Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 341: The Order of the Solar Temple Part I - The Beginning

Episode Date: November 17, 2018

It's a return to cults on this week's episode as we begin our series on one of the most mysterious of the late twentieth century: The Order of the Solar Temple. Join us as we trace the paths of leaders Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret as they wind their way down a path that eventually led to the murder and/or suicide of 74 people.  

Hey there! Ben Kissel here for Last Podcast Network. I want to tell you about my show A. Blinken's Top Ad. For more than nine years, Marcus and I have strived to present you with the most accurate and honest political podcast out there. In these turbulent times, it's our intention to unite the country with impassioned debate that reaches out to the rational Americans who find their voices more muffled every day. Every week I use my political science background, my experience running for office, along with my lifelong passion to stand up for the downtrodden, the wrongfully accused, and the invisible man and woman to bring you news like you haven't heard before. Let's face it, traditional news has failed

us. We promise to always tell you the truth the best we see it and I personally guarantee to not be swayed by hyper-partisanship but be guided by facts. To listen, search A. Blinken's Top Ad on any podcast platform or go to lastpodcastnetwork.com and find it under shows. Hail yourselves everyone! Now back to Last Podcast on the left. There's no place to escape to. This is the last top ad. On the left. Right above your glass. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? So I started noticing something as we were going through this episode. Joe DiMambro has

the same physical body as L. Ron Hubbard who has the same physically shaped body as who? Your favorite special guest of Last Podcast on the left, Hong Kong Henry Zabraus. That's right, he does. So I'm saying how many specific women of this world have viewed the bodies of both Joe DiMambro and L. Ron Hubbard as the body of God himself. Alright, well don't get too fully yourself. This is the last podcast on the left. I am Ben Kissel with Marcus Parks here in New York. Hi Ben.

And yes, our guest for episode, what are we on now? I think it's 341. So our special guest for episode 341, he's been here for 340 episodes, Henry Zabrowski. Yeah man, I have the body of a God. And I can see why that's why people react so startled to me. Because I'm trying to add more of shirtless walking on the street. Right. Because in LA I see it all the time. And why should they be allowed to do it and not me?

Well you know who else people get startled by? The leprechaun. It's not because of your God-like body. Oh, there's me go. I would be great as that, honestly, sexy leprechaun. I'm going to say couch this and wait for Heidi Wee next year, sexy leprechaun. Heidi Wee, alright. So why even mention these cult leaders, you might ask. Today's episode, this stuff, I'm just going to say it's wacky. Wacky?

I'm going to go with wacky. We're going to talk about the order of the solar temple and I don't know why this story isn't more famous, but ladies and gentlemen, you're going to hear this story here first. Well we're going to get into why this story isn't more famous. Alright. We're going to talk about the solar temple, a.k.a. Le Aldo du Tempe Soleil. Congratulations. Very good.

Thank you. It was a largely mysterious doomsday cult that gained a short-lived worldwide notoriety in the mid-90s for the mass suicide and or murder of 74 of its members in Switzerland and Quebec. Wow. So now that is far above Heaven's Gate suicide. That's over twice what Heaven's Gate was. Jeez, alright. Yeah, but technically do they count less because they didn't have any penises?

Perhaps. But unlike other suicide cults who do it all in one go, the OST spread theirs over a period of three years from 1994 to 1997, killing themselves or murdering other members in five separate incidents. Whoa. And I tell you what, they had a little bit extra pizzazz. Then even Jonestown, even Don Jonestown is one of the most famous mass suicides in the world.

We deeply covered it and the pictures from it are devastating. Right. But if you look at the crime scene photos of the order of the solar temple and the way the bodies were found laid about in their golden robes covered in burnt, I mean just burnt alive, it is fucking, it's metal as shit. Well, you know, if you're going to commit suicide, it's always important to dress like Ric Flair. Really, that is the key to, but it is interesting, don't forget ladies and gentlemen as well.

I don't know why I'm saying ladies and gentlemen tonight. I'm shaming some inner AM radio host or something, but it was Flavorate at Jonestown, Flavorate. But really, this isn't like Jonestown. There were only a couple of survivors out of the five nights in question and that was only out of one of the nights, nor are there any tape recordings of the event, nor was there any real in-depth investigation done on any of the killing sites save one. Because they did it right, unfortunately. I mean, wrong right.

Right, right, of course. Now even though the people of Quebec and Switzerland certainly remember the cult, the order of the solar temple was little more than a blip on the millenarian doomsday cult landscape of the 90s as far as the rest of us went and there are reasons behind that. First of all, they lacked the panache of the more well-known cults of the time. That's where we will have a debate because if you look at the footage of inside the temple, it looks like a Brian De Palma film. Well it does, but nobody but people like us know about it.

Because the order of the solar temple, they were not as outwardly dangerous as Om Shinrikyo. They weren't as wacky as Heaven's Gate and their end was nowhere near as dramatic as the Branch Davidians. To that end, they weren't all that public either. Comparatively, we actually don't know a lot about the order of the solar temple because it was mysterious by design. So was it because, were they humble? Was that the issue?

No, no, no. With that kissle. How do I put this, because you know I've even said my distrust of introverts, unfortunately of course, because I'm an extrovert and so I just feel like they're always plotting. This truly is that. They were so not humble that they believed that their secrets truly were worth keeping. And that's why it attracted the sort of what you'd say societal high-level members. People with a lot of money, people with a lot of personal cachet, people apart of famous

families. And what you're looking at is an actual real secret society. This whole thing was so secretive that some of the members, their close family members didn't even know they were in the cult until those family members showed up dead. Interesting. Okay. That's true discipline within a cult. That's hard to get.

I mean, look at us. Just within the three of us, we constantly accidentally tell people what the next episodes are going to be. When we should be holding those cards close to the vest, like Biggie Small says in the Commandments of the Crack Man, I don't know if that's the name of the song. That sounds pretty cool. The thing is that that secretiveness is what makes the Order of the Solar Temple so special. They were a real life secret society of the kind that we normally only see in novels and

horror movies. Cool. And the end of the cult is among the most horrific ends that any cult has ever met. All right. However, some argue that the Order of the Solar Temple wasn't even really a cult. Some say that it would actually be more accurate to describe them as an esoteric magical society that got out of hand. And there is something to be said about this claim.

Can I just call it a cult? Because that is an esoteric society that got out of hand. Esoteric. Not esoteric. Esoteric. It's just a lot for me to sing. I'm just going to call it a cult. Yes.

I would say I lean towards esoteric magical group that got out of hand because what we have here is something different than the Golden Dawn where I think they met up with other extreme nerds because we're going to see they have a lot of right wing influence deep inside of here. And what do we know about right wing nerds? They are incredibly dangerous. Oh yeah. So this is in Switzerland.

This is in Switzerland. This is in Quebec. They had some in Australia. Hey, Marcus. What? It doesn't sound like they're so neutral. Is there a God? But they only killed themselves.

And actually, this is where I'll debate you because they only killed themselves. Okay. All right. I guess that's neutral. Well, I think the OSD, they actually share a lot more with the early 20th century European magical societies like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Thule Society than they do with Heaven's Gate or the Branch Davidians. Okay.

Like the Golden Dawn, the Order of the Solar Temple made their rituals and doctrines purposefully obtuse and difficult to understand. That way, when people did understand it or at least pretend to understand it, it made them feel extra special. And that played in perfectly to the claims that the leaders made that their members were superior to the rest of society. I see. Also, never underestimate the power of a paywall.

They put each layer, they put each layer behind a paywall. Right. Each one has to be, you have to pay in to get into the next branch. You'll learn more secrets. You pay in to get to the next branch. You get a cape, which is true, they love their fucking capes, which is like a regular Benedict Cumberbatch. Love it.

Love it. I assume he wears capes. Of course. And then the third one, they show up and now you're a fucking knight. It's like an improv school, where each time you're paying to get more and more friends and influence. And a lot of, sometimes you're Tina Fey, but a lot of times you're a Clinton McGregor. Never heard of him.

Exactly. Exactly. So it's interesting. It seems like they write this stuff super confusing. Does anyone actually truly understand it? Or is it like David Ike's book, The Biggest Secret, or The Greatest Secret, where it's all such nonsense that people are just like, I get it, but you can't get it. Can I respond?

It's never about a destination, Kissel. All of this. If you read the Rosicrucian, did you read the Rosicrucian manual that got sent to us? I signed up for the actual Rosicrucian Society to read what exactly it was that they believed in and they believe in a lot of stuff. It's a lot of stuff. And you have to understand it's about the journey. It's about, it's, it's reveling in the mysteries.

