Order of the Solar Temple Part II

 

The Pyramid and Golden Way

In 1973, Di Mambro founded and became president of the Center for the Preparation of the New Age (French: Center de Préparation à l'Age Nouveau, CPAN). CPAN was a yoga school, but also presented itself as a "cultural center for relaxation". In 1976, eight people including Di Mambro, most of whom lived together, formed a building society in Collonges-sous-Salève and bought a building that they called "The Pyramid" (French: La Pyramide). The group was also called by its members the Fraternity of the Pyramid (French: Fraternité de la pyramide). This hid an esoteric society, consecrated as the Temple of the Great White Universal Lodge, Pyramid Sub-Lodge 24 June 1976. In June 1977, Di Mambro met orchestral conductor Michel Tabachnik, who, having an interest in esotericism, attended and became a member.

On 12 July 1978, Di Mambro founded the Golden Way Foundation (French: Fondation Golden Way). The Golden Way became the center of activities in Di Mambro's variety of groups. Several members donated large amounts of money, allowing them to buy a property in Saconnex-d'Arve (Geneva) which hosted meetings, including for non-members. The Golden Way functioned as a "front" for a smaller group of people, the "Fraternity", which undertook secret esoteric rites. The Fraternity, like many other New Age organizations in the 1970s, had communal ideals, holding all their property communally. This attracted members — one member had previously been in the Scottish Findhorn New Age group — but also disappointed them when the reality of the group failed to live up to the ideal. As well as the Fraternity there was the "Community", which was made up of members who kept their income and paid for rent/food and drink.

While the group's headquarters were impressive, the group lacked a successful communicator with which to spread its ideas. In 1981, Jouret was invited as a speaker, and spoke about homeopathic medicine at one of their conferences. Di Mambro was impressed by him, and invited Jouret to join, and he was officially accepted into the group alongside his wife on 30 May 1982, where he quickly rose in the ranks. Di Mambro then told others that Jouret possessed charisma, so he should be the frontman for the group, while Di Mambro controlled it from behind the scenes. Jouret became the group's "propagandist" and began giving lectures promoting it in 1983.

Cosmic child

In June 1981, Di Mambro, then 57, began an affair with then 21-year-old Dominique Bellaton. He later claimed to receive a revelation from the "masters" that Bellaton would produce a "cosmic child" through theogamy. About that time, Jouret founded the Amenta Club (later renamed simply Amenta, then Atlanta). In 1982, Di Mambro announced that a "great mission" awaited the foundation. He also announced that a "child-king" was to be born into the community. Di Mambro had actually impregnated Dominique Bellaton, a former manicurist, who was well known in Geneva and had previously had several affairs with businessmen. Di Mambro claimed that this child's conception was created from the power of his mind and Immaculate Conception.

Their child, initially named Anne Bellaton, was born on 22 March 1982. The child was viewed as "the Christ of the new generation", but was born female, something attributed by Di Mambro to human imperfection (believing the child's mother being human had led to an imperfect Christ). Di Mambro claimed the child was an Avatar, a male soul trapped in a female body. She was then renamed Emmanuelle (the male version, Emmanuel, being Jesus's messianic name), but was referred to with male pronouns. He required Emmanuelle to wear gloves and a helmet to protect her purity as the "cosmic child", who he considered the "messiah-avatar" of the planet's new age.

Renewed Order of the Temple

In 1970, French legate of AMORC Raymond Bernard established the neo-Templar group the Renewed Order of the Temple (ORT) at the suggestion of Julien Origas, who was given control of the group shortly after. During a meeting of the ORT and the OSTS with the Golden Way Foundation in 1981, Julien Origas met Jouret. Origas was impressed by him, and invited him to come to Auty with him and join ORT. Jouret was initiated into ORT, quickly rising into its leadership ranks. Jouret and Origas became close, and Origas may have appointed Jouret to be his successor and the next Grand Master.

Origas died in 1983, after which Di Mambro urged Jouret to take over the order, and he became its new grand master that year. The same year, Michel Tabachnik was made president of the Golden Way Foundation. Jouret was initially accepted by the remaining ORT members as successor, but began introducing new and foreign concepts into the ORT, inspired by Di Mambro's ideas. Jouret was never consecrated as Grand Master, which was an important process to many esoteric groups, and he was not an officer in the legal aspects of the organization; this was used to oust him in 1984.

