2
Need for Purification and Forgiveness
2
Christological Events (Transfiguration)
1
Importance of Prayer
1
Two Witnesses
1
As a fundamentally Protestant biblical group, Heaven’s Gate naturally featured a Christology, a set of positions on the nature of Christ’s incarnation. Few of the Two’s markings in their Bible directly treat the nature of Christ, though they did underline six separate passages in Luke that speak to the question. Notably, they marked material related to Jesus’s overcoming of temptation (Lk 4:12–14), prayer life (Lk 6:12), and miracles (Lk 8:33, 8:54–55). That the two founders identified these passages indicates their interest in what Christ did on Earth; however, they framed these by marking two other passages. The first, a statement by Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, declared, “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people, And hath raised up an horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David; As he spake by the mouth of his holy prophets, which have been since the world began” (Lk 1:67–70). This passage presents several major themes: that the Lord has visited “his people,” that God speaks through prophets, and that God provides a savior. While these themes are unremarkable for most Christians, within the context of an extraterrestrial hermeneutic, they explain the underlying theology of Heaven’s Gate. Based on a reading of the three statements they subsequently authored, Applewhite and Nettles treated any reference to God in a materialistic fashion, reckoning that what the Bible calls God is actually a highly developed extraterrestrial worshipped by humans as a deity. Here they followed the contours of the broader extraterrestrial biblical hermeneutic. Assuming that interpretive framework, the Two took Zacharias’s statement that the Lord “hath visited” Israel literally, as evidence that the extraterrestrial being worshipped by the Israelites literally visited his people, making the Bible in fact a record of alien visitation. Regarding Christ specifically, Nettles and Applewhite followed the traditional Protestant approach of understanding the New Testament as centered on the life and teachings of Jesus, who offered not only moral teachings, but also the means of entering the heavens. They also followed conservative Protestant hermeneutics in reading the text quite literally rather than as a metaphor, though of course they interpreted its literal meaning differently. For Heaven’s Gate, of course, the heavens represented physical space beyond the atmosphere of the planet. The Two’s final notation regarding Christ’s nature appears in Luke 9:28–34, the section of the text traditionally called the Transfiguration, since in this passage Christ’s visage becomes “white and glistering [i.e., glistening].” Importantly, during this episode, God the Father speaks from overhead in “a cloud,” recognizing Jesus as his son. Though Nettles and Applewhite made no effort to notate the nature of this cloud in the actual text of their Bible, they would return to it in their written statements a year later, explaining that it was “what humans refer to as UFOs.”9
In this first statement, titled “Human Individual Metamorphosis,” Nettles and Applewhite paid particular attention to the nature of Christ’s incarnation, following the notations of their KJV Bible. In keeping with a central tenet of their extraterrestrial hermeneutic, the Two stressed not only the heavenly origin of Jesus, but also his physicality. Before incarnating on Earth, Jesus possessed a material body, and his awakening represented a “metamorphic” (rather than spiritual) process:
Approx. 2,000 years ago an individual of that next kingdom forfeited his body of that kingdom and entered a human female’s womb, thereby incarnating as the one history refers to as Jesus of Nazareth. He awakened to this fact gradually through the same metamorphic process. . . . Jesus’ “Christing” or christening was completed at His transfiguration (metamorphic completion) and He remained in the “larva” environment, with other humans, only for some 40 days to show that His teachings had been accomplished.10
In this statement, Nettles and Applewhite laid out a basic theology of incarnation as read through their extraterrestrial hermeneutics, drawing on the passages that they had identified earlier, notably the Transfiguration. In keeping with their broader insistence on materialism, the Two identified Jesus as possessing a physical extraterrestrial body before incarnating, and implied that he either returned to this body or transformed his human body after his mission on Earth. He accomplished this, the Two explained, through use of a UFO, that is, the “cloud of light” of the biblical text. In addition to cementing the Two within the UFO subculture and identifying their hermeneutical approach as an extraterrestrial biblical one, their explanation of the “cloud of light”—a glossing of Luke-Acts (Lk 24:51; Acts 1:9) and possibly Ezekiel (Ezek 1:4–28) as well—as a UFO indicates the Two’s desire to both interpret the biblical text as indicating the evidence of past visitations by UFO and also explain the miracles of the Bible in strikingly materialistic means. Both of these desires derive from their specific hermeneutical approach.
