Heaven's Gate, Mark Twain, High Weirdness...

by **glubglubglub** » Wed Oct 05, 2005 7:25 pm

Was looking through old internet rumors and so forth, and found this re: Heaven's Gate: <a href="http://members.aol.com/phikent/inman.txt">members.aol.com/phikent/inman.txt</a> With the noteworthy section below: On March 30, the New York Post reported that the Heaven's Gate victims all had $5.75 on their persons, likening this to Captain Stormfield, the hero of a 1907 short story by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. UFO researcher Bufo Calvin has disproved that claim and unearthed more evidence linking the group's founder, Marshall Herff Applewhite, to the Twain short story. "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" opens with the hero, a San Francisco skipper "dead 30 years" flying through deep space. He races a giant comet, which puts him off course. As a result, he arrives at the wrong "gate" and finds himself among throngs of aliens ("a sky-blue man with seven heads and only one leg.") Eventually he gets to the Earth section of Heaven and spends the rest of the story trying to adjust. Bufo Calvin uncovered this item in the story: "And mind you, I'm not talking about only the grandees from our world, but the princes and patriarchs and so on from all the worlds that shine in our sky, and from billions more that belong in systems upon systems away outside of the one our sun is in. There were some prophets and patriarchs there that ours ain't a circumstance to, for rank and illustriousness and all that. Some were from Jupiter and other worlds in our own system, but the most celebrated were the poets, Saa, Bo and Soof, from great planets in three different and very remote systems." Applewhite first called himself "Bo," when he founded the group in the early 1970s. Did he borrow the name from the extraterrestial poet- philosopher in Clemens's story? In the story, Clemens also wrote, "Why, Peters, we don't know anything about comets, down here. If you want to see comets that are comets, you've got to go outside of our solar system--there's there's room for them, you understand." Could Clemens have been referring to the Oort Cloud? If so, then how could he have been aware of it in 1907, eight decades before the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope? During the week, a ROUNDUP reader wrote in and noted that the second half of the comet's name Hale-Bopp can be reduced to BO and P**P, a shorthand version of "Bo and Peep," the names Applewhite and his now-dead consort Bonnie Lu Trusdale Nettles called themselves in 1975. Another reader pointed out that, in addition to Helena Blavatsky, the comet's initials H.B. could also refer to Hugh Auchincloss Brown, the catastrophe theorist. In the 1960s, Brown warned that a buildup of ice at the South Pole could result in the Earth's surface slipping around over its molten core. Florida could wind up where Alaska is now, with a frozen climate. And vice versa. Newsweek magazine reported, "And, finally, we're told by one doomsayer on the Web to read the best- selling LUCIFER'S HAMMER (1977) about a comet that "causes major trouble for Earth"; it was discovered by fictional astronomers Time Hammer and Gavin Brown, and then named Hammer-Brown. These are the very same initials as Hale-Bopp! The point? Our Web friend doesn't say." (See Newsweek, April 7, 1997, page 43) --- So unless this Mark Twain story is more popular than I'm aware of -- or someone at the NY Post cerca that era is more literary than I'd be inclined to believe w/out some evidence -- somehow the members of Heaven's Gate all carrying around $5.75 brings to mind the Twain story...since the choice of alias for Applewhite -- Bo -- seems an uncanny parallel to the story, and although the choice of Peep (instead of Poof) is a bit harder to make a convincing link to Twain's story with, but it seems strange: from a rather tenuous link -- the pocketchange -- a more bizarre maybe-link emerges, as if on cue. Synchonricity, coincidence, internet psychoceramics (ie, crackpottery)? For the interested the Twain story can be read (in full, I think) here: <a href="http://www.mtwain.com/Extract_from_Captain_Stormfield's_Visit_to_Heaven/0.html">www.mtwain.com/Extract_fr...ven/0.html</a> note that there's a second part (link roughly in the upper-right).

by **banned** » Wed Oct 05, 2005 9:25 pm

**spoiler on LH** That's when I realized that I have no skills to offer in a post apocalyptic world. I quit the scouts because it was too regimented, I can't even make a fire with two sticks let alone build a cabin or make a generator out of old can openers. Niven of course believes technology is the route to salvation and all we have to do is fire up the old nuclear power plant again and presto, civilization returns. If you believe, say, that Periclean Athens was more civilized than 21st Century New York, despite the absence of electricity, and that it might be nice to live in a human-scale world again only this time not allow the rise of elites who enslave the majority who do the work, you might not like the book. I've been recommending it for 20 years.

