Sunset Of The Solar Temple: The Esoteric Christianity Of An Interstellar Cult
An essay in a series on the spiritual history of extraterrestrials
Just before midnight on the evening of 4 October 1994, a barn in Ferme des Rochettes near Cheiry, Switzerland began to burn with eighteen people inside it (see photo). They were all dead, arranged like spokes on a wheel, wearing capes. Three more bodies were found inside an octagonal room with mirrors on seven walls, and one more body in a farmhouse nearby. Altogether, 21 people had been shot, execution-style. Fourteen of them had plastic bags placed over their heads. “Canisters of propane and garbage bags full of gasoline sat hooked up to detonation devices” which failed to explode.1 The last of the dead had taken his own life in the farmhouse.
As Swiss firefighters uncovered the horror, they had no idea that even more terrible scenes were unfolding elsewhere at the same moment. For as the barn took fire, so did the condominium in Morin Heights, Quebec, near Montreal, belonging to New Age guru Luc Jouret. Gerry and Collette Genoud died in the blaze. Inside the storage closet, firefighters made a grisly discovery: Tony Dutoit, stabbed fifty times in the back; his wife Nicky Christopher, stabbed eight times in the back, four times in her throat, and once in each breast; and their three-month-old son Emmanuel, who had been stabbed six times in the chest with a wooden stake pinned through his heart. Forensic examination determined that all three had died on 30 September.
Three hours after the flames rose at Cheiry, a complex of buildings in Granges-sur-Salvan, Switzerland also started burning. Here, firefighters discovered 25 bodies, including four children and three teenagers, inside two of the three chalets belonging to a religious group calling itself the Solar Temple. A Swiss magistrate later concluded that of these 52 deaths in that country over 24 hours, fifteen were suicides by “the Awakened,” while 30 “Immortals” were lured into deadly rituals, ingesting tranquilizers before they were shot. Seven people considered “traitors” were executed. Dutoit and his young family had been brutally murdered for betraying and polluting the secrets of the cult, whose leaders were among the dead at Salvan.
The world soon learned that the Solar Temple (Ordre du Temple Solaire, or OTS) was a Rosicrucian organization. Born in Germany at the beginning of the modern world, Rosicrucian religion has always been closely associated with Freemasonry, the Illuminati, and conspiracy theories. OTS was therefore suffused with New Age esoterica along with medieval Templar mythology. Joseph DiMambro, the spiritual leader of OTS, and Jouret, its charismatic front man, offered believers an afterlife on a different planet from earth. “The transit was to salvation in a higher realm of existence and consciousness,” Catherine Wessinger writes.2 “The believers would receive ‘glorious “solar bodies” on the star Sirius,’ but Jupiter and Venus were also mentioned by Solar Temple believers as their destination.” Four of the dead left notes mentioning their desire to “see another world.”
This was the spiritual inheritance of Emanuel Swedenborg and Helena Blavatsky. In this essay series, we have become familiar with this occult bricolage, or pastiche of beliefs, drawn from an eclectic cultural menu. It is the star-stuff from which the flying saucers were made, the secret religious history of belief in aliens. Di Mambro was a New Age prophet with a Christian doomsday, just like another, contemporary UFO cult, Heaven’s Gate. Indeed, with their leadership already dead, the ritual OTS deaths did not stop until a fourth atrocity took place just four days before Marshall Applewhite and his followers also took their own lives with tranquilizers and bags over their heads in 1997. Rosicrucianism was only one of the many esoteric topics that interested Applewhite on his spiritual journey to his cometary rendezvous. Here is the story of an obscurantist mystery religion that devolved into mass suicides.
Embedded below is the 21 February episode of the 1996 Channel 4/France 2 show Silent Witness. In this documentary, cult survivor Hermann Delorme explains that he was a spiritual seeker, not a victim of control. “I would have become involved with just about anything to stay involved with Dr. Jouret and I felt that if I was able to get closer to him or at least to stay within the group that at some point, I would gain more knowledge, I would probably have access to revelations, to wonderful things. and maybe even at one point to be in contact with either entities, or extraterrestrials, or whatever. That’s the impression that I got,” Delorme told his interviewer (emphasis added).
“And you wanted that?” The interviewer clarifies.
“Oh yes, I wanted that.” Clearly, he did, for when Luc Jouret asked him to obtain three handguns with silencers, Delorme did as he was asked.
The video includes a recording of the cult initiation ceremony. As the soundtrack changes from Wagner’s Lohengrin to a Gregorian chant, two Templars in white mantles take a robe and surplice from an altar and dress a man wearing a suit and tie in the new garments. He then kneels before a priest with his hands on a red rose and a bible that has a sword for a bookmark. A priest dubs him into knighthood. The ritual attendees file into the room two by two, paired male and female. Everyone wears white mantles with red crosses on the breast.
