lowing the incident). Rose-Marie Klaus managed to have
lurid accounts of the “cult of the end of the world” published
in the media. Vinet was fired from his position at Hydro-
Québec, and police investigations were launched in France
and Australia, where Di Mambro had some financial inter-
ests, later grossly exaggerated by sensationalist accounts in
the press.
It is not easy to determine whether the preparation for
a “transit” of the core members of the OTS to another planet
(through suicide) was started before or after the first Canadi-
an police actions in 1993. The first versions of the texts
about the transit (proclaiming that the end of the world was
near, and that it was eminently reasonable to leave planet
Earth in search of salvation on the star Sirius or on another
faraway planet) were probably written at about the time the
Canadian investigation was started in February 1993. That
same year the OTS was confronted by two major factors of
internal stress. In Quebec, dissension about Jouret’s leader-
ship erupted, and Robert Falardeau, an officer with the Que-
bec Ministry of Finances, replaced him as Grand Master
(with Jouret remaining an important international leader).
In Europe, Di Mambro had serious health problems. A num-
ber of French and Swiss members had left the OTS in 1993,
wondering whether their money had not mostly been spent
to support the leader’s luxurious lifestyle. Worst of all, ru-
mors began circulating in 1990 that the most secret and sa-
cred experience of the OTS—visible manifestations of the
Masters of the Temple—were, in fact, holographic and elec-
tronic tricks stage-managed on behalf of Di Mambro by a
loyal member, Antonio (Tony) Dutoit. These rumors led Di
Mambro’s son, Elie, to quit the OTS. Dutoit and his wife
eventually confirmed the rumors, distanced themselves from
Di Mambro, and in 1994 named their newborn baby Chris-
topher Emmanuel. This was particularly intolerable for Di
Mambro, who considered the name Emmanuel to be re-
served for his own daughter, who was named Emmanuelle,
but was addressed in the OTS as “Emmanuel,” as if she were
male. Emmanuelle—allegedly conceived by Dominique Bel-
laton, Di Mambro’s mistress, through cosmic intercourse
with an ascended Master—was regarded as the embodiment
of the cosmic Christ. As a consequence, Di Mambro become
persuaded that the infant Christopher Emmanuel Dutoit
was the antichrist and another omen of the imminent end
of the world.
Within this climate, Di Mambro had a paranoid reac-
tion to the police investigations, and set in motion the chain
of events eventually leading to the “departure.” It is unclear
when exactly messages from the Masters and from a “Heav-
enly Lady” channeled by Di Mambro and by Camille Pilet
(1926–1994)—the most prominent and wealthy business-
man in the OTS and the alleged reincarnation of Joseph of
Arimathea—started preparing the Templars for a “transit”
out of this world, but preparations probably began around
- It is also unclear when (probably in 1993) an inner
core of members learned that the transit would not involve
a spaceship or other extraterrestrial vehicle, but would be a
mystical suicide. At any rate, on October 4, 1994, fire de-
stroyed Joseph Di Mambro’s villa in Morin Heights, Que-
bec. Among the ruins, the police found five charred bodies.
Three of these people—the Dutoits and their infant son—
had been stabbed to death before the fire. Having perpetrat-
ed or at least supervised the killings in Morin Heights, which
probably took place on September 30, Joël Egger and Domi-
nique Bellaton (the mother of the “genuine” cosmic child)
joined forty-six other OTS members and children of mem-
bers in Switzerland. In the early morning of October 5, the
police found all of them dead in two OTS centers in Cheiry
(canton of Fribourg) and Granges-sur-Salvan (canton Va-
lais). Twenty-three bodies were found in Cheiry and twenty-
five in Granges-sur-Salvan, along with the remains of the de-
vices programmed to start the fires that almost destroyed
both OTS centers. From the lengthy investigation of the
Swiss police and judiciary, it seems that most of those dead
in Cheiry were murdered, while at least half of those found
in Granges-sur-Salvan committed suicide. But the dichoto-
my between suicide and murder is only part of the story.
Documents left by the Temple suggest that along with mur-
dered traitors and core members strong enough to under-
stand the full implications of the transit, there were also
weaker Templars. The latter did not oppose the idea of the
transit (although they may have understood it as something
different from a suicide), but they needed “help” to accom-
plish it.Interestingly, after the murders and suicides few former
members reinterpreted the OTS from the anticult perspec-
tive, and the majority continued to express sympathy for the
organization. It seems that Di Mambro had explicitly
planned the survival of some “witnesses” by establishing the
ARC (Association for Cultural Research for the external
world, but in fact the Association Rosy-Cross) in Avignon
on September 24, 1994. One of the speakers at the Avignon
meeting was a well-known French conductor, Michel Ta-
bachnik, who had joined the OTS some years earlier and had
been an occasional speaker with Jouret in Quebec. The only
public figure to survive the 1994 tragedy, he was accused by
a sensationalist press of being the secret leader of the OTS
or at least Di Mambro’s successor. Although he was acquit-
ted in a criminal trial in France in 2001, Tabachnik’s musical
career was compromised.
Notwithstanding the continued police interest in what
was left of the OTS, a second “transit” happened on Decem-
ber 23, 1995, when sixteen OTS members and three of their
children were found dead in the Vercors mountains, near
Grenoble, France. In a third incident, discovered on May 23,
1997, in Saint-Casimir, Quebec, another five members of
the OTS—including Bruno Klaus, the former husband of
vocal apostate Rose-Marie Klaus—committed suicide. While
only a handful of persons who regard themselves as members
of the OTS or the ARC remain alive in Europe or Quebec
after the third incident, further suicides cannot be ruled out9068 TEMPLE SOLAIRE