THE MARKER WE'VE BEEN...WAITING FOR

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Students of the millennium and historians of the bizarre have long been predicting such a catastrophic event in the twilight years of the 20th century, duly noting the rise in the 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.

In one of those odd confluences that keep cults and conspiracy theorists percolating, the day after the bodies were found Charles Manson was up for and denied parole for the ninth time at Corcoran State Prison. "These monks that just took their heads in San Diego," Manson noted at his hearing, "they're way behind the times." But cult experts disagree. What happened in San Diego, they say, was unprecedented. James Tabor, who teaches religion at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and was involved in the last desperate attempts to communicate with David Koresh by radio broadcast, says, "This group is completely different. These people rather calmly followed suicide as their exit, in a very positive way, to a higher level of existence. They define death not as the enemy of life but as life itself." United Methodist minister J. Gordon Melton, editor of the authoritative Encyclopedia of American Religions, agrees. "In this case they had a positive motive, a great place to go to," he says. "So why hang around here?"

"THE TRUE MEANING OF 'SUICIDE' IS TO TURN AGAINST THE NEXT LEVEL WHEN IT IS BEING OFFERED."

The Heaven's Gate victims did more than leave suicide notes; they left suicide press kits. One of the first to receive the materials was a former cult member using the name Rio D'Angelo (police say he is really Richard Ford), who got a Federal Express package containing two videotapes, a letter and two computer discs. He took the tape home last Tuesday night and watched it. On Wednesday he came to work at the Interact Entertainment Group in Beverly Hills, California, which had employed Higher Source, the cult's Web-page design service. Rio told his boss, Nick Matzorkis, that he was convinced his former associates were all dead. Rio and Matzorkis drove to the house, and Rio went inside. When he came out, says Matzorkis, he was "white as a sheet." They notified the San Diego sheriff's office, whose deputies came in expecting a minor emergency at most and found themselves removing 39 corpses in what was about to become a media circus.