“People who join cult are crazy and stupid”. But, are they really?
except they are not — they are just like us: Sporting a haircut, professional & educated, wearing Nike, and struggling filling a spiritual void.
People who join “cult groups” are often describe by media as crazy, duped, and brainwashed — and let’s be honest here — you probably think the same as media simply because as a result, this has been the “common knowledge” without countervailing information that has been readily available to us. As viewers, we lampoon their choices and think of them as irrational beings. But, the list of members who joined The Heaven’s Gate group, a UFO “religion” who claim they are the “cult of cults” proved that this judgement could be one sided.
In an ABC News documentary[1], it gives us a view on the hidden secret behind the curtains of the Heaven’s Gate house. Like how group identity diminishes one’s identity of the self,[2] the documentary avoids mentioning their names but gives a description on who they were before.
Without hearing their backstory, it was almost hard to distinguish the differences in them. Like any other cult groups, the resemblance in their physical appearance is hard not to miss. They were all wearing identical gray clothes, and all were sporting similar buzz cut. Their looks reinforces a unified group mentality, but also strips away any gender markers in them; it was difficult to distinguish who was the male from the female as they appeared similar to a genderless alien, which is the very claim of who they truly are. Despite their group identity, their backstory tells uniqueness about their individual stories on who and where they came from.
In the video, by the stove was a woman steering a pot who was once a high-heeled cheer leader in New York. A tall man by the door was a Colorado businessman and a former political candidate. Next to her was the brother of the famous actress Nichelle Nichols, who played lieutenant Uruha in the iconic Star Trek. While they were all high achievers with promising future, these kind and intelligent people trade their daily lives, careers, families, and friends in exchange of living communally in a UFO believing group led by Marshall Applewhite who was facing his own emotional and identity struggles. What made them join Applewhite’s group?
Applewhite, a closeted homosexual, was a former professor at St. Thomas University, but was fired for not containing his “libidinal energy” through having an affair with a male student. As he was trying to overcome his libido for sexual pleasures in a hospital, he met nurse Bonnie Lu Nettles there in the mid 1970s. According to Margaret Singer in Coming Out of Cults, “many participants joined these religious cults during period of depression and confusion, when they had a sense that life was meaningless” (1). As members join a cult, it could also be a similar narrative for leaders who start this kind of group. For instance, Applewhite was the first “member” of Nettles’ astrology and new philosophies, he later became the leader of his cult group partnering with Nettles. He believed and taught that chosen people like him who were impregnated by aliens belong in another universe. This imagination provided a disillusioned escape in his internal and sexual conflict. In fact, he tried to devoid himself of his old self by taking a different name as “Do” (a musical note), and naming Nettles as “Ti”. As the two consolidates Heaven’s Gate’s doctrine. Ti left her daughter, and Do divorced his wife and abandoned his children. The two were definitely facing psychological and daily challenges, especially Do when Ti died of cancer. Do tried to contain his ego as his “libidinal energy” continually searched for a male object to shower it and met the needs of his sexual desires. In other words, as Sigmund Freud defines it, it is where one “project their psychic energy on objects that is outside the self” (72). In order for the ego of the self to be expressed in a different object, in Do’s case a sexual male, one has to have an “object-cathexis”. It is only through this way that the libidinal energy will be contained because “[t]he object has taken the place of the ego ideal” and “will [now] receive the attention and infatuation” (75). For Do, the idea of an extraterrestrial universe and ungendered aliens promised him utopia and occupied his ego. It provided him solutions to all the means of escapes he was looking for especially his confusion in his gender and sexual desires.
In the same way, as he believed that a flying saucer would come to the Earth to pick him up from a world he initially felt alienated to, it became the unifying idea that his followers embraced as well. His followers joined him in projecting their “object-cathexis”, which means the receiver of love, towards the idea of apocalyptic evacuation resulting to obedience to Do.
Do also takes place the object catexis of his followers, where the ability to criticize him becomes silent. “Everything that [Do] does and asks for is right and blameless” (75). This is why when Do asked his followers to castrate themselves, some of his followers who flew to Mexico with him did it because “self-sacrifice thus follow as a natural consequence” (75). This act of castration did not only provide Do a means of containing his libido, it also encouraged the group on the idea that their bodies were mere “containers” of their alien spirits. Incapacitated for emotional restraint and delay of the spaceship that never came, the group took a shortcut to their “spirituality” leaving their physical bodies behind to find redemption in an extraterrestrial world. They willingly abided and left their message not to specific family members, but to “Earthlings” in general. Their reduction from individuals to the level of alien group individuals cut their family ties and restrained them to develop reasoning and independence that eventually led them to do a group ritual that declared the biggest mass suicide that happened in the soil of America.
So, on the night of March 27, 1997, a mansion of death in Rancho Santa Fe, California, yielded 39 bodies including its leader Do. The group ingested vodka and sedatives, and suffocated themselves by tying bags over their heads. Along with their unifying act of suicide was their matching dark clothing and their “Just do it” sneakers with $5.75 in their pocket. They laid on their backs and were draped with a purple cloak signifying their Heaven’s Gate logo and color related to a spacecraft. Their identical, ungendered appearance, and castrated bodies made it impossible for police to identify them individually as they escape their reality and took the shortcut to their imagined extraterrestrial utopia, the very reason on what draw them to join the group; an escape to reality. So, perhaps cult members are not so unfathomable; they represent the dire extreme of something we all do, which is to seek meaning and connection in our lives when we feel excluded, or bankrupt in our spiritual life. All of them claim that they are leaving their “earthly vessels”. This means that they desire and long for a place that is “spiritual” — sadly it was in their own terms. They tried to crawl out from their failures, inner struggles, temptations and sins, and chose to believe to something that will be the object-catexis of their void heart. The questions then are clear: on humans’ continuous rejection of the Holy GOD, who offers salvation, to what extent are they able to fill in their spiritual void, and will they ever be? If humans will listen to each other and be loving, is there a possibility to not feel excluded in the world made for us?
Works Cited Page
ABCNews. “Videos inside Heaven’s Gate House Reveal Those Lured into Cult: 20/20
‘The Cult next Door’ Preview.” YouTube, YouTube, 11 Mar. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dju4F0twu0A.
Dein, Simon, and Roland Littlewood. “Apocalyptic Suicide.” Mental health, religion & culture 3.2 (2000): 109–114. Web.
Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Ch.IX, Herd Instict).
Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Ch.VIII “Being in Love and Hypnosis).
Heaven’s Gate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_(religious_group)
Singer, Margaret. “Coming out of the Cults.” Cult Recovery 101, 11 Feb. 2018, https://cultrecovery101.com/cult-recovery-readings/coming-out-of-the-cults/.
Heaven’s Gate cult members record farewell messages: 20/20 Preview
https://abcnews.go.com/2020/video/heavens-gate-cult-members-record-farewell-messages-2020-83400859
Notes:
[1] ABCNews. “Videos inside Heaven’s Gate House Reveal Those Lured into Cult: 20/20 ‘The Cult next Door’ Preview.” YouTube, YouTube, 11 Mar. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dju4F0twu0A.
[2] Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Ch.IX, Herd Instict, p.81)
[3] Daily Mail. Biggest mass suicide in the soil of the USA.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9012075/Heavens-Gate-UFOs-cults-largest-mass-suicide-event-American-soil.html
*This paper received an “Exceeds Expectation mark” in a UC Berkeley Cults in Popular Culture class, but edited for this blog post.
