UFO-religions in Historical Perspective: A comparison of Heavens Gate and the Cathars By Martin Pjecha So-called UFO-cults have been

portrayed in sociology as a typical product of postmodern Western industrial societies, a synthesis of science and religion.1 The very term UFO-religion is somewhat misleading, as it mistakes the discourse, or the medium, for the message. This is true particularly of one such group, which existed from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s, called Heavens Gate, which infamously committed mass-suicide in 1997, coinciding with the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet which they believed to be a sign of the impending re-cycling of the world. Undoubtedly, their specific blend of a recognizably Christian terminology and framework with science-fiction themes is modern, but many of their core beliefs, including their Christology, anthropology, Salvation teaching, and teaching on materiality, are not. These are traceable far back in time and have been recurrent across various societies, in movements in both Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, specifically in the dualist heresies including the Manicheans, the Bogomils, and specifically the Cathars of southern France and Italy in the thirteenth-century. Enlightenment and Weberian ideas about secularization theories, which are still influential in both popular and academic spheres, have helped to create these misconceptions of the secularness and modern origins of UFO-religions. If modernity implies an end to religious revelation and the waning of religion more generally,2 then new religious movements will necessarily mix secular-scientific and religious prophecies, and will be less religious than

Andreas Grnschlo, Waiting for the Big Beam: UFO Religions and Ufological Themes in New Religious Movements, in The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements, ed. James R. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 434. 2 Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 18-20.

established ones. Some recent work in history and sociology, however, has challenged such a normative and static idea of religiosity. Salvador Casanova Murgia has correctly argued that the secularness of many so-called New Religious Movements (within which UFO-religions are usually included) is not evidence of a waning interest in religion, but in a change in religious appearance beyond traditional settings.3 Moreover, Stanley Tambiah has shown that some historical evidence regarding the pre-Enlightenment secularists reveals the fluidity or disappearance of the distinction between religious, magic, and secular.4 In more general terms, it should be observed that modern apocalyptic movements or cults pose a difficult conceptual challenge for modern sociologists of religion regarding their classification and religiousness. One typology offered has given such movements no place within the religious-secular binary. This approach distinguishes modern apocalyptic movements as either of the traditional or religious type, which include those religious movements that anticipate imminent, total, collective, this-worldly, supernatural-salvation; the secular, those belief systems that in every way are the functional equivalent of their religious predecessors, expressed in nonreligious idioms from which the supernatural has been purged; and the improvisational, built of disparate elements, drawn not only from religion and ideology but from the occult and esoteric as well. The last is not simple syncretism of the former two, since no pure tradition is transformed or infiltrated by the ideas, symbols, or texts of another, but rather a new tradition is improvised from the most diverse and seemingly incompatible elements.5
3

Salvador Jimenez Murgia, Re-Enchanting a Religio-Scientific Experience: Understanding the Extraordinary within the Pana-Wave Laboratory, Epoch: The University of California Journal for the Study of Religion , 23 (2), 229-30. 4 Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Magic, science, religion, and the scope of rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 24-8. 5 Michael Barkun, Politics and Apocalypticism, in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, vol. 3, ed. Stephen J. Stein (New York: Continuum, 2000), 443-9.

Another approach has allowed cults into the religious framework, but has not clarified their ambiguous position there. Thus, in a modern compilation on Religions in the Modern World, these groups are lumped together with other New Religious Movements in a chapter separate from Christianity proper. The term New Religious Movement is acknowledged as less politically-derogative than cult or sect, but their academic treatment apart from the context of Christianity nevertheless implicitly voids any potential claim to a longer religious heritage or continuity, since NRMs are movements which have come to prominence in North America and Europe since the Second World War. 6 Yet another approach maintains that the cult-sect is neither distinct from religion, nor a different kind of religion, but religion in its primitive or pure form. Thus, it is through contact with the world and through secularization that sects are tamed and transformed into churches. Their initial otherworldliness is reduced and worldliness is accommodated. Institutional religions are thus inherently passive, acted upon by secularization which is the primary dynamic of religious economies, itself engendering movements of revival (sects) and innovation (cults).7 This seems to suggest a cyclical process, from cult-sect to church through secularization, and then splintering from of cults-sects, also through secularization. The general problem with these approaches is their a-historic conceptions of what religion, particularly in the Christian context, has meant and could mean. The first two frameworks cited which define cults as either outside religion proper, or outside Christianity proper, make assumptions regarding the acceptable belief content of these terms. Both of these frameworks, either explicitly or implicitly, assume a normative or pure tradition of religion and

