Tract Offers Clues About Group’s Theology, Motives

Following a charismatic leader known as “the Representative” and taking their cue from the heavens--Comet Hale-Bopp--the men and women of the Heaven’s Gate cult apparently believed they were leaving this week for a spaceship that would take them to a utopian “Next Kingdom.”

The complex theology and strident beliefs of 39 cult members, who died in an apparent mass suicide in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe, apparently are spelled out in a voluminous tract they left behind. It is titled “Heaven’s Gate: The Door to the Physical Kingdom Level Above Human.”

The religious tract and a series of other computer postings on the World Wide Web offered a ready cache of clues to a bizarre event that might otherwise have taken weeks to uncover.

Experts saw in the group’s writings a synthesis of ancient and modern religious themes, mixing space-age images with biblical citations in a quest for salvation.

The Heaven’s Gate manifesto describes its principal leaders as a man named “Do” or “King Do” and a woman named “Ti,” who it said were infused by heavenly spirits more than 20 years ago. That mystical event propelled Do, described as a former college music professor, and Ti, a registered nurse from Houston, on a two-decade odyssey, searching for acolytes on their mission to reach “the Next Level,” the text said.

The descriptions of the two leaders also appeared to closely match those of a duo that has been widely criticized for more than a decade by authorities and in several states. Officials say that the pair ruined many lives by manipulating their followers into abandoning reality and all their worldly possessions.

In a haunting videotape that a surviving group member from Michigan released to a television station Thursday, a follower told why she was prepared to leave Earth for King Do.

“Maybe they’re crazy for all I know, but I don’t have any choice but to go for it, because I’ve been on this planet for 31 years and there’s nothing here for me,” said the woman, who sported close-cropped hair and sat next to another woman, who remained silent.

“I don’t feel there was any way that anybody could say that I was influenced by somebody’s strong personality,” the woman added. “The second time I sat with King Do, I felt absolutely [that] . . . there was no lie in [him], that there was truth and goodness beyond anything I’ve ever seen.”

On their Web site, Heaven’s Gate followers repeatedly invoked Christian imagery and biblical citations to make their case--construing the appearance of their own “Representative” as a sort of Second Coming. But they rejected mainline Christian and Jewish religions as “counterfeits” that had strayed hopelessly from their original purposes.

In their detached, often rambling New Age jargon, they proclaimed that they were forsaking worldly wants and were reaching instead for a “Next Level.” Non-believers who are left behind will be “plowed under” in a coming apocalypse, they said. One of the group’s Internet postings, titled “Our Position Against Suicide,” asserted that outsiders commit the equivalent of suicide by turning “against the Next Level when it is being offered.”

“That window to Heaven will not open again until another civilization is planted and has reached sufficient maturity (according to the judgment of the Next Level),” the more than 100-page text said.

On their infrequent public forays in recent months, members of the group left a distinct and sometimes unsettling impression. They typically dressed in black pants and shoes and wore their hair shorn close to their heads. Many seemed obsessed with the television series “Star Trek,” according to Nick Matzorkis, a Beverly Hills businessman who worked with members of the group for about nine months to establish Web sites.

The group had disavowed all their possessions and meditated frequently. They swore off alcohol, drugs and sex. Some of the men had even been castrated, one of the female members told Matzorkis last fall, he said.

The members of the group had come to view their bodies only as “containers” or “vehicles” that they would shed once they rendezvoused with a spaceship.

“I’m surprised how well this ‘vehicle’ is dealing with it,” a former cult member said after he discovered the bodies Wednesday morning, according to Matzorkis, who employs the man in his computer company.

Members of the group said they were flourishing in their isolation from tainted mainstream institutions. They said they felt a philosophical bond with a wide array of fringe people and groups--the Branch Davidians of Waco, the Unabomber, the Order of the Solar Temple, Aum Shinri Kyo of Japan and the Freemen of Montana--whom they believed were also fighting a “corrupt world.”

“This is not to say that the Next Level and this Representative would condone many of [the] choices and actions” of those groups, the manifesto said. “However, these groups seem to have correctly identified the ‘enemy,’ and feel compelled, at varying degrees, to separate from what they believe is a corrupt world.”

Experts said Thursday that Heaven’s Gate has some parallels in both ancient and modern times.

The Representative’s theology bears rough comparison to the ideas of Gnostic sectarians some 17 or 18 centuries ago, said Marvin Meyer, a religion professor at Chapman University in Orange.

Although the modern computer-generated tract does not cite the ancient groups, it too reflects a sense of alienation from mainstream society and presents an escapist solution.

Gnostics, or “knowers,” also wrote of being trapped in a corrupt world, within unwanted bodies. They were denounced as heretics by early Christians. The Representative’s theology appears to mix neo-Gnostic ideas with New Age, UFO and apocalyptic speculations--”the sort of things you can pick up just by talking with people on the street,” Meyer said.

Carl Raschke, a religious studies professor at the University of Denver and an authority on cults, said: “They wore uniforms. . . . They see themselves at war with hostile forces. . . . The kind of black world I’m describing is the real context of people who want to live out a fantasy world of Luke Skywalker versus Darth Vader. They probably see themselves as Luke Skywalker.”

The apparent mass suicide seems to have its closest antecedent, in recent times, in the deaths this decade of members of the Solar Temple--in 1994 in Switzerland, in 1995 in the French Alps, and last week in Canada.

Members of that group talked about reaching out to a higher plane. Many killed themselves with drug overdoses and left lengthy explanations of their actions with former members. Finally, the timing of the deaths was connected to various celestial events, such as the summer or winter solstice.

The coincidence of the Heaven’s Gate deaths with recent celestial and religious events was striking to many observers Thursday. The deaths came just a few days after the spring equinox and a partial lunar eclipse and while the Comet Hale-Bopp is appearing in the northern sky. And Easter, Christianity’s celebration of Jesus’ resurrection, is just a few days away.

“There are always cults and cult-like behavior surrounding the millennial end times,” said Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society. “People are looking for signs that the end is near, and here we have the comet and a lunar eclipse and the millennium. For these people, there are just too many weird things going on.”

Computer lines and radio talk shows have been buzzing for weeks with reports that the comet is accompanied by a companion spacecraft. Pictures of the ship have been distributed on the Internet. The Heaven’s Gate group acknowledged the significance of the comet’s appearance in one of its online messages.

“Whether Hale-Bopp has a ‘companion’ [spacecraft] or not is irrelevant from our perspective,” said the posting on the group’s Web site (which was at www://heavensgate.com). “However, its arrival is joyously very significant to us at ‘Heaven’s Gate.’ The joy is that our Older Member in the Evolutionary Level Above Human (the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’) has made it clear to us that Hale-Bopp’s approach is the ‘marker’ we’ve been waiting for--the time for the arrival of the spacecraft from the Level Above Human to take us home to ‘Their World’--in the literal Heavens.”

Such messages went out not only on the group’s Web site, but to scores of other newsgroups where Heaven’s Gate proselytized for new members. Among the groups that received the messages in the last six months were some designed for Christians, conspiracy buffs, victims of abuse, astrologers, atheists, libertarians and members of the militia movement. The Internet has logged tens of thousands of hits on each of those sites.

The Representative promises in the texts to carry on the work of Christ.

“Remember, the one who incarnated in Jesus was sent for one purpose only, to say, ‘If you want to go to Heaven, I can take you through that gate--it requires everything of you.’ Our mission is exactly the same. I am in the position to today’s society as was the One that was in Jesus then.”