The Most Evil Secret Societies in History (16 page)

It was a horrible scene. Some of the bodies were in the chapel, in the basement and some in what looked like a conference room with a round table. There were empty champagne bottles lying on the floor.
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Tragically, there were further such deaths to come only two days later. In another Swiss ski resort, Granges-sur-Salvan, located a little over 100 miles away from Chiery, the fire department was called out to deal with a fire in three adjacent chalets. On entering the buildings twenty-five corpses were discovered (including three teenagers and four children), many of whom had been shot in the head several times. The obvious conclusion was that the two tragedies were closely related, but what was the link? The answer to that came when all of the dead from both incidents were identified through dental records and discovered to have belonged to the Order of the Solar Temple. Autopsies also revealed that only fifteen out of the forty-seven had been willing suicides. An international search for the leaders of this now murderous cult was swiftly launched.

Joseph Di Mambro was born on August 19, 1924 in southern France and, though he trained as a clockmaker and jeweler, from an early age he expressed an interest in esoteric religions. In 1956, at the age of thirty-two, he became a member of the Rosicrucian Order, AMORC (Ancient and Mystic Order of the Rosy Cross), and continued his involvement with this group until 1969, by which time he had founded his own brand of religion, one for which he had more than a few disciples.

Moving from southern France to settle near the Swiss border, in 1973 Di Mambro founded the Center for the Preparation of the New Age, a society to which those who joined had to donate vast sums of money in order, Di Mambro said, that he could care for the whole community. This was not the sect's only dubious practice, for Di Mambro also persuaded members that he was the reincarnation of several political and religious leaders ranging from the Egyptian god Osiris to Moses. He also ruled that he alone could decide who was to marry whom and who was allowed to bear children. The idea behind this latter ‘law'was that all cult members were, in fact, reincarnations of famous personages and to produce children of a superior quality it was vital that marriages and procreation only took place between suitable candidates. His own son, Elie, was apparently one such gifted child whose destiny was to usher in the New Age, while Di Mambro's daughter, Emmanuelle, was supposedly one of only nine ‘cosmic children' and as such was allowed no physical contact with anyone save immediate family members. Extraordinarily, his ideas drew many respected citizens, some extremely wealthy, to the sect. In 1978, Di Mambro founded a core group of followers initially known as the Foundation of the Golden Way and afterwards, around 1984, renamed the Order of the Solar Temple.

Di Mambro had always felt he needed a second-in-command, someone who could dedicate himself to the recruitment of new members. He turned to a man to whom he had been introduced a couple of years before, a Belgian medical doctor by the name of Luc Jouret. Born on October 18, 1947 in the Belgian Congo (present-day Zaire), Jouret was a charismatic, eloquent individual who soon doubled the number of new recruits to the order as well as inspiring existing members by claiming not only to have been (in a former life) a member of the fourteenth-century order known as the Knights Templar, but also to being the third incarnation of Christ.

By 1989, the Order of the Solar Temple appeared to have a worldwide membership of 600, with followers living not only in Canada, Switzerland and France, but also in the USA, Spain and the French Caribbean. Jouret was in his element, traveling between all these countries, giving lectures and seminars and receiving large donations. A report in
Time
Magazine by journalist Michael Seville estimated that Jouret and Di Mambro had accumulated a fortune of approximately $93 million over the years by reigning in their followers' assets. So what could followers expect in return for their generous donations? According to Luc Jouret, after members had died and left their physical bodies, they would rejoin each other via ‘death voyages' on another planet named Sirius. Jouret also, during his lectures, advanced the theory that the end of the world (‘the time of disasters') would arrive due to human neglect, but that a handful of chosen people (‘noble travelers') would transcend this cataclysm before it occurred and ascend to Sirius via a pathway of fire. In fact fire was, disturbingly, a recurrent theme where Luc Jouret was concerned.

Obsessed from an early age by stories of the Order of the Knights Templar, an ancient monastic military order formed in
AD
1118 by nine men from the First Crusade who banded together and vowed to protect pilgrims traveling to the Holy Lands, Jouret was particularly absorbed by the manner of their deaths. Over a period of 200 years the Knights Templar grew to be one of the most powerful secret organizations in Europe, not only fighting alongside King Richard I (the Lionheart) of England but also enjoying the support of, amongst others, Pope Innocent II. Feared as warriors, they were also revered for their wealth and essentially invented banking as we now know it today. Their powers seemed limitless, but such wealth and power inevitably caused jealousy and fear among other equally powerful European rulers. Finally, in 1307, King Philip (the Fair) of France, desperately in need of funds to support his war against Edward I of England, decided to move against the Knights Templar on the grounds that they had committed heresy. On October 13 he had all the knights arrested, seizing their lands and assets and forcing them to confess a whole gamut of sins including the worship of the Baphomet, homosexuality and sodomy, trampling and spitting on the holy cross and heresy. In 1310 King Philip had fifty-four of their number burned at the stake, and Pope Clement V subsequently made membership of the order illegal. The last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Jacques de Molay, was burned on March 19, 1314, and during his ordeal he is said to have cursed both King Philip and Pope Clement, claiming they would die within the year. Whether the story is apocryphal or not, Clement did pass away one month later and Philip seven months after that.

