Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

by Lawrence Wright

The 1990s saw the rise of apocalyptic movements in many different countries. As the millennium drew near, the theme of science fiction and UFOs became especially pronounced and deadly. In October 1994, police in Switzerland, investigating a fire in a farmhouse, discovered a hidden room with eighteen corpses wearing ceremonial garments, arranged like spokes in a wheel. Other bodies were found elsewhere on the farm. Their heads were covered with plastic bags; some had been shot or beaten. The next day, three chalets burned in another Swiss village. Investigators found more than two dozen bodies in the ruins. They had been poisoned. Some of the dead had been lured to the scene and murdered, but most were followers of Joseph Di Mambro, a French jeweler, who had created a new religion, the Order of the Solar Temple. Di Mambro’s chief lieutenant, a charismatic Belgian obstetrician named Luc Journet, preached that after death the members would be picked up by a spaceship and reunited on the star Sirius. Like Hubbard, Journet had been influenced by Aleister Crowley and the Ordo Templi Orientis. A year after these macabre incidents, the burned corpses of sixteen other members of the group were found in Grenoble, France; then, in 1997, five more members of the order burned themselves to death in Quebec, making a total of seventy-four deaths. In contrast to the Branch Davidians or the followers of Jim Jones, who were predominantly lower class, the members of the Solar Temple were aff...