 1997 suicides
Religious Name within Heaven’s Gate
Year of Entrance / Initial Membership
Do
(Founder)
Alxody*
1975
Glnody†
1975
Chkody†
1975
Jnnody†
1975
Jwnody†
1975
Lggody†
1975
Lvvody†
1975
Mllody
1975
Nrrody†
1975
Ollody
1975
Prsody
1975
Slvody†
1975
Snnody
1975
Stlody
1975
Stmody†
1975
Wndody
1975
Anlody†
1976
Brnody†
1976
Dymody
1976
Drrody†
1976
Dstody
1976
Jmmody†
1976
Smmody†
1976
Sngody
1976
Srrody
1976
Strody
1976
Tllody
1976
Trsody
1976
Evnody*
1991
Avnody*
1994
Gldody
1994
Leody*
1994
Qstody†
1994
Tddody†
1994
Wknody†
1994
Yrsody†
1994
Vrnody
1995
Dvvody
1996
†: contributed to the Heaven’s Gate anthology (“Purple Book”)
*: did not appear in videotaped Exit Videos
In appealing to the spiritual seeker but offering a product that claimed exclusivity, the founders of Heaven’s Gate situated their movement within the American religious marketplace in a place where they could appeal to spiritual seekers looking to escape from a cycle of Sheilaism and devote themselves to a single religious pursuit. Sociologist Wade Clark Roof has written of this pursuit as part of a “quest culture” that developed during the American postwar period. Roof locates this “open, spiritual searching style” among not just spiritual seekers but members of institutionalized religions, “Christian Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Charismatics, and in addition, many mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, and others who might not think of themselves immediately in such terms, yet for whom the language of ‘journey’ and ‘walk’ and ‘growth’ are commonplace.”18 While most Americans remained rooted in their quests within single religious traditions—analogous to how most travel by highways on their physical journeys—others looked beyond the mainstream traditions into groups within Campbell’s cultic milieu. Roof calls this the “spiritual marketplace” in which numerous spiritual and religious groups compete to offer destinations or excursions to America’s spiritual pilgrims.
The individuals who joined Heaven’s Gate were all spiritual seekers, but they hailed from a diverse range of locations within the American spiritual marketplace. In journalist James S. Phelan’s interviews with members and ex-members, he found a diverse range of individuals. One man joined Heaven’s Gate because of a longtime fascination with UFOs, another called herself a lifelong spiritual seeker, a third was raised Catholic, but trekked across the country to find the group and described it as the “first time in my life [that] I have a firm faith that there is something higher.”19 Others included an agnostic who experimented with hallucinogenic drugs and looked for meaning in the stars, and a Jewish seeker from New York who had journeyed to Israel and India to try kibbutzim (communes), drugs, and gurus. Phelan summarized his subjects as sharing “one common denominator among almost all the converts. Almost all are seekers . . . They have spent years, in the trite phase, ‘trying to find themselves.’ Many have tried Scientology, yoga, Zen, offbeat cults, hallucinogens, hypnosis, tarot cards and astrology. Almost all believe in psychic phenomena.”20 Years later, an analysis of the thirty-nine members who committed suicide in 1997 revealed that little had changed. While they hailed from different places, social locales, and generations, the majority of members had long histories of spiritual exploration.21
Yet it would be a mistake to assume that all the individuals who joined Heaven’s Gate were hippies. Several were quite well-to-do, and comfortably middle class. John Craig (Lggody, as he was called wit
hin the group), who joined in summer 1975 and remained with the group until the suicides, was a successful land developer and former Republican candidate for Colorado’s House of Representatives. His business colleagues described him as “the last guy in the world you’d think would do a thing like this,” “an ideal businessman with no problems,” and “having perhaps the finest family in town.”22 In the case of Craig, looks were obviously deceiving. While not demonstrating any of the usual characteristics of a spiritual seeker, Craig clearly was. A family friend introduced him to members of Heaven’s Gate and he left to join the group shortly thereafter.23 Craig remained with the group until the end. A post-suicide tabulation published by the New York Times showed that several members, like Craig, came from the upper social strata of America, including the daughter of a judge and a child of a major telephone company executive.24 As Roof noted, spiritual seekers belonged to all of America’s religions, not just the alternative ones or counterculture. Historian James Hudnut-Beumler has traced a rich tradition of subtle resistance against the “religion of the American dream” throughout the 1950s and 1960s, emblemized by individuals such as Kerouac and the other beatniks. While Craig and others joined Heaven’s Gate a decade later, Hudnut-Beumler’s contention still holds that even white middle-class conservative American Christians longed for meaning in a variety of ways, inside and outside of the conventional churches.25 Robert S. Ellwood made a similar set of claims in his study of the mainstream American religion of the suburbs, finding an “underground religious economy” of beatniks, UFO enthusiasts, and monastics.26 No shortage of options for alternative religious questing existed, and Heaven’s Gate fit within that cultural world.
Those who joined Heaven’s Gate had generally experimented with other new or alternative religions previously. In her study of the Unification Church, another new religious movement from this era, sociologist Eileen Barker found massive defection rates and a revolving door of converts and apostates. A little more than half the members who joined were still members a year later, and more than two-thirds had left within four years. In terms of those who had merely attended a meeting of this new religion and not actually joined, less than half a percent of individuals who visited the Unification Church center Barker studied were affiliated with the group two years later.27 Evidence from scholars who have studied other NRMs parallels Barker’s results, revealing high levels of defection.28 In many cases, individuals bounce from one group to another, becoming serial converts.29 Clearly, numerous members of Heaven’s Gate had been involved in other new religious movements, sectarian groups, and alternative living experiments, ranging from communes to alternative food practices to membership in actual new religious movements. The vast majority of people who attended informational meetings hosted by Heaven’s Gate and who even joined the group left the movement, but those who stayed found what they had been looking for in their spiritual quest.