As Heaven’s Gate’s theology developed, the founders’ and members’ views of Christ changed. By the end, members far more often cited the Gospel of John in explaining the nature of Christ, the gospel that most emphasizes Christ’s otherness.11 John’s preamble, describing the Word as being with God in the heavens before incarnating on Earth, would surely have echoed members’ beliefs about Christ journeying to Earth from the Next Level and then back again. Further, while at first they held a classically Christian position that Christ was both human and non-human (extraterrestrial rather than divine in the classic sense), by the end of the movement they advocated an adoptionist position, namely that the extraterrestrial being that was Christ entered into Jesus’s body at the point of his Baptism and transformed him from a merely human being into a superhuman one.12 Even more importantly, members of the group began to look to their leader Marshall Herff Applewhite as a reappearance of Jesus in another human body. Members had debated this possibility as early as 1975, but the Two’s statements that Jesus would wait for them aboard a UFO seemed to contradict this, or at least complicate the identification of Applewhite with Jesus.13 The movement made this identification explicit only later, in a statement authored by Applewhite shortly before the suicides, a September 1995 release that the group posted to nearly a hundred Internet fora in their hope to gain publicity and converts. Applewhite wrote:
I am about to return to my Father’s Kingdom. This “return” requires that I prepare to lay down my borrowed human body in order to take up, or reenter, my body (biological) belonging to the Kingdom of God (as I did approximately 2000 years ago, as Jesus, when I laid down the human body that was about 33 years old in order to reenter my body belonging to the Kingdom of Heaven).14
This new position that Applewhite was Jesus seemed to have developed at some point between 1992 and 1994. Heaven’s Gate produced a series of satellite television broadcasts in late 1992 and early 1992, and while the broadcasts made explicit mention of Jesus as offering the same message as Heaven’s Gate, the group made no claims that their leader was in fact Christ incarnate. This group’s May 1993 advertisements similarly did not discuss this issue, though since the advertisements made scant reference to Christ one cannot determine what precisely members believed at this point. Yet by June 1994 the members of the group clearly had come to believe that their founder and leader was none other than Jesus returned to Earth, with a provocatively titled poster used to advertise their meetings: “He’s Back, We’re Back, Where Will You Stand?”15
The elevation of Applewhite to Christhood occurred simultaneously with the development of another radical theological tenet, namely that Heaven’s Gate’s co-founder Bonnie Lu Nettles was the same extraterrestrial being that the Bible referred to as God and that Jesus called the Father in the New Testament. Nettles had died in 1985, and while it appears that this spiritual elevation of her position occurred simultaneous to that of Applewhite, it clearly built upon a decade of incr
easing rhetoric of apotheosis. Again, as early as 1975 members had pondered this possibility, but it had never become an official position of the group, and ex-members report that it was not anything either Nettles or Applewhite had explicitly taught at that time.16 In the first surviving material that Heaven’s Gate produced after Nettles’s death, a 1988 booklet they used for proselytizing purposes presumably authored by Applewhite, the movement’s spokesperson declared that
since that time [of the death], Do has been experiencing the role of having to communicate mentally with her, his Older Member, in a strengthening opportunity for mental or telepathic communication (not to be confused with the popular concept of channeling or spiritualism). The class has witnessed Ti’s mind meshed in Do’s thinking and even his choice of words as he talks to them. Does the quote “The Father is in Me and I am in My Father” mean maybe a little more than we previously thought it might?17
While the author of the booklet did not explicitly declare Nettles the same being as the one referred to as God in the Bible, the conflation of the deceased Nettles (“Ti” in the parlance of the group) with the Father from a paraphrasing of Jesus’s words in the Gospel of John (14.11), clearly indicated that the movement’s perspective on Nettles was that she served a central role in their theological worldview. By 1994, the identification of Nettles with the biblical Father was explicit, and the movement’s members referred to Ti as the senior member of the heavens who administered Earth and its affairs.
