Post by Admin on May 9, 2014 18:30:48 GMT
The Gospel According to Applewhite / A bit of Theosophy, a bit of X-Files, a bit from the Book of Revelation -- the mix-and-match theology of the Heaven's Gate cult had antecedents everywhere
Sunday, April 6, 1997
Trying to unravel the eclectic beliefs of Marshall Herff Applewhite is like visiting a schizoid supermarket of spiritualism, pop culture and twisted theology.
For 25 years, Applewhite and the co-founder of Heaven's Gate, Bonnie Lou Nettles, borrowed material from sources as diverse as "Star Trek" reruns and the Book of Revelation.
As everyone knows by now, Applewhite's followers believed the Hale-Bopp comet was followed by a spacecraft coming to whisk them off to heaven. Their 39 bodies, dressed in black pants and Nike shoes, were discovered 10 days ago under triangular purple shrouds in a Southern California mansion.
And for the past 10 days, cult- watchers and religion scholars have been struggling to understand the Gospel According to Applewhite, to decode the occult catechism he and his computer-savvy followers left behind on the World Wide Web.
Applewhite, the son of a Presbyterian minister, met Nettles, a nurse and astrologer, in a Texas hospital in 1972. One version of the story says Applewhite was hospitalized for heart trouble and had a "near death" experience. Another says Applewhite checked into a psychiatric hospital to have himself "cured" of homosexuality.
Either way, Applewhite and Nettles struck up a platonic partnership based on their common interests in astrology, channeling, reincarnation and Christian mysticism.
Nettles was already involved in Theosophy, a spiritualist movement founded in the 19th century by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a Russian-born mystic.
Blavatsky envisioned a magical universe of disembodied spirits of white light and a Great White Brotherhood of "ascended masters." Her work inspired countless other spiritualists, people who believe they can make psychic contact with the dead.
Succeeding Blavatsky in the Theosophy movement was Englishwoman Annie Besant, who died in 1933. Besant coined the term "New Age" to describe a coming era of peace and blessedness.
When Applewhite and Nettles met, she was an astrologer and spiritualist who claimed to have psychic contact with "Brother Francis," a Franciscan monk who died in 1818.
"Herb Applewhite supplied the Christianity and Bonnie Nettles supplied the spiritualism," said Robert Balch, a University of Montana sociologist who studied the cult's early years.
"They were influenced by a lot of New Age ideas, and by esoteric interpretations of the Book of Revelation," Balch said. "It was a blend of stuff. They added UFOs as they went along."
In 1972, the couple opened a short-lived metaphysical bookstore, the Christian Arts Center, at the First Unitarian Church in downtown Houston, where Applewhite worked as music director.
Within a year, Applewhite and Nettles were referring to themselves as the "two witnesses" mentioned in Revelation 11:3 -- "And I will grant my two witnesses authority to prophesy for one thousand two hundred and sixty days, wearing sackcloth."
In the early 1970s, Applewhite wrote years later, he and Nettles were "two unsuspecting humans in Houston" who were incarnated by space aliens and transformed into "Bo" and "Peep," two shepherds from the Kingdom of Heaven.
"They consciously recognized that they were sent from space to do a task that had something to do with the Bible," he wrote.
Around 1975, Bo and Peep discovered that adding UFOs to the mix was a great way to attract both religious followers and the attention of the news media.
They hit the road, looking for a crew to join them aboard a spacecraft that would take them off to the "next evolutionary level."
Local newspapers, including The Chronicle, covered their appearances around the country. When 20 of them mysteriously "disappeared" from a small Oregon town in 1975, the "UFO cult" briefly became a national story.
They later reappeared in Colorado, and popped up in campgrounds around the Midwest, but the media had lost interest in "Bo" and "Peep." They would soon drop off the radar screen, lingering in relative obscurity for two decades.
Nettles died of cancer in 1985, many followers fell away, but a remnant of devotees remained under Applegate's control.
