Heaven's Gate

Postmodernity and Popular Culture in a Suicide Group

George D. Chryssides, George D. Chryssides

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351931182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religiöser Fundamentalismus & Sekten

On March 26, 1997, the bodies of 39 men and women were found in an opulent mansion outside San Diego, all victims of a mass suicide. Messages left by the Heaven's Gate group indicate that they believed they were stepping out of their 'physical containers' in order to ascend to a UFO that was arriving in the wake of the Hale-Bopp comet. The Heaven's Gate suicides were part of a series of major incidents involving New Religions in the 1990s, as the new millennium approached. Despite the major attention that Heaven's Gate attracted at the time of the suicides, there have been relatively few scholarly studies. This anthology on Heaven's Gate includes a combination of articles previously published in academic journals, some new writings from experts in the field, and some original Heaven's Gate documents. All the material is expertly brought together under the editorship of George D. Chryssides.

Chapter 1

Approaching Heaven’s Gate

George D. Chryssides

On 26 March 1997 the news broke that some 39 members of a “cult” known as Heaven’s Gate had committed mass suicide in a suburb of San Diego, California. Few people had heard of the group, which had not featured in anti-cult literature and was relatively unknown in the academic world. The almost universal ignorance of the group did not prevent anti-cult leaders securing interviews on television and radio, where they were designated as “cult experts” and declared that this was “a typical cult,” demonstrating the dangers that “cult involvement” posed for today’s youth. Academics, who by their nature want to research their material thoroughly and provide measured judgments, were inevitably much slower to make their voices heard and to provide firm, reliable information.

Various contributors to this collection of essays recount the history of Heaven’s Gate at various stages of its development, but a brief reminder might be helpful here. The group’s leaders were Marshall Herff Applewhite (1931–1997) and Bonnie Lu Nettles (1927–1985), who claimed to be the Two Witnesses described in the Book of Revelation and organized public lectures in various states in the US and Canada in 1975–76. They took on pseudonyms of matching pairs, such as “Guinea” and “Pig,” “Bo” and “Peep”, and finally “Ti” and “Do” (pronounced “Doe”). Their message was a blend of biblical apocalyptic and UFOlogy, in which they offered seekers transition to “The Next Evolutionary Level Above Human,” claiming that a spacecraft would come to collect those who accepted this message. In 1996 the group rented a large mansion in Santa Fe, on the outskirts of San Diego, California, where they lived as a semi-reclusive community. In the same year, the Hale-Bopp comet was sighted. Members believed another object was visible behind it, which they believed was the spacecraft with which they could rendezvous. After recording individual farewell video messages to family and friends, the 39 residents (including Applewhite) ended their lives. All but two of them were found lying under purple shrouds, wearing black trousers and Nike trainers; beside each bed was a small luggage case, suggesting an intended journey. A few of the male members had been castrated.

Over a decade later, there is still no academic book that specifically addresses the Heaven’s Gate group. One or two short popular books emerged months after the event, and served a useful purpose in their attempts to provide greater understanding of the group. Brad Steiger and Hayden Hewes, who authored Inside Heaven’s Gate, had the advantage of having been acquainted with the Heaven’s Gate leaders and members over twenty years before the disaster, when the group was then called Human Individual Metamorphosis (HIM). It was years later that a trickle of academic journal articles appeared, seeking to make sense of the phenomenon, although sociologists Robert Balch and David Taylor had also researched the group covertly as participant-observers in the 1970s.

It might be asked why this present collection of essays is needed. As time passes, the younger generation of students who sign up for courses in new religious movements (NRMs) no longer remember Jonestown, Waco, the Solar Temple, and Heaven’s Gate. Indeed, an important issue in the study of NRMs generally is that the new soon becomes the old, and they become interesting not as issues in current affairs, but in the history of minority religious organizations. The fascination of Heaven’s Gate, however, lies in a number of factors. It is the only example in these four groups where the mass deaths that brought the organization to an end were unarguably suicides. At Jonestown, Jim Jones’s aides were armed with machine guns, apparently ready to shoot anyone who disloyally refused to imbibe the cyanide, or tried to escape into the jungle. Although members of the Waco group could have saved themselves by surrendering to the authorities, they were killed by the fire at the compound, or by gunshot wounds—apart from one or two survivors. At the Solar Temple, participants do not appear to have taken their own lives, but were shot, probably by leader Luc Jouret, although the positioning of the bodies suggested voluntary participation in a ceremonial ritual. It remains unknown whether members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God willfully committed suicide by barricading themselves inside the burning church; however, those who were later discovered in the mass graves could certainly have not ended up there of their own volition.

