Both types of dualism had to combine and ferment before adherents would seriously entertain the possibility of suicide. These two forms of dualism informed how the group’s members thought about the world and the self, and enabled the idea of suicide. Yet other factors contributed as well. Most importantly, the hoopla surrounding the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet and claims that a UFO trailed the comet signaled to them that their time had come to an end, and that the whole world would at last see their commitment to the Next Level. In the end members chose to commit suicides because they had rejected the intrinsic value of the world and the human body, and because their leader, Applewhite, had indicated that the time was right to discard their attachments to both of them. The vast majority of members accepted this logic and chose to exit their human bodies.
In other words, there was a very clear reason that members chose suicide: because they did not perceive the actions they chose as suicides. They looked to them merely as a form of graduation from an unwanted terrestrial existence on an undesirable planet in disagreeable bodies, to a cosmic existence in the Next Level in perfected new bodies. For members, suicide was the only logical choice within their worldview. Members had expected and even hoped that a government raid would end their earthly lives, but when that did not transpire they chose to end their lives themselves. In order for the adherents of this religious movement to have made this choice, several historical developments had to occur, culminating in how members of the group responded to the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet and a rumored extraterrestrial companion. The rest of this chapter traces the history of the end of Heaven’s Gate, and how the members’ beliefs and worldview developed to enable the actions they chose.
The History of the End
The Rancho Santa Fe mansion in March 1997 may have held the discarded bodies of the Heaven’s Gate dead, but the process had begun to unfold thirty months earlier, in September 1994, forty miles up the California coast in a San Clemente warehouse. There the members of Heaven’s Gate listened as their founder and leader Marshall Herff Applewhite, with an empty chair set beside him to represent the departed Nettles, explained that just as Jesus had willingly allowed himself to be killed, so too they might need to discard their bodies to enter the Next Level. Neoody, one of the few people attending that meeting who is still alive, reports that after Applewhite explained this new theological development, he asked the members of the group, “What if we had to exit our vehicles by our own choice? Did we have a problem with that?”17 Neoody indicated that one member did object, and immediately made plans to depart. Sawyer, another former member of Heaven’s Gate who attended the meeting and reported substantially the same wording of Applewhite’s questions, indicated that a second person left as well.18 The remaining members of the movement, somewhere around thirty-six individuals, voiced their approval of the possibility.19 (Neoody and Sawyer later left the group for different reasons, as did several others.)
Why? Why would three dozen people—plus more by 199720—willingly accept the idea that they might need to intentionally terminate their earthly existence? Fundamentally, because they had already rejected both the world and their bodies. From the spring of 1976, when Nettles first closed “the harvest”—that is, active proselytizing through holding large public meetings—until March 1997, the members of Heaven’s Gate functioned as a sort of highly isolated roving monastery. Adherents sought to isolate themselves from the world and even when necessity forced them to engage, for work or to spread their message, they tried to remain apart from it. Eventually they even came to hate the world, and rejected it as a foreign place. By the end of the group’s existence members spoke of themselves as something akin to popular psychic Ruth Montgomery’s concept of “walk-ins,” spirits from the Next Level who had long ago been human, but had abandoned their humanity in order to become Next Level creatures, and now returned to complete a predetermined task.21 Members therefore saw themselves as more alien than human, as engaged in only a temporary sojourn on Earth but destined to return to the Next Level. One of the earliest and most explicit examples of such occurs in a 1994 statement that Applewhite or other members of the group wrote but did not distribute. Using the third person to refer to themselves, they wrote, “[t]hey began ‘touching down’ on Earth (evacuating their bodies and the crafts they came in) in the 1940’s and subsequently began incarnating in adult human bodies in the 1970’s and will evacuate this planet within the next year (‘96).”22 This statement links multiple concepts: the origin of members of the class in crashed UFOs such as those found in Roswell; the walk-in concept of entering human bodies so as to interact with others on Earth; and an imminent return to the Next Level, though this document predicted an earlier exit (1996) than actually occurred.
Members of the Class might have discovered the concept of walk-ins by reading Montgomery’s 1979 book on the topic, Strangers Among Us: Enlightened Beings from a World to Come, or they might have encountered the term on the television series The X-Files, which featured multiple episodes exploring the topic. Regardless, they included “walk-ins” among the invisible key terms on their web page that would allow an Internet search engine to link the term to their web page. They clearly represented themselves as such, though they did not use the term. The ramification was nevertheless evident: they had come to Earth to complete their final lessons and overcome their humanity, but they did not belong here. While quite different from the earlier teachings of the Two and in fact difficult to harmonize with the movement’s long-standing teachings of human individual metamorphosis and human self-development, members’ willingness to voice that sort of belief shows how strongly they had come to reject both the world and the bodies they inhabited, their vehicles.