"What's different about this group is the number of years they were underground and intensely brainwashed," said Janja Lalich, who runs the Cult Recovery and Information Center in Alameda.
Lalich is now counseling two families with former members from Heaven's Gate.
"They had their identities stripped away," she said. "They went around for months with hoods on and couldn't see each other. They had to stay in pairs. They had to engage in self-criticism. There were periods when they couldn't sleep for more than four hours. There were strange diets. They took on new names."
When the bodies of Applewhite and 38 followers were found dead in Rancho Santa Fe, Kevin Lewis was deep into his research on a book about UFO cults.
"As UFO cults go, Heaven's Gate was relatively small and obscure," said Lewis, a professor of theology at Biola University in Los Angeles. "Actually, it's more accurate to call them 'extraterrestrial cults' as the idea of a spaceship isn't always involved."
According to Lewis, the largest of these groups is the Urantia Foundation, which is based in Chicago and has been active since the 1950s. He estimates that it has about 5,000 members worldwide.
Its Bible is the 2,100-page Urantia Book, a 1955 collection of writings compiled by William Sadler, a Spiritualist-influenced writer who died in 1968.
Urantia teaches that its writings were commissioned by extraterrestrial beings from across the universe. They purport to be a retelling of cosmic history, and redefine the role that Jesus plays in human salvation.
Tom Burns, vice president of the Urantia Foundation, said in a prepared statement that his organization has no connection with Heaven's Gate, UFOs, cults, nor "the advocacy of suicide."
Nevertheless, Lewis said many UFO and ET cults have a common story about "a space brother from an alien race, someone more highly evolved than we humans, who comes to Earth to give us new information."
Both Heaven's Gate and Urantia, Lewis said, attempt a "reinterpretation of Christianity that takes away the uniqueness of Jesus Christ."
Lewis sees these groups as a modern revival of early Christian "Gnostics," or "knowers," who claimed to have secret knowledge, but were condemned by the early Christian church. Gnostics saw the material world as evil, Lewis said, and themselves trapped in unwanted bodies.
"Gnostics saw Jesus as a human who was energized for his ministry by some kind of spirit," said Lewis.
Heaven's Gate followers had a similar idea -- that space beings came upon Jesus at the time of his baptism.
Applewhite compared himself to Jesus Christ, claiming he was incarnated 2,000 years later by those space beings.
To Lewis, Heaven's Gate's ideas about the body help explain their decision to commit mass suicide.
"Most people have a natural fear of death, " Lewis said. "But if you see salvation as leaving the body, you can see suicide as a spiritual option, as a way to salvation."
At the same time, he added, Heaven's Gate teachings don't really make sense. "Why kill the physical body if you plan to climb aboard a physical UFO?" Lewis asked.
In 1988, Applewhite wrote his own history of the group, entitled "The UFO Two and Their Crew." In it, he condemned as satanic the very philosophies he and Nettles had used to concoct their own mix- and-match theology.
"One of the major tools of Lucifer is the New Age movement -- Theosophy, Ascended Masters, channeling, Eastern religions, mysticism, yoga, Christ consciousness within, and the 'Ye are God' concept," Applewhite wrote. "All are a fantasy and a trap."
Heaven's Gate resurfaced in the 1990s with an advertising blitz, a Web page and a final cross- country tour. "Bo" and "Peep" were now "Ti" and "Do," a reference to notes on a musical scale.
Although Nettles had died years before, she continued to play a major role in the cult's teachings. There were hints that the group hoped to be reunited with "T" aboard the spacecraft tailing the Hale-Bopp comet.
Now, however, Applewhite's message was darker, more apocalyptic. Heaven's Gate attracted few new members.
In 1993, Applewhite issued his "final offer" to anyone who wanted to join them. No one seemed to be listening to him anymore. Earth was doomed, he wrote, because "its inhabitants are refusing to evolve."
In its final years, the cult seemed to be preparing for a physical battle against the forces of evil. Before moving to San Diego County, they built a huge concrete and earth fortress in the mountains south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Last week, police discovered that the cultists had a cache of weapons in an Escondido storage locker.