Elisabeth Arweck, New Religious Movements, in Religions in the Modern World, ed. Linda Woodhead et al. (London: Routledge, 2002), 269, 279-81. 7 Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 429-30.

Christianity, within which improvisational beliefs in UFOs do not simply fit, or which is somehow temporally-defined by its existence prior to World War Two, and spatially-defined within North America and Europe. Taking into account historical counter-examples, however, such a normative model of a pure tradition is revealed as false; from its very beginnings Christianity struggled to create an orthodoxy from a variety of christianities, and the multiplicity of creeds never disappeared even after an orthodoxy prevailed. The east-west schism, the multiplicity of near-Eastern Churches, each with their own inner dissidents and heretics, makes a normative Christianity unattainable. Moreover, defining improvisation or innovation outside Christianity is equally objectionable, since this assumes a static, unevolving tradition which was never true of either the most conservative orthodoxies or the most radical heresies. The modern rejection of unacceptable innovations is one that has been echoed throughout the centuries of Christianity, from iconoclasm to indulgences, and must necessarily raise one tradition to a normative level in order to argue against the innovations of another. Furthermore, those approaches which do consider secular or secularization as a variable of importance still consider it only in the Weberian negative sense, the absence of religion; either the distinction between religion and the secular is taken for granted, or the secular is considered the privileged agent of change in relation to religion. UFO-religions are particularly difficult to harmonize within any pure tradition because of their seemingly high degree of modern innovation, and, given their reliance on science-fiction themes, they seem to be natural by-products of modernity. Speaking specifically of the Ralian religious movement, which takes as its foundational text its founders eschatological accounts of his meetings and communications with extraterrestrials, one modern author insists that [d]espite its explicit protestation that its members are not ufologists, the

Ralian religion would not exist if it were not for the historic advent of the UFO phenomenon. Such claims cite Jungian psychology, the postmodern condition, the death of God,8 and the influence of pop-culture and media in the modern world as factors contributing to the rise of UFO-religions.9 Again, this approach is a-historical. Apocalyptic visions from angels, saints, or in dreams were common in the middle ages and earlier, across Europe but also outside it. Nor were the texts which these prophets produced only popular amongst heterodox or extreme sects; the infamous medieval apocalyptic author Joachim of Fiore received encouragement from the Papacy and his advice was sought by kings, queens, and princes.10 The attempt to reduce every aspect of UFO-religions, from their conversion process, their beliefs, and their organization to a recognizable by-product of modernity ignores the parallels, both historical and contemporary, that such characteristics have with those of other, more mainstream, religious affiliations which by now have been normalized. The wonder expressed by scholars and public alike at the strange rules, dress, exclusiveness, and celibacy of Heavens Gate,11 for instance, is itself an expression of modernitys discomfort with the deeply religious, but is only possible by somehow normalizing similar behaviors among priests, monks, and nuns in our own cultures and of their counterparts in others. To illustrate the survival of certain religious themes and ideas throughout history, a brief overview of the abovementioned heretic group, the Cathars, will allow some insight into the beliefs of the Heavens Gate group, given their similarities. Essentially the core of Cathar
8

Bryan Sentes and Susan Palmer, Presumed Immanent: the Ralians, UFO Religions, and the Postmodern Condition, Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Vol. 4, No. 1, (Oct. 2000), 86-7. 9 Stephen D. OLeary, Apocalypticism in American Popular Culture: From the Dawn of the Nuclear Age to th e End of the American Century, in Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, 394-6. 10 Bernard McGinn (trans.), Apocalyptic Spirituality: Treatises and Letters of Lactantius, Adso of Montier-en-Der, Joachim of Fiore, The Franciscan Spirituals, Savonarola (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1979), 98. 11 Robert W. Balch, Looking behind the Scenes in a Religious Cult: Implications for the Study of Conversion, Sociological Analysis, Vol. 41, No. 2, (Summer, 1980), 137-43.

