Heaven's Gate
Page 14
Demonology: Luciferian Space Aliens
The cosmology that members and leaders of Heaven’s Gate developed emphasized not only materialism in terms of the heavenly Next Level and angelic Next Level beings, but their opposites as well. Just as heaven physically existed as a real place filled with living extraterrestrial creatures, so too did hellish beings exist in a real physical sense. At the opposite end of the Heaven’s Gate cosmology from the peaceful Next Level and its members, the dark forces that members of Heaven’s Gate called the Luciferians occupied the role of tempters and antagonists. In the early days of Heaven’s Gate, the founders and members paid little attention to the concept of darker forces, though they did believe in malevolent “spirits” or “forces” that could interfere in personal development. But as the movement’s theology grew, the concept became more developed, and by the early 1990s Heaven’s Gate possessed a rather thorough demonology. In the words of the group’s 1993 advertisement placed in USA Today and various regional newspapers,
there are many space alien races that through the centuries of this civilization (and in civilizations prior) have represented themselves to humans as “Gods.” We refer to them collectively as “Luciferians,” for their ancestors fell away from the keeping of the true Kingdom of God many thousands of years ago. They are not genderless—they still need to reproduce. They are nothing more than technically advanced humans who have retained some of what they learned while in the early training of members of the true Kingdom of God, e.g., limited space-time travel, telepathic communication, advanced travel hardware (spacecrafts, etc.), increased longevity, advanced genetic engineering, and such things as suspended holograms (as used in some religious “miracles”).28
This advertisement hints at the Manichean position that members of Heaven’s Gate took toward the cosmos. Adherents of the ancient and now mostly defunct Manichean religion believed that Earth exists as a sort of battleground between good and evil, and that individual human lives serve as skirmishes in that battle. Like ancient Manicheans, adherents of Heaven’s Gate believed that while wholly (or holy) good Next Level beings strived constantly to maintain a just and stable cosmos, periodically harvesting human souls to join them as the members of Heaven’s Gate hoped to do, the universe was also filled with foul forces intent on destroying the Next Level’s work, confusing human beings, and masquerading as gods. The reference to using extraterrestrial technology to mimic religious miracles serves as a staple of ufology and the various ancient astronaut theories that proclaim extraterrestrial visitations as the roots of the world’s religions, as well as various forms of popular science fiction that tells stories of advanced species passing themselves off as gods among primitive humans. (Science fiction great Arthur C. Clarke’s famous statement that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic is perhaps emblematic of this sort of position, though phrased in a way less offensive to believers in religious miracles.29)
For adherents of Heaven’s Gate, Earth itself became the battlefield for these two forces, the location where the Next Level and the Luciferians struggled over the fate of the population of the planet. Unlike true Manichaeism or even pop science fiction, the result of this conflict was never in doubt. The Next Level not only possesses superior morality to the Luciferians, but superior technology. While Luciferian influence periodically waxes and wanes, the Next Level ultimately always achieves the upper hand. Earth therefore witnesses the rise and fall of civilizations, but each wave of civilizations culminates in the Next Level defeating Luciferian influence, harvesting a crop of human souls to join the Next Level, and restarting human civilization again. As a result, Earth functions as a sort of cosmic classroom where living beings must prove themselves above the temptations of the Luciferians and therefore deserving of Next Level membership. As Heaven’s Gate member Anlody wrote shortly before the suicides, “Earth and its human level are the hell and purgatory of legend. It wasn’t meant as a place in which to get comfortable or to stay. It was set up as a place to separate the renegades of Heaven—the Luciferians—from those who have risen above the human level, and a place to test souls striving to get to the Level Above Human.”30 Such a position not only posited earthly existence as a brief moment within the scope of a cosmic conflict between good and evil, but also implicitly devalued human life as compared to the Next Level existence to which Heaven’s Gate members looked as their goal. While seemingly bizarre, this view actually tracks broader Evangelical Protestant Christian thought, which often fixates on otherworldly heavenly salvation and envisions earthly life as a mere prelude to the life to come. In the years immediately preceding and following the Heaven’s Gate suicides, the vastly popular Evangelical millennial fiction series Left Behind conveyed a similar sentiment, contrasting the finitude and tribulation of momentary human existence on a dying Earth with the eternal joys of heavenly salvation.31 Readers of Left Behind thought of course of Christian images of Heaven. Heaven’s Gate members looked to the physical heavens.