Applewhite was sounding more and more paranoid, feeling more and more persecuted. "Luciferian" space creatures were conspiring with the government. He compared Heaven's Gate's situation with that of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, the apocalyptic Christian sect that a few years earlier battled federal agents before their Waco, Texas, compound erupted in a blazing inferno.
Carl Raschke, a professor of religious studies at the University of Denver, called the teachings of Heaven's Gate "X-Files theology."
"Applewhite saw himself as Jesus Christ engaged in covert action," Raschke said. "They used mainstream Biblical beliefs about the second coming and the rapture so people with a basic Christian mind-set would be sucked into their space-age version of the Book of Revelation."
Millennialism (from the Latin word for 1,000) comes from the Book of Revelation, the bizarre visionary conclusion of the New Testament -- a book written at a time when Christians were being fed to the lions and used as human torches by the Roman Emperor Nero.
This Revelation, or Apocalypse, describes a final, horrible battle between the forces of good and evil. Satan is thrown into a bottomless pit, and Christian martyrs are raised from the dead to reign with Christ for 1,000 years.
It's a text that has fascinated the persecuted and the paranoid for nearly 2,000 years. Countless Christians and non-Christians have tried to decipher the Book of Revelation, looking for clues about when and how human history will end and how something new will rise from the ashes.
Some religion scholars say the approach of the year 2000 has brought a new wave of doomsday cults.
Raschke is not so sure.
"Everyone's talking about millennial cults, but I'm getting a little jaded," he said. "Heaven's Gate has a lot more to do with Hale-Bopp than it does with the year 2000."
Other cult-watchers point out that the Heaven's Gate suicides were conducted in the days leading up to Good Friday, which marks the crucifixion of Jesus. It was also the same week of a total lunar eclipse and the peak of the Hale-Bopp comet.
Lewis noted the color of the cult's death shrouds, purple, is often associated with Passion Week, when Christians remember Jesus Christ's last days on Earth.
Their triangular shape is often seen in the New Age movement and among UFO groups as a reference to the Egyptian pyramids -- and to the speculation that space aliens helped build them.
Lalich, the cult counselor from Alameda, sees little value in poring over the pages upon pages of convoluted doctrine Applewhite and his followers posted on the World Wide Web.
"It's typical of UFO cults, a mishmash of stuff, a great mystical gobbledygook," she said. "It's all part of putting people in a trance by not being able to figure out the ideology."
Lalich sees more of an explanation in the sexual insecurities of Marshall Herff Applewhite, who was reportedly fired from two jobs because of his homosexuality and later had himself castrated in an apparent effort to control himself.
What speaks volumes about Heaven's Gate, Lalich said, is the fact that other male cultists were so brainwashed that they followed suit and mutilated their own bodies -- known as "vehicles" in the cult's parlance.
Or, as Applewhite explained on the World Wide Web:
"Some in the class have chosen on their own to have their vehicles neutered in order to sustain a more genderless and objective consciousness."
TWAIN, COMETS AND THE COST OF ETERNITY
What role did Mark Twain play in the closing chapter of the Heaven's Gate cult?
Bufo Calvin, a contributing editor to "Strange" magazine and creator of the "Bufo's Weird World" newsletter, thinks he has an explanation for one of the strange tidbits surrounding the sect's attempted rendezvous with the Hale-Bopp comet.
According to sheriff's deputies, some of the deceased cult members had a $5 bill and three quarters in their shirt pockets.
"Twain was very cynical about religion, and once wrote that the fare to get to heaven on the tail of a comet was $5.75," Calvin says.
Efforts to confirm the quote with several Twain experts proved unsuccessful as The Chronicle went to press.
Nevertheless, Twain did feel a certain affinity with another celebrated celestial event -- Halley's Comet.
Halley's Comet appeared in 1835, the year Twain was born, and appeared again in 1910, the year he died. Twain wrote of Halley's Comet in 1909:
"It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.' "
One more footnote: Heaven's Gate members were devoted fans of the "Star Trek" TV show, which has featured a Mark Twain character on several of its episodes.