It's never just arriving in some place. All right. Well, this journey and the paywall and all that shit, that's how the OST was able to capture a membership that was a mixture of the middle class and the wealthy, with members ranging from Canadian business executives, to police officers, to local politicians, to even a Swiss watch magnate. Oh, I mean, this is as Switzerland as it can be. There's so much chocolate and watches in this story and it's like, so much skiing.

He is a famous man of the B.C. Klett. And I was like, oh, he does the B.C. Klett? And so when I had to look at that opera, I was like, oh, bicycle. Oh, he's a bicycle man. He'll pay money to a bicycle man. So they got a Canadian businessman, just I would assume surrounded by ducks.

I would guess he's in the loon business. I don't know why. And then you got a watchmaker. Multiple high level Canadian business men and you know, watches in Switzerland. That's no joke. I mean, it's like being a race car driver in America. We're not going to relitigate the clock. Okay.

I've heard a lot of comments about our clock conversation. We're not here to do that today. If you went to New York City to Green Point and you met the king du pizzer, who is real, there's a king of pizzas. Like the man that the other ones go to, there's that guy from Napoli. I don't know what he does. And you have to go and you have to kiss his Parmesan scented ring. Like then you would understand the true power of the watchmaker in Switzerland.

All right. I get it. I get it. The Parmesan ring is amazing, by the way. Well, one of the things that attracted these people was that the OST was run like a business. For example, a judge that worked on the solar temple case actually wrote in his final report that the OST was structured like a multinational corporation. There was so much money moving in and out of the solar temple that some believe that

it was more likely a criminal enterprise engaged in vast amounts of money laundering and that the cult was just a front. I kind of, I do believe in some of that, but the problem is there's no evidence of it because Luke Sharray and Joe DiMambro really fucking covered it up. Yeah. They covered it up well. So this is where we get the Umschenricchio ties in, right, where it's kind of a front? It's also got, it's got tastes.

I believe that Order of the Solar Temple, like if it was a, it was like if Scientology was run by Dan Brown and Dio. Oh, holy diver indeed. But it's hard to know just what the Order of the Solar Temple was really up to because there have been no definitive books written on the subject. As far as sources go, we've had to cobble together the story from a variety of internet and print sources. To the biggest sources were a collection of essays called The Temple of Death and a chapter

on the solar temple from a book by Shelley King called The Most Evil Secret Societies in History, which is actually a solid read. It's nowhere near as trashy as it sounds. Cool. I like how trashy it sounds. Yeah. This is why every officer has to go to every single cult, knock on the front door and say, what are you up to?

Just ask. Then in order to fill it out, we've used a wide range of internet sources such as the New York Times, the LA Times, Time Magazine, Infosec.org, ReligiousTolerance.org, Watchman.org, and Nexus Magazine. Have you seen the runner of Infosec.org? I have not. What is Infosec.org? He looks like if Jesse Eisenberg didn't have the 4% of charm that he has.

But on the other hand, it's also possible that since this story occurred in Quebec in Switzerland, the entire story has been written just in French. Oh, that's why it's all the letters are twisted around. Yeah. Because I was trying to look at some of the stuff and I was like, I do want to apologize up front because there's a lot of, because Swiss French is also different. Right. Right.

I think so. I think it's different. I don't know. It all blends together. But I didn't take French in high school. I took Spanish in high school. We were in Canada quite a bit, what was it, last year? Last year, I think.

I spoke to a lot of French people, putin toilette. That's what I learned. That is French fries with a bunch of gravy on it and then you got to go to the bathroom. But I would like to reiterate, if there's anything out there, because I believe there is one book that was written by a survivor, but it is in French. So we try to look at, if we have any listeners that speak French, that have read any of this primary source material, please drop a book report into the email because we tried as much as we could.

So we cobbled together as much as we can and over the series, we're going to try and put out the most definitive, as much as we can offer, collection of information about order of the solar temple. I would pay $10,000 to watch you, Henry, try to read a book in French, just to see the frustration in your face. Well, it's like a Sunday cartoon strip. You're going to come to the living room. The book's going to be upside down.

I'm wearing like a spoken jacket going like, ah, international day. But according to the French, you mean, le de, un tour national. Perfect. Yeah. Since none of us speak French, this is the best that we can do, but we've definitely tried our hardest to make this as accurate as we possibly can. We're going to try our best to tell the story of the order of the solar temple. But there's a couple of well, I heard in this story because Marcus and I have some

different interpretation of the facts, which could either speak to gaps in either one of our reading. All right. Very cool. Now, one of the most interesting aspects of the temple leadership is that this cult was actually run by two men. A new age guru, Luke Gere, was the face of the operation in charge of recruitment while Joseph DeMambro, who could easily be described as a professional cult leader, ran things

behind the scenes. Interesting. DeMambro really has shit figured out because he has figured out how to do nothing but still be the leader of stuff for a long time. And up until he died, he actually, I'm going to put this out there, Joseph DeMambro is a successful cult leader. Yeah. Where he actually saw it through to the very end and he got the exact ending that he wanted.

Yeah. And he got it at the age of 70. Wow. Yeah, man. So just my question is, how did the Italian get to Switzerland? Because he's Italian, right? No, he's not Italian. DeMambro?

Yeah. He's French. Oh, okay. I mean, maybe his last name... You could be French and have an Italian last name. I'm learning this too, Kissel. Okay. Do you know that you can have that?

I didn't know. You can be like Antonio Babanatio and you're from London. It happens. Okay. See, DeMambro seemed to be more the brains of the operation, as he'd run two fairly successful cults slash magical societies before Jauré even entered the picture. It's for that reason that our story begins with the life of Joseph DeMambro. I do think that this is very unique in cults from what we've seen.

I mean, we now have done full deep dives into Jonestown, Om Shinrikyo, where else were the other... Heaven's Gate. Well, we didn't do a deep dive into Heaven's Gate. We also did Children of God. Children of God. We did Children of God. And I feel that this is really the first example of Joe DeMambro understood that it takes

a village to run a cult. And so he went out there. He knew he had to get good people to surround himself with. And what I mean good people, I actually mean bad people. Right. Can I just ask, what happened to the two previous cults? How did those end? You'll find out.

Okay. DeMambro was born on August 19, 1924 in southern France to a single mother whom he was said to have a quote unquote special relationship with, as they would reportedly stay up far into the night knitting together. Okay. Well. How I enjoyed knitting, oh my sweet Mazeera, and I'm on it to you, sir, that I have divorced the fresh capital.

How I love to knit together the heirs from your breast. My sweet sweet Mazeera. And she's just like, oh, that's he suck it on the mother. God, that's gotta be a great childhood. Oh my goodness, Harry Bressa. DeMambro reportedly said he picked up quote, the rhythm of his mother during this time. I've seen a couple of videos and X videos where people really pick up the rhythm of their mother.

Yeah, I know what you're up to on there. So did they really have a sexual relationship? I have no idea if they actually did or not, I just said he had a special relationship with his mother. Well, okay. I will say being over mothered leads to a very confident boy, which is where I would say I align myself. I see there's a lot of Joe DeMambro in me and that I have the potential to fucking make

it where he fucking lost it out. All right. It's interesting that now you relate to him after we've just been talking about how he might have had sex with his mother. And now this is the moment where you claim to be part him. But I couldn't suckle, so it doesn't really matter. It's that we're actually not the same because my cheek muscles were too weak as a boy to get the milk out of my mother's nipples.

All right. The thing is, as far as the first 32 years of DeMambro's life goes, that's pretty much all we know. Okay. Just the knitting and the rhythm. And when you compare that to how much we know about the life of, say, Jim Jones, that's pretty goddamn remarkable. All right.

It's said over and over again that DeMambro was a jeweler and a clockmaker by trade, but no one ever says when he practiced those trades or where he lived or what he was really doing for his first three decades on earth. We can infer that he lived in southern France from 1927 to 1956, but what he was doing during World War II is anyone's guess. Okay. What you do know is that in 1956, DeMambro joined the ancient and mystic order of the Rosie Cross and thus began a life immersed in esoteric knowledge.

The Rosie Cross, don't search it on Pornhub. That sounds really disgusting. It sounds awful. Yeah. It sounds like a prolapse. You know what? Yeah. I understand.

