Heaven's Gate
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The members of Heaven’s Gate posted Applewhite’s second statement far more widely than the first one, to sixteen different UseNet newsgroups, as well as reposting the same message with different subject lines to the same newsgroup, a clear breach of unofficial UseNet protocol (“netiquette”) that indicated how seriously and urgently they saw their task. The members changed the title of the post on several Star Trek–oriented newsgroups to read, “The Real Q—An E.T. Speaks Out,” a reference to an omnipotent extraterrestrial being known as “Q” on the popular Star Trek: The Next Generation, and a being that they obviously envisioned as comparable to Next Level aliens in power and scope.58 In addition to some unusual choices of newsgroups such as the urban folklore forum (alt.folklore.urban), the group also targeted newsgroups focusing on the discussion of artificial intelligence (comp.ai.philosophy, etc.) as well as drug-induced spirituality (alt.drugs.psychedelics). The lack of attention to religious newsgroups is not remarkable in this instance, since the movement had intentionally written this statement for a different audience, but the lack of focus on either ufological newsgroups or more mainstream scientific newsgroups indicated that just as Applewhite and the members of Heaven’s Gate had begun to give up on Christians, clearly they had moved away from appealing to secular ufologists and scientists as well, and looked instead to those who stood on the fringe between fact and fiction, present technology and speculation.
The responses to the UseNet postings were not positive, and while many of their posts were simply ignored, others became targets of ridicule. “Please keep this obvious dribble [sic] from appearing in these forums again!” posted one UseNet reader in New Zealand, responding to the E.T. Speaks post in the artificial intelligence newsgroups.59 Another responded with a mangled gibberish quote from the 1951 science fiction movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, perhaps meant to indicate that the poster envisioned the Heaven’s Gate message as also gibberish.60 The most serious response might have been from a University of San Francisco astronomer, who countered with both a religious and scientific retort: “Are you saying that you are an alien? You know what, I think you are making a faise [sic] claim in your article. I believe God created mankind and it is only God who created the earth, for that matter, the entire universe since the beginning of time. I’m an astronomer who knows stuff about aliens. If you are an alien, prove it to me.”61 The Star Trek newsgroup readers tended more toward the snarky than engaging. “[T]hat was about dumbest thing I’ve seen yet,” one reader posted.62 Another offered, “. . . and your point with posting this on a Star Trek board (or ANY other board for that matter) is . . . ? (oooooh, I can’t wait to hear the answer to THIS question—biting my tongue as it is firmly planted in my cheek as I read this posting . . . ).”63 Only one poster seemed to take the statement seriously, noting that “I am very receptive to the idea of other species from other planets” and that Star Trek fans would be more accepting of such a fact, but the writer ended this apparently positive response by turning it on its head, saying that he was “forced by my next life-level admiral of the Xqizx dimension to write this . . .”64 Yet generally readers of the newsgroup simply ignored the postings, with four of the newsgroup posts garnering no responses, and fewer than a dozen people responding to all of them combined.65 These types of responses—and lack thereof—surely discouraged the members of Heaven’s Gate. The group’s anthology frames the failed UseNet experiment thusly, “It was clear to us that their [i.e., the statements] being introduced to the public at that time was premature.”66 The group posted several more times to UseNet in August and September 1996, with similar results.67 One former member later told Balch and Taylor that the experience of the UsetNet postings and other attempts to communicate with outsiders using the Internet indicated that “we just were not able to interface with the public . . . it was time to leave.”68
The UseNet postings included for the first time a URL, or uniform resource locator, an address that computer users might use to find the group’s website. While ubiquitous today, at the time the World Wide Web was hardly a widely used system, and the group’s creation of a website was novel. Analyzing a series of different polls and studies, Princeton sociologists Paul DiMaggio, Eszter Hargittai, and their colleagues explain that the Internet and its usage “began its rapid ascent only in the early 1990s, when graphical interfaces became widely available and commercial interests were allowed to participate.”69 They found that twenty-five million Americans—about 3 percent—used the Internet in 1995, with only about twenty thousand websites existing in that year. By 1999, Internet usage had increased to eighty-three million, and ten million web pages by 2000.70 Clearly Heaven’s Gate was on the leading edge of technological innovation, at least when it came to Internet communication and creating a web presence. The URL they first provided pointed to a web address they soon abandoned—http://www.indirect.com/www/lillo—but the group soon began hosting a website on an Internet domain of its own, the now-famous heavensgate.com, in 1996. This website represented one of the group’s final attempts to reach out to the broader world with its message. The group’s first website is lost and was never saved by any known website archive, so one cannot know what it contained. The first archived copy of the movement’s web page dates only to December 22, 1996, when the movement had purchased the heavensgate.com domain and hosted a site on it.
