Heaven's Gate

by Benjamin E. Zeller

  That the UFO rendezvous represented a technological reimagining of the Rapture explains why the Two so adamantly insisted that the UFOs would not land, but would meet the successful candidates for the Next Level in midair. During the Waldport meeting, Applewhite and Nettles stressed that although Jesus awaited successful candidates for the Next Level in a UFO, “He will not come down to this environment and show you His bruises and His glowing white robe. But he is present at close range, even now.”52 Attendees of the meeting might have interpreted that remark as an indication that the only evidence that Applewhite and Nettles promised was their demonstration and not the presence of Christ, and the Two certainly did stress that point as well. Yet their response to one of Brad Steiger’s questions clarified the importance the Two placed on the aerial rendezvous itself, that is, the technological enactment of the Rapture. “Will other people be able to see the spaceship land and see the followers get on board?” asked Steiger. The Two responded, “[t]he spacecraft will not land. Individuals will be lifted up to the spacecraft if they have overcome. That is why if you go on this trip you have to overcome everything. If you have not overcome, you will not be lifted up.”53 Other sources repeated this important claim that the UFO would not land, and that the elect would rise into the air to meet Christ and craft midair.54 Best explaining the Two’s defense of this proposition, they desired to portray the impending departure of their followers on the UFO as a materialistic form of the Rapture as read through an extraterrestrial biblical hermeneutics.

  From Dispensationalism to Suicide

  As should be clear, the initial eschatological vision that the Two presented did not permit suicide as an option. Nor did it really work as a theology for a movement that existed for two decades, well longer than the Two initially indicated it would. And Nettles’s and Applewhite’s earlier eschatology completely failed to account for the death of Nettles in 1985, which violated the fundamental assumption of the group that there would be a bodily rapture of the faithful aboard midair UFOs. Nettles’s death in particular resulted in a massive theological shift toward an eschatology predicated on mind-body dualism, a neo-Calvinistic notion of election and predestination, and increasing apocalyptic expectations. All of these permitted and even encouraged the development of a theology supportive of suicide.

  Nettles’s death served as a watershed in the history of Heaven’s Gate, as important as the founding of the group itself. Applewhite became sole leader of the movement, and the surviving members transformed Nettles into a God-like figurehead whom the group members identified with the Father in the New Testament and Christian theology. Little clear evidence exists on Nettles’s death itself, with conflicting statements from members, her family, and the media. She died on either June 18 or 19, 1985 from liver cancer, but had suffered from various other forms of cancer and health ailments for the previous year.55 She had lost an eye to cancer in May 1982, and according to Sawyer (“Sawyer” is his nom de plume when discussing Heaven’s Gate), a former member who is still a believer, she had been in pain for some time before and after that episode.56 Ex-members Mrcody and Srfody reiterated that claim, noting that she had been suffering from disease for some time, and her passing was not entirely unexpected.57 Yet for members of Heaven’s Gate, Nettles’s death was not death, but a point of transformation. Her co-founder Applewhite described the death as something far closer to a consciousness transfer than a true death:

  To all human appearances it was due to a form of liver cancer. We could say that because of the stress, due to the gap between her Next Level mind and the vehicle’s genetic capacity, that the cancer symptom caused the vehicle to break down and stop functioning. However, it was strange that she experienced no symptoms prior to the week she left her vehicle, and for the most part her vehicle slept through the transition. We’re not exactly sure how many days it might have taken her to return to the Next Level vehicle she left behind prior to this task.58

  Nettles’s death marked the first occurrence of the death of a member. While early in the movement’s history the Two had preached that they would be martyred and resurrected—in accordance with the prophecy of Revelation 11—the Two had long since abandoned that teaching, and regardless Nettles did not resurrect after her death. The Two had adamantly insisted that one had to be alive to undergo the transition from human being to extraterrestrial and to board the UFO bound for the Next Level. “You do not have to die,” they told Brad Steiger in 1976.59 “You must take a changed-over physical body with you into the next level,” they had elaborated.60 The Two’s followers had also clearly understood this teaching. When two of the Los Angeles converts were asked by a reporter in 1975 whether you have to die to go to the next level, their answer was direct. “Absolutely not.”61 Nettles’s death changed all this. This was surely a moment of massive cognitive dissonance, when a sudden and unexpected event shook the expectation of the group’s adherents. The surviving documents from this era are few, and all produced retrospectively several years later.