theology was to explain the nature of evil and their view of materiality. Cathars rejected that a good God could be capable of creating a sinful world, and this led them to posit the existence of two Gods, an evil and a good, which had created their own mirror-image universes. The bodies, spirits, and souls of most humans and animals had originally resided in the good Gods creation (which was the Biblical Land of the Living), but their souls were somehow captured by the evil God, either by trick or by invasion of the heavenly Land. These were then entrapped into new, evil bodies by the evil God when they reached his creation, Hell. Not only was their body a prison, but so was this entire cosmos; death of the body did not mean the freedom of their eternal souls, but only a re-entrapment into a new body, a cycle which would repeat indefinitely without intervention.12 Escape from Hell was only possible by breaking the cycle of reincarnation, which was achieved by the ritual of consolamentum, which effectively reunited the soul in hell with the spirit in heaven. Members able to attain this status were called perfect, and were guaranteed salvation to the Land of the Living after death in this world. To train for the status of perfect, the soul had to declare war on their evil bodies, including strict diets, renunciation of familial and social ties, and of desires for sex or property. Sexual distinction, as part of the earthly body, was not recognized as important. The status of perfect was, however, a contingent one, and was only guaranteed as long as the designated lifestyle was maintained; minor sins threatened the redeemed souls independence from the evil body, and so penance was perceived as a means to re-establish that separation. For major sins, like sex, a perfect could lose his redeemed status completely, and need to undergo the consolamentum again.13 Cathar Christology was similarly

12

Bernard Hamilton, The Cathars and Christian Perfection, in The Medieval Church: Universities, Heresy, and the Religious Life, ed. Peter Biller and Barrie Dobson (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1999), 7-10. 13 Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation , 2nd. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 106-9.

dualistic. Christs passion was real and legitimate, but did not take place in this world, but rather in the Land of the Living. For Cathars this was a necessary condition, since the good Christ could not take human physical form in the evil realm, as it was against his good nature. However, Christ did come to this world in immaterial form, though he successfully imitated a physical form, but this visit was an instructive one, to teach humans to be reconciled to God.14 Cathars made no technical distinction between perfects and simple believers. Unlike Catholic monks, Cathar perfects were not the representatives of an especially pious vanguard, but represented what it meant to be Christian. Nevertheless, in practice if not in theory, simple non-perfect Cathars could find some acceptance in the church, living worldly lives but faithful and perhaps learning the ways of the perfect which could be helpful to achieving perfection in the next life. As the numbers of actual perfects were always quite low, non-perfect believers who saw them as restored angels could express their faith with material aid and shelter.15 Moving from the Cathars to the Heavens Gate cult, we certainly find several differences and amendments, particularly in the realm of discourse and terminology, but even more striking are the parallels and similarities which the two movements shared, divided by more than sevenhundred years. Heavens Gate was founded in the early 1970s by a music teacher, Marshall Applewhite, and a nurse, Bonnie Nettles, who had found a common interest in spirituality and were awakened to their extraterrestrial origins and special mission on Earth.16 Heavens Gate essentially shared the Cathars radically negative view of materiality and physical existence, and the informative role of Christ in this world. Christ the Son was instructed by his Father to descend to earth from the Next Level and take a human vehicle with the sole purpose of offering the way into the Kingdom of Heaven. This involved leaving behind all worldly things,
14 15

Hamilton, 11-12. Lambert, 108-9. 16 Heavens Gate part 1 of 6, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmTq19ii2KA&feature=related.