Founding

Following this, the ORT schismed. Jouret had no legal right to the ORT name, so he founded a splinter group in Geneva, Switzerland upon his ousting, alongside Di Mambro, in 1984. Jouret later claimed that this schism had been the will of the ascended masters, who had appeared to him two years prior and revealed to him a 13 year plan until the world ended. This group was formally created 21 June 1984, and at the time of its creation the Golden Way Foundation was formally dissolved (though "Golden Way" was still used to refer to the group's Geneva commune, that still had 50 members). It was first called the ORT–Solar Tradition before being renamed the International Chivalric Order of the Solar Tradition (French: Ordre international chevaleresque de Tradition solaire, OICTS or OICST) and finally the Order of the Solar Temple (OTS). Jouret, a compelling speaker, was the "front man" for this organization, though Di Mambro was the actual leader.

The OTS was dually schismatic and a direct continuation of the original ORT, with occult-apocalyptic teachings descended from that of Jacques Breyer and Origas, which it tied to other apocalyptic concepts and some white supremacist ideas from Origas. Breyer attempted to mediate the schism, suggesting the groups separate with goodwill; Breyer's mediation did not work and the OTS and the other branch of ORT grew to dislike one another. He suggested that Jouret and Di Mambro's group transfer to Canada to spread the movement. The ORT already had some Canadian administration in Trois-Rivières and Quebec City, which were led by Robert Falardeau. To convince him to help them find land in Canada, Falardeau was given the title of "grand financier" by Jouret and Di Mambro. From then on, the group's most active locations were in French-speaking Europe and Quebec; from Quebec, the group intended to spread its influence to the United States, and began a translation project to make OTS ideas available to English speakers. This was mostly unsuccessful, as the OTS never had more than a few American members. In the English speaking world, the OTS went by the names Order TS and Hermetica Fraternitas Templi Universali.

In 1985, Di Mambro decided to set up a survival center in Canada in the event of nuclear war. An estate, named Sacred Heart (French: Sacré-Coeur) was purchased in Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade, Quebec, to create an organic farm. The organization set up several subsidiaries, both official and hidden, to finance these real estate purchases; Di Mambro made a profit by reselling his stakes in these purchases to members. Di Mambro, Jouret, Dominique Bellaton and Camille Pilet bought four semi-detached chalets on Chemin Belisle in Morin-Heights, Quebec and, with members' money, several other houses for OTS activities (including a farm in Cheiry, Canton of Fribourg) managed by member Albert Giacobino.

Di Mambro had asked Tabachnik to draw up a series of writings to inspire him to rise in ranks within the order, called the Archées. Many of the Order's concepts and principles were inspired by these writings, third degree initiatory texts. Written between 1984 and 1989, they were made up of 21 articles, each ranging from 15 to 20 pages. They were considered difficult to understand even by members of the OTS.

Decline

The group reached its membership height in January 1989, with 442 members: 187 in Metropolitan France, 90 in Switzerland, 86 in Canada, 53 in Martinique, 16 in the US, and 10 in Spain, from which they gained more than $36,000 in monthly revenue overall. Most members of the OTS had little contact with the leadership, and little or no idea of their violent plans. Some financially successful members individually donated amounts ranging from the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to the group, to finance the "life centers"; however, some of the money was instead used to fund the leader's own travel expenses and cost of living expenses for OTS members who did not have other support. The group began to have financial problems.

Beginning in the late 1980s, several members began to doubt Di Mambro. In 1990, Di Mambro's son Elie discovered that the apparitions that appeared during OTS ceremonies were faked, operated by Tony Dutoit, who confirmed this, before leaving the group. Elie, who also realized that the "masters" his father presented did not exist, then revealed this to other members. Some members explained the falsification away as necessary to keep "weaker souls" in the group, but numerous other members, whose faith in the group had been previously damaged by the silencer scandal, left the group and demanded a reimbursement of money they had donated. Joseph Di Mambro promised to return the sums requested, but several OTS members resigned in quick succession in 1990, leaving only the core group of OTS members. Many people, including Elie and many high-ranking members, left.

The Archedia clubs were dissolved in 1991. 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. As a result Jouret slowly become less prominent in the leadership role of the Solar Temple and quit its executive committee in January 1993.

