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.

Next up in the song is “Ray, a drop of golden sun” but I’m guessing that would have sounded too boastful.

“Me” is what follows Ray but that would have lead to a whole Abbott and Costello routine, “go tell Me that the meals need to be ordered.” “But why am I telling you? You already know that the meals need to be ordered.”

Okay so we are up to Far, which as we all know is a “long, long way to run.” You would think that Heaven’s Gate would be all about this one, after all they were going Far into space. Apparently not.

Following Far, we have “Sew, a needle pulling thread.” That would have just made people think that the person speaking was stalling and not just trying to get someone’s attention. “Sooo….” “Oh I’m sorry, were you talking to me?”

Then we have the part where Rodgers and Hammerstein gave up and just wrote “La, a note to follow Sew” and that simply isn’t going to work with a cult. You need to be creative. Cults are a dime a dozen. You need a clear cut plan in case people ask questions such as “why do we want to go into space?” (In this case: they wanted to return home.)

Finally we get to “Tea, a drink with jam and bread.” So I guess they were going with the bookend approach to the names? At least they didn’t stick with their original names of Bo and Peep because frankly who wants to be in a cult where the leaders just lose their sheep/followers all the time because they are eating?

In conclusion, it’s not the song I would have gone with… but I suppose it could have been worse: it could have been “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.” At least “My Favorite Things” will always remain as just a song associated with Sound of Music and not with anything else, such as Christmas music. Oh wait…

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash