UNISIL

In March 1997, police found 39 bodies lying nearly in their beds, their heads and torsos covered by purple cloths in a large home in California. They were all wearing black shirts and trousers and had a $5 note with three quarter coins in their pockets. They also wore an armband which read: ‘Heaven’s Gate Away Team’. All of them had drunk a cocktail of vodka and phenobarbital and wrapped their heads in polythene bags.

Heaven’s Gate was one of many millennial and UFO-based cults in the United States. It was originally set up in the early 1970s by Marshall Applewhite together with Bonnie Nettles, who had died in 1985. They were known as ‘Do’ and ‘Ti’ and she believed themselves to be “The Two” (two ‘witnesses’ mentioned in the Book of Revelation).

The cult combined various beliefs - Christian salvation and apocalypse, evolutionary advancement and travel to other worlds. The people who joined the cult renounced family and worldly goods to live a communal life of asceticism and celibacy in a rented mansion they described as a monastery. They called each other brothers and sisters and knew that the next level of existence would be free of gender and sexual activity. Some, including Applewhite, underwent castration.

Pity would be no more, If we did not make somebody Poor: And Mercy no more could be, If all were as happy as we;

And mutual fear brings peace; Till the selfish loves increase, Then Cruelty knits a snare, And spreads his baits with care.

He sits down with holy fears, And waters the ground with tears: Then Humility takes its root Underneath his foot.

Soon spreads the dismal shade Of Mystery over his head; And the Caterpillar and Fly, Feed on the Mystery.

And it bears the fruit of Deceit, Ruddy and sweet to eat; And the Raven his nest has made In its thickest shade.