Anti-cult movement

The OTS had largely escaped negative public attention from the anti-cult movement in the 1980s, other than two lines published in a French anti-cult booklet about Jouret in 1984. He and the group were left out of later 1980s editions. In 1991, a former member, Rose-Marie Klaus, contacted a Montreal cult-watching organization, Info-Secte, and following that the group produced a letter warning other organizations in Canada about the group.

Klaus's husband had left her for a "cosmic marriage" to another woman, and she wanted money she had given to the organization returned; she sued the group, and attempted to get negative press coverage on the OTS.  While her husband Bruno Klaus (later dead in the 1997 mass suicide) had been getting increasingly involved in the OTS, Rose-Marie was growing less involved, but continued to live with him near the group's compound. One day, Bruno arrived home, and told her that the OTS masters had decided that he was to be with another woman; Rose-Marie, upset by this, asked Jouret to mediate between them. His solution to this issue followed the OTS practice of "cosmic coupling", which ignored "earthy marriage"; he set up Rose-Marie with another man, André Friedli, later one of the killers in the 1995 incident. Rose-Marie was not satisfied with this and it only briefly lasted. She stated that "I saw later that this man went with other women, the women had other men. It was very mixed up."

For several years after this, she repeatedly tried to get Bruno back; having a "foot inside, but always one outside" the OTS community, but eventually gave up, and began contacting anti-cult groups. On 10 September 1991, the president of Martinique's branch of the Association for the Defense of Families and Individuals (the leading French anti-cult group), asked various Canadian associations for information on the group in a letter, following several Martinicans leaving the island to join them. In 1992, after an invitation from a French cult-watching organization, Klaus visited Martinique, where she denounced the group. Her statements were picked up on by the local media.

Gun scandal

The next year the group encountered further trouble. The police of Canada, which was then investigating Q-37 (a mysterious group that threatened to assassinate Canadian public officials, which was eventually determined to have never existed), believed the OTS may have been involved. Soon after, the group's locations in Quebec were raided and two members were arrested on grounds of possession of illegal weapons. Jouret had asked the men to buy three semi-automatic guns with silencers, illegal in Canada, resulting in the three being arrested. Jouret and the other two men were given only light sentences after the crime (one year of unsupervised probation and a $1000 fine intended to be paid to the Red Cross), but 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".

Though Jouret had encouraged some members of the OTS to learn to shoot, at the time, members of Info-Secte believed the group to be of a survivalist nature, and that they intended to use the weapons to defend themselves after an apocalypse; a representative of Info-Secte publicly expressed his confusion as to why they needed silencers for this purpose. Even tabloid newspapers that covered the OTS, which ran lurid stories about the organization, did not indicate they believed them capable of violence. In March 1993, some members of the group tried to convince the press that the OTS was harmless and mostly dedicated to moral improvement and gardening, and denied allegations of being a cult.

Following the arrests, other countries and agencies began investigating as well. Two days after the men were arrested; the Sûreté du Québec announced an inquiry into the financial aspects of the group, with the Australian police launching a parallel investigation later in the year. A bulletin from Interpol alleged that Di Mambro and Odile Dancet had been involved in two banking transactions in Australia, each worth $93 million. In 1994, the French authorities delayed the reissue of Jocelyne Di Mambro (Di Mambro's wife)'s passport due to an investigation. At the same time, a former member of the OTS, Thierry Huguenin, called Di Mambro and demanded his money back, threatening to file a criminal complaint if he did not. In February 1994 a photocopied letter was mailed to about 100 members, revealing financial misuse, the reveal of which made both Di Mambro and Jouret furious. In March, the Canadian RCMP was helping the Australian Federal Police in an investigation over possible money laundering by the OTS, and the Swiss authorities also received Australian bulletins. Later on, there was no evidence found of money anywhere close to that amount, or money laundering, but this led to conspiracies.

The OTS viewed itself as increasingly persecuted, though according to Jean-François Mayer, there was little actual opposition to the group, with Quebec Public Security Minister Claude Ryan explicitly stating the government would not surveil cult members in the wake of reports on the group, and denying information claiming the group had planned to commit terrorist attacks in Canada. The leadership believed the increasing legal and media attention to be both a conspiracy against the OTS and a sign of the Kali Yuga, and the group's ideas became increasingly focused on environmental destruction and ecological collapse.