The dividing line between murder and suicide is not a sharp one. Whether it should be said that Jonestown was a “mass suicide” is a moot point, when members appear to have had a Hobson’s choice about how to die, rather than whether to do so. In Heaven’s Gate, by contrast, the fact that the bodies were laid out so methodically, with attention to exact detail, indicates that the deaths were planned with care, and involved substantial preparation time. If anyone had second thoughts about the wisdom of their proposed action, there must have been time to reconsider. Escape was possible, if any member had been minded to opt out. There were no armed guards, and doors and windows provided normal access. Although the house in which the suicides occurred was in an outlying suburb of San Diego, without access to public transport, it was secluded rather than isolated; a rather long access road was shared by neighbors, who were within easy walking distance.

The group was distinctive in its blend of source material, drawing on a somewhat eclectic mix of biblical exegesis, popular culture, and UFOlogy, coupled with its use of the Internet, which was only in its infancy in 1997. Applewhite’s interpretation of Christian scripture appears to have completely ignored any conventional study of the Bible he may have undertaken during his brief period as a student at Union Theological Seminary. Instead, he appears to have preferred an idiosyncratic interpretation, linking it with UFOlogy and science fiction. The Heaven’s Gate religion displayed a postmodern tendency to combine sources that are not conventionally or readily juxtaposed, and the various contributors to the present collection comment particularly on the themes of postmodernism and popular culture.

The “New Age”

In order to understand Heaven’s Gate it is necessary to explore the US countercultural background of the period, with its interest in alternative lifestyles and spiritualities to those of traditional Christianity and capitalism. The “hippies” gained particular media coverage, being renowned for their distinctive “flower power” attire, the communes they established, their experimentation with recreational drugs, and their emphasis on love and peace, contrasting themselves particularly with the politics of the Vietnam War. Typically, New Agers placed a high value upon the self, regarding it as potentially good, even divine, in contrast with the traditional Christian doctrine of original sin. A key characteristic of the New Age was personal spiritual seeking, rather than any claim to have found absolute truth in some form of organized religion. Firsthand spiritual experience was particularly sought, rather than acceptance of religious truth on the basis of ecclesiastical or scriptural authority. Allied to the rejection of traditional authority and the belief in the integrity of the self came the concept of the seeker. The spiritual journey is a personal quest, and the individual has the task of exploring a variety of spiritual options, selecting and combining whatever appears to meet one’s spiritual needs at any given time.

The New Age contained an optimism that hoped for a brighter future. This “New Age” was the Age of Aquarius, in which the Earth was beginning to fall under the influence of the zodiacal constellation Aquarius, having spent two thousand years under Pisces. Pisces, the fish, is an important Christian symbol, and the emergence from Pisces signaled the eclipse of the Christian Church’s influence on our planet. The interest in the zodiac highlights the interest of many New Agers in astrology. What was taking place beyond the Earth was significant, and what conventional science taught about the stars and planets at best fell short of the whole truth about the universe. It is therefore not surprising that in sectors of the New Age an interest arose in UFOs and extraterrestrial life.

