They offered initiation into ancient Christian mysticism, ritual communion with the spirits, an understanding of reincarnation, and the destined transition to inhabiting a "solar-body" in the Sirius star-system. But it all ended in murderous blood sacrifice and fire—and 74 dead believers.
What is this dark preoccupation with sacrifice and ritual killing in the name of metaphysical belief? Grotesque to modern ears, yet quite commonplace historically.
Julian covers the late 20th-century French cult, The Order of the Solar Temple, for his Roots of Conspirituality series. They identified with the Knights Templar, weaving Rosicrucianism and Theosophy into a tangled web of fraud, spiritual deception, and the dramatic, tragic deaths of everyone involved.
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They offered initiation into ancient Christian mysticism, ritual communion with spirits, an understanding of reincarnation, and the destined transition to inhabiting a solar body in the serious star system, but it all ended in murderous blood sacrifice and fire.
74 dead, including 10 children and an infant.
The men who started it all were an odd French-speaking trio.
Julien Origas had been jailed after the war for Nazi collaboration.
He still had shadowy ties to white supremacist groups.
Luc Juré was a charismatic homeopath and devoted communist who had suffered a sickly childhood in the Belgian Congo.
Joseph de Mambru was a violinist, a jeweler, and a career criminal who had fled to Tel Aviv after stealing expensive precious stones from a business associate.
He was the quiet mastermind behind the scenes, gaining more and more control of the emerging cult after Origas eventually died.
We begin here with a glimpse of that tragic and macabre ending.
The orgy of ritual killing, which would leave 74 dead, began with a sacrifice that was really an assassination ordered by de Mambro of a husband and wife and their three-month-old child, he had declared was actually the Antichrist.
So, trigger warning here for some gruesome details.
If you would rather, you can skip forward now for 30 seconds.
I'll pause.
The couple were bound together and wrapped in a carpet, while the body of the infant was stuffed behind a water heater.
All three had been stabbed to death with two ceremonial knives, but the supposed Antichrist baby also had a wooden dagger driven through his heart.
As in all the other murders and suicides in this story, for the most part, the houses they were in had been set on fire.
In the locations with larger groups, the bodies were also methodically arranged, sometimes into star shapes.
What is this dark preoccupation with sacrifice and ritual murder in the name of some spiritual cause?
It sounds so grotesque to our modern ears, but if we go back into the history of religion, it was actually quite commonplace.
It's an idea and a way of constellating spiritual meaning, mythology, and ritual practice designed to connect us to the unseen world.
And it had a strong foothold in diverse human cultures for thousands of years.
We'll look into that history of sacrifice, as well as this cult I've been introducing here today.
It's called the Order of the Solar Temple.
Also, stay tuned if you'd like to learn more about the Knights Templar, whose legacy they claimed to be continuing.
I'm Julian Walker, and this is a conspiratuality bonus episode titled Temple of Blood and Fire.
It's the latest in my series of standalone episodes called The Roots of Conspirituality that stretches across time and continents to try to make sense of how we got here.
And by here, I mean this place where we have conspiracy theorists and religious maniacs taking over the world.
You can join us at patreon.com slash conspirituality to gain access to all these Monday bonus episodes as well as everything else we do ad-free and to chat and debate with us and our followers there.
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The three men I mentioned, Julian Aurigas, Joseph de Mambro, and Luc Jorier, first intersected in the early 1980s in southern France.
They'd all variously been involved for many years in Rosicrucian spiritual sects.
Now, what is Rosicrucianism?
It's a form of esoteric European Christianity that dates back to the 17th century.
It claimed to reveal esoteric truths that had been hidden from mankind, which revealed insights into the spiritual realms.
Sound familiar?
What these three would end up creating is the organization called the Order of the Solar Temple.
And in addition to their Rosicrucian mysticism, they claimed to be carrying the legacy of the medieval Knights Templar, a real group that actually existed during the Crusades, but which has since been clouded by mythology and spiritual idealization.
Ironically, perhaps the only thing that this modern-day cult had in common with the Knights Templar is that they also ended in blood and fire.
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