including family, sensuality, selfish desires, your human mind, and even your human body.17 Explaining their faith, Marshall Applewhite, or Do as he called himself, stressed that unless you hate everything of this world - your sister, your mother, your brother - everything of this world, you will not know the Kingdom of Heaven,18 and the human condition is a temporary condition, a stepping stone, an opportunity to get out of this kingdom.19 Evacuation from this world was given its immanent importance by the impending spading under which was about to occur. Like the Cathars, Heavens Gate had a cyclical believe concerning existence, and the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet was a signal that the present cycle was closing. After its recycling or refurbishment, the planet would be filled for a new human civilization. To avoid re-entrapment and escape to the level above human,20 and also to prove their trust in Gods messenger,21 it was necessary to discard the human vehicles, hence the mass-suicide. Nevertheless, like the Cathars, there was a place for simple believers; Do referred to two additional kinds of believers other than those who chose to discard their human forms: the fully faithful who make an effort to estrange themselves from their human forms, and those who made no effort but acknowledged the truth of his message. These believers would not ascend to the Higher Level immediately after death, but would have a second chance to do so after the recycling.22 Though the fate of non-believers seems unclear, it can be supposed that they are destined never to ascend. Regarding their recruitment methods, Heavens Gate obviously had the advantage of pamphlets, the internet, video, and public recruitment drives over the Cathars. Nevertheless, the

17 18

Do, Dos Intro: Purpose Belief, http://www.heavensgate.com/misc/intro.htm. Heavens Gate Cult Initiation Part 2, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZnBkdFooFU&feature=related. 19 Heavens Gate Cult Initiation Part 6, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgJ07HMkJB4&feature=related. 20 Heavens Gate Cult Initiation Part 1, http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=AqSZhwu1Rwo. 21 Heavens Gate Cult Initiation Part 3, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3nynIIBeq8&feature=related. 22 Ibid.

permanent members of Heavens Gate, like the Cathars, comprised a wide range of class and age groups; early in their existence, Heavens Gates nearly two-hundred members ranged in age from 14 to 75, though mostly in their early twenties, and had at least some level of postsecondary education. Moreover, though many were single and weakly committed to their jobs, some older members left large families, good jobs, and expensive homes to follow the Two.23 What we know about the Cathars confirms a similar pattern. Its membership ranged from the poor and urban workers to aristocrats, but the majority came from the artisans and lesser traders. The long-term existence of the heresy, however, depended more on families than personalities, at least in France,24 but local exceptions certainly existed. Dos claim of being the incarnation of the same mind, or message, as that of Christ25 also parallels several Cathar cases. In 1178 Henry, the Abbot of Clairvaux, was sent as a papal legate to Toulouse, and recorded that one man of particular importance for the local Cathar community was so blinded by the devil that he called himself John the Evangelist.26 What this brief comparison shows is that there was a strong theological and organizational similarity between Heavens Gate and the Cathars. Nevertheless, it is unlikely (or at least unnecessary to assume) that there was any direct borrowing involved to explain this similarity; Marshall Applewhite probably did not research an obscure medieval heresy for spiritual guidance. Even the presence of evidence for direct contact and religious borrowing, as there was for the Cathars with the eastern Bogomils,27 does not alone explain why the idea of returning to a previous state of perfection was appealing. Somehow this coincides with a basic human feeling of social alienation and simply of not belonging in ones own skin or society.
23 24

This refers to Applewhite and Nettles, or Ti and Do. Balch, 137. Lambert, 115-7. 25 Heavens Gate Cult Initiation Part 1, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqSZhwu1Rwo. 26 Joseph R. Strayer, The Albigensian Crusades (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1971), 254. 27 Lambert, 120-1.

