A Different Look at the Heaven’s Gate Cult

David Redles is quite correct in his contention that apocalypticism is inherent to most mass violence. Joining Gershom Scholem (The Messianic Idea in Judaism [1971]) and others, who have warned of the dangers posed by those committed to “pressing for the end,” his essay makes several points on the allure the apocalyptic holds for many in society. I would like to use this opportunity to suggest a slightly different understanding of the Heaven’s Gate event.

The Heaven’s Gate suicide’s immediate media wake witnessed two main camps of experts. The first saw it as a cultic phenomena and dutifully went about identifying coercion, guruism, and brainwashing as the main ingredients of the suicidal soup. Celebrants in a culture marked by definitional looseness and political naiveté, they easily labeled the event a tragedy and advocated greater vigilance on the part of the state and public to prevent any further catastrophes. The second,

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invoking the fundamental irrationality of the spiritual quest, adopted a more apologist tone. Although this contingent refused to engage in the sanctimonious reductionism central to social scientific analysis, their commentary was almost completely devoid of any form of insight, rendering it eerily forgettable.

What both failed to realize is that the end for the sexless wayfarers came sometime in the early eighties. As the “Great Communicator” (Ronald Reagan), employing a great menu of apocalyptic tropes, moved through the nightly news convincing Americans of the Russians’ unalterable venality, this group of unanchored innocents were engaged in constructing a theology that established both the Earth’s ultimate unviability and an avenue of escape.

Many consider Baudrillard’s pronounce-ment made in “Looking Back on the End of the World,” “everything has already been wiped off the map. It is useless to dream; the clash has gently taken place everywhere,” to be another example of European intellectual nihilism, a condition that inhabitants of the New Jerusalem find most palatable. Yet with this Heaven’s Gate testimonial, “I’ve been on this planet for thirty-one years and there’s nothing here for me,” it receives an absolute edification. Taken seriously (something few desire to do), the statement discloses a “mentality” and situation that is post-apocalyptic. Because the end has been so “gentle” in coming, the elite can continue their insistence on the marginality and madness of those intimate with the end (while simultaneously going feverishly about the fortification of their workplaces and residences against the Beast’s possibilities). But those margins are spilling over with individuals radically demoralized by the society’s spiritual and emotional disembowelment. For them, any act of will aimed at the creation of meaning requires a fair degree of excess.

As described by such chroniclers as Denis Johnson, George Saunders, and Campbell McGrath, the post-apocalyptic is a world thick in disengagement and vitiation. In the following passage from Denis Johnson’s “The Glen Where the Failed Gods Are Drinking” (in Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly [1995]), “I just a poor mortal having stumbled onto/ the glen where the failed gods are drinking/ stand here almost remembering my birth/ and the trees too are beautiful and dead,” the lone individual, cursed with a hypertrophied memory, occupies a terrain in which the divine is debauched and nature resides in a state of pornographic defoliation. In such conditions, the attributes of expediency and adaptation, to name only two perennial favorites of psychologists and other guardians of culture, strike even the quasi-authentic as far more sinister than self-destruction.

Let me conclude by invoking E.M. Cioran (On the Heights of Despair [1992]), a philosopher well suited for apocalyptic modes of being. In his “The Sense of Endings,” an essay in which he states “there are so many kinds of death,” Cloran argues that “when men can no longer bear the monotony and banality of ordinary existence, they will find in each experience of the absolute an opportunity to commit suicide.” In the realm of the post-apocalypse, suicide remains an extreme but not fanatical act; an act that in many, perhaps most, instances cannot be considered violent. Too much has been sacrificed for ordinary life to be considered sacred. Because the victim and perpetrator are identical and the death imposed consensual, there is no manhunt, no trial; the conjectures floated by the experts seem to hold only air, the anchors appear even more jejune than usual. Even for the most devoted this makes for barely passable entertainment. Perhaps this is one reason those who remain earthbound dread it so.

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