Compounding the difficulties, Di Mambro also began having issues with Emmanuelle. Though she had been raised from birth to be a messiah figure, by the age of 12 she had become uncooperative, rejecting her role in the group and taking an interest in typical teenage pop culture. He believed her to be under threat from the Antichrist, who, he believed, was born to Tony and Nicky Dutoit in summer 1994. Di Mambro had previously forbidden Nicky from giving birth, but after she left the group, they had a son, whom they named Christopher Emmanuel. Di Mambro, deeply offended by the name similarity, the disobeying of his instructions, and that he had not been consulted in the naming of the infant, ordered the family be murdered later in 1994.

Mass murders and suicides

Planning

Given the scale of the issues facing the group leaders, it was decided they would "transit" to Sirius. The OTS termed the acts a "transit", which they described as "in no way a suicide in the human sense of the term". In their view, traitors would be simply murdered, while "weaker" members would be "helped" to transit, and the remaining members considered strong enough would kill themselves. Members believed that, upon death, they would acquire "solar bodies" in a faraway location in space (typically given as the star Sirius, but alternatively Jupiter or Venus). The group's leaders wrote four letters expressing these views, known as The Testament, which contained messages of the order's beliefs. Patrick Vuarnet was instructed by Di Mambro to mail the Testament letters to several people. Shortly before the end of the group, the OTS was renamed as Alliance Rosy-Cross (French: Alliance Rose Croix, ARC, with the public name of the Association for Cultural Research) in a final meeting in September 1994, though this may have actually been intended as a new organization.

These letters divided the dead into three groups.

"Traitors", who were murdered

"Immortals", who had been "helped" in death (killed) by other members

"Awakened", who had committed voluntary suicide,

Morin-Heights, Cheiry and Salvan

On 30 September 1994, the Dutoits were lured to Di Mambro's chalet in Morin-Heights by Dominique Bellaton. Two members, Joël Egger and Jerry Genoud killed the family, repeatedly stabbing them, including the three month old child. As ordered by Di Mambro, these murders were carried out in a ritualistic fashion. Bellaton and Egger left for Switzerland the same day, while the Genouds spent the next four days cleaning up the scene and preparing for death. On 4 October they set incendiary timers to go off and burn the house down, dying as a result.

During the night from 2 to 3 October 1994, 23 died in Cheiry. 20 of the dead had been shot with one gun; 21 of them had died from gunshot wounds, previously drugged with sleeping pills, with another two dying of suffocation from plastic bags. The ones who had killed the others in Cheiry were Egger and Jouret, though it is possible they were not the only ones. In Salvan, the dead had been injected with poison; according to the investigative report, it is likely that the fatal injections at Salvan were done by Line Lheureux, with Annie Egger doing the same to the children. On the morning of 5 October, the Testament letters were mailed out.

On 4 October 1994, the bodies of the Genouds were found in the burned out chalet; the next day the bodies of the Dutoits were found in the building's cellar. On 5 October, Swiss examining magistrate André Piller was called by the police to respond to a fire at Cheiry, arriving half an hour later, where the bodies were discovered. Soon after this they heard news the fire in Granges-sur-Salvan, of the three villas; when the fires there died down, they found the bodies in Salvan. These two fires were connected when Egger's car, who lived in the Cheiry house, was found parked outside the Salvan commune, and the next day, the Canadian police realized that there was likely a connection between the Morin-Heights fire and the Swiss ones as the properties were owned by the same men.

The leadership of the OTS cared deeply about the group's legacy, and spent a large amount of time preemptively creating a "legend" through both the manifestos they mailed to various media and scholarly sources, and by destroying all evidence that would have conflicted with their own story. This plan was disrupted, as some of the ignition devices had failed. This failure left behind a large number of the Temple's written documents, some of which were found on the group's surviving computers, as well as audio and video cassettes, able to be looked through by investigators.

According to Thierry Huguenin, Jouret and Di Mambro had planned for there to be exactly 54 dead, in connection with 54 Templars who had been burned at the stake in the fourteenth century. This was to allow an immediate magic contact with these departed Templars. However, Huguenin escaped from the scene last minute, having sensed danger, which left the death toll at only 53. After the event, some other members declared their continued support for the group's ideas, and even regretted not having been chosen for the "transit". A Swiss magistrate concluded that of the fifty two deaths, only fifteen were suicides.

