The People’s Temple in Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate, The Order of the Solar Temple. All cults that ended in tragic mass suicides. How could such lofty aspirations end so badly?
For today’s self-contained installment of The Roots of Conspirituality series, Julian explores the shadow side of the anxiety-relieving religious notion that death is just a doorway into a better place.
How do charismatic prophets indoctrinate believers into ending their lives, and often the lives of their children, in the name of spirituality?
Julian briefly examines each of these groups, along with Paul Nthenge Mackenzie’s Good News International Ministry—450 of whose followers starved themselves to death in a Kenyan forest in 2023. Then he transitions into exploring philosophical, psychological, evolutionary, and neuroscience-based ways of understanding the elements that make these spiritualized perversions of our survival instincts possible.
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That's an idea that many people find hopeful, positive, whether it's the revolving door of reincarnation spiraling the soul upward toward the god realization of enlightenment, or the promise of eternal bliss on an otherworldly plane.
The concept of an afterlife, enjoyed as the immaterial soul which animates this temporary body, has almost universal appeal.
But there's a dark side to this pleasant notion of transcending death.
Think of the 39 bodies found at that Rancho Santa Fe mansion 20 miles north of San Diego in 1997, reclining on their bunk beds in uniform black Nikes sporting unisex bowl haircuts with ceremonial purple fabric draped over their bodies and faces.
The Heaven's Gate faithful believed the day had come to leave their earth suits and ascend to the mothership, literally riding behind the tail of the Hale Bob comet visible in the sky.
The key, they were told would open the door to the Great Beyond was a deadly mixture of drugs stirred into the pudding or applesauce that they each dutifully swallowed like it was a holy sacrament.
All it did was tragically close the door on their real lives and any possibility of future love and happiness.
In this way, they echoed the actions of the much larger group of Americans some 20 years previous who had followed their preacher Jim Jones to a remote settlement in the South American British colony of Guyana.
There, having fled negative publicity in Indianapolis, and then more of the same, plus potential criminal charges in California, the People's Temple relocated in late 1973.
Just five years later, all 913 members, including 304 children, a hundred and five of whom were younger than ten, all died in the mass suicide ritual of drinking poisoned flavor aid juice mix.
It wasn't Kool-Aid, it was Flavorade.
Beyond the Inner Circle and their tragic end, Jones had also fooled many others during his rise.
He had wrapped himself in the robes of a socialist Christianity and drawn a congregation made up of at least 80% African Americans, with his fake faith healings, demonstrations of clairvoyance and revolutionary utopian politics.
Before allegations of his drug use and physical emotional and sexual abuse spread during their time in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and before we as a culture collectively became better informed about cult dynamics, Jones had actually been lauded by First Lady Rosalind Carter and presidential candidate Walter Mondale.
He also had ties to several progressive Bay Area politicians like Willie Brown, Harvey Milk, George Moscone, and Jerry Brown.
Where Jim Jones would eventually claim to literally be a Christ-like savior figure, the even stranger Heaven's Gate cult leaders called themselves Doe and T because they loved the movie The Sound of Music and its signature Doh Ray Me song.
Their real names were Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, with Marshall being the main spokesman and teacher, Nettles was positioned as the sage who was in communication with the aliens about the so-called next level of spiritual evolution beyond the human body.
I'm Julian Walker, and this is a conspirituality bonus episode titled Death is But a Doorway.
It's part of my Roots of Conspirituality series, which you can find after joining at Patreon.com slash conspirituality at the very top of our page under the collections tab.
Now, each self-contained episode like this one explores the history of fantastical beliefs and cultish group delusions that underlie today's phenomenon that we call conspirituality, from the founders of new forms of Christianity via hallucinatory revelations and New York spirit mediums who talk to the dead in the late 19th century, to English yogis who claimed to travel on UFOs a hundred years later, to Indian gurus who promised paranormal abilities to their hippie followers in the 70s.
It's all there, and more.
The appalling climax at Jonestown was, until 9-11, the biggest single deliberate loss of American civilian life, and it remains the largest modern murder-suicide that we know of globally.
In both the 1978 Jonestown event and the Heaven's Gate deaths almost 20 years later, we see how the most primal instinct human beings have to stay alive can be subverted, overridden, I would argue perverted by powerfully distorted metaphysical beliefs about death.
There have been other events like these.
We'll discuss the order of the solar temple today, too.
There is sect who had groups in multiple French-speaking countries who enacted a series of gruesome group murder suicides based on the conviction that they would be transported to the planet Sirius to be reunited with the Knights Templar, who were burned at the stake in the Middle Ages by the French monarchy via the Catholic Inquisition.
Obviously, there's more to all of these stories, which I will unpack before reflecting on how seemingly bizarre tragedies like these are possible due to the mysteries of the human mind.
Let's get started.
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