Heaven's Gate

by Benjamin E. Zeller

  While beliefs are important, so too are religious practices. Chapter 5 considers the development of the religious practices within Heaven’s Gate, particularly the manner in which adherents used these practices to structure their terrestrial lives with reference to the extraterrestrial salvation that they sought. I make use of historian and cultural theorist Thomas A. Tweed’s theorization of religion as a constellation of practices related to crossing and dwelling, showing how members both dwelt in religiously created homes and sought to cross to an idealized home in the heavens. Since self-transformation lay at the heart of Heaven’s Gate’s religious message from its very first days until the end of the movement’s history, unsurprisingly, practices aimed at self-transformation lay at the heart of the group’s religious practices. Self-transformative practices of dwelling included building communal homes, members rhetorically transforming their homes into spacecraft, and recreating the individual as a monastic member of a crew. Self-control and self-purging also served central roles in the lives of members of Heaven’s Gate and in their daily religious practices as they sought to cross out of this world into that of the eternal salvation of the Next Level. This included techniques such as prayer, fasting, meditation, and astrology.

  The final core chapter, “Why Suicide?: Closing Heaven’s Gate,” focuses on why the group’s members were led by their convictions to embrace a theology of suicide as the best option for securing eternal salvation. I trace the development of a metaphysically and culturally dualistic worldview within the movement and an increase in pessimism toward the outside world and its value. This relates to transformations within the group’s apocalyptic thought and its context, as well as the advent of conspiratorial thinking within Heaven’s Gate and the broader social context of such thought, especially as Michael Barkun has recently traced in American society. I therefore conclude that dualistic thinking about the self and the world, a pessimistic outlook and the experience of rejection by outsiders, failed expectations about a potential government raid on the group, and the mass public attention to the Hale-Bopp comet and an alleged UFO trailing the comet all led to the eventual suicides.

  The book concludes with an afterword that positions Heaven’s Gate as representative of many of the same forces shaping the broader American religious environment and religions in the United States. I argue that Heaven’s Gate was American religion wrought small, a social barometer that revealed the religious climate at the turn of twenty-first-century America. This includes aspects such as the centrality of biblical interpretation, Christian primitivism, spiritual seeking, and alternative spiritual practices, appeals to science and scientific legitimacy, and apocalyptic thinking.

  * * *

  When considering the overall argument and thrust of this book, a related set of ideas should emerge as most pertinent. First, Heaven’s Gate must be studied within the context of its emergence, growth, and death. Biographers take the same approach when studying their subjects, indicating how individuals reflect their cultural, historical, and social contexts, but also reveal those same contexts through crystallizing such forces into a single life. I see Heaven’s Gate as doing something analogous, and this book aims for the same sort of contextualization that one finds in a biography. Heaven’s Gate both reflects the context of its environment—Christian apocalypticism, New Age spiritual practices, the religious quests of baby boomers, new religions of the counterculture, the narcissistic pessimism of the 1990s—as well as reveals how those forces interacted in the form of a single religious body.

  Second, this book should make clear that we need to take seriously the religious beliefs, practices, worldviews, and life choices of adherents of alternative, belittled, and discredited religious movements. It is far too easy to dismiss the members of Heaven’s Gate as either insane or victimized, and in both cases we fall into the same sort of trap of demonization that colors the dehumanizing political discourse of the twenty-first century.

  Third, this book has a historiographic point as well. The study of new religious movements has long been ghettoized within the academic study of religion. Scholars of NRMs—such as myself—have formed our own academic groups, journals, and associations. While these are appropriate processes for any subfield within the study of religion, it has unfortunately meant that the study of individual new religious groups tends to become linked only to the study of other NRMs. We not only assume that the context of our study includes other new religions, but we tend to reify the concept of “new religious movement” as a sort of distinct type of religion that sets it—and us, as scholars of the phenomenon—apart from other religions and their study.

  This book is not about new religious movements, though Heaven’s Gate is of course one such group. Rather, this book is about a group, its religious history, and its religious environment. I do not see Heaven’s Gate as representative of a reified category of NRM, but as an indicator of American culture and society. The implicit argument of this book is that scholars must study new religions as parts of broader religious environments and not as stand-alone movements. Heaven’s Gate has more in common with other religious movements of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s in the United States—Christian Evangelicals and yoga practitioners, for example—than it does new religious movements of other times and places.

  Finally, a note on sources, and another on language: one reason that scholars have written comparatively little on Heaven’s Gate—as opposed to groups such as the Branch Davidians or Peoples Temple—is the relative paucity of sources. No proper Heaven’s Gate archives exist, and few publicly assessable collections hold materials produced by the group. I have made use of the few available archival materials, held in the Special Collections at the University of California Santa Barbara’s American Religions Collection. Several published interviews also exist, as well as various news stories produced by reporters over the years. The articles written by sociologists Robert W. Balch and David Taylor based on their ethnographic fieldwork in the group in the 1970s are most helpful. Several journalists and non-academic historians have produced histories and assessments of the movement, notable Rodney Perkins and Forrest Jackson’s Cosmic Suicide: The Tragedy and Transcendence of Heaven’s Gate (1997) and Bill Hoffmann and Cathy Burke’s Heaven’s Gate: Cult Suicide in San Diego (1997). Since neither book is properly peer reviewed, and both are rather sensationalistic, I have not used these books themselves, but rather mined them for the primary sources that the authors themselves had uncovered. In all cases, I have verified any materials that I first encountered from these books or other media sources.

