TEMPLE SOLAIRE. The Order of the Solar Temple, a European esoteric movement, shocked European public opinion with its mass suicides and homicides of 1994, 1995, and 1997, and it had a crucial effect on subsequent anticult activity by various European governments.

The Arginy Movement

A whole group of new religious movements flourish with foundational mythologies connected to the medieval Knights Templars. Most trace their origin to the Order of the Temple founded in 1805 by Bernard-Raymond Fabré-Palaprat (1777–1838), a French physician and Freemason. After Palaprat's death, the movement went through a number of schisms, and by 1950 more than one hundred small neo-Templar bodies were in existence throughout the world. New groups emerged during the 1950s, some of them claiming mystical experiences in which their founders were directly initiated as Knights Templars from the spirit world by ascended "Masters of the Temple."

Jacques Breyer (1922–1996), a prolific French esoteric author, claimed to...