Secret Societies: Inside the World's Most Notorious Organizations (40 page)

Secret societies investigator Nesta H. Webster has been praised despite her overt racism.

Webster had a right to express her views, and readers should continue to maintain the freedom to absorb them. The same freedom, it can be argued, should be provided Hitler's
Mein Kampf
and Mao's Little Red Book.

These freedoms must bring with them an appreciation of the risk that social organizations, and individuals within them, may be targeted in a manner that defies their ability to prove their innocence, a principle of freedom of the press that we neglect at our peril.

On the reverse side of this coin is the risk that truly menacing organizations could be underestimated and disregarded if grouped among the darlings of the fringe-dwellers. Like wolves concealing themselves among the sheep, at least a handful of secret societies may represent a genuine source of concern easily grouped in the minds of the public as either benign or misunderstood.

It is easy to dismiss these organizations in this manner. It may also be dangerous.

THIRTEEN

CRITICS, ALARMISTS
AND CONSPIRACY
THEORISTS

WHEN DOES PARANOIA MAKE SENSE?

WITH THE EXCEPTION OF EXTREME FUNDAMENTALIST RELI
-gious sects, most people assume a laissez-faire attitude towards neighbors and co-workers who profess a belief in fairies, ufos, personal angels or similar entities. As long as the acceptance or skepticism has no impact on our lives, we feel free to harbor our own convictions and tolerate those of others.

Should our response to a neighbor's belief in secret societies be different? Since most organizations qualifying as secret societies—with the exception of Cosa Nostra, Triads and Yakuza—are for the most part benign fraternal groups, how seriously should we take claims that they are manipulating our lives without either our knowledge or our approval? And how far should we go in investigating the agenda of these groups?

The latter question is a practical one, with practical limitations.

Anyone with an Internet connection and a search engine can summon up dozens of societies whose stated beliefs and agenda range from promoting alchemy (Central Ohio Temple of Hermetic Science) and “Benevolent Satanism” (United Luciferan Church of France) to conducting telepathic relations with Mars (Aetherius Society). Many such organizations are, in reality, variations on long-established societies such as Masons and Gnostics, or alternative religions pursuing a belief in karma and reincarnation. Their activities, no matter how much or how little we subscribe to their tenets, should remain entirely their concern.

From time to time, however, the curtain is drawn back to reveal disturbing, often tragic, activities stemming from a
clandestine group. Among these was the Order of the Solar Temple. Its impact may have been minimal and limited, but the lesson of its birth and demise is important if only because it determines the transition point between a cult and a secret society. Solar Temple began as the former, and almost morphed into the latter.

Solar Temple consisted of several dozen trusting members and their children under the command of two charismatic leaders: Joseph Di Mambro, a French citizen born in Zaire, who became something of an expert in audio-video effects; and Luc Jouret, a Belgian physician who reportedly drew strength to conduct the group's ceremonies from having sex with one of the female members of the congregation. The Order of the Solar Temple was founded by Jouret and Di Mambro in 1984; its formal name, revealed only to the highest qualified members, was International Chivalric Organization of the Solar Tradition. Di Mambro had abandoned his trade as a jeweler after becoming a member of amorc, the dominant Rosicrucian group. He left amorc under circumstances involving a charge of swindling, and in 1970 moved to a region of France near the Swiss border where he posed for several years as a psychologist.

In 1978, Di Mambro met Luc Jouret, and together they joined the Renewed Order of the Temple, dedicated to Templar and Rosicrucian themes. Jouret became the Grand Master, but within a year he was forced out for, rumor has it, misappropriation of the order's funds. Di Mambro and many other followers left with him, and the ragtag group eventually formed the Order of the Solar Temple with Jouret filling the post of Grand Master.

Originally a licensed physician, Jouret proved to be a charismatic leader who attracted a number of recruits to the organization during a lecture tour of Switzerland, France, and Quebec, Canada. As the organization grew, Jouret and Di Mambro established three levels of membership. The entry level, Amanta, was for new initiates attracted by Jouret's lectures and seminars. The next level, Archedia Clubs, was reserved for members who wished to further explore the ideas and teachings of the order. The most highly qualified members were added to the International Chivalric Organization of the Solar Tradition.

The Order of the Solar Temple, founded by Luc Jouret, might have achieved secret society status.

Jouret continued on the lecture circuit, promoting himself as “Luc Jouret, Physician, Revealing Secrets of Love and Biology.” The sessions segued from “love and biology” to a hectoring message of spirituality and apocalypse, with Jouret warning of volcano eruptions, vanishing forests and other environmental disasters. Only a small core of people physically and intellectually strong enough would survive the catastrophe, Jouret cautioned his audiences. The Solar Tradition was seeking those who qualified, preparing them to inherit the earth when all others were gone.

