Know Place: Heaven’s Gate and American Gnosticism

Bonnie Nettles and Marshall Applewhite, the founders of the millenarian movement Heaven’s Gate, began teaching at a retreat they called Know Place, where one came to “know thyself” in the “no-place of Utopia.” This initial phase set the stage for a process of self-recognition that would become the hallmark of conversion to the movement, much as Gnosticism employed in the first centuries of the common era. The parallels between late antique Gnosticism and Heaven’s Gate are remarkable. Both posited two breeds of humans, one a material husk and the other an enlightened soul temporarily trapped on earth. Both proposed radical gender equality and maintained a rigorous ascetic regime. Both proffered death as a return to a prior state of gnosis rather than a disjuncture into a new life and afterlife. This paper examines the rhetoric of self-verification employed by both movements as it relates to a modified monotheism.