Heaven's Gate
Page 17
As spiritual seekers, the individuals who joined Heaven’s Gate sought self-transformation and development, though they might not have used those terms. In fact, such self-transformation emerged as the heart of this inchoate religious movement. “In a general sense ‘personal growth’ can be understood as the shape ‘religious salvation’ takes in the New Age movement,” explains historian Wouter Hanegraaff.4 Other scholars take the same position. Gordon Melton calls transformation the “primal experience” of the New Age movement. “New Agers have either experienced or are diligently seeking a profound personal transformation from an old, unacceptable way of life to a new, exciting future.”5 American religious historian Sarah M. Pike takes a similar approach, explaining that the term is an umbrella description, but at its heart the New Age possesses one common core: “New Agers are committed to the transformation of both self and society through a host of practices that include channeling, visualization, astrology, meditation, and alternative healing methods such as Reiki . . . or iridology.”6 For both Melton and Pike, transformational practices and technologies of transformation serve as the center of the New Age movement from which Heaven’s Gate drew many of its adherents.
Not surprisingly, self-transformation lay at the heart of Heaven’s Gate’s religious milieu from its very first days until the end of the movement’s history, and therefore at the heart of the group’s religious practices. Nettles and Applewhite taught that they served as religious guides—later this developed into far more elevated positions of course—to help adherents transform themselves into perfected extraterrestrial creatures. In the first phase of the movement’s history, before Nettles’s death in 1985, the two emphasized the physical nature of this process. They labeled it a biological and chemical process of overcoming one’s humanity and personally evolving into a higher organism. They likened it to a caterpillar’s metamorphosis or a student’s graduation, two metaphors that remained within the collective discourse of the movement until its demise two decades later. Their First Statement encapsulated this approach in explicit form, comparing human beings to the pupal stages of extraterrestrial life,
However, if the human is thought of as the larva of that next kingdom then there are, at times, those who are approaching the completion of their individual metamorphosis and are beginning to have some of the attributes and characteristics of that next kingdom. When the metamorphosis is complete their “perennial” and cyclical nature is ended for their “new” body has overcome decay, disease and death. It has converted over chemically, biologically, and in vibration to the “new” creature.7
In addition to alluding to the then-current name of the movement—Human Individual Metamorphosis—and foreshadowing the later name—Total Overcomers Anonymous—this statement shows how Nettles and Applewhite positioned self-transformation at the center of their religious vision.
Elsewhere they used academic metaphors, comparing their spiritual teachings to a rigorous classroom experience meant to propel students from lower levels of awareness toward higher ones. “A way of understanding this process is to think of his cycles [of experiences and existences] as twelve grades in school,” explained the Two.8 Because the Two accepted the idea of reincarnation—a belief probably deriving from Nettles’s background with Theosophy, which also accepts reincarnation—they looked to this schooling process as a long and arduous one. Yet they argued it was worth it, for it culminated in transformation into extraterrestrial life. “It is graduation time for all levels of life forms,” they declared in the continuation of the metaphor.9
The pupae/pupil metaphors positioned Heaven’s Gate within the culture of self-development and self-exploration that characterized the New Age movement. It also ties into Theosophy, which both Applewhite and Nettles admitted to reading and with which Nettles had been affiliated. Inspired by Buddhist and Hindu views of reincarnation, Theosophy teaches that individuals take more successfully evolved incarnations so as to personally evolve toward higher consciousness. Nettles and Applewhite did not stress reincarnation in their early teachings, but they clearly accepted it, and Applewhite later made it a sanctioned and important part of the Heaven’s Gate belief system. Reincarnation served an unclear role at the end of the movement’s existence, but several ex-members confirmed that they believed it was a part of the group’s beliefs even at the end.10 Since so many Americans accept reincarnation—upwards of 24 percent of all Americans, as recently as 2009—the Two parlayed this popular belief into a means of reaching out for new adherents.11 It became part of their rhetoric of self-transformation.