Sunday, April 6, 1997
Trying to unravel the eclectic beliefs of Marshall Herff Applewhite is like visiting a schizoid supermarket of spiritualism, pop culture and twisted theology.
For 25 years, Applewhite and the co-founder of Heaven's Gate, Bonnie Lou Nettles, borrowed material from sources as diverse as "Star Trek" reruns and the Book of Revelation.
As everyone knows by now, Applewhite's followers believed the Hale-Bopp comet was followed by a spacecraft coming to whisk them off to heaven. Their 39 bodies, dressed in black pants and Nike shoes, were discovered 10 days ago under triangular purple shrouds in a Southern California mansion.
And for the past 10 days, cult- watchers and religion scholars have been struggling to understand the Gospel According to Applewhite, to decode the occult catechism he and his computer-savvy followers left behind on the World Wide Web.
Applewhite, the son of a Presbyterian minister, met Nettles, a nurse and astrologer, in a Texas hospital in 1972. One version of the story says Applewhite was hospitalized for heart trouble and had a "near death" experience. Another says Applewhite checked into a psychiatric hospital to have himself "cured" of homosexuality.
Either way, Applewhite and Nettles struck up a platonic partnership based on their common interests in astrology, channeling, reincarnation and Christian mysticism.
Nettles was already involved in Theosophy, a spiritualist movement founded in the 19th century by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a Russian-born mystic.
Blavatsky envisioned a magical universe of disembodied spirits of white light and a Great White Brotherhood of "ascended masters." Her work inspired countless other spiritualists, people who believe they can make psychic contact with the dead.
Succeeding Blavatsky in the Theosophy movement was Englishwoman Annie Besant, who died in 1933. Besant coined the term "New Age" to describe a coming era of peace and blessedness.
When Applewhite and Nettles met, she was an astrologer and spiritualist who claimed to have psychic contact with "Brother Francis," a Franciscan monk who died in 1818.
"Herb Applewhite supplied the Christianity and Bonnie Nettles supplied the spiritualism," said Robert Balch, a University of Montana sociologist who studied the cult's early years.
"They were influenced by a lot of New Age ideas, and by esoteric interpretations of the Book of Revelation," Balch said. "It was a blend of stuff. They added UFOs as they went along."
In 1972, the couple opened a short-lived metaphysical bookstore, the Christian Arts Center, at the First Unitarian Church in downtown Houston, where Applewhite worked as music director.
Within a year, Applewhite and Nettles were referring to themselves as the "two witnesses" mentioned in Revelation 11:3 -- "And I will grant my two witnesses authority to prophesy for one thousand two hundred and sixty days, wearing sackcloth."
In the early 1970s, Applewhite wrote years later, he and Nettles were "two unsuspecting humans in Houston" who were incarnated by space aliens and transformed into "Bo" and "Peep," two shepherds from the Kingdom of Heaven.
"They consciously recognized that they were sent from space to do a task that had something to do with the Bible," he wrote.
Around 1975, Bo and Peep discovered that adding UFOs to the mix was a great way to attract both religious followers and the attention of the news media.
They hit the road, looking for a crew to join them aboard a spacecraft that would take them off to the "next evolutionary level."
Local newspapers, including The Chronicle, covered their appearances around the country. When 20 of them mysteriously "disappeared" from a small Oregon town in 1975, the "UFO cult" briefly became a national story.
They later reappeared in Colorado, and popped up in campgrounds around the Midwest, but the media had lost interest in "Bo" and "Peep." They would soon drop off the radar screen, lingering in relative obscurity for two decades.
Nettles died of cancer in 1985, many followers fell away, but a remnant of devotees remained under Applegate's control.
"What's different about this group is the number of years they were underground and intensely brainwashed," said Janja Lalich, who runs the Cult Recovery and Information Center in Alameda.
Lalich is now counseling two families with former members from Heaven's Gate.