Mllody, reflecting on the choices of her fellow students to submit their lives for their beliefs, explained that they wanted something more than the human world had to offer, seeking some type of goodness, some type of rightness, that they did not feel in this world; another emphasized Im really tired of this world and what it has become; yet another that theres just nothing interesting here, not enough to keep us. Variations of this theme of disillusionment are repeated throughout virtually all the student statements.28 The important point here is that there is nothing uniquely modern about such disillusionment. One need not resort to the abovementioned postmodern condition or the death of God to explain such a phenomenon; certainly this may be demonstrated with reference to the Cathars, but also with the less-unorthodox example of monks and nuns who gave up possession for seclusion, or various religious ascetics and hermits, both orthodox and heterodox, which became popular in the late middle ages. Other Heavens Gate members shared the appeal of the groups ideas with interviewers after they left it. Michael Conyers, a member of thirteen-years, explained that Ti and Dos message was one that was talking to my Christian heritage but in a modern updated wa y. Like, Mary was impregnated by being taken up on a spacecraft that was an answer that was better than just plain virgin birth; it was technical, it had physicality to it. Another former member of nineteen years, Sawyer, explained I had all this energy to be kind of like an evangelist and yet before the group I had no real avenue for that.29 Rio DAngelo, a member of three years, explained that after some years of searching for spiritual purpose, Heavens Gates teaching on the world as Gods soul garden offered a theology that was so incredibly believable, and very basic. And I understood it, it sounded familiar to me.30 Steven Hill, who joined with his wife just six months before the suicides, explained the groups sympathy to some recent anxieties and
28 29

Student Exit Statements, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORVx62aDbyU. Heavens Gate part 1 of 6, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmTq19ii2KA&feature=related. 30 Heavens Gate part 3 of 6, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5sZUZhKBqw.

difficulties the Hills had faced. Though forced to leave their children in the care of relatives, Steven explained the group seemed to be a perfect match.31 These accounts give some insight into the appeal and message of Heavens Gate for its members, and again parallels with the Cathars may be instructive. Much of the appeal of Cathar theology came from its simplified theodicy, that is, its explanation on the origin of evil. Rather than the classical Augustinian emphasis on the fall, original sin, and free will, Cathar dualism gave the responsibility of evil to the evil god, which explained evil in the world. In much the same way, the tangibility or simplicity of Heavens Gate theology de-mystified traditionally mystical events like the virgin birth or the meaning and origin of life, mentioned above. In addition the group offered those somehow socially-alienated, like Sawyer and the Hills, support to express their spiritual drive or their worldly difficulties. However, re-interpretation or demystification of common religious dogmas, or the role of religious groups of providing an avenue for spiritual expression or of serving as a safe-haven, are also not modern as such, and can be found throughout history in both orthodox and heterodox groups. Even the UFO, that symbol of modernity which scholars take to be the defining common theme of UFO-religions, is in the case of Heavens Gate the medium, not the message. First of all, the Heavens Gate members clearly believed in the immanent destruction of the world, and so evacuation was in the first place a matter of survival. In addition, the level above human was the next stage in the process of evolution, and whatever the specific promises of Do, members clearly perceived it as somehow representing heaven, utopia, or a state of perfection, similar to the Cathar Land of the Living, all that this world is not. This explains the profound joy which both the Heavens Gate members, and the Cathars, expressed before their worldly deaths. One Heavens Gate member of 21 years, Jmmody, speaking just days before the groups
31

Heavens Gate part 4 of 6, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DWlVq8zHYo.

exit, expressed I am very excited about going, I can hardly wait, and Im ready to go!,32 and another, asked about his feelings on the coming event laughingly answered This is the happiest day of my life!.33 Accounts of the Cathars show a similar theme of restlessness which accompanied their escape from this world. In 1210, when one of their strongholds was captured, almost one hundred and fifty perfects were given the option of recantation or death by fire; only three recanted, the rest chose death, and many of them threw themselves into the fire of their own accord. Similar accounts exist of Cathar children, who otherwise would have been spared, jumping into the flames where their parents burned.34 By fetishizing the flying saucer in their treatment of the discourse of these groups, scholars and the media necessarily misunderstand their appeal to their members and their historical continuity. Such an a-historical approach to the categorization of UFO-religions, by both academics and the media, has biased the consideration of such groups by judgments on the verity, or lack thereof, of their theologies. This is both because of the heterodoxy of their beliefs and their seeming discontinuity with established religious traditions, which are supposedly immune from secularization. As such groups are surely deluded,35 the sociologist and the psychologist must try to explain how believers could possibly follow such a manifestly false belief-system. In some ways, this reveals a religious double-standard; a modern believer in an omnipotent god attracts little attention from scholars when he says Im a Christian or Jew or Muslim, yet less orthodox New Religious Movements, especially those labeled cults, exercise all possible sociological, economic, political, and psychological theorists who are dazzled by their existence.

