Heaven's Gate

by Benjamin E. Zeller

  This approach highlights one of the central features of extraterrestrial biblical hermeneutics, that of philosophical materialism. Christopher Partridge calls the same phenomenon physicalism, but I prefer the technical term drawn from the study of philosophy of religion, which is materialism. As philosophers define it, materialism is a philosophy that roots fundamental existence within the physical reality around us that can be perceived through empirical means, understood in a rational manner, and interacted with through ordinary means. Materialists hold that life is purely a physical phenomenon, and reject claims to supernaturalism, spiritual existence, or forms of philosophical dualism that root human existence within a mind or soul apart from the body.38 For Heaven’s Gate’s founders and members, materialism functioned as one of their fundamental assumptions. They therefore read the Bible through that lens, interpreting stories of miracles, visions, and supernatural beings as purely material happenings misunderstood by ancient people as somehow non-material.

  Heaven’s Gate’s extraterrestrial biblical hermeneutics provided for its founders and members a way of interpreting the biblical text and deriving meaning from it. They used this approach to search the text for evidence of extraterrestrial contact with humans, and to try to understand the extraterrestrials’ teachings and instructions. As Heaven’s Gate grew and its founders further developed their theologies, they modified their earlier assessments of the meanings of the text. Most crucially, they shifted their self-understandings and views of their missions. Yet throughout their history they used the same hermeneutical approach.

  Science and Technology in the Worldview of Heaven’s Gate

  Though the main scholarly debate over the nature of the Heaven’s Gate worldview has focused on whether the group predicated itself on Christian or New Age themes, several other major influences and elements also characterize the movement’s worldview. Like many other groups in the modern world, Heaven’s Gate elevated issues of science and technology within its theology and ideology. The founders and members of new religious movements of the mid- and late-twentieth century have tended to make extensive use of ideas about science and technology, owing partially to the tremendous rise in the public place of science, and partially to the advent of the contemporary age that makes science and technology central parts of popular culture.39 Religious historian Steven M. Tipton writes of this new scientific age as rooted in the basic facts of modernity: “[i]ts growing influence over American life derives in part from the compatibility of utilitarian individualism with the conditions of modernity: technological economic production, bureaucratic social organization, and empirical science,” he explains.40 Science and technology have infused contemporary social structures, and therefore culture as well.

  Within Heaven’s Gate, science played a central role as a rhetorical tool used to understand the movement, its identity, and its relationship with outsiders. As a UFO religion, this is hardly surprising. Historian of new religions John Saliba has postulated, “UFO phenomena are a new type of religion that attempts to formulate a worldview that is more consistent with the culture and technology of the twenty-first century.”41 Both I and Christopher Partridge have made similar arguments that attraction to technology and science serve as hallmarks of UFO religions, and Carl Jung’s famous declaration that UFOs function as “technological angels” offers perhaps the most standard view of how religious groups predicated on belief in UFOs and space aliens have used ideas drawn from science and technology in place of those traditionally ascribed to religion.42

  The founders and members of Heaven’s Gate spoke extensively about how scientific their movement was, and how science supported their beliefs. Most directly, Applewhite declared of his religious beliefs in a 1997 video, “This is as scientific—this is as true as true could be.”43 The equation of truth with science goes to the heart of what Tipton and others note as the manner in which science has achieved a sort of cultural preeminence. Elsewhere, Applewhite and others invoked biology, chemistry, and physics to support their religious positions. Their transition into perfected Next Level beings was an “evolution,” they wrote, and was accomplished through “biological and chemical” means.44 Members invoked technological references as well, often computer-based ones. The self existed on a “hard drive,” the body as a form of “hardware,” and the true self in the form of “software,” wrote several of the members.45 The movement’s website even linked to a (now defunct, and sadly un-archived46) web page, “Science Without Bounds,” that Heaven’s Gate webmaster, probably a member named Glnody, described as “A Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Mysticism.”47