Cosmology: The Next Level, Its Members, and Its Enemies
One very important tenet that remained constant throughout this theological development was the materiality of Christ, the Father, and all other beings inhabiting the heavens, what Heaven’s Gate eventually called the Next Level. In their first statements from 1975, Nettles and Applewhite called the heavens from which the extraterrestrials came “the next evolutionary kingdom,” or “kingdom world” or “next kingdom.”18 This kingdom or level represented what most other Christian readers of the Bible would call Heaven. It was the place from which Jesus came before his incarnation, and to where he returned. Entrance into that kingdom represented the goal of the group, and Nettles and Applewhite offered teachings designed to assist people to enter it. In keeping with their extraterrestrial hermeneutic, Nettles and Applewhite made it quite clear that the kingdom was not in fact a misty ethereal realm or spiritual plane of existence, but literally “another world.” Its inhabitants possessed physical bodies that featured both chemical and biological makeups, although such bodies transcended the biological limitations of earthly life, such as sustenance, sexual reproduction, and death.19 Again, one can see how the Two’s hermeneutical approach led them to offer a materialistic interpretation of what most interpreters in the Protestant tradition generally understand to mean heaven or the heavens.
As Heaven’s Gate developed, the concept of this other world became increasingly central, eventually culminating in the notion of the Next Level or the Evolutionary Level Above Human (TELAH). The founders and members of Heaven’s Gate considered TELAH such an important concept that they named the legal entity they created to maintain their website and intellectual property after their suicides the TELAH Foundation, which they turned over to ex-members Mrcody and Srfody who continue (at the time of this writing) to operate it. Heaven’s Gate member Smmody offered perhaps the most explicit statement about the Next Level in her statement simply titled “T.E.L.A.H.—Evolutionary Level Above Human,” a statement that appeared in the anthology the movement created shortly before the end of the group. Smmody explained the Next Level as the most important concept that the group had to offer humanity. She emphasized that it was both real and entirely physical, and therefore a true place and not some sort of metaphor or spiritual plane of existence. “The Next Level, the Kingdom of Heaven, is a real physical place. It is a many-membered Kingdom. . . . The TRUE Kingdom of God (the Next Level) is a REAL place—a reachable place.”20 Smmody equated the fact that the Next Level was real and the fact that it was physical, indicating her rootedness in a materialist philosophy. All other statements produced by Heaven’s Gate members or leaders took the same approach and emphasized the same themes that the Next Level was physical, tangible, and therefore real. Smmody and others declared that real, tangible living beings populated this Next Level, and that these extraterrestrial beings, whom Heaven’s Gate members referred to as “members of the next level,” existed in material, biological form. Since the members of Heaven’s Gate believed that they would literally transform into the same Next Level creatures as a result of their involvement in the religious group, these beliefs functioned as absolutely central components of their theology.
Heaven’s Gate members harped upon the nature of Next Level beings as biological and real, a theme that Applewhite and Nettles emphasized in their first statements and members of Heaven’s Gate wrote and spoke about even in the final weeks of the movement. Whereas in the early days Applewhite and Nettles offered only vague statements about the specific physical nature of the Next Level extraterrestrial beings, members of the group in its final years held very specific beliefs about the Next Level beings. To take one representative account offered by Jwnody—whose writings we have already considered in some detail—Next Level aliens represented the ideal form of biological existence. “[T]he physical characteristics of our species,” Jwnody wrote, is that “Next Level bodies are genderless and very pleasant looking, oftentimes somewhat childlike or wisely gentle in their appearance.”21 Jwnody and others additionally described the Next Level beings as “non-mammalian,” “non-seed-bearing” (i.e., not-fertile), “eternal,” and “everlasting.” Moving beyond physical characteristics, members of Heaven’s Gate described the Next Level beings as “crew-minded” and “service-oriented.” Smmody summarized these beliefs in his T.E.L.A.H. statement: “Ti and Do and their students (crew) have come from a genderless, crew-minded, service-oriented world that finds greed, lust, and self-serving pursuits abhorrent.”22
Figure 4.1. Printout of digital artwork showing a Next Level alien. The group’s large printout that they displayed in their home has been lost, but several smaller printouts remain. Image © TELAH Foundation.
