Heaven's Gate

America's UFO Religion

Benjamin E. Zeller

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781479811137
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

2015 Best Book Award from the Communal Studies Association The captivating story of the people of Heaven’s Gate, a religious group focused on transcending humanity and the Earth, and seeking salvation in the literal heavens on board a UFO. In March 1997, thirty-nine people in Rancho Santa Fe, California, ritually terminated their lives. To outsiders, it was a mass suicide. To insiders, it was a graduation. This act was the culmination of over two decades of spiritual and social development for the members of Heaven’s Gate. In this fascinating overview, Benjamin Zeller not only explores the question of why the members of Heaven’s Gate committed ritual suicides, but interrogates the origin and evolution of the religion, its appeal, and its practices. By tracking the development of the history, social structure, and worldview of Heaven’s Gate, Zeller draws out the ways in which the movement was both a reflection and a microcosm of larger American culture.The group emerged out of engagement with Evangelical Christianity, the New Age movement, science fiction and UFOs, and conspiracy theories, and it evolved in response to the religious quests of baby boomers, new religions of the counterculture, and the narcissistic pessimism of the 1990s. Thus, Heaven’s Gate not only reflects the context of its environment, but also reveals how those forces interacted in the form of a single religious body. In the only book-length study of Heaven’s Gate, Zeller traces the roots of the movement, examines its beliefs and practices, and tells the captivating story of its people.

1

The Cultural and Religious Origins of Heaven’s Gate

One problem that scholars have had in studying Heaven’s Gate is that the movement changed radically over its twenty-five-year history. For example, the group that we call Heaven’s Gate only used that name to refer to itself in its final days on Earth. For much of its history, the group members called themselves Human Individual Metamorphosis, Total Overcomers Anonymous, and often simply “the Class.” Today we know this new religious movement as Heaven’s Gate—and I will continue to call it that—but its name often changed. (While admittedly anachronistic to refer to the movement throughout its history using the moniker of Heaven’s Gate, I continue to do so because it is simpler for both author and reader.)

The group’s organizational structure changed too. At first, Heaven’s Gate existed as merely two people: its founders Marshall Herff Applewhite (1932–1997) and Bonnie Lu Nettles (1927–1985), who used names like Guinea and Pig, Bo and Peep, and eventually Ti and Do, as well as “the Two.”¹ (I will refer to them by their birth names, or as “the Two” when they acted in concert to lead the movement.) As they attracted followers and adherents, something odd happened: the group became even less organized. Researchers and journalists who studied the group in its first months discovered that its leaders often did not attend recruitment meetings, seldom traveled with the group, and exerted only minimal control over the organization of this inchoate religious movement. All this changed in 1976, when the Two instituted a rigid hierarchal social structure predicated on their absolute control over the social and religious lives of their adherents. That style of organization characterized Heaven’s Gate until its end in 1997, though Nettles had died in 1985, leaving Applewhite as the sole leader.

In terms of the movement’s religious practices, equally substantial changes occurred. The shifts paralleled the organizational changes. At first, Applewhite and Nettles exerted little control over the religious practices of their followers, though they did provide guidelines and some requirements. Yet followers often skirted these requirements and invented their own ways of following the guidelines. Later, the Two put into place more stringent requirements and instituted a monastic style of living that adherents used to rigidly control their lives. Again, that later pattern of practices lasted until the end of the movement.

Religious beliefs also changed. Most fundamentally, in the early days of Heaven’s Gate the Two taught that followers would journey to outer space (what they called the “Next Level”) on UFOs while still alive, bringing their physical bodies with them through a process akin to metamorphosis. They emphasized biological, chemical, and metabolic changes that would enable this process. After the death of Nettles in 1985—which followers understood to represent only the death of her physical body and the release of her true self to return to outer space—Applewhite taught that adherents may have to die in order to journey on to the Next Level. By the end of the movement’s history, physical death had become a necessity rather than a mere possibility.

These many changes make Heaven’s Gate more difficult to characterize and study, but they actually reveal something very important: Heaven’s Gate functioned as a living, changing religion whose leaders and members adapted to unexpected developments through institutional, practical, and theological modifications. The group demonstrated flexibility. As it changed, it reflected the changing society around it. In this chapter I develop an overall picture of how Heaven’s Gate evolved in its formative years, before Nettles’s death. The overarching theme that emerges shows two extremely creative religious innovators who founded a new religious movement predicated on multiple strands of religious thought.

