Author's Note
Readers may find parts of this book difficult to believe. This is, however, the true
details of the religious beliefs of an extraordinary group of people. The 'illuminations'
drawn from their beliefs have been selected from the statements, documents and interviews
by cult members. Since the beginning of time, people have sought to answer the questions
raised in this book. It is dedicated to all who have ever asked these questions, and
written in hopes that all who pursue these questitons in the future will do so with the
healthy understanding that perhaps we are not meant to answer all of life's questions. The
key of life may be to enjoy it to its maximum while we are here.
Prologue
"It is often the fanatics, and not always the delicate spirits, that are
found grasping the right thread of the solutions required by the future."
Ernest Renan, History of the People of Israel
Rancho Santa Fe, California, March 26, 1997. The day the Heaven's Gate cult, believing
they alone had the answers to life's ultimate question, ceremoniously slipped their mortal
coil and escaped into the 'beyond.'
Their story left the human family stunned, dominating the human conversation on the
Easter weekend that followed. It touched the eternal spirit in all of us, simultaneously
evoking fear, loathing and compassion. We all know we will die. It is this knowing that
compels us to comprehend this situation, to find a 'Web page' of truth in this traitorous
and cowardly act. What force, this book seeks to answer, could cause a misfit soul to want
to pull and whirl itself away from Earth, especially to a waiting space ship?
Despite the fact that their propaganda, offered in highly sophisticated web pages,
suggests they wanted to be free of Earth life, the actions of the Heaven's Gate cult had a
totally opposite effect. Instead of freedom, the manner of their death created a silver
cord which is now gripped by the imaginations of millions of people around the world. In
their carelessness, they will never be free of Earth life. Instead of being worshipped as
heros, they are immortalized as villains in the museum of human consciousness.
This book deals with the peculiar belief systems possessed by the Heaven's Gate cult
and other notorious cults of the 90's. In these beliefs is found the "force" or
"unifying agent" which drove them to extinction. As an investigator of similar
beliefs, I too built a worldview using many of the sticks and stones the Heaven's Gate
cult used to build their temple. It's okay to believe in UFO's, reincarnation, and life on
other planets. The striking difference is the unifying agent holding these beliefs
together. Unfortunately, in the case of the Heaven's Gate cult the Biblical adage 'and
slime they had for mortar' applies. This 'slime' separates them from all the other seekers
of the world who chose a more permanent bonding agent to unify their beliefs and ground
them to the Earth.
"The well-adjusted," writes Eric Hoffer, "make poor prophets. On the
other hand, those who are at war with the present have an eye for the seeds of change and
the potentialities of small beginnings." The Heaven's Gate cult believed themselves
to be visionaries not just at war with the present, but with all of Earth life in general.
Early on they developed the radical idea that for them to achieve peace it was mandatory
that they leave Earth.
"The radical," Hoffer wrote, "has a passionate faith in the infinite
perfectibility of human nature. He believes that by changing man's environment and by
perfecting a technique of soul forming, a society can be wrought that is wholly new and
unprecedented." Jefferson, Washington and Franklin were radicals. Ghandi in India was
a radical. Martin Luther King was a radical. They sought to revive the human spirit
through the resurrection of an ancient belief in a golden age, believing in this act we
could create a utopia.
The Heaven's Gate cult also believed themselves to be radicals. They revived ancient
beliefs, too, particularly in space beings who planted the human soul on this Earth. They
preached a return to these ancient beings and their beliefs. The difference is for
Heaven's Gate death is utopia and they believed this utopia was elsewhere other than the
Earth. They passionately pursued this ideal to its ultimate fulfillment.
Why? The Heaven's Gate cult lived at the top of the material pyramid of human
civilization. They had 'arrived'. In Rancho Santa Fe, spacious estates with their rolling
and wooded lawns huddle together to form an island in a region that is otherwise a pancake
of desert. It's one of the world's richest communities, a private garden in a world
becoming increasingly a maze of concrete and steel: an ideal place for the wealthy to
retire to the Sun and to either contemplate or forget about the rest of the world.
Despite their accomplishments as talented web page designers, the misfits of Heaven's
Gate never believed they had 'arrived' on Earth. They didn't even consider themselves
earthlings. No accomplishment, no matter how stellar, would satisfy the titanic needs of
their souls. For them, salvation could only come in the form of total separation from the
prison of Earth. To stay here, their propoganda professed, was suicide.
For this reason, the garden at Rancho Santa Fe became the perfect place for a mass
suicide. Monday morning, March 24,1997, rose like any other in the palatial home the
Heaven's Gate cult called "our temple." That day, instead of creating web-pages
for their clients, the men and women who lived here dressed themselves in matching
clothing, packed themselves into their bunk beds and awaited further instructions. In
their pockets they carried cash, perhaps an echo of the ancient Egyptian belief that the
dead had to pay the ferry men, the keepers of the gates to heaven.
