COMET MAY NOT HAVE BEEN ONLY FACTOR IN TIMING OF SUICIDE.

Byline: Jane Gross The New York Times

It is a season of signs and wonders, of comets and lunar eclipses, of the vernal equinox and the holiest days on the Christian calendar.

How many of these converging events, not to mention the approaching millennium, influenced the mass suicide discovered Wednesday in a Spanish-style mansion in San Diego County?

This was the question that religious scholars pondered as they traded theories on the Internet, tried - mostly unsuccessfully - to sign on to the Heaven's Gate Web site and took their turns as instant celebrities on ``Nightline'' and CNN.

``There is a confluence of so many important dates,'' said J. Gordon Melton, who runs the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Santa Barbara, and has written several encyclopedic works on religion in general and cults in particular.

``Even Buddha's birthday is not that far away. It's hard to say which of these correlations were particularly made,'' Melton said.

His confusion was echoed by Robert S. Ellwood, a professor of religion at the University of Southern California. ``We'll have to wait for more information to see if they were consciously aware of the synchronicity or not,'' Ellwood said.

There was evidence aplenty that the 39 men and women, who lived and died communally, timed their suicides to the dazzling Hale-Bopp comet, which they apparently believed was trailed by a spaceship that would transport them to a happier and holier world, beyond the bounds of flesh and time.

In this belief, they seemed to be close cousins of the Solar Temple cult, which scholars say embraced a stew of beliefs borrowed from New Age philosophy, the Western occult tradition, Gnosticism and other apocalyptic religions. Solar Temple members, also professing a desire to flee the world of matter for the world of the spirit, have taken their own lives in three mass suicides recently, in Switzerland, France and Canada.

Scholars speculated that both the Solar Temple, in its most recent suicide in Quebec on Sunday, and the group in Rancho Santa Fe, whose deaths were discovered Wednesday, were moved to act by certain stirring natural events and profound dates on the calendar.

Some guessed that once autopsies were performed in San Diego, it would turn out that the computer cult had taken their lives either at the start of the spring equinox, which occurred March 20, the Thursday before the bodies were first seen by sheriff's deputies, or on the lunar eclipse, which occurred March 23, the Sunday of the Quebec suicides.

Others surmised that it was no accident that they died draped in shrouds of purple, the color traditionally associated with Lent.

And then there is the approach of the year 2000.

``This transition - this major transition in the calendar - stimulates people's religious imaginations,'' said Catherine Wessinger, an associate professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.

``All religions are concerned with well-being, in our earthly life or after we die,'' Wessinger said. ``Some believe the only way to achieve well-being is in heaven. Others dream the impossible dream that complete and total well-being can be achieved here on Earth. These significant dates get more people hoping for terrestrial salvation. And if they are frustrated, they shift to the other realm.''

But theories about the vernal equinox, the eclipse or the millennium are just guesses. The connection to the comet, on the other hand, was explicit, in videotapes left behind by the cult. And without condoning their dreadful mass death, religious scholars noted that such celestial wonders have fascinated people from the beginning of time.

``These events (appearances of comets) have inspired strange interpretations in human beings as long as there have been human beings,'' said James T. Richardson, a professor at the University of Nevada at Reno. ``We are not as far as we'd like to think from primitive tribes. The Star of Bethlehem was probably a comet or a supernova. But people imbued it with great meaning, meaning that dominates all of Western culture today.''