Yet ironically, members only embraced suicide because they had tried to engage the world. Their attempts, spread over the years since the death of Nettles, had resulted in numerical failure and a general sense that the world had rejected them. Multiple times adherents of the movement broke their self-imposed isolation and reached out to attempt to share their message and attract new members. In 1988 they mailed a short booklet, the ’88 Update, and in late 1991 and early 1992 they broadcast a twelve-part satellite program discussing their beliefs. These tentative outreach efforts lay the groundwork for the movement’s final push into the world, a series of advertisements in 1993 that culminated in face-to-face meetings in late 1993 and throughout 1994. These outreach efforts did succeed in attracting a few individuals who joined the movement and stayed, but in several cases these new converts were actually briefly former members in the 1970s who had left and rejoined. Balch and Taylor reports that approximately twenty-five individuals joined during this time, with “about half” staying beyond a few months.23 Excluding those who rejoined, only seven new individuals joined in this period from 1991 to 1994 and remained committed enough to stay until the end (see table 2.1). The overall success rate was therefore quite low, with about a half dozen new adherents based on several years of work, more than thirteen hours of satellite broadcasts, dozens of posters printed, a costly advertisement in USA Today, and thousands of miles of driving between multiple states to hold public meetings. The scope of their travel was indeed high. Members of Heaven’s Gate traveled in four and sometimes five groups from January 21, 1994 until August 19, 1994, starting in Texas and California and including visits to the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Washington), Mountain West (Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah), West (Arizona, New Mexico), South (Louisiana, Georgia, Florida), Midwest (Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota), and New England (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine).24 With only a few converts to show from these travels and almost no serious media attention, by any meaningful measure, these outreach efforts failed.
Members of Heaven’s Gate were not unaware of this relative numerical failure. The posters and advertisements the group used in 1994 became increasingly pessimistic and confrontational in tone. The first poster, used to advertise a November 1993 meeting, described the group’s
beliefs in eight rather succinct bullet points. Titled, “The Only Way Out of This Corrupt World,” it nevertheless shied away from any explicit depiction of worldly corruption or any discussion of what would happen if one remained, and focused instead on a more positive message of the Next Level itself. By June 1994, the poster the group used somewhat more confrontationally declared, “He’s Back, We’re Back, Where Will You Stand?” and stated directly that the world was about to be “re-booted—canceled and restarted.” The final poster, dated August 18, 1994 and included in the group’s 1997 anthology but not used for advertisement purposes, implied that the group members may be murdered, and explicitly declared in all uppercase letters that they may need to die, “The Shedding Of Our Borrowed Human Bodies May Be Required In Order To Take Up Our New Bodies Belonging To The Next World.” The poster indicated that humans today were “enslaved,” that all existing religions were “corrupted by malevolent space aliens,” and that the Next Level would soon begin “the process of recycling Earth’s environment and inhabitants.”25 Certainly nothing in any of the posters was new or noteworthy when judged in comparison to the group’s theology and previous statements, but in terms of how the members of the group chose to self-represent themselves through the media of posters, the group’s advertisements during the 1994 tour increasingly and clearly became more dire.
The group ceased holding meetings in August 1994. Sawyer recounts that during the final meeting he oversaw, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on August 13, the only person in attendance was from the media.26 Neoody similarly recounts lackluster responses, particularly on the East Coast where “the attitude was pretty bad” and they “[did] not find any like minded people.”27 Neoody recounts that these failures, especially in August in New England, resulted in Applewhite’s decision to halt active proselytizing and once again retreat to cloistered living. In Neoody’s words, “[o]ne day in Maine, after having gone through the whole country to give, what they thought was the most important information on the planet[,] Do said, ‘Well, I guess it’s time for us to quit holding meetings for a while.’”28
The failure of the outside world to respond to the message offered by members of Heaven’s Gate signaled to its adherents and leader that their mission was nearly over. At this point Applewhite gathered his followers in the San Clemente warehouse and at this time he publicly disclosed the possibility that the group members may need to leave the Earth by their own hands. Crucially, two important factors contributed to this development: the comparative failure of attempts to proselytize, and the apparent lack of any active persecution from outside forces that would result in the adherents of Heaven’s Gate being murdered and therefore freeing their souls to journey to the Next Level. Sawyer, who was present at the meeting, made the first part of this connection quite clear in his later explanation: “He [Applewhite] wasn’t sure yet[,] but what precipitated his saying that was in part the dwindling response of the public to their second face to face message delivery around the U.S. and Canada that began on January 1, 1994 and ended in mid September of that same year.”29After months of travel the lack of any apparent success led Applewhite and other members to decide that Earth’s inhabitants had apparently lost their chance for advancement to the Next Level.
In the March 19, 1997 “Exit Video” that Applewhite produced—three days before members began their “exits”—an hour-long synthesis of his reasoning for the eventual suicides, a nearly exasperated Applewhite explained that while he and his movement offered the only opportunity to enter the Kingdom of Heaven—and that all those left behind were subject to recycling and death—individuals outside the movement did not seem to recognize or take seriously the magnitude of their message. “It is not our fault” that people haven’t taken seriously the opportunity, he explained. “We’ve been ignored, ridiculed, . . . whatever cult you can call it, we’ve been called that.”30 The world, Applewhite indicated, had rejected them, and they now rejected the world as being apparently uninterested in the Next Level or eternal salvation.
