Heaven's Gate

by Benjamin E. Zeller

  Like the other religious practices developed and utilized by members of Heaven’s Gate, the group’s food and eating practices helped members look beyond their earthly condition toward an ideal of crew-mindedness, otherworldly asceticism, and separation from materials of purely terrestrial concern. Adherents therefore followed a series of regulative restrictive diets, but avoided following any singular diet for too long so as to avoid focusing on the diet itself. As Applewhite remarked in 1992,

  We’ve used every diet in the book that you can think of. And for the period of time that we’re using a particular diet, we do it seriously. We’d really think, “This is a super diet!” We used a vegetarian diet, we used a fruitarian diet—not just for a few days—we were vegetarians for a long, long, long time. We were fruitarians for quite a while. We did water fasts for an extended period of time. We’ve done juice fasts. We’ve done Hippocrates’ diet. We’ve done Gersen’s [sic, i.e. Gerson’s] diet. We’ve done so many diets that, you know, we ran out of books of diets to do. And while we were using each one of them, we were devoted to it. We tried testing this and testing that. But we then began to realize that what we were really doing was liberating ourselves.79

  Applewhite astutely observes here a form of intense serial devotion to diet, but not for the sake of the diet itself. Key to this religious approach, members of Heaven’s Gate sought to break their sense of enjoyment of food and their view of food as anything other than mere nutrients. Members report that at no time did they feel malnourished or ill, but certainly many of the diet regiments and the specific ways that members of Heaven’s Gate followed them would have tasted monotonous and bland. All this worked to break members’ interest in food. The group’s members went so far as to develop new nomenclature for food, renaming it as “fuel” and referring to eating as “consumption.”80 This sort of technical language served to distance them from the materials they ate, from the act of eating, and the enjoyment that most people associate with eating.

  Yet despite the various diets they tried, one commonality emerged. The majority of the diets to which members adhered were vegetarian, including the Hippocrates and Gerson diets, and the far more restrictive fruitarian diet. Vegetarianism has traditionally served as one of the major ways that Christian religious practitioners have attempted to control the body through food. Under the rubric of “constructing bodily boundaries,” scholar of Christianity and food David Grummet has written that:

  Food has performed a significant role in defining and preserving the boundaries between different church bodies and different human bodies. By requiring abstention from specific foods, especially meat, particular Christian churches and groups have established markers of inclusion in their corporate body and of exclusion from that body. Moreover, by associating immoderate eating with promiscuity and seeking to prevent both, Christian groups have sought to impose moral and spiritual discipline on their members’ physical bodies.81

  In Grummet’s reckoning, Christian experiments with vegetarianism—which he documents as a quite broader and more historically rooted phenomenon than is often assumed—represent the attempt to control the body and its desires, and harness the body for a tool of Christian practice. Within the context of Heaven’s Gate, vegetarianism served that same role. By controlling the consumption of meat, individuals controlled desire, and by controlling desire they controlled and limited their humanity.

  The leaders and adherents of Heaven’s Gate believed that the members of the Next Level whom they emulated and toward which they sought to transform themselves existed without eating. Applewhite specifically noted that such Next Level beings do not engage in sex, eating, or dying. These three things became linked as fundamental qualities of the human level, or “mammalian existence” to use other language of the group. Earthly mammals focused on procreation and imbibing, and earthly mammals died. Next Level beings did not procreate through sex and did not eat, and they did not die either. Eating therefore rhetorically became seen as a form of “little death” that members sought to avoid. Applewhite framed this as an intentional act of mimesis, explaining that “they [members of the Next Level] would also show no signs of digestive organs as humans know them. So wouldn’t it follow that it is important to have no likes or cravings for food, other than as fuel, if you hope to inherit a Next Level vehicle (body) or suit of clothes?”82

  Yet despite this, group members ate well. Ex-members provided a set of recipes to me, which they called “experiments,” which included such normal American fair as pasta, soups, and salad. During the 1970s and 1980s members baked whole-wheat breads, and ate lean proteins, but they ate balanced meals and felt satisfied.83 Copies of several gourmet cookbooks were found in the group’s Rancho Santa Fe home after the suicides, and throughout the movement’s history individuals would eat in restaurants while traveling.84 Group members splurged on chicken pot pies at a Marie Callender restaurant shortly before they died, and ate a final communal meal of pizza immediately before the suicides.85 What this indicates is therefore that members of Heaven’s Gate—like most people—simultaneously sought to control their eating, yet gave into their cravings.

