The Order of the Solar Temple (French Ordre du Temple Solaire) was a secretive esoteric group that drew on neo-Templar mythology, claiming a lineage from the medieval Knights Templar, together with Rosicrucian, New Age, and survivalist-apocalyptic themes. It was led by Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret, and attracted a relatively affluent and educated membership in France, Switzerland, and Quebec. The group taught an apocalyptic expectation of a coming catastrophe and a doctrine of "transit", a passage, through death, to a higher state of existence, sometimes associated with the star Sirius. Its history came to a violent end in a series of linked deaths in 1994, 1995, and 1997, in which some 74 members in total died in Switzerland, Quebec, and France in events investigators concluded involved a combination of suicide and homicide, including the deaths of children.
The deaths, occurring in multiple countries and staged with ritual elements, made the Solar Temple, alongside Jonestown and later Heaven's Gate, one of the principal cases in the scholarly study of why a small number of new religious movements turn to collective violence. Analysts point to the combination of apocalyptic belief, internal crisis and external pressure, and a leadership that framed death as spiritual transit.