Word: ranchos
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...body count at Rancho Santa Fe is a reminder that this conventional wisdom falls short. These are the waning years of the 20th century, and out on the margins of spiritual life there's a strange phosphorescence. As predicted, the approach of the year 2000 is coaxing all the crazies out of the woodwork. They bring with them a twitchy hybrid of spirituality and pop obsession. Part Christian, part Asian mystic, part Gnostic, part X-Files, it mixes immemorial longings with the latest in trivial sentiments. When it all dissolves in overheated computer chat and harmless New Age vaporings...
...against it. For instance, while many of the dead at Jonestown were poor, the Solar Temple favors the carriage trade. Its disciples have included the wife and son of the founder of the Vuarnet sunglass company. The Branch Davidians at Waco came from many walks of life. And at Rancho Santa Fe they were paragons of the entrepreneurial class, so well organized they died in shifts...
...search for meaning, the mind is apt to go down some wrong paths and to mistake its own 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...
...from a psychiatrist before withdrawing from the production. Thus, through crumbling ambition and the denial of desire, the easy affability of a young Texan from Spur, who loved to perform in lavish productions like Oklahoma! and South Pacific, was transmogrified into the troubled charisma of a cult master in Rancho Santa Fe, California, one who last week led his 38 followers on a fatal comet chase...
...early days of the cult were a far cry from the well-organized, high-tech Rancho Santa Fe operation. Applewhite and Nettles, who did odd jobs to support themselves, were arrested in Harlingen, Texas, for stealing gasoline credit cards, a charge that was later dropped. Applewhite then spent months shuttling from state to state in a confusing legal tangle over a car. During this period, he wrote his first spiritual manifesto. Applewhite and Nettles also had a brush with a comet. Stranded with a broken-down car in St. Louis, Missouri, they comforted themselves with the thought that "God would...