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.
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, 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.
Esotericism 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.
Fraud convictions In 1967, he met Albert Boiron, a technician. 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.
At this time, 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 November 1969 in Tel Aviv. This was the third child of Hélène and Di Mambro. While in Israel, he continued to express interest in the occult, writing a letter to his friend Guy Bérenger discussing occult sentiments. He left AMORC in 1970. 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.
Group leadership Di Mambro approached members of the Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem (OSMTJ), a Templar order that met in Geneva. 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 La Pyramide, founded by Di Mambro, began meeting regularly in a house in the Geneva countryside, for community, discussion and mutual support on topics such as diet and spirituality.
About 1977, he divorced Ghersi, following several instances of him cheating on her. In 1977, he married Joselyne Duplessis, a 28-year-old woman from Lyons (Di Mambro, meanwhile, was 55). They had met through occult circles; Joselyne could not have children, which Di Mambro did not mind as by that time he already had four. According to someone who knew them, they got on very well, and were extremely close, keeping no secrets from each other. However, they were noted to not act affectionate to one another. As Duplessis was Di Mambro's wife, she quickly gained power within the community and was distant and cold to the rest. She wrote out his sermons, and did not mind Di Mambro's constant cheating on her, which she tolerated without complaint.
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 was perceived by Foundation members as a medium and as a "walk-in" being (a being who takes on the body of another with their consent).
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 had actually impregnated Dominique Bellaton, a former manicurist, who was well known in Geneva and had previously had several affairs with businessmen. Bellaton's parents had brought her to Di Mambro at the age of 19, worried about her interest in men and drugs; Di Mambro told her that she was the reincarnation of Hatshepsut, and made her his main mistress. Di Mambro claimed that this child's conception was created from the power of his mind and Immaculate Conception. This was backed up in a ceremony, in which one of the invisible Masters pointed a sword shining a beam of light at Bellaton's throat (the sword was actually fitted with a lightbulb).
Their child, initially named Anne Bellaton, was born on 22 March 1982. Joselyne did not mind this, and agreed to take care of the child even though it was not hers. The child was viewed as "the Christ of the new generation", but was born female, something attributed by Di Mambro to human imperfection (believing the child's mother being human had led to an imperfect Christ). Di Mambro claimed the child was an Avatar, a male soul trapped in a female body. She was then renamed Emmanuelle but was referred to with male pronouns. In January 1986 Di Mambro legally recognized the child as his biologically at the French Consulate in Quebec.
Jouret gave a number of lectures in which he defended the existence of a link between a spiritual approach and homeopathy. Having noticed Luc Jouret's good elocution and communication skills, Di Mambro decided to meet him, and was charmed. He invited Jouret to join the Golden Way, where he quickly rose in the ranks. In 1983, after the death of Julien Origas, leader of the neo-Templar order the Renewed Order of the Temple (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.
Solar Temple In 1984, Jouret and Di Mambro formed the International Chivalric Order of the Solar Tradition (, OICTS) in Geneva, which would later become the Order of the Solar Temple. Jouret was the outward image and primary recruiter for this organization, though Di Mambro was the actual leader. However, according to former member Thierry Huguenin, inside the order Jouret was simply like everyone else having a job to do; he was the grand master, but Di Mambro was the secret master unknown to the public.