Heaven’s Gate

Marshall Applewhite was born in Texas in 1931, the son of a Presbyterian minister. He trained as a singer, taught music at the University of St Thomas in Houston, and was known as a charismatic performer. In 1972 he met Bonnie Nettles, a nurse, in Houston. Nettles was interested in astrology, Theosophy and channelling, and the two quickly formed an intense spiritual partnership that both insisted was not sexual. Over the following years they came to believe that they had been sent from another world to deliver a final message to humanity.

Calling themselves the Two, and later Bo and Peep, they travelled the United States speaking at small meetings. They taught that a kingdom of advanced beings, the Level Above Human, existed in physical space, and that a spacecraft would come for those who prepared themselves. In September 1975, after a meeting in Waldport, Oregon, about twenty people left their homes to follow the pair. The disappearance made national news, and the sociologist Robert Balch, who joined the group under cover for some weeks, wrote one of the first academic studies of it.

Groups such as Heaven’s Gate are popularly called cults, but scholars of religion generally prefer the term “new religious movement”, since “cult” is a contested label that tends to judge a group before describing it. Heaven’s Gate is often grouped with UFO religions, a family of movements that see salvation coming from beings in space.

The teaching of the Two combined several traditions. From Christianity they took the idea of a kingdom of heaven and the hope of transformation; Jesus, they said, had been an earlier visitor from the Level Above Human. From Theosophy and the New Age came ideas of spiritual evolution and higher beings. From science fiction came the vocabulary of spacecraft and away teams. The human body was a temporary “vehicle”, and the task of a member was to overcome everything that tied the soul to it.

In practice this meant a life of strict discipline. Members gave up their names, families, jobs and possessions and took new names. They lived celibate lives, and several men, including Applewhite, chose castration. They dressed alike, cut their hair short and worked through daily routines laid down in written procedures, often in pairs. Applewhite and Nettles, now called Do and Ti, were their teachers, and the group thought of itself as a classroom.

The teachers presented this discipline not as punishment but as a path of growth, comparing it to the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly. Members spoke of their bodies as containers to be kept in order until they were no longer needed. Many who later left the group described their years in it as a sincere spiritual search, and some kept in friendly contact with those who stayed.

After 1976 the group withdrew from public view and lived in camps and rented houses, moving between states. Its numbers fell from perhaps two hundred at the height of its travels in the mid-1970s to a few dozen. In 1985 Nettles died of cancer, a blow to a group that had expected to leave Earth in their physical bodies. Applewhite taught that she had gone ahead to the next level and continued to guide them from there.

In the 1990s the group returned briefly to public outreach, advertising its message in national newspapers and holding meetings. It also found a new source of income in the early World Wide Web, building websites for clients under the name Higher Source. In 1996 the members moved into a large rented house in Rancho Santa Fe, an affluent community north of San Diego, and published their teachings online under the name Heaven’s Gate.

By the mid-1990s Applewhite had come to teach that members would not be taken up in their bodies but would leave them behind to join the next level. Comet Hale-Bopp, discovered in 1995, became one of the brightest comets of the century and was at its most visible in the spring of 1997. In late 1996 an amateur astronomer claimed on a popular late-night radio show that an object was following the comet, and the rumour spread widely. Heaven’s Gate saw in the comet’s arrival a sign that its time had come.

In the months before, the group had prepared openly. Its website announced that the members’ time on Earth was ending, and Applewhite recorded videos explaining the teaching to anyone who would listen. Members tied up their affairs and completed work for their clients. Outsiders who met them in this period described them as polite, friendly and calm, which made what followed all the harder for their families to understand.

In late March 1997, 39 members, Applewhite among them, died in the house at Rancho Santa Fe over a period of several days. They were found on 26 March, after a former member alerted the authorities. The dead were 21 women and 18 men, aged from 26 to 72. They had recorded videos and left statements on the group’s website explaining their beliefs. Investigators found no sign of outside involvement.

The deaths shocked a country that still remembered Jonestown and Waco, and news coverage focused on the strangest details, from the matching clothes to the science-fiction vocabulary. Scholars tried to look past these. Catherine Wessinger and Benjamin Zeller have placed Heaven’s Gate in the long history of American religious seeking, showing how its members, many of them educated and thoughtful, came to accept its teaching step by step over many years.

Researchers have also noted how the group’s isolation and its leader’s view of the body made self-destruction seem logical to its members. Heaven’s Gate was among the first religious movements to use the internet to spread its message, and its website was preserved after the deaths by two former members. A few former members also died by suicide in the following years. The case is studied today as a warning of how apocalyptic belief, a closed community and a single authoritative teacher can lead to tragedy.