The idea of transformation into an extraterrestrial may strike many people as unbelievable and downright bizarre, but it made sense to adherents of Heaven’s Gate for several reasons. First, the New Age emphasis on self-transformation and personal spiritual evolution had already primed them to accept such a possibility. Major New Age teachers and books such as Jane Roberts’s Seth Speaks, Helen Schucman’s A Course in Miracles, Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance, Shirley MacLaine’s Out on a Limb, and James Redfield’s Celestine Prophecy all taught that individuals could transform themselves both physically and spiritually through specific spiritual practices. American champions of the Hindu practice of yoga in particular claimed that yoga could enact bodily transformations leading to not just greater wisdom or flexibility, but a variety of arcane powers as well. Paramahansa Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship and its kriya yoga system, as well as Swami Muktananda’s siddha yoga movement, both upheld variants of this, and both were active in the mid-1970s when Heaven’s Gate attracted its first converts. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation, another very popular Indian import at the time Heaven’s Gate was emerging, also upheld a vision of transforming the body, though in this case through meditative practices, and obtaining new abilities possibly including levitation.12 Proponents of all of these popular techniques taught that individuals could transform their bodies into more perfected forms, achieving a variety of powers and abilities.13
Remaking the World as the Next Level: Dwelling
Having traced the origins and context of the religious world of Heaven’s Gate, as well as the overall goal of members to achieve personal self-transformation into perfected alien creatures, one can now consider how members sought to achieve this through religious practice. Religious practice has recently become a new focal point within the study of religion, offering scholars a manner of reaching and analyzing “religion on the ground” and not just in the heads of believers. Under this rubric of “lived religion” scholars have focused on how the adherents of a diverse range of religions create meaningful practices in their daily lives, within the context of social groups and institutions.14 In the words of historians Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Leigh Eric Schmidt, and Mark R. Valeri, attention to practice allows scholars to broaden the scope of our studies and consider religion from a wider angle. “Within religious studies, the deployment of the category of practice has facilitated examinations of behavior beyond narrow constructions of ritual and liturgy, enabling scholars to move into the murky arenas of daily social encounter and everyday experience,” they explain.15 Indeed, attention to religious practice within Heaven’s Gate helps us to highlight the actual experiences of members rather than only the final ritual—suicide—for which the group is best remembered.
Pierre Bourdieu has reminded scholars that practice serves as a means of translating one’s fundamental personhood—habitus, to use his term—into a means of living and relating to the people and institutions around oneself. Habitus provides a means of understanding one’s world through deeply held assumptions, approaches, and perspectives, but practice is how a person lives. Practice functions as the way of translating habitus into means of creating, procuring, and using capital, either in the material sense of food and stuff, or the immaterial sense of religious and social capital.16 Bourdieu focused on religion in its role within colonial and post-colonial conflicts, but his general point has broader relevance.17 Terry Rey,
one of Bourdieu’s foremost interpreters within the field of religious studies, argues that Bourdieu points scholars toward study of the body within the context of practice: “Bourdieu’s work offers much analytical power to scholars seeking to understand the central place of the human body in religious experience and practice.”18 Practice, for Bourdieu, involves control and manipulation of the individual body of the member of society and collective body of society itself.
