ABSTRACT
Many thousands of words have now been written about Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate, and even more tears have been shed. In 1978 909 people who were living a communal existence in a People’s Temple agricultural project perished by poisoning in the remote jungles of Guyana, at the behest of their leader, Jim Jones. Two hundred and eighty-seven of them were children. Those reluctant to commit suicide had it forced on them by others. How many died in this fashion is unclear. An audiotape exists of the fi nal mass gathering. It begins with Jones saying: ‘How very much I have loved you’. He sounds exhausted. His words are sometimes slurred. Other voices are heard but the last statement on the tape is from Jones: ‘Take our life from us. We laid it down. We got tired. We didn’t commit suicide, we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world’. 1
In the intervening minutes, death was unleashed on a scarcely imaginable scale. Jones himself was among the dead, shot in the head by persons unknown, how voluntarily or otherwise we can never say. Nor was the carnage restricted to Jonestown. Earlier that day, two planes prepared to depart from a nearby airport with a small number of ‘defectors’. They were attacked by Jonestown gunmen. US Congressman Leo Ryan, who had spent the previous day in Jonestown talking to members, was killed, together with an NBC cameraman and three others. Nine people were seriously injured. Some few seconds of the shooting survive on videotape. On a lesser scale, but equally tragic for those involved and their families, 39 devotees of Heaven’s Gate died in California in March 1997. They had also consumed poison and left behind upbeat videos, proclaiming their devotion to the group’s ideals and leader, and affi rming their faith in the better life awaiting them at ‘the level above human’.
