Joseph Di Mambro

Joseph Léonce "Jo" Di Mambro (19 August 1924 – 5 October 1994) was a French cult leader and convicted conman who founded and lead the Order of the Solar Temple with Luc Jouret. Di Mambro had been associated with a variety of esoteric groups before founding OTS. After the cult began to face increasing public and legal pressures, he died in a mass murder–suicide with other cult members in October 1994. While Jouret was considered by the public to be the figurehead of the group, Di Mambro was the true head of the organization.

Early life
Joseph Léonce Di Mambro was born 19 August 1924 in Pont-Saint-Esprit, a town in the Gard department of France, the oldest of three siblings. His father was an Italian immigrant, and Di Mambro was often bullied for his ethnic background. He later stated his sister was decapitated after she stuck her head out of a train window, an incident which he described later in life with joy. His family was not particularly religious.

Possibly in an effort to avoid forced labor and being moved to Germany during the occupation of France, Di Mambro married on 11 March 1944, having a single child in the relationship. His friends stated that the occupation made him secretive and distrustful of others. After a friend's family's house was raided by German officials and burnt to the ground for collaborating with the French Resistance, Di Mambro's house was also searched, but his family was spared by the Germans due to the fact he played the violin, as the German officer was a musician. After the war he was part of an orchestra.

Di Mambro was then known to be interested in spiritualism. From the age of sixteen on, he gained an apprenticeship as a jeweler and watchmaker. He opened a jewelry store, where he fixed watches and surrounded himself with luxury goods, noted to be obsessed with appearances. After the war, his business began to do badly, and Di Mambro instead decided to make a living as a medium.

Esotericism and convictions
Starting in the 1950s, Di Mambro became involved in esoteric groups. He attended an AMORC meeting in 1955, which was then one of the most active groups, and became affiliated with them. He became convinced that he was a "great spirit" from the ancient past. Soon after, he learned of the Knights Templar, and became fascinated.

In 1966, he was divorced from his first wife, and married again soon after. The next year, he met Albert Boiron, a technician. In short order, Di Mambro convinced him to join him in the jewellery business, and they began to work together out of Di Mambro's apartment. Di Mambro introduced Boiron to spiritualism, which Boiron became very interested in. After working together for a few years, Di Mambro suggested they move their workshop to the basement, and Boiron agreed; however, soon after this move, Di Mambro disappeared, along with all of Boiron's gold, jewels, and jewellery. Boiron hired a lawyer in an effort to track him down, but was unsuccessful, and never saw Di Mambro again. Di Mambro was in Tel Aviv with his wife and their two children, with his wife expecting their third child, as he believed that his child being born in Israel would grant it an "exceptional" destiny. Their child, Élie, was born in February 1969 in Tel Aviv.

Believing that his past actions had been forgotten, Di Mambro moved back to Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1972, and acted as a psychologist. Soon after, he was sentenced to six months in prison for writing bad checks, breaching patient trust, and for impersonating a psychiatrist. Di Mambro approached members of the Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem (OSMTJ), a white supremacist Templar order that met in Geneva.

The Solar Temple
Di Mambro founded in 1973 the Centre for the Preparation of the New Age in Collonges-sous-Salève. Two years later, a Geneva-based community known as the Brotherhood of the Pyramid, or alternatively La Pyramide, began meeting regularly in a house in the Geneva countryside, for community, discussion and mutual support on topics such as diet and spirituality. A fire occurred in 1979, which has been suggested to have possibly been an insurance scam by Di Mambro. Orchestral conductor Michel Tabachnik attended, enjoyed the atmosphere, and became a member, where in 1977, he met Di Mambro, who suggested he take over the community and structure it. The following year, the two men created the Golden Way Foundation, of which Tabachnik became president. Di Mambro also set up the Amenta society to disseminate the ideologies of the Golden Way Foundation and recruit new members. Di Mambro was perceived by Foundation members as a medium, a "walk-in" being (a being who takes on the body of another).

