PSYCHOLOGISTS theorise that the Higher Source members were persuaded to kill themselves by a charismatic leader who may have suffered a crisis. The ages of the dead and their upper middleclass background fit in with profiles of the cult members of the 1990s.
The US cult expert Mr John Hochman, a psychiatrist, yesterday dismissed the idea that the Rancho Santa Fe suicides were committed by people with severe mental problems. "We can see that these folk were motivated sincere, professional and able to earn a living," he said. "They didn't join any religious group in order to do away with themselves.
"This came from their leader," he said. "The belief system is irrelevant - space ships or whatever - that's just to keep the interest going. The creator is the leader and he is the key."
Psychological profiles of cult recruits usually show emotional turmoil involving guilt, shame, loneliness or helplessness, and appear typically among young people aged 18 to 26. A historical analogy is the Gnostics, groups from biblical times who believed in secret wisdom revealed only to sect members, and in this case validated by their joint deaths.
There are said to be more than 500 cults in Britain and 2,500 in the United States alone.
The doomsday prophet Luc Jouret, head of the Swiss based Renewed Order of the Solar Temple, was blamed for the deaths of 53 of his followers in Switzerland and Canada. Five more Temple believers killed themselves in Canada last week.
Dozens of Korean groups that preach apocalypse and a rapture in which people are magically beamed up to heaven were disappointed recently when the world did not end as predicted.
In 1993, David Koresh, self proclaimed Son of God, gathered his Branch Davidian followers in a compound in Waco, Texas, and sent at least 70 men, women and children to their deaths in a fiery shootout with government agents.
Jim Jones led 913 followers into the Guyana jungle and persuaded them to commit mass suicide by drinking cyanide laden Kool Aid in 1978. He told them they were going to heaven.
A French lawyer warned yesterday that about 50 people close to the Solar Temple sect were in danger in France and might try to commit suicide at any time.
Ms Joelle Vernay acts for the National Union of Defence Associations of the Family and the Individual, which is a civil plaintiff in the case of the mass suicide of 16 Solar Temple members near Grenoble, in December 1995.
Ms Vernay said that the five people who died last weekend in Canada during another "transit" into the next world had all told Canadian police that they no longer belonged to the sect.
Ms Vernay said that former sect members still strongly believed ink the precepts of sect leaders. She claimed that any meeting of these people was "potentially dangerous" and could set off "new transits". There were about 50 people in France sufficiently close to the sect to run this risk, she said.
In Tokyo, meanwhile, a Japanese government official told a court yesterday that the Aum Supreme Truth sect used sex in its religious training and made followers drink the blood of its leader.
The official, Atsushi Toda, was giving evidence at the trial of the Aum leader, Shoko Asahara, in connection with the nerve gas attack on the Tokyo metro in March 1995, and other crimes.
Members of the quasi Buddhist Aum Shinrikyo sect are accused of the gas attack in which 11 people died and 5,000 were injured.
Mr Toda told how the government had been wary in 1989 to give Aum Supreme Truth recognition as a religious group status because of the tactics used.
Mr Toda, who handled the registration, said: "What made us sceptical about the sect at that time was a series of troubles with relatives of followers, its use of sex in religious training and another training method making followers drink the blood of the guru."
He told the Tokyo District Court that the cult defended itself by saying that sex was no longer used in training and that the drinking of Mr Asahara's blood had only been carried out once.