Suicide in the face of possible persecution remained a distinct chance, and as the years advanced without any sign of overt government attack, the possibility of suicide without any direct instigating factor rose into prominence. Neoody reports that the group considered specific means of suicide shortly after the September 1994 meeting, purchasing a copy of Derek Humphry’s Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying, which had been published in 1992.40 This book provides medical, legal, and ethical advice and specific instructions for patients facing terminal illnesses who wish to end their lives. The members of Heaven’s Gate looked to the specific instructions that Humphry offered in the book as they prepared for the possibility of suicide, and the eventual suicides followed Humphry’s instructions closely. Humphry recommends that those who wish to die ingest powdered barbiturates taken in yogurt or pudding, drink strong alcohol to increase the effects, and then tie a plastic bag over the head. This method, Humphry indicates, “is 100 percent certain.”41 Tellingly, Humphry discourages the use of weapons to commit suicide, as they can sometimes maim or paralyze but not kill. The group briefly considered intentionally instigating a shootout with government forces and even purchased some firearms, but following Humphry’s advice opted not to rely on the luck of where a bullet landed.42 The group members locked the guns into storage, and opted for the chemical means that Humphry recommends. In the 1997 suicides members of Heaven’s Gate substituted applesauce for pudding, but otherwise followed Humphry’s instructions.
Yet while the members of the movement prepared for the possibility of suicide, they continued living as well. A year later, in 1995, members of the group built the Manzano, New Mexico “launch pad”—as discussed in the previous chapter—what Neoody calls a “Monastery Fortress,” what was to be a massive array of buildings akin to a small community with spaces for members to sleep, eat, and work.43 Importantly, Applewhite and the movement’s adherents clearly intended the launch pad to serve as a permanent home for the group, meaning that they did not envision an imminent demise of the group or the immediate need for suicides or other forms of earthly exits. Yet the group abandoned plans for the launch pad once snow began to fall in the autumn, implying that perhaps their view of building a permanent home on Earth was not ultimately a strong enough impulse for them to continue.
Around this time (1994–95) the first members of Heaven’s Gate sought and received medical castration. After the suicides the revelations that several members of the group, including Applewhite himself, were castrated led to a flurry of sensational news reporting and various pop-psychological interpretations. Different members of the group described their rationale for the procedure differently, but all agreed that the fundamental reason that they or their co-religionists chose to “have their vehicles neutered,” as members referred to the procedure, was the need to control the body and its hormones. Applewhite explained that they chose to do so “in order to sustain a more genderless and objective consciousness,” while Stmody indicated that the procedure permanently blocked the production of “hormones that keep the body intoxicated, stupid, empty-headed, and ‘blind.’”44 The chronology is unclear, but either Srrody or the partnership of Alxody and Vrnody engaged in the procedure first, in 1994 or 1995, followed by Applewhite himself.45 Four other members underwent the procedure according to autopsies performed after the suicides two years later.46
From the perspective of Heaven’s Gate’s theology and the worldview in which members lived, castration made perfect sense, just as suicide did, and for similar reasons. Members of Heaven’s Gate rejected any identification with human bodies, which they regarded as merely vehicles, containers, or plants. The true self was the soul, which transcended the body and sought entrance to a genderless kingdom, the Next Level. Further, since the first years of Nettles’s and Applewhite’s movement, then still known as Human Individual Metamorphosis, they taught that adherents had to control and sublimate sexual desires so as to overcome their base human condition and recondition themselves for service to the Next Level. Members abstained from sex and masturbation, and ex-members recounted that the absolute abstention and control of sexual desire was often the most difficult practice of the group. Neutering provided a simple solution.
Yet surgical castration, as much as it showed how members cleaved to the Next Level and sought admission there, signaled that Applewhite and others were still quite intent on remaining on Earth and continuing their earthly lives at least for the foreseeable future. Given the long recovery from such a surgical procedure—Neoody reports that Applewhite’s surgery had long-lasting and unpleasant complications47—one cannot expect suicidal individuals to seek out or undergo it. In fact, while the castrations clearly demonstrate the Next Level centeredness of members’ thinking, it also shows that they had not entirely rejected earthly living at least for the moment, either because they felt they had more to learn and experience in the world, or because they had not fully give up hope that outsiders might still recognize and accept the message that they brought.
One Final Push: The Internet, Heaven’s
Gate Anthology, and Other Media
Members made several last ditch efforts to reach the broader world with the teachings of their movement, most notably two statements posted on the Internet in the autumn of 1995, followed in 1996 by the publication of the group’s anthology, two new videotapes, and the group’s website. Together these outreach efforts represented the group’s last attempts to reach an outside audience, and while they succeeded in attracting one member who eventually joined the movement and remained for the suicides (and one who joined and left before the suicides48), by and large these efforts resulted in little concrete results. In fact, members reported ridicule and heckling rather than support, and the lack of public interest in their message highlighted their earlier suspicions from 1994 that the time for earthly engagement must be coming to a close. Ironically, these outreach attempts probably served as the final impetus for the decisions to turn inward and end the group’s existence, and certainly the group’s members’ forays onto the Internet provided a crucial link to a counterculture of conspiracy that eventually brought to their attention the Hale-Bopp comet and with it a sign of the end.