  Beyond limits on food, members of Heaven’s Gate incorporated a broad range of ascetic limitations into their religious practices. One of the longest-standing of such practices entailed the use of partners, sometimes called check-partners, which provided a means of forcing members to self-examine their actions, be honest with themselves, and create tension and friction intended to help them overcome their humanity. Nettles and Applewhite made this partnering an important part of their teaching in the earliest days of the movement’s history, and it remained important for decades into the 1990s. In the words of the group’s founders in a letter they sent to prospective candidates in 1977, “[b]ecause this process works best if you have a partner, you should be willing to be paired up with another person for a time. You will serve each other in bringing out those human aspects which must be overcome. This will occur without premeditation. Human irritation, frustration, anxieties, reactions, etc., must all be overcome. The only bond between you and another person will become a mutual desire to get to the Next Realm.”86

  In practice, members of the movement lived alongside their partners, sharing material possessions, money, and physical space with their partners, and traveling alongside them as a dyad. Since the group’s leaders assigned partnerships with an eye toward increasing friction, during the first years of the group’s existence they made sure to assign heterosexual men and women as partners, and keep gay men or lesbian women together in same-sex pairings. Sexual tension as well as routine interpersonal tension owing to close quarters and constant daily contact therefore led to anxiety, self-consciousness, and sometimes conflict. Applewhite and Nettles apparently hoped that these feelings would prove cathartic in helping their followers overcome their human attachments, emotions, and especially sexual attractions.

  By the early 1990s, Applewhite viewed the choice of partners somewhat differently, noting that he avoided pairing people if there was a possibility of mutual attraction. “The partnership could still work if one partner was slightly ‘turned on’ by the other, but the other partner could not possibly be physically ‘turned on’ by that person,”87 he cautioned. He also offered a more complete explanation of the partnering approach, and even a biblical rationale for it. Applewhite explained in a 1987 proselytizing leaflet, “This is a totally new way of life we have adopted—always reaching, together with our partner, for the most right solution to a problem or the most right action, based on what we think our Heavenly Father would have us do. This is what was meant in the Bible by ‘Wherever two or more are gathered together in my name . . .’ ‘In my name’ means looking to Him for guidance. We believe that when two individuals work together to come to an agreement, they are more likely to arrive at what their Heavenly Father would have them do.”88 Rooting the partnership ideal in the biblical tradition appears as a rather late attempt to explain a practice that
the group had developed decades earlier, and possibly Applewhite intended this explanation only for outsiders. Regardless, he explained the philosophy of partnering in the same way as he and Nettles did in the 1970s, as intending to break the individual’s self-reliance and individualistic focus and force them to overcome their attachments and human-level feelings.

  Numerous members and ex-members attested to the value of their partners and the practice of working with a partner. Referring to the sexual tension between himself and his female partner, one Heaven’s Gate member—using a pseudonym of ‘Seymour’—from the first year of the movement explained that “It’s like a kind of battle takes place and then the fire goes out.” Having extinguished that flame, Seymour spoke positively of his partnership and its effects.89 Such a process certainly followed the way that Applewhite and Nettles intended it to function, and for Seymour the partnership worked in accordance with how he and his partner wished.

  Former member Srfody similarly recounted an experience of overcoming tension in her partnership with Glnody during their time together in “fiber-lab” (laundry). Srfody described herself as an efficient and fast worker, and folded laundry quickly. Glnody by contrast worked much more slowly, and after several days of working together in fiber-lab felt “small and hurt” by comparison to Srfody. Glnody brought this to the attention of Srfody, and with the guidance of Applewhite they discussed it and Srfody tried to work more slowly and in concert with Glnody. “It worked out really well, it had a way of bringing out aspects of yourself you needed to overcome. . . . Partnership leads us to do what is otherwise rude. It leads to compassion and empathy,” Srfody explained. Because most people avoid conflict and see direct confrontation as rude, the partnership approach forced members to do what in some sense is quite unnatural in broader American culture. Srfody saw it as a way of overcoming her own tendencies to work quickly and not think about how this made others feel.90

  Yet partnerships unfolded in complex manners, and like any intensive personal relationship, they did not always develop the way the leaders of the movement intended. They sometimes resulted in strong friendships, frustration and animosity, and even broken hearts. Referring to a much later period in the group’s existence in the mid-1990s, Neoody details one of his own partnerships that resulted in all three. Having been assigned a recent convert named Joyody, Neoody bonded with his partner over their mutual experiences of having raised children before joining the movement and facing the difficulties of cutting ties with their children. They were of approximately the same age and shared a similar path of spiritual seeking. “We got along great,” Neoody recollected. Neoody and Joyody separated after two weeks to travel with different groups, but several months later reunited and once again partnered. “One day we were out looking for a place to camp and told her that I was really glad we had this time together because I hadn’t been able to talk to her in a long time.”91 Neoody details tender moments of friendship and deep heart-to-heart conversation. This resulted, Neoody noted, in Joyody admitting to herself, Neoody, and Applewhite that she had fallen in love with him. “I told her she should be falling in love with DO [Applewhite], not with me! She began to cry and said she knew that and she felt badly, but she couldn’t deny the feelings.” Applewhite split up Neoody and Joyody’s partnership, and Joyody left the group. She rejoined, and left again. Then she rejoined again, and before leaving for the last time she confronted Neoody, took his hand, said how “very special” he was to her, kissed him, and left for good. Neoody ended his tale, written years after the events described, with an emotional note. “Joyody, wherever you are, I hope you are well and happy.”92 Even in a movement as strict as Heaven’s Gate, with a theology and practices calling for radical self-control, denial of the flesh, and rules designed to prevent emotional attachment, the basic humanity of members remained ever present.

