Rhetoric of the Rejected Body at ‘Heaven's Gate’

Summary

In this article, I argue that the leader of the ‘Heaven's Gate’ or Human Individual Metamorphosis religious group known by its acronym ‘HIM’ committed ritual suicide with his followers in 1997 as a result of his own rejection of the mainstream Protestant ideology with which he was raised. The son of a Presbyterian minister, Applewhite confronted what he considered the overly worldly and materialistic social norms of his mainstream Protestantism through performing an identity that completely rejected his own human selfhood. Coming to believe that he was actually a multidimensional spiritual being named ‘Do’ that was only incarnated in the human body of Applewhite, he validated that belief by creating a community of followers who also rejected their humanity, believing that they too were possessed by non-physical beings. This community sought to minimize gender roles and the sexuality that those roles imply. In the end, this rejection became so radicalized that it led them all into the choice to negate their human identities completely through suicide.

On 14 September, 1975, ‘The Two’ held a public meeting in the small coastal town of Walport, Oregon. Soon, the national newspaper stories fed a rumor that these New Age spiritual leaders had kidnapped 20 attendees of that meeting. Though this so-called kidnapping was more the product of fear than actual fact, the news brought Bo and Peep, ‘The Two’, national attention.