by **glubglubglub** » Wed Oct 05, 2005 9:46 pm

suggestion: Periclean Athens:Modern Civilization::Slaves:Oil+Electricity unless your Periclean Athens didn't maintain about a 3:2 freeman-slave ratio.

by **glubglubglub** » Wed Oct 05, 2005 10:03 pm

and from rereading your post I'm not sure we're even at odds. That said, LH is a bit of a tangent to the point of my post was supposed to be: Mark Twain writes a story at the end of his career in which an earthling visits heaven, and amongst the major luminaries therein are a Bo and a Poof...(and the visitor gets there riding a comet) Heaven's Gate's founder picked a name for himself -- Bo -- that seems drawn from the story, and his female partner's chosen name -- Peep -- seems close enough to not be out of the question (ie, they hoped to be Bo and Poof but realized it sounded to close to Bo and Peep not to seem weird, and so opted for Bo and Peep instead), and at least as reported in the media the cult was waiting to 'catch a ride on a comet' The NY Post article suggests the parallel between the Twain and Heaven's Gate stories -- riding a comet (really a ufo trailing a comet) to heaven, although it's unclear what suggested the similarity of the stories to the writer at the Post -- but glosses over the naming similarity...but there's a rabbit hole here of sorts, in that the connection between the cult's founder's ideology and the story background seems a tad deeper. Whether this is anything legit is a whole separate question, but it does seem weird enough to bring to attention and file away.

by **banned** » Wed Oct 05, 2005 10:12 pm

But I wasn't talking about whether or not everyone was free, only that in philosophy, science, the arts, there was a degree of sophistication that is superior to our 'high culture' of America in 2005. Economic history is not my strong point so I can't say whether I think your equation is valid. Certainly slaves allowed for an elite that had time to worry about how many centaurs danced on the head of a pin rather than scrabbling for survival; on the other hand, oil has made it possible, at least in the 'first world', for ordinary people to have an amount of leisure time and access to knowledge that only an elite had in Periclean Athens, and yet we haven't had an explosion of high quality cultural products--we have movies that are 90 minute fart jokes, reality TV, brain-junk-food bestsellers. If we got knocked back to where society was prior to the discovery of oil in Titusville (a topic dear to my heart as one of my ancestors was a coal oil dealer at the same time Rockefeller was creating Standard Oil) I don't think descent into barbarism is an inevitable outcome; however, since I think the average American now has a cultural level somewhere around that of a talking baboon, if you take away the oil and the gadgets and distractions oil makes possible, I don't see most of the people I meet on a day to day basis as likely to participate in the creation of a viable society where, as the Amish do today, everybody goes to bed with and gets up with the sun and, when someone says "Got Milk?" if the answer is no they go looking for the cow, not the QuikMart.

by **glubglubglub** » Wed Oct 05, 2005 10:46 pm

and for what it's worth it does seem to be my life's mission (fo r what that's worth) to at least think through and design a viable society with that aim...dunno why, but that's always been ticking away...and if the 'design' phase succeeds perhaps try to get the ball rolling. also for what it's worth, I tend to think that technology is going to be of use here...not in the Niven style (as I gather from the book) of flicking the power switch back on, but in that we're already quite near the technology required to build an (expensive upfront) mostly-automated food production infrastructure...I can go on at length about the details that'd involve, but it's doable with sufficent funds (there's most of the rub), just economically inefficient as a business proposition and apparently not something any private group/organization is interested in researching on the public record. Again, as a business proposition the research, design, and subsequent rollout of such a system makes negative sense in any kind of market situation, but as a way of buying one's freedom (within reason, ie, I'm sure the man will try to keep such people down) from the basic physical and economic imperatives of life it might well be a bargain... And from that -- and technicalities, like the scale of maximum efficiency of construction and operation falling into at most a few thousand per 'outpost', from what I can guesstimate -- comes the social problem: how do design a society that'd be relatively inoculated against both the current powers that be's attempt to maintain control and domination, and also against the incredible amotivational and degenerative impulses such a no-work-needed-to-maintain-basic-life-functions lifestyle would bring... Clearly the prevailing political, social, and cultural institutions in America are not up to the task, as they have failed to keep the populace from sliding into docile senility just on account of a few decades of ease and prosperity... And this is getting both off-topic and probably giving away too much before its proper time of release (ie, when it's finished). Like most people who feel they've been given a mission of sorts I can probably blab on about this much past the point that anyone cares to listen or is conceivably able to maintain interest, but there you have it...

Heaven's Gate, Mark Twain, High Weirdness...

Heaven's Gate, Mark Twain, High Weirdness...

Lucifer's Hammer is a scary read.

human-scale civilization indeed

on reflection that was a bit snide

Point taken

we are basically in agreement then

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