“UFO-religions” in Historical Perspective:A comparison of Heaven’s 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 Heaven’s 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

established ones. Some recent work in history and sociology, however, has challenged such a 1 Andreas Grünschloβ, “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.

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”, Epoché: 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

Christianity, within which “improvisational” beliefs in UFOs do not simply fit, or which is 6 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.

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, un-

evolving 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 Raëlian religious movement, which takes as its foundational text its founder’s

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

Raëlian 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 Heaven’s Gate,11 for instance, is itself an expression

of modernity’s 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 Heaven’s Gate group, given their similarities. Essentially the core of Cathar

theology was to explain the nature of evil and their view of materiality. Cathars rejected that a

8 Bryan Sentes and Susan Palmer, “Presumed Immanent: the Raëlians, 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. O’Leary, “Apocalypticism in American Popular Culture: From the Dawn of the Nuclear Age to the 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.

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 God’s 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 soul’s 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

dualistic. Christ’s 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 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.

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 Heaven’s 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 seven-

hundred years. Heaven’s 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 Heaven’s 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,

including “family, sensuality, selfish desires, your human mind, and even your human body”.17

14 Hamilton, 11-12.15 Lambert, 108-9.16 “Heaven’s Gate part 1 of 6”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmTq19ii2KA&feature=related.17 Do, “Do’s Intro: Purpose – Belief”, http://www.heavensgate.com/misc/intro.htm.

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, Heaven’s 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 God’s 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, Heaven’s Gate obviously had the advantage of

pamphlets, the internet, video, and public recruitment drives over the Cathars. Nevertheless, the

permanent members of Heaven’s Gate, like the Cathars, comprised a wide range of class and age

groups; early in their existence, Heaven’s Gate’s nearly two-hundred members ranged in age

18 “Heaven’s Gate Cult Initiation Part 2”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZnBkdFooFU&feature=related.19 “Heaven’s Gate Cult Initiation Part 6”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgJ07HMkJB4&feature=related.20 “Heaven’s Gate Cult Initiation Part 1”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqSZhwu1Rwo.21 “Heaven’s Gate Cult Initiation Part 3”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3nynIIBeq8&feature=related.22 Ibid.

from 14 to 75, though mostly in their early twenties, and had at least some level of post-

secondary 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. Do’s 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 Heaven’s 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 one’s own skin or society.

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

23 This refers to Applewhite and Nettles, or “Ti and Do”. Balch, 137.24 Lambert, 115-7.25 “Heaven’s 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.

type of goodness, some type of rightness, that they did not feel in this world”; another

emphasized “I’m really tired of this world and what it has become”; yet another that “there’s 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 Heaven’s Gate members shared the appeal of the group’s ideas with interviewers

after they left it. Michael Conyers, a member of thirteen-years, explained that “Ti” and Do’s”

message was one that was “talking to my Christian heritage but in a modern updated way. 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 D’Angelo”, a member of three years,

explained that after some years of searching for spiritual “purpose”, Heaven’s Gate’s teaching on

the world as God’s “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 group’s sympathy to some recent anxieties and

28 “Student Exit Statements”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORVx62aDbyU.29 “Heaven’s Gate part 1 of 6”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmTq19ii2KA&feature=related.30 “Heaven’s 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 Heaven’s 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 Heaven’s 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 de-

mystification 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 Heaven’s Gate the medium, not the message. First of

all, the Heaven’s 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 Heaven’s Gate members, and the Cathars, expressed before their worldly

deaths. One Heaven’s Gate member of 21 years, Jmmody, speaking just days before the group’s

31 “Heaven’s 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 I’m 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 “I’m 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 “Heaven’s 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 O’Leary, 394.

The comparison of Heaven’s 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 science-

fiction and religion. Certainly, many of their claims and much of their discourse, as is the case

for Heaven’s Gate, is represented in language which is pseudo-scientific and reveals science-

fiction 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; Heaven’s 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.

Grünschloβ, 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.” Epoché: The University of California Journal for the Study of Religion, 23 (2): 225-251.

O’Leary, 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 Raëlians, 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, “Do’s Intro: Purpose – Belief”, http://www.heavensgate.com/misc/intro.htm.

“Heaven’s Gate Cult Initiation Part 1”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqSZhwu1Rwo.

“Heaven’s Gate Cult Initiation Part 2”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZnBkdFooFU&feature=related.

“Heaven’s Gate Cult Initiation Part 3”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3nynIIBeq8&feature=related.

“Heaven’s Gate Cult Initiation Part 6”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgJ07HMkJB4&feature=related.

“Heaven’s Gate part 1 of 6”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmTq19ii2KA&feature=related.

“Heaven’s Gate part 3 of 6”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5sZUZhKBqw.

“Heaven’s Gate part 4 of 6”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DWlVq8zHYo.

“Heaven’s 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.