Word: haling
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...number of obscure cults and the increasingly fevered pitch of their rantings. And it is not just that time of the century; it is that time of year too, with Holy Week, the vernal equinox and a partial lunar eclipse converging, all heated up by the extraordinary Hale-Bopp comet lighting the night skies. For those who go in for cosmological conjunctions, it was a perfect week for an apocalypse. For those who seek more human motives, there was the intriguing report on abc's Nightline that Applewhite had intimated to a friend that he was dying of cancer...
Other acquaintances were aware of some of the group's odder beliefs. A man who worked with Higher Source for more than six years on several computer projects discussed the imminent coming of the Hale-Bopp comet with them. "They didn't know, but they felt it could be something other than a comet--that maybe it was a spaceship coming to collect them," the acquaintance says. He says he even joked with them about Jonestown once, but got little reaction. This man last heard from the group just a few weeks ago; they wanted help setting up some...
...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...