I understand. Oh, yeah. Wrecked up. The ancient and mystic order of the Rosie Cross, a.k.a. Amark, was a Rosicrucian order founded in the 1910s by H. Spencer Lewis. And it's still around. Still around. I mean, these guys.

I just joined it. Yeah. Like these guys, they could best be described as low impact occultism. It's very entry level stuff. This stuff is so out in the open, I can head up to the Amark Center on 135th Street right now and just get a belly full of information. Hold on. It's better than an ass load.

So they're a low impact. They're the Nordic track, of course. Is that what's going on here? They are very, their belief system is broad and it's about leading a more spiritual and psychically connected life to nature and our place in the universe. The Rosicrucian order is said to be a part of mystery schools that have been around for thousands upon thousands of years. So basically, I mean, we need to do an entire episode on the Rosicrucians, like an entire

series because there's so much to unpack out of the Rosicrucians. But straight up, it's like, their lessons go from how to balance your checkbook to how to astral protect yourself. So it's like, it's all across the map. Yeah. Okay. I mean, to give it really broad overview, I mean, their main focus is, quote, the study of the elusive mysteries of life in the universe, offering spiritual wisdom, mastery of life,

expanded awareness, and a sense of connectedness, and all this information is supposedly gleaned from what they call the secret schools. Good Lord, guys. You know what the irony of all of this is, I'm going to join. I am back. I'm going to go. It sounds pretty cool. I mean, really?

I mean, Amork, they're not a cult. Even though it certainly sounds like one, I mean, nobody's making a ton of money off of this. And it seems like it's more just, it's like a fairly innocent fraternal organization that's been around since the 1700s that once boasted Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry as a member. They're, I mean, honestly, Henry, you know, astral projection, that's pretty cool. But I want to know how to balance my checkbook. I like these guys.

I think it only costs something like $105 a month to join. I'm looking at the application right now. They have to choose you. So that is a little bit difficult. But I mean, secret schools are real. That's a part of what has been around since the beginning of time, this idea of coded information that is hiding essentially parables and shit that is told from generation to generation that hide within those parables real information about the world.

I mean, people, you could even say that about us, is that if you get through all the jerk-off jokes on our show, you'll learn something. Sure. But it's almost as if the journey through the jokes makes you earn the information. Absolutely. See, Amork, they're essentially a gigantic mishmash of half a dozen mythologies and religions all cobbled together to form one overarching philosophy. Okay.

But for the most part, that's just what it is. Philosophy. There's no real money involved. There's not really any one person at the top. And nobody is having sex because of their association with Amork. I mean, there's got to be at least one woman in Belgium that if you said, hey, I'm actually a part of Amork. She'd be like, Zutelo.

And then just jump right on you because she knows that you have the powers of the ancients. Interesting. Amork, huh? Amork, yeah. Amork. And since none of that was happening, since there was no money flowing in and out, there was no real power structure and there was no sex, Amork wasn't given Joseph de Mombro what he really wanted.

You say this, but I actually think he gave him exactly what he wanted. It is a perfectly vague superstructure of beliefs that what you can then do is take that information and package it. So like Rosicrucian order, when you join Amork, what you get is these lessons that you're supposed to rumorate over for an hour and a half each week. And then you essentially take a test and you go through all of this shit and you work your way up the levels, very similar to Scientology. But I think what he realizes is that it's because of the vacuum of leadership, is that

when you could go in there, you can create a whole esoteric society and be like, holy shit, because you're probably in this room filled with a bunch of impressionable people, both like women with no bras on and men with their with handlebar mustaches. Sure. I don't know what Belgium is like. I don't know what it's like in Southern France. Sounds accurate. But you're like, I can own all these bitches if I fucking figure out how to make myself

the top of the pyramid. And how do I do that? Oh, I just tell him I am. Well, I think Joseph de Mombra, like, yes, he was looking for information. He did glean a lot of information from Amorq, but as far as activities went, that wasn't what he wanted. He wanted something more. He wanted something a little more dangerous.

And so in 1969, when de Mombra was well into his forties, he'd been with Amorq for about 13 years. He'd left. And it seems like the lesson that he took with him was this. The esoteric world is a mashup culture. You can mix and match whatever you want using the myths, religions, and histories of the past. And just so long as you sell it, you can get people to follow you.

But de Mombra had no interest in a philosophical society. He wanted something more powerful. And I think we can infer this from his criminal record at the time. He was arrested for impersonating a psychologist in France in the early 70s, so we know he had no problem manipulating people. Oh, thank you for coming to my office. Isn't it how interesting that I could make a therapist's office just by putting up a sign.

Yeah, great to be here. Yeah. You're the hugest woman I've ever seen. My prescription for you is to cut off your feet. Too tall for you, sir. I mean, ma'am. The third psychiatrist to tell me that this week, I guess I'll just do that. And de Mombra was also arrested for writing bad checks around the same time.

So we know he had no problem with fraud. Okay. De Mombra was primed and ready to begin his new career. And he did that in 1973 when he founded the Center for the Preparation of the New Age. There's a part of this that it's not that I, it's not that I appreciate the work that Joe de Mombra put in. But I will say there is an entrepreneurship discerning a cult that I respect in a way where you look at it where like on some level, there's the book that we have been reading

on this, the Order of the Solar Temple, the Temple of Death, has a really good breakdown of, well, you know, when we look at eventually the Knights Templar, what's really the difference between a successful cult and a religion? Right. If the successful cult manages to fit incorrectly into society's needs and the things that it wants and essentially, and there's enough infrastructure around it that then the status quo allows it to exist, eventually it just becomes legit. Like you become, you can have billboards up, you can do all this shit.

And De Mombra was trying to mix and match it. But the thing is, is that showing all the check fraud and all this stuff on one level, you could say, oh, he was just trying to fake it till he made it. Right. But then the other level is, oh, he's a classless scumbag that will do anything for money. I do like that idea of cult leaders as entrepreneurs, because in some ways they are, and I would love to see them on Shark Tank. And naturally, Mr. Wonderful, he would buy 10% of the company, $500,000, that's probably

what they're about worth. That appreciation, if you could show, but you've got to do the math on Shark Tank in order to prove it. And then you have Marshall Appelwright just being like, and then all you have to do is snip the tip. And they're all like, that's interesting. Do you have proprietary rights to that, to cutting the top with a penis offer? Mr. Wonderful always takes a royalty also, you know, it's ridiculous.

Well, still in France, DeMombro began attracting followers by convincing him that he was the reincarnation of everyone from Osiris to Moses. And those chosen for his group, well, they just happen to be the reincarnations of famous people too. Don't you want to feel special, Marcus, just for a fucking second? Don't you just want to have a mysterious, tiny, fat-budded man with a mustache tell you that you're special? Because I've been looking at you, Marcus, honestly, a lot.

We've been doing this show together for eight years. I'm sorry, Kissel, unfortunately, your last re-incarnation cycle, you were a box of chicken. You were literally a box of chicken thighs, so you're doing great now. But Marcus, can I tell you, I think you're a descendant of Ripley T. Zeppelin, the inventor of the Zeppelin. Wow. It is amazing. That's incredible.

Congratulations. Everyone is always reincarnated like Cleopatra or like King Tut. Maybe you're just the town fiddler or like the person they call like the magic tickler. And like you were crucified for doing that. Oh, just so you know, for those bits of information, you guys both owe me $500. Fine, here it is. DeMombro exerted complete control of his followers early on, decreeing that he was the only one with the knowledge and the foresight to pair his followers in marriage.

And these people could only have children if and when DeMombro allowed it. This is sort of, can I actually say, so, but this is when the center of the, for the preparation of the new age was kind of already clicking along up until then he was throwing a lot of Rosa Crucian shit at them and then hit them with, I also can see your life cycles with my mind's eye. Well deciding when people have relationships and then deciding when they can have kids, that's really intrusive stuff here. Yeah, extremely so.

Now the reasoning behind this was that since everyone was a reincarnation of someone famous and powerful, selective breeding would naturally produce the strongest offspring that could usher in the said new age. How many women were Marilyn Monroe? That's what I want to know. Can you be multiples or do you only get one? I think that DeMombro was allowed to be multiples, but most everyone else could just be one. Luke Schoray that we'll see later on, he started pulling the reincarnation bit in Canada and

he would switch it up. He would do, he would very often do the, I had the vision last night that you are in the previous life, Marilyn Monroe and the only way for me to prove it is that I have to test it with a mimpiness. And then the next morning he'd wake up and she'd be like, I'm so glad that we had that conversation last night about me being Marilyn Monroe and now I'm going to be bride of the cosmos. And he's just like, yeah, about that.