Eschatology
Heaven’s Gate’s extraterrestrial biblical hermeneutic became particularly evident in their treatment of eschatology (ideas about the endtime) and especially their reading of the New Testament biblical text, the book of Revelation. Specifically, their approach led them to interpret a Christian eschatological understanding known as dispensationalism, and its key component, the Rapture, by means of their hermeneutical lens, envisioning it in its extraterrestrial and materialistic form. This reinterpretation of a particular form of apocalyptic thought eventually contributed to the mass suicides that ended the terrestrial existence of Heaven’s Gate, but in the early days of the Two’s work together, it served as a hinge for much of their thinking. What I call Applewhite and Nettles’s “technological dispensationalism” derived from their reading of a section of Revelation and other biblical texts.
Throughout the first several years of the history of Heaven’s Gate, the Two predicated their message on what they dubbed “the demonstration.” The Two declared that at some point in the near future, an unknown party would assassinate them. After outsiders verified them as dead, the Two would repair their bodies, metamorphose themselves into extraterrestrials, and depart the Earth aboard a UFO, thereby “demonstrating” the truth of their message to their followers and the wider world. The “Human Individual Metamorphosis” statement explained,
There are two individuals here now who have also come from that next kingdom, incarnate[d] as humans, awakened, and will soon demonstrate the same proof of overcoming death. They are “sent” from that kingdom by the “Father” to bear the same truth that was Jesus’. This is like a repeat performance, except this time by two (a man and a woman) to restate the truth Jesus bore, restore its accurate meaning, and again show that any individual who seeks that kingdom will find it through the same process. This “re-statement” or demonstration will happen within months. The two who are the “actors” in this “theatre” are in the meantime doing all they can to relate this truth as accurately as possible so that when their bodies recover from their “dead” state (resurrection) and they leave (UFO’s) those left behind will have clearly understood the formula.32
Though the subsequent two statements did not explicate the demonstration nearly to the extent that the first statement did, both mentioned it. The second statement alluded to a forthcoming “illustration” and described the Two as “illustrators,” and the third extended the theatrical metaphor of the first statement in describing the event as a “death and resurrection scene” to “demonstrate” the nature of real resurrection.33 Other sources provided more details. The “What’s Up?” mailing in July 1975, for example, provided details on the time frame of the resurrection, clarifying that “the ability to heal a diagnosed dead body and walk away some 3½ days later . . . is one of the characteristics of a member of that next kingdom.”34 Applewhite and Nettles apparently did not stress the demonstration at some of their earliest public meetings—a limited Waldport trans
cript does not mention it, nor do the first newspaper articles on the movement—but they discussed the demonstration in each of the interviews they granted, to Hayden Hewes in July 1974, Brad Steiger in January 1976, and James Phelan later that same month.35 Several of the Two’s earliest followers who also granted interviews mentioned the demonstration.36
The demonstration that the Two espoused in fact represented an interpretation of an end-time prophecy from the New Testament’s book of Revelation filtered through the lens of their specific hermeneutical method, a fact that the Two hinted at with their reference to a three- and-a-half day time period to repair their bodies. When interviewer Brad Steiger asked Applewhite and Nettles if they patterned themselves on “the experience and death of Christ,” whom Christian tradition also records as lying for three days before resurrection, they responded by alluding instead to “the passage in Revelation” that predicted them.37 Steiger did not push them on this matter, perhaps because as a secular ufologist he was unfamiliar with Revelation. Phelan, who interviewed Applewhite and Nettles shortly after Steiger, failed to provide a direct quotation, but summarized that the Two “base[d] this prediction on the claim that they [were] not