Luc Jouret
Luc Georges Marc Jean Jouret was a Belgian doctor and homeopath. Jouret founded the Order of the Solar Temple 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 DiMambro was the true leader of the group, Jouret was its outward image and primary recruiter.
Born in the Belgian Congo, Jouret received his doctorate in medicine from the Université libre de Bruxelles in 1974. After suffering a serious illness, Jouret lost faith in modern medicine; he began practicing homeopathy and other kinds of alternative medicine. He also served for some time in the Belgian Army and participated in the Battle of Kolwezi. He was known as an excellent public speaker, and gave lectures on alternative medicine alongside New Age topics. In 1981, he met Joseph DiMambro while lecturing for his Golden Way Foundation, with whom he became close. At Di Mambro's direction Jouret took control of the neo-Templar Renewed Order of the Temple group following the death of its leader, Julien Origas; he was ousted shortly after. Di Mambro and Jouret then formed a schismatic group, the Order of the Solar Temple.
Jouret was the Solar Temple's public face, but in his role internal to the group, he was subservient to DiMambro. Following stressors within the group, including Jouret's arrest for directing members to illegally buy silencers in Canada, he and DiMambro became increasingly paranoid, and the group's ideological concept of travelling to another dimension would grow more prominent. They began to plot a mass murder–suicide which they called a "transit". Jouret, alongside Joël Egger, shot and killed 23 OTS members in Cheiry. Jouret then died of suicide by poisoning, alongside 24 other members of the Solar Temple in Salvan, Switzerland.
Early life
Luc Georges Marc Jean Jouret was born on 18 October 1947 in Kikwit, in the Belgian Congo. He was the second son of Napoléon and Fernande Jouret, both Belgian. His father Napoléon Jouret had studied in Germanic languages and was a local government official in Belgium, while Fernande was a housewife. After the birth of Jouret's older brother in Belgium in 1946, Jouret's parents 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.Jouret was born a year later; he was a sickly child, suffering from rickets, pulmonary issues, whooping cough, as well as nutritional issues. Due to the lack of medical equipment and the climate in the Congo, his 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. They 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, fearing 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, and Jouret was an especially devoted communist. Napoléon Jouret, then 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. Jouret's older brother said that while he was not abused, he believed Jouret was. Jouret left 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, 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 doctorate in medicine from the Université libre de Bruxelles 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 practiced 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.
First marriage and association with Di Mambro
In 1977, both Jouret and his female companion Marie-Christine Pertué, a French sophrologist four years his junior, became affiliated with the World Teacher Trust. The WTT, founded by Ekkirala Krishnamacharya, combined theosophical Master ideas with homeopathic ones. They both visited Krischnamacharya in India, and were important players in promoting the WTT in Europe. In 1980, Jouret and Pertué married, which allowed Jouret to acquire French citizenship in 1982. 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.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. They met in late 1980. 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. According to a friend, Jouret deeply wished for other people to recognize him, which Di Mambro gave him ; in his view, Di Mambro had done to Jouret what he had done to everyone else. Moral standards that applied to normal members of the group, particularly around sex, were not applied to Jouret, and he was given large amounts of funds.
At the time he met Di Mambro, Jouret was having marital and personal problems. Pertué and Jouret had only recently gotten married, but they continually argued; Jouret aggravated Pertué's anorexic tendencies by policing her diet making sure she was vegetarian. About this time Pertué told Jouret that was pregnant, to his elation. Jouret was extremely excited to be a father, and also saw fatherhood from an esoteric angle. Their son, Sébastien Jouret, was born in 1981. Sébastien was born with a serious congenital heart defect, and was taken to the intensive care unit at the Brussels University Hospital. He died four days later. Sébastien's funeral was conducted secretly with no one else invited; Jouret left highly specific requirements for the gravestone. A tornado later destroyed the cemetery his son was buried in, and the grave of Jouret's son was the only marker left standing, while heavier markers were swept away. Di Mambro told Jouret that this experience was sent to him from higher powers so that he could understand his mission on earth in the cemetery. He later expressed to his friends that he was reassured by the fact that his son had died "pure"; he told another that he was relieved his son was dead because had he lived his life would have been limited due to the defect. Jouret became depressed following the death of his son, and Pertué would not recover; she abandoned her life plans, refused to eat and also began to believe that the child was not actually Jouret's and was conceived without sexual intercourse.
Order of the Solar Temple
Di Mambro arranged for Jouret to meet Julien Origas, the founder of the Renewed Order of the Temple, who Di Mambro was close to. Jouret joined ORT in 1981. Jouret and Origas 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 ORT, 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.Di Mambro forced Jouret to divorce Pertué, claiming they had a "cosmic incompatibility" and that she was "unworthy" of him. In a letter in 1983, Jouret told their friends he and Pertué had mutually decided on a divorce. 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 group, she did not leave. 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". Pertué and Jouret officially divorced in 1985. However, she told her family that she would continue to live with him. Following separation from Pertué, Jouret engaged in numerous brief relationships with women, with whom he would often be physically and verbally violent towards. From one of these relationships he had a son born out of wedlock in late 1983, whom he acknowledged as his a year later.
In 1984, Jouret and Di Mambro formed the International Chivalric Order of the Solar Tradition 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. In 1984, Jouret was ordained as a priest by Jean Laborie, a "self-proclaimed bishop" and dissident Roman Catholic. Laborie had been contacted by Jouret, asking him to be ordained. Laborie, appreciative of someone willing to follow in his footsteps, which was rare, agreed to this quickly. To make the ceremony more original, Jouret suggested they hold it in an actual chapel, which Laborie appreciated. Laborie still had some concerns, to which Jouret blatantly lied and suggested his motivation to become a priest was a desire to evangelize, and after becoming one said he would move to Africa to preach the word of Laborie's church. His actual motive was to obtain more power over the group, gaining the movement prestige. The ordination was done in the Castle of Auty in January 1984. Laborie also ordained Thierry Huguenin, another member alongside Jouret, and two other members.