This complex display is but one part of the alchemical “unfoldment” in which the initiate undergoes Rosicrucian transformation. Delorme went through this ritual and found it satisfying. The scene described here begins around the 26:34 mark.
In late December 1995, another sixteen OTS members were found at Grenoble, France. Fourteen had been drugged, shot, and burned. The other two, a French police officer and a French immigration inspector, had committed the ritual murders before taking their own lives. Some of the dead had left notes about going to “see another world.” In the weeks that followed, journalists, government ministers, and scholars received a series of “Transit Letters” or “Testaments” explaining their intentions.
Finally, on 22 March 1997, five people died near Saint-Casimir, Quebec. All of them took tranquilizers, including the elderly woman who set fire to the house and suffocated herself with a plastic bag. Altogether, 69 people had taken their own lives or been murdered over a period of two and a half years at five different locations in three different countries.
Wessinger identifies OTS as “a Neo-Templar secret society that participated in the diffuse Western occult tradition, which includes Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, Neo-Templar, and Theosophical groups.” Influenced by Jacques Brayer and Julien Origas, the founders of OTS were deeply-studied in occult Christianity and the New Age. Jouret was a homeopathic medicine specialist during the 1980s, “a popular public speaker on the New Age circuit” according to Wessinger. Di Mambro had been a member of the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross (AMORC) since 1956 and became Master of the Lodge at Nimes, France in 1969. “During the 1970s, Di Mambro made a full-time career as a New Age teacher.”
In 1973, he co-founded the Center for the Preparation of the New Age, in Annemasse, France, close to Switzerland. In 1978, Di Mambro founded the Goldden Way Foundation in Geneva. The Golden Way Foundation became the parent of the Solar Temple.
Di Mambro and Jouret turned the Golden Way Foundation into the Ordre International Chevalresque Tradition Solaire in 1984, which they later changed to OTS. From the beginning, it was a secret society with clubs serving as fronts for occult Christian practices. “Di Mambro functioned as a prophet speaking the words of the enlightened Masters of the Great White Brotherhood, who were believed to guide evolution on the planet Earth,” Wessinger writes. “Di Mambro claimed to be the reincarnation of Osiris, Akhnaton, Moses, and Cagliostro, and his followers saw him as a “Cosmic Master” (emphases added).
These are all recognizable elements of the occult bricolage studied in this essay series: Ascended Masters guiding human progress, reincarnations of Egyptians and biblical prophets, a fascination with dubious 17th century con artists. Just knowing what any of that means requires historical study. Seekers drawn to OTS were not poor or deluded. “The Solar Temple members were well-to-do, educated people,” hardly hippies or lost children. Hermann Delorme was a successful insurance executive. The dead of 1994 “included a high-ranking official in the Quebec government, a reporter for a Quebec newspaper, a retired sales manager for the Swiss watch corporation Piaget, a mayor of a Quebec town, and a wealthy Geneva businessman.” Esoteric religion is not for the weak-minded or the feeble soul.
The Solar Temple appealed to French-speaking people of Roman Catholic background. The elaborate Solar Temple liturgies appear to have been an important attraction to the believers, along with the promise that, through participation in rituals, they would achieve the enlightened consciousness necessary for their inclusion in the coming Age of Aquarius.
Mostly disappointed Catholics, the believers were supposed to be an egregore, a “common aura” or “bank of consciousness” that would produce nine “cosmic children” through OTS to initiate the New Age. Di Mambro produced one of these children, Emmanuelle, with Dominique Bellaton, an OTS member. They “staged an ‘immaculate conception’ in the Sanctuaire when a Master pointed his sword, which emitted a laser beam that appeared to illuminate Bellaton’s throat,” Wessinger explains. “Jocelyne Di Mambro was disguised as Manatanus, wearing a cape and mask, and Bellaton held a flashlight inside her mouth so that her throat appeared swollen and glowing,” Susan J. Palmer adds.3
It was just one of the illusions that Tony Dutoit had created for the ritual performances in the Sanctuaire at Sylvan, where holographic Ascended Masters deigned to visit earth and make announcements in person. Telling these secrets to OTS believers when he arrived in Quebec with his young family had been Dutoit’s final betrayal.
To pursue their egregore project, OTS exercised a very high level of control over the believers. The “members permitted their identities and marriages to be rearranged by the leaders,” Wessinger writes. Taking a page from the Theosophists, “Di Mambro would identify various members as the reincarnations of various famous people and even deities, such as Bernard de Clairvaux, Joseph of Aramathea, Queen Hatshepshout, and Ram. Members often were paired in ‘cosmic marriages’ between partners with significant age differences.” Tony Dutoit did not have Di Mambro’s permission to marry Nicky Christopher. Di Mambro believed the Dutoits’ child “threatened the status of his daughter as the avatar, and he concluded that the Dutoit infant was the Antichrist.”
