The Order of the Solar Temple, or simply the Solar Temple, was an esoteric new religious movement and secret society, often described as a cult, notorious for the mass deaths of many of its members in several incidents throughout the 1990s. The OTS claimed to be based upon the ideals of the Knights Templar and incorporated a mix of Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, and New Age ideas. It was founded by Luc Jouret and Joseph Di Mambro in 1984, in Geneva, Switzerland.

A new religious movement (NRM), also known as alternative spirituality or a new religion, is a religious or spiritual group that has modern origins and is peripheral to its society's dominant religious culture. NRMs can be novel in origin or they can be part of a wider religion, in which case they are distinct from pre-existing denominations. Some NRMs deal with the challenges that the modernizing world poses to them by embracing individualism, while other NRMs deal with them by embracing tightly knit collective means. Scholars have estimated that NRMs number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Most NRMs only have a few members, some of them have thousands of members, and a few of them have more than a million members.