Concluding Thoughts
For Heaven’s Gate members, suicide made sense according to their belief system and, as Balch and Taylor explains in the context of their sociological approach, was something to expect from them. They were prone to radical actions, and had a propensity for extreme behavior such as the practices of ‘Central’ and castration.
Among the causes are their belief system, their method of the selection and cropping of members, the psychological factors coming from the past lives of their leaders including sexuality issues and also external events and the perception of these events by their leaders, with a perspective of ‘everything falling into place’(223).
The final objective of Heaven’s Gate was to disconnect from everything human, even their bodies. Suicide offered the logical conclusion for their story. For them, their deaths signified their maturation, a graduation from ‘the Classroom’ and gave entrance to their version of Heaven.