The group’s two 1995 Internet statements, posted in September and October, convey the same basic information in two distinct forms. Both statements were posted to UseNet, the Internet-based bulletin board system that at the time represented the most widely read and interactive form of communication on the Internet. UseNet is organized into a system of newsgroups, organized within categories such as comp. (computers), rec. (recreation and entertainment), sci. (science), various country-based categories such as uk., and a general catch-all of alt. (“alternative” to the other categories). Within each category one found subcategories and even sub-subcategories, until one ended up in a specific newsgroup to which one could read and post, e.g., alt.tv.news-shows for the discussion of television news shows, or rec.arts.startrek. tech, for the discussion of the technology of the science fiction series Star Trek. Like much in the early decades of the Internet, UseNet was decentralized, and unlike many forums or chat systems of more recent decades—this was long before “social media” existed as a term or concept!—anyone could post to the majority of the UseNet newsgroups, and anyone could read them and respond. Members of Heaven’s Gate posted to UseNet to several different newsgroups.
Table 6.1: UseNet Posts by Date and Group
The first statement, “Undercover Jesus Surfaces,” used religious language to describe the group’s beliefs and self-consciously represented an attempt to reach a Christian audience, according to Applewhite.49 Generally it followed the contours of the previous materials produced by the group, and it certainly represented the standard theology and approach of the group. The statement introduced and explained the group’s Christology and soteriology, and explained the concept of deposits and incarnation. The post avoided any explicit apocalyptic lang
uage about the impending demise of Earth and its inhabitants, but it called Heaven’s Gate the “‘last bus’ out of this civilization” and implied that those who remained behind would lack any possibility of advancing beyond the human level.50
Where this UseNet posting departed from other materials was its description of an explicit expectation of a forthcoming government raid and the demise of the group and its leader. The post began with the statement that “I am about to return to my Father’s Kingdom. This ‘return’ requires that I prepare to lay down my borrowed human body,” a rather clear announcement that the group’s departure for the Next Level was imminent and bodily. Yet Applewhite not only avoided any discussion of suicide, he explicitly positioned an alternative, namely that group members would lay down their human bodies and exit their vehicles—that is, die—through a violent confrontation with the government. Applewhite encouraged potential candidates who wished to join him and his movement in the Next Level to prepare for just such an eventuality:
How is this “laying down of our bodies” to occur? If you DO recognize me and choose to look to me for guidance, I would recommend that you purchase firearms, get comfortable using them (or partner with someone who can), and somehow position yourselves (separate from others enough to not be vulnerable) so that you might establish a relationship with me, protected from interference as far as possible. In this day and time the authorities make no bones about their “need” to protect the public from “dangerous radicals like us.” They will aggressively attempt to require us to abide by their values and their rules (which are of this Luciferian world and its society—as difficult as that might be to believe). They won’t hesitate to trump up charges or suspicions in order to search us or take us into custody so they can “judge for themselves” whether or not we are some kind of a threat. There is no need for us to be submissive to their wishes (such as to their search or custody questioning) when we know we have broken none of God’s laws. Not only have we done nothing wrong, but our total existence is devoted to entering and offering God’s World. Our choosing to not “be submissive”—coupled with “being armed”—pretty much addresses the “laying down of our bodies” question.51
This UseNet posting is remarkable in its bluntness in calling for those who wished to join Applewhite to arm themselves and wait for the government forces to kill them. He added that if he was arrested and executed, then individuals could “join me as soon as they choose to.” He also included a cautionary note that Ti would confirm the precise means by which he and the members of his group would exit, and that possibly a spacecraft might rescue them first. Yet the vast majority of his writing—in fact, the longest of his enumerated notes in the posting, is the above quoted material.52 Clearly, in the autumn of 1995, Applewhite and other members of the movement expected an imminent government raid that would result in their deaths, or at least the deaths of the human bodies. This was the time period during which they procured firearms, and during this time period they expected their deaths to come at the hands of the U.S. government.
