Heaven's Gate (religious group)

Epic card · No. 5208

Heaven's Gate was an American new religious movement primarily known for the mass suicide of its members in 1997. Often described as a cult, it was founded in 1974 and led by Marshall Applewhite (1931–1997) and Bonnie Nettles (1927–1985), known within the movement as Do and Ti, respectively. Nettles and Applewhite first met in 1972 and went on a journey of spiritual discovery, identifying themselves as the two witnesses of the Book of Revelation, attracting a following of several hundred people in the mid-1970s. In 1976, a core group of a few dozen members stopped recruiting and instituted a monastic lifestyle. Scholars have described the theology of Heaven's Gate as a mixture of Christian millenarianism, New Age, and ufology, and it has been characterized as a UFO religion. The central belief of the group was that followers could transform themselves into immortal extraterrestrial beings by rejecting their human nature, and they would ascend to heaven, referred to as the "Next Level" or...

Read on Wikipedia