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Last night, I repeated this ritual, this time scanning the heavens for Hale-Bopp. Dining halls had been abuzz with tales of sightings for days, and Harvard's armchair astronomers regaled whoever would listen with hyperbole and an occasional fact. Not wanting to miss out on the chance of four millennia, I turned my eyes skyward yet again. The same pea-sized white blob hung in the sky, and it was only after I cleaned my eyeglasses that I was convinced it was indeed a comet and not a piece of lint from the laundry room--piece of lint whose...
...time of the end, apparently, was last week. A recently posted "Red Alert" announcement on the group's Website hailed the Hale-Bopp comet as the "marker" the members were waiting for. In this belief, at least, Heaven's Gate cultists were not alone. According to a popular theory circulating on the Internet, a spaceship is hidden behind the comet--whether inhabited by benign or evil aliens is unclear. Astronomers say the image behind the comet in some photographs is a mere star...
...often in religious thinking, the sky figures importantly in the New Apocalypse. For centuries the stars have been where the meditations of religion, science and the occult all converged. Now enter Comet Hale-Bopp. In an otherwise orderly and predictable cosmos, where the movement of stars was charted confidently by Egyptians and Druids, the appearance of a comet, an astronomical oddity, has long been an opportunity for panic. When Halley's comet returned in 1910, an Oklahoma religious sect, the Select Followers, had to be stopped by the police from sacrificing a virgin. In the case of Hale-Bopp...
Astronomical charts may also have helped determine the timing of the Heaven's Gate suicides. They apparently began on the weekend of March 22-23, around the time that Hale-Bopp got ready to make its closest approach to Earth. That weekend also witnessed a full moon and, in parts of the U.S., a lunar eclipse. For good measure it included Palm Sunday, the beginning of the Christian Holy Week. Shrouds placed on the corpses were purple, the color of Passiontide, or, for New Agers, the color of those who have passed to a higher plane...
...reflection for the face of God. Much of the time, those errors are nothing more than episodes of the human comedy. Occasionally they become something worse. This is what happened at Rancho Santa Fe, where foolish notions hardened into fatal certainties. In the arrival of Comet Hale-Bopp, the cult members saw a signal that their lives would end soon. There are many things about which they were badly mistaken. But on that one intuition, they made sure they were tragically correct...