One of the most helpful recent theoretical considerations of religious practice and its connection to religious identity and beliefs is the approach of cultural theorist and American religious historian Thomas A. Tweed, who also highlights issues of the body. Tweed considers the place of religious practice as part of a broader project in crafting a theoretical understanding of religions, and as such one must contextualize his view of practice with his view and definition of religion. Tweed defines religions as “confluences of organic-cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing on human and suprahuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries.”19 Wordy as that definition may be—and Tweed admits to this—it centers and highlights the practices that Tweed considers most central to religion, namely the creation and maintenance of worlds in which the religious live. Tweed calls this “crossing and dwelling,” and places these practices at the heart of religious life. He connects these practices to the notion of what he calls “organic-cultural flows,” named embodied practices that religious individuals perform as parts of communities of religious belief and practice. Tweed writes:
as many theorists have noticed, religions are performed. The religious prescribe and enact a wide range of embodied practices, including culturally patterned practices or rituals—for example, praying, bowing, reading, singing, fasting, dancing, meditating, or chanting. To say that religions are organic-cultural flows, then, is to suggest they are confluences that conjoin to create institutional networks that, in turn, prescribe, transmit, and transform tropes, beliefs, values, emotions, artifacts, and rituals.20
Within the religious system of Heaven’s Gate many such religious practices existed, and they functioned as Tweed describes. Heaven’s Gate members structured their lives around practices related to eating, sleeping, working, meditating, and creating homes, all of which fall within Tweed’s category of “dwelling.” They also practiced acts—often the same ones—that sought to transport them from their human worlds to superhuman ones, often but not only through physical travel. Such “crossing” practices included actual movement, but also prayers and other actions designed to distance the self from the human level of existence. Members of Heaven’s Gate tended to combine both crossing- and dwelling-related practices within the same actual religious behaviors, for example meditation or eating. Yet one can also attempt to separate these practices according to Tweed’s typology in order to better understand how such religious practices functioned within the context of the religious world of members.
Heaven’s Gate members dwelled in many places and in many ways. They were a highly mobile group, moving from campground to campground in their early years and from house to house in their later years. Often small subgroups of members would strike out on their own and create “satellite” colonies, or travel separately so as to host meeting and other public events. Yet within all this crossing they dwelled too. Heaven’s Gate members created human homes and human lives, but they did so with the intention of overcoming their basic humanity. Tweed describes dwelling as an active process by which one creates meaning and gets one’s bearings. “[D]welling, like crossing, is doing. Dwelling, as I use the term, involves three overlapping processes: mapping, building, and inhabiting.”21 Because living groups such as Heaven’s Gate tend not to follow strict theoretical divisions, it is best in this case to look at these three processes as one single fluid set of activities: Heaven’s Gate members mapped their cosmos through creating homes and individual identities, built livable worlds through actions within those homes that helped them create the types of identities that they sought, and tried to inhabit this world through ritual practices that rooted them within their religious community. These practices then reinforced the adherents’ beliefs, creating a religious system in which individuals found meaning and value.
Throughout the history of Heaven’s Gate, members grappled with how to create livable space in which to dwell, and how to use that practice to make meaning and achieve their religious goals of transcendence and overcoming the human condition. The specific way they did this involved transforming human space into Next Level space, by rhetorically repositioning it. “Next Level”-talk served as one of the most important modes of religious practice, since it actively created meaningful dwellings for members. Because Heaven’s Gate members believed that Next Level beings lived and worked in spacecrafts in manners reminiscent of the world of Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, or Stargate, they used language drawn from those science fiction franchises as the central way of rhetorically creating meaningful dwellings.
