Heaven's Gate

by Benjamin E. Zeller

  As compared to Nettles, Applewhite possessed a more conventionally Christian background. A Texan by birth, he was the son of a popular and successful Presbyterian preacher, Marshall Herff Applewhite, Sr. Called widely by his middle name, Herff, the younger Applewhite attended Austin College in Sherman, Texas, where he was remembered as an extrovert with a magnetic personality that “he put to only positive uses,” in the words of a former college roommate.10 He served as a campus leader in the a cappella group, judiciary council, and association of prospective Presbyterian ministers, and graduated with a degree in philosophy. College acquaintances remember him as a budding musician as well as interested in religious ministry.11

  After graduating from college in 1952, Applewhite enrolled at Virginia’s Union Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian divinity school, but left after two years to study music.12 Following a brief stint in the Army Signal Corps, he earned a Masters degree in music and voice from the University of Colorado, though he never strayed far from a religiously oriented vocation.13 A talented vocalist and charismatic instructor, Applewhite directed the chorus at Houston’s St. Mark’s Episcopal Church and the fine arts program at the University of St. Thomas, as well as working at a string of churches and even a synagogue.14 He married fellow Texan Anne Pearce shortly after graduating, and had two children, but the couple separated in the mid-1960s and divorced in 1968.15 He remained estranged from his ex-wife and children until the end of his life. Applewhite bounced between various jobs, teaching and conducting music, until he met Nettles eight years later. Yet Applewhite also dabbled in astrology, and he clearly was somewhat of a religious seeker. A friend reported that Applewhite had become interested in UFOs, science fiction, and ancient mysticism shortly before meeting Nettles.16

  His religious life would change forever when he met Bonnie Lu Nettles in the Houston hospital where she worked in 1972. Numerous accounts exist of why Applewhite was in the hospital, but all agree that Applewhite was at a moment of life change and even crisis. His sister indicated that he had suffered a “near death experience” and was hospitalized because of a serious heart blockage.17 Robert W. Balch, a sociologist who produced the first notable studies of Heaven’s Gate, indicated that the encounter was “chance” and that Applewhite had been visiting a friend who was recovering from an operation, a position that Applewhite also took. (Balch also noted that Applewhite’s life was in a state of confusion and flux at the time.)18 Evan Thomas, a reporter who investigated the group following the Heaven’s Gate suicides, claims that Applewhite was a mental patient who had suffered a serious mental collapse, though he provides no evidence of that claim; neither does he indicate from where he derived that rather late interpretation.19

  While the exact reasons for Nettles’s and Applewhite’s meeting will never be fully known, clearly both were in the midst of significant life changes. Nettles was separated and in the process of divorcing. Her husband did not support her spiritual pursuits, and she felt called to something more than her current situation. Her daughter remembers going outside with Nettles to look at the sky, with both talking about how they hoped that a flying saucer would land and take them away.20 Applewhite’s situation was even more muddled. He was a bisexual, yet neither his relationships with women nor men had brought him any long-term happiness. In addition to his divorce, he had suffered a broken engagement and a series of homosexual relationships about which he felt deeply ambivalent. He admitted to a friend that he felt his relationships were “all failures” and that “any kind of relationship is stifling and short lived.” He considered giving up intimate relationships entirely, but also admitted that he longed for a partner.21 He had recently been fired from a well-paying job and found himself isolated from both former friends and family, as well as struggling financially. Regardless of whether he was a patient at the hospital where he met Nettles, he had suffered from various health ailments including frequent headaches and anxiety.

  Some scholars and journalists have argued that the two’s life circumstances, especially Applewhite’s sexual and relationship problems, directly led them to create the religious worldview of Heaven’s Gate, with its emphasis on celibacy and control.22 Scholar of communications Robert Glenn Howard posited that Applewhite’s “apparently obsessive beliefs” about “human psychic problems of identity formation,” in combination with either his sexual confusion or a mystical experience, led to the specific form that Heaven’s Gate took.23 For Howard, total rejection of the body, gendered social norms, and sexual identity led directly to the eventual suicides.24 Sociologist Susan Raine goes even further, rooting the theological development of Heaven’s Gate in Applewhite’s “lifelong struggles with his own sexuality, coupled with his mental health problems.”25 The actual evidence of Applewhite’s madness is slim. He did seem crazy to some people, especially those who met him and Nettles during their initial “awakening” period, but apparently he did not present any such behavior after 1975.26 While Raine is sometimes careful to admit that Applewhite’s mental health problems were merely “alleged,” she nevertheless presents an image of Applewhite as both schizophrenic and delusional, and argues that these conditions led to the creation of Heaven’s Gate’s belief system.27

  Such approaches are overly reductionist and not very helpful. Many psychological, social, and cultural factors were at play and influenced Applewhite and Nettles as they created Heaven’s Gate. While it is easy to dismiss someone who believes in unconventional religions as ipso facto delusional or schizophrenic—as Raine does—there is no clinical reason to assume that a person who believes in UFOs and extraterrestrial communication is any more insane than a person who believes in angels and prayer. Such arguments are inherently circular, since the primary evidence for Applewhite’s apparent madness is his founding of an alternative new religion, and that is precisely what such arguments also attempt to explain. These explanations also fail to consider the role that Nettles played in the creation of Heaven’s Gate. Her theosophical and ufological background were at least as important as the religious or psychological experiences that Applewhite brought to the movement, and she contributed as much to the theological content of the system as did he. Arguments that discount her relevance therefore fail on basic empirical grounds.

