Interview with Christian Tal Schaller on the Theme of "Cults"

In 1997 Christian Tal Schaller and his wife, Johanne Razanamahay, founded the Institut de santé globale in the Drôme, in south-east France. Within a year the centre was raided by gendarmes under a warrant linking it to the Order of the Solar Temple, a suspicion that collapsed after two days, followed by prosecutions over hotel-trade and building-permit infractions and a five-year ban on organizing health courses and lectures. In this 2006 CICNS interview he gives his own account, presented here as his testimony and his allegations, not established fact, of how the “cult” and “cult deviance” labels shaped his treatment by the French courts, public authorities and media.

CICNS interview. (English translation of the interview published on the CICNS YouTube channel on 11 November 2006. The French transcript was machine-transcribed from the video and cleaned before translation; passages the machine could not reliably hear are marked [inaudible].)

[Interviewer]: Dr Christian Tal Schaller is a general practitioner. He also holds various qualifications in the fields of complementary medicine and psychotherapy. Since 1990 he has been a director of the Vivez Soleil publishing house, an avant-garde publishing venture in the fields of health and spirituality. He is an international lecturer and has led health seminars for more than 20 years. He has written some fifteen books on holistic health.

In 1997, Christian Tal Schaller and his wife, Johanne Razanamahay, created the Institut de santé globale in the Drôme, in south-east France. Their stance — advocating a new, positive and responsible way of approaching health, and proposing the path of a new spirituality freed from dogma, an individual and tolerant spirituality — earned them prosecution by the courts, which accused them, if not of being a “cult”, of being “cult deviants”.

Dr Tal Schaller gives us here a very lucid account of his direct experience of how alternative health and spiritual choices are treated by the justice system and the public authorities in France.

[Schaller]: When my wife and I came to settle in France in 1987, our plan was to create a holistic health education centre that would bring together therapists and teachers, with the aim of giving people information enabling them to take their health into their own hands.

We had the great surprise, after barely a year of operation, of receiving, in October 1997, a visit from a multitude of gendarmes, armed to the teeth, and they had two search warrants. One related to the Solar Temple affair — that is, on that warrant we were presented as associates of the Solar Temple, as if we were an extremely dangerous cult. The gendarmes who came were convinced they were coming to save the trainees from a collective suicide that was bound to happen within days. After two days of searches and police custody, that part of the case collapsed completely, since we had absolutely nothing, neither of a cult nor of an extremist group of any kind whatsoever. And so, in a way, that part of the case fell away.

On the other hand, there was another part of the case, which was that we had a few infractions of the laws on hotel-keeping. We were not yet in order with the trade register. Our premises were not yet fully compliant for receiving groups. And we had trainees who were helping us renovate the premises, which, for the judges, was illegal labour. And it was for that part of the case that we went before the court in Valence the following year. And to our great surprise, because these were, one may say, truly minor infractions, we received not only an extremely high fine, but also a strange penalty, which consisted of banning us for five years from organizing courses and lectures on anything concerning health and personal development. And that was really a very discriminatory measure, and one which in the end had no connection with the infractions that had been recorded.

And that is when we understood that, in a way, we were being prosecuted in court for recorded infractions, but still with the idea of making us out to be a cult, even though everything had shown that we were not one. And in the years that followed, we always had this phenomenon. That is, we went back to court several times, and we always had the impression that the judges were in effect telling us: “Yes, you may not be a cult, but you are still a cult deviant.” With this term “cult deviant”, you can put whatever you like into it. And in a way, we were as good as condemned in advance, since we were in a “cult deviance”. That is, for the judges, the dynamic in which we work, which is somewhat avant-garde since we try to get new ideas across, corresponded, for those judges, to something extremely dangerous. And they probably had the feeling that they were somehow protecting the population, and trying to block us both materially, on the financial level, but also sending us a message, telling us: “You are not welcome in France.”

Before the authorities intervened, no complaint whatsoever had been filed against us. No one had ever complained about our services. And we had no reason to suspect an event of this kind. So, what was striking is that we realized there had been coordination. To give one example, the journalists of the Tribune de Genève, which is a Swiss newspaper, were there at the same time as the gendarmes. So you realize there was a certain coordination, that everything had been organized. And in what appeared in the press in the days that followed, we were really presented as dangerous people. It was quite clear that the aim was to launch a rumour. And that rumour never stopped. In the years that followed, the rumour continued to say that we were a dangerous cult. These were things that circulated more or less everywhere and appeared in newspapers, in television programmes. We were presented, in a way, as people who are not straight, who are not clear.

And what was amusing is that the gendarmes who came were convinced they were going to find secret cellars, swords, ceremonies — in short, things in the line of the Solar Temple. They had made that conflation. Since our publishing house was called Édition Vivez Soleil, and before that we had a foundation called the Fondation Soleil, well, between “soleil” (sun) and “solaire” (solar), the conflation was quickly made.

After the first trial we had, we were astonished to see that things did not stop there. The following year, we were summoned to court over a question of building permits. And it was truly Kafka, or Courteline, depending on how you want to look at it. That is, we had done work inside the buildings, for which no building permit is needed. But given that context, the judges decided, because we did not have the right to do this work, that they imposed a fine of 6,000 euros on us for having done work without a building permit. When we had repainted the interior… It was preposterous. That is the feeling we had every time: that the judges have an idea, where we are not a cult, but we are still a “cult deviance”, we have avant-garde ideas. Consequently, they do not look into whether we are guilty of an offence or not; they look for how to justify the conviction, with an argument of their own, in a way.

