Just Do It !

It is very difficult to imagine a scenario in which the entities Web Design, Comet and Castration would merge at some common point, I do not believe that there is a writer who could in a `coherent` way combine all of that and create a convincing narrative. But where imagination is powerless, there is reality with its sometimes unlikely but completely real dynamics. And that reality for hundreds of people in the United States, from 1975 to 1997 was known under the name `Heaven's Gate`.

The start of the trend of religiously motivated suicides does not belong to a sectarian but to the mainstream religion of Judaism and about 960 members of it (a plagiarism of an obscure desert cult and the aborted religion of the psycho Akhenaten) who in 74 AD chose to take their own lives faced with the alternative - surrender into the hands of pagan Roman legionaries...This trend experienced its `revival` in the nineties when extreme sectarians from all over the world united in their madness and triumph of irrationality, faced with the appearance of three zeros in the number of the year that was the last in the second Millennium.

In the already mentioned year 1997, the comet Hale-Bopp was clearly visible in the heavens with the naked eye, perhaps some random virtual traveler on this blog reading these lines will recall the spectacular sight from 28 years ago when the celestial body was clearly visible for several months with its long tail in the sky, faintly illuminating the night and attracting all eyes pointed upwards. Precisely that phenomenon that in ordinary people caused nothing more than mild discomfort mixed with respect and the occasional random thought about the significance or lack there of of the good old planet Earth - for a small group of sectarians meant final salvation, deliverance from earthly suffering, ascension to a new level of existence and of course - returning home, as it was written on their logo - Heaven's Gate - Away team!

Home was an alien planet from some galaxy unknown to the public, an idea that simmered within the walls of the brains of leader Marshall Applewhite and his pseudo-wife Bonnie Nettles who did not live to see judgment day in physical form but appeared as a spiritual concept of her quasi-husband after death...The world, faced with a constant avalanche of shit, at least for the last 6,500 years - was a foreign place for the sect members who were convinced that they were nothing more than physical containers of alien consciousness.

Hardcore from start to finish, the sect was innovative, in step with the times and sometimes a little ahead, the Internet, apart from being a source of income (some of the sect members were web designers and developers), also served for self-promotion and for recruiting new members. And all this in the mid-nineties when net penetration was at its very beginning. How many corpses instead of 39 would there have been in the rented `palace` near San Diego, California if they had Facebook, YouTube or Twitter at their disposal is a question, I would bet at least ten times more. Applewhite, an enigmatic charismatic, former university music professor and ex-Christian - experienced a severe identity crisis, primarily due to his misunderstood bisexuality and the general (counter)culture of the 1960s, which resulted in a new religion in which there was a place for aliens, Jesus, the Beatles (also worshipped by his sectarian predecessor Charles Manson), asceticism and all sorts of New Age situations from which Marshall, together with his wife, created a rather simple and seductive concept.

According to them, the Earth was on the verge of `recycling` due to the long reign of Satan in it, and the aliens, with their spaceship that traveled skillfully camouflaged behind the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet, headed to Earth to accept the souls of those who would deserve evacuation through ascension in the ship. And ascension was possible only with long seances, fasting, denial of sexuality (at least nine members cut off their own testicles) and of course - suicide! Between March 19 and 21, 1997, equipped with new clothes and new sneakers (Nike) - the sect members prepared a hellish cocktail of large quantities of Phenobarbitol, Vodka and juice. And to make the dream complete, there were plastic bags around their heads. A slow fall into sleep accompanied by suffocation...

In order to protect their corpses from defilement with feces and vomit (a natural reaction of the body after drinking the cocktail and after suffocation), Applewhite and his best follower stayed after the initial suicide of 37 members to clean up the shit and vomit and leave the corpses in a respectable position, on beds covered with purple blankets. Then the leader and his `adjutant` took their own lives, as they should, because the `captain` is the last to leave the damned dimension...The anthology footage, made by a castrated sect member who, by chance, was the only one to miss the event the next day - shows covered dead sect members in an unreal peaceful atmosphere, gently disturbed by the juddering of 78 legs, all wearing black Nikes with the recognizable logo...They Just Did It!

Two ex-sect members, after seeing the case on TV, disturbed by the possible loss of the alien ship that was ``towed'' behind the comet, poisoned themselves two months later, bringing the final tally of sect members who went to meet the aliens to the final figure of 41. A little creepy but true, the sect's website still exists and you can visit it at the following link: http://heavensgate.com/ although for understandable reasons it has not been updated since March 1997...It is unknown who pays for the hosting of this site because the number of surviving active members was 1 (one) but the number of ex-sect members, many of whom remained with great respect for the sect and its leader, is several hundred, so it is entirely possible that some of them pay for this site.

The only sect that is more hardcore in terms of beliefs than this one are the Nuwabians, for whom it is impossible to determine what they did not mix into the pot of their theology, various mythologies and religions that found a place in the head of its founder Dwight Yorke, a former Manch player...lol, no, it is still another Dwight Yorke, the namesake of the famous footballer and at least a few hundred light years older than him. One of the fundamental beliefs of the Nuwabians is the following:

Everyone is originally conceived as twins, but usually only one of the twins survives to be born. Another one is usually aborted. Some of the aborted fetuses survive their abortion to live in the sewers, where they are being gathered and organized to take over the world!

Fetuses.

Ex-twin fetuses.

Who survive abortion.

And retreat into the sewers.

Where they grow and gather.

In order to organize themselves.

To conquer...the world...

I will briefly return to the initial statement that fantasy is powerless against reality. Because no one in the world is so (un)creative that they can invent people who believe in the above. Only reality can create such people...

(Roger Mortis, 089)