  But most of the materials I have used in writing this book come directly from the movement itself: its 1997 self-published anthology and the videos that the movement produced in its final half decade, including a twelve-part series in 1992 and two hour-long instructional videos produced in the last year of Heaven’s Gate’s existence, audio tapes from 1982 to 1985, and interviews and statements made by ex-members. Some of the most useful of the sources are the “Exit Videos,” the videotaped messages left by members just before their suicides. Some have called these video suicide notes, but I prefer to think of them as videotaped epistles. Like letters, they are exhortative and pedagogical, offering instruction and advice to those left behind after the members have left the Earth. For a short window of time, adherents believed, heaven’s gate remained open. These intensely heartfelt Exit Videos called for family, friends, and the general public to follow members through that gate. I have also spoken with, interviewed, and exchanged emails with numerous former members, all of whom have provided details into the history and development of this religious group.

  Those exchanges made it very clear to me that my use of religious studies language differs greatly from the language within the group. What I call a ritual, members called an exercise. What I call prayer, they called focusing. What I call a religious movement, they called a class, and what I call members, they called students. I have continued to use the language most familia
r to scholars of religion, but I do wish to note from the onset that the members of Heaven’s Gate—or students in the Class, to use their terminology—would not have used the same words. Ex-members have nevertheless recognized the same phenomenon behind the different labels. Even Applewhite himself admitted that such labels were appropriate, remarking on how the group did not refer to itself as a religion, but that it certainly fit the definition.12

  The most notable case of a fundamental difference in language, and one that reflects a basic difference between the worldview of members of Heaven’s Gate and the majority of those outside, involves the suicides themselves, which members and ex-members refer to as “exits.” For members, the true self transcended the body, and death of the body seemed almost inconsequential. I do not support suicide, religious or otherwise, but in listening to the voices of the adherents of Heaven’s Gate I have taken seriously their religious claims. While keeping in mind the tragic end of this new religious movement, this book focuses equally on its beginning and middle. In doing so one discovers how much Heaven’s Gate reflected American culture, and how its development represents a story of the birth, life, and death of an American new religion. Heaven’s Gate is not just a suicide cult, as it is often called. Heaven’s Gate is America’s UFO religion.

  1

  The Cultural and Religious Origins of Heaven’s Gate

  One problem that scholars have had in studying Heaven’s Gate is that the movement changed radically over its twenty-five-year history. For example, the group that we call Heaven’s Gate only used that name to refer to itself in its final days on Earth. For much of its history, the group members called themselves Human Individual Metamorphosis, Total Overcomers Anonymous, and often simply “the Class.” Today we know this new religious movement as Heaven’s Gate—and I will continue to call it that—but its name often changed. (While admittedly anachronistic to refer to the movement throughout its history using the moniker of Heaven’s Gate, I continue to do so because it is simpler for both author and reader.)

  The group’s organizational structure changed too. At first, Heaven’s Gate existed as merely two people: its founders Marshall Herff Applewhite (1932–1997) and Bonnie Lu Nettles (1927–1985), who used names like Guinea and Pig, Bo and Peep, and eventually Ti and Do, as well as “the Two.”1 (I will refer to them by their birth names, or as “the Two” when they acted in concert to lead the movement.) As they attracted followers and adherents, something odd happened: the group became even less organized. Researchers and journalists who studied the group in its first months discovered that its leaders often did not attend recruitment meetings, seldom traveled with the group, and exerted only minimal control over the organization of this inchoate religious movement. All this changed in 1976, when the Two instituted a rigid hierarchal social structure predicated on their absolute control over the social and religious lives of their adherents. That style of organization characterized Heaven’s Gate until its end in 1997, though Nettles had died in 1985, leaving Applewhite as the sole leader.

  In terms of the movement’s religious practices, equally substantial changes occurred. The shifts paralleled the organizational changes. At first, Applewhite and Nettles exerted little control over the religious practices of their followers, though they did provide guidelines and some requirements. Yet followers often skirted these requirements and invented their own ways of following the guidelines. Later, the Two put into place more stringent requirements and instituted a monastic style of living that adherents used to rigidly control their lives. Again, that later pattern of practices lasted until the end of the movement.

  Religious beliefs also changed. Most fundamentally, in the early days of Heaven’s Gate the Two taught that followers would journey to outer space (what they called the “Next Level”) on UFOs while still alive, bringing their physical bodies with them through a process akin to metamorphosis. They emphasized biological, chemical, and metabolic changes that would enable this process. After the death of Nettles in 1985—which followers understood to represent only the death of her physical body and the release of her true self to return to outer space—Applewhite taught that adherents may have to die in order to journey on to the Next Level. By the end of the movement’s history, physical death had become a necessity rather than a mere possibility.