  Ex-members provide the most candid reports. They all indicated that Nettles’s death rocked the movement and Applewhite, but that most persevered. All agreed that Applewhite was able to cope and seemed to rise to the occasion, though he also had to respond to his feelings of loss. Sawyer, who was a member at the time, explained that

  Do was certainly very distraught when Ti passed on. It wasn’t all that evident, except when He expressed it to us in a meeting and He did at that time want to also move on—[to] exit His vehicle[,] as Ti and Do both for a long time literally hated what this world had become . . . Yet He knew He still had a job to do to complete the task He had taken on, that Ti started Him on.62

  Sawyer indicates that Applewhite was able to hold together the group through his own leadership, and that members seemed to accept Nettles’s passing as merely part of a cosmically conceived plan. Neoody, a lapsed member of the movement who still identifies with the group’s identity and message, simply explained that Nettles’s death had “confused” Applewhite, though this comment was made years later and obviously underplayed the extreme emotional turmoil that surely resulted from the death of his spiritual partner.63 Finally, Mrcody and Srfody—also members at this time who subsequently left the movement—indicated that Nettles’s death “was really tough . . . a baptism by fire” for the members of the movement. “Everyone knew [she was sick], but it was unfathomable that she could die.” Mrcody and Srfody explained that during Nettles’s illness and immediately after her death, members began to discuss how the human body “simply couldn’t handle the rigors of outer space” and Next Level activity, and that these bodies “would not survive the transition.” They began to consider the need to “abandon the vehicle” (the body), though Mrcody and Srfody cautioned that “no one was discussing suicide” and that members still believed a flying saucer would pick them up, but now conceived as providing them with new bodies at that time rather than merely picking them up from Earth.64

  From a sociological and theological perspective, Do was able to maintain cohesion of the movement by transitioning to a new form of extreme dualism, meaning that Ti was still alive, just in the Next Level. Nettles’s prolonged illness probably provided the impetus for the Two to consider the ramifications of her potential death, a possibility that the spread of her cancer would certainly have raised. Applewhite’s retrofit of the movement’s theology saved the group from a certain collapse. This effort was made easier by the earlier reformulation within the group’s theology of the idea of the Demonstration, which the Two had at first indicated would mean their actual murders followed by resurrections. Predicated on their interpretation of Revelation 11, Applewhite and Nettles had initially declared that they would be martyred, lay dead in the street for three days, and then be resurrected through Next Level technology, thereby demonstrating to humanity the validity of their teachings and the need to overcome human-level consciousness and cleave to the Next Level. Yet the Demonstration did not occur, and Applewhite
and Nettles were forced to reinterpret the prediction as one describing a metaphorical martyrdom and resurrection. Applewhite indicated their theological reasoning in the ’88 Update, the booklet produced to provide a mini-history of the movement:

  when the TV network news programs all broke the story about the two . . . Ti and Do felt that further meetings were pretty hopeless and people had already made up their minds about how ridiculous this all was. Ti and Do felt that the demonstration was still the one thing that could change that. However, they grieved literally for days, feeling like they had been shot down by the media and the mission was dead. They received instruction to not walk into a physical demonstration but rather to know that the “killing in the street” of the two witnesses had occurred at the hands of the media.65

