Luc Jouret

Luc Georges Marc Jean Jouret (October 18, 1947 – October 5, 1994) was a Belgian cult leader, homeopath, and second in command of the Order of the Solar Temple (alongside Joseph Di Mambro) a new religious movement. He, alongside 52 other members of the group, died in a mass murder-suicide on October 5, 1994.

Quotes

• My notion of God is that He is the essence of what makes all things happen.
  • Conference in Lausanne 5 October 1987, quoted in Mayer 1993.

• We are in the reign of fire, everything is being burned.
  • Conference in Geneva 13 October 1987, quoted in Mayer 1993.

• If we do not consider tradition in light of scientific facts, it is useless; nothing can be learned from it. By the same token, if science does not incorporate tradition into its facts, it too is useless.
  • L'Eternel Présent, 1987, 3rd episode, quoted in Mayer 1993
• Quel avenir pour nos enfants ? Au fond, c'est une question qui nous intéresse tous. C'est vrai que partout, des voix s'élèvent dénonçant la pollution. Qui dénoncent la disparité des richesses, qui dénoncent la guerre. Des voix s'élèvent partout pour essayer de protéger ce qui est encore à protéger, mais pourtant. Les décisions qui sont prises pendant les rassemblements internationaux sont extrêmement lentes. Trop lentes, pour ce qui pourrait apparaitre comme potentiellement la survie de l'humanité. Donc nous sommes, nous les hommes d'aujourd'hui, confronté avec la nécessité de repenser notre existence. Il est urgent de le faire, car ce qui disparait ne disparait que physiquement mais engendre le début d'un nouveau cycle ; une nouvelle existence.
  • What future for our children? In the end, it is a question that interests us all. It is true that everywhere, voices rise that speak against pollution. Voices that rise against wealth disparity, against war. Voices rise to attempt to protect what is still worth protecting, and yet. Decisions which are taken during international conferences are extremely slow, too slow, for what can seem to potentially be humanity's survival. So we, the men of today, are confronted with the need to rethink our existence. It is urgent to do so, as all that disappears only disappears physically but is the beginning of a new cycle, a new existence.
  • La Fraternité, 2023, episode 1

• There were some transcendent experiences in my life, some experiences that made me directly experience a superior aspect of man—to which I had previously been blind [...]
  • L'Eternel Présent, 1987, 1st episode, quoted in Mayer 1993

• Our brains will undergo modifications, physical in the second phase, but certainly subtle and vibratory at first, which will cause man (the ones who are able) to react completely, and in a different way to events.
  • L'Eternel Présent, 1987, 2nd episode, quoted in Mayer 1993

• in all great civilizations we notice that doctors were always priests and vice-versa. I am convinced that a doctor who is not concerned with reintegrating himself into a dimension in which the spiritual is more important than the physical cannot understand his patient as such. And this is rather the tragedy of medicine today, not to denigrate its authentic value concerning what it has allowed as far as transformation of man, but it nevertheless still leads to a dead end because it refuses to integrate the spiritual man into the physical man, even though the spiritual has conditioned the physical.
  • L'Eternel Présent, 1987, 4th episode, quoted in Mayer 1993

• In the interior of the physical body there blooms a vital force, a vital energy which was there before Man’s physical appearance on earth.
  • Quoted in Hall, John R.; Schuyler, Philip D. (2000). "The Mystical Apocalypse of the Solar Temple" (in en). Apocalypse Observed: Religious Movements and Violence in North America, Europe, and Japan. London; New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-203-97766-8. 

• You are not sick because you have a disease; you have a disease because you are sick.
  • Quoted in Hall & Schyuler 2000

• Quand je vois la violence qui se déchaîne autour de moi, de nous. Je parle de Jo et de moi par exemple, parce qu’on n’accepte pas qu’on fasse partie d’une figure bien précise de la fin des temps. [...] Mon Dieu, quel cirque. Ça devient terrible. On vit une fin de fous, de fous... [...] Si tu savais ce qu'il faut jouer pour tenir la machine, tu n’as aucune idée. Enfin, bref, on arrive au bout. [...] Quelle planète, mon Dieu, qu’est-ce qu'on a foutu de descendre sur cette merde. Quelle planète, mon Dieu, qu’est-ce qu’on a foutu de descendre sur cette merde.
  • When I see the violence unleashed around me, around us. I'm talking about Jo and myself, for example, because we don't accept that we're part of a very specific figure at the end of time. [...] My God, what a circus. It's becoming terrible. We're living a crazy, crazy end... [...] If you only knew what you have to do to keep the machine going, you have no idea. Anyway, in short, we're coming to the end. [...] What a planet, my God, what the hell did we do to land on this shit.
  • 1994 wiretap by the Quebec police, quoted in Bédat, Bouleau & Nicolas 2000

