Heaven's Gate

by Benjamin E. Zeller

  Those gifted with deposits had “eyes to see” the message that Heaven’s Gate brought, a clear biblical reference that Applewhite cited accordingly. Different members of Heaven’s Gate offered slightly different assessments of the true nature of the deposit, indicating that members felt no need for theological unity on this point. Snnody stated that the deposit contained the soul, and that different sorts of deposits existed. Some deposits mark a soul as beginning its journey to the Next Level, others mark an individual for use by a Next Level consciousness that is in need of a physical body, and a third type indicates a soul in the process of development.74 Snnody states that most human beings lack deposits and implies that therefore the majority of people lack true souls. Snnody’s compatriot Jnnody offered a slightly different approach, explaining that souls can exist without deposits, but that such souls can never advance beyond the human level of existence and are therefore stunted. Jnnody concurs that only individuals with deposits can recognize the truth offered by Heaven’s Gate and thereby achieve Next Level consciousness.75 Applewhite by comparison seems at time to almost dismiss the relevance of the topic, explaining that anyone who understands and accepts the message that he offers by definition has been bestowed with a deposit and therefore is one of the elect. “Well, if the Next Level picks you, don’t question it. Let them be the ones responsible for that,” Applewhite simply stated.76

  Applewhite’s mention of “the elect” reveals his rootedness in the Calvinist worldview that shaped his own Presbyterian birth tradition, a tradition with which he would have been deeply familiar given his father’s ministerial vocation and his own attendance at a Presbyterian seminar. While the Presbyterian denomination with which Applewhite and his father were associated no longer upheld the orthodox positions of predestination and election as laid out in Calvin’s Institutes or the Westminster Confession, Applewhite surely would have studied them for their historical and theological value. Predestination teaches that God predestines certain souls for salvation (“the elect”) and others for damnation, a position identical to the one that Heaven’s Gate eventually adopted. As I have noted in my previous research on Heaven’s Gate—as has Christopher Partridge—the presence of this neo-Calvinist notion of election marks Heaven’s Gate as a Christian theological offshoot.77 Applewhite developed a rather complicated interpretation of the doctrine of election, but effectively summarized his view with the simple axiom that those who accepted his message must be elect, and those that rejected it clearly were not elect.78

  Why exactly did Applewhite and adherents of Heaven’s Gate even introduce this notion of election? Election separated the in-group from the out-group and explained the troublesome revolving door of group membership and the failure of Heaven’s Gate to attract large numbers of converts.79 Unlike the Puritans, Dutch Reformed, or other Calvinist communities, members of Heaven’s Gate did not profess any doubts about their election. Do specifically reminded them that if they remained part of the group, they were elect. No members or former members of Heaven’s Gate or its predecessor movements recorded any Edwardsian struggles over the state of their souls and whether they were of the elect. There is no evidence that Nettles or Applewhite ever turned away any prospective adherents under the pretext that the Older Members declared them to be not elect. Never did the spiritual leaders of the movement eject a follower because he or she lacked grace, although Ti and Do expelled at least nineteen people from the group over the years.80 Since Reformed traditions generally uphold the idea of the “perseverance of the saints”—once elect, always elect—the expulsion of members seems remarkably discordant with this sort of Calvinist predestinarian theology. This approach might also have served to encourage retention within the movement, though the group’s turnover rate indicated it did not fully succeed, dropping from forty-eight members at the time Nettles died and around when the doctrine of election was introduced to twenty-four in the early 1990s before the group began recruiting again.81 While it might have slowed the rate of attrition, it did not solve it, and it is doubtful Applewhite intended it to do so.

  Rather, the neo-Reformed elements of the group’s soteriology served to minimize cognitive dissonance, a term coined by Leon Festinger to refer to a psychological state created when members of a religious group must rectify two contradictory sets of facts or beliefs. In his flawed but valuable study of the pseudonymously named “Seekers,” a small UFO group that Festinger and his collaborators had studied, he utilizes the concept of dissonance in order to explain how the group members responded to a failed doomsday prophecy. The failures of predicted events to occur among both the Seekers and Heaven’s Gate bear remarkable similarity—for the Seekers, no UFO landing, for Heaven’s Gate, widespread rejection by the popular audience and no UFO landing. As a result, Festinger argued, members experienced cognitive dissonance. “The fact that the predicted events did not occur is dissonant with continuing to believe both the prediction and the remainder of the ideology of which the prediction was the central item,” writes Festinger.82 In the case of the Seekers, the disappointed believers sought to reduce the dissonance by proselytizing. Applewhite and Nettles developed for their followers a neo-Calvinist doctrine of election that explained why so few people joined their movement, satisfying Festinger’s requirement that the group minimize dissonance in order to survive: “[t]he dissonance would be largely eliminated if they discarded the belief that had been disconfirmed, [or] ceased the behavior which had been initiated in preparation for the fulfillment of the prediction.”83 Heaven’s Gate did both, discarding the notion that salvation, i.e., the overcoming process, was open to all, and largely neglected proselytizing for extended periods of time. The cognitive dissonance model best explains this shift in Heaven’s Gate’s tone.

