8221; of Christ foretold in the Bible's Book of Revelation. According to the Bible, the two witnesses are prophets who will be slain by a beast from the bottomless pit, then be resurrected and ascend to Heaven. They were both anti-establishment and intolerant, calling for total separation from society, simple living with shared resources, and adherence to a rigorous moral code. Applewhite also required members of the cult to dress, talk, and look the same. He made them all wear the same clothes, shaved everyone’s head, and made them refrain from using personal pronouns such as “he” and “she”. They were also not permitted to marry, have sex, or drink. Members had to give all their possessions to the cult; several even voluntarily castrated themselves. Much of the essential beliefs of Heaven's Gate are spelled out in a lengthy, first-person statement published on the group's website. Written in 1995 by Mr. Applewhite (under the title “An E.T. Presently Incarnate”), it reveals that Ms. Nettles died in 1985 (or, as he wrote, “separated from her borrowed human container and returned to the Next Level”). The rest of their faith system is detailed in a 200-page book that the members of Heaven's Gate self-published. One of them wrote that they had spent 17 years undergoing a type of re-education, “a 'metaphoric' classroom experience of changing over their consciousness and behavior,” evolving to reach a stage in which they could enter the higher realm that Mr. Applewhite and Ms. Nettles preached. In these and other works, the group elaborated on its theology, based on a Christian framework, but with a whole new set of millennialist beliefs that seems more like the works of a renowned science fiction writer. The beliefs were these: Two thousand years ago, the beings of the Kingdom Level Above Human appointed an “Older Member” to send to Earth a “Repr...