The daughter was cloistered for the first three months of her life. “To keep Emmanuelle pure, she had to wear a helmet and gloves, and no one but family members were permitted to touch her. Her father always referred to Emmanuelle as ‘he’” (emphasis added). Di Mambro would follow her through the temple opening the doors with a remote control device whenever she commanded them to “Ouvrez!” Taught five languages and instructed in Templar philosophy by Nicky Dutoit, Emmanuelle was encouraged to believe she had magical powers. “At age twelve, however, Emmanuelle was becoming unruly and expressing interest in teenage popular culture.” She was turning into a young woman instead of a masculine savior.
The OTS was clearly dysfunctional. Jouret was removed from his leadership position at the “ark of safety” commune in St. Anne-de-Perade, Quebec in 1987. Membership peaked in 1989 with 442 members, mostly in the Francophone world: 90 in Switzerland, 187 in France, 53 on the island of Martinque, 16 in the United States, 86 in Canada, ten in Spain. During the 1980s, OTS was focused on survivalism. In 1990, Di Mambro’s son discovered the trickery in the Sanctuaire, learned the truth from Dutoit, and denounced his father to the OTS. Di Mambro had promised an avatar (lit. ‘descendant’), but he was suddenly running out of both descendants and members.
As the controversy roiled the faithful, leading many to quit OTS, the leadership clique began to spiral. “Members gave even greater emphasis to the gnostic dualism found in the Western occult tradition between spirit and matter, and the Solar Temple adepts opted to abandon this contaminated earthly world to its cataclysmic fate, while they carried the fruit of the earthly evolution of consciousness forward into an evolutionary cycle on another world,” Wessinger writes. We return to the question: how did a group inspired by esoteric Enlightenment Christianity turn so dark?
Tall Tales of the Rosy Cross
The answer is that darkness was always present in Rosicrucianism from its origins in what is now Germany. Arthur Edward Waite, systematizer of the eponymous Waite Tarot deck, was the first serious historian to study the origins of Rosicrucianism. While it was impossible to positively identify who the first pamphleteers were, “in their acknowledged manifestoes they avow themselves a mere theosophical offshoot of the Lutheran heresy, acknowledging the spiritual supremacy of a temporal prince, and calling the pope Antichrist.”4
Timing is everything. There were three books, all from mysterious authors. First was Fama Fraternitatis, a text that German occultists passed around starting sometime after 1610; it was published in 1614. Second was Confessio Fraternitatis, published in 1615. Last was The Hermetic Romance; or the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, published in 1616. Not by coincidence, Frederick V, Elector Palatine and head of the Protestant Union, had married Princess Elizabeth Stuart of England in 1613. Their match, and the alliance it suggested with England, gave Protestants within the Palatinate hope for a successful uprising against the new Hapsburg emperor, a zealot who hated Protestantism.
Rudolph II had been a freethinker, tolerant of the Bohemian church and its mystical brotherhood, the Bohemian Brethren. Science, especially astronomy, had grown by leaps and bounds under his patronage. He was repelled by the fanaticism of his nephew and successor, Ferdinand of Styria, who moved to suppress the Bohemian church upon his succession. A spiral of violence led to the Thirty Years War in 1618. Wary of contending with Hapsburgs, James I of England never sent help to his son-in-law, who was utterly defeated at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620 and died in Dutch exile. Foreign interventions complicated the conflict. When it finally ended in 1648, the heart of Europe had been ravaged and depopulated. The Peace of Westphalia is seen as a formative moment in western civilization and the present world order.
It was also the beginning of the Enlightenment. A new generation of German thinkers called themselves the Rosicrucian Fraternity. It was “a society for the advancement of esoteric science and the study of natural laws,” Waite writes. But the hatred still simmered. Surveying the writings of Rosicrucianism in the 17th century, Waite finds them “intemperate in their language, rabid in their religious prejudices, and, instead of towering giant-like above the intellectual average of their age, we see them buffeted by the same passions and identified with all the opinion of the men by whom they were environed.” More than monkish magicians interested in kabbalah, they were revolutionaries. Emphasis added:
The voice which addresses us behind the mystical mask of the RoseCross does not come from an intellectual throne, erected on the pinnacles of high thinking and surrounded by the serene and sunny atmosphere of a far-sighted tolerance; it comes from the very heart of the vexatious and unprofitable strife of sects, and it utters the war-cry of extermination. The scales fall from our eyes, the romance vanishes; we find ourselves in the presence of some Germans of the period, not of “the mystic citizens of the eternal kingdom.”
Waite writes that “there is no novelty in the Rosicrucian pretensions, and no originality in their views. They appear before us as Lutheran disciples of Paracelcus …we find nothing in either manifesto to connect them with the typology of a remote period. It is, therefore, in modern, not ancient times that we must seek an explanation of the device of the Rose-Cross” (emphasis added). Modernity had arrived and Rosicrucianism was a completely modern movement — a political religion. There are “no vestiges of the Rosicrucians traceable before the beginning of the seventeeth century,” Waite says. Their source texts were fantastical because they were fantasies. “It is obvious that they are devoid of historical value, but they are all excessively curious,” Waite observed.