Yet equally important, there seemed little evidence that the government, hostile family members, or other outside forces were likely to storm the members’ home and kill them in some sort of mass violent act. The possibility remained, which explains why Applewhite presented suicides or intentional self-induced exits as a mere possibility in the September 1994 meeting, rather than a foregone conclusion or eventuality. Sometime in the following years, probably in 1996, Applewhite authored a document entitled “Our Position Against Suicide” that members eventually posted on the group’s website at the end of 1996. The document laid out several possibilities of how members might free themselves of their human bodies so as to journey to the Next Level: (1) physical pickup onto a spacecraft, and transfer of bodies aboard that craft; (2) natural death, accident, or random violence; (3) outside persecution; and (4) willful exit of the bodies in a dignified manner.31
The first possibility, “boarding a spacecraft from the Next Level very soon (in our physical bodies),” harkens back to the group’s first teachings, and Nettles’s and Applewhite’s explanation that one does not need to die in order to join the Next Level, since they would board the UFOs midair.32 This remained a possibility, however remote, even in the mid-1990s, though the example of Ti’s abandoning of her human vehicle clearly revealed an alternative. Applewhite referred to the case of Nettles/Ti in noting a second possibility, “one or more of us could lose our physical vehicles (bodies) due to ‘recall,’ accident, or at the hands of some irate individual.”33 Applewhite had at one point indicated that Nettles’s vehicle had simply burned out from her overuse of its facilities, and according to at least one source he thought he might be developing health problems of his own.34 This also remained a possibility for one or two members of the group, but waiting for old age, disease, or random chance seemed an unlikely way to ensure the entrance of the entire Class into the Next Level.
The document indicated a third possibility, “we could find so much disfavor with the powers that control this world that there could be attempts to incarcerate us or to subject us to some sort of psychological or physical torture (such as occurred at both Ruby Ridge and Waco).”35 Here Applewhite referred to two infamous cases of violence involving conflict between religious groups and the U.S. government—the 1992 actions against the Weaver family in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the 1993 raid on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, the latter just three years before Heaven’s Gate members posted this document onto their web page. In the case of the Weavers, members of a right-wing white supremacist Christian movement called Christian Identity, a dispute over illegal weapons and a possible conspiracy against the federal government resulted in the U.S. Marshals and FBI laying siege to the family’s cabin, eventually killing two members of the family.36 The case sparked wide public attention based on apparent bureaucratic failures that led to escalation as well as the seeming heavy-handedness of the government response, which included shooting to death the mother of the family, Vicki Weaver, while she held her infant in her arms. The Branch Davidian case similarly involved a government raid targeting a religious group, in this case by Texas officials, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), and the FBI, over charges of weapons violations and child abuse. Eighty-two Branch Davidians died in the conflict, along with four ATF agents, over a fifty-one-day siege that culminated in a conflagration following the use of military-style equipment including tanks. Again, the events attracted broad attention and in some quarters—particularly among alternative religious groups and members of fringe subcultures—condemnations of excessive force and government persecution.37
Adherents of Heaven’s Gate looked to a similar raid against their movement as one possible avenue through which their earthly existences may end, but by 1997 this possibility seemed increasingly remote. Even if a raid was indeed forthcoming, members considered the possibility that they might need to end their own lives to avoid torture, arrest, and murder, or in the words of Applewhite, “to e
vacuate their bodies by a more dignified, and less agonizing method.” In other sources, Applewhite and movement members explicitly linked this to the example of the Jewish rebels of Masada in 73 CE, whom tradition recounts committed mass suicide when it became apparent that the Roman army would overrun them, most likely raping and torturing many before their deaths, and possibly forcing others to live as slaves. Josephus, a Jewish historian of the era, recounts that nine hundred and sixty ancient Jews chose suicide rather than death or capture at Roman hands.38 The Masada suicides attracted worldwide attention in the mid-1960s when excavations unearthed the ancient fortress and twenty-five bodies, all of which were entombed in 1969 with full Israeli military ceremony as Jewish heroes of antiquity.
Another possible example of religious suicide that might have inspired them, though not one to which members of Heaven’s Gate alluded, is that of the members of Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple in Guyana on November 18, 1978. In the case of members of the Peoples Temple, a network of former members, family of current members, and government agencies all worked together to investigate claims of rights abuses within the movement’s utopian commune of Jonestown, in the Guyanan countryside. Like the members of Heaven’s Gate, the members of the Peoples Temple had previously considered suicide as an option in response to potential persecution, and their enacting of “revolutionary suicide,” in the words of their leader Jim Jones, followed a well-rehearsed routine of death by poison when they finally enacted it. Unlike the case of Heaven’s Gate but like the Weavers of Ruby Ridge and Branch Davidians, members of the Peoples Temple actively fought with outsiders and there is strong evidence that at least some of the suicides were in fact murders, and certainly the infants and children poisoned to death did not make informed choices about ending their own lives, or even do so by their own hand. It is unclear why the members of Heaven’s Gate never referenced Jonestown and the Peoples Temple, but in all likelihood the fact that the Jonestown dead included adults and children who did not willingly commit suicide, and perhaps the overall notoriety of the group, minimized its value as a potential parallel or exemplar.39
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