Luc Jouret
| Luc Jouret | |
|---|---|
| Born |
18 October 1947 Kikwit, Belgian Congo |
| Died | 5 October 1994 (aged 46) Salvan, Switzerland |
| Occupation | Founder, Order of the Solar Temple |
Luc Jouret (18 October 1947 – 5 October 1994), born in Kikwit, Belgian Congo, was a Belgian religious group leader in Switzerland. He co-founded the Parti Communautaire Européen with Jean Thiriart, a leading member of the neo-Nazi Jeune Europe Belgian group. Later, Jouret also founded the Order of the Solar Temple also known as the Order of the Solar Tradition) with Joseph Di Mambro in 1984. He committed suicide in the Swiss village of Salvan in October 1994, leading to a mass suicide of his followers.
Jouret was born on 18 October 1947 in what was then the Belgian Congo, Africa. His Belgian parents returned to their homeland in the 1950s, and Jouret attended the Free University of Brussels from which he received his medical degree. During his college years he also became a Marxist, a fact that placed him under police surveillance. Two years after graduation, in 1976, he joined the Belgian Army and became a paratrooper. While in the army he participated in a famous action in Zaire to rescue some Europeans whose lives had become threatened in the newly independent nation.
Following his time in the army, he began a formal study of homeopathy and qualified as a homeopathic physician. He travelled widely studying various forms of alternative and spiritual healing. At the beginning of the 1980s he settled in Annemasse, France, not far from the Swiss border. He continued to lecture widely on holistic health and the paranormal and invited those who responded to him into Amenta Club (later renamed the Atlanta Club).
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 (1924–1994). Di Mambro had been a Rosicrucian and Jouret had in 1981 affiliated with the Renewed Order of the Temple, an occult order founded in the 1970s by Julian Origas (1920–1983). They soon discovered their mutual interests and in 1984 together founded the Solar Temple. By this time Jouret was traveling widely through French-speaking Europe, Eastern Canada and Martinique as an inspirational speaker. While Di Mambro directed the group from behind the scenes, Jouret was its outward image and primary recruiter.
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