ordinary visitors from outer space but heavenly messengers whose appearance was foretold in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation.”38 Elsewhere, the Two provided a specific reference. One man whom Applewhite and Nettles encountered recalled that they told him, “We have a message for you. You are to meditate. Read Revelation 11 and meditate.”39 Similarly, a member of the movement wrote on a postcard to her family in September 1975, “Mama. Am doing beautifully. Truly feel I am on the path I’ve searched for. Thank God. Please don’t worry. Have faith. I am completely taken care of while I am learning my Father’s will always in all ways. P.S. Read Revelation Chapter 11 in the New Testament.”40
The Revelation passage to which Nettles, Applewhite, and their follower alluded describes two witnesses prophesying during the final days, only to meet popular scorn, assassination, and subsequent resurrection. The King James version of the New Testament declares, in a chapter marked in their Red-Letter Bible:
[An angel said:] And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy. . . . And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them. And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city. . . . And after three days and an half the spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; . . . And they ascended up to heaven in a cloud. (Rev 11:3–12)
The Two read this Revelation text through the eyes of their extraterrestrial biblical hermeneutic, and owing to the basis of that approach, Applewhite and Nettles emphasized its materialistic nature, its ability to transform the individual, and of course its extraterrestrial nature. The Two insisted that the special case of the resurrection of the two witnesses represented a demonstration of the metamorphic possibilities of the human body, an option they held open for others as well. In keeping with their hermeneutical approach, they recast the Revelation prophecy in material and ufological terms, insisting that the Bible’s description of resurrection and the ascension to heaven “in a cloud” represented a coded or symbolic description of a totally material process, and in fact represented a next-level spacecraft. “This demonstration is to clarify what Christ’s mission was 2,000 years ago. Man could not understand then, but can now at this time,” Applewhite handwrote onto one of the Two’s mailings.41 The Two’s reliance on the book of Revelation provides a crucial hint to unpack the Two’s wider message. Specifically, Applewhite and Nettles filtered a variety of Protestant Christian millennialism known as dispensationalism through their interpretive assumptions.
Dispensationalism emerged in the nineteenth century, and by the 1970s had become a feature of many conservative American evangelical Protestant communities.42 Dispensationalists rejected the (postmillennial) ideal of human progress so prevalent in nineteenth-century American and European culture, and rather assumed a relatively constant decline of human civilization. Historian George Marsden explains the dispensationalist position: “Christ’s kingdom, far from being realized in this age or in the natural development of humanity, lay wholly in the future, was totally supernatural in origin, and discontinuous with the history of this era.”43 Scholars also sometimes refer to dispensationalism as a type of premillennialism, since the prophesied one thousand years of peace (millennium) follows Christ’s return. For dispensationalists, when the end comes, it occurs suddenly, in accordance with a strict reading of the book of Revelation, and proceeds utterly unstoppably.
C. I. Scofield (1843–1921), who systematized the theology through his publication of a reference Bible, identified seven dispensations, or eras: innocence (Eden); conscience (antediluvian); human government (postdiluvian); promise (Old Testament patriarchs); law (Mosaic); grace (the current age of the Church); and kingdom (the future dispensation of Christ’s heaven-on-Earth). The sixth dispensation ends with what Scofield called the “rapture of the true church,” during which living Christians rise into the air, meet Christ, and ascend into heaven.44 Applewhite and Nettles borrowed several aspects of the dispensational system, but in typical Protestant fashion, read the system through their own examination of the Bible. Hence, the Two’s hermeneutic strongly shaped the resulting eschatological perspective of the group.