  Rather than reduce Heaven’s Gate to the result of Applewhite’s alleged psychological state, one must consider the cultural and social dimensions of their past histories and shared experiences, and the development of the group itself. For example, representations of space aliens and UFOs in popular culture and the ufology subculture, Nettles and Applewhite’s past studies of Asian religions, theosophy, and Christianity, and the social dynamics of the counterculture of the late 1960s and 1970s all provided equal muses as the two constructed their religious worldview. That being said, rejection of sexual relationships, settled jobs, and middle-class life did become hallmarks of Heaven’s Gate. All of these American cultural norms had failed the group’s founders as well. Yet this is merely one aspect of a highly complex religious ideology and practice.

  Becoming the Two

  In the months after Nettles and Applewhite met in the Houston hospital, they forged a lasting spiritual bond that became the center of Heaven’s Gate, even after Nettles died in 1985. On a psychological level, the two provided each other the supportive relationship that each desperately needed, and on a religious level the two brought their disparate experiences and perspectives together to form a nexus of theosophy, Protestantism, the New Age, and ufology.

  Whereas the accounts at the end of Heaven’s Gate tended to focus almost exclusively on how Applewhite shaped the ensuing movement, it was Nettles whose worldview primarily influenced the development of the two’s spiritual journey, and former members recount that it was she who served as the real leader of the movement.28 Applewhite had undergone several mystical experiences in the previous months, but seemed unable to find the words or framework for explaining them. According to one account recollected by a friend and collected by B
alch, Applewhite had had a visionary experience and needed help processing and interpreting. “He said a presence had given him all the knowledge of where the human race had come from and where it was going. It made you laugh to hear it, but Herff was serious. And he didn’t seem crazy.”29 Elsewhere, Balch reports that Applewhite had experienced “strange voices, and later bizarre dreams and out-of-body experiences.”30

  Yet Applewhite’s limited dabbling in astrology and readings about ancient mysticism failed to provide him a convincing interpretive schema with which to understand and frame his experiences. Nettles provided that. In a 1976 interview, Applewhite explained that the moment they met was life-changing, but that he had also been looking for just such a moment. “I felt I had known her forever. I had wanted someone to do an astrological chart on me, so when I met her, I ran right out to my car and got my birth certificate.”31 As Applewhite indicated, he had wanted someone like Nettles to help him process his experiences. In particular, he hoped that person would use an astrological chart to do so.

  For believers in astrology, charts function as a religious technology that aids in revealing the intrinsic contours of personality, identity, and destiny of the individual. A chart determines and locates the position of planets and stars during the precise moment of the individual’s birth—hence Applewhite’s need to retrieve his birth certificate. A trained astrologer not only creates a chart but also interprets it, explaining how the stars and planets have led to specific influences in the subject’s life. Depending on the astrological system that the subject and astrologer utilize, the chart may also reveal secrets about the subject’s past lives and future fate.

  Nettles did Applewhite’s chart. They determined that they had known each other in a previous life and that they had an important mission to perform together in their new incarnations.32 They used this new realization to explain not only Applewhite’s recent mystical experiences, but all the relationship ills and other interpersonal dramas that had plagued the two of them over the previous years. As they later explained in another 1976 interview, “it was as if we were being guided by forces greater than ourselves. We were snatched from our previous lives. We went through a very confusing period of transition.”33 Importantly, the astrological framework that Nettles offered Applewhite helped both of them to understand and interpret their experiences, to give meaning to the (admittedly pedestrian) suffering that the two had undergone. Like all religions, the inchoate kernel of Heaven’s Gate offered meaning and solace. It provided sanction for them to reject the most painful parts of their lives—broken relationships—and forge a new (platonic) partnership together based on mutual spiritual development.

  The two decided to found a joint venture that they named the Christian Arts Center. At the center they sold books and offered classes on a variety of New Age topics, including astrology, meditation, mysticism, theosophy, healing, metaphysics, comparative religions, arts, and music.34 Despite the name of the center, the two had moved rather firmly away from the Christianity of Nettles’s Baptist upbringing and Applewhite’s Presbyterianism, and into the realm of the New Age movement. The New Age is notoriously difficult to define, since it functions as a loose movement of individuals and groups. New Age practitioners focus on means of self-transformation through spiritual technologies and practices such as astrology, channeling, body work (yoga, breath meditation, etc.), and diet. Scholar of new religions J. Gordon Melton argues that such goals of self-transformation and planetary transformation are the hallmark of the New Age, and that all New Age practices orient toward these goals.35 James R. Lewis cautions that even this generalization may not sufficiently define such a diffuse movement, and instead argues for a set of defining traits such as healing, syncretism, transformation, and appeals to psychic powers.36 Scholars identify theosophy, astrology, Western esotericism, channeling, alternative healing, Christian mysticism, and ufology as parcels and influences in the contemporary New Age movement.37 Regardless of how one defines the New Age, Applewhite and Nettles had clearly positioned themselves and their new entity as part of this phenomenon.

