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The burnt bodies were found in Switzerland, Canada and France. Some had been shot in the head, others asphyxiated. Most were drugged.
But all were seemingly dead in a ritualistic collective suicide inside buildings engulfed in flames.
In 1994, 53 members of the secretive religious sect known as the Order of the Solar Temple died – a few by suicide, most murdered – and left with them a message.
‘It is with unfathomable love, pure joy and no regret that we leave this world,’ the order’s ‘Transit for the Future’ document said.
‘Men, do not cry for our fate, but cry for your own.’
The deaths from 30 September to 5 October 1994 included former members and so-called ‘traitors’. Twenty-three bodies were found in a fire-ravaged farmhouse in the tiny village of Cheiry, 48 miles north of Geneva, Switzerland.
Twenty-five were found in three burned-out chalets at Granges-sur-Salvan, 47 miles east of Geneva, dying from poison injection. Five were found ritualistically murdered in Morin-Heights – including an infant.
The order’s leaders were nowhere to be found, police believed.
What local officials found inside was chilling. A circle of corpses around an altar, their heads aimed outwards as if they were blasting away like rockets. Bodies wearing white, red or black capes, depending on their rank
Chalices used to burn incense. A macrobiotic research lab – nature was key. A painting of a bearded, almost Christ-like man looking on, a jar labelled ‘DNA’ and the charred corpse of a baby inside a plastic bag. A cassette taped to a door.
But why did these people do this, whether voluntarily or otherwise? They hoped to make a ‘death voyage’ to a distant star known as Sirius, where, probably by a flying saucer, they’d land on a planet and form a paradise.
The Order of the Solar Temple’s beliefs were a ‘dangerous cauldron of New Age, esoteric, and secret society beliefs’, Stephen Kent, a professor at the University of Alberta’s Department of Sociology, told Metro. On top of a deep appreciation of the environment, they also saw themselves as the successor of the Knights Templars, a mysterious Catholic military order from the 13th century.
Central to this, the sect felt the Earth would soon suffer the same fate as Sodom and Gomorrah – go down in flames. Earth was only a pitstop for them, and the end of the world was imminent.
For about a decade, the order, initially known as the International Chivalric Organization of the Solar Tradition, was barely known to anyone outside of its 400 or so followers. But the wave of gruesome, bizarre deaths – and the money-hungry dark sides of its leaders – changed all that.
To the sect’s roughly French and Canadian followers, Luc Jouret was their only means of escape. A charismatic spiritual lecturer with one thing on his mind – the end of all life – who knew all the secrets to life.
‘We are in a circle of fire,’ Jouret wrote in the 1980s. ‘Everything is being consumed. We are about to make a leap in macro-evolution.’
Even Spanish designer Paco Rabanne was smitten. He met the homoeopathic doctor in 1992 – both had a mutual interest in all things fantastical, he said – describing him as of ‘sound mind’.
‘Jouret was not a madman and God knows I have known madmen who claimed to be Jesus Christ or the heavenly Virgin,’ Rabanne said.
Was the Order of the Solar Temple a cult?
A seductive leader, with out-there ideas that either affirmed or rejected the world and sincere followers; in other words, the Order of the Solar Temple is a cult.
That’s a word, however, that academics like Dr Aled Thomas, a teaching fellow at the University of Leeds’ School of Philosophy, Religion, and History of Science, aren’t too fond of.
The Order of the Solar Temple is more of a ‘minority religion’, he tells Metro, also known as a ‘New Religious Movement’.
‘The term has also been used to villainise and cause moral panics surrounding minority groups, often with racial implications – such as a lot of Islamophobic rhetoric,’ he explains, adding that behaviours that are typically billed as ‘cultish’ can actually be applied to most mainstream religions and politics.
‘There is a stereotype surrounding new religions which presents its members as having been “brainwashed” by duplicitous leaders,’ Dr Thomas said, ‘however, that concept has been debunked in the social sciences since the 1980s.’
There are many reason why people joins cults, Dr Edd Graham‑Hyde, a senior researcher at the evangelistic group, Church Army.
‘There’s an underlying sub-conscious desire for empowerment innate within us,’ he says. ‘Therefore, when they find a group that makes them feel like they belong, that they have some sort of special knowledge, and that espouses supreme significance for the movement then they are more likely to join.
‘This is because the individual is left feeling accepted, intelligent and of having worth or value which adds value to their life or those around them – ultimately, this is empowering.’
Then there was the French jeweller, convicted conman and fan of all things esoteric Joseph Di Mambro. He founded the Golden Way Foundation, an environmentalist group in Geneva in 1978 that was struggling to get off the ground as it lacked a charming leader – Jouret ticked all of the boxes.
