How the loudest ritual suicide in American history has to do with collectible sneakers? Esquire tells the story of the totalitarian sect Heaven's Gate - escapists and dreamers who wanted to get into Star Trek, but unexpectedly found themselves in an episode of The X-Files or American Horror Story.
Sleepy, warm Californian afternoon, March 1997. An old pickup truck slowly drives up an empty dusty road to an unremarkable mansion in the Rancho Santa Fe area. Boxes with shoes in the back - the owners of the mansion ordered 39 pairs of identical sneakers from a famous brand. The salesman unloads them at the door: "Why do you need so much for the basketball team?" For the team. But not for basketball - for the crew of the spaceship. As in Star Trek, only ends darker.
Marshall Applewhite, leader of the Heavenly Gate sect and leader of this expedition, sits in front of his line of followers in a cheap plastic chair, posing as a Starfleet officer on the bridge. The camera turns around. The sectarians wear the same black uniform with the "Heavenly Gates Airborne Group" stripes. The landing group, away team, was the name of the explorers of new planets in Star Trek. The astronauts smile tiredly when Applewhite calls out their names: “Jwnodi! Yrsodi! Lies! " A week later, the videotape with this recording will first go to the local sheriff, and then to television. Viewers of the evening news around the world will see a surreal sight: 39 bodies, covered with identical purple headscarves, from under which legs stick out in black sneakers. The firm's logo marks the end of the sect's long history,which promised its adepts a trip on a flying saucer in the tail of comet Hale - Bopp.
The police take away the bodies of the sectarians. The loud ritual suicide of three dozen people shocked the whole of America.
The fate of Heaven's Gate itself could be an episode of a series - The X-Files, American Horror Story, or Stranger Things. A destructive cult in a sunny California suburb - very close to the ordinary world and at the same time infinitely far from reality. The neighbors did not suspect anything - they rarely saw the people who rented the mansion in 1996. The cultists almost never left the house and lived according to the schedule invented by Captain Applewhite. Seclusion, strict diet, ban on emotions, celibacy, the same clothes for men and women, shaved heads. The Heavenly Gates adepts dreamed of getting rid of bodily desires, previous attachments and, in general, of their past personality. In the higher dimensions, Applewhite taught, there is no gender and base feelings. Enlightened cosmic beings think collectively, like a hive,and move freely around the universe. Like the Borg race in Star Trek. The students understood at a glance: "Star Trek", "Star Wars", "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" - Applewhite explained his convoluted cosmology in the understandable language of pop culture. The mansion gradually turned for the sectarians into a kind of starship "Enterprise", which landed on an alien hostile planet. True, the heroes of the series explored the world around them, and the sectarian cosplayers sat inside, listening to lectures of their fake captain Kirk for hours and endlessly reviewing sci-fi films that he selected to his taste. Hundreds of people passed through the sect: some just went to meetings, some lived like this for years, but only 38 introverted visionaries and the captain were in the last landing party. Modest, cheerful,engaged in spiritual search - this is how relatives and friends described the members of the sect. In old family photographs of sectarians, there are ordinary American inhabitants, doomed to live an average American life and escaping from it first in dreams of traveling across the Galaxy, and then completely deciding to evacuate from the world of the living.
Once upon a time, Heaven's Gate was not a suicidal cult of insane Star Trek cosplayers, but an ordinary commune for geeks and hippies. At the turn of the seventies, "flower children" staged antiwar marches, indulged in free love and experimented with psychedelics, and the future Captain Applewhite was going through an existential crisis. His wife left him and took two children. From his job - a music teacher at the University of Alabama - was fired for having an affair with a student. In addition, Applewhite, the devout son of a Presbyterian pastor, was, to his horror, homosexual - and could not reconcile a forbidden attraction with a harsh Puritan upbringing. So he would have plunged into depression, but met Bonnie Lou Nettles. Bonnie Lou was the perfect conservative wife: husband, four children, nursing in a mental institution - in fact,there the future leaders of the sect met. Nettles often went to esoteric meetings and seances, and after hours peered up into the sky, hoping to see a flying saucer. Both Applewhite and Nettles dreamed of change and took the meeting as a sign from above. Nettles convinced a new acquaintance that they had already met in a past life. They began to call themselves "Two" - hinting at a connection with the prophets from the Revelation of John the Theologian, the harbingers of the Apocalypse - and took the names Do and C, in honor of the first and seventh notes. Two gurus set off on a journey across America, preaching and completing their legend on the fly from excerpts from books they had read - Blavatsky, Heinlein, Asimov and the Bible. The result is a nuclear cocktail of Christian eschatology, palp fiction, ufology and esotericism. Such sermons didn’t work on intellectuals, but they did well on everyone else.