It may seem contradictory that a link should be made between the somewhat nebulous New Age Movement, the characteristics of which are rejection of authority and organized religion, personal seeking and eclecticism with the Heaven’s Gate group, which was highly organized, with Applewhite and Nettles having complete authority, and with its providing confident answers to life’s questions, thus marking an end to members’ spiritual journey rather than yet another part of one’s search. Several points are worth noting in this regard. First, the characteristics of New Age which I have identified above are merely salient features, not all of which are present in every, or even most, New Age groups. Second, the movement’s early years in the 1970s involved a much looser organization, with public invitations to lectures on UFOs by Nettles and Applewhite. Only a small minority of the audience took further steps to deepen their involvement, and hence presumably their brief acquaintance with the group’s ideas became a disposable part of a spiritual or intellectual journey. Third, as various contributors point out, the group itself underwent change. As Benjamin Ethan Zeller points out, in its earlier years individual members were permitted to relay messages from the extraterrestrials, but later, as Applewhite felt the need to assert his own authority over the group, all purported communication from the Next Level required his endorsement. Paul Heelas, in his study of the New Age movement, includes firmly structured organizations such as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), Osho and the so-called ‘self religions’ such as est (Erhard Seminar Training), among others. A well-established organization with a tight structure can none the less become a part of an individual’s spiritual journey.

UFOlogy and Religion

As we have noted, UFOs and extraterrestrials were dominant themes in the Heaven’s Gate worldview. Whether such interests should be viewed as countercultural is debatable. On the one hand, the vast majority of US and European citizens claim no such contacts with extraterrestrials, and have no active interest in the UFO phenomenon. On the other hand, space exploration is very much part of the agenda of the US, Russia, and Europe, and the possibility of there being intelligent life in other parts of the universe is a matter of serious scientific investigation. In 1960 the radio astronomer Frank Drake pioneered the quest to detect radio signals from potential extraterrestrial life forms in space. Drake’s search was pursued first by Russian scientists in the 1960s, and in the early 1970s NASA’s Ames Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California developed a number of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) programs, involving transmitting radio signals as well as searching for them, and inscribing messages on pioneer space probes that would provide extraterrestrials with information about the Earth’s position within the galaxy, together with messages in mathematical and scientific “languages” that would demonstrate to alien life forms that intelligent life existed on the planet Earth.

However, even before the inception of these scientific studies, there were those who claimed that we did not have to search for signs of extraterrestrial life. Space aliens, they believed, had already been observed, and indeed had landed on Earth. Serious public attention was given to the UFO phenomenon in 1947, when airline pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed a sighting of three vessels flying past his aircraft which appeared to be traveling at an apparently impossible speed of 1,656 miles per hour. This was no visual hallucination: his instruments verified the presence and the speed of these craft. When later questioned about his experience, Arnold reported that the vessels had the appearance of “saucers.” Arnold’s description appears to have originated the expression “flying saucers,” and made Arnold the object of much ridicule. However, the fact that Arnold was a professional pilot and well acquainted with objects in the sky lent credence to his report: he certainly could not be dismissed as an attention-seeking eccentric.

In the same year, the famous Roswell incident occurred. On July 2, 1947 a farmer at the Foster Ranch near Corona, New Mexico reported a nearby explosion, followed by the discovery of metallic debris on a nearby field which appeared to be the remains of a flying craft. According to some reports, the authorities discovered five bodies, none of which were recognizably human. One, apparently, was still alive, and was taken away for scientific investigation, and was able to communicate telepathically with the investigators. The incident remains controversial, with believers in extraterrestrial visitation averring that there was an FBI “cover-up,” while more conservative commentators suggested that the object might have been a weather balloon, and that the allegation concerning bodies being discovered was entirely fictitious.

A further incident is said to have occurred on March 25, 1948: the Aztec UFO crash. No crash was directly observed, but allegedly a remarkable undamaged spacecraft was found at Aztec, 99.99 feet in diameter, made of heatproof metal, without any screws, rivets, or welding to hold it together. Inside the hold were 14 humanoid bodies with the characteristic large, slanting eyes, together with a small nose and mouth. They were reportedly 42 inches in height, on average, and typically weighed 40 pounds. The phenomenon was apparently investigated by a distinguished team of scientists, including astrophysicists, aeronautical engineers, and military personnel.