During the mid-1990s, fears of government raids of unconventional or radical groups were no mere paranoid fancy, but rooted in real events such as the government actions against the Weavers and Branch Davidians. Further, two more recent historical events no doubt influenced Applewhite’s suspicions that things were going downhill fast, that a war between the government and radical outsiders like himself was accelerating, and that the government would soon execute or murder members of Heaven’s Gate. Just seven days before Applewhite wrote and posted the “Undercover Jesus” statement, the New York Times and Washington Post published a pseudonymously authored manifesto entitled Industrial Society and Its Future written by a violent social activist at that time known as the Unabomber, later revealed to be named Ted Kaczynski. Kaczynski had terrorized the education, technology, and infrastructure industries through letter-bombs he sent to targets he identified with an oppressive industrial system, seeking to start a war between anarchist radicals such as himself and the technocratic forces of modernity. The Unabomber would soon be caught after the publication of what the FBI called his “manifesto,” and there is no evidence that Applewhite or other members of Heaven’s Gate sympathized with him, but the anti-institutional and anti-government views of the Unabomber manifesto clearly had some resonance with Heaven’s Gate self-perceived position, and the massive government search for him and the discussion it engendered among some adherents of radical and alternative religions meant that potential raids were very much in the air.
Probably even more concerning to Applewhite, and indicative of an accelerating war between the government and various fringe groups, was the event that occurred five months earlier. Two anti-government survivalists named Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols had orchestrated the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh and Nichols envisioned their bombing as a political act, and explicitly invoked the Weavers of Ruby Ridge and Branch Davidians of Waco as martyrs of government persecution. Allied with radical right Christian groups, the weapons rights movement, and various anti-government militia groups, McVeigh and Nichols focused a spotlight on what they perceived as an oppressive social and governmental system. Again, there is no evidence that members of Heaven’s Gate identified or sympathized with McVeigh’s and Nichols’s ideas, but the specter of a war between the federal government and groups that the government considered fringe or suspect became an important part of the culture of radical and alternative religious groups with which Heaven’s Gate apparently increasingly identified, at least based on Applewhite’s references to guns and government raids.
Heaven’s Gate posted the “Undercover Jesus” statement to newsgroups focusing on current events and the media (alt.current-events.usa, alt.tv.news-shows, alt.news-media, alt.good.news) as well as those associated with alternative spiritual practices (alt.consciousness, alt.consciousness.mysticism, alt.consciousness.near-death-exp[ience], alt.drugs.culture). The first set of newsgroups generally served the same role that the alternative media of the blogosphere would a decade later, a space for those who rejected the mainstream media to post news stories and comment on their interpretations. These newsgroups were hotbeds of claims of cover-ups, government malfeasance, conspiracies, and other controversies. The second set of newsgroups appealed to individuals interested in alternative spiritualities, and provided a free and uncensored place to discuss spiritual awakening through mystical or druginduced experiences. Interestingly, although Applewhite indicated that he intended the post to “address the religious world, primarily the Christians, in relationship to their expectation for Jesus’ return,” he did not post the statement to any of the myriad of Christian newsgroups.53 (Despite the title, alt.good.news is not a Christian newsgroup, but one focused on discussing positive or affirming news stories.) While one must avoid an argument based on a lack of something, the unusual fact that Applewhite wrote a statement for Christians but posted to newsgroups for alternative news and spirituality indicates that he and members of his group had become increasingly aware that conventional Christians had little interest in their movement, and that their opportunities for appealing to outsiders were strikingly limited, a position that the Two had begun to take not even a year into their shared work together in creating Heaven’s Gate, but had reached full fruition at this time.54
The second UseNet posting, “E.T. SPEAKS: UFO’S / SPACE ALIENS / REBOOT CIVILIZATION,” used language designed to appeal more to secular-minded individuals, those interested in ufology, science, and science fiction. Applewhite described it as “what we would consider more clinical and objective terminology.”55 The movement posted this statement primarily to newsgroups associated with science fiction, and Star Trek and Star Wars in particular, for example rec.arts.sf.misc (‘sf’ meaning science fiction), alt.startrek, and rec.arts.st.starwars.misc. This statement echoed the first one in content, describing the group’s view of the nature of the cosmos, planet, human existence, the Nex
t Level, and the nature of the soul. Regarding the exit from their human bodies, the statement similarly described the possibilities as either departure “aboard a spacecraft in a laboratory circumstance, as we head for home,” or the “‘dropping’ of ‘that shell’” during violent confrontation with the agents of the “‘space’ alien humanoids,” that is, the government forces employed by the Luciferians.
This statement did not have the same imminent tone as the previous one regarding the group’s exit, but instead it emphasized a far more apocalyptic vision of the impending demise of Earth’s present civilization, “[b]ecause of the overripe corruption of the present civilization, this is the last scheduled visit before its recycling. It is the End of the Age. The human population, under space alien ‘thought domination,’ has become irreversibly perverse and rotten.”56 Human existence, the statement indicated, was about to come to an end, and the only way to survive was to overcome the Earth with Applewhite and his coreligionists. While the apocalyptic urgency was heightened, the overall theological message had not changed. Yet the statement nevertheless highlighted a highly dualistic vision of a cosmic war between good and evil soon to engulf Earth and its inhabitants: “A war in the literal heavens is underway as the alien races fiercely battle each other vying for the literal, invaluable spoils of this planet. Their campaign is escalating—actively recruiting, experimenting, and mining elements both mineral, biological (genetic)—in their efforts toward survival.”57
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