Luc Jouret

Luc Jouret
Photo of Jouret, used to advertise a 1991 lecture
Born	Luc Georges Marc Jean Jouret (1947-10-18)18 October 1947 Kikwit, Belgian Congo
Died	5 October 1994(1994-10-05) (aged 46) Salvan, Switzerland
Cause of death	Suicide
Occupation(s)	Founder, Order of the Solar Temple
Spouse	Marie-Christine Pertué ​ ​ (m. 1980⁠–⁠1985)​
Children	1
Signature

Luc Georges Marc Jean Jouret (French: [ʒuʁɛ]; 18 October 1947 – 5 October 1994) was a Belgian cult leader and homeopath. Jouret founded the Order of the Solar Temple (OTS) with Joseph Di Mambro in 1984. He committed suicide in the Swiss village of Salvan on 5 October 1994 as part of a mass murder–suicide. While Di Mambro was the true leader of the group, Jouret was its outward image and primary recruiter.

Early life

Luc Georges Marc Jean Jouret was born on 18 October 1947 in Kikwit, in what was then the Belgian Congo. He was the second son of Napoléon and Fernande Jouret (born 1923, née Jeanmott), both Belgian. His father Napoléon Jouret was known as an authoritarian parent, but was described by Jouret's older brother as "hard-working" and "a man of great honesty". He had studied in Germanic languages and was a local government official in Belgium, while Fernande was a housewife.

After their first son had been born in Belgium in 1946, the couple moved to the Belgian Congo, where they settled in Kikwit; at the time, the colonial administration of the territory needed more civil servants, and Napoléon took up a job in territorial administration. Luc Jouret was born a year later – a sickly child, suffering from rickets, pulmonary issues, whooping cough, as well as nutritional issues in his early life. Due to the lack of medical equipment (and the climate) available in the Congo, the family returned to Belgium when he was 18 months old. By the age of three he had recovered under his mother's care. Though he remained fragile in health, the family returned to the Congo and settled in Matadi where a third son was born in 1951. Napoléon switched careers into teaching Germanic languages to Belgian children, both black and white, and the family moved to Luluabourg. In 1954, when Jouret was six, he fractured his skull after being hit by a cyclist. His family, afraid for his life, returned to Dour, Belgium for good. A fourth child, a daughter, was born two years later.

As a teenager Jouret, now in better health, began to excel at sports, particularly judo and climbing. He aimed to become a teacher in physical education. In 1966, he enrolled in the prestigious Université libre de Bruxelles with a scholarship; his brother, also a student there, described him as a "serious idealist" at the time, not interested in money. Following May 68, communism was popular at the school, including with Jouret, noted to be more devoted to it than other students. One professor commented on an assessment that he "would be an even better student if he studied less female students".

His father, now a school administrative manager, was an avid secularist and progressive critic of Belgian society. He created an organization opposing Catholic influence in Wallonia, of which he was president. At home however he was disciplinarian and occasionally physically abusive; a teacher of Jouret's sister recalled she would arrive at school sobbing and confessed to her that their father made their family life difficult. Jouret's older brother said that while he was not abused, he believed Jouret "has bad memories of it". Jouret would leave home at about 21 years of age, under violent circumstances. A later patient of Jouret said that he had complained to him later in life of the lack of freedom and strictness of his upbringing.

Homeopathy and esotericism

At the age of 20, Jouret began to experience severe pain, and was diagnosed with coxarthrosis (osteoarthritis of the hip joint), a diagnosis unusual for someone his age. As a result of this he spent 14 months mostly immobilized in bed and subject to constant medical care, an event which he described as making him lose his faith in modern medicine. Faced with the reality that he would no longer be able to become an athlete as he had wanted, Jouret was distraught.

Visiting students discussed with Jouret homeopathy and alternative medicine, and he set up an appointment with a homeopath. Jouret's condition seemed to improve after a year, but he was still unable to achieve his previous aims, instead choosing to focus on medicine. As he could not regularly attend the classes due to his illness, he had to repeat the course, wasting two years of effort. Gradually Jouret's condition began to improve, which he attributed to homeopathy, and he received his medical degree. Jouret became interested in a variety of alternative medicine, including iridology, macrobiotics, and acupuncture in addition to homeopathy. Jouret also became interested in politics, particularly Maoism, and joined the Union of Communist Students. Interested in both China's history of traditional medicine and its communist politics, he decided to travel to China.