During long years of training they had prepared themselves for what was to come. By
this procedure, all 39 members of the cult would converge upon a space ship following the
comet Hale-Bopp, their true home. Hale-Bopp was the "marker" the Heaven's Gate
soldiers had been waiting for. It represented the culmination of their mission and the
dawning of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
Moments later two members of the Heaven's Gate cult entered the bedrooms of their
"brothers and sisters," as they called each other. This exercise was not a
drill. With the comet above them it's all for real now. Each cup holds a combination of
phenobarbital and alcohol. Phenobarbital is a barbiturate drug that doctors have long
prescribed for its sedative and antiseizure properties. In minutes, it kills painlessly by
producing drowsiness, coma and collapse of the circulatory system.
As they sipped their "elixers of life," cult members incontrovertibly
believed members of the Kingdom of Heaven were aboard a craft trailing Hale-Bopp awaiting
their return. On the computer monitors which filled the house, images of the alien-human
hybrids, or Extraterrestrial Biological Entities, who inhabited this ship watched over
them.
With one sip the most intimate and thoughtful act any human can make was done. From
here, the automatic death mechanism within turned the key and released the soul inhabiting
these bodies. Whether or not they made it past the keepers to heaven's gate is not for us
to decide.
Millennial Madness
Tolerantly hosting misfits is a way of life in California, they breath life into its
image as a cutting edge region of the world. It's entertainment and computers that are at
California's political, economic and cultural heart, however - bringing shared
experiences and new frontiers to the world. Together, misfits and computers, along with a
self-proclaimed messiah who indoctrinates with a video camera, have placed California, and
by extension the entertainment and computer industries, on the furthest fringes of a new
shared experience: millennial madness.
March 26,1997 marked the end of age. From this point forward until well after the year
2,000 the entire world will be wrapped in the clutches of the change of millennium. This
millennial madness is what makes Heaven's Gate's story not just another California, or
technology-gone-mad story, however. This madness moves from California to a mountain
retreat in Switzerland, to the vineyards of France, to Quebec, Canada to Tokyo, Japan.
It was in Quebec, in the days just before the Heaven's Gate suicide, that several more
of the Order of the Solar Temple's membership evacuated this Earth in an altar of flame.
Since 1994, 74 Solar Temple members have died in mass suicides. Members believed they were
reincarnated Knights Templar, a secretive medival holy order founded by nine French
knights after they excavated the site of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.
Like the members of Heaven's Gate, disciples of the Order of the Solar Temple believed
death is an illusion and "real" life begins once we escape Earth life. Heaven's
Gate members believed their death would lead to salvation aboard a UFO trailing Hale-Bopp.
Solar Temple members believed in an afterlife on Sirius, the brightest star in our solar
system, which as we will see, was the key image in the millennial beliefs of the Christ
figure.
There is no known link between the Heaven's Gate and Solar Temple suicides. In fact,
there are glaring differences. The suicides in Canada and Europe were fiery, ritualistic
affairs and the victims were men, women and children. What links the groups is not the
manner of their deaths. It is their religious beliefs. Both groups claim access to an
advanced, even ancient, cosmology which involves belief in everything from UFO's,
extraterrestrials, soul transplantation, soul harvesting and reincarnation to stargates.
In the case of Heaven's Gate they claimed answers to such perennial questions as who are
we? How did we get here? What are we doing here? And, how do we leave?
We shall examine their beliefs, point by point, revealing the historical, mythological
basis for their conclusions. An awareness of the historical continuity of these beliefs
imparts a sense of sense itself in the senseless acts of suicide. The fact that Heaven's
Gate was founded by a former psychiatric patient has led many observers to dismiss the
cult as just another band of lunatics. This deprecating attitude denies their humanity. By
portraying the cult members as somehow deformed their story fails to inform us. Our intent
is to show what they believed in hopes that it will prevent another disaster of this kind
from ever happening again.
The Aum Supreme Cult
At the opposite end of the Pacific a man who once claimed to be that beast awaits trial
in Japan. Shoko Asahara, a bearded and blind charlatan, believed himself to be the
reincarnated Hindu god of death, Shiva. This is the Hindu version of Satan.
Like Heaven's Gate, Asahara's Aum Supreme Cult was a wired, high-tech affair run by the
brightest of the bright - engineers, geneticists, pharmacologists - recruited from the
best Japanese and American universities. They ran a billion-dollar empire built on bucks
from their sale of LSD and other drugs which they manufactured. These same labs worked day
and night refining enough chemical and biological weapons to kill millions.
At the height of his power, Asahara was negotiating with the former Soviet Union to
acquire nuclear warheads to unleash Armageddon. Of course, only he and his cult members
would survive this total anhiliation of the human race. And, of course, once the misfits
(the rest of us) were exterminated the Aum Supreme Cult would rebuild the human race and
colonize the galaxy. Other members were sent to Zaire to collect the insanely deadly Ebola
virus. As a first step, on March 20, 1995, his disciples poured the deadly nerve gas sarin
into the Tokyo subway system, killing 12 people and injuring 6,000 more.
All of these cults have something in common: a belief in the Judeo-Christian idea of
Armageddon: the end of the world. All of the Heaven's Gate members are presumed dead. The
Order of the Solar Temple has members in Britain, the United States and Australia. The Aum
Supreme Cult has disbanded, and many of its members are in jail. Still, questions remain:
what did these people believe that would push them to suicide?