It seems that to my mind's eye has made the bit of a blue bear. You have to leave. You have to get out of here. You know what? I don't care. People always say I want to come back as Marilyn, come back as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that's what I say. Well, what Henry's saying is absolutely true and, you know, and Jerry, and he would do

that with everyone. He wouldn't just do it with women. He would do it with the guy who'd be like, Hey, guess what? Last night found out you're Moses, now you're a leader, and then the next day he would wake up. Yeah, dude. It's you. You're Moses.

You're a leader. Oh, yeah. Come on. Let's go. And then the next day he would wake up and be like, you know what, dude? I was wrong. You're not Moses. Guess what, Ben?

You're Moses. Cool. I love you're not Moses. So it sounds, I mean, honestly, they sound like a mix between Billy Mays, RIP, the greatest pitch man of all time, and then just somebody trying to get laid. Like a pick. It's like Billy Mays and a pickup artist. Yeah, you got to start somewhere before you become a deity.

And that's how you start, man. This is the bush leagues of being a God. Okay. Well, as far as pairing everybody up went, when he came, when it came to the reincarnations, let's say if someone who was the reincarnation of Moses were to unwittingly get together with the reincarnation of Cleopatra, you're going to have all sorts of problems there. Naturally. Of course.

Yeah. Do we want to create another Jamie Kennedy? One is enough. But if you mixed Cleopatra with, say, King Arthur, then you got something special. Okay. Yeah, you do. And DeMombro said that he was the only one who knew the path to successful breeding. He was the breedmaster.

Okay. I like the term the breedmaster. I kind of want to just get what it says like official breedmaster license and go, I mean, like, y'all should fuck like back around. Yeah. Sounds like the horrible horror movie where you get it, like one of those movies where you just see the cover back in the day of VHS's and then you put the VHS in and in this case it would just be a bunch of horse insemination and you're like, why am I watching this?

It was a cool cover, but this is disgusting. So while DeMombro was heading up the center, he started picking up lackeys that would follow him until the end. One of those was respected Swiss orchestra conductor, Michael Tabaknik. Now, Tabaknik would eventually go on trial in the late 90s for his involvement in the solar temple. And there's a lot of speculation as to how much he was really involved. But we do know that he had extensive knowledge of the occult and at the very least wrote

many of the materials that would eventually be used by the order of the solar temple. So together, DeMombro and Tabaknik took some of DeMombro's followers and moved to Geneva, Switzerland in 1978. Very nice. There they rebranded the center for the preparation of the New Age into the foundation of the Golden Way. This is important because this is a Scientology did too. It's about shifting locations and names, so essentially you're even confusing the people

that already involved. Picking up new, basically by changing the name, like you remember New Papacy, for some reason you get a fucking bump every single time you change the name because people go like, oh, what the hell is that? And it starts with these lectures. But also DeMombro very smartly held out for these type of famous people like Scientology did where he understood like, I need respected members of society to be involved in this, to bring people into the fold.

So if he was a cult leader now, he would get Instagram's Norbit, Frenchie in the news, Doug the Pug might be able to be a member of the cult. But I don't think Doug the Pug can be flipped. No, I don't think so either. He's honest. As the sun burns, he is honest. I actually have a story about Geneva, Switzerland. My grandfather had a lot of money in the banks there, but we're not going to go into that.

Oh, weird. I wonder why he had to hide all that money. No, it's fine. He was in a country that was famously neutral in a certain war. Whatever, man. It just feels weird that he had to strap a bunch of money to his body in order to cross a bunch of country lines to go put it in an unnamed Swiss bank again. Yeah, but he was before ATM's, so it was a little bit more difficult back then.

Even though things were going fair to Midland when it came to DeMombro's Egyptian based cosmic children hodgepodge, he was missing a hook, something romantic to really capture the European imagination. And the hook that he eventually found was the Knight's Templar. I just imagined. It's flags and trombones and horses winging and out there and they got the, it's cool, man. It's super metal.

They're coming as they're fucking over the ridge. They got fucking a bleedin' Jesus on a cross. Everyone's scared of him. I'd be opening up my beer cans with a guillotine. Now, that really does sound fun. The Knight's Templar are among the most storied organizations in history, popping up in everything from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to the Assassin's Creed video game series. But since their period of relevance occurred almost a thousand years ago, and since they

were a secret society of sorts, and since it's just a damn good story, the historical record on the Knight's Templar is heavily debated. It is heavily, heavily debated. We are literally just scratching the surface of a topic that has books and books and books and ducks and all the shit and movies all piled on top of it. Dan Brown is literally drives in a yacht with wheels because of the Knight's Templar. They are, the Knight's Templar is, I want to cover them very, very badly, fully. And we will as a part of, eventually we will do a secret school series if I'm allowed

my say for once. I think that you get your say quite, I wouldn't say you get your say, I think you get your yell quite a bit, but of course you make great decisions. Now when you're debating this, you're not allowed to wear pants, right? Is that the rule where it's like the debate has begun, remove your pants and then sit and then, I don't know, assume whitey tighties. Well, concerning the debate, you know, as we've discovered with the order of the Solar Temple, the fact that the Knight's Templar is so heavily debated isn't that surprising.

I mean, we can barely figure out what happened with the secret society that existed only a couple of decades ago. So you can only imagine how difficult it is to come to a consensus about a secret society that existed 700 years in the past. A true secret society is a beautiful thing because what they've learned over periods of time, so what we've seen with the Freemasons, now the Freemasons have a new Netflix series where they're trying to be super transparent about everything, which makes me just trust them even more.

That's like the new Pope. I hate that shit. I hate when you're now, oh, so now we're nice. Right. But a part of it is when you create the wall of secrecy, the wall becomes a mirror and then you can put whatever you want onto it and that's exactly what they want. But the Knight's Templar is debated because of the workings of it because we're going to see it became way more like McDonald's than the Illuminati.

Interesting. Okay. What we're going to give here is the Occam's razor version of the story, told as succinctly as we can get. So the Knight's Templar were a Catholic military order that was established in the year 1119 between the first and second Crusades back when Christians decided to take back the Holy Land through a centuries-long campaign of warfare, torture, and murder. But the thing was, taking back the Holy Land was meaningless if no one could actually go

there, so the Knight's Templar were created to escort rich people on holy pilgrimages from Europe to Jerusalem. Now yada, yada, yada. This is a lot of yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, and those two fucking paragraphs. All right. So know that, but the Knight's Templar were either a group of rapists and murderers that were kicked out of England because no one would go.

It was either that because they offered indulgences to people that would go to Jerusalem to fight the Crusades, so they think maybe they went and they gave all these guys a clean slate spiritually to go. Or it was true royal bloodlines. Don't know. I don't know. It could have also been like that these were truly pure beings, that these were pure men with altruistic Christian faiths that were doing their duty towards God by bringing the

faithful to the Holy Land. I mean, they sound like, it's exactly what the, the Poke, it's exactly what the Pennsylvania Poker King did. He just brought people to Poland, they probably just got hammered and had a great time. They might have. Or it could be that the Knight's Templar were just a bunch of psychopaths that wanted an excuse to put a sword through someone's throat and not have any consequences. Honestly, that's pretty cool.

Fueled by the power of Jesus Christ himself, you're allowed, you're nay, you are told by Jesus to fucking murder. Oh yeah. With that fucking square helmet, I mean like, in the name of Christ, I cleave you, and then just fucking slash an open dude's fucking guts and he's like, and then the guy next to him is like, should we have asked them to convert first? No, God will do it. And the other side.

But even though the Knight's Templar were definitely among the most feared combatants of the Crusades, only 10% of them actually saw any combat. The other 90% were administration. Their racket was to hold on to the valuables of pilgrims while they were off on their little jaunts, and while they were gone, the Templars would charge interest, essentially inventing modern banking as we know it. And also, that's the problem with our public school system, the bureaucracy, give more money to the teachers, cut the fat of the top.

That's right. This is not your spell, I'm sorry. This is Knight's Templar's time. And of course, these guys had all the necessary secret rites and rituals. You fucking got you, dude. When a Knight's Templar was inducted, they would swear to honorable motives that had nothing to do with wealth or fame, and if they were accepted, the Grand Master would kiss them on the lips, neck, and belly.