  One must partially read the use of science as a rhetorical tool to differentiate the group from other religions, and particularly from the forms of Christianity that actually shared the most in common with Heaven’s Gate on a theological level. For example, as opposed to the “superstitious” Christian concepts of Heaven that members of Heaven’s Gate deplored, adherents of the group believed their heaven to be empirically verifiable, and therefore scientifically proven to be real. Of course, it would be extremely difficult to actually disprove the existence of the Next Level, requiring advanced feats of astronomy. High and distant, it is unlikely that any human would be able to marshal proof enough to discount the Next Level’s existence. However, like the medieval image of Heaven hovering above the clouds, their heaven was as real as a rock or a tree. One could fly a spaceship to it. One didn’t need to be dead to physically encounter it (at least as members initially believed). In the minds of the members of Heaven’s Gate, any person with sense enough to believe in the existence of the Earth had no recourse but to believe in the Next Level. It required no leap of faith, only the recognition that our telescopes had not yet pierced the farthest reaches of the sky.

  This physicalism extended to the movement members’ beliefs that biological Next Level entities were in fact what religious people mistakenly believe to be supernatural beings. In an early interview Nettles and Applewhite explained that the figure Christians call Lucifer or Satan actually was an extraterrestrial, a living biological being who had “displeased the Chief by getting into his own ego trip” with the consequence of Lucifer’s banishment to planet Earth and the nearby cosmos.48 Members continued to hold this belief until the end of the movement. By the end of the group’s terrestrial existence, adherents described the Christian concept of grace as an implanted chip, prayer as a type of radio transmission, and the miracles described in the Bible as technological wizardry. As Heaven’s Gate member Jwnody—a prolific spokesperson for the group who authored much of the materials that the movement’s leader Do did not—wrote in a statement published in the group’s anthology, “Urgent Warning: The lawless, the criminals, the major corrupters of the inhabitants of this world, from the Kingdom of God’s point of view, are human-equivalent space aliens who have been deliberately deceiving—victimizing—your most prominent religious leaders. These technologically advanced alien species have succeeded in having these leaders look to them as ‘Almighty God.’”49 Using their technological devices that humans mistake as miracles, the Luciferian extraterrestrials answer prayers of unwitting religious people, situating themselves as the Lords of the planet.

  The belief that Heaven’s Gate’s worldview was somehow “scientific” and that religious people lacked this bona-fide legitimate rational sense of perspective undergirded Jwnody’s writing. “Just who are the real occultists? Where are there more meaningless rituals performed than in the church, e.g., baptism, burial ceremonies, marriage ceremonies, genuflection, crossing oneself, kissing the Father’s ring, . . . ? And who, in reality, are the number one promoters of idolatry?”50 Christians, she answers. Worst of all, under the yoke of Christianity, “you are encouraged to pray to some ‘god’ or mythical concept of Jesus.”51 Jwnody’s scare quotes and her vitriol indicate the degree to which she believed her own beliefs modern, scientific, and rational, and unlike those held by members of other religions. Lest Asian religions
escape unscathed from the group’s rhetoric, in his lament for the “victims” of world religions, Jwnody’s co-religionist Stmody laments that Buddhism is no better than Christianity, a religion predicated on “ritual and myth,” which he equates to superstition. Echoing Karl Marx, perhaps unconsciously, Stmody accuses Buddhism of dulling the mind of the masses. “But Buddha’s message . . . is mainly ritual and myth that keeps people sidetracked, hooked on the ‘drug’ of spirituality.”52 Stmody, Jwnody, and other members of Heaven’s Gate connote religion with the belief in myths, a suspect epistemology to self-professed “cynical, skeptical” spiritual seekers. They contrast this with what they considered the rational and scientific beliefs that they held.53