Those writings were however quite influential on Royalist astrologer and occultist John Heydon, for the ideas of the Rosicrucian literature had transmitted to England. “In John Heydon we find the names Rosicrucian, Rosicrucianism, &c., used in a general sense, and as terms to conjure with,” Waite writes. “The supposed brethren are confounded with the elder alchemists, theosophists, etc., and an irrational antiquity is gratuitously bestowed upon them.” The word ‘Rosicrucian’ took on an agglutinating quality. Thomas Vaughan used it as “a generic term, embracing every species of mystical pretension” to combine them with his Anglicanism in 1612. It was alchemy in action.
Heydon, who lived at the beginning of English colonization of the Americas, even told a story of the time before Noah’s flood, when the downfall of a great civilization had forced the inhabitants of that lost land to settle in the Americas and suffer technological backsliding. “So marvel you not at the population of America, nor at the rudeness of the people, younger a thousand years, at the least, than the rest of the world,” Heydon wrote. It was a new age of scientific navigation, and Englishmen were only just now reconnecting with lost worlds. “By this accident of time we lost our traffique with the Americans with whom, in regard they lay nearest to us, we had the most commerce.” It was their natural right as Englishmen to have the Americas back, see how that works?
France was also roiled by the Rosicrucian idea, but “there are at least four competing versions” of the 1623 manifesto which terrified Paris. Stories of invisible Brethren, the invocation of spirits and demons into service, and the general anti-papist sentiment of Rosicrucian writings sparked a two-year moral panic, with Parisians supposedly seeing Rosicrucian boogeymen everywhere. There was more fear of Rosicrucianism than real Rosicrucians. But France was going through its own Wars of Religion, too. Indeed, a much more sanguine Charles I of England tried to support the Protestant cause at La Rochelle in 1627. These real threats were sublimated in French nightmares about Rosicrucians in the bedroom turning invisible when they are seen, which sounds like sleep paralysis.
Like Swedenborg before them, the Rosicrucians of revolutionary France were alleged to have psychic powers. “The Comte de Chazal was possessed of vision at a distance, and witnessed the horrors of the French Revolution from a vast distance, with amazing perspicuity, by means of mind’s eye” in 1794 while he was on the island of Mauritius, White says. Also like Swedenborg, the Comte was a Freemason. However, “there is no traceable connection between Masonry and Rosicrucianism,” White explains. The Rosicrucian Society of England “as a body is not otherwise connected with the Masonic Order other than by having its members selected from that fraternity.” Rosicrucianism grows in the soil of Masonry; it is the plant and not the soil.
Reflecting Victorian sensibilities, or perhaps anticipating multilevel marketing schemes, the rules of the Rosicrucian Society set out the exact sums that members paid to advance in grade through a complex, many-layered heirarchy. “In 1871 the society informed its members that it was entirely non-Masonic in character, with the sole exception that every aspirant was required to belong to the Masonic Brotherhood” first. “The assigned reason is the numerous points of resemblance between the secrets of Rsoicrucians and Freemasons. The object of the association was then stated to be purely literary and antiquarian, and the promulgation of a new masonic rite was by no means intended.”
Instead, new ideas were being incorporated into the bricolage. For example, there was now a Great White Brotherhood guiding the spiritual evolution of earth. “It is an opinion entertained by the elect in modern thesophical circles, that the true Rooscrucian Brotherhood migrated into India, and this notion is to be countenanced by a Latin pamphlet … published in 1618,” Waite explained. Both the Church of Theosophy and the Order of the Golden Dawn were Rosicrucian, but they were adopting eastern occultism. “They have developed into Thibetan Brothers, have exchanged Protestant Christianity for esoteric Buddhism, and are no longer interested in the number of the beast,” Waite wrote. “Their violent antipathy to the pope still remains: they have not yet torn him in pieces with nails, but probably expect to accomplish this long-cherished project about the period of the next general cataclysm.”
Not-so-secrets of the temple
In the Routledge volume The Order of the Solar Temple: Temple of Death, John Walliss writes that “Blavatsky’s interest in ancient Egypt bears obvious importance for the subsequent development of the Rosicrucian movement, and hence for the ideas of the OTS.” Walliss traces a direct line of spiritual inspiration. “It is hard to overestimate Bailey’s influence on the Solar Temple. In particular, her preoccupation with Sirius and her emphasis on Ascended Masters provided momentum to the modern Rosicrucian revival.”