  Applewhite showed remarkable reflexivity in recognizing that the public would generally judge their teachings to be “ridiculous” and that they stood little chance of attracting any significant number of converts. After all, the news stories to which Applewhite referred had revealed not only the names of the Two but also the rather damning facts of Applewhite’s incarceration and various relational ills. One cannot know to what extent this need for a “reboot” might have served as impetus for Nettles and Applewhite to redefine the nature of the Demonstration, versus to what extent the fundamental problem was that the Demonstration had not yet occurred as predicted. Early Christians also had to respond to a similar “delay of the parousia” problem wherein the expected prophetically mandated event did not occur. (The Biblical Greek term parousia—literally, “presence”—means the return of Christ, and became an issue in early Christianity given the non-event of Christ’s return to Earth.) Scholars of new religious movements in particular have noted that such delays often occur, and that successful new religions respond to the delay of the parousia through theological creativity.66

  Applewhite and Nettles successfully held together their movement by reinterpreting the Demonstration to refer to a symbolic martyrdom and resurrection, and in doing so they planted the seeds for further reinterpretation of key eschatological claims. Effectively, members who would not accept such theological reinterpretations would have already left the movement during its early days, meaning that the only members remaining as part of Heaven’s Gate into the 1980s and 1990s were already comfortable with this sort of reinterpretation and placed allegiance in the leaders themselves rather than the specifics of their religious message. Therefore, in the wake of Nettles’s death, when Applewhite fundamentally transformed Heaven’s Gate’s vision of the nature of the human self and the form that salvation would take, adherents accepted this reinterpretation as well. Only one member left because of Nettles’s death.67

  Following Nettles’s death, Applewhite deemphasized premillennial dispensationalism and replaced it with a more general apocalypticism. Gone were specific references to a midair rapture, and never again did he refer to the seven dispensations of the Scofield system. However, Applewhite and the members of Heaven’s Gate substituted a new apocalypticism predicated on ufological conspiracy theories, cultural pessimism, and technological Armageddon. Applewhite generally preferred horticultural metaphors when discussing eschatological concerns, most commonly referring to Earth as a garden about to be refreshed, and the few individuals who would journey to the Next Level as a sort of crop. In the 1991–92 satellite broadcasts he introduces the topic of the end-times in precisely this way: “here we are at the end of the Age and it’s harvest time. Harvest time means that it’s time for the garden to be spaded up. It’s time for a recycling of souls. It’s time for some to ‘graduate.’ It’s time for some to be ‘put on ice.’ It’s time!”68 In a later broadcast in the same series, after viewers had some chance to hear more about their message and beliefs, Applewhite offered an even more dramatic and imminent perspective: “between now and the end of this decade—and I’m afraid I feel like we’re off a number of years, that it’s going to be significantly before the end of this decade—will be the end of this Age. So, it’s spade time. And the big, big, big surprise will come.”69 Later in the same broadcasts Applewhite mentioned disease, environmental disasters, war, plague, extraterrestrial invasion, and government persecution as possible means by which the Next Level would allow the garden of Earth to become “spaded over.” A certain theological sloppiness existed in Applewhite’s approach, since he at times indicated that the forces of the evil Luciferian space aliens would be responsible for these events, and at other times indicated that such occurrences were in keeping with Next Level plans and judgments. Yet since the same inconsistency generally exists among more mainstream believers in Christian apocalypticism—substituting Satan for Luciferian extraterrestrials and God for Next Level ones—Applewhite merely reflected the influences of his millennial source tradition.

  Alongside this shift in apocalyptic thinking away from rapture-oriented dispensationalism and toward a more general catastrophic millennialism, Applewhite taught that those destined to be saved, i.e., members of Heaven’s Gate and those who followed them, would ascend to the Next Level not in bodily but in a non-corporeal form. This more than any other shift permitted the eventual adoption of a theology of suicide, since it made the body an unnecessary hindrance to the soteriological pursuit. Since the first days of the movement, Applewhite and Nettles had denigrated the human body and taught the need to overcome it. Yet they had initially indicated that one had to transform the flawed human body into a perfected Next Level one through entirely physical means. Applewhite jettisoned this approach in the wake of Nettles’s death.