  Salvation Through Suicide

  In a now famous monograph on the Peoples Temple, the new religious movement that engaged in a mass suicide and murder in Guyana in 1977, David Chidester wrote that “suicide itself may be regarded as an act of symbolic design. On the level of symbolism, suicide may factor out all of the variables of human life by imposing a single, self-determined order on the chaos of events.”84 While numerous differences exist between the murder-suicides of the Peoples Temple members and the suicides of Heaven’s Gate members, Chidester’s argument holds in both cases. Suicide functioned as a way to give meaning and order to life, and for the adherents of Heaven’s Gate it functioned as the means of ending their terrestrial existence on their own terms.

  The concept of suicide emerged in Heaven’s Gate religious doctrine only very late in the group’s history, but when it did the stage had been set for members to take very seriously the possibility of the need for religious suicide. Ex-members Mrcody and Srfody stated that no one had discussed suicide before they left the group in September 1987: “There was no talk ever of exiting [i.e. suicide] like they [eventually] did,” they explained.85 Balch indicates that a former member indicated discussions occurring as early as 1991, which seems to be the earliest possible date.86 By contrast, ex-member Neoody recounts that the first mention of suicide occurred in the late spring of 1994. Neoody remembers this event as not particularly noteworthy, and that Applewhite had simply noted that he had received a revelation from the spiritual form of Nettles indicating that they may need to lay down their human bodies in order to join the Next Level.87 In all likelihood, members of Applewhite’s inner circle had discussed suicide as early as 1991, and Neoody only became aware of this when Applewhite publicly announced it in 1994. It is also important to note that Neoody writes from the perspective of a surviving member of a defunct group, and that he penned his thoughts on the episode a decade and a half after the described events. Yet the chronology Neoody describes of other events—travels, meetings, rentals of homes—can be easily verified through other materials, and one can therefore trust Neoody’s memory of when Applewhite first raised the issue of suicide. At any rate, Heaven’s Gate publicly alluded to the possibility of suicide in an August 1994 p
oster provokingly titled “The Shedding of Our Borrowed Human Bodies May Be Required In Order To Take Up Our New Bodies Belonging To The Next World.”88

  In Neoody’s assessment, Applewhite presented suicide as an option because of the model of Jesus’s willing death nearly two thousand years earlier. Since Applewhite claimed to in fact be the same spiritual being who had incarnated as Jesus, he spoke from personal experience, and explained to the group simply that “Jesus was ready to go back to the Father.” In Neoody’s recollection, Applewhite continued: “With tears in His eyes He said: ‘leaving the body here is how the Soul of Jesus traveled back to the ‘Next Level.’ He asked of all of us ‘What if we had to exit our vehicles by our own choice? Did we have a problem with that?’ We all had a long conversation about the possibilities . . . As it turned out most people had no problem with that. They didn’t identify with the vehicle anyway.”89

  Neoody admits that one member publicly challenged the decision and “packed his bags” that night. But Neoody himself stayed, though he later left the group shortly before the actual suicides. He explained that when Applewhite first broached the topic, he and his co-religionists supported suicide since they did not identify with their bodies (“vehicles”). Since the death of Nettles the basic theological beliefs of the group, at least as Neoody understood it, had indicated that they would abandon their human bodies and receive perfected Next Level bodies upon leaving the planet. Voluntarily relinquishing the human body therefore did not strike him—or most others, according to his memory—as odd. “Separate yourself (Soul/Mind) from the vehicle,” Neoody paraphrased Applewhite’s teachings. The soul or spirit encapsulates the true self, and the body is a mere container to be discarded when no longer needed.

  This sort of dualistic approach also appeared in the August 1994 poster. Referring to themselves in the third person, the members of Heaven’s Gate declared, “They say that they may be required to discard their ‘undercover costume’ (their borrowed human body) as they depart—leaving their ‘chrysalis’ behind.” While the poster equivocated on whether this possibility would be required and whether perhaps the group might leave in bodily form on a “‘cloud of light’ (spacecraft) before such ‘laying down of bodies’ need occur,” the dualistic assumptions that Applewhite and others had built over the decade since Nettles’s death clearly were evident.90

  Less than three years later the members of the movement took their lives in the act of collective suicide that ended the movement, a topic to which I will return in the final chapter of the book. But it would be a mistake to think that this idea had emerged out of thin air. Suicide built upon decades of rhetoric and ideology that denigrated the value of the human body, human activities, and human relationships. It built upon the same long history of proclaiming the possibility of martyrdom and resurrection, and it built upon the explicit mind/body dualism that the movement embraced after Nettles’s death. While it would be an equal mistake to assume that suicide was the only option Heaven’s Gate members had, one must recognize that it seemed like an almost natural concept to those adherents who had accepted and lived within this belief system for years. True suicide, members believed, meant staying behind on a doomed Earth rather than joining the Two in the Next Level.