During his college years he joined the Walloon Communist Youth, which resulted in the police placing him under surveillance. He graduated with a medical degree in 1974. Two years after graduation, in 1976, he joined the Belgian Army, saying it was "the best way to infiltrate the Army with Communist ideas", and became a paratrooper. While in the army he participated in the Battle of Kolwezi, a joint French and Belgian airborne operation which resulted in the liberation of hostages from the city of Kolwezi.

For some time he would practice conventional medicine, before he began to practice homeopathy. Following his time in the army, he began a formal study of homeopathy and qualified as a homeopathic practitioner in France. He travelled widely studying various forms of alternative and spiritual healing; it is known that he visited the Philippines in 1977, and he later stated he had visited China, Peru, and India. In 1980, he married Marie-Christine Pertué, a sophrologist four years his junior. He established a homeopathic practice, initially in Belgium, starting in the late 1970s. At the beginning of the 1980s he settled in Annemasse, France, not far from the Swiss border, and began to practice homeopathy there, where he was very successful.

Meeting Di Mambro

Among the groups for which he lectured was the Golden Way Foundation, a New Age group in Geneva, Switzerland, and he became close friends with the foundation's leader, Joseph Di Mambro. Jouret was immediately a favorite of Di Mambro; he encouraged his ambitions and exempted him from a member's typical work. Soon after, he stopped contacting his family and largely abandoned his former friends. In one letter to a former friend, he wrote that he had "changed his life" and "had a lot of work to do" but that if he could he would see them again.

Di Mambro would arrange for Jouret to meet Julien Origas, the founder of the Renewed Order of the Temple (ORT), who Di Mambro was close to. Jouret would join ORT in 1981. Jouret, a former communist, and Origas, a neo-Nazi, became quite close, and Origas may have appointed Jouret to be his successor. In 1983, after the death of Origas, Di Mambro urged Jouret to take over the order, and he became its new grand master the same year. Within the year Origas's daughter forced him out of the group over a dispute involving leadership and funds, resulting in a schism with half of ORT going with Jouret. Jouret then formed and lead a schismatic group of 30 ORT members, which opened branches in Martinique and Quebec. The same year, Michel Tabachnik was made president of the Golden Way Foundation.

In 1984, Jouret and Di Mambro formed the International Chivalric Order of the Solar Tradition (French: ordre international chevaleresque de Tradition solaire, OICTS) in Geneva, which would later become the Order of the Solar Temple. Jouret was the outward image and primary recruiter for this organization, though Di Mambro was the actual leader. However, according to former member Thierry Huguenin, inside the order Jouret was simply like everyone else having a job to do; he was the "Grand Master", but Di Mambro was the "secret master" unknown to the public. At some point, Jouret was ordained as a priest by a "self-proclaimed bishop", a dissident Roman Catholic.

In a letter in 1983, Jouret told their friends he and Pertué had mutually decided on a divorce, while in actuality Di Mambro had ordered they separate, portraying the couple as having a "cosmic incompatibility". In a ceremony, Pertué was "emptied" of her "spiritual content", and condemned to wander until the day she died; Jouret was advised not to contact her, however they did interact occasionally in the following years. Despite her harsh treatment by the cult, she did not leave. Pertué and Jouret officially divorced in 1985, following the death of their only child in infancy; however, she told her family that she would continue to live with him. Following their divorce, Pertué devoted herself to the group, developing anorexia, depression, and other mental health issues; Jouret, however, was told by Di Mambro that he was the reincarnation of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux – he viewed Jouret as too important for such a "mediocre wife".

