Sect members meet violent end - sect called 'Cross of the Arrow,' 'Cross of the Rose,' or 'Cross and the Rose'

Christian Century, Oct 19, 1994

To the people who lived down the road near Cheiry, Switzerland, the four dozen members of an obscure sect were good neighbors, involved in organic gardening and biological research. But on the morning of October 5, as police on two sides of the Atlantic began investigating what they initially believed to be a carefully arranged ritualized mass suicide in Switzerland and a possibly related fatal fire in Quebec, a more sinister and violent side of the group and its leader, 46-year-old Belgian-Canadian Luc Jouret, began to emerge.

Police reports and published news accounts in Montreal and Switzerland suggest that Jouret and his followers adhered to an unusual combination of New Age beliefs and literalistic apocalypticism that included weapons stockpiling and survivalist thinking. Last year several critics accused Jouret of engaging in "brainwashing." The ex-wife of a sect member compared the group to the Branch Davidians, 78 of whom died in 1993 near Waco, Texas, in a shootout with federal agents.

As news of the Swiss deaths broke, police and religion experts were scrambling to understand what had transpired in Switzerland and how it might be linked to Jouret and his Canadian movement. Police found the bodies of at least 23 men, women and children at a farm in the small town of Cheiry, as well as 25 more bodies in Granges-sur-Salvan, a mountain hamlet some 100 miles south of Cheiry. Both villages lie in western Switzerland approximately 50 miles from Geneva. Reports say that the Swiss group was known variously as the "Cross and the Rose," "Cross of the Rose" or "Cross of the Arrow."

Many of the victims were discovered in what the Associated Press described as "a concealed underground chapel lined with mirrors" and reached through a hidden door in an adjoining barn. They were wearing red, white and black ceremonial robes; some had plastic bags tied over their heads; and some had their hands clasped in prayer. According to a New York Times report, a former member stated that the wearing of plastic bags was not an unusual part of the group's meetings: "We were under plastic, symbol of the estrangement from nature. Members had to confess how they had sinned against nature."

However, according to Andre Piller, a Swiss judge who is investigating the incidents, doubts about the mass-suicide theory arose after tests and physical examinations showed that, in addition to the presence of the plastic bags - and the discovery that some members' hands were tied behind their backs - some of the sect's members died after taking, or being given, "a powerful violent substance" via injection. Piller also revealed that at least 20 of the bodies discovered in Cheiry had bullet wounds. These findings have led Swiss officials to question whether the deaths were suicides, murders or a combination of both.

Jouret, whose Quebec-based sect is known as "the Order of the Solar Temple" or "the Order of the Sun Temple," is believed to have rented one of three chalets used by the sect in Switzerland after fleeing Canada last year. The discoveries in Switzerland came just hours after a fatal fire north of Montreal destroyed a duplex owned by Jouret's group, leaving at least four people dead. At least 52 persons believed to be connected to Jouret have been found dead in Canada and Switzerland. Authorities have not established whether Jouret died in one of the fires or remains alive and at large.

Insight into the incendiary deaths of sect members may be provided by documents sent to a Swiss expert on sect activity, Jean-Francois Mayer. According to the New York Times, Mayer received three manuscripts via mail, one of which stated in part: "We are leaving this earth to find in all lucidity and freedom a new dimension of truth and absolution, far from the hypocrisies and oppression of this world, in order to achieve the seeds of our future generation. We're now free of a burden that day by day became increasingly intolerable. Know, meanwhile, that we will continue to work through other means and other times."

In Canada, Jouret and his Order of the Sun Temple received more attention and scrutiny than they desired. In March 1993 two men allegedly connected with the sect were arrested for trying to buy weapons for the group. "The police believe that they are arming for the end of the world," the Montreal newspaper La Presse wrote at the time. An arrest warrant was issued for Jouret, but reportedly he fled to Switzerland before it could be served. Government officials and religion experts have estimated membership in the Order of the Sun Temple in Canada at 40 to 80.

As the gun scandal unfolded in Canada, members claimed that they merely belonged to the Association for Research in Life Sciences or (sometimes) the Academy of Research and Knowledge of the Higher Sciences (ARCH) and that they were concerned with nutrition and hygiene, especially with growing organic tomatoes. "We tell people how to eat healthy, how to prepare vegetables, meat, take morning showers, things like that," La Presse reported a member as saying. But Rose-Marie Klaus-Oppliger, the ex-wife of a Jouret follower, told a Quebec radio station last year that "Jouret pretended to be Christ. He told people that a great catastrophe was coming, and that only the chosen would survive."