Hell at Heaven's Gate

National | Computer cult merely a new take on ancient Gnosticism

The irony is complete: cultic mass death in gorgeous Rancho Santa Fe, where many people would love to live. In this materialistic heaven on earth, in this American Garden of Eden, the home of Douglas Fairbanks, Bing Crosby, Jimmy Durante, and Victor Mature, two weeks ago all hell broke loose. Thirty-nine mostly middle-aged, well-educated people willingly took their own lives in the name of religion. Is this event unique, the tragic end of one more nutty Californian sect, or is it a particularly jolting expression of the new pagan spirituality now permeating once-Christian America?

This cult of computer geeks, nourished on the sci-fi mythologies of Star Trek and Star Wars and the seduction of cyberspace, epitomizes much of the contemporary "spiritual" cutting edge of pagan mysticism, sexual androgyny, and opposition to the family. In our culture of death, with its new priesthood of Kevorkians, abortionists, gay shamans, and feminist witches, and its New Left gospel of unrestrained freedom, this ritualistic mass suicide functions as the ultimate religious act of human liberty and the individual's right to die. Oddly, Heaven's Gate is both very modern and very old, for it shares with the hi-tech scholarship of the "Jesus Seminar" and the heresies of ancient Gnosticism certain ideas about death.

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