The Early History: The UFO Two

Bonnie Lu Nettles had not been particularly religious growing up, nor was she a rigorous proponent of any one spiritual path, though she had dabbled in astrology and theosophy. Marshall Herff Applewhite had been raised by a preacher and even attended seminary, but his real love was music and, as a closeted bisexual in 1970s Texas, the church would not have seemed a natural home regardless. It is odd, then, that these two individuals, one a part-time astrologer and the other a former seminarian, would found one of the world’s most famous UFO religions. But they did. The early history of Heaven’s Gate is the history of the meeting and spiritual partnership of Bonnie Lu Nettles and Marshall Herff Applewhite.

Neither Nettles nor Applewhite had particularly noteworthy backgrounds before meeting and creating the new religious movement that would become known as Heaven’s Gate. A native of Houston, Nettles was a registered nurse, mother of four children, and partner in a failing marriage. She had been raised Baptist, but she was not particularly fervent in her Christian faith. A high school friend described Nettles’s church attendance as primarily social, attending “just because the gang [of friends] did.”² As an adult she was biblically literate and interested in religion, but not devout. By the time she met Applewhite, her religious interests had taken a far less conventional turn.

Astrology and the occult fascinated Nettles. A lapsed member of the Houston branch of the Theosophical Society in America—an eclectic religious body emphasizing a variety of spiritual practices—and an amateur astrologer, Nettles inhabited a New Age subculture of disincarnated spirits, ascended masters, telepathic powers, and hidden and revealed gnosis.³ She channeled spirits, including a nineteenth-century Franciscan monk named Brother Francis, held a séance group in her living room, and was interested in UFOs. She also authored an astrology column in a local newspaper.⁴ Such unconventional religious practices were even more important to her than her interpersonal relationships: Nettles’s husband did not approve of her spiritual activities, and the couple’s relationship had begun to disintegrate even before Nettles found a new spiritual partner in Applewhite. They divorced in 1972.⁵

Though Nettles and Applewhite would later discount the value of Nettles’s theosophy, her involvement in the Theosophical Society indicates one of the formative religious influences in her life, one that clearly influenced her later religious thought. Even after Nettles and Applewhite met and began formulating their new religious understanding, they sold theosophical material in their short-lived New Age bookstore, The Christian Arts Center.⁶ Theosophy is the product of the late nineteenth century and another famous pair of religious innovators, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907), and their circle of friends and associates. Scholar of theosophy Robert Ellwood traces the movement to multiple sources: nineteenth-century romanticism, the Victorian debates over the relationship between science and religion, and the Western discovery and fascination with the East, especially India.⁷ Theosophy’s founders combined an earnest commitment to progressivism with all of these religious influences, forming a new religious movement that promulgated a philosophy drawing on Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and the Western Occult tradition. Its most important features include the evolution of the human soul through multiple incarnations, and access to and learning from a series of spiritual masters inhabiting distant physical or spiritual places or planes. Theosophy also idolized science. All of these elements later became central doctrines of Heaven’s Gate, though in modified forms.⁸

Nettles’s Theosophical Society in America had been shaped by other religious innovators before it reached her. Theosophists Annie Besant, Charles Webster Leadbeater, Jiddu Krishnamurti, William Q. Judge, and Katherine Tingley all formed and reformed theosophical sub-movements that evolved from Blavatsky and Olcott’s teachings and materials. Mid-twentieth-century theosophical popularizers Guy Ballard (1878–1939) and Edna Ballard (1886–1971) emphasized the notion of the “Ascended Masters,” transcendental beings who served as spiritual masters to members of the Ballards’ “I AM” movement. This movement became very popular in American theosophical and later New Age circles, and left an obvious mark on Heaven’s Gate. The Ballards extended Blavatsky and Olcott’s notion of Mahatma masters—who originally included living masters, spiritual beings, and extraterrestrial Venusians—and focused on the latter two categories. I AM’s Ascended Masters generally existed in spiritual or extraterrestrial realms, and offered religious teachings through channeling and other spiritual means of communication. Importantly, the Ascended Masters were embodied, having “ascended” from Earth to the higher realms that they now inhabited. This approach—and especially the idea of embodied masters—became an important part of Heaven’s Gate’s thought. Channeling certainly found a home in the new religion that Nettles founded with Applewhite. Nettles’s séance group channeled not only deceased human beings such as Brother Francis, and in one case Marilyn Monroe, but also extraterrestrials from planet Venus.⁹ While the Two borrowed the idea of extraterrestrial beings offering religious truth and knowledge, they repudiated other aspects of the theosophical worldview, notably the plurality of spiritual teachers, its liberal acceptance of a multiplicity of truths, and most of its religious practices.