Can I not be accepted? Now is his time. Sir Kissel, of the Puerhunt, reveal your belly, the Raspberry of Hailiness, does it tickle you? He's a witch. Horrible. But the thing was, as time went by, the Templars got soft. By the time the 1300s rolled around, the Arab world had been lost, the Crusades were over,

and the Templars were little more than businessmen and bankers. What I heard was that they didn't get, it wasn't so much soft as it was that they got organized, and they started providing a true competition towards the Catholic Church and the Christian Church. And basically what they did was, they basically were creating a little empire, and then they were creating their own little churches and little administrations who are doing all this shit. It's just so happened that King Philip of France owed them a bunch of money.

A whole bunch of money. I wouldn't go against the Catholic Church back in the day, man. They were pretty brittle. And I would say, yeah, our two statements are not mutually exclusive, because yes, they did become extremely organized, and they essentially became the establishment, but they were no longer the large group of psychopaths with swords that they were 200 years ago, and nobody back then was going to fuck with the Knights Templar. I mean, but by the 1300s, King Philip decided there was not going to be any problem with

wiping these fuckers out. And that is what we call here on the show, moment of agreement. That's great. That's congratulations guys. It's rare. It's rare. It's nice. It's nice.

But that's the thing, yeah, King Philip, he owed him a lot of money. He also had a war with Edward I of England going on that was getting mighty expensive. So in order to seize the Knights Templar assets and wipe out his own debt, all on one fell swoop, King Philip declared the Knights Templar heretics and accused them of everything from using severed heads in their rituals to having gigantic gay Templar orgies. Oh, man, stinky, stinky Templar orgies, with the flaps, pulling all that metal down just to stab it in there. And like, yes, I happened to see, sir, kissle the purant, your butthole is empty of God's

love. And that's why I shall cleave it. But they're allowed to do that now. Yeah, they are allowed to do that now. And I think it's brave. And if they want to do that, they can. Absolutely. And I can tell you, after our stakes in OKC, my butthole is not empty of any love.

Edward I, shouldn't that just be Edward? Well, there were. There were. Yeah, if he was the only Edward, they just call him King Edward. But then there was like two, three, four, five, six. There's a lot of Edwards afterwards. I just think it starts at the second. Just be Edward.

Well, what it does is that it tells you that there's a succession of Edwards. I see. Your comic misunderstanding one day will be dementia. So King Philip, to bolster these heretic claims, he found a few disgruntled knights and a king allowed them to testify against all the others. And so 138 Templars were rounded up and tortured until they confessed to at least one charge. Then on May 12, 1310, King Philip ordered his men to load 50 far Templars into horse carts for transport outside of Paris.

There the king's men unhitched the horses and burned the men alive right there in the carts. They were essentially putting an end to the Knights Templar. Okay. Now, to come back, remember this. This is the story that is then used to fuel order of the solar temples and the idea of the retribution for the Knights Templar and the concept that they then existed in secret for years and years and years passed on, passed on by secret members of the Knights Templar.

And that weird fake fact would be used by cults and various esoteric groups from the generation. So this allows them to claim victimhood, right, to say we've been persecuted in the past. Growing up, I heard a lot about the Romans throwing Christians to the lions. It's like everywhere. And it did happen. It was just a long time ago. Yeah, it kind of came out on top.

And honestly, the Christians kind of, they spent that whole cache with, what is it, the Crusades. Yeah, because they kind of flipped it and reversed it and became bloodthirsty psychopaths and monsters. Interesting. For a little while. For a few hundred years. What's a few hundred years among friends?

Now, of course, it's not just the martyrdom of the Knights Templar that makes them attractive to esoteric groups. There's also the fact that, you know, to put it in the most human way possible, the Knights Templar looked super cool in a way that frankly appeals to nerds. Okay. It fucking does, dude. It's metal as shit. It's fucking, you're out there, you got the armor and shit.

Nothing makes a fat man look better than armor because it covers it all up. Yeah. I mean, of course, fat men look great dressed like toasters and other appliances. Yeah, it's pretty much the aesthetic is the Knight Monty Python in the search for the Holy Grail, the one that guards the bridge that gets all of his limbs chopped up. That's pretty much a Knights Templar aesthetic, but you make it white instead of black. Okay, I see. No, dude.

We have it directed by Guy Ritchie. The whole thing is that that guy is supposed to be a fucking badass with this fucking beard hanging out of this fucking chain mail and he's got a huge broadsword covered in the blood of heretics and shit. It's fucking awesome. Can I just ask, what the hell happened to Guy Ritchie? Did Madonna just ruin the guy? I think he's got a new movie coming out, actually.

It's supposed to be like a... King Arthur was not... It was brutally bad. Well, so because the aesthetic appealed to nerds and because of the whole victimhood martyrdom thing, a resurgence in Neo-Templar societies founded by intellectuals and occultists came in the early 1800s. And by the 1950s, hundreds of these organizations existed throughout the world with many of them claiming that they were being initiated as Knights Templars from the spirit world

by ascended masters of the temple. Honestly, I do get it. That is much more exciting than being Steve. That's an exciting life to live. I get it. And burgeoning cult leader, Joseph de Monbro, looked at this super interesting mythology that had an attractive, built-in iconography that was rooted in a familiar religion, i.e. Christianity, and he said, yeah, I was initiated too.

Okay. Hell yeah, dude. You just claim that you're a Knights Templar. And then all of a sudden you are. That's the magic of suggestion. Or lying. It's also lying. Oh, you say one way, I say the other way, because I consider myself a bit of a entrepreneur.

Now de Monbro wasn't the only person knocking around Europe in the 70s that was obsessed with the Knights Templar. Another man much younger than de Monbro was about to enter the scene. That man was the second half of the Order of the Solar Temple's leadership, Luc Jarre. Now Luc Jarre had what de Monbro didn't have, which was he had the looks, he had the gumption. He sounded like, remember in Home Alone when they were all in the hotel watching the French television, watching the French television shows? He looks like those French actors, which is like, ze l'ai pas, ze l'ai déjà bon côté.

I couldn't understand what he was saying in French, but it is very romantic, very sexy. Yeah. Five o'clock stuff. He's a low-key type of guy, but that was exactly what de Monbro needed. Now, since Jarre was a good 20 years younger than de Monbro, we got a little bit more information concerning his early life, but again, compared to guys like Jim Jones, there really isn't much. Luc Jarre was born in 1947 in the Belgian Congo in Africa in what is now known as the Democratic

Republic of the Congo. Okay. I don't know what his parents were doing there, but soon after Jarre's birth, the family returned to their home country of Belgium. I think it's safe to say they weren't like community organizing or like building. I would assume what they were doing there is nefarious. In that point in the Belgian Congo, they were trying reforms. They were like, there was like an economic growth and like starting in the mid-40s up

until the 60s and then a revolution came and it became the Democratic Republic of Congo that we know and fear today. The only thing we really know about Jarre's personality growing up comes from his younger brother who said that Jarre was a gifted competitive child who was an accomplished alpinist by the time he was a teenager. What is an alpinist? Mountain climber. Oh.

Say mountain climber, you French. I'm just repeating what the brother said. I get it. Brother said alpinist, I'm going to call him an alpinist. That's a great way to say someone who's trying to escape their family. That's really, yeah, the elves and the alpinist. It does sound like, do you ever see that live show, The Puppetry of the Penis? Nope.

I watched them in college. Yeah. And it was quite interesting. It seems like that could also be called an alpinist. Hi, my name is Alpinist. I am the creator of Puppetry of the Penis, absolutely, of course. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Then when Jarre reached his late teens, he began consorting with a group called the

Walloon Communist Youth. Do they walk backwards? What is the Walloon? That is just. It's fun. It's cute. They're trying to make it cute. I don't know.

I mean, it sounds like when we say Walloon, it's different than say if you're speaking French, you're like Walloon, communist youth. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Walloon. They do sound like a cult that invented the duck face in the selfie pictures. These guys presumably made up of a bunch of teenage Belgian communists. After that, Jarre took those communist beliefs with him into the Belgian army where he served

as a paratrooper. There, he told one friend that he would quote, help communize them to clean out the army. Although I have no idea what that means. Oh, right. I don't know. Because it didn't seem like it worked. No. Because I don't think that they take to it.

I don't think they take to a new 17-year-old communist being like, we should all share this same bottle of soap, and they're like, get out of here. But following that, Jarre attended the Free University of Brussels and became a licensed physician, which would become one of Jarre's main selling points. Because if you can't trust a doctor, then who can you trust? In the book we were reading, in the Temple of Death, Jarre, in an interview with this reporter, actively says that the doctors of previous society, which I have no clue if it's real or not, were at the shamans and the priests of their society.

