Luc Jouret

Luc Georges Marc Jean Jouret (18 October 1947 – 5 October 1994) was a Belgian doctor and homeopath. Jouret founded the Order of the Solar Temple (OTS) with Joseph Di Mambro in 1984. He committed suicide in the Swiss village of Salvan on 5 October 1994 as part of a mass murder–suicide. While Di Mambro was the true leader of the group, Jouret was its outward image and primary recruiter.

Born in the Belgian Congo, Jouret received his doctorate in medicine from the Université libre de Bruxelles in 1974. After suffering a serious illness, Jouret lost faith in modern medicine; he began practicing homeopathy and other kinds of alternative medicine. He also served for some time in the Belgian Army and participated in the Battle of Kolwezi. He was known as an excellent public speaker, and gave lectures on alternative medicine alongside New Age topics. In 1981, he met Joseph Di Mambro while lecturing for his Golden Way Foundation, with whom he became close. At Di Mambro's direction Jouret took control of the neo-Templar Renewed Order of the Temple group following the death of its leader, Julien Origas; he was ousted shortly after. Di Mambro and Jouret then formed a schismatic group, the Order of the Solar Temple.

Jouret was the Solar Temple's public face, but in his role internal to the group, he was subservient to Di Mambro. Following stressors within the group, including Jouret's arrest for directing members to illegally buy silencers in Canada, he and Di Mambro became increasingly paranoid, and the group's ideological concept of travelling to another dimension would grow more prominent. They began to plot a mass murder–suicide which they called a "transit". Jouret, alongside Joël Egger, shot and killed 23 OTS members in Cheiry. Jouret then died of suicide by poisoning, alongside 24 other members of the Solar Temple in Salvan, Switzerland.

Luc Georges Marc Jean Jouret was born on 18 October 1947 in Kikwit, in the Belgian Congo. He was the second son of Napoléon and Fernande Jouret (née Jeanmott), both Belgian. His father Napoléon Jouret had studied in Germanic languages and was a local government official in Belgium, while Fernande was a housewife. After the birth of Jouret's older brother in Belgium in 1946, Jouret's parents moved to the Belgian Congo, where they settled in Kikwit; at the time, the colonial administration of the territory needed more civil servants, and Napoléon took up a job in territorial administration.

Jouret was born a year later; he was a sickly child, suffering from rickets, pulmonary issues, whooping cough, as well as nutritional issues. Due to the lack of medical equipment and the climate in the Congo, his family returned to Belgium when he was 18 months old. By the age of three he had recovered under his mother's care, though he remained fragile in health. They returned to the Congo and settled in Matadi where a third son was born in 1951. Napoléon switched careers into teaching Germanic languages to Belgian children, both black and white, and the family moved to Luluabourg. In 1954, when Jouret was six, he fractured his skull after being hit by a cyclist. His family, fearing for his life, returned to Dour, Belgium for good. A fourth child, a daughter, was born two years later.

As a teenager Jouret, now in better health, began to excel at sports, particularly judo and climbing. He aimed to become a teacher in physical education. In 1966, he enrolled in the prestigious Université libre de Bruxelles with a scholarship; his brother, also a student there, described him as a "serious idealist" at the time, not interested in money. Following May 68, communism was popular at the school, and Jouret was an especially devoted communist. Napoléon Jouret, then a school administrative manager, was an avid secularist and progressive critic of Belgian society. He created an organization opposing Catholic influence in Wallonia, of which he was president. At home however he was disciplinarian and occasionally physically abusive. Jouret's older brother said that while he was not abused, he believed Jouret was. Jouret left home at about 21 years of age, under violent circumstances. A later patient of Jouret said that he had complained to him later in life of the lack of freedom and strictness of his upbringing.

At the age of 20, Jouret began to experience severe pain and was diagnosed with coxarthrosis (hip osteoarthritis), a diagnosis unusual for someone his age. As a result of this he spent 14 months mostly immobilized in bed and subject to constant medical care, an event which he described as making him lose his faith in modern medicine. Faced with the reality that he would no longer be able to become an athlete as he had wanted, Jouret was distraught.

Visiting students discussed with Jouret homeopathy and alternative medicine, and he set up an appointment with a homeopath. Jouret's condition seemed to improve after a year, but he was still unable to achieve his previous aims, instead choosing to focus on medicine. As he could not regularly attend the classes due to his illness, he had to repeat the course, wasting two years of effort. Gradually Jouret's condition began to improve, which he attributed to homeopathy, and he received his medical degree. Jouret became interested in a variety of alternative medicine, including iridology, macrobiotics, and acupuncture in addition to homeopathy. Jouret also became interested in politics, particularly Maoism, and joined the Union of Communist Students. Interested in both China's history of traditional medicine and its communist politics, he decided to travel to China.