"They had their identities stripped away," she said. "They went around for months with hoods on and couldn't see each other. They had to stay in pairs. They had to engage in self-criticism. There were periods when they couldn't sleep for more than four hours. There were strange diets. They took on new names."
When the bodies of Applewhite and 38 followers were found dead in Rancho Santa Fe, Kevin Lewis was deep into his research on a book about UFO cults.
"As UFO cults go, Heaven's Gate was relatively small and obscure," said Lewis, a professor of theology at Biola University in Los Angeles. "Actually, it's more accurate to call them 'extraterrestrial cults' as the idea of a spaceship isn't always involved."
According to Lewis, the largest of these groups is the Urantia Foundation, which is based in Chicago and has been active since the 1950s. He estimates that it has about 5,000 members worldwide.
Its Bible is the 2,100-page Urantia Book, a 1955 collection of writings compiled by William Sadler, a Spiritualist-influenced writer who died in 1968.
Urantia teaches that its writings were commissioned by extraterrestrial beings from across the universe. They purport to be a retelling of cosmic history, and redefine the role that Jesus plays in human salvation.
Tom Burns, vice president of the Urantia Foundation, said in a prepared statement that his organization has no connection with Heaven's Gate, UFOs, cults, nor "the advocacy of suicide."
Nevertheless, Lewis said many UFO and ET cults have a common story about "a space brother from an alien race, someone more highly evolved than we humans, who comes to Earth to give us new information."
Both Heaven's Gate and Urantia, Lewis said, attempt a "reinterpretation of Christianity that takes away the uniqueness of Jesus Christ."
Lewis sees these groups as a modern revival of early Christian "Gnostics," or "knowers," who claimed to have secret knowledge, but were condemned by the early Christian church. Gnostics saw the material world as evil, Lewis said, and themselves trapped in unwanted bodies.
"Gnostics saw Jesus as a human who was energized for his ministry by some kind of spirit," said Lewis.
Heaven's Gate followers had a similar idea -- that space beings came upon Jesus at the time of his baptism.
Applewhite compared himself to Jesus Christ, claiming he was incarnated 2,000 years later by those space beings.
To Lewis, Heaven's Gate's ideas about the body help explain their decision to commit mass suicide.
"Most people have a natural fear of death, " Lewis said. "But if you see salvation as leaving the body, you can see suicide as a spiritual option, as a way to salvation."
At the same time, he added, Heaven's Gate teachings don't really make sense. "Why kill the physical body if you plan to climb aboard a physical UFO?" Lewis asked.
In 1988, Applewhite wrote his own history of the group, entitled "The UFO Two and Their Crew." In it, he condemned as satanic the very philosophies he and Nettles had used to concoct their own mix- and-match theology.
"One of the major tools of Lucifer is the New Age movement -- Theosophy, Ascended Masters, channeling, Eastern religions, mysticism, yoga, Christ consciousness within, and the 'Ye are God' concept," Applewhite wrote. "All are a fantasy and a trap."
Heaven's Gate resurfaced in the 1990s with an advertising blitz, a Web page and a final cross- country tour. "Bo" and "Peep" were now "Ti" and "Do," a reference to notes on a musical scale.
Although Nettles had died years before, she continued to play a major role in the cult's teachings. There were hints that the group hoped to be reunited with "T" aboard the spacecraft tailing the Hale-Bopp comet.
Now, however, Applewhite's message was darker, more apocalyptic. Heaven's Gate attracted few new members.
In 1993, Applewhite issued his "final offer" to anyone who wanted to join them. No one seemed to be listening to him anymore. Earth was doomed, he wrote, because "its inhabitants are refusing to evolve."
In its final years, the cult seemed to be preparing for a physical battle against the forces of evil. Before moving to San Diego County, they built a huge concrete and earth fortress in the mountains south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Last week, police discovered that the cultists had a cache of weapons in an Escondido storage locker.
