Luc Jouret

Luc Georges Marc Jean Jouret (French: [ʒuʁɛ]; 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.