Heaven’s Gate promised a chance for a way out of the endless revolving doors of spiritual seeking. Certainly the movement’s theology did not appeal to everyone. Despite the fact that in its early days the founders exerted little control and made few actual demands, its theology demanded exclusivism, and the religious practices Applewhite and Nettles required were puritanical—avoidance of sex, drugs, alcohol, and recreation. Yet for individuals who sought spiritual answers, enough found Heaven’s Gate appealing that they joined. Once they did so, they located themselves in a movement that both assumed and challenged the popular elements of the spiritual quest and the cultic milieu. Heaven’s Gate accepted the premise of the spiritual quest and valorized the search for spiritual knowledge, but it also curtailed it and offered a ready-made answer to the questions raised by the quest.
Post-1970s Converts
Heaven’s Gate had a relatively unique historical trajectory in terms of proselytizing and membership. While leaders and members of the group actively evangelized in the first formative years of the movement’s history, they ceased seeking converts in the spring of 1976 and generally refrained from proselytizing during the group’s remaining twenty-year history. They emerged from their self-imposed seclusion only five times during that time: in 1988 when the movement’s members produced a booklet that they mailed to various New Age centers; in 1991–92 when they produced a series of satellite television broadcasts; in 1993–94 when the movement placed a national newspaper advertisement and once again began active proselytizing through a series of nationwide meetings; and in 1997 shortly before the mass suicides when the group used the Internet to try to reach potential converts. New members joined during each of these periods with the exception of the 1988 effort (see table 2.1). Because they converted during a social period quite different from the mid-1970s, their individual trajectories into Heaven’s Gate deserve additional attention.
Ten of the thirty-nine individuals who belonged to Heaven’s Gate at the time of the suicides had joined during these recent periods of the group’s evangelization: Of these, all but three of the more recent converts either contributed to the movement’s anthology or produced Exit Videos—videotaped farewell notes that all but four members created—to publicly state their views and beliefs about the group. These seven converts who left their own words about having joined in the 1990s—the earliest in 1991 and the latest in 1996, just six months before the suicides—tell tales of religious exploration and increasing frustration with an inability to find religious fulfillment until discovering Heaven’s Gate.
Tddody—members of Heaven’s Gate took new six-letter names ending on “-ody,” as discussed and analyzed in chapter 530—offers an interesting case of an individual who joined the movement in its first years, left, and then rejoined in the 1990s. As to the first experience that drew him into the group, Tddody describes it as a type of fate. “I first came in contact with Ti and Do (my Teachers) in the mid-70s at a meeting in California. At that meeting, things occurred that in no way could be called coincidence. As Do spoke, questions would come to mind, and as I would think the question, Do would say something like, ‘Some may wonder about . . .’ and state the question I was thinking. When this occurred, I felt as if I were in a tunnel with Do at one end and me at the other. Although I sat in the back of a packed auditorium, it was is [sic] if no one else were there, but He (Do) and His Older Member (Ti) and myself.”31 Tddody joined and spent three years in the movement before leaving.
Tddody also emphasized fate in telling the story of his reentry into Heaven’s Gate. “In October of 1994, I was guided by the grace of the Next Level into a ‘chance meeting’ with my former classmates, and I expressed my sincere and earnest desire to re-enter the class,” he explained.32 But Tddody also described his disgust at the broader world and a narrative of pain and disillusionment as driving him away from conventional living and toward spiritual seeking. “While in the world, I had tasted success and found it to be very rude, mean, aggressive, and quite abrasive and distasteful—‘qualities’ I have no wish to enhance or develop. I have seen the world through a thousand pairs of eyes and despised it each and every time—without exception!” Continuing, Tddody indicates that “In the world, I’d been harassed, beat up, lied to, cheated, threatened, robbed, and abused in almost every way thinkable.”33 Clearly Tddody considered his time away from Heaven’s Gate at best a learning experience and negative reference, and at worst a sort of hellish nightmare.
Tddody also indicated that he had tried many different spiritual paths in the intervening years since he first met the founders of Heaven’s Gate. “I’ve been down many different paths . . . I’ve tried it all and nothing worked,” he explained in his Exit Video. Tddody intentionally avoided discussing the alternative approaches he tried in the time before returning to the movement, referring to that period as “time wasted . . . walking down paths that were dead ends.” This pattern repeated in the narratives of the other recent converts to Heaven’s Gate, most of whom described a life of questioning, exploration, and seeking before joining Heaven’s Gate,
but (intentionally?) omitting the description of what sort of spiritual pursuits they had tried.
Qstody, who takes his religious name within Heaven’s Gate from the word “quest” and the idea of being on a spiritual quest, offered nearly the same assessment as Tddody. He offered a bleak assessment of his life before joining the movement, describing a spiritual journey that had resulted in frustration rather than elucidation, and specifically critiqued the various religious options outside the movement as “[l]ike programmed puppets worshipping false myths, rituals, futile belief systems and counterfeit fantasy gods. I felt angry, alienated, hopeless, incomplete and utterly unsatisfied in this world no matter what I tried. Many times I could barely keep from going into a complete coma, trying to stay awake enough to muster a desperate constant prayer, to keep my hope and motivation alive in this space alien HELL.”34 The theme of alienation and living in an alien world emerge most forcefully, and especially ironically, since members of Heaven’s Gate sought extraterrestrial salvation. But their belief system emphasized that maleficent space aliens actually controlled human society, and hence Qstody found in Heaven’s Gate a worldview that explained his deep sense of alienation as entirely appropriate and proper. In fact, Heaven’s Gate reinforced this sense of alienation by offering to Qstody a vision of himself transcending the world and rejecting the human condition.
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