  The religious world of Heaven’s Gate ended with the suicides, but their theological world remains in the materials they left behind. This chapter has argued that adherents of the movement constructed and lived within a dense and internally coherent set of religious beliefs and doctrines, a theology as logical to them as other religious theologies are to other practitioners. Members of Heaven’s Gate upheld views of how one achieved salvation (soteriology), the order of the universe (cosmology), the nature and meaning of Christ (Christology), the nature of the forces acting against them (demonology), and beliefs about the end-times and final days of the Earth (eschatology). While certainly not convincing to outsiders, for adherents of Heaven’s Gate these religious beliefs provided meaning, structure, and order in their lives.

  5

  Religious Practices in Heaven’s Gate

  Most of the scholarship on Heaven’s Gate has focused on the group’s social dynamics, their history, or increasingly on their religious beliefs, as the last chapter did.1 Yet Heaven’s Gate had a thorough set of religious practices that they developed over their two-decade history. Studying these practices presents more difficulties than studying their social dynamics, history, or beliefs, since practices leave fewer remnants. One can track membership and interview current or former members to assess a group’s social dynamics, assemble archival material to get a sense of the group’s history, and analyze the textual material to ascertain what members of the movement believed. But how does one study the religious practices of a defunct group?

  In this chapter I reassemble the religious practices of adherents of Heaven’s Gate by piecing together the ephemeral materials they left behind. Interviews with former members, devotional handbooks, behavioral guides, field notes from those who studied them, and the textual, audio, and video material the group left behind all provide some pieces of the puzzle. But before considering the religious practices of Heaven’s Gate members, we must consider the religious practices of the movements that influenced Heaven’s Gate’s development. The adherents of Heaven’s Gate borrowed and transformed the majority of their religious practices from sources within the diffuse New Age movement.

  As previously noted, Applewhite, Nettles, and the majority of their followers all hailed from the religious environment that one can call either the early New Age movement or the cultic milieu, to follow Colin Campbell. Yet Heaven’s Gate tended to blur the boundaries between Christianity and the New Age, leading to an ongoing debate between scholars as to how to situate it and confusion among people trying to understand what this group was. As I have argued, Heaven’s Gate’s beliefs were fundamentally shaped by Christianity and their overall religious scheme was predicated on their interpretation of the Bible. Yet their religious practices did in fact derive from the New Age movement. In particular, Heaven’s Gate inherited from the New Age an emphasis on self-transformation as the central idea of salvation and the central religious practice.

  Self-Transformation and the Spiritual Practices of Heaven’s Gate

  Scholars have had a difficult time trying to define the precise practices of the New Age movement, just as they have had trouble defining the movement itself. It includes practices such as the use of tarot cards, crystals, shamanic healing, ufology, therapeutic touch, energywork, past life regressions, and meditation. New Age practitioners engage in a broad array of spiritual practices drawing from the Western esoteric, spiritualist, Native American, Asian, and Western religious tradition. One finds astrology, channeling, sweet lodges, yoga, and kabbalism side by side in the New Age. Yet one commonality stretches across most New Age practices and beliefs, that of self-transformation as the key means of self-development and salvation.

  Particularly on the West Coast of America where Heaven’s Gate emerged, the New Age movement drew much of its impetus from the work of transpersonal and humanistic psychology, specifically the system developed by Abraham Maslow (1908–70). An academic psychologist, Maslow did not himself become involved in the New Age. Yet his research and writing did. Maslow focused on the idea of what he called “self-actualization,” wherein a person achieves the highest level of psychological functioning, which is characterized by a sense of wholeness, truth, completion, and peace. He wrote of “peak experiences” akin to what religious individuals would call mystical experiences, and he encouraged individuals to seek them out. Maslow’s ideas became very influential in the New Age movement under the guise of the Human Potential movement. Human Potential stressed that each individual must seek self-fulfillment and individual transformation so as to seek self-actualization. The Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, served as the center of the Human Potential movement, and the founders and members of Heaven’s Gate would have literally crossed its p
ath while trekking between the recruitment meetings they held.2

  The New Age movement overlaps with the Human Potential movement, and many of the New Age practitioners who joined Heaven’s Gate would have been familiar with it. Historian Kay Alexander has argued that Human Potential’s peak experience in fact equates on a secular level to the transcendent, and “was born of a new interest in the spiritual dimension of experience.”3 The individuals who became involved in Human Potential became familiar with language about heightening their spiritual and psychological awareness, self-transformation, and individual growth. Heaven’s Gate used similar language, no doubt because of Nettles’s and Applewhite’s own readings of the diverse spiritual literature, and perhaps also intentionally as a way to form a bridge to potential converts.