In his lectures, Jouret claimed he had been a Knight Templar in a previous life, and asserted he would lead the most loyal of his followers to a planet orbiting Sirius. He also claimed to be a third reincarnation of Jesus Christ and that his daughter had been immaculately conceived. Over time, he and Di Mambro crystallized the Solar Temple's philosophy into a blend of neoTemplarism, New Age philosophy, Christianity and survivalist paranoia. Life was an illusion, members were taught. “Liberation is not where human beings think it is,” Jouret warned. “Death can represent an essential stage of life.” The end was nigh, the world would end by fire, and only the most trusted members of the Solar Temple would escape the flames. Meanwhile, Jouret pledged to lead the group towards a number of vaunted objectives reminiscent of Templar goals, including the following:

1. Re-establishing the correct notions of authority and power in the world.

2. Affirming the primacy of the spiritual over the temporal.

3. Giving back to man the conscience of his dignity.

4. Helping humanity through its transition.

5. Participating in the Assumption of the Earth in its three frameworks: body, soul, and spirit.

6. Contributing to the union of the Churches and working towards the meeting of Christianity and Islam.

Each ceremony began with a confession of sins. Instead of the privacy accorded to this process in Roman Catholicism, this confession was conducted as guided group meditation, the effect enhanced by luminous particles that appeared to materialize from the participants’ bodies courtesy of video tricks performed by Di Mambro.

Things grew more bizarre. Before conducting ceremonies, Jouret sought a female member to provide the strength he needed to deliver his lectures by having sex with him. During many of his ceremonies, spiritual beings seemed to appear at Jouret's command, thanks not to Jouret's spiritual powers but to expensive electronic projection devices operated by Di Mambro. While Di Mambro's primary duties occurred backstage, he also was fond of engaging in sexual liaisons with female members of the order, presumably to give him strength to operate the projector.

Membership grew to about 500 in the early 1990s, which is when trouble arrived. Jouret had advised members to stockpile weapons in preparation for the end of the world, which led to Jouret being charged with illegal gun possession in Canada. Shortly after a member of the order named Tony Dutoit publicly spoke out against the Solar Temple he, his wife Nicky and their child were murdered in their home in Morin Heights, Quebec, killed with shocking savagery—Dutoit suffered more than fifty stab wounds, his wife was stabbed four times in the throat and eight times in the back and once in each breast, and their infant child had been stabbed six times before his body was wrapped in a black plastic bag suspended from a wooden stake. An investigation discovered that Dutoit had told other members that the apparition illusions used in the order's ceremonies were a sham.

The order began to crumble, with Jouret and Di Mambro subjected to humiliation by defecting members. It was too much for their egos to accept. On the night of October 4, 1994, residents of Chiery, Switzerland, reported fires raging in the area of the Solar Temple quarters. The remains of fifty-three members, including Jouret and Di Mambro, were found the next morning in the building's ruins. Autopsy reports showed that two victims died of suffocation and twenty-one had been administered sleeping pills before being shot in the head. Others were found with plastic bags over their heads, and many showed signs of struggle, indicating that the deaths were not part of a mass suicide pact.

A year later, the charred bodies of another sixteen members, arranged in a star pattern with their feet towards the source of the fire, were found in a burned-out chalet in the Swiss Alps. The dead included both the wife and son of Jean Vuarnet, who had made a fortune in ski wear and sunglasses. All the victims had been shot, stabbed, suffocated or poisoned. Two years later, a final five lives were taken in St. Casimir, Quebec, in the burned home of Didier Queze, a member of the order. Four bodies in an upstairs bedroom had been arranged in the shape of a cross; the fifth, Didier's mother, was on a sofa in the living room with a bag over her head.

A total of seventy-four members died at the hands of this neo-Templar order. Charges of murder were brought against a Solar Temple member and former symphony conductor named Michel Tabachnik, but he was found not guilty and released. No one was ever convicted, nor were the weapons used to murder the victims located.

Enough was revealed about the order, however, to generate wild speculation based on minimal facts. Stories began circulating among newsletters and Internet sites that Solar Temple financing had been achieved by running weapons between Europe and South America, leading to claims of a “military-occult complex,” all to achieve goals of “the fascist-Masonic lodge.” Unless, of course, the reader subscribed instead to
allegations that Radio Canada reporters discovered the organization actually earned its money by laundering hundreds of millions of dollars through the infamous Bank of Credit & Commerce International (bcci). Closed in 1991, bcci indulged in fraudulent record-keeping, rogue trading, flouting of bank ownership regulations and money laundering within a structure so complex that a complete picture of its activities is still not available. (For the record, no legitimate news source, including Radio Canada, has ever published stories about either activity by the Solar Temple beyond identifying them as “rumors.”)

Di Mambro and Jouret were disturbed and dangerous men cut from the same warped fabric as was James Jones, who led hundreds to their deaths in the 1978 Jonestown massacre in Guyana, and David Koresh, whose Branch Davidians died in a fiery standoff with the fbi in 1993.

What are we to make of leaders who hold life-and-death control over their adherents, and what happens if these leaders choose to exert their powers on a global stage? The line between cult and secret society grows blurry and indistinct when the organization grows in scope and power.

Any search for serious threats from secret societies on a wider range could begin, perhaps, with a snatch of dialogue from a 1948 Hollywood western movie entitled
Ft. Apache
between Owen Thursday, a newly arrived Lieutenant Colonel played by Henry Fonda, and the crusty captain of Fort Apache played, of course, by John Wayne.