The Heaven’s Gate website in 1996 served as a clearinghouse for several sets of documents that the group had produced in the previous years: the “Our Position Against Suicide” statement, transcripts of two 1996 videotapes of Applewhite’s teaching, a revised version of the E.T. Statement that members had posted to UseNet in 1995, and the movement’s new anthology that they published in 1996. The majority of the content derived from the anthology, and in fact the group posted electronic files for their entire book online, free for download and with a broad copyright statement allowing free redistribution. While their use of an Internet website garnered wide media attention after the suicides, it was a quite late development within the movement and used merely as another means of posting information, one more form of media that they adopted alongside posters, newspaper advertisements, satellite television, videotapes, and books.71 Despite some claims to the contrary, nothing about Heaven’s Gate resembled what one might imagine as an “Internet religion.”72
The movement’s anthology represented a far vaster effort by the group’s members in its final full year of existence, and provided the eponymous name that this twenty-year-old movement adopted in its final year of existence and now into perpetuity. Applewhite had used the capitalized term “Heaven’s Gate” a year before in 1995 to refer to the idea of entrance into the next level, but the anthology represented the first time he or others used it to refer to the group itself.73 That being said, the choice to use the name “Heaven’s Gate” to refer to the group appears to be an intentional one, with ex-member Neoody explaining that Applewhite explained it to him and others, and meant it as a reference to himself and the Class as the only way (“gate”) into the Next Level (“heaven”).74 It also represented the movement members’ attempts to leave some record of the Next Level’s teachings for posterity after they had left the Earth, and in this regard the publication of the anthology must be recognized as one of the initial actions that culminated in the suicides. Earlier in 1996, Nrrody and Glnody began compiling the movement’s teachings and with the aid of Jwnody and others produced an anthology of the most crucial documents that the group had created over the years. Eventually titled, How and When “Heaven’s Gate” (The Door to the Physical Kingdom Level Above Human) May Be Entered: An Anthology of Our Materials, the original edition includes material only until April 1996, indicating a late spring or early summer publication, before the movement filmed its two 1996 videos.75 The group made some slight reorganizations and revisions and gave the second and final edition to ex-members Mrcody and Srfody at the time of the suicides, asking them to arrange for its publication and distribution.76 Most of the m
aterials included in the anthology originated from Applewhite, with the transcripts of the 1991–92 Beyond Human satellite series compromising the bulk of the book, but also including twenty-three statements written by members of the group as well as introductions by Jwnody and Applewhite. (Glnody wrote an introduction as well, but the second edition moved this to the section including statements by other members; Jwnody’s introduction remained in the frontmatter.)77 Jwnody positioned the anthology as a last legacy of the group, implying an awareness that the end of their earthly time was near, but also avoiding any specific statement as to how and when their mission would end. She wrote,
And so this [book] brings us before the public once again, with our “farewell legacy.” At the time of this writing, we do not yet know the extent of this seventh, and we suspect final, public involvement. This book, an anthology of our materials, begins “phase one.” Nothing is predetermined. The response of the world to the Next Level will be monitored very carefully. What happens next remains in the balance.78
Since the records and digital logfiles no longer exist, it is impossible to know how many people downloaded the book from the heavensgate.com website. Mrcody and Srfody indicated that the book subsequently sold so poorly that the publishing and distribution company sold back to them the remaining copies as discounted remainders. One individual, Dvvody, joined the movement based on encountering the book and other material on the group’s website and corresponding with members and Applewhite via email. (Dvvody’s husband also considered joining, but did not for somewhat unclear reasons.)79 Yet again, the effort of producing a three-hundred-fifty-page book and website seemed to have little net effect, with only one person joining and one other expressing interest. At this point, however, members looked solely to the Next Level and had broadly given up on attempting to reach other members of the human species.
Along with the book, the group produced two videos, both of which featured a serious-looking Applewhite presenting his teachings directly to the camera. Effectively videotaped lectures, the group provided the tapes free of charge or for nominal shipping fees. They also provided transcripts in English and German for these two tapes, both posted online on their website. The titles of the two tapes, Last Chance to Evacuate Earth Before It’s Recycled and Planet About To Be Recycled—Your Only Chance To Survive—Leave With Us, convey the sense of apocalyptic urgency that members of Heaven’s Gate had begun to feel. Years of rejection from outsiders and failed attempts to seek public awareness had resulted in the group’s members beginning to believe that their mission was coming to a close and the Earth’s inhabitants faced their final hours. In the words of Applewhite in the first minutes of the first tape, “Now, today we have quite a different urgency. It’s urgent to me, and it’s urgent to the students that sit before me. Our reason for speaking to you is because we feel to [sic] warn you of what is just around the corner. I’ll try to just put it as briefly as I can and as clearly as I can. This planet is about to be recycled, refurbished, started over.”80
Throughout the videotapes Applewhite explained the basics of Heaven’s Gate’s cosmology, indicating the nature of the Next Level—called by its synonym the Evolutionary Level Above Human in the videos—and his place in that cosmology. He focused on the Luciferians and their success in controlling human society, and by contrast the truth (with a capital “T” in the transcript) of what he and Nettles offered. Applewhite emphasized the need to overcome human practices and behaviors, and he called for potential candidates to join the Next Level to show curiosity and dig deeper into the materials that he and his co-religionists left behind. The majority of what he discussed followed in the same vein as the decades of material he and others in the movement had already produced, and there was no new theological material in the videos per se.