Lecturing and apocalypse predictions

By this time Jouret was traveling widely through French-speaking Europe, Eastern Canada and Martinique as an inspirational speaker. He traveled a wide conference and lecture circuit in hotels and universities in several countries. His specific presentations included ones titled: "Old Age: The Doorway to Eternal Youth", "Love and Biology", "Old Age: The Doorway to Eternal Youth", and "Christ, the Sphinx, and the New Man". Jouret was a popular lecturer to Francophone audiences in both North America and Europe, with one commentator describing him as "something of a phenomenon". His publications and lecture recordings were sold in several New Age bookstores and health food shops. He would lecture to the public from a homeopathic and New Age persona, providing a path to the secret society beneath – usually, at least some who attended his lectures were interested. Jouret was known as an excellent speaker, and according to former member Hermann Delorme:

You start listening and by God, you know, you just all of a sudden feel so attracted to what he is saying. You talk about the universe, you talk about how man is made of four ingredients and how the stars are made of these same four ingredients. Then you go back to Egypt and Egyptology, and then somewhere along the line comes the possibility of extraterrestrials. And it goes on and it goes on like that. But the more you hear, the less you understand, and therefore, the more you want to know. You slowly get caught up in the web.

Jouret would spend much time in Martinique, starting in 1984. The OTS had more than 100 members there, mostly inherited from ORT's branch. At the head of the Martinique branch was Pierre Celtan, who in his decision making would always refer to Jouret (himself always referring to Di Mambro); he was described as "seduced" by Jouret. Jouret began to give more Amenta Club conferences there, to hundreds of listeners, the wealthiest of whom would be drawn into the group. While never publicly denigrating the beliefs of the Martinicans, knowing he had to take into account their beliefs in order to appeal to them, Jouret expressed his annoyance with the Martinicans to a friend, Claude Giron. He told Giron that while he tried to be comfortable with all the races, "it must be recognized that they have different abilities". Jouret was noted to act "haughty, distant, or frankly contemptuous" to black members of the Solar Temple in Martinique, while accepting the whites.

Within a few months, he convinced the members in Martinique that they needed a new sanctuary, which he invited them to contribute to buying. In 1986, he would tell the Martinicans that the island would sink into the ocean by the end of the year. The members were terrified, but Jouret gave them a solution, which was to move to the group's Canadian base, which he said would be protected due to it sitting upon a large granite plate with a strong magnetic field. Jouret predicted that Quebec would be spared from the apocalypse. He told the Martinican members that if they did not move to Quebec, they would die; 30 members would take up this offer, selling their houses and leaving the spouses and children who did not want to go along. Jouret advised them to not pay taxes and borrow huge amounts of money, used to fund the new location in Quebec, as after they died it would not matter. After the new year rolled around and Martinique still existed, members wondered if he could have made a mistake. He assured them that it was merely a "remission", but that the apocalypse would soon come and it was more important than ever to maintain the location in Canada.

Following the 1988 Saguenay earthquake, the view held by Jouret and other Templars that Quebec would be a safe haven from the impending apocalypse was damaged, which was the main reason they had moved to Canada. Members of the Sacred Heart commune began to criticize his leadership and his predictions (viewing them as too specific). The farm was also not self-sustaining, and the commune was close to bankruptcy. The members of the Sacred Heart commune disliked Jouret, accusing him of a lack of financial transparency and sexual exploitation of women. He was viewed as a dictator by the Quebec members of the group, and was also not present often as he constantly traveled. There was a resulting power struggle between the Quebec and Swiss templars. Canadian members began to question him, and Jouret was replaced as the Grand Master of the Sacred Heart commune by Robert Falardeau in about 1990.

Jouret would found a separate group afterwards, l’Academie de Recherche et Connaissance des Hautes Sciences or ARCHS (a pun on the "ark of survival"), taking several loyal members with him. His close friend Jean-Pierre Vinet, a vice president in the Hydro-Québec company, would help him transition to a different role, lecturing for management; several officials of Hydro-Québec would then join ARCHS. Hermann Delorme was made president of ARCHS, but this was actually a ceremonial role with little meaning. Jouret, having given up his profession as a homeopath to devote himself fully to the OTS, began lecturing on personal development at various companies, universities and banks, mainly in Quebec but also in Switzerland, France and Belgium. Di Mambro, who had a dim view of these lectures as "disseminating the ideas and principles of the OTS to the public", began sabotaging the lectures. Jouret eventually abandoned his activities and became totally dependent on Di Mambro. He would slowly become less prominent in the leadership role of the Solar Temple and quit its executive committee in January 1993.

