Heaven’s Gate

There is presently a documentary on the Heaven’s Gate cult on HBOMax. I decided I should watch it because I’m fascinated with anything relating to humans and my main thought was …. leading a cult just seems like a whole lot of work. You think of cults as kind of like a massive Hare Krishna experience…people dancing around, flowers in the hair, everyone having deep religious experiences.

OH HECK NO, there is a ton of work that is done. In Heaven’s Gate, one could say a galactic amount. The leader started recruiting for this thing 25 years earlier! Just think about all you have to do to get a cult up and running. There is marketing. There are presentations. There are uniforms with cute Heaven’s Gate Away Team patches. Someone has to make those patches.

And apparently there is the part where you get to name yourself. From what I can gather, the followers did not name themselves. The leaders did though and the ones from Heaven’s Gate have two of the most unique names that I have ever heard of: Do and Ti. Are you thinking that those names sound like something from musical theater but you just can’t just figure it out? You are correct. Do and Ti were named after the “Do-Re-Mi” song from Sound of Music. I mean I guess there are worse notes to be named after but the whole point of the song is that you use all the notes, not just two to make up a song.

So let’s analyze this. Why “Do”? Why “Ti”? First up, we have “Doe a deer, a female deer” — ironically this was the male leader’s name.