Word: switzerland
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...lecturer in Canada, France and Switzerland, Luc Jouret, a 46-year-old homeopathic physician and spiritual explorer, expounded New Age theories of child rearing and nutrition. But there were occasions when his audiences got a glimpse of a different Jouret, the would-be messiah who warned that the world would end soon in a convergence of environmental disasters and that only a select few would survive. Jouret liked to talk about the transformative power of fire: "We are in the reign of fire," he said on Swiss radio in 1987. "Everything is being consumed...
Last week Jouret's words seemed to hang in the air over the ashes at two sites in Switzerland and one in Canada where 53 of his followers and their children died. Police in two countries are trying to find out whether the deaths were mass suicide, mass murder or some bizarre combination of the two. An international arrest warrant has been issued for Jouret and fellow cult leader Joseph di Mambro, a 70-year-old French Canadian called "the Dictator" or "Napoleon" by some in the sect...
...some of the deaths may have been suicides, part of one more episode in cult pathology to put beside the weird tragedies at Jonestown, Guyana, and the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. A victim was found with a letter to her family explaining that she had come to Switzerland to die. Jean-Francois Mayer, a Swiss authority on cults, made public three letters he said were posted to him by cult members before the fire. "We are leaving this earth," read one, "to rediscover, lucidly and freely, a dimension of truth and absoluteness...
Jouret is believed to have attracted up to 75 followers around Quebec and 200 more in Switzerland and France. Though some were recruited from among his patients, most learned of him through the lectures he gave on two continents. In 1988 and 1989 he was paid to speak at a public utility, Hydro-Quebec, where he talked of "self-realization" and recruited more than a dozen employees. Listeners who seemed receptive to his initial message might find themselves invited to join an inner circle where his full apocalyptic vision was unveiled...
With the positive ID of Jouret's death, the mystery of the cult doesn't get any closer to being solved -- it just deepens, says TIME Switzerland reporter Robert Kroon. There's still the question of who benefited from the undoubtedly large sums of money that the cult collected from its members. Swiss media are reporting a transfer of $93 million to an Australian bank account held by one cult figure. "This was obviously a cult with a double life," says Kroon. "But you wouldn't think that the leaders would collect all this money and then kill themselves...