Joseph Di Mambro

Di Mambro on CCTV
Di Mambro in 1993

Joseph Léonce "Jo" Di Mambro (August 19, 1924 – October 5, 1994) was a French cult leader of the Order of the Solar Temple (alongside Luc Jouret) a new religious movement. He, alongside 52 other members of the group, died in a mass murder-suicide on October 5, 1994.

Quotes

  • Do you realize that we are the only people on the planet to see these things?
    • Quoted by a former Canadian member, Reader's Digest, 1997
  • There are people who claim that I have taken from you everything. What I have taken I haven't taken for me, since I leave everything behind. But I will leave nothing behind, I will leave ashes, I will leave nothing to the bastards who have betrayed us. The harm they have done to the Rosy Cross, that I cannot forgive. What they have done to me doesn't matter, but the harm they have done to the Rosy Cross I won't forgive. I cannot.
    • From a spring 1994 tape, quoted in Mayer 1998
  • We are rejected by the whole world. First by the people, the people can no longer withstand us. And our Earth, fortunately she rejects us. How would we leave [otherwise]? We also reject this planet. We wait for the day we can leave... life for me is intolerable, intolerable, I can't go on. So think about the dynamic that will get us to go elsewhere.
  • We don't know when they might close the trap on us… a few days? A few weeks? We are being followed and spied upon in our every move. All the cars are equipped with tracing and listening devices. All of their most sophisticated techniques are being used on us. While in our house, beware of surveillance cameras, lasers and infra-red. Our file is the hottest on the planet, the most important of the last ten years, if not the century. However that may be, as it turns out, the concentration of hate against us will give us enough energy to leave.
    • File found on his computer, quoted in Wessinger 2000, Walliss 2004, p. 138
  • Di Mambro: People have beaten us to the punch, you know.
Jouret: Well, yeah, Waco beat us to the punch.
Di Mambro: In my opinion, we should have gone six months before them... what we'll do will be even more spectacular.
    • Spring 1994, talking to Luc Jouret, quoted in Mayer & Siegler 1999, Walliss 2004, p. 144
    • On aurait dû partir six mois avant Waco. Mais ce que nous ferons sera plus spectaculaire. (according to Bédat, Bouleau & Nicolas 1997)
  • Space is curved, time comes to an end... Our cycle is over, these images tell all. [...] The good-hearted man can live in this precise second... a sublime event: the passage of the cycle of Adamic man towards a new cycle of evolution, programmed on another earth, an earth prepared to receive the stored vibrations enriched by the authentic servants of the Rosy Cross.
    • Talking to a member of the OTS, quoted in Mayer & Siegler 1999

About Joseph Di Mambro

  • I think the people who claim that Di Mambro was a conman are right. I think that the people who claimed that Di Mambro was convinced about his spiritual message are right too. Di Mambro was just a kind of complex personality, actually a kind of schizophrenic and disturbed personality. The major, the terrible consequence of it, is that it is a total loss of reality and the dream world he elaborated was shared with several people, who more and more entered into his delusions.
    • Jean-François Mayer, 1996 Witness documentary
  • In 1984 I met him, he was maybe one of the last conscious persons on earth. He moved with the forces, it was that simple. I don't like to use the word 'power'.
    • Former member Louis-Marie Belanger, quoted in Palmer 1996 and Hall & Schuyler
  • [Di Mambro] explained to us that one day we'd all be called to a meeting at which a transit would be accomplished. It had to do with a mission, with a departure towards Jupiter.... He said to his listeners that they had to be on call twenty-four hours a day so as not to miss the departure and that once the order was given, we would have to move quickly.
    • Quoted in Mayer & Siegler 1999
  • Akhnaton, of course, was Di Mambro. Di Mambro was Akhnaton, Moses, Cagliostro, Osiris. He used to say, "You understand, in all my incarnations I always had to fight, because my spiritual development was always so far in advance of the time when I was living."
    • Thierry Huguenin, quoted in Hall & Schyuler 2000
  • But interestingly, for the members of the group, the real charismatic personality was Jo DiMambro. Now when I look at the video recordings of Jo DiMambro's lectures, it is just disastrous. He wasn't an eloquent speaker. But when I spoke with former members, and I told them that, they were just incredulous. Jo DiMambro, they would say, he was brilliant, he was extraordinary, and so on, because those people invested him with the qualities of a cosmic master.
  • DiMambro had created a kind of virtual reality around himself. He only saw people who accepted everything he demanded. He didn't very much like people contradicting him. He was also trying to cultivate relationships with some other occult orders around the world. He was developing a fantasy world, and suddenly people in the core group put that into question --suggesting that actually this world he had created around himself doesn't exist.
  • [Di Mambro] could have reached the end of his rope. He could be at the end in terms of health. He could be at the end in financial terms. He could be harassed by people who want money. He could be at the end on the level of the sect— there was a loss of members, loss of support, abandonment by his close relatives.
    • Investigating Judge Piller, quoted in Hall, John R.; Schuyler, Philip D. (2000). "The Mystical Apocalypse of the Solar Temple" (in en). Apocalypse Observed: Religious Movements and Violence in North America, Europe, and Japan. London; New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-203-97766-8. 
  • Joseph courant à perdre haleine à mes côtés, avant qu'un obus nous fracasse, c'est le souvenir le plus fort qu'il me reste de lui. Un garçon qui a peur.
    • Joseph running breathlessly beside me, before a shell smashed us, is the strongest memory I have of him. A scared boy.
    • From his former friend Gilbert, quoted in Bédat, Bouleau & Nicolas 1997 (Bédat, Arnaud; Bouleau, Gilles; Nicolas, Bernard (1997) (in fr). L'Ordre du Temple Solaire: Enquête et révélations sur les chevaliers de l'apocalypse. Montréal: Libre Expression. ISBN 978-2-89111-707-4. )
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