So why shouldn't a doctor move closer to being a priest? And that a doctor should have the same level of importance to his flock as a priest does so he should be both controlling their body and their spirit. But soon after beginning his practice, Jarre became disillusioned with the medical profession and set off traveling the world in search of himself, where he picked up acupuncture and homeopathy. For those of you who don't know, homeopathy is the practice of treating a disease by giving the patient small doses of natural substances that in a healthy person would

create the symptoms of the disease. For example, just earlier this year, a boy in Canada made headlines when he was treated for aggressive behavioral problems with a homeopathic mixture that contained rabid dog saliva. Why? Well, how do you get that? Because if he's aggressive, then you treat him with something in the natural world that makes you aggressive, i.e. being rabid.

It's supposed to be like a natural inoculation. Yes, it's supposed to get the body working its own red or its own white blood cells. Well, I mean, he could have turned into Kujo. What are they doing in Canada? It's nice to be in the paper though. Yeah. It's a big deal in Canada. Well, a less extreme example would be treating allergies with minuscule amounts of red onions

because red onions make your eyes water in the same way that allergies do. Onions. Yeah. I love red onions. Onions. I love an onion. But I'm not saying that it's, but we just, does it work or not? I have no real opinion on it.

I feel like if whatever works for you works for you, but I guess you should probably vaccinate your kids though. Yeah. That's probably a big thing to do. I would think so. Polio's coming back, which is a, which is a problem. That's a bad thing. Yeah.

Now I do know in Switzerland, it is legally recognized in Canada. It's legally recognized. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just feel like Canada, they wear the same colored denim on the top and the bottom. Well, nothing wrong with a little tuxedo. Come on.

Well, the point is though, is that homeopathic remedies eventually became Luke Jere's bread and butter. By 1976, Jere had set up his own homeopathic clinic in Belgium. And since the two are closely related, Jere started getting into new age belief as well. Usually if you're in a homeopathic, you're probably in the crystals too. I took a doctor, but notice that you are getting very fat. So, so I will literally give you some bread and butter because it makes you fat. And you think that maybe you eat what makes you fat and you get skinny?

I don't know. I was hoping for the bread and butter treatment, hell yeah. But the new age stuff wasn't Jere's only interest in the esoteric. He also just happened to be obsessed with the knight's Templar and reportedly had been from a young age. And since he was starting to amass a bit of a following with his homeopathic clinic, he started meeting with other people in Europe who were also in the new age game. And one of those people was Joseph DeMombro.

Ooh, so he had his own little Magnolia Bakery going on. Yeah, Matt, not Magnolia Bakery, Magnolia Bakery is here in New York City. I think it's the Magnolia Farms. Was it just the farms? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're talking about- Jojo and Chip. We saw the silos. We saw the silos.

We saw the silos, yeah. It's not Magnolia Bakery. And we had to explain to you in Waco as well that you were not going to be getting cupcakes. Don't get that little insight into our traveling. We don't need all that. We definitely drove a half hour out of our way because I wanted to get a shirt for Jackie. And I remember kissing me like, yeah, this is fun if you go over there, I can get myself a cupcake.

I was like, no, that's not what it is, kiss me like, see me and tell me, I'll go up in there. It's not going to be any fucking cupcakes. And I was just like, no, there's not, there's not a bakery. It's not going to be anything. We're just trying to get a shirt. And then we arrived and it was a fucking two lines around the block. Yes.

Fuck this shit. I just, I don't like that your impression of me is like the fat guy from Varsity Blues. Do you remember that guy? Good Lord. Well, D'Amombro and Gere, they didn't join forces immediately. Rather, D'Amombro introduced Gere to another guy who was obsessed with the Templars. That man was Julian Oregas. Oh man, this fucking guy.

Now, Oregas is a hard guy to pin down. Some say that he was a former member of the Nazi secret police known as the Gestapo. Others say that he was just an interpreter for the Nazis, but still did four years in prison for collaborating. Either way, though, the guy's a fucking Nazi. He was a straight up for real Nazi, like not a nude Nazi, not an alt-right Nazi. He was an actual head of uniform. Right, right.

Okay. And white supremacists of all stripes have flocked to the Knights Templar for centuries like moths to the flame. I see. For example, because, you know, these guys are their crusaders. They take the white man into the Holy Land and kill the brown man. And a little understated fact about white supremacists and the alt-right, they're fucking nerds.

Yeah, dude. They really are nerds. That's why they're worth it. I love nerds. Let's not malign nerds. Okay. I love nerds. The problem is aggressive, evil nerds.

Yeah. The evil nerds, which we've already covered with the Nazis, they still exist. Yeah. They stamped out number one by not fucking them and number two by physical force. All right. These guys were, Anders Brevik, who was one of them. Yes. We'll have to cover him in the future.

Yeah. I mean, Anders Brevik, he, you know, who, you know, if you'll remember, killed 77 people in Norway in just one day in 2011, claimed to actually be in the Knights Templar. I see. He said that he was part of a secret Knights Templar underground cell that had members all over Europe, and the reason behind the massacre was to draw attention to his far right anti-Muslim manifesto that was largely a plagiarization of the Unabomber Manifesto. Okay.

He just switched out some words. Right. Now, Anders Brevik was probably lying about the vast underground network business, but at the very least, Brevik loved cosplaying in a homemade military uniform that featured a Knights Templar medal as its centerpiece, and Knights Templar iconography plays heavily into the imagery of quite a few modern far right groups. I love cosplay. I think it's adorable when you cosplay as their devil or as kill shot or something like that.

Yeah. I like sexy cosplay too. I like that quite a bit. Military cosplay is a special kind of intense. I want to say the word nerd. I don't know. What's the other word for it? Military cosplay, those people are like, they could be scary.

Yeah. They could be scary. But the right wing groups always ruin all the shit. It's like they're ruining Al-Sutra, where they take all the symbolism and they pervert it for their own dumb shit ends. I hate this shit because it's Templar rules, but I hate that they've been used to do bad things. Oh yeah, and all right's been using it as well, the whole day use vault thing.

Have you heard about that? Yeah. Yeah. It's all Knights Templar shit. I see. Yeah. I never did anything close to what Anders Brevik did. His game was a fairly successful Templar-based cult called the Renewed Order of the Temple.

We actually know very little about their beliefs outside of their obsession with the Knights Templar and their a-ping of Rosicrucian themes. What we do know is that Jere and Aurigus got along like gangbusters, and Jere joined the Renewed Order of the Temple in the early 80s. At the same time, Jere got friendlier with Demombrough, and Jere joined the foundation of the Golden Way as well. That was Demombrough's cult that he was running. Okay, so this became the traveling will-burys of shitheads.

Okay, so how many cults are we dealing with right now? Right now we just got two. Well, right now it's just two, so Aurigus and Demombrough. Okay. No, we got Luke Jere's cult too that he's dragging along his members with. Well, it's not a cult, Luke Jere doesn't have a cult yet. He just has a follow, like he has a small follow. That's the homeopathic.

That's the homeopathic. Those are his patients, I guess. Right now Luke Jere has good customers, but it's not quite a cult just yet. I see. But besides his affiliation with these groups, Luke Jere was becoming a star in the New Age world in his own right. His homeopathic clinic was getting more popular, and as a consequence, Jere was gaining his own followers.

And when Jere realized that he really had something special here, he took his message on the road, giving lectures at New Age bookstores around Europe preaching the virtues of naturopathy and ecology. Okay. So a part of his central tenets were that disease was caused by bad things going into the body, and that he also felt that spiritually pollution was created by bad things going into our souls on planet Earth. So it started with a really light message about eating healthy, taking care of yourself

and all this shit. But he immediately would shift right into this age of Aquarius stuff, saying that the age of Aquarius was coming, and the only way for us to make the spiritual jump to the age of Aquarius was that we needed to cleanse our souls and we needed to cleanse our bodies. Because if not, he didn't clarify what would happen, but he did say it would be best to prepare yourself for the jump. He is already planting these seeds. I'm going to say also, I'm just going to go in on a limb here, 60s and 70s, the worst

pop song, Age of Aquarius. Oh, I hate that song. I kind of love that song. I really love that song. This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius, age of Aquarius. It's always like hot hippie chicks dancing and guys with long moustaches kind of shivvy and next to him. Yeah, I mean, like Henry was saying, I mean, this is all pretty innocent stuff in the early

days. And of course, you know, it's a mostly positive message and it's delivered by a handsome charismatic guy. And so Joray gained even more followers, more like fans, I would say. But in 1983, Aurigus died, leaving the renewed order of the temple leaderless. So Joray, who figured he'd built up enough capital both inside and outside of the order to make a serious run for the throne, tried taking leadership for himself. But his run failed and the Aurigus family forced him out.