Having met while Jouret was giving a lecture, sharing fears about the future of climate change, the pair founded the order in 1984 in Geneva. They bought a chalet complex at Morin Heights to act as the headquarters.
Jouret’s public image as a well-meaning homoeopath helped get people interested in what the pair had to say. Though being able to learn the truth the order offered involved a fair bit of money being offered, with people encouraged to sell everything and invest in any of their projects to help them buy a ticket to salvation.
Jouret was the smooth-talking leader and Di Mambro was the shadowy associate and bookkeeper. Both would engage in sexual relations with female members of their flock, with Jouret claiming it would give him ‘spiritual strength’ and one ritual saw him do so and conjure spirits around him – spirits nothing more than expensive projections operated by Di Mambro.
Soon enough, regional officers were set up across Switzerland, Canada and more. At its peak in 1989, there were 442 members: Ninety in Switzerland, 187 in France, 86 in Canada, 53 in Martinique, 16 in the US and 10 in Spain.
The flock included seemingly straight-laced people like wealthy tycoons, business journalists and public officials.
This was the ’90s after all. ‘The 1990s unfolded amidst growing concerns in the West over apocalypticism and end-of-the-world scenarios as it approached the second millennium after Jesus’ death, amplified by the New Testament’s Book of Revelation,’ Kent said.
‘Predictions of technological failures involving the Internet and the resulting social collapse that would ensue, combined with foretold environmental catastrophes added to these religiously-influenced concerns.’
Jouret and Di Mambro sat on a pile of around $93,000,000 which, adjusted for inflation, is roughly $202,000,000 today. The money was from among other things, ‘donations’ from their flock, helping them buy houses in Europe and Canada and temple sites.
In the early ’90s, however, Jouret and Di Mambro’s hold was weakening. Members were growing increasingly frustrated with the leaders.
Accusations that sect members were engaged in paramilitary activities, arms trafficking and money laundering weren’t helping. In 1993, Canadian police accused Jouret of being behind Q-37, a paramilitary group, and the following year was alongside two other sect members charged with possession of illegal weapons. (Jouret had long urged followers to stockpile weapons.)
‘Jouret became increasingly angry after his weapons conviction in Canada, and paranoid about the media attention that this conviction catalyzed,’ explained Kent.
‘Di Mambro was in failing health amidst growing financial problems, anticipating that exposure of the tricks and deceptions used in the secret ceremonies would expose him as a fraud.’
‘For both men, therefore, life was becoming increasingly difficult with bleak futures awaiting them, so a fantasized escape to another world and new lives on it became a deadly, dysfunctional way of dealing with the circumstances of their actual realities.’
On September 30, the Dutoit family, all former members, were the first to die. In a grisly ritualistic murder in Morin-Heights, the family including their baby were killed by three followers for being ‘traitors’, reportedly believing the child was the antichrist.
People in the towns of Cheiry and Granges-sur-Salvan awoke on October 5 to the smell of smoke. Building the order followers once called home had been set alight with explosives made from gasoline, butane and a phone-activated detonator.
In the hours before the killings, Di Mambro was out at a restaurant in Salvan with some of his most toadying followers. Jouret, meanwhile, was buying bin bags.
The doomed followers recorded their final moments on tape and ate their last meal before drinking something and falling unconscious.
At least five children were among the 53 who died. Three of the Quebec victims, killed roughly three days before the others, had been stabbed – their killers among the dead at Grandes-sur-Salvan. Most at Cheiry had been shot – as many as eight bullets to the head.
Jouret, Di Mambro and many of those who organised the deaths were among the dead. Something that police did not realise at the time, with a brief manhunt ensuing.
Officials concluded that of the death toll, only 15 were voluntary suicides, with the public recoiling at the ‘extraordinarily violent’ ways the flock died, Kent said.
‘The Solar Temple story became a global media frenzy that heightened calls throughout Europe for increased international cult monitoring and regulation,’ he added.
On October 6, the order was banned in Quebec. This wouldn’t stop the cult from continuing for years. A few remaining members even said they were annoyed they weren’t one of the dozens to ‘transmit’ to Sirius.
Two other mass suicides/murders erupted. In 1995, 16 followers died in France, while five more died in Quebec two years later – they left behind three teenagers who refused to take part.
For Rabanne, he counted himself as among those who, like the followers of the Order of the Solar Temple, are people trying to find answers in the world.
‘Now, at 61, I am trying to find the reason why we are on Earth,’ he said in 1994.
‘But I have always said that this search must be carried out outside of sects and that the best guru is always a b*****d.’
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected].
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