Order of the Solar Temple
French cult and secret society
The Order of the Solar Temple (French: Ordre du Temple solaire, OTS), or simply the Solar Temple, was a new religious movement and secret society, often described as a cult, notorious for the mass deaths of many of its members in several mass murders and suicides throughout the 1990s. The OTS was a neo-Templar order, claiming to be a continuation of the Knights Templar, and incorporated an eclectic range of beliefs with aspects of Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, and New Age ideas. It was led by Joseph Di Mambro, with Luc Jouret as a spokesman and second in command. It was founded in 1984, in Geneva, Switzerland.
Di Mambro, a French jeweler and esotericist with a history of fraud, co-led the group with Jouret, a Belgian homeopath known for lecturing on alternative medicine and spirituality. Di Mambro had founded several past esoteric groups, and had previous affiliation with a number of other organizations. This included The Pyramid and the Golden Way Foundation, a New Age group founded by Di Mambro that the OTS replaced. The OTS was founded by Jouret and Di Mambro out of a schism from the separate neo-Templar group the Renewed Order of the Temple (ORT), which Jouret had taken over and then been kicked out of. The group was active throughout several French-speaking countries. Its practices focused largely on ritualistic elements, with beliefs in the ascended master figures of Theosophy, who they believed resided on the star Sirius.
The public source identifies “Order of the Solar Temple” as french cult and secret society. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Order, Solar and Temple.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1571099. VIAF identifies the subject as 130122499. The Library of Congress control number is n98052816. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1984.
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This entry incorporates text from “Order of the Solar Temple” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.