Specifically, he names “Jacques Breyer (1922-96), who heralded the so-called Arginy Renaissance, drew substantially on Bailey’s ideas,” while “Joseph Di Mambro himself used Bailey’s Great Invocation to commence OTS ceremonies.” Di Mambro had been a member of the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), which promotes the image of Rosicrucianism being linked to “ancient Egyptian history, especially the Egyptian Mystery Schools of the fifteenth century BcE, and in particular to the pharaohs Thutmose III (fifteenth century BcE) and Akhenaten (fourteenth century BcE).” We should take these claims seriously, though not literally: “Whatever the authenticity of such a pedigree, such claims signal AMORC’s considerable interest in ancient Egypt — a recurring theme in the OTS.”
John R. Hall and Philip Schuyler explain that local conditions favored the OTS spreading to Canada. “Once as Catholic as the pope, Quebec underwent ‘a revolution tranquille’ in the early 1960s.” Centered in Switzerland and southern France, the group’s beliefs “are part of a wider francophone New Age culture awash with ideas of immortality, reincarnation, time travel, and astral voyages.”
Rosicrucianism is never simple, and “the specific hybrid character of the Solar Temple has to do with how it combined apocalyptic and mystical elements.” The “sociological incoherence” of the OTS is resolved through “a mysticism colored both by dualism and by connections with Christian apocalyptic martyrdom” — namely the idealized medieval Knights Templar. Even the number of the dead in the OTS massacres, 53, seems to have been an effort to match the number of Templars burned at the stake in 1314. Di Mambro appears to have tried luring the first person to leave his group years before into his chalet to be the 54th victim. OTS was “the product of an idiosyncratic theology made possible by a form of client mysticism that mapped transcendence within a dualistic matrix of life and death” — in other words, Di Mambro peddled the “experience” of transformation, a “mystical mood,” that split the world in two.
There was the tiny Solar Temple, and there was the great, profane world outside it. As the world seemed to press in at the doors of the sanctuary, OTS leadership became resigned to their own destruction. They “had long held to a secret doctrine of soul travel between earthly existence and eternal transcendence, and even in the absence of persecution, their theology might have been developed toward warranting a ‘transit,’ which would look like mass suicide in earthly terms,” Hall and Schuyler write. Perhaps the violent end was destined from the beginning. There was no growth potential for OTS, but they could not admit defeat, for this would mean giving up their beliefs. Violence permanently resolved the cognitive dissonance. “The cultural formula to do this was already in their possession, and they may have planned to use it” before their troubles began. “The most esoteric of Temple doctrines claimed to bridge the gulfs of separation between this world and other realms, between the historical present and other times, between finite life and infinite immortality.”
Too many things were going wrong all at once. The effort to prevent anyone touching Emmanuelle, to collect her feces for compost in the vegetable garden, all to maintain her perfect purity, had been for naught. She was not a divine being, after all, but a normal human girl on the cusp of becoming a teenager. It was one of the many pressures that came to bear on the spiritual leader of the cult. The project of creating the new human race (or “Solar Race”) was supposed to “guarantee the survival of the universe” in Di Mambro’s words, but no mass conversion had happened — and the OTS community was coming apart.
“The Solar Temple as a whole never faced any proximate visible threat,” Hall and Schuyler write. “However, for the Temple’s principals to sustain the collective honor of their enterprise, they had to construe their failure as the consequence of persecution and resolve the crisis in a way that affirmed their mystical powers.”
Jean-François Mayer, the only academic to meet Di Mambro and study OTS before its fiery demise, writes for Routledge that “the structures had obviously been planned for a movement much larger than it ever became.” For it turns out that New Age seekers are fickle:
The success of Jouret’s lectures had mistakenly led the order’s leaders to believe there was a potential for many more adherents; they obviously misunderstood the dynamics of the “cultic milieu” and the fact that many “seekers” in this milieu prefer permanent seekership and a succession of “spiritual experiences” to formal and lasting affiliation with one group only. Most people who attended Jouret’s lectures were not ready to commit themselves.
Mayer also concludes that “some members of the Solar Temple were already on their way toward violence before the public exposure of the group” when police in Quebec arrested Delorme and two other OTS members for the attempt to purchase handguns with silencers. He argues that “the first document clearly alluding to a ‘departure’ from Earth had apparently been prepared shortly before the problems encountered by the group in Quebec.”
Di Mambro, Jouret, and their closest members clearly began to believe their own hype. “Internal documents from the core group, discovered during the investigation, also disclose a growing paranoia during the last few months, the order being seen as facing a conspiracy of planetary dimensions.” Walliss writes that “the OTS leadership did have some grounds for feeling that things were not going as well as they would have liked. One would be hard pressed, however, to claim that they were experiencing anywhere near the level of opposition which they claimed.”
The court in Quebec made the three men arrested in the gun sale sting pay $1,000 fines and gave them no jail time, but the so-called ‘Transit Letters’ still deplore the alleged unfairness of the charges and the media coverage of the story as “mass murder.” The effect was not immediate, however, as more than a year had passed between the verdict and the violence. “The Swiss authorities concur that, though the idea of a transit dates from 1990, psychological preparation did not begin until 1993,” Hall and Schuyler note. The arrests had been a triggering event, to risk a pun.
