Order of the Solar Temple

Order of the Solar Temple, small New Religious Movement that was founded in Geneva in 1984 and is best known for the murder-suicide of 74 of its members in 1994–97.

The Solar Temple was founded in Geneva in 1984 by Luc Jouret, a homeopathic physician and New Age lecturer, and Joseph De Mambro. Its headquarters was later moved to Zürich, where a leadership council of 33 members presided, and regional lodges were set up to perform initiation ceremonies and other rites in Switzerland, Canada, and elsewhere.

The Solar Temple traced its history to the revival of the Knights Templar (a military-religious order founded in the 12th century that was suppressed by papal command in 1312) in the years after the French Revolution. In 1805 Bernard-Raymond Fabré-Palaprat, claiming to be the head of the Knights Templar, attempted to re-create the order. His group split into many factions, some of which developed a belief in the imminent end of the world. Before founding the Solar Temple, Jouret had belonged to a descendant of one of these factions, the Renewed Order of the Temple.

Integral to the teachings of the Solar Temple was the belief that the Earth would face a worldwide catastrophe in the mid-1990s. In anticipation of this apocalyptic event, members believed it was necessary to enter a higher spiritual plane. Thus, on Oct. 4–5, 1994, 53 members of the Solar Temple in Canada and Switzerland were murdered or committed suicide, and the buildings in which they died were set on fire. A year later another 16 members killed themselves, and 5 more died similarly in March 1997.

The Solar Temple was one of several 20th-century New Religious Movements whose ends occurred in acts of murder-suicide. The apparent affluence of the temple’s membership challenged the prevailing conception of such incidents as the product of deprivations experienced by members and suggested a more ideological causation. The group seems to have survived the tragic events of the 1990s, and in the early 21st century it was believed to have between 140 and 500 members.