  One can easily lose sight of why members of Heaven’s Gate followed these strict regiments of bodily and mental control, and why adherents committed themselves to rules that so limited their freedoms and choices. Yet the individuals who belonged to Heaven’s Gate believed that this method represented the only way of achieving salvation, as surely as do members of other religions calling for various forms of asceticism. In the words of Nettles and Applewhite from the first days of the movement, they aimed to “subject the person to all the experiences and circumstances necessary to overcome all his human needs. . . . [which] actually converts the cells of the body, chemically and biologically, into a new body. Upon the completion of his conversion experience that new body will have overcome death and decay.”93 Or, in the words of Applewhite from the closing days of the movement, “[we]offer the way leading to membership into the Kingdom of Heaven . . . if you leave everything of this world and follow me, I can take you into my Father’s Kingdom . . . Leaving behind this world included: family, sensuality, selfish desires, your human mind, and even your human body if it be required of you—all mammalian ways, thinking, and behavior.”94 Over the two decades of history, the basic religious goal had not changed: overcoming one’s humanity in order to transcend the human level and cleave to that of the Next Level.

  Prayer

  Prayer occupies a central position in the religious practices and lives of the members of most religious traditions, including the Christian tradition from which Heaven’s Gate derived, but also the other various source religious traditions that influenced Heaven’s Gate. While nearly universal, prayer is also entirely situated, and reveals as much about the one who prays as the being to whom one does the praying. As philosophers of religion Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba wrote in their introduction to The Phenomenology of Prayer, prayer “connects . . . [the believer] to something beyond ourselves and beyond immediate reality. . . . Prayer, though, is not simply about a connection to the divine but also about us.”95 Prayer takes particular forms in particular religious culture, and the study of prayer therefore illuminates those specific religious contexts.

  Members of Heaven’s Gate prayed. Prayers took several forms within the movement, paralleling the same patterns that one finds on other religions. Some prayers took petitionary forms, making requests of the Next Level, its members, or the “Older Members,” i.e., Applewhite and Nettles, either before or after her death. Other prayers assumed the style of thanks-givings, blessings, or praises. Some served as meditative focuses, and others functioned within rituals intended for healing or spiritual awakening. Numerous prayers existed, though not all were preserved in full form. Applewhite and Nettles taught that members should construct their own prayers and pray in the ways that suits them best, and therefore only fragments remain from those members who chose to write down their prayers or preserved them in some other way.

  A member named Brnody penned an essay called “Up the Chain” for the group’s anthology that included a selection of her prayers. Brnody’s essay focuses on the theme of communication of ideas, requests, teachings, and energy up and down the “chain” connecting her to Applewhite (as Do) to the deceased Nettles (as Ti) and from her to the other members of the Next Level. She concludes her essays by providing examples of the sort of prayers she uses in asking for help from the Next Level, and Ti in particular. In a very Protestant way she cautions that her prayers are “only intended as a guideline to show you how you might formulate your requests,” and that each person must pray in their own way. Ex-members confirmed that these prayers were unique to Brnody.96

  Brnody explicitly directs nearly all of her prayers to Ti and Do, her Older Members. Adherents believed that the Next Level communicated in a highly regimented way, with the most senior of Next Level ideas, energy, and assistance trickled down to the chief administrator for Earth—Ti—and then her representative on the planet—Do—and then to the adherents of Heaven’s Gate—Next Level members in training. Brnody makes engaging in just this sort of hierarchal chain a central part of her prayer life. The second prayer she includes in her collection—the first asks for help in not identif
ying with the human body—calls for the Next Level to help her self-develop toward achieving her goals of joining the level above human. “I ask for your unquenchable thirst and desire so that I don’t place any limitations on my growth, and I ask that your will be mine so that I push to do everything in my power to become a viable newborn of the Level Above Human—the Next Level.”97 Brnody’s petitionary prayers focused on these two general types of requests: overcoming one’s humanity and human attachments, and spiritual self-development toward achieving Next Level membership. Toward those two ends, she asked specifically for wisdom, maturity, strength, courage, and selflessness.

  Some of Brnody’s prayers take such a generalized form that one can imagine them on the lips of nearly any religious person. For example, her prayer, “I ask for your strength to graciously accept lessons and correction, to overcome the fear of change, and to make the adjustment on the spot and move on,” bears remarkable similarity to the commonly used “Serenity Prayer” credited to mid-twentieth-century American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Brnody did not cite Niebuhr or the prayer directly, but it appears that Brnody merely paraphrased the existing Serenity Prayer and rephrased it in a manner more befitting her needs as an adherent of Heaven’s Gate. Her prayers as well as Niebuhr’s express a similar sentiment of accepting and strengthening from the experience of the vicissitudes of life. Both frame this sentiment in an explicitly petitionary form, asking assistance from the being(s) in which the adherents believe. Both served as central practices in the prayer lives of individuals, though Niebuhr’s mainline Protestantism and Brnody’s Heaven’s Gate of course differed in numerous ways.