So these repeated convictions caused us serious financial difficulties, since it was quite simply very difficult to keep our economic activity going in France with such rumours and with convictions of this kind. We survived all the same, but it is true that it caused us great difficulties in terms of our company’s turnover and in terms of being able to work properly. So we had five years of deficit. And in fact we were only able to survive because we also have activities in Switzerland, which allowed us to bear these disadvantages.

We had the impression — when I say “we”, it is because I am also speaking on behalf of my wife, since we lived through this together — but we really had the impression that France was almost one of the champion countries of this witch-hunt. And the kind of story we went through is not imaginable in Switzerland, nor, I think, in Germany, Italy or Spain either.

I believe that this spiritual search, which is spreading more and more through the population, for a new spirituality, obviously collides with the powers that would like to control people and keep them in fear. And there, obviously, one collides with very large economic interests, since the whole pharmaceutical and vaccine industry has as its goal that people blindly obey what they are offered, and above all that they do not question the established order. Whereas any spiritual path means moving forward, evolving, questioning oneself, and consequently stepping out of conformism. And I believe that conformism, in a way, leads people to be consumers, and that those who want people to consume, for reasons of economic profit, do not really want, in a way, people to wake up and leave systems of passive consumption and obedience to the authorities. And I believe it is somewhat this will to keep populations under tutelage, both psychologically but also in terms of their habits, that creates this fight against all emerging forms — of a new spirituality, of new medicines, of new ways of living.

So I believe that this struggle we see today, between authorities seeking to maintain a status quo and individuals seeking to find new forms of social life, is a struggle which unfortunately is not very new, one we already saw with the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, or with all the attempts there have been by people who want to bring forth, in a way, solutions to the problems of an era, and then those who want nothing to change. It is a permanent tension. And I believe that, in any case, things change. But there are people who would like to keep things, in a way, as they are, quite simply because they draw many advantages from them, and because for their power, change means they risk losing it. And I believe that is what creates this tension. But in the medium and long term, it is always change that wins. And structures are bound to transform.

We were able to observe, in the contacts we had with the public authorities, notably with the gendarmes who questioned us during two days of police custody, that while at the start they thought we were crooks, charlatans and dangerous people, after two days of questioning they were very friendly, and they found our ideas very interesting. So I believe the real problem is that when people are afraid, it is because they are ignorant. Ignorance is the cause of intolerance. It rhymes — ignorance and intolerance. When people take the trouble to inform themselves, they discover that what frightens them is not as dangerous as they had still believed. And my wish in this regard is that the people in the institutions inform themselves better, so that they understand that facing them they do not have dangerous madmen who want to put society to fire and the sword, but people engaged in a personal search that is beneficial to society.

And I believe that is the heart of the problem. It is seeing that the people who look for solutions and who look for new paths are indispensable to society. They are the ferment from which a future can be born. And hunting them down is a grave error. Because it means, in a way, depriving oneself of innovation and of the contribution of something that will invigorate society.

So, it is true that many people today use this word “cult” to cast anathema on a neighbour, on a colleague, or on a spouse in a divorce case. And that, in a way, this rumour and this way of saying things without ever really naming them clearly does a great deal of psychological damage. And I believe the crucial point is that people should be able to speak out. And then that they should be heard.

Unfortunately, it is true that the media today are terribly partisan. Since they love, in a way, to inflate events and to report rumours without taking the trouble to verify them. And it is unfortunate, in a way, that the media have acquired such bad habits of not checking their information and, quite frankly, of engaging in sensationalism, without realizing that they destroy the lives of many people through a lack of professional conscience. And, quite frankly, I do not agree. I find that, in that respect, the situation has clearly worsened over the past few years. And that one has the feeling, precisely, of media that seek to stir up emotions and that use, in a way, everything that strays a little off the beaten track in order to demonize it.

And this demonization of people who are not on the rails of conformism is a kind of mechanism of wanting to protect what one knows. And all of that is based on fear. And the fear of change is a great fear, shared by all those who want to cling, in a way, to structures so that they do not move and nothing changes. But their fear can only grow, because change is a fundamental law. So, sooner or later, things change, and that is why their fear is great.

I think it is very important, in this day and age, that everything new should be able to emerge, and that the people who are searching for new solutions — whether in the field of health, of spirituality or in other fields, housing, ecology — should, in a way, have the space for creativity they need in order to contribute what seems important to them. And that trying to normalize all individuals and bring them back to a conformism in which everyone is holed up in fear, afraid of rumours and afraid of their neighbour, is not a good solution.

And I also believe that this demonization of people who move towards new experiences makes, in fact, no sense. Because you cannot oppose something — a little like when day breaks. And the day that is breaking is individuals who want to take charge of themselves, who want to stop obeying structures which, in a way, oppress them, and who want to run their own lives. And it is a true renaissance. We have a new society that needs to emerge, and this emergence cannot be stopped. So it is a bit of a pity to fight against what carries the new, and this attempt is in any case doomed to failure.

The most important message in all this is that each individual has a very important role to play, and that by learning to manage their life on every level, instead of being someone who denounces, who criticizes and who is afraid, they become a positive, responsible individual who brings solutions to today’