As compared to Nettles, Applewhite possessed a more conventionally Christian background. A Texan by birth, he was the son of a popular and successful Presbyterian preacher, Marshall Herff Applewhite, Sr. Called widely by his middle name, Herff, the younger Applewhite attended Austin College in Sherman, Texas, where he was remembered as an extrovert with a magnetic personality that “he put to only positive uses,” in the words of a former college roommate.¹⁰ He served as a campus leader in the a cappella group, judiciary council, and association of prospective Presbyterian ministers, and graduated with a degree in philosophy. College acquaintances remember him as a budding musician as well as interested in religious ministry.¹¹

After graduating from college in 1952, Applewhite enrolled at Virginia’s Union Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian divinity school, but left after two years to study music.¹² Following a brief stint in the Army Signal Corps, he earned a Masters degree in music and voice from the University of Colorado, though he never strayed far from a religiously oriented vocation.¹³ A talented vocalist and charismatic instructor, Applewhite directed the chorus at Houston’s St. Mark’s Episcopal Church and the fine arts program at the University of St. Thomas, as well as working at a string of churches and even a synagogue.¹⁴ He married fellow Texan Anne Pearce shortly after graduating, and had two children, but the couple separated in the mid-1960s and divorced in 1968.¹⁵ He remained estranged from his ex-wife and children until the end of his life. Applewhite bounced between various jobs, teaching and conducting music, until he met Nettles eight years later. Yet Applewhite also dabbled in astrology, and he clearly was somewhat of a religious seeker. A friend reported that Applewhite had become interested in UFOs, science fiction, and ancient mysticism shortly before meeting Nettles.¹⁶

His religious life would change forever when he met Bonnie Lu Nettles in the Houston hospital where she worked in 1972. Numerous accounts exist of why Applewhite was in the hospital, but all agree that Applewhite was at a moment of life change and even crisis. His sister indicated that he had suffered a “near death experience” and was hospitalized because of a serious heart blockage.¹⁷ Robert W. Balch, a sociologist who produced the first notable studies of Heaven’s Gate, indicated that the encounter was “chance” and that Applewhite had been visiting a friend who was recovering from an operation, a position that Applewhite also took. (Balch also noted that Applewhite’s life was in a state of confusion and flux at the time.)¹⁸ Evan Thomas, a reporter who investigated the group following the Heaven’s Gate suicides, claims that Applewhite was a mental patient who had suffered a serious mental collapse, though he provides no evidence of that claim; neither does he indicate from where he derived that rather late interpretation.¹⁹

While the exact reasons for Nettles’s and Applewhite’s meeting will never be fully known, clearly both were in the midst of significant life changes. Nettles was separated and in the process of divorcing. Her husband did not support her spiritual pursuits, and she felt called to something more than her current situation. Her daughter remembers going outside with Nettles to look at the sky, with both talking about how they hoped that a flying saucer would land and take them away.²⁰ Applewhite’s situation was even more muddled. He was a bisexual, yet neither his relationships with women nor men had brought him any long-term happiness. In addition to his divorce, he had suffered a broken engagement and a series of homosexual relationships about which he felt deeply ambivalent. He admitted to a friend that he felt his relationships were “all failures” and that “any kind of relationship is stifling and short lived.” He considered giving up intimate relationships entirely, but also admitted that he longed for a partner.²¹ He had recently been fired from a well-paying job and found himself isolated from both former friends and family, as well as struggling financially. Regardless of whether he was a patient at the hospital where he met Nettles, he had suffered from various health ailments including frequent headaches and anxiety.

Some scholars and journalists have argued that the two’s life circumstances, especially Applewhite’s sexual and relationship problems, directly led them to create the religious worldview of Heaven’s Gate, with its emphasis on celibacy and control.²² Scholar of communications Robert Glenn Howard posited that Applewhite’s “apparently obsessive beliefs” about “human psychic problems of identity formation,” in combination with either his sexual confusion or a mystical experience, led to the specific form that Heaven’s Gate took.²³ For Howard, total rejection of the body, gendered social norms, and sexual identity led directly to the eventual suicides.²⁴ Sociologist Susan Raine goes even...