  Finally, the adherents of Heaven’s Gate’s embraced science only partially, circumscribing it within their clearly religious worldview. Heaven’s Gate members critiqued science on the same grounds on which they critiqued religion: the movement’s adherents saw both as epistemologically questionable worldviews. Ultimately, science itself functioned as an alternative religion, the “cult of Science” or “temple of science,” as two members of Heaven’s Gate labeled it.54 Heaven’s Gate criticized science as relying upon dubious naturalist assumptions, just as religion relies upon dubious supernaturalist assumptions. A movement that claimed the existence of disincarnate spirits, extra-sensory perception, and the evolution of souls, Heaven’s Gate was as leery of purely naturalistic explanations of reality as it was repulsed by what it considered superstitious religiosity. Members rejected what philosopher of science Mikael Stenmark calls epistemic scientism, “[t]he view that the only reality that we can know anything about is the one science has access to.”55 Applewhite therefore contrasted faith with scientific proof, arguing that faith leads to true knowledge, whereas science does not. Setting the word within quotes, Applewhite revealed his suspicion that scientific “proofs” do not prove anything. “[N]o ‘proof’ that would ever satisfy the scientific community was offered (no spacecraft landed in our backyard). But, through the nurturing of faith, we came to know the reality of the Next Level and that Ti and Do are our Older Members,” he wrote of himself and his movement.56 Adherents of a religious ideology, the members of Heaven’s Gate self-consciously understood their epistemology as deductive rather than inductive: it required faith, not empiricism. While members embraced science, they implicitly realized its limits within the confines of their religious system.

  Science Fiction, Invented Religions, and Religions of Fiction

  While science certainly served a central role in how members of Heaven’s Gate thought about themselves and their movement, so did science fiction, which served as one of the most important ways in which the group’s members synthesized the various components of their religious bricolage as they assembled a meaningful worldview. Beginning with the first media coverage of the group after the 1997 suicides, journalists have fixated on this aspect of Heaven’s Gate. Magazines and newspapers—ranging from the sober New York Times to the popular TIME and Newsweek to the sensationalistic National Inquirer—all called Heaven’s Gate a “science fiction cult” and covered aspects of its “science fiction theology.” To take just one example: The Los Angeles Times, which because of its geographic proximity to Rancho Santa Fe became the newspaper of record for the coverage of Heaven’s Gate, framed Heaven’s Gate as a product of science fiction. The April 2, 1997 edition of the Los Angeles Times referenced a popular science fiction television series in the subtitle of its front-page article on the group. “‘I Want to Believe’ is the mantra not just for TV’s ‘X-Files’ but also for many Americans who look to science or sci-fi—or what lies in between—to explain life’s mysteries.” The article that followed focused on how Heaven’s Gate was part of “an increasingly popular culture in which the search for meaning has turned to a fuzzy fusion of science and science fiction.”57 Another article in the Los Angeles Times, this one a guest editorial, even blamed the mass media, particularly book publishers and television producers, for feeding “the public a steady diet of science fiction fantasy, packaged and sold as real,” that Heaven’s Gate transformed into its “pseudoscientific” religion.58

  Partially, journalists found the notion of Heaven’s Gate as a science fiction cult a useful trope since it helped them to frame the group as bizarre and illegitimate, an approach that Sean McCloud has documented as typical of coverage of NRMs since the 1960s.59 Yet science fiction possesses certain parallels to religion, ones upon which Heaven’s Gate did indeed draw. Both consider ideas beyond the typical ken of usual human experience, both treat weighty issues such as the future of humanity and its place in the universe, and both seek to transcend the ordinary. Indeed, several other new religions have also drawn from or invoked science fiction, since the sympathies between religion and science fiction seem so prevalent.60

  I have elsewhere written far more extensively of Heaven’s Gate as a “science fiction religion,” and I will not belabor that point here.61 However, one must take note of the prevalent place of science fiction within the Heaven’s Gate worldview. Heaven’s Gate incorporated elements from science fiction directly into its worldview. The group’s members believed in classic science fiction tropes such as UFOs, interstellar wars, alien technologies, and human-alien hybrids, and referred to God as an extraterrestrial being. Despite these science fiction elements, the movement did not incorporate them willy-nilly. Rather, Heaven’s Gate carefully introduced material drawn from science fiction in order to support and explain the theological perspectives that they developed through their specific hermeneutical approach. Yet since the movement declared that the Jewish and Christian Bibles were records of extraterrestrial contact with Earth, and that Earth functioned as a laboratory and classroom for extraterrestrials, certain parallels existed between their basic theology and that of science fiction. Indeed, several science fiction stories bear a remarkable similarity to Heaven’s Gate’s theology, most notably the movie and television series Stargate, a fact that members of the movement noted and used as part of their appeal to science fiction fans. Heaven’s Gate member Rkkody cited Stargate as an accurate depiction of the origin of Earth’s religions—“closer to reality than anyone thinks” in his words—as well as a good tool to convey the theology behind Heaven’s Gate, indicating his reflexive awareness of the use of science fiction within the group.62 In the case of Stargate, which describes malevolent extraterrestrials as the sources of much of the world’s religions and troubles—obvious parallels existed. Since the Heaven’s Gate theology predates that particular science fiction franchise, this is not a case of using fiction as a source for religious innovation, but rather appealing to outsiders using well-known elements drawn from popular culture.