Legal issues

Members in Martinique were beginning to be frustrated with Jouret, viewing him as a dictator who was controlling and intruded unnecessarily into their private lives. In 1990, Michel Branchi, a member of the Martinican Communist Party and correspondent for the Martinican branch of the anti-cult group ADFI, who happened to have a relative in the OTS, organized a meeting between the families of members and Jouret in order to "attack" him. Questioned by their relatives about, among other things, why couldn't they see their relatives and what the money was used for, Jouret refused to answer and invoked his rank in the group, wishing for respect. A relative of one victim insulted him, and Branchi said that if he did not leave Martinique they would take the "necessary measures". At the same time, other Templar movements in Martinique were threatening his life (viewing him as competition); he returned to Canada.

This incident deeply affected the group. Jouret was terrified, and expressed to a friend that he had no choice but to leave for the threats he had received. He would ask Giron to add to the group's survival kits iodine, to help them survive a nuclear explosion. Giron would express to Jouret that his "trap" was "money and women". Every summer solstice Jouret would send all the members a message; in the message in 1991, Jouret instead sent an "indecipherable cosmic jumble", invoking a variety of esoteric elements. Journalist Arnaud Bédat described this letter as "[emptying] the store of Templar horrors."

In March 1993, two members of the OTS – Jean Pierre Vinet and Hermann Delorme – were arrested for attempting to purchase three semiautomatic guns with silencers, which are illegal in Canada; this came after Jouret had encouraged them to buy the weapons. A warrant for Jouret's arrest was issued, which could not be carried out as he was in Europe, and the Canadian press's attention was drawn to the OTS. He was caught on a police wiretap saying:

When I see the violence unleashed around me, around us. I'm talking about Jo and myself, for example, because we don't accept that we're part of a very specific figure at the end of time. [...] My God, what a circus. It's becoming terrible. We're living a crazy, crazy end... [...] If you only knew what you have to do to keep the machine going, you have no idea. Anyway, in short, we're coming to the end. [...] What a planet, my God, what the hell did we do to land on this shit.

Vinet and Delorme would appear in court on the charge of trafficking prohibited weapons on 30 June 1993. Jouret would appear 15 July, on the grounds of arms trafficking and conspiracy. He plead guilty, but obtained conditional discharge at his request, which kept his criminal record clean and allowed him to keep practicing medicine. The judge believed that the weapons purchases had been made in a "defensive context", and that the individuals involved had already been punished by the media coverage. Jouret and the other two men were given only a light and symbolic sentence after the crime: one year of unsupervised probation and a $1000 fine intended to be paid to the Red Cross. Jouret was silent during the trial, and immediately returned to Switzerland, having spent less than 24 hours in Quebec. In the aftermath the media took interest in the group; the Canadian press began to report, using information gained from police wiretaps, conversations between members of the OTS, which they described as a "doomsday cult".

Following the gun scandal, Jouret became very paranoid and concerned with purported injustice, as well as the legal investigation he faced in several countries. Delorme never spoke to him again after the incident, but Vinet told him that Jouret was "changed" and that he became a "tired, tired, tired, disappointed, disillusioned person". He began speaking of the "transit" concept previously established by Di Mambro. His physical condition began to deteriorate, and he would not sleep; instead, he would spend the nights reading comic books. According to a former member, he would constantly repeat that he was "sick of it" and that they had to "stop it". In June 1994, he would call his mother and tell her that, if anything happened to him, to not worry, as he had already done a lot in his life. His mother was extremely worried about him due to his obsession with the apocalypse and his pessimistic outlook. The next month he would call a former friend who had recently become slightly distanced from the group; Jouret begged him to meet up. According to this friend, Jouret was anxious and felt threatened, but would not say why.

Mass suicide

Jouret and Di Mambro began to put together a set of documents that would be mailed out in October 1994 detailing their rationale for their final act, mass suicide, which they believed would let them escape the world to a higher dimension. The night before he died, Jouret joined Di Mambro and a small group of members in a lavish last meal together at a local restaurant. On 3–5 October 1994, Jouret and 52 other members of the temple died by murder and suicide at two locations in Switzerland. Prior to their own death, the group assisted other members who had taken tranquilizers to die. These members were shot. His ex-wife, also killed, had been invited to Cheiry; several of the dead in Cheiry had been killed as "traitors" to the movement. Hall and Schyuler noted she may have been killed for more "personal" reasons; she was killed with two bullets to the head.