The Two’s most clear codification of their dispensational system occurred in a statement that they prepared for Hayden Hewes and Brad Steiger’s book, UFO Missionaries Extraordinary, a portion of which the book’s publisher printed in the final text as “A Statement Prepared by The Two.” In this statement, Applewhite and Nettles described the world as passing through seven historical dispensations—using the term in its technical sense—five of them in the past, one current, and one in the future. Paralleling the standard Protestant dispensational system, which they presumably read in a Scofield Reference Bible or some other source, the Two named the five past dispensations Adam, Enoch, Moses, Elijah, and Jesus, three of which (Adam/innocence/Edenic, Enoch/conscience/antediluvian, Moses/law/Mosaic) precisely match the Scofield system of dispensationalism. Like other dispensationalists, they identified the current dispensation as the present, declaring that “[t]he sixth major help period for Earth’s human garden is now.”45 Finally, they invoked the standard dispensationalist understandings of the end-time, explaining that the seventh dispensation would end with “what the Christian church refers to as the second coming, the ‘rapture,’ and the completion of the final prophecies in John’s Book of Revelation.”46 Thus far, the Two’s presentation of dispensationalist premillennialism closely followed the standard form found in many evangelical Christian churches.
Unlike most Christians following the Scofield dispensational system, however, Applewhite and Nettles interpreted their dispensationalism through the lens of their extraterrestrial biblical hermeneutic, seeking to synthesize the dispensational system with their broader theological worldview. Extrapolating from the dispensationalist assumption that God relates to humanity in different ways during each dispensation, Applewhite and Nettles explained that during particular eras, kingdom-level spacecrafts emitted a powerful burst of energy that washed over the Earth. Ever attuned to the materialism that characterized their hermeneutical approach, the Two maintained that while “you might not be able to see the actual physical manifestation of energy,” it nevertheless existed, and shined on the planet like a shaft of light.47 When this extraterrestrial energy touched the Earth, it created an “energy field” conducive to human development. Employing another materialistic metaphor, and one that invoked the extraterrestrial as well, the Two explained, “[t]hat energy source might be more clearly understood if you picture a searchlight that is circling the far distant heavens [momentarily] without interference from other bodies in the heavens, clearly shining on this planet as it did approximately two thousand years ago in its last orbiting.”48 L
ike a physical spotlight, planets and other astronomical objects might obstruct the Next Level energy, resulting in only periodic eras during which the light reached the Earth. This reinterpretation of dispensationalism, itself an interpretation of the biblical text, applies the fundamental assumptions of extraterrestrial biblical hermeneutics to the end-time scenario.
Much of Christian dispensationalist thought focuses on the idea of the Rapture of the faithful, the event during which dispensationalists believe living Christians rise into the air, meet Christ, and ascend into heaven. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), a dispensationalist best seller that was popular when Applewhite and Nettles first formulated their ideas, climaxed with a description of the Rapture, as well as incorporated the concept into much of the overall work.49 (It is likely that Applewhite and Nettles read Lindsey’s book, one of the decade’s best sellers, given their admission of reading a variety of religious, spiritual, and scientific literatures; however there is no direct evidence of influence. It is also possible that since Texas, specifically Dallas, served as the center of dispensationalism, it percolated into their thought through less direct means.50) Applewhite and Nettles accepted the idea of the Rapture, but transformed the traditional view into a technological and material event. Rather than meeting Christ midair, their followers would aerially rendezvous with UFOs, one of which would hold the extraterrestrial whom human Christians remember as Jesus of Nazareth. “The one who was Jesus will come in at close range (as soon as those who have chosen to change over do it) and receive the elect in his company,” they explained in their 1976 published statement.51 (The Two presumably had not yet settled on the identification of Applewhite as Jesus at this time.) The UFOs, now bearing the human beings who had overcome their humanity through Applewhite and Nettles’s process, would ascend into the literal heavens, forever leaving behind the Earth. In using the specifically religious term, “the elect,” Applewhite and Nettles revealed the underlying religious content of their message, which used the vocabulary of their ufological hermeneutics—UFOs, biology, and space—but the concepts of Christian dispensationalism—resurrection, prophecy, and Rapture.