32

Heavens Gate Students Final Exit Statement JMMODY-OLLODY-DWODY, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-s1oqIIfN4&feature=related. 33 Student Exit Statements, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORVx62aDbyU. 34 Strayer, 71. 35 OLeary, 394.

The comparison of Heavens Gate with the Cathars is only one of many possibilities which could illustrate the importance of distinguishing amongst New Religious Movements rather than simply categorizing them together, and also reconsidering their newness, as it is unnecessary and indeed inaccurate to insist on the prime importance of modernity in their existence. Not all New Religious Movements are new or secularized mixtures of sciencefiction and religion. Certainly, many of their claims and much of their discourse, as is the case for Heavens Gate, is represented in language which is pseudo-scientific and reveals sciencefiction influences, but this should not put their religiosity into question; every religion expresses itself with language and terminology which its believers find most evocative and convincing. Nor should the medium be confused with the message; Heavens Gate was a religious group which offered like-minded people a meaning to existence and a haven from social anxieties, and it was a solution which its believers found appealing, and so, despite its heterodoxy, served many of the important functions that all religions do, both new and old.

Bibliography Printed Sources Arweck, Elisabeth. New Religious Movements, in Religions in the Modern World, edited by Linda Woodhead, Paul Fletcher, Hiroko Kawanami, David Smith. London: Routledge, 2002, 264-288. Balch, Robert W. Looking behind the Scenes in a Religious Cult: Implications for the Study of Conversion, Sociological Analysis, Vol. 41, No. 2, (Summer, 1980): 137-143. Barkun, Michael. Politics and Apocalypticism. in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, vol. 3, edited by Stephen J. Stein. New York: Continuum, 2000, 442-460. Casanova, Jose. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Grnschlo, Andreas. Waiting for the Big Beam: UFO Religions and Ufological Themes in New Religious Movements, in The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements, edited by James R. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, 419-444. Hamilton, Bernard. The Cathars and Christian Perfection, in The Medieval Church: Universities, Heresy, and the Religious Life, edited by Peter Biller and Barrie Dobson. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1999, 5-23. Lambert, Malcolm. Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, 2nd. Edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. McGinn, Bernard (trans.) Apocalyptic Spirituality: Treatises and Letters of Lactantius, Adso of Montier-en-Der, Joachim of Fiore, The Franciscan Spirituals, Savonarola. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1979. Murgia, Salvador Jimenez. Re-Enchanting a Religio-Scientific Experience: Understanding the Extraordinary within the Pana-Wave Laboratory. Epoch: The University of California Journal for the Study of Religion, 23 (2): 225-251. OLeary, Stephen D. Apocalypticism in American Popular Culture: From the Dawn of the Nuclear Age to the End of the American Century, in Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, 392-426. Sentes, Bryan, and Susan Palmer, Presumed Immanent: the Ralians, UFO Religions, and the Postmodern Condition, Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Vol. 4, No. 1, (Oct. 2000): 86-105.

Stark, Rodney and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Strayer, Joseph R. The Albigensian Crusades. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1971. Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. Magic, science, religion, and the scope of rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Online sources Do, Dos Intro: Purpose Belief, http://www.heavensgate.com/misc/intro.htm. Heavens Gate Cult Initiation Part 1, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqSZhwu1Rwo. Heavens Gate Cult Initiation Part 2, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZnBkdFooFU&feature=related. Heavens Gate Cult Initiation Part 3, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3nynIIBeq8&feature=related. Heavens Gate Cult Initiation Part 6, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgJ07HMkJB4&feature=related. Heavens Gate part 1 of 6, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmTq19ii2KA&feature=related. Heavens Gate part 3 of 6, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5sZUZhKBqw. Heavens Gate part 4 of 6, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DWlVq8zHYo. Heavens Gate Students Final Exit Statement JMMODY-OLLODY-DWODY, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-s1oqIIfN4&feature=related. Student Exit Statements, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORVx62aDbyU.