End of Days by Sylvia Browne

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 9th, 2022 in Prophecy, Stories

The eighteen men and twenty-one women ranged in age from twenty-six to seventy-two. They were dressed in identical black Mandarin-collared shirts, black pants, and Nike shoes. The suicides took place in three shifts over a period of three days—fifteen on the first day, fifteen on the second day, and nine on the third—so that those left behind could cover the bodies with purple shrouds bearing the words Heaven’s Gate.

All of the deceased were also found with their identification in their pockets, as well as a five-dollar bill and three quarters. An astute columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle subsequently unearthed a quote from Mark Twain that seems as if it must be more than just an unfortunate coincidence: “The fare to get to heaven on the tail of a comet was $5.75.”

A suicide note from the group read, “By the time you read this, we suspect that the human bodies we were wearing have been found … We came from the Level Above Human in distant space and we have now exited the bodies that we were wearing for our earthly task, to return to the world from whence we came—task completed.”

“Task completed,” tragically and needlessly, to escape the “imminent recycling of life on Earth” that proved to be nothing more than the manipulative rhetoric of a man who clearly thought the purpose of having power was to abuse it.

Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple

Two decades before the Heaven’s Gate tragedy was the horror of the Peoples Temple, a doomsday cult founded by a well- educated former mainstream Christian named James Warren Jones.

Initially ordained in the Disciples of Christ Church, Jim Jones originally founded the Peoples Temple in 1955 as a mission in Indianapolis devoted to helping those who were living in poverty and with catastrophic illness. He began his ministry preaching the Holy Bible, love, and equality to his large interracial congregation. He also began claiming the ability to cure cancer and heart disease, which understandably prompted the first of many unwelcome governmental investigations into Jim Jones, his organizations, and his practices.

The more powerful Jim Jones became in the eyes of his followers, the more he rejected the Bible as a pack of lies and taught that he himself was the messiah, the Second Coming of Christ. Only he, he claimed, stood between his congregation and the imminent destruction of the world in a nuclear holocaust. He and his devoted, multiracial Peoples Temple membership, being on the side of enlightened righteousness in an otherwise evil society, would be the sole survivors of this nuclear extermination, thanks to an anticipatory mass suicide and simultaneous resurrection, and they would create a new Eden. It was probably no coincidence that in 1965, right around the time the government started its first investigation of Jim Jones, he moved the Peoples Temple to Northern California—more specifically, to Ukiah, which Esquire magazine listed as one of nine U.S. cities that could survive a nuclear attack.

As the Peoples Temple expanded into San Francisco and Los Angeles, the gospel according to Jim Jones became more and more communistic and anti-Christian, and his dangerously manic behavior increased in direct proportion to his addiction to prescription drugs, primarily phenobarbital. At the same time, defectors from the church began reporting Jim Jones’s and the Peoples Temple’s human rights practices and potential income tax abuses to the government and the news media. By 1977, the pressure from such close scrutiny inspired Jones to lead about a thousand of his most devoted Peoples Temple members to relocate to a 4,000-acre agricultural project on land they’d leased from the government of Guyana in 1974.

Jonestown, as the project came to be called, was anticipated as a communal “promised land.” Instead it involved brutally difficult work and a sparse, regimented existence in the middle of the steamy South American jungle, thousands of miles from everyone and everything familiar. Jim Jones’s health and sanity suffered dramatically from the relocation, so that sudden rages and hours of delusional ranting over the Jonestown loudspeakers long into the night weren’t uncommon.