Yet Applewhite highlighted two issues on which he had not hitherto focused, namely his opposition to the category of “religion” and the nature of the individuals who possessed deposits or souls but were not part of his Class. As regards religion, Applewhite made a special distinction between the teachings of Heaven’s Gate and those of religions and spiritual groups, insisting that the teachings of Heaven’s Gate center on a physical reality and are spiritual only in the sense that they related to the mind or spirit. He did admit that Islam offered some value, since its members valued modesty, a strong connection with God, and would die for their faith. Yet he cautioned that Islam was ultimately no better than any other religion, and that “if the extent of your religious background was Star Trek—that in itself could be the best background you could have,” hardly a ringing endorsement!81 Like his various other statements on religion, as well as those by Jwnody and other members—discussed previously in chapter 3—Applewhite here engaged partially in rhetorical positioning of his movement vis-à-vis other competing religious groups, but he also had recognized that religious leaders and movements had by and large rejected the teachings he offered, and he had come to see them as not open-minded seekers of Truth, but corrupted demagogues controlled by maleficent space aliens. “I hate the lower forces who have taken the very Truths that were initially the Truths, and have reduced them to ‘religion,’ and they made the religions more attractive and more human,” he exhorted in the first of the videos.82 “There is not a religion on the face of the globe that is of God, as it is today. All of those ideologies that are called religions use corrupted records and corrupted interpretations,” he said in the second.83 Religions, for Applewhite and fellow members of Heaven’s Gate, had fallen away from their true nature as revelations of the Next Level and become mere tools for demonic space aliens to control humanity. Instead of teaching how to overcome the human level and earthly existence, they mired humans in terrestrial living in a broken world.
On one level, Applewhite’s discourse about the corruption of all other existing religions merely follows a trope of other founders of new religious groups. The Prophet Muhammad similarly claimed that the earlier monotheistic religions of Judaism and Christianity had become corrupted, and that the revelations he offered served only to correct these corruptions.84 Just over a millennium later the Bahá’í prophets and leaders made similar claims about Islam.85 In the United States, the nineteenth-century prophet Joseph Smith, Jr. declared that Christianity had become corrupted after the end of the early apostolic era, and that his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) came to renew and reestablish true religion.86 One finds similar claims among numerous Protestant groups, Christian “primitivists” who believe that Christianity went astray after the first days of the early or primitive church and that only their preferred branches of Christianity reconstruct or renew the true religion.87
While in this regard Applewhite certainly falls in line with other prophets and reformers, his rejection of the very category of religion marks his work as somewhat different. Partially this reflects him and the adherents of Heaven’s Gate as part of an anti-institutional, anti-ritual, individualistic religious current that has long categorized American religion, but the widespread rejection that he and members of the movement experienced had clearly left its mark on Applewhite’s view of religion. Somewhat defensively but quite reflexively, Applewhite explained that Heaven’s Gate’s message “would be easier to accept if it were more spiritual, if it were more complicated, if it had more ritual with it, or more trappings of religion.” Yet, he continued, “in my Father’s house, no incense is required, no flowing robes, no tinkling bells, no genuflecting, no sitting in the lotus position, no things of ‘spirituality,’ even though our Father’s Kingdom requires cleansing of the spirit, the mind.”88 While a latent Protestant suspicion of ritual clearly exists in these words, the recognition that others did not consider his movement a true religion also explains why Applewhite so vehemently declared the world’s religions and even the concept itself to be beyond repair.
The second concept that Applewhite highlighted involved the nature and fate of individuals who might be somewhat receptive to his
teachings or perhaps followed an analogue path but were not members of the Class and did not intend to join them. As early as the first year of the formation of the movement that would become Heaven’s Gate, Nettles and Applewhite had taught that there were “many ways up the mountain, but only one way off,” to paraphrase from several of their materials.89 While they recognized the validity and value of other forms of spiritual seeking, they taught that only those who adopted their Human Individual Metamorphosis method, or the Process, would achieve the type of transformation that would allow entrance to the Next Level. Early on they also noted that those who did not join them were perhaps unlucky or unfortunate, but could merely wait until the next representatives of the Next Level arrived a few thousand years hence and could advance beyond human in a later incarnation.90
This sort of teaching fell by the wayside in the intervening years, and Nettles and Applewhite seldom discussed the fate of those who did not join their movement. In the final years of Heaven’s Gate, Applewhite at times seemed to imply that all those remaining on Earth were destined for recycling and destruction, hardly a pleasant prospect. Yet in both the 1996 videos, Applewhite returned to his earlier teachings and beliefs that he shared with Nettles, namely that advancement beyond the human level existed as a possibility for some individuals not in the Class, but only in the distant future. However, he made an important distinction in these videos. Such an opportunity existed only for some humans, those with deposits or souls who had made some limited advancement in their earthly lives but were unable or unwilling to make the final sacrifices to join the Next Level at this time. He explains that this possibility exists primarily for those who trust and believe in him and the Next Level but lack the strength to follow through. Such individuals will be spared the spading over that deposit-less humans will experience, and “will be kept in the keeping of the Kingdom Level Above Human, and replanted at another time, and given another chance.”91