Word: jonestown
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...group of people are going to choose to die together, it is best to have a master plan: proper burial outfits, packed suitcases, lists, farewell videotapes, even recipes for death. The ghastly jumble of bodies piled upon bodies discovered in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978 may have provided a stark lesson in how not to do it. That mass suicide was a disorderly, ungracious way to meet your maker, a study not in serenity but in chaos...
...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 new domain names on the Internet. "They talked about the future a lot," he says. "That's what's confusing." He, too, received a postmortem videotape...
...bulk food and computer hardware, at least forty modern-day monks designed and built web sites for businesses on the outside, including the San Diego Polo Club, a movie company, and a British maker of airline parts. On Wednesday, in three neatly planned shifts, they died. The world saw Jonestown, felt Waco, and cried cult. And this time, a cult for the information age. These days, the stereotype of the computer nerd has grown a bit stale. But it is precisely that stereotype--young, intelligent, socially inept--which stencils nicely onto the classic profile of a cult victim. Yet these...
Religious leader Shoko Asahara, who is being sought for questioning in connection with the subway attack, could strike one as such a figure. Of course, the Japanese are hardly the only people to produce mimics of God or apocalyptic cults. Think of Jonestown or Waco. But what is distinctive about postwar Japan is the number of people pretending to be God. The country is riddled with cults and so-called new religions...
...signs of foul play, at least some of the deaths may have been suicides, part of one more episode in cult pathology to put beside the weird tragedies at Jonestown, Guyana, and the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. A victim was found with a letter to her family explaining that she had come to Switzerland to die. Jean-Francois Mayer, a Swiss authority on cults, made public three letters he said were posted to him by cult members before the fire. "We are leaving this earth," read one, "to rediscover, lucidly and freely, a dimension of truth and absoluteness...