Wherever the truth may lie, it is undeniable that UFOs exist—provided the claim simply means that objects in the sky have been sighted which cannot readily be identified and for which there is no obvious scientific explanation. Whether these are the vessels of extraterrestrials is, of course, much less certain, but evidently the possibility is not so absurd as to be ruled out by the scientific community. Indeed, an entire center has been set up in Chicago—the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS). Allen Hynek, the center’s director, distinguishes five types of “close encounter” (CE) with extraterrestrial life. The phrase “close encounters of the third kind” became widely known through the science fiction film bearing that title, the “third kind” (CE3) being a situation where extraterrestrial creatures reportedly appear—which is how the film ends. The first kind (CE1) is a straightforward claimed sighting of a UFO: no evidence remains, and no contact is made with any occupants. The second kind (CE2) involves a UFO sighting where evidence is left, for example scorch marks on the ground, or debris. In the fourth kind of close encounter (CE4), the observer is taken away in the alien craft—an alien abduction, sometimes allegedly for scientific research, and sometimes to undergo physical abuse. In the fifth variety (CE5), there is communication between the aliens and the observer, as for example Claude Vorilhon, the founder of the Raëlian organization, has claimed. Raël claims to have discovered a spacecraft and met its occupant, who came from a more advanced civilization, and who later took Raël on a space voyage to their planet.

The widespread interest in extraterrestrial life found expression within popular culture in television series such as Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, first screened in 1969, and in films such as Star Wars (released in 1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (also 1977), and E.T. (1982). Popular culture interacted with the popular interest in UFOs: the number of reported sightings has appeared to increase in parallel with the increasing popularity of television series and films about aliens and UFOs, and the descriptions of reported spacecraft seem to be related to their portrayals in popular media. There were peaks in reported sightings following the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977 and of the blockbuster Independence Day in 1996—although, curiously, the year 1982, when E.T. was released, marked a dip in such reports. In the US, the National UFO Reporting Center has reported “tens of thousands” of calls since 1974, and in Britain the year 1996 brought about a peak of 600 such reports, contributing to a total of approximately 11,000 sightings in Britain between the early 1900s and the 2000s.

The UFO phenomenon has an ideal blend of themes and contributors to attract wide curiosity, involving ardent believers, skeptics, debunkers, hoaxers, scientists, military intelligence personnel, professed victims of alien sightings and abductions, and psychiatrists who have sought to determine their state of mental health. In addition to reported direct sightings, the period following 1996 was also marked by claims of secondary evidence of extraterrestrial visitation, for example crop circles and cattle mutilations. Although many of the reported sightings have been found to have rational explanations, being variously aircraft, meteors, lights, and other natural objects, there remains a core of phenomena that have not been explained. Allied to this, allegations of military and government “cover-ups” have helped to fuel public curiosity. On August 5, 2010 it was revealed that members of Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s cabinet met with military intelligence officials and agreed that reports of unusual craft should be kept as classified information. After collaborating with General Dwight Eisenhower, he instructed that one particular report of an encounter between RAF bombers and a UFO should be kept secret for at least fifty years, to avoid mass panic.

This blend of claimed experiences, science fiction, scientific investigation, military intelligence, and conspiracy theories was an ideal combination for arousing public interest in UFOlogy. Added to these is an inherent conviction, held by many, that the sheer vastness of the universe makes it unlikely that the Earth is the only life-sustaining planet. A recent online survey by the SETI Institute posed the question “Are we alone in the universe?” and found that only 3.64 percent of respondents agreed with the proposition “Yes, we are on our own,” while 77.34 percent expressed the opinion, “No. There must be life out there. We just need to keep looking.” A further 18.98 percent supported the statement, “Probably not. But we may never find other life” (SETI Institute, 2010).¹

The UFO Religions

The interest in UFOs and extraterrestrials had its religious dimension. Alice Bailey (1880–1949), founder of the Arcane School, wrote about an advanced spiritual hierarchy that was particularly associated with the Sirius star system, the planet Venus and Shamballa (sic), which was a mythical land located in the “higher ethers” which the Christ was inhabiting in anticipation of his imminent return to Earth. A number of New Age spiritual teachers claimed to have received spiritual messages from extraterrestrials, whom they regarded as spirit guides, and whose teachings they disseminated in the form of “channeled” writings. Ernest L. Norman and his wif...