Applewhite was sounding more and more paranoid, feeling more and more persecuted. "Luciferian" space creatures were conspiring with the government. He compared Heaven's Gate's situation with that of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, the apocalyptic Christian sect that a few years earlier battled federal agents before their Waco, Texas, compound erupted in a blazing inferno.
Carl Raschke, a professor of religious studies at the University of Denver, called the teachings of Heaven's Gate "X-Files theology."
"Applewhite saw himself as Jesus Christ engaged in covert action," Raschke said. "They used mainstream Biblical beliefs about the second coming and the rapture so people with a basic Christian mind-set would be sucked into their space-age version of the Book of Revelation."
Millennialism (from the Latin word for 1,000) comes from the Book of Revelation, the bizarre visionary conclusion of the New Testament -- a book written at a time when Christians were being fed to the lions and used as human torches by the Roman Emperor Nero.
This Revelation, or Apocalypse, describes a final, horrible battle between the forces of good and evil. Satan is thrown into a bottomless pit, and Christian martyrs are raised from the dead to reign with Christ for 1,000 years.
It's a text that has fascinated the persecuted and the paranoid for nearly 2,000 years. Countless Christians and non-Christians have tried to decipher the Book of Revelation, looking for clues about when and how human history will end and how something new will rise from the ashes.
Some religion scholars say the approach of the year 2000 has brought a new wave of doomsday cults.
Raschke is not so sure.
"Everyone's talking about millennial cults, but I'm getting a little jaded," he said. "Heaven's Gate has a lot more to do with Hale-Bopp than it does with the year 2000."
Other cult-watchers point out that the Heaven's Gate suicides were conducted in the days leading up to Good Friday, which marks the crucifixion of Jesus. It was also the same week of a total lunar eclipse and the peak of the Hale-Bopp comet.
Lewis noted the color of the cult's death shrouds, purple, is often associated with Passion Week, when Christians remember Jesus Christ's last days on Earth.
Their triangular shape is often seen in the New Age movement and among UFO groups as a reference to the Egyptian pyramids -- and to the speculation that space aliens helped build them.
Lalich, the cult counselor from Alameda, sees little value in poring over the pages upon pages of convoluted doctrine Applewhite and his followers posted on the World Wide Web.
"It's typical of UFO cults, a mishmash of stuff, a great mystical gobbledygook," she said. "It's all part of putting people in a trance by not being able to figure out the ideology."
Lalich sees more of an explanation in the sexual insecurities of Marshall Herff Applewhite, who was reportedly fired from two jobs because of his homosexuality and later had himself castrated in an apparent effort to control himself.
What speaks volumes about Heaven's Gate, Lalich said, is the fact that other male cultists were so brainwashed that they followed suit and mutilated their own bodies -- known as "vehicles" in the cult's parlance.
Or, as Applewhite explained on the World Wide Web:
"Some in the class have chosen on their own to have their vehicles neutered in order to sustain a more genderless and objective consciousness."
TWAIN, COMETS AND THE COST OF ETERNITY
What role did Mark Twain play in the closing chapter of the Heaven's Gate cult?
Bufo Calvin, a contributing editor to "Strange" magazine and creator of the "Bufo's Weird World" newsletter, thinks he has an explanation for one of the strange tidbits surrounding the sect's attempted rendezvous with the Hale-Bopp comet.
According to sheriff's deputies, some of the deceased cult members had a $5 bill and three quarters in their shirt pockets.
"Twain was very cynical about religion, and once wrote that the fare to get to heaven on the tail of a comet was $5.75," Calvin says.
Efforts to confirm the quote with several Twain experts proved unsuccessful as The Chronicle went to press.
Nevertheless, Twain did feel a certain affinity with another celebrated celestial event -- Halley's Comet.
Halley's Comet appeared in 1835, the year Twain was born, and appeared again in 1910, the year he died. Twain wrote of Halley's Comet in 1909:
"It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.' "
One more footnote: Heaven's Gate members were devoted fans of the "Star Trek" TV show, which has featured a Mark Twain character on several of its episodes.