  Figure 4.2. Video snapshot of Marshall Herff Applewhite (Do) from the 1991–1992 satellite series Beyond Human. Image © TELAH Foundation.

  Applewhite and members of Heaven’s Gate were explicit in defining the body as a mere container that served little purpose beyond conveying the true self until such time as the body was no longer needed. To again quote the 1991–92 satellite program, the first major theological material produced by the group after Nettles’s death:

  we use the reference [of “vehicle”] to this body that we’re wearing—this flesh and bones—we use the term “vehicle” because it helps us separate from the body. . . . Whether it’s a “vehicle” or “vessel,” the term helps to get out of identifying with it. Where we get into trouble is when we identify and call this “me,” because this is certainly not me if the soul has awakened. This is just a suit of clothes that I’m wearing, and at times it can be an encumbrance for me. It can be something that I don’t want to identify with.70

  Communications scholar Robert Glenn Howard calls this the “rhetoric of the rejected body,” and he roots this rhetoric in a combination of inherited Protestantism and Applewhite’s own rejection of his corporeal nature based on his muddled sexual identity and experiences. Howard rightly calls Applewhite’s “co-opt[ing] and radicaliz[ing] the coercive power of Protestantism related to gender roles and sexuality” a rejection of both Christian and American societal norms.71 While I find Howard’s approach somewhat misguided in its highlighting of Applewhite’s sexuality and disregard for his religious searching and background, Howard’s characterizing of Applewhite’s theology as it relates to the body is apt: Heaven’s Gate rejected the body outright.

  Instead, Applewhite and members of the movement believed that the individual self rested in a non-corporeal essence that they variably called the soul, self, or—later, toward the end of the movement—the deposit. A slow shift away from religious language and toward a sort of rhetorical materialism exists in their theological treatment of the soul, with both members and Applewhite in the 1991–92 broadcasts making use of the explicit language of the soul. At times, such as in the context of the discussion of the body as vehicle, Applewhite made no attempt to even explain the nature of the soul beyond indicating that it is “the real ‘me’” and a sort of “invisible container” that holds the body within itself.72 Yet generally Applewhite assumed his viewers—generally familiar with Christianit
y, based on American demographics—would have the same idea of “soul” as he did. It was the soul, Applewhite seemed to assume his viewers knew, that journeyed to the Next Level and would become the rootstock of a perfected extraterrestrial creature.

  By the end of the movement’s history, Applewhite and his followers treated the soul in a different way, a quasi-technological way that they insisted was materialistic rather than supernatural, despite its incorporeal nature. By 1996, just a year before the suicides that ended the movement, Applewhite described the soul using terms more reminiscent of computer technology than medieval theology: “their [Next Level] design enabled them to make small ‘mental deposits’ in human plants. We’ll call those ‘deposits,’ for sake of understanding, the ‘soul.’ And those deposits are really like a small bit of Next Level ‘hardware’ with capacity for Next Level information.”73 Elsewhere Applewhite used similar language, referring to the deposit as computer-like, or akin to a computer chip. Heaven’s Gate member Snnody was even more explicit in her statement “Deposits,” which appeared in the anthology Heaven’s Gate produced shortly before the movement’s end. Snnody writes that “deposits can also be compared to tiny computer chips programmed with a sort of ‘homing device’ to seek nourishment which can come only from a member of the Level Above Human,” and that deposits function to provide “programming” to allow the self to begin its “metamorphic process” of becoming a Next Level being. Applewhite and Nettles had used language of metamorphosis since the first days of the movement, and Snnody invokes such language for similar reasons, namely to rhetorically position Heaven’s Gate as offering a sort of materialistic equivalent to what most religious people would consider salvation. Snnody and other members went to great lengths to use entirely physical and material metaphors drawing from horticulture and technology to explain the nature of the deposit.