After Luc Jouret gave a number of lectures in which he defended the existence of a link between a spiritual approach and homeopathy, Di Mambro decided to meet him. At the same time, Di Mambro became involved with the Renovated Order of the Temple (Ordre rénové du Temple, ORT), a revival of Ordo Templi Orientis that had been created by former Rosicrucians in 1968. In 1983, after the death of Julien Origas, leader of the ORT, Di Mambro urged Jouret to take over the order, and he became its new Grand Master the same year, before he was expelled by Origas's daughter. Luc Jouret's appointment immediately triggered a split within the Renovated Order of the Temple, giving rise to the International Chivalric Order of the Solar Tradition, of which he became head.

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 soon had the idea that Dominique Bellaton, a young drug-addicted woman who had been hunted by pimps who joined the order at her parents' request, was the surrogate mother of the "cosmic child". A ceremony in the order's crypt, organized with special effects, helped to confirm to the members the supernatural powers of "theogamic conception" without sexual intercourse, when in fact Dominique was Di Mambro's mistress and had been pregnant for several weeks. Their child, Emmanuelle, was born on March 21, 1982. Di Mambro variously claimed to be a reincarnation of Osiris, Akhenaten, Moses, and the Italian occultist Cagliostro. 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. He pretended to receive his orders as the leader of the group from mysterious "masters". Di Mambro ordered his followers in their personal lives, particularly the OTS practice of "cosmic coupling", which forced apart married couples and put them with other members, which he claimed as the will of the "Cosmic Masters".

In 1984, Jouret and Di Mambro formed the International Chivalric Order of the Solar Tradition in Geneva, which would later become the Order of the Solar Temple. Jouret, a compelling speaker, was the "front man" for this organization, though Di Mambro was the actual leader. The Solar Temple wedded the Templars tradition to the New Age, part of a Neo-Templar tradition that claimed to descend from a lineage of grand masters that claimed to go back to the medieval Order of the Temple that was suppressed at the beginning of the fourteenth century, an idea which French historian Régine Pernoud called "totally insane". The temple offered a program of personal spiritual progress through the practice of occult disciplines and rituals that invoked the power of the Great White Brotherhood to bring forth the New Age.

Mass suicide and death
Beginning in the late 80s, several members began to doubt Di Mambro. In 1990, Di Mambro's son Elie discovered that the apparations that appeared during OTS ceremonies were faked, operated by Antonio 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.The leaders began to monitor members who said they wanted to leave the OTS. Some were spied on, others had their phones tapped. Many members, including Di Mambro's own son and many high-ranking members, left.

In the 1990s, Jouret, having given up his profession as a homeopath to devote himself fully to the OTS, began lecturing on personal development at various companies, universities and banks in several countries. Di Mambro, who had a dim view of these lectures, began sabotaging Jouret, who eventually abandoned his activities and became totally dependent on Di Mambro.

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 additionally believed her to be under threat from the Antichrist, who he believed was born to Antonio 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, who they named Christopher Emmanuel. Di Mambro, deeply offended by the name similitarity, 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.

On September 30, 1994, Dominique Bellaton lured the couple Antonio Dutoit and Suzanne Robinson, along with their 2-month-old baby Christopher-Emmanuel, to Di Mambro's chalet at 199 Chemin Belisle in Morin-Heights. Di Mambro regarded the baby as the Antichrist, because his own daughter was named Emmanuelle and he had not been consulted in the naming of the infant. He ordered the infant to be eliminated by two knights of the sect, Jerry Genoud and Joël Egger, to prevent his reappearance. Di Mambro believed that the Antichrist was born into the order to prevent him from succeeding in his spiritual aim.

On the night of October 4 to 5, 1994, two fires broke out in Switzerland: one at around 11:55 p.m. at the "La Rochette" farm in Cheiry, and another in three chalets at in Salvan. When the fire department arrived, they found 23 people dead in Cheiry and 25 in Salvan. Di Mambro, in addition to his wife and child, were also among the dead. Many bodies were burned beyond recognition, and Jouret and Di Mambro's bodies had to be identified via dental records.