Sunset Of The Solar Temple: The Esoteric Christianity Of An Interstellar Cult

An essay in a series on the spiritual history of extraterrestrials

Bodies recovered by Swiss responders at Cheiry on 5 October 1994

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. DiMambro 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.

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