By then, it was clear the group had no room to grow, anymore. The decline in their spiritual authority “distorted the OTS leaders’ perception of the outside world, leading them to see affronts, opposition, plots, and conspiracies where arguably there were none, and to radically revise their view of salvation,” Walliss writes. The guns may have been intended for survivalism, but after the trial and the embarrasments of ex-members going public, survival became moot. “Rather than seeking to survive the ecological apocalypse, they would, instead, abandon the world to its fate and effect a transit ‘with all lucidity and in full consciousness’ to their home in the stars.”
Their ritual exit derived from the same occult bricolage as Heaven’s Gate. “The Solar Temple possessed a cosmology similar to that found in other Western occult groups, including Theosophical groups, in which the evolution of consciousness is described as taking place in recurring cycles on planets,” Wessinger writes.
At various points, the advanced seeds of consciousness (the fruit of evolution on a planet) transfer from one planet to another, and the cycles of evolution continue. Whereas optimistic, progressive expectations about the transition from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius tend to stress the upward movement of a cycle of evolution, the Solar Temple’s experience of cultural opposition and internal stresses made committed members focus instead on the downward movement of the cycle, and they concluded that evolution had reached its end on Earth.
The interstellar home to which they returned was another legacy of Theosophy. “It was taught that a Blue Star appeared some 26,000 years ago,” Blavatsky wrote in The Secret Doctrine. “This star — Sirius — was the home of a number of Ascended Masters, also known as the Great White Brotherhood, who came to earth, and inhabited a subterranean spiritual realm known as Agartha.” An “energy or force emanating from the sun Sirius” produces “self-consciousness in man” on earth. This is the energy which is transmitted into the initiate during the ritual of transformation “with terrific force; were it not that the Hierophant and the two sponsors of the initiate pass it primarily through their bodies, it would be more than [the initiate] could stand.”
Through ritual sex magic — the egregore — a “small spiritual elite could become capable of decorporealizing, according to their degree of initiation within the Temple; corresponding to the three levels of membership were three levels of initiation—initiates, awakened souls, and immortals,” Hall and Schuyler write.
In the Routledge volume, Marc Labelle points again to the AMORC leader that Di Mambro knew, consulted, and imitated. Jacques Breyer, who had spurred the Templar resurgence of 1952, held a “‘doctrine of ‘carbonization of bodies,’ which claims that the power of fire is sufficient to prompt the energetic leap” to the afterlife. This belief “was adopted literally by the order,” Labelle writes.
Messianism took many forms inside the order. Revealing a complex of self deification, Jouret declared he was none other than the Lamb of God, that is the Savior. By comparison, one could say that Di Mambro reserved for himself the role of God the Father, or rather the role of Zeus-Pater (Jupiter), and that the “ethereal” Tabachnik evokes the Holy Ghost. Elisabeth Huneau, a young girl suffering from personality disorders, was left by her parents in Di Mambro’s care. He took her to Deir el-Bahari in Egypt to meditate together in the temple of Queen Hatshepsut, of whom Di Mambro said she was the reincarnation. He announced a revelation: Hatshepsut would give birth to a being as powerful as Christ. Hatshepsut was made pregnant by the god Manatanus [...] of whom Di Mambro was—guess what?—the reincarnation. After this “divine” episode, all had to respect “a purity zone” of many meters around Hatshepsut, who was adorned with luxurious dresses and jewels.
Ah, the perks of being a cult leader! Sex and death and transmutation formed a system of progressive revelation, but there was always hierarchy. “By 1990, the rules of the order described an organization under the absolute authority of a secret inner group called the Synarchy of the Temple. There were three major degrees — Brothers of the Court, Chevaliers of the Alliance, and Brothers of Former Times — each with three internal ranks.”
Heirarchy held secrets. Di Mambro limited attendance in the magical chamber with the holographic Ascended Masters to just four people at a time, performing shows differently every time, so that no two experiences were exactly the same. Wallis suggests that Di Mambro and Jouret saw their mass suicide “as an attempt to save the many secrets and, indeed, ‘secrets within secrets’ on which the group was built.” Perhaps “the transit fires were supposed to destroy all evidence of the OTS, including even the bodies of the members, leaving behind only the Testaments as their legacy.” Let us now turn to those testaments — and the two men who made them happen.
Doomsday and the cult
As the cult’s fortunes waned, the inner group took a new direction. “Members gave even greater emphasis to the gnostic dualism found in the Western occult tradition between spirit and matter, and the Solar Temple adepts opted to abandon this contaminated earthly world to its cataclysmic fate, while they carried the fruit of the earthly evolution of consciousness forward into an evolutionary cycle on another world,” Wessinger writes. She traces the beginning of this turn to 1987, when Jouret was voted out of his position at the Quebec commune in a power struggle with the family of its founder, neo-Nazi Julien Origas. Di Mambro, Breyer, and Origas had been a close trio for many years, but the connection had failed for Jouret.