Heaven’s Gate members called their abodes “crafts,” short for spacecrafts. Former Heaven’s Gate member Neoody explains that they did so in order to mimic the Next Level and create a Next Level-like atmosphere: “it is our understanding that ‘Next Level Beings’ do most of their tasks from a spacecraft. So, we were taught to do all of our tasks as if in a laboratory on board a spacecraft with crew minded accuracy.”22 Robert W. Balch, who studied the group during its early days, reported a similar phenomenon of members redefining their dwelling places as crafts during the group’s formative period of 1975 and 1976, showing that this practice reached back to the movement’s formative days.23 Renaming these spaces in this way, the members of Heaven’s Gate created sacred spaces meant to duplicate those in the literal heavens, outer space. While they did so using the language of science fiction, they were quite serious about the practice. Since Next Level beings dwelled in crafts, and Heaven’s Gate members sought to become Next Level beings, they too lived in crafts. Within each craft they similarly transformed the constituent spaces into dwellable spaces through the use of Next Level language. As previously noted, Neoody explains that they called bedrooms “rest chambers,” kitchens “nutri-labs,” laundry rooms “fiber-labs,” and offices “compu-labs,” terms that the members felt represented the high-tech nature of the Next Level. Members renamed as “out of craft tasks” their excursions out of the house to earn money through odd jobs or to engage outsiders.24
These practices as described by Neoody illustrate what Tweed calls the “homemaking” aspect of dwelling. Religious individuals, he indicates, engage in practices of “constructing, adorning, and inhabiting domestic space. Religion, in this sense, is housework.”25 Heaven’s Gate’s members remade their human dwellings into spaceships fit for the Next Level and its inhabitants, created homes through religious language and the way they related to the space. They therefore transformed the mere ordinary space in which they dwelled—campgrounds, rented houses, and in one case even a warehouse—into sacred space, space that they as religious people could inhabit. This transformation provided the spaces with a sense of meaning and transcendence, and gave those living within them a sense that they were not merely engaged in ordinary human dwelling, but actively engaged in the religious pursuit of overcoming the human condition. Even excursions out of the safe space of the craft became transformed through this religious language. Rather than a potentially unsettling sojourn from the insular and sectarian community in which they lived, outings became “out of craft tasks” akin to spacewalks.
One of the best examples of Heaven’s Gate’s members’ religious practices as they related to dwelling involves a camp that the group purchased and transformed in Manzano, New Mexico, in 1995. Naming it the “launch pad,” the members of Heaven’s Gate attempted to build the most elaborate manifestation of their spatial practices on the abandoned husk of a former summer camp previously owned by an insurance company. There they sought to create a multi-building community modeled on
the “Earth ship” approach of building structures using recycled tires. Though the movement did not complete their “launch pad,” it serves as a powerful example of how they developed their spatial practices in an attempt to create a Next Level dwelling.
The Earth ship model, popularized by Michael Reynolds in Solar System Press’s book, Earth Ship: How to Build Your Own, calls for creating buildings through the careful deployment of recycled automobile tires. Billed as an ecological and self-sufficient way to create an alternative way of living, supporters of the Earth ship approach view it as a way to sustainably live within the limited resources of the planet, as well as create self-sufficient homes not dependent on external resources such as hookups to electricity, sewage, or water. The Earth ship movement therefore blends environmentalism and ecological awareness with survivalism and homesteading. For Heaven’s Gate members, this alternative model of creating a dwelling offered a chance to create a non-human building while still living among humans. The name “Earth ship” would have appealed to them, and we know that members of the movement purchased a copy of Reynolds’s book to use while building the launch pad.
The members of Heaven’s Gate planned to build several buildings according to the Earth ship model. In addition to a multi-room dwelling of which they successfully built the walls but not a roof, they also planned for a bakery, pharmacy, lookout tower, and a kitchen and mess hall, what they described to the later owner of the property as a “nutrilab” and “consuming area.”26 Clearly the movement’s members were planning on a long-term dwelling, and one can see in their plans the approach of a group of people interested in orienting themselves in time and space, as Tweed would describe it.27 Heaven’s Gate’s adherents intended to use this space to live in accordance with Next Level norms and practices, on an Earth ship that contained not just a craft to live within, but all the other buildings necessary to support and maintain their community, ranging from defense (guard tower) to sustenance (bakery, nutri-lab, and consuming area), and health (pharmacy). Interestingly, the forty-acre property that they purchased already contained a mess hall from its previous service as a summer camp. Building new Earth ship style dwellings for the production and consumption of food, despite adequate conventional facilities already existing, shows just how seriously they took the need to inhabit Next Level rather than human level dwellings. Yet for all this, the launch pad project did not prove a long-term success. Neoody reports that when the weather turned cold, the group abandoned the launch pad and moved to Phoenix.28 They sold the property after only ten months of ownership.29 While dedicated to the principle of Next Level dwelling, Applewhite and members of the movement apparently lost interest in this particular means of seeking to do so. “It was just too hard to keep doing,” members reported.30