In a final, fifth note written by the group, Jouret was blamed for the group's actions. A note was found in Di Mambro's chalet, which read:

Following the tragic Cheiry Transit, we wish to make it clear, on behalf of the Rosy Cross, that we deplore and totally disassociate ourselves from the barbaric, incompetent and aberrant behavior of Doctor Luc Jouret. Taking the decision to act on his own authority, against all our rules, he has transgressed our code of honor and is the cause of a veritable carnage that should have been a Transit carried out in Honor, Peace and Light. His departure does not correspond to the Ethics we represent and defend to posterity.

Following the deaths, it was not immediately realized that Jouret was among the dead. The investigating judge issued a warrant for his arrest, but within a week it was found that he, along with all the main suspects in the deaths, were dead. Jouret and Di Mambro's bodies were so badly burned they had to be identified via dental records.

Mostly in an attempt to discourage devoted former members from visiting their graves, the location of the graves of Jouret and Di Mambro were not officially released, with authorities describing it as "top secret". As neither of their families came to claim their bodies, they were both cremated following their autopsies. According to the three journalists Arnaud Bédat, Gilles Bouleau, and Bernard Nicolas, who investigated the case, as the canton where the death occurred has jurisdiction in Switzerland, they were buried secretly under an unmarked slab in a cemetery in Sion, Switzerland, where "the two gurus of the Order of the Solar Temple, now rest in peace. And, as the saying goes, for eternity."

The Solar Temple disbanded after Di Mambro and Jouret's deaths, though a year later another group would commit suicide and in 1997 five more died, following the first group.

Publications

• —— (1992). Médecine et conscience (in French). Louise Courteau. ISBN 2-89239-152-0. OCLC 26808052.

References

Bibliography

• Bédat, Arnaud; Bouleau, Gilles; Nicolas, Bernard (1997). L'Ordre du Temple Solaire: Enquête et révélations sur les chevaliers de l'apocalypse (in French). Montreal: Libre Expression. ISBN 978-2-89111-707-4.
• Bédat, Arnaud; Bouleau, Gilles; Nicolas, Bernard (2000). L'Ordre du Temple solaire: Les Secrets d'une manipulation (in French). Flammarion. ISBN 978-2-08-067842-3.
• Clusel, Shannon; Palmer, Susan J. (2020). "The Solar Temple in Quebec and the Saint-Casimir "Transit"". In Palmer, Susan J.; Geoffroy, Martin; Gareau, Paul L. (eds.). The Mystical Geography of Quebec: Catholic Schisms and New Religious Movements. Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 217–245. ISBN 978-3-030-33061-3.
• Hall, John R.; Schuyler, Philip D. (2000). "The Mystical Apocalypse of the Solar Temple". Apocalypse Observed: Religious Movements and Violence in North America, Europe, and Japan. London; New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-203-97766-8.
• Lewis, James R. (2005). "The Solar Temple "Transits": Beyond the Millennialist Hypothesis". In Lewis, James R.; Petersen, Jesper Aagaard (eds.). Controversial New Religions (1st ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-515682-9.
• Lewis, James R., ed. (2006). The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death. Controversial New Religions. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7546-5285-4.
  • Introvigne, Massimo. "Ordeal by Fire: The Tragedy of the Solar Temple". In Lewis (2006).
  • Mayer, Jean-François R. "The Dangers of Enlightenment: Apocalyptic Hopes and Anxieties in the Order of the Solar Temple". In Lewis (2006).
  • Chryssides, George D. "Sources of Doctrine in the Solar Temple". In Lewis (2006).
• Mayer, Jean-François (April 1999). ""Our Terrestrial Journey is Coming to an End": The Last Voyage of the Solar Temple". Nova Religio. 2 (2). Translated by Siegler, Elijah: 172–196. doi:10.1525/nr.1999.2.2.172. ISSN 1092-6690.
• Morath, Pierre; Lemasson, Eric (8 February 2023). "Les survivants de l'OTS parlent 2/4". La Fraternité. Episode 2 (in Swiss French). Radio Télévision Suisse. Retrieved 20 March 2024.
• Palmer, Susan J. (October 1996). "Purity and Danger in the Solar Temple". Journal of Contemporary Religion. 11 (3): 303–318. doi:10.1080/13537909608580777. ISSN 1353-7903.