Vercors

On the morning of 16 December 1995, 14 members of the OTS, including three children, were immolated in a circular star-formation in an isolated clearing on the Vercors massif, near Saint-Pierre-de-Chérennes in France. Two other bodies were found near them. The investigation conducted by the Grenoble Gendarmerie hypothesized that the 14 people, including three children, took sedative pills; then Jean-Pierre Lardanchet and André Friedli shot each member in the head one by one with two .22 caliber rifles. After that, they poured gasoline on the bodies and set them on fire, before they both shot themselves in the head with two .357 Magnum revolvers. The bodies of the two perpetrators were found alongside the burned ones. On 23 December 1995, the 16 bodies were discovered after a missing person’s investigation by the gendarmerie, after having been led to the bodies by a hunter.

The plot had been orchestrated by Christiane Bonet, a devoted former member of the OTS who said she could commune with Jouret and Di Mambro from the afterlife. Some of those who died left behind notes where they discussed that they would "see another world". Investigators concluded that of the 16 dead, at least four had not died willingly.

Saint-Casimir

On 22 March 1997, five members of the Solar Temple died in a mass suicide in Saint-Casimir, Quebec, burning their house down with them inside. The dead included two couples: Chantal and Didier Quèze, as well as Pauline Riou and Bruno Klaus (Rose-Marie Klaus's ex-husband), and one of their parents. Responding officers found three teenage survivors at the scene, the children of the Quèzes, who were found to be drugged. Following the first failed attempt to initiate the mass suicide (that included them against their will), the children had negotiated their right to live with their parents, who eventually agreed that they did not have to die. Following this, the adults continually failed to burn the house down, becoming increasingly sick, until eventually the teenagers burned the house down at their parents' request.

The children were ultimately not charged with any crime, as the fact that they had been drugged and the influence the cult could have had on them was viewed as mitigating their responsibility. The adults had mailed a transit letter to several Canadian news outlets, in which they explained that they had taken their own lives believing that their deaths would let them "transit" to another planet to continue living.

Aftermath

In the wake of the deaths, fear of cults took hold of the French and Swiss populations. The group immediately became well known. The members of the OTS were noted as not conforming to the usual idea of a cultist, vulnerable and easy to influence, but were instead respected members of society in powerful positions, some of whom were very rich, a surprise to many. The group's actions were a major factor in the toughening of the fight against cults in France, resulting in a general rise in opposition against purported cults. After the deaths, Swiss cantonal authorities founded the Centre intercantonal d'information sur les croyances, an organization meant to provide information on cults. The acts of the Solar Temple prompted European governments to begin to monitor new and nontraditional religious movements, and also influenced the American anti-cult movement. Following the deaths, on 29 June 1995 the French National Assembly voted, unanimously, to appoint the Guyard Commission to study the phenomenon of cults.

In the following years, the French media accused other cults/sects of being like the Solar Temple, plotting their own mass suicides; included among them the Unification Church and Scientology, as well as Aumists and Raëlians. The Raëlians were particularly affected by this, repeatedly accused of plotting mass suicide. The leader of the Raëlians, Raël, responded to the affair by saying: "If those idiots in the Solar Temple decided to kill themselves, that is not our problem" and "why do the journalists always call me for comment when there's a collective suicide? I don’t want to die! I want to be around to piss them off for a long time!" The Raëlians put out a press release stating that suicide was against their belief system. The Aumists were also affected, being told by the police that there was a rumor they would commit mass suicide "like the Solar Temple". In January 1998, a group called the Atman Foundation was suspected of plotting ritual suicide in the Teide National Park in the Canary Islands; police of the island had announced they had prevented another OTS suicide, which made headlines around the world. It was later clarified that they were unrelated groups. Later investigations of that group failed to turn up proof of the ritual suicide allegation, and the leader was acquitted of all charges.