Swiss-born Luc Jouret was, with Joseph Di Mambro, one of the leaders of the Solar Temple secret society. Both committed suicide along with twenty-one others at a farmhouse near Chiery in the Swiss Alps in 1994.

The sinister chapel of the Order of the Solar Temple which was discovered at the farmhouse in Chiery behind a secret sliding wall panel. On the floor lay eighteen corpses.

Jouret was enthralled by the Knights Templar, having fed off the stories surrounding their grisly deaths. He traveled extensively giving lectures claiming that elite members of the Solar Temple could absorb the original Knights Templar's spirituality by donating large sums of money. Ludicrous as these claims sound, there were plenty of men and women willing enough to believe Jouret and become members of the group. The academic, Jean François-Mayer, quotes from the statement of one such individual attesting to these beliefs:

I, a Lightbearer since the most remote times, the time which was given to me on Planet Earth is completed, and I go back freely and willingly to the place from which I came at the beginning of times! Happiness fills me, because I know that I have fulfilled my duty, and that I can bring back in Peace and Happiness my capitalized energy enriched through the experience which I have lived on this Earth – back to the source from which everything comes. It is difficult for the man of the Earth to understand such a choice, such a decision – to leave willingly one's terrestrial vehicle! But such is it for all those who carry with them Light and Cosmic Consciousness and know where they go back.
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Given such a mindset, it was only a matter of time before members of the group began talking about ‘the end of the world' and how when that time came, members of the Solar Temple would leave this world and go on a death voyage together, back to the planet Sirius.

But why the precise dates that the two leaders finally chose? Sadly, it appears that, far from having any spiritual significance, the truth of the matter was far more worldly. Several members of the cult had become disenchanted with Di Mambro and Jouret and were demanding the return of their investments. Undoubtedly a factor in this rebellion was the demise of another cult. In February 1993, a fifty-four-day siege at Waco in Texas had begun when David Koresh, the leader of the Branch Davidians sect, decided the time was ripe for his cult to commit mass suicide. Eighty-four followers (including many children) died in the ensuing fire, pictures of which were broadcast around the world. This caused a huge drop in the number of new recruits into cults, not to mention a wave of desertions by people desperate to leave the cults they had already joined. Membership of the Solar Temple plummeted.

It was a worrying time for Di Mambro, but his troubles were only just beginning. Later that same year a long-time member of his group became wise to Di Mambro's implementation of laser tricks to make the spiritual ‘Grand Masters of the Solar Temple'appear to believers. This man was Tony Dutoit; the same Tony Dutoit whose body was later found stuffed in a cupboard in Canada with fifty knife wounds in his back. Thierry Huguenin, a Swiss dentist, also spoke of the type of tricks Di Mambro liked to play on his disciples.

Two women began to get undressed as the first notes of Wagnerian music sounded. As they revealed their underwear, a lightbulb detached itself from the spotlight, severed the head of a rose and smashed at the foot of the altar. Jo [Di Mambro] brandished a sword and cried, ‘By the powers invested in me, I trace a protective circle around this holy assembly.'
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It all sounds exceedingly childish, yet to members of the cult it was obviously a serious display of Di Mambro's powers. Nevertheless, sceptics such as Dutoit were adding to the pressure on Di Mambro, who was also being investigated by several banks for money laundering. As if to add insult to injury, his own children, Elie and Emmanuelle, had begun growing less inclined to believe their father's teachings. Indeed, Elie was more than happy to expose his father's fakery, which he did on a number of occasions, causing at least a dozen members to leave the Solar Temple.

But if Di Mambro had problems, he wasn't alone, for Luc Jouret also had his fair share of concerns. At some point prior to 1994 he was voted out as Grand Master of the Canadian branch of the Solar Temple due to his increasingly eccentric behavior, coupled with his controlling leadership style that many key members had grown to resent. Several testimonies state that prior to the beginning of one of the Solar Temple's many rituals, Jouret would insist on having sexual relations with a female member of the cult in order to give him ‘spiritual strength.' But it was Jouret's leadership style that really led him into trouble and finally saw him being demoted. In turn, this led to major disagreements among the European branches of the society and angered Di Mambro, who had always trusted Jouret implicitly. As several investigative journalists later discovered, however, this wasn't the first time Jouret had been ousted from office. Prior to joining the Order of the Solar Temple, Luc Jouret had belonged to a racist, neo-Nazi magical organization, co-founded by a former Gestapo officer called Julien Origas. After a failed grab for overall control of the group Jouret left, only to join Di Mambro's Solar Temple where he made the same mistake all over again. The police were also interested in Luc Jouret's business dealings as it had come to light that he had begun dealing in illegal arms. Along with two other Solar members he was convicted and fined $1,000.

Di Mambro and Jouret both, therefore, had reason to be concerned about the Solar Temple's future and, more importantly, their own positions as leaders. The straw that appeared to break the camel's back concerned Tony Dutoit. Dutoit's wife, Nicki, had previously been ordered by Di Mambro not to have any children but, desperate to start a family, she ignored Di Mambro's directive and gave birth to her son, Christopher-Emmanuel. On hearing the news, Di Mambro immediately declared the child to be the anti-Christ, sent by negative forces to challenge his daughter's position as the true messiah.