• L’homme n'a aucune raison d’être. Que nous mourions tous maintenant, le soleil ne s'arrêtera pas de briller.
  • Man has no reason to exist. If we all die now, the sun won't stop shining.
  • Quoted in Bédat, Bouleau & Nicolas 1997 (Bédat, Arnaud; Bouleau, Gilles; Nicolas, Bernard (1997) (in fr). L'Ordre du Temple Solaire: Enquête et révélations sur les chevaliers de l'apocalypse. Montréal: Libre Expression. ISBN 978-2-89111-707-4. )

• If you make the first steps, I’ll make sure that you make the other ones.
  • Talking to former member Hermann Delorme, quoted in Hall & Schyuler 2000

About Luc Jouret

• You start listening and by God, you know, you just all of a sudden feel so attracted to what he is saying. You talk about the universe, you talk about how man is made of four ingredients and how the stars are made of these same four ingredients. Then you go back to Egypt and Egyptology, and then somewhere along the line comes the possibility of extraterrestrials. And it goes on and it goes on like that. But the more you hear, the less you understand, and therefore, the more you want to know. You slowly get caught up in the web.
  • Hermann Delorme, quoted in Hall & Schyuler 2000

• [...] the real problem was that Luc Jouret and Jo DiMambro were people who couldn't very easily tolerate any kind of criticism or opposition. I remember a small but significant personal experience with Luc Jouret in December 1987. [...] We spoke for about 3 hours and at some point I mentioned two lines about him that had been published in an anti-cult booklet in France. It was really nothing of consequence. It wasn't even associated with the group he belonged to at that time, but to another group to which he had belonged before. When I mentioned that book, he told me, "Oh yes, Mr. Mayer, really that's something which I didn't like at all." He explained to me that he had tried to call the author in order to get a correction, and the author refused to speak with him. He called the author a second time. The author refused again. He called the author a third time. The author turned him down, and he told me, "you know, Mr. Mayer, one week later he was dead."
  This kind of remark is quite enlightening about the real allergy to opposition which such a man could have developed. I took it, of course, as a hidden warning to me. It seems I was the only person investigating the group to any extent. I hasten to say that it is not very clever, because usually if people warn me this way it makes me only more curious.
  • Mayer 1998

• Il disait que son père avait été inutilement sévère, qu’il ne lui avait laissé aucune liberté. Pour cette raison, il se montrait partisan d’une éducation très ouverte, sans contraintes, pour que les gamins s’épanouissent. C’est pour ça, me confiait-il, qu’il aimait par-dessus tout la liberté. Il pensait à la sienne, bien sûr.
  • He said that his father had been unnecessarily strict, that he hadn't allowed him any freedom. For this reason, he was in favor of a very open education, with no constraints, so that kids could blossom. That's why, he confided to me, he loved freedom above all else. He was thinking of his own, of course.
  • Gilbert Leblanc, a former patient of Jouret, quoted in Bédat, Bouleau & Nicolas 1997

• For outsiders, Luc Jouret was definitely a charismatic, charming personality. He was a very, very impressive person, especially in his interaction with with an audience. I did some research on the group in 1987, and at that time I attended lectures given by Luc Jouret for hours in front of several hundred people.
  • Jean-François Mayer, Apocalyptic Millennialism in the West: The Case of the Solar Temple, 1998

• I remember the very first lecture, already mentioned, which I attended with Luc Jouret. That was March of 1997 in Lausanne. Luc Jouret was lecturing on the topic "Love and Biology." On the advertisement it simply said: "Luc Jouret, Physician. Love and Biology." Nothing apocalyptic in the title. But after 10 or 20 minutes, he was already delivering a spiritual message with a strong apocalyptic content, telling the audience that volcanoes are about to erupt, forests are dying, this earth can no more endure these atrocities generated by mankind, and so on. This was a typical tone in his lectures.
  • Jean-François Mayer, Apocalyptic Millennialism in the West: The Case of the Solar Temple, 1998

• Jouret’s act forces us to recognize the religious motifs that lurk beneath even the most materialist assessments of the unraveling environment, as if all the secular tools of activist science and politics cannot help us dodge the West’s great cataclysmic story. Just as some tribal societies ritually enact the birth of the cosmos, Jouret performed civilization’s end, magically expressing the ideology of those ecologists who get so deep they start lobbying for the voluntary extinction of the human race.
  • Erik Davis, Solar Temple Pilots: Reading the End Times with Luc Jouret, October 25, 1994, in the The Village Voice