A Fatal Lunacy

By JIM TROTTER

Knight-Ridder Newspapers

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Thirty-nine bodies in repose, clad in black, each covered across the face and chest with a shroud of purple cloth. By common definitions of violence, there was no sign other than the overpowering stench of death that something terrible had happened.

It looked as if they lay themselves down to sleep, one investigator said.

If we are to believe the early reports from Rancho Santa Fe in Northern San Diego County, these deceased members of Heaven's Gate were intelligent Internet travelers. They were men and women who used the vast resources at their fingertips to create a world so narrow and delusional that mass suicide was seen as entry to a higher plane of existence.

Specifically, we are told by those who viewed the group's Web site, the transport was believed to be a craft idling in wait, perhaps in the shadow of the Hale-Bopp Comet. The comet's appearance was perceived as the green light for death and the portal beyond.

Words fail, but several come to mind: Tragic, sad, bizarre, mad.

Star Trek fantasy

Many of the deceased are being described as 18 to 24 years old. They leave behind parents of a certain age, who today, no doubt, are struggling through their grief and devastation to comprehend this final voyage. Somehow it seems a compendium of Star Trek fantasy and fatal lunacy.

But these people didn't start out crazy, said Margaret Singer, the UC-Berkeley psychology professor and internationally known expert on cults.

"Cults don't recruit crazy people or dumb people," she said. "They want normal to intelligent people, people who can be obedient to ideas."

Singer, who is best known for her work on the 1978 Jonestown massacre, said the apparent contradiction between technological savvy and cult self-destruction is not nearly as great as one might think.

"It's going to be so interesting to find out their full story," she said. "People don't realize how vulnerable they are sitting in front of a computer. They trust it because it's science or the printed word. Intelligence is no vaccination against this kind of thing."

Fertile breeding ground

To the contrary, she said, computers and the Internet are a fertile breeding ground for cults.

"There is a whole bunch of young people and adults in front of their computers hours every day, and most of them kind of went through high school and college immersed in science and math," Singer said. "They're not very streetwise, and they become very trusting of what others put before them. They are not exercising good judgment."

Singer has won many awards for her investigations into cults, including the Leo J. Ryan Memorial Award, named for the congressman killed in Guyana while investigating Jim Jones and his 913 followers who died at Jonestown.

"People don't understand that it's a step-at-a-time process," she said. "Most are picked up at a vulnerable time in their lives. They are deceptively recruited. They're going to join a group to help ecology, to use the example of Luc Jouret's group, the Order of the Solar Temple. And they wind up in eco-fatalism, with the only chance of escape being to set themselves aflame with wires and gasoline."

Solar Temple cultists have committed 74 fiery suicides in the past three years.

Magical thinking

The leaders of cults claim "magical powers and magical thinking," Singer said.

"They claim to know things beyond human knowledge."

Often they use coincidental confluences - such as the current Easter season, upcoming birthday of Buddha and the Hale-Bopp Comet as indications "that such and so should be done. It's all part of their magical thinking."

Thirty-nine bodies in repose.

Tragic, sad, bizarre, mad.

Jim Trotter is a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, 750 Ridder Park Drive, San Jose, CA 95190, or by e-mail at jtrotter@sjmercury.com.