One guy that was a member of the renewed order of the temple in one of the docks I watched, I believe it was the the witness was the documentary series. What he said was that they actually did a whole ceremony. There's like the game. We had the pump in circumstance, Luke Joray entered and we did the switching. We ended this up there. And then the family was like, no, no, like you're trying to get the whole ceremony going and then literally people going like, stop it, stop it, you're not leader yet.

He's like, but I do not understand. We've already blew the trumpets. And it's like, no, we can't blow the trumpets until we filled out all these trumpet firing forms. Ah, interesting. So he was real close. Really close. Yeah.

And a lot of members supported him being the leader. And that's when DeMombro got an idea. See DeMombro, he's doing all right as a cult leader, but he was terrible at recruiting. Yeah, because he was a little fucking troll. He was a very gross little man. Yeah. And he was great at picking up weirdos who were already into this yet, but he was bad at getting the regular folks through the door.

Yeah. You want to expand the base. Mm-hmm. So when DeMombro saw that this good looking, eloquent, charismatic Belgian named Luke Joray was looking for a new home, DeMombro asked him if he'd like to be second in command as something new he was cooking up. And Joray agreed. Like, not to make an announcement, to all of my followers, I have decided to take my

talents to South France. That's an NBA joke. Oh my God, was that it? Was that it? What? There's a LeBron James joke. Oh my God. And that was only, that only happened nine years ago.

Yeah. So that is, we were at Bobby Bonilla who has been retired for about 20 years. But now you're all the way up to 2007. See? That's amazing. I'm becoming 11. I'm becoming a full-fledged, straight man. So Luke Joray took half of the renewed Order of the Temple membership and his homeopathic

followers and merged them with DeMombro's Foundation of the Golden Way. And that is how the Order of the Solar Temple was born. Awesome. And with this merger came an infrastructure that definitely nudged the whole situation from a magical society over in the cult territory. Okay. Because remember this, the way this started was a bunch of loosely affiliated nerds yelling at chalices and conference rooms.

Like it started with a bunch of guys talking about the Holy Grail and the Knights Templar and talking about Rosicrucianism and eating beets in a room. Which I can't imagine what that smelled like, especially in France. So now they all kind of sat and figured out like, what are we going to do? Because they took Joray's immediate cult structure and DeMombro understand how we can flex this as hard as possible. So Joray sort of became the face. Is that safe to say?

That is 100% the case. Okay. Yeah, Joray was the face and DeMombro was the guy behind the scenes. I see. And around this time, Joray introduced levels into the mix, which is essential for any money making cult. Of course. Now there were three structures that a member had to ascend through to make it to the inner

circle. The first was the Amanta Club. This was made up of people that Joray picked up at his lectures. Did you read the testimony of what was like going to one of the Amanta Clubs original meetings? No. They had a big, they had a big what they called a, straight up they called it a pole party where they went out and had these bonfire nights for the solstice and it was a big

pole and all these nerds in a field and they said the pole was supposed to stand for the poles of the earth and they sat and they had eggs. They literally ate eggs and they went around the pole with the streamers and there she sat and watching it and that some of them, a lot of them got tired. Some of them stayed up to watch the sun come up, which was supposed to be the main crux of the meeting. I mean, honestly, man, it sounds like a perfect meeting for Edith Massey from Pink Flamingos. Eggs.

Give me more eggs. Now the introductory offer that a prospective member could subscribe to was an observer membership, which would let them participate without commitment for three to six months and if they decided to join, the price was 142 Swiss francs per quarter. Oh per quarter. How many francs? How many francs is dollars? That's eight hot dogs.

Swiss francs is two dollars. But then you have to go back, but then we have to do, this is 70s money. Yeah. Well, this is 1984 money. 1984. It's nine hot dogs. Nine hot dogs. Wow.

It's a direct, it's a direct conversion. Cool. Huh. So 142 dollars. So actually, so quarterly, so you're paying about a grand a year. I would say a grand, a grand a year. That's introductory though. That's expensive.

I mean, it's a middle class expense and that's, if you get a cape, honestly, that's pretty much worth your money right there. I got $300 for Mufon and that's all like, I got, this time I got the hat, I got the new polo, I got the lanyard, but now I find out that when I sign up for the VIP thing, I get a new VIP inspector polo and then I get the platinum lanyard. Man, uh, it just, it's, it's cool. Yeah. It's very cool.

Congrats. It's the new shirt. Is it, is it more breathable? It's worse. That's right. It's a terrible shirt. Very good. No, once people were a part of the Amanta club, they would then be in charge of spreading

the word by booking more spots at more new age bookstores for Jarray. And they would do one hell of a job as Jarray would go on to speak at over 200 functions. And these lectures seemed like they would be, you know, when you first checked out the advertisements, you think, ah, this is typical new age feel good time because like this is what one of the advertisements said. What looks Jarray physician, speaking on love and biology. Oh, interesting. See, it's kind of romantic.

It's a little bit. It sounds cool. And it's very interesting because that's what he would do. I mean, this was really before it got sinister. Yeah. I mean, it obviously was, it was always a grift, but the thing started as like he was doing the inspirational speeches and they were trying to figure out. They really just in the end, before they wanted to murder everybody, they really just wanted

to control everybody. I see. I feel like when you see a sign that says comedy, live comedy night, and then you go in and someone is, it's a prop comedian. Yeah. And you're like, this has all been a lie. Well, I mean, even though it wasn't that dark in the early days, but definitely had an edge to it.

Because when you went in, you heard Jarray preaching about ecology and healthy living and all that, but the tone was starting to get a little more apocalyptic. He said definitively that the end of the world was coming and that we'd all be killed by either a collapsing environment or super volcanoes or both. So he's a, he's a fire and brimstone nutritionist. Yes. In a way. Yes.

Which is a rock and roll nutritionist. Okay. Rock that diet, buddy. Interesting. But the audience members could avoid all of that if they followed Luke Jarray. Of course. And if a person bought that line of horseshit and joined the Amanta Club, they were then eligible for the Arcadia Club, but only those who were deemed worthy were asked to join

this level. You couldn't apply for this. You had to be asked. Honestly, this is fucking UCB. Yeah, it's UCB. This is Michael Ian Black and what's the other one? No, no, it's not Michael Ian Black, no, no, no. This is, it's Amy, it's, it's all of them.

It's fucking Matt Besser. Nobody outside of New York City knows what the fuck UCB is or they don't know what UCB is. They don't know what improv classes are. They forget about it. They know what improv classes are. I've seen that in several cities and I think you recognize your improv teachers a little bit in Lutorette.

Yeah, absolutely. Now if people bought the first line, they'd be asked to join the next line. Okay. Now once people reached the level of the Arcadia Club, they were given more advanced knowledge that Jarray said would enable them to move towards a higher consciousness and of course the price went up exponentially at this level as well. What are we at now? Well, I don't know.

We don't know. I absolutely have no idea. It's the, it's the prices where it says ask the manager. You know what I mean? And where you're fucked. Interesting. Okay. So, but we can assume it was pretty expensive.

Pretty expensive because just like with Scientology, each level came with a set of prohibitively expensive books that outline the theology. But the trick is, as it is with Scientology, that information only raises more questions. Of course. And those questions are only answered if you reach level three. The top level was the international knighthood chivalric organization of the solar temple, which I assume sounds a lot smoother in French. But I will say you get a, you get the cape.

This is where you get your cape. But you get a cape at every level. So, you could have three capes at this point. You get a white cape at the first level. Okay. You get a red cape at the second level. And then the third level, black. Black fucking cape, dude.

That's so bad at. That's what I want from my cult. Yes. A white merch. My white cape would be just filled with like ranch dressy and catch up just immediately. I see that you have turned your white cape into more of a Dalmatian color. The third level came with an extraordinary initiation feat. This is where only the richest and most powerful would be allowed.

And it demanded, quote unquote, severe discipline. Yeah, man. You have to not slap Luke Jarre every single time he says something dumb about how tomatoes will make you not gay. Yeah. It sounds like this whole level three sounds like the gym coach in Nightmare on Elm Street part two. That's what it sounds like.