Marshall Applewhite, the leader of Heaven's Gate, resembled the heroes of the first seasons of Star Trek even in appearance. In his youth, he played in musicals and conducted choirs.
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Two aging hippies hitchhiked, lived in a tent, earned food by donating blood, preached in esoteric circles and at meetings of Christian parishes. To the listeners, they seemed to be the highest extraterrestrial beings stuck on Earth in human bodies - just like Jesus of Nazareth two thousand years ago. Applewhite and Nettles declared the body as a temporary shell, and the purpose of life is to move to the "next level" and move to the kingdom of heaven (literally - on a flying saucer). This ridiculous design becomes a little clearer if you know that it was invented by people who adored "Star Trek" - they spied the principle of teleportation from planet to spaceship in the same place. It remained only to assemble the crew, prepare it and wait for the right moment. Ironically, one of the first followers of the sect was the brother of Nichelle Nichols, the actress who played the role of Lieutenant Uhuru in Star Trek. Gradually, believers gathered around the self-proclaimed alien beings. After one of the sermons, twenty people at once left their families (some of them children) and went on a journey for their new spiritual teachers. It was a triumph, and this was a problem: even then, the sect demanded to cut off ties with loved ones, so the relatives of the missing sounded the alarm. Heaven's Gate did not want to attract attention - in post-Mansonian America, sects were treated with caution. The adepts were allowed to go home - many families then saw their relatives alive for the last time - and then the "Heavenly Gate" announced that "the harvest is over" and no more new members would be recruited. Sectarians,frightened by the attention of the press and police, they disappeared from prying eyes. At first it was like a summer camp: traveling, spending the night in campsites, songs with a guitar around the fire, apostolic poverty.
Applewhite served six months for theft. He claimed that God gave him the car.
Lecture for students.
The serene life ended in 1985 - by that time hippies had been replaced by yuppies, and ultracapitalism had replaced free love and hopes for a utopia. And Nettles was painfully dying of cancer. When she died, the main tenet of the "Heavenly Gate" doctrine collapsed: the supreme being, which was supposed to move to the spaceship along with the body, left its tortured shell on the hospital bed. Applewhite was crushed with grief: he lost a spiritual friend, the tale collapsed. To the cultists, he explained that Nettles was the embodiment of a powerful entity - God - and a weak human body could not withstand such strength. Applewhite claimed that Nettles was alive and continued to communicate with him telepathically, but he himself seemed to no longer believe in this. He fell into depression again and gradually began to go crazy.
Identifier of aliens and other personal belongings of sectarians.
The sect became more and more dark and closed, the rituals - more and more strange. To completely erase the former identities of his followers, Applewhite replaced their names with callsigns according to the principle once coined with Nettles: Mllodi, Gdodi, Chkodi, Prsodi. In the instructions of the captain there was less and less meaning: "We must run not from reality, but into reality." "It is necessary to evacuate from the Earth before it is handed over for processing." The celibacy prescribed to the sectarians reached a painful degree - eight of them decided to emasculate themselves. Instead of preaching at hippie gatherings, the adepts bought ads on USA Today. In 1993, they began publishing manifestos on Usenet, the future Internet (but there they laughed at the space prophets). In 1995, Applewhite left a series of incoherent posts on newsgroups under the heading "Jesus undercover reveals his identity before leaving." And then astronomers announced that comet Hale - Bopp was approaching the planet - its bright tail was clearly visible from Earth. Ufologists convinced the public that a UFO was flying in the comet's tail. "Heavenly gates" have waited for their sign. Applewhite rented a spacious house in California and (very American-style) bought every cultist alien abduction insurance. Applewhite rented a spacious house in California and (very American-style) bought every cultist alien abduction insurance. Applewhite rented a spacious house in California and (very American-style) bought every cultist alien abduction insurance.
March 1997. Captain Applewhite sits in a cheap plastic chair. He records a farewell video and introduces his team. 39 to beam up - a woman with a haircut under a boy speaks just like the heroes of Star Trek. Applewhite is calm, its adherents are serene - voluntary imprisonment on a fantastic death row has come to an end. Once they dreamed of space, but now they are devastated people, exhausted by isolation. A few days later, they would put on their uniforms again, and pocketed a five-dollar bill and three-quarters each. They will pack and place their bags next to the bunks, preparing to take the essentials on board the ship.
Thirty-nine members of the Heavenly Gate sect have committed the most massive ritual suicide in American history. Their site has survived on the Internet - a naive page from the era of early web design. The last message is still flashing there: "Red alert!" A pair of sneakers of the same model now costs 5-6 thousand dollars.