In the trial and media coverage of Néo-Phare, a small French cult, the group was frequently compared to the Solar Temple. Le Figaro declared it the "new OTS", and journalists compared the leader Arnaud Mussy to Jouret and Di Mambro. Psychologist and cult expert Jean-Marie Abgrall said during the trial of that group that they were like the Solar Temple, as both groups recorded their meetings and practiced swinging. A former member discussed with the news a comparison between Néo-Phare's doctrine and the Solar Temple's concept of going to Sirius, and in one instance, TF1 producers (who wanted the exclusive rights to make a documentary about the case) wanted them to look like the Solar Temple, surprised at their lack of belief similarities, and when they found out they did not have many, they left. Susan Palmer argued the trial of Mussy may have been an attempt by the French justice system to compensate for the innocent verdict in the Tabachnik trial. The OTS suicides had shocked the French public, and due to the failure of the justice system to convict the only person who ever went on trial in the case, there was no "satisfying" conclusion, deeply frustrating the French authorities.

Legal proceedings

On 23 December 1995, during the journal de 13 heures program on the French channel TF1, journalist Gilles Bouleau claimed that the group had survived and united behind Michel Tabachnik, indirectly declaring that Tabachnik was the mastermind behind the Vercors incident. Tabachnik was investigated following the incident; Fontaine placed him under examination on 12 June 1996 for conspiracy. At the time of the investigation, due to the death of the two leaders in Salvan in 1994, Tabachnik was the only defendant in the case. The examining magistrate considered that Tabachnik, through his writings and his conferences, could have incited followers to commit suicide. He was therefore charged with participation in a criminal conspiracy.

On 13 April 2001, at the Grenoble Museum-Library, which had been transformed for the occasion, the court trial of Michel Tabachnik for "criminal conspiracy" began. The plaintiffs' side split into two camps; one camp, led by Alain Vuarnet, felt that the trial should not focus on Tabachnik's responsibility but on the investigation itself, which they felt had not been thorough. Another, led by the anti-cult group UNADFI, believed that Tabachnik and his writings were the cause of the mass suicides, and that cults must be eradicated. On 25 June 2001, the court acquitted Tabachnik, on the basis that there had been no conclusive proof found of any involvement, and his writings accused of influencing the members into death were deemed unlikely to have influenced them. The public prosecutor appealed the criminal court's decision, and Tabachnik was tried again in a second trial beginning 24 October 2006. The appeals court upheld the lower court's ruling, and he was acquitted a second time in December 2006.

Media and conspiracies

Due in part due to the difficulty of explaining many aspects of the OTS, conspiracy theories was common. One former member claimed that the evidence of murder had been fabricated by the Sûreté du Québec, and another claimed that the murders were actually a CIA operation to cover up a deal Jimmy Carter had supposedly made with a group of aliens living in an underground laboratory in Nevada. In 1996, a documentary was in production that claimed that Jouret was actually still alive. As described by Susan J. Palmer, "false or unverifiable trails have been laid: secondhand testimonies are traded by journalists, ghost-written apostate memoirs are in progress and conspiracy theories abound." Initial media and anti-cult movement responses focused largely on the idea that the members had been brainwashed, but when the relative affluence of the members was realized, they were considered to not fit the typical conception of a brainwashing victim (i.e. young, poor).

Narratives then shifted to a conspiratorial one, in which the OTS was not actually a cult but a front for something else entirely, involving organized crime, money laundering, and the secret services of several countries. The claimed amount of 93 million dollars in their accounts was found to be inaccurate, and there was no evidence ever found of money laundering, but this narrative fueled conspiracies and much press speculation. In one version of the theory, commentators alleged connections between the OTS and various political scandals, citing alleged links between Jouret and members of Gladio. Many books have been written by journalists promoting these theories, but no significant evidence of them has ever surfaced, and it was disregarded as a hypothesis by the investigations in Canada and Switzerland. Other conspiracies linked the OTS to famous people and events. None of these claims were substantiated by the investigation. In one example of this, David Cohen, in his 2004 book Diana: Death of a Goddess attempted to link the OTS to both Princess of Monaco Grace Kelly and then-Prince Charles. The theory was sourced from a well-known Swiss fraudster and does not match up with known facts about the OTS.

Several books have been published about the case. Several former members of the OTS wrote memoirs, including Tabachnik and Thierry Huguenin. Many journalists authored books on the OTS, including Arnaud Bédat, Gilles Bouleau and Bernard Nicolas, who authored Les Chevaliers de la mort. It has also been the subject of works from academics, including The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death and Les Mythes du Temple Solaire.

Order of the Solar Temple. (2025, February 1). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Solar_Temple