Further reading for Heaven’s Gate
Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion by Benjamin E. Zeller
Cosmic Suicide: The Tragedy and Transcendence of Heaven’s Gate by Rodney Perkins & Forrest Jackson
It’s hard to understand just how hard the Jonestown mass suicide affected the entire world. Photos of hundreds of dead bodies cooking in the Guyanese jungle really fucked people up and that wound was torn open again in 1997 when the bodies of 39 identically dressed members of the Heaven’s Gate cult were found dead by ritual suicide in their Rancho Santa Fe, California communal home. This series of episodes is a reexamination of a previous episode from the deep past of Last Podcast on the Left.
What separated the Marshall Applewhite and his cult from similar cult tragedies, however, was their exceptionally peculiar set of beliefs. Applewhite’s cult believed in a cross-over of Christian gnosticism and UFO lore. Started somewhere in the early 1970’s by Marshall Applewhite and his partner, Bonnie Nettles, the cult led a nomadic life of poverty typical of outfits like these but with the death of Nettle’s in the mid-80’s and the cult suddenly without a rudder, Applewhite led the cult down a dark path of apocalyptic eschatology. He took the cult’s central belief that the Earth would come to some catastrophic end and the only way to survive was to leave the planet by vacating your human body and elevating your existence to a purely spiritual level.
With the approach of the Hale Bopp comet in 1997, Applewhite became convinced that the comet would be accompanied by a spacecraft that was there to received the elevated spirits of humanity and this would be the last chance the cult had a chance to break free. And they went willingly.
Episodes: 397 – 399
Episode Links
