Between the autumn of 1994 and the spring of 1997, seventy-four members of a small esoteric order died in a series of fires in Switzerland, Canada and France. Their leaders called the deaths a “transit,” a departure for a higher world near the star Sirius. Police found that many of the dead had been drugged and shot, and that some, including children, had plainly not chosen to go. The Order of the Solar Temple has been studied ever since as a case of how a secret society built on Templar legend can turn on its own members.
The order
The group was the joint creation of two men. Joseph Di Mambro, born in southern France in 1924, had spent years in the Rosicrucian order AMORC and later ran his own communal spiritual circles near Geneva, including the Golden Way Foundation, set up in 1978. Luc Jouret, a Belgian homeopathic doctor born in 1947, had briefly led a branch of a neo-Templar body before being pushed out. In 1984 the two founded the order, with Jouret as the charismatic public speaker and Di Mambro directing affairs from behind the scenes. Public lectures on health and personal growth fed recruits into inner clubs and, for the most committed, into a chivalric order with robes, swords and initiations claimed to descend from the medieval Knights Templar. At its peak in 1989 it had a little over 400 members, most of them in France, Switzerland and Canada.
The teachings mixed Christian imagery, Rosicrucian and Templar lore, ecological alarm and an expectation of imminent catastrophe. Members were told they were noble travelers from elsewhere who would eventually return to their source. In ceremonies, ascended “Masters” appeared to senior members in an underground chapel; the apparitions were in fact special effects operated by a member, Antonio Dutoit, and the scholar Jean-François Mayer, who advised Swiss police, found no evidence the Masters in Zurich existed at all. By the early 1990s members were drifting away and asking for money back, Di Mambro’s son Elie had exposed the trickery, and Jouret had been charged in Quebec in 1993 in connection with an attempt to buy illegal handguns.
What happened
On September 30, 1994, at a chalet owned by Di Mambro in Morin-Heights, north of Montreal, two members killed Dutoit, who had since left the group, along with his wife and their three-month-old son, whom Di Mambro is reported to have described as the Antichrist. The chalet was later set alight, and the bodies were found on 4 and October 5. In the night of 4 to October 5 fires broke out at a farmhouse in Cheiry, in the canton of Fribourg, and at chalets in Granges-sur-Salvan in the Valais. Firefighters found 23 bodies at Cheiry and 25 at Salvan, among them Jouret and Di Mambro. Most of the Cheiry dead had been given sleeping pills and then shot, and two had been suffocated with plastic bags. Testaments left by members described the deaths as a willing return to the source from which they had come.
The order did not end there. In December 1995, sixteen more members, three of them children, were found burned in a star formation in a forest clearing in the Vercors massif near Grenoble; investigators concluded that two of the group had shot the others before killing themselves. On March 22, 1997 five members died in a house fire at Saint-Casimir, Quebec, after several failed attempts. Three teenagers in the house persuaded the adults to let them live and survived.
The trials
The founders were dead. Swiss investigators looked at the Swiss conductor Michel Tabachnik, who admitted he had belonged to the order, but found nothing linking him to the 1994 deaths. A French investigating magistrate took a different view and sent him for trial on a charge of criminal association, accusing him of helping to prepare members for death. A court in Grenoble acquitted him in June 2001. Prosecutors appealed, and in December 2006 the appeals court upheld the acquittal.
Where it stands
Theories of hidden accomplices and cover-ups have circulated since the first fires. The documented record points instead to an organization in collapse, led by two men facing exposure and loss of control, who arranged a mixture of murder and suicide and framed it as a spiritual journey. Some members clearly went willingly. Others, including the children, did not, and the word “suicide” alone does not describe what happened to them.