Importantly, Heaven’s Gate members envisioned their transformation into Next Level creatures as the ultimate goal and the form that “salvation” took within their movement. Within this theological context, Next Level aliens functionally equated to not only angels, but the saved elect in post-human life. The movement even presented an image of the Next Level aliens, one created by a member using a computer graphics program, a printout of which adorned their home, and also available as a link on their website.23 The image shows a silver-colored being on a purple background, an image that any viewer would immediately recognize as an extraterrestrial of the sort made famous by Steven Spielberg in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in the television series The X-Files, and in any number of science fiction books, graphic novels, television shows, and cartoons. The image bears striking similarity to the extraterrestrial beings usually called “Grays” as described by abductees and contactees, notably Betty and Barney Hill in their 1965 account and Whitney Strieber in his 1987 book, both of which were staples of ufology.24 Heaven’s Gate’s “Gray” appeared far more tranquil and peaceful than those portrayed by abductees and contactees, but no less inhuman. Featuring an enlarged bald head, large sunken eyes, and a tiny mouth and ears, the image conveys intelligence and awareness. The being displays no gender markers and possesses a face that appears gender-neutral. It wears a featureless silver-colored article of clothing that seems to adhere tightly to its nearly identically colored skin.
The written and visual portrayals of Next Level beings offers an important glimpse into Heaven’s Gate theology, primarily since this is how the members envisioned the true nature of God the Father and Christ, and also because members themselves wanted to become entities akin to this. The being is genderless, ageless, and seems to have little need for a mouth, indic
ating a relative unimportance for food or other forms of imbibing. In fact, members of Heaven’s Gate spoke of their ideal life as one of sole focus on the requirements of being part of a crew, with no need for such “mammalian” activities such as sex, relationships, eating for enjoyment, alcoholic consumption, or other forms of recreation. Members believed that Next Level beings nourished themselves through absorbing sunlight, lived in states of pure bliss, and had evolved beyond the need for personal ownership of property.25 Applewhite and Nettles had emphasized the need to live in a way similar to the Next Level beings as far back as their first public teachings in the mid-1970s, and this remained central until the end. Members of Heaven’s Gate saw themselves as a crew that focused exclusively on crew-minded activities.
Two things were happening here. First, members of Heaven’s Gate had reinterpreted the traditional Christian view of angels and projected it onto the members of the Next Level. While perspectives on angels differ throughout history and among different Christian denominations, the general theological consensus indicates that angels exist as what medieval historian David Keck calls “heavenly spirits,” created beings inhabiting the heavenly world and interacting with humans to assist, challenge, and engage earthly activity.26 Recent times have seen a resurgence of interest in angels, ranging from New Age appropriation of angel imagery to various forms of Christian representation. But, like the traditional theological approach, today’s angel aficionados treat these beings as immortal, genderless, perfected beings, in many ways alien to our human condition. Heaven’s Gate members transposed this image of the angel onto their view of the Next Level beings.
Second, and perhaps more important given the avowed interest of members in science fiction, the adherents of Heaven’s Gate imagined Next Level beings as living in an idealized version of the universe as portrayed in Star Trek, its successor series, and recent science fiction movies and television shows such as Stargate. Star Trek, especially the original series produced in 1966–69, shortly before the birth of Heaven’s Gate, imagines a universe wherein the central characters in the television show live and function as a harmonious crew dedicated to peaceful exploration and maintenance of an orderly universe. While Star Trek’s characters would often fight, they only fought enemies, never fellow crew members, and the crew generally functioned as a stable and efficient whole. The more recent Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST:TNG) replicated this pattern, and several members of Heaven’s Gate alluded to this model. Most notably, Jwnody ended her Exit Video by both quoting the words and mimicking the hand gesture made by the characters in ST:TNG about to leave a planet and return to their spaceship, “Thirty-nine to beam up!”27 This was the model that Heaven’s Gate looked toward when they imagined the Next Level and its inhabitants.
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