Extreme discipline. Yeah. It seems like this is kind of a, is it a sexual thing? Well, we're going to get into all the sex afterwards. We're going to get into the sex in the next episode. People are so in need of like a bunch of really rigid rules. It's quite strange to me. I love it.

According to Ursula K. Le Guin's Dispossessed, people are naturally, people are inclined to be governed because it's easier to be governed. Yeah. That's what Loki said. Interesting. Yeah. Huh. Yeah, that's what a lot of villains say.

The Ursula K. Le Guin's not a villain. Was Loki a villain? I watched The New Avengers and Loki is no longer a villain. He actually helped us. Well, in the first Avengers movie, he was a villain. That was the greatest political speech in the history of movies. But soon after founding the temple, Jarre's lectures started taking a darker tone. On one Swiss radio show, he said, quote, We all use the reign of fire.

Everything is being consumed. He then started putting out audio cassettes of his lectures, including one called Fundamental Time of Life, Death. Interesting. Wow. Okay. And one of his most unknowingly prophetic remarks, Jarre said this on that tape. Death is the ultimate stage of personnel growth.

And this is just the beginning of the order. I see. So yeah, man, he's already doing Death the ultimate trip. Yeah. Which has been like, well, I mean, I'm like, cool, Luke and all and shit like that. But I thought we were gonna like actual project. So I like to go into my ex-girlfriend's house and see her take a shower and shit. I don't know, man.

Right. Crazy. Now, while Jarre was acting as the face, DeMombro was behind the scenes, building the mythology, slowly creating his own little world of deception, subjugation, sex, and eventually murder. And that's where we'll pick back up next time with the actual beliefs, rituals, members, and eventual criminal activities of the Order of the Solar Temple. All right. Well, this is, I'm just gonna say, as I said before, wacky.

You think this is what I'd say? I wouldn't call this wacky. I wouldn't call this wacky. No, because everyone's just buying into it. Yeah, man. It's metal as shit. We can go metal, but it is just funny to me how it's just so easy. It seems easy.

Too easy to start a cult. That's all I'm saying. They had a couple under them. The amazing thing is that we have no idea how many cults exist just in this city that we're in right now. Of course. How many cults are in New York City right now? How many cults are in Los Angeles right now?

I'm in Los Angeles. I almost just joined a cult when I was doing yoga. They show up all the time. You never know when this shit pops up. I love cults though. This is still my favorite of all the, this is my favorite of all the true crime subjects because you can really get into it and you can see yourself because I do believe in this life, man, you're either a leader or a follower.

And so like the Marines say, which I've always believed, you gotta lead follow or get out of the way. You know what I mean? That's on a t-shirt. I've also seen a t-shirt which says on the back where it says if you could read this, the bitch fell off. Yeah. I mean, in no ways that a bumper sticker side by side with the Confederate flag.

No, no, that is just totally, all right, the order of the solar temple. Well, awesome stuff. Part one. Yeah. Part one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is going to be a three-part series. Yeah.

All right. Yeah. Are we doing three parts? We're doing three parts, buddy. All right. Awesome. Let's get this going, man. I'm fucking all about it.

And I tell you what, today, you know what I'm fueled by? And I'm going to do a plug for a listener who sent me this. I don't know who sent it to me and they sent it to me a while ago. But I've been, I love my Spring Hill Jack coffee, but I just got a man-bought coffee. It's real good. All right. Very good. Very good.

Yeah. So I'm about to take a big ol' shit. Wonderful. Being fueled to this. Because I don't know if you can hear this. We're all like pretty sick. I know. So a lot of us.

Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, we were on tour, you know, for a week. And that, you know, that, of course, I came back with a cold source so large that my top lip began overlapping my bottom lip. A night to remember. We want to thank everyone in D.C., Dallas, Austin, OKC. It was awesome.

It was so great. Yeah. Everyone was so incredibly cool. And honestly, we spent a little time in Dallas and in full disclosure, we were a bit like, I wish we had more time in Austin. But Dallas, I love the bars out there. Great bars. We had a great time.

We got to see the election in Texas, a lot of sad Beto fans out there, but it was fun though. Positive overall, guys. Positive overall. Great. You can listen to Abe Lincoln's top hit for all that kind of stuff. And remember, if you fuckers can turn Lubbock blue, that is an accomplishment. All right.

Well, we had a great time. Yeah, we had a blast time. And then we're going to be in Indy in Chicago next week. I'm really excited to be so cold my balls fall off because it's currently 77 degrees in the sun in Los Angeles. Of course. And I'm not ready for your onslaught of reality. No, it's fine.

We spent yesterday in 25 degree weather and stinging ice snow. It was interesting. Yeah. And that'll be, when are we doing that? At the end of the month? Yeah, November 30th in Indianapolis and December 1st in Chicago. Awesome. And next week, we have to do Thanksgiving.

So we're not going to be with you. Yeah. Yes, we are taking a break. But what we're going to do is, side stories is still going to come out. We'll do a side story. Side stories coming out. We are going to be prepping for these next two episodes. The content we have over December, I'm so fucking excited for.

We have a bunch of stuff we've been waiting to get to for many years that we have been tackling because a part of it's being like, you know, if we don't do it now, what are we going to do? We're still we're fucking dead? Absolutely. So yes, anyway. And also don't forget the, yeah, a little bit, a little bit of plug here. Don't forget it's Christmas season.

Christmas is coming up. So if you would like some gifts for your loved ones, go over to lastpodcastmerch.com. Absolutely. Or lastpodcastontheleft.com and follow the link to the merch place merch page. We got a lot of, we got some fun detective popcorn plushies for everyone. Absolutely. That would be a wonderful little gift. Please stop fucking.

Well, I don't know. I don't know who, don't fuck them. But a part of it is that we, part of that December rollout is that we're going to be filming our live show in December and we're going to be pushing that to you guys. For those of you that have not been able to make it to the live show this year, we're going to be selling it live. And I hope you guys can take a look at what we're putting together because once we're done shooting this live show, we're throwing it out and writing a new one.

Yeah, absolutely. This is what we do every time. We've done this like five times. We've written an entire show because we believe you guys deserve something, especially. Absolutely. So that'll be, and that'll be fun to watch with your whole family over Christmas. And I think we'll be like $6.66 or something like that. Totally affordable.

Yeah. And next year, we're trying, we're starting to plot out like a whole tour for next year. So we, we are going to be coming to, yeah, trust me, Indianapolis and Dallas are not, or Indianapolis and Chicago are not going to be our last live shows. 2018, we're going to be, or 2019, we're going to be going all over the world. All over the world. Yes. Cannot wait.

We always love seeing you all. All right, everyone. Well, thank you so much for listening and thank you for giving to our Patreon. Should we request a million dollars for Six Flags? Well, this is going to be our new idea. I mean, we need, we actually have to put a heading on our Patreon page, but we got a new Patreon level, a million dollars a month, Six Flags on Us. Six Flags on Us.

Six Flags on Us. If anyone wants it, we will take you to Six Flags and we'll have a hell of a time. And it's on us. And it's on us. It's on us. The whole trip will be on us. Even if you just do a million dollars for one month again. That's okay.

We'll still go to Six Flags. It's on us. On us. It's on us. You get all the, any of the rides you want to go on, any of the corn dogs, any, any merch. We'll get the pass pass. You can stack a bunch of hats on my head.

I don't care. All right, everyone, thank you all so much for listening. Hail yourselves. Hail Satan. Hail Geen. Hail me. And I'm a goose deletions. And may the memories of the night's template go far into space.

It does sound fun to like cling some beers to. Yeah. Yeah. It does. Hey, side stories listeners. This is Henry Zabrowski. You may recognize me. I'm the host of this podcast along with the other fucking monster Ben Kissel.

And I'm here to tell you about Trollville, a new series brought to you and created by me, Natalie Jean, and Seneca's Navi. This show is about what happens when you take an internet troll and you watch his online behavior slip into his real life and see how does that change him? Is he ready to join society? We've made this project with a lot of love on our own dime. I'm really hoping you guys will enjoy it. It's $1.99 per episode and $5 for the entire series.

It's over 50 minutes of my body jiggling back and forth. We're really, really proud of it and we hope you guys can check it out. It's on Vimeo. The URL is Vimeo.com slash on demand slash Trollville. Again that's Vimeo.com slash on demand slash Trollville, which is Troll as in pieces at Troll and Ville, V-I-L-L-E. Please check it out. I think it's a fucking masterpiece for my sweet slippery fingers.

Hail Satan.