CULT'S TACTICS SAPPED IDENTITY : RITUAL, REGIMEN LED LASTLY TO GRAVE.

Byline: Frank Bruni The New York Times

For 39 men and women who believed they were bound for a starry utopia in outer space, the fare to the heavens was a life adhering to exacting prescriptions and regimens.

At their sprawling house in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., they woke at predetermined intervals to pray. They ate the same food at the same hours. They wore short haircuts and shapeless clothing, intended to distract them from such frivolous realities as sexuality or even sexual identity.

Previously, when members of the cult traveled the country in 1994 in an effort to expand their ranks, they were spotted with identical wedding bands on their fingers, symbols of their marriage to one another and their subjugation of the self to the group.

Common rituals and a common sense of purpose were the supposed passports to paradise, and these defined the community of believers who died in what may have been the largest mass suicide on American soil this century, much as they define other cults whose existence depends on rendering members docile and rapt.

Over the years, the precise details of life inside the cult led by Marshall Herff Applewhite changed. In the late 1970s, for example, the group reportedly lived in a Wyoming encampment in the Rocky Mountains, where members sometimes wore hoods over their heads and altered their work chores every 12 minutes in accordance with beeps from a command tent.

Just before the end, in contrast, they lived in an exclusive suburban enclave, having traded campground drudgery for high-tech prowess and the designing of Web pages for companies that wanted a presence on the Internet.

But as a more complete portrait of the cult emerged from interviews with experts on cults, statements of former members and published reports, it became clear that for most of the group's history, which spanned more than two decades, its members followed specific scripts as they pursued a shared destiny.

``Anyone willing to play by the rules was welcome,'' Robert W. Balch, a professor of sociology at the University of Montana who studied the group for years, wrote in a 1995 book.

It also became clear that the Total Overcomers, or Heaven's Gate - just two of the names adopted by the group over the years - always recruited new members in a manner that could be described as almost bashful.

Keeping its address secret, the group would advertise meetings with posters, discourage potential recruits from joining on the spot and insist that they come to a follow-up session, sometimes at a location that would be difficult to reach. In one case, aspiring members had to travel to a post office 800 miles from the initial meeting place so that they could look in a ZIP code book for the scribbled directions to the next meeting place.

Longtime members talked to new recruits about free will even as those recruits were effectively robbed of that capacity and were encouraged to cast away the detritus of their lives before joining.

``They were very explicit - people had to make a free and conscious choice,'' Balch said in an interview Friday.

Balch, posing as a recruit, traveled with members of the group for two months in 1975 as they pitched tents in a variety of Western states. He said Applewhite and co-leader Bonnie Lu Trusdale Nettles, who died of natural causes in 1985, had even bought bus tickets home for people who wanted to leave the group and had once driven a defector to the airport.

But Applewhite and Nettles, calling themselves Bo and Peep, as in shepherds of a flock, also encouraged recruits to renounce their former lives.