History & overview · every faith gets one
A neo-Templar order that expected to leave the Earth for Sirius.
The Ordre du Temple Solaire was founded in 1984 by Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret, and drew its members largely from the professional middle class of French-speaking Switzerland, France and Quebec — doctors, civil servants, a mayor, an Olympic skier's family. Its lineage claim was Templar: an unbroken order surviving the suppression of 1307, its authority held by Masters who communicate from Sirius. Its practice was ceremonial and expensive, conducted in underground sanctuaries hung with cloth, using robes, swords, chalices, taped organ music and concealed projection equipment to produce apparitions of the Masters. Members were told the Earth was ecologically finished and that a Transit would carry them, in new solar bodies, to a world elsewhere. Seventy-four people died between 1994 and 1997.
Seventy-four members and former members died in three episodes. On 4 and 5 October 1994, five died at Morin Heights, Quebec, 23 at Cheiry and 25 at Les Granges-sur-Salvan in Switzerland — 53 in all, including both founders. In December 1995, sixteen died in woods near Grenoble in the Vercors, three of them children. In March 1997, five died at Saint-Casimir, Quebec. The Swiss investigating magistrate Andre Piller concluded that the 1994 deaths fell into three groups: roughly fifteen genuine suicides, about thirty people helped to die with sedatives and firearms, and seven killed as traitors. At Cheiry, investigators concluded most of the dead had not been expecting to die at all, but to be taken bodily.
Why it is filed this way
A movement in the Western esoteric line rather than a church: initiatory, fee-paying, secretive by design, and organised in degrees borrowed from Freemasonry. Jean-Francois Mayer, the Swiss scholar who had studied the order before 1994 and was given documents by a member days before the deaths, has argued that the theatrical apparitions were not incidental — that the discovery of the projection equipment by members was one of the pressures that preceded the killings.
The order did not survive the 1997 deaths. Small groups in the same neo-Templar current continue in Europe and Quebec; none claims the name.
The founding
Di Mambro was a French jeweller who had passed through the Rosicrucian order AMORC in the 1950s and ran a series of small esoteric communities through the 1970s. Jouret was a Belgian-born homeopathic doctor, a fluent public lecturer on health and ecology, who gave the order its recruiting face — the lecture circuit brought people in, and only later did they discover there were inner degrees. The two met around 1981 and built the order in overlapping layers, so that most members never knew what the innermost circle was told.
Its founding is bound to Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret — 1984 CE.
What it holds
Reality. Layered and provisional. The visible world is a degraded stage the initiate is meant to pass out of; matter, in this teaching, is something that happened to the spirit rather than its home..
The divine. The order addressed the Masters of the Great White Lodge — presented as living beings resident on Sirius who direct human history and speak through chosen intermediaries. Christ appears in the teaching, but as a solar principle expected to return in glory rather than as the figure of the gospels. Di Mambro's daughter Emmanuelle, born in 1982, was presented to members as a cosmic child conceived by theogamy..
Death and after. Reincarnation, with a final passage out of the cycle: the Transit was described as death only in appearance, the initiate waking in a solar body on another world..