  The Christian Arts Center failed after only a few months, so the two moved “out into the country” to found a retreat center that they named Know Place, a name that capitalized on both the sense of “knowing thyself” and the homonym of a “no-place,” that is a liminal utopia wherein one finds oneself. There they taught classes on New Age topics such as astrology, theosophy, and mysticism, and met individually with students. They also focused more on their own spiritual development. They delved into theosophical material, including Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, and many other New Age, Christian, and theosophical texts.38 They also consulted with a Filipino occultist with interests in Hindu mysticism, who concurred with them that they had a special mission to accomplish.39 The mystic renamed Nettles as Shakti Devi (meaning “Powerful Goddess”) and Applewhite as Shri Pranavah (roughly translating to “Auspicious Mantra”), providing an important symbol of their rebirth. The names did not last, though the effect did. The two were no longer just two individuals. They were on the road to becoming—as they would soon refer to themselves—The Two.

  The Revelation of Self-Discovery

  Had Applewhite and Nettles continued their semi-solitary musings at Know Place it is unlikely that they would have formed a new religious movement. Instead, they left the isolation and safety of the Houston environ and began a multiyear process of religious searching and proselytizing that eventually resulted in the formation of a small religious community. This community would grow from its two founders in 1973 to one more person in May 1974 to several dozen a year later in May 1975, and finally to several hundred in late 1975 and early 1976.

  Nettles and Applewhite understood themselves as seekers, and after closing Know Place in January 1973, they spent more than a year wandering throughout North America on a religious quest for self-identity. They read a variety of New Age, theosophical, science fiction, Christian, and Asian religious materials. As Applewhite later described it, “[w]e studied everything we could get our hands on that had to do with any sort of awareness—spiritual awareness, scientific awareness, religious awareness. Our thirst was absolutely unquenchable.”40 The Two had become religious seekers, trying out new beliefs and identities as they sought a new means of understanding themselves and their relationship to each other and the world.

  In adopting the mantle of seekers, Nettles and Applewhite were not aberrations, and while their method of dropping all familial and social connections to wander may seem extreme, it in fact represented a far broader religious milieu. The 1950s had witnessed Jack Kerouac and the beatniks engaging in a similar phenomenon, and in the 1960s of course waves of countercultural youth had wandered the nation’s cities and byways and become known as the hippies. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a decade of seekers. Sociologist of religion Wade Clark Roof surveyed the baby boomer generation that came of age during this era and found that seeking functioned as a major theme of their religious experience. While neither Nettles nor Applewhite were boomers—they were born too early—their experiences nevertheless captured the gestalt of the time. In assessing his survey findings, Roof defined the religious world of this time as focused on a “turning inward.” He explains that a “common theme in this turning inward is the emphasis on exploring religious and spiritual traditions. Exploration gets elevated to the level of a spiritual exercise in an age that is aware of the great diversity of religions.”41 Roof found that 60 percent of boomers preferred to explore differing religious teachings and learn from them. This seeking undoubtedly had an impact. By 1988, when Roof performed his survey, a quarter of boomers accepted astrology and reincarnation.42 By 2008, a quarter of all Americans did as well.43 Spiritual seeking has tremendous impact in American religious culture.

  Nettles and Applewhite’s period of seeking ended when they came to a more definitive view of themselves and their new identities. While camping in July 1973 along the Oregon coast near the Rogue
River, the Two—as they now almost always called themselves—came upon a firm realization of their identities and mission. They were the two witnesses described in the Christian New Testament’s Book of Revelation, destined to be martyred and resurrected before an unbelieving world, which they dubbed “the demonstration.” They based this belief on a passage in Revelation 11, one that they explicitly cited in later sources, which indicates two witnesses being slayed by a “a beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit” and after being resurrected, “ascend[ing] up to heaven in a cloud” (Rev. 11:3–12, King James Version).

  In pinning their religious identities and missions on this passage in Revelation, the Two had veered from their initial New Age forays into the apocalyptic millennialism that characterized the conservative Evangelical Protestantism of the time. In fact, they came to promote a variant of dispensational premillennialism, a type of apocalypticism that focuses on deciphering the clues in Revelation and the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Daniel to develop a precise time line of the end-times, with reference to great “dispensations” of time. Crucially, dispensationalism also posits a “rapture of the faithful” wherein the elect meet Christ in midair and journey to Heaven. The Two would later transform this system and these beliefs within their own religious worldview.