  These many changes make Heaven’s Gate more difficult to characterize and study, but they actually reveal something very important: Heaven’s Gate functioned as a living, changing religion whose leaders and members adapted to unexpected developments through institutional, practical, and theological modifications. The group demonstrated flexibility. As it changed, it reflected the changing society around it. In this chapter I develop an overall picture of how Heaven’s Gate evolved in its formative years, before Nettles’s death. The overarching theme that emerges shows two extremely creative religious innovators who founded a new religious movement predicated on multiple strands of religious thought.

  The Early History: The UFO Two

  Bonnie Lu Nettles had not been particularly religious growing up, nor was she a rigorous proponent of any one spiritual path, though she had dabbled in astrology and theosophy. Marshall Herff Applewhite had been raised by a preacher and even attended seminary, but his real love was music and, as a closeted bisexual in 1970s Texas, the church would not have seemed a natural home regardless. It is odd, then, that these two individuals, one a part-time astrologer and the other a former seminarian, would found one of the world’s most famous UFO religions. But they did. The early history of Heaven’s Gate is the history of the meeting and spiritual partnership of Bonnie Lu Nettles and Marshall Herff Applewhite.

  Neither Nettles nor Applewhite had particularly noteworthy backgrounds before meeting and creating the new religious movement that would become known as Heaven’s Gate. A native of Houston, Nettles was a registered nurse, mother of four children, and partner in a failing marriage. She had been raised Baptist, but she was not particularly fervent in her Christian faith. A high school friend described Nettles’s church attendance as primarily social, attending “just because the gang [of friends] did.”2 As an adult she was biblically literate and interested in religion, but not devout. By the time she met Applewhite, her religious interests had taken a far less conventional turn.

  Astrology and the occult fascinated Nettles. A lapsed member of the Houston branch of the Theosophical Society in America—an eclectic religious body emphasizing a variety of spiritual practices—and an amateur astrologer, Nettles inhabited a New Age subculture of disincarnated spirits, ascended masters, telepathic powers, and hidden and revealed gnosis.3 She channeled spirits, including a nineteenth-century Franciscan monk named Brother Francis, held a séance group in her living room, and was interested in UFOs. She also authored an astrology column in a local newspaper.4 Such unconventional religious practices were even more important to her than her interpersonal relationships: Nettles’s husband did not approve of her spiritual activities, and the couple’s relationship had begun to disintegrate even before Nettles found a new spiritual partner in Applewhite. They divorced in 1972.5

  Though Nettles and Applewhite would later discount the value of Nettles’s theosophy, her involvement in the Theosophical Society indicates one of the formative religious influences in her life, one that clearly influenced her later religious thought. Even after Nettles and Applewhite met and began formulating their new religious understanding, they sold theosophical material in their short-lived New Age bookstore, The Christian Arts Center.6 Theosophy is the product of the late nineteenth century and another famous pair of religious innovators, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907), and their circle of friends and associates. Scholar of theosophy Robert Ellwood traces the movement to multiple sources: nineteenth-century romanticism, the Victorian debates over the relationship between science and religion, and the Western discovery and fascination with the East, especially India.7 Theosophy’s founders combined an earnest c
ommitment to progressivism with all of these religious influences, forming a new religious movement that promulgated a philosophy drawing on Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and the Western Occult tradition. Its most important features include the evolution of the human soul through multiple incarnations, and access to and learning from a series of spiritual masters inhabiting distant physical or spiritual places or planes. Theosophy also idolized science. All of these elements later became central doctrines of Heaven’s Gate, though in modified forms.8

  Nettles’s Theosophical Society in America had been shaped by other religious innovators before it reached her. Theosophists Annie Besant, Charles Webster Leadbeater, Jiddu Krishnamurti, William Q. Judge, and Katherine Tingley all formed and reformed theosophical sub-movements that evolved from Blavatsky and Olcott’s teachings and materials. Mid-twentieth-century theosophical popularizers Guy Ballard (1878–1939) and Edna Ballard (1886–1971) emphasized the notion of the “Ascended Masters,” transcendental beings who served as spiritual masters to members of the Ballards’ “I AM” movement. This movement became very popular in American theosophical and later New Age circles, and left an obvious mark on Heaven’s Gate. The Ballards extended Blavatsky and Olcott’s notion of Mahatma masters—who originally included living masters, spiritual beings, and extraterrestrial Venusians—and focused on the latter two categories. I AM’s Ascended Masters generally existed in spiritual or extraterrestrial realms, and offered religious teachings through channeling and other spiritual means of communication. Importantly, the Ascended Masters were embodied, having “ascended” from Earth to the higher realms that they now inhabited. This approach—and especially the idea of embodied masters—became an important part of Heaven’s Gate’s thought. Channeling certainly found a home in the new religion that Nettles founded with Applewhite. Nettles’s séance group channeled not only deceased human beings such as Brother Francis, and in one case Marilyn Monroe, but also extraterrestrials from planet Venus.9 While the Two borrowed the idea of extraterrestrial beings offering religious truth and knowledge, they repudiated other aspects of the theosophical worldview, notably the plurality of spiritual teachers, its liberal acceptance of a multiplicity of truths, and most of its religious practices.