The Order of the Solar Temple

The Order of the Solar Temple belonged to a long tradition of modern esoteric orders that claimed descent from the Knights Templar, the medieval military order suppressed by the papacy in 1312. Since the eighteenth century, Freemasons, occultists and Rosicrucian groups had told stories of Templars who survived in secret and handed down hidden wisdom. In twentieth-century France and Switzerland, several small neo-Templar orders competed for this heritage.

Joseph Di Mambro, born in France in 1924, was a jeweller by training who became involved in Rosicrucian circles. In 1978 he founded the Golden Way Foundation in Geneva, a centre for spiritual teaching where followers lived and studied together. In the early 1980s he met Luc Jouret, a Belgian doctor born in 1947 who practised homeopathy and gave popular lectures on health, ecology and spirituality. Jouret was a gifted speaker, and he became the public face of the movement, while Di Mambro directed it from behind the scenes.

Groups like this are usually called cults in the press. Scholars of religion tend to prefer the term “new religious movement”, because “cult” is a contested label that can blur the differences between very different groups. The Solar Temple stands out among them for the wealth and education of many of its members.

From 1984 the order, known in time as the Ordre du Temple Solaire, recruited through Jouret’s lecture clubs in Switzerland, France, Belgium and Quebec. Those who attended heard about natural medicine, the coming ecological crisis and the need for spiritual awakening. A smaller number were invited into the order itself, where they took part in ceremonies in Templar-style capes, with swords, chalices and candles, and rose through grades of initiation.

The inner teaching combined Christian imagery with Rosicrucian and Theosophical ideas. Members were told that the order was guided by Ascended Masters, hidden spiritual beings, and that they themselves had lived earlier lives as Templars and other figures of sacred history. During rituals, inner members saw what they believed to be apparitions of the Masters and of sacred objects. Former members later testified that these had been produced with lighting and stage effects.

Di Mambro held great authority over the private lives of members. He decided who should live in the order’s houses, who should pair with whom, and how money should be used, and members gave large sums to the order. Some lived on farms in Quebec, which the leaders presented as places of refuge from the catastrophe they expected. Their teaching increasingly spoke of the end of the present world and of a “transit” by which the chosen would pass to a higher plane, associated with the star Sirius.

Much of this was hidden from those on the outer edges of the movement. People who came to Jouret’s lectures, or bought his books and recordings, met a doctor who talked about healthy food, homeopathy and respect for nature, themes that were popular in the New Age culture of the 1980s. Only gradually, and only for a few, did the lectures lead to the inner order and its rituals. This layered structure helped the order attract people who would never have joined a group that announced the end of the world on its first evening.

By the early 1990s the order was in trouble. Members left and demanded the return of their money, some had seen through the staged apparitions, and in 1993 Jouret and others were charged in Quebec in connection with an attempt to buy handguns, which brought police scrutiny and press reports. Di Mambro was in poor health, and the leaders came to see the world as hostile and persecuting. Former members were demanding explanations, and the leaders’ own family circle was under strain. In this atmosphere the language of transit, once a spiritual metaphor, took on a darker and more literal meaning in the leaders’ writings.

Between 30 September and 5 October 1994, five people, among them an infant, were killed in a house at Morin-Heights in Quebec. On 5 October, 23 people were found dead in a farmhouse at Cheiry in the canton of Fribourg, and 25 in chalets at Granges-sur-Salvan in Valais, where buildings had been set on fire. Di Mambro and Jouret were among the dead. Letters sent to the media described the deaths as a voluntary departure, but Swiss investigators concluded that many of the victims, including children, had been killed and that only some had chosen to die.

The deaths did not end there. In December 1995, sixteen members, three of them children, were found dead in a forest clearing in the Vercors massif in south-eastern France. In March 1997, five more died in a house at Saint-Casimir in Quebec, while three teenagers in the house were allowed to leave and survived. In all, 74 people died.

The events caused shock in Switzerland, France and Canada, partly because many of the dead were respected professionals. Investigations in all three countries followed. In France, the Solar Temple deaths helped shape a parliamentary inquiry into sects and later legislation against the abuse of vulnerable people by groups. One former member, the only person ever tried in connection with the deaths, was acquitted by a court in Grenoble in 2001, and the acquittal was confirmed on appeal in 2006.

Scholars such as Jean-François Mayer, Massimo Introvigne and Catherine Wessinger have studied how the order’s leaders, facing defection, scandal and their own decline, turned their teaching of transit into a plan for death. Their work stresses that the members did not join to die, and that an esoteric movement of the kind found across Europe became deadly only through the choices of a small group at its centre. The deaths also left families in several countries grieving relatives who had seemed to lead ordinary, successful lives, and their testimony shaped how the press and the authorities later approached such groups. The order itself ceased to exist after 1997.