The Order of the Solar Temple (OTS)

Followers & Leaders

The Cult

Luc Jouret

Jouret was the Belgian-Canadian, charismatic leader of the Solar Temple Order. He was a physician who worked with his colleague, Joseph Di Mambro.

The Solar Temple was founded by Luc Jouret, a homeopathic physician and New Age lecturer, and Joseph De Mambro. Its headquarters was eventually moved to Zurich where a leadership council of 33 people presided as other regional sites and lodges were established in Sweden.

Paola Estrada

KC Shaw

Alexa Sheppard

Sami Steers

Period: 1

Joseph Di Mambro

He was the French-Canadian leader of the cult

known as "the dictator". He was the financial mastermind of the entire operation.

Together they preached a mix of Catholicism, New Age pseudoscience and apocalypse. It only lasted about 10 years, but the Order still had an estimated number of 300 members to whom they preached this hodegpodge of Catholic conservationism and disaster to.

The OTS

Origin

Fatalities

The Order of the Solar Temple (aka the International Order of Chivalry Solar Tradition) was a small religious cult that was founded in Geneva, Switzerland in 1984. It is best known for the murder-suicide of over 70 of its members in 1994-1997.

The Solar Temple traced its history to the revival of the Knights Templar (a military-religious order from the 12th century that was suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church) after the French Revolution. In more recent times, the Knights Temple has been attempted to be recreated as it dispersed into many factions all over the world. Before founding his own cult, Jouret had belonged to a descendant of one of these factions, the Renewed Order of the Temple.

October of 1994 is when the cult officially ended in Switzerland and Canada. Its members began to die off from either homicides, mass-suicides, burnings, shootings, suffocation, tranquilizers, and other forms of torture. The first to be sacrificed to the New Age was a couple and their child who were killed by Di Mambro because he believed their child was the antichrist. The list of over 300 fatalities over the next 3 years was extensive. Jouret and De Mambro had killed themselves and their families not only due to their rising tensions for cult control, but also to secure a spot for themselves on the other side.

Integrated into the teachings of the Solar Temple was the belief that the Earth would face a worldwide catastrophe in the mid-1990s. In preparation for this event, its members found it necessary to enter a higher spiritual plane.

The End!

How Long It Lasted

How It Started

The goal of this cult was to disseminate the group's philosophy and to bring together a spiritual elite in order to achieve a higher state of consciousness. As the years went on, some members and even his own family began to question Di Mambro's authority and mystical powers. In 1994, two members of the OST wrote a letter denouncing his behavior. They criticized him for his change in lifestyle and his seemingly fraudulent actions he had built for the members. The group's funds were drained which led the members to question the entire cult as a whole.

In 1976, Joseph Di Mambro founded the Centre for the Preparation of the New Age to support his beliefs and to perhaps create some sort of following. Shortly after this, a small group of men and women came to live with him so he could transmit his knowledge and beliefs to them so that they could together prepare for the New Age and its arrival. Participation in the group would enable members to prepare their bodies and spirits for passage into the new world. Luc Jouret rapidly integrated himself into Di Mambro's inner circle as he brought the cult into the public eye. Their partnership helped give the cult its official name.

Still abiding to their faith, the members still followed Jouret and Di Mambro. The OST only lasted about 10 years as it became one of the cult's of the 20th century to end in murder-suicides. The apparent affluence of the temple's membership challenged the prevailing conception of the upcoming incidents as a product of reluctance from the group as it suggested a more ideological reasoning.

The Order of the Solar Temple (OTS)