  Members also made extensive use of science fiction in seeking to convey their ideas to the public. The movement’s one-third page advertisement in the national American newspaper USA Today, published May 27, 1993, best represents this approach. Transposing the story of the incarnation of Christ—an important aspect of Heaven’s Gate’s “backstory,” since they believed they were continuing Christ’s mission—onto that of Star Trek, the advertisement proclaimed: “Two thousand years ago, the true Kingdom of God appointed an Older Member to send His ‘Son,’ along with some of their beginning students, to incarnate on this garden. While on Earth as an ‘away team’ with their ‘Captain,’ they were to work on their overcoming of humanness and tell the civilization they were visiting how the true Kingdom of God can be entered.” Here Heaven’s Gate referenced the “away team,” an invented concept from the fictional Star Trek universe of a small group of crew members descending from their spaceship so as to engage in some activity on a planet’s surface. They also referred to Christ as a “Captain,” alluding to the main characters of the various Star Trek television series, namely Captain Kirk from the original series and Captain Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation.63

  The advertisement continued, explaining the nature of the Heaven’s Gate movem
ent with reference to Christ and his apostles as well as to Star Trek. “That same ‘away team’ incarnated again in the 1970’s in the mature (adult) bodies that had been picked and prepped for this current mission. This time the ‘Admiral’ (the Older Member, or Father, incarnate in a female vehicle) came with the Son—‘Captain’—and his crew.” Alluding to the rank system in Star Trek’s quasi-military Starfleet, the authors of the advertisement portrayed the movement’s founders as both divine figures and science fiction characters, Applewhite/Christ/Captain, Nettles/God the Father/Admiral.64 Readers of the advertisement who had seen Star Trek would surely have thought of the pairing of Admiral Kirk (the character had been promoted since the days of the television show) and Captain Spock from the various Star Trek motion pictures produced in the decades before the advertisement, especially Star Trek IV, released two years earlier, which featured the Enterprise crew visiting twentieth-century Earth in an attempt to “save the planet from its own short-sightedness,” in the words of the movie.65

  Heaven’s Gate’s USA Today advertisement used other language drawn from Star Trek as well, most notably its reference to human morality as a “prime directive.” In Star Trek the prime directive is a moral imperative of not interfering with another culture’s natural development. For Heaven’s Gate members, here drawing on a New Age sense of individual self-transformation, the prime directive became the moral requirement to not interfere in another person’s spiritual development. The advertisement ended with another Star Trek reference, and one that combined the group’s biblical, ufology, and science fiction language. The members of the movement would depart on “the true ‘Enterprise’ (spaceship or ‘cloud of light’).” This brief statement combines the multiple languages that Heaven’s Gate spoke. Even casual consumers of science fiction would recognize the reference to the Enterprise, the spaceship that ferries the crew of the original Star Trek series and Star Trek: The Next Generation between its adventures, and over the course of the televisions series even develops a life of its own as something more akin to a character than an object. Heaven’s Gate also utilizes a more generic term, “spaceship,” a concept with which readers of the advertisement familiar with ufology would more closely identify. Finally, the movement referenced the biblical tradition and the “bright cloud” (elsewhere, “cloud of light”) said to be present at divine events, and what Heaven’s Gate believed was a UFO.66