Born in the Belgian Congo, Jouret became a member of the Walloon Communist Youth after his family’s return home during decolonization. Graduating medical school in 1974, he then enlisted as a paratrooper, participating in the Kolwezi raid that rescued Belgian citizens from Zaire. Adopting homeopathy, he developed successful practices in France, Switzerland, and Quebec. “In the 1980s, Geneva and Montreal were perhaps the two cities with the greatest number of esoteric groups in the world,” Wessinger explains.
Jouret and Di Mambro “were established Grand Masters in the Knights Templar tradition and had collaborated in organizing workshops since 1976. In 1984 they entered into a more formal relationship,” co-founding the organization that would become OTS, Susan J. Palmer writes for Routledge. Jouret “captivated” a number of AMORC members for OTS with his public speaking. “Di Mambro, born in 1924, was trained in the Rosicrucian tradition (AMORC), and became leader of La Pyramide which became later, in 1974, the Golden Way in Geneva.”
Hall and Schuyler write that Jouret developed “a theology of health and environmental consciousness that would counter the ecological apocalypse.”
These ideas became wedded to other “New Age” motifs — astrology, numerology, and time travel — that themselves have been persistent elements in both the syncretic symbolic codes of European Catholicism and the “invented traditions” of Knights Templar and Rosicrucian mysticism.
The working relationship between the two men had clearly deteriorated, however. Before the ‘transits’ in Switzerland began, Joseph Di Mambro gave Patrick Vuarnet, who would lead the fourth and final ‘transit’ in France, a “short fifth letter printed in the same computer font as the other four,” Hall and Schuyler note. It reads: “Following the tragic transit at Cheiry, we insist on specifying, in the name of the Rose+Cross, that we deplore and totally disassociate ourselves from the barbarous, incompetent, and aberrant conduct of Doctor Luc Jouret,” who “is the cause of a veritable carnage which could have been a transit performed in Honor, Peace, and Light.” He was throwing his spiritual partner under l’autobus.
Not that Di Mambro was any more sane than Jouret by this point. Sick with cancer and suffering a range of health issues, Meyer writes that “the founder of the movement had lost touch with reality.” In particular, Meyer cites “an amazing (tape-recorded) discussion within the core group, in which Di Mambro boasts that the order would do something ‘more spectacular’ than Waco.” Di Mambro was referring to the infamous federal raid and siege on the Branch Davidian compound as well as the subsequent deaths of more than eighty members in a massive blaze. The arrest of Hermann Delorme, and the charges against Jouret, took place during the Waco standoff, so the two discrete headlines were associated in the public mind already. Di Mambro was vowing to outdo the very thing he and Jouret had been accused of planning to do.
“We are rejected by the whole world,” Di Mambro said in an audiotape recorded during the spring of 1994. “First by the people, the people can no longer withstand us. And our earth, happily she rejects us. How [else] would we leave? We also reject this planet. We wait for the day we can leave.”
“Immediately prior to the transit in 1994 Di Mambro founded in Avignon the ARC which had the double meaning of Alliance Rosy-Cross for the initiates, and the Association for Cultural Research for the public,” Henrik Bogdan writes for Routledge. Rather than another rebranding, as they had done during the 1980s, this was symbolic of the end of the OTS. “In Western esotericism death is often seen as a symbol of an initiatory passage from one state of being to another, where the candidate is leaving the material world and values behind him to embark on a spiritual quest for enlightenment.” The melding of opposites, such as life and death, is in fact the “chemical wedding” of Rosicrucian lore. “Death is seen as a transition in which the physical body (which is subject to change and decay) becomes separated from the soul.”
“The plan seems to have been for the fire to more or less completely destroy everything in the Swiss centers. This would have compelled investigators to focus on the group’s self-interpretation of their action,” Lewis writes. Walliss suggests that both leaders wanted to “create some kind of legend for the order” with “one last spectacular ritualistic gesture to the world.” They were attempting to “salvage some honor” through self-destruction as a cult, saving their souls, so to speak. Bogdan:
As an esoteric Masonic initiatory society the Solar Temple is an extreme and unparalleled case in which the practice of initiation took a bizarre turn. The transit became the ultimate ritual of initiation which marked the passage from the profane world to the spiritually pure world of another planet. Through death the members were initiated into disincarnate Masters and thus became the link between the world of men and God.
