Joseph Di Mambro

Joseph Léonce Di Mambro (19 August 1924 – 5 October 1994) was a French esotericist who founded and led the Order of the Solar Temple alongside Luc Jouret. Di Mambro had been associated with a variety of esoteric groups before founding OTS. He was convicted of several counts of fraud, including impersonation of a psychiatrist. He founded the Solar Temple with Jouret in 1984. He committed suicide in the Swiss village of Salvan on 5 October 1994 as part of a mass murder–suicide.

Born in 1924 in France, the son of an Italian immigrant, Di Mambro was apprenticed as a watchmaker and jeweler in his teenage years. After World War II, Di Mambro joined the Rosicrucian organization AMORC. In the late 1960s, Di Mambro scammed a business partner and then fled France, before returning several years later. In 1972 he was sentenced to several months in prison on unrelated charges. Afterwards, he founded several New Age and spiritual groups, including the Golden Way Foundation, and met Luc Jouret in the 1980s. Under Di Mambro's direction Jouret took control of the neo-Templar Renewed Order of the Temple group; he was ousted shortly after, but Di Mambro and Jouret then formed a schismatic group, the Order of the Solar Temple.

While Jouret was considered by the public to be the figurehead of the group, Di Mambro was the true head of the organization. Following stressors within the group, Di Mambro and Jouret became increasingly paranoid, and the group's ideological concept of "transiting" to another dimension would grow more prominent. They began to plot a mass murder–suicide which they called a "transit". In October 1994, many members were murdered in Cheiry under his direction. Di Mambro himself died of suicide by poisoning, alongside 24 other members of the Solar Temple in Salvan, Switzerland.

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, Raphaël Di Mambro, was an immigrant from Northern Italy, a glassworker. His mother Fernande Marie Raoux was a seamstress. Di Mambro was regularly bullied in school for his Italian heritage. While extremely close to his mother, he hated his father and his sister; he viewed his father as lacking ambition.

His family was not particularly religious, though Fernande would sometimes attend church, and Di Mambro was fond of the atmosphere of mass. At the age of 16, he gained an apprenticeship as a jeweler and watchmaker. At a young age, he viewed himself as better than other youth, apart from the rest. When the glassworking facilities closed down during the occupation of France (as the Nazis had little interest in glass work), his father instead made weapons for the Nazis, as did many other workers at the time. When some of his associates joined the French Resistance, he distanced himself from them, while also trying to avoid being incorporated into the STO (the Vichy France compulsory work program for the unemployed). His friends stated that the occupation made him secretive and distrustful of others.

Towards the end of the war, the occupying Germans attempted to hunt down the remaining resistance fighters and those who refused to participate in the work program, and many went into hiding. Possibly in an effort to avoid forced labor and being moved to Germany during the occupation, Di Mambro married Jeannine Saltet on 11 March 1944, having a single child in the relationship, Bernard. He did not attend school for long, preferring music; after the war he was part of an orchestra. Saltet was also a musician and would later become a music teacher. 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; his family was spared by the Germans due to the fact he played the violin, as the German officer was a musician. Following the liberation of France, his father disappeared under mysterious circumstances and was never found. Di Mambro did not mourn him for long.

Di Mambro was then known to be interested in spiritualism. 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. He became well known locally for supposedly mystical abilities.

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, joining in 1956. AMORC was then the largest Rosicrucian order. He became convinced that he was a "great spirit" from the ancient past. He quickly learned about AMORC teachings, joining a group in Nîmes. He regularly attended the lodge, learning AMORC teachings. He claimed to develop psychological abilities as a result of this, particularly immense concentration. He became head of an AMORC lodge in Nîmes in 1956, which lasted until 1958. While Di Mambro found little respect elsewhere, he commanded respect in AMORC, training as an initiate over the next few years. He became skilled at manipulating others, speaking of visions in a way that commanded the attention of those around him. Soon after, he learned of the Knights Templar, and became fascinated. By 1966, he had divorced his first wife; that year, he married again to Hélène Ghersi, who he lived with in Pont-Saint-Esprit. He soon introduced her to occultism.