Everyone who died, or received an invitation to die, was an insider or a former insider. No external enemies were targeted, nor was the public affected. First to die was the traitor Tony Dutoit, who had revealed the secrets of the temple to Di Mambro’s son Elie in 1990, prompting the denunciation which had begun the slide in membership. Tony’s son “threatened the status of [Di Mambro’s] daughter as the avatar, and he concluded that the Dutoit infant was the Antichrist,” Wessinger says. Nicky, Tony’s wife, had instructed Emmanuelle in Templar philosophy. Di Mambro had opposed their marriage and her pregnancy, and so the child had to die as well.
Joel Egger and Dominique Bellaton, Emmanuelle’s mother, who had been close to Nicky, conducted these grisly ritual murders. Then they flew back across the Atlantic to participate in the final scene at Salvan while Gerry and Collette Genoud took their own lives. Egger’s car was found at Cheiry, where he apparently took part in setting up the massacre and blaze.
Then, as planned, the ‘Testaments’ started arriving, ‘post-transit.’ The Knights Templar had given up on earth reaching the New Age. “The race is heading irreversibly toward its own destruction,” read “Transit to the Future.”
All of Nature is turning against those who have abused it, who have corrupted and desecrated it on every level. Awaiting favorable conditions for a possible Return, we will not participate in the annihilation of the human kingdom, no more than we will allow our bodies to be dissolved by the alchemical slowness of Nature, because we don’t want to run the risk of their being soiled by madmen and maniacs.
Punishment is intrinsic to the transits. “Those who have breached our Code of Honor are considered traitors. They have suffered and will suffer the punishment they deserve for the ages of the ages.” The unwilling victims, including Emmanuelle, are being “gently helped.” The authors “have planned, in a full state of consciousness, without any fanaticism, our transit which has nothing to do with suicide in the human sense of the term.” They know better, for they have gnosis, hidden knowledge.
“To Lovers of Justice” whined about mistreatment and persecution of the “Bearers of Light” by the media in service of a global conspiracy. Stopping short of anti-Semitism, the letter invokes “a secret evil organization on a worldwide scale, highly supported financially, and determined to silence or destroy all those who would be likely to interfere with their interests.” The world is against them, boo hoo.
“The OTS conceived of its own community as shaped like a vessel or container,” Palmer writes. Perhaps a grail would be a better metaphor, but the idea is tied to all sorts of modern alternative beliefs about the world. “It was a ‘hollow earth cult’ in the sense that members believed in the existence of Agartha, the theosophical subterranean world, where the Ascended Masters lived in a superior state of civilization.”
As with the purity of Emmanuelle, or the purity of the body without naturopathic medicine, or the purity of the natural world, pollution was a chief concern. “We will not risk pollution by enraged madmen [or] take part in the murder of the earth,” it says. “According to a commandment from the Great White Lodge of Sirius, we have closed and chosen to blow up all the sanctuaries of the Secret Lodges to prevent their desecration by ignorant people or impostors” while they “board Osiris’s starship.”
The “Testament” also punishes humanity for “stubborn refusal to evolve the consciousness required for entrance to the New Age.” The Masters have taken their ball and gone home: the “Seven Entities of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh left the Secret Chamber during the night of March 31, 1993, taking with them the capital Energy-Conscience of the seven fundamental planets of our solar system.” That will surely show us.
Hermann Delorme says “there was talk of this ‘departure’ for Sirius,” location of the Great White Lodge, in the early 1990s. Hall and Schuyler note that one of the transit letters “alludes to a group of 33 Rosicrucian Elder Brothers who once lived their own terrestrial lives, but who now use ‘assumed bodies to manifest themselves in this world and to accomplish the Divine Plans.’” Such beings are familiar to students of New Age religion as “walk-ins.”
If we are good, they will come back to earth with presents, like Santa. “We leave this Earth to rediscover, in complete lucidity and freedom, a Dimension of Truth and the Absolute, far from the hypocrisies and oppression of this world, with the end of producing the embryo of our future Generation,” the Solar Temple said. Their sun has set, but it will come back around again, as it always does. The Templar legend is too strong to stay underground forever.
Trashcan-Lid Theosophy: Eduard 'Billy' Meier's Cult Of Alien Contact
Canton Zurich, the western, German-speaking part of Switzerland, is gorgeous. A photo viewer is so distracted by the surreal scenery that the spaceship hovering weightless above the landscape seems almost a natural phenomenon. William Eduard “Billy” Meier entirely owes his success as a flying saucer photographer to the land he inhabits, for when he has pointed his camera into picturesque scenes like this, his spaceships have been the most compelling. The successful Meier compositions — the photos that Sotheby’s
Lewis, James R., editor. The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death. Routledge, 2016.
Wessinger, Catherine. How the Millennium Comes Violently: From Jonestown to Heaven’s Gate. Seven Bridges Press, 2000.
Lewis, James R., editor. The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death. Routledge, 2016.
Waite, Arthur Edward. The Real History of the Rosicrucians. George Redway, 1887.
I read all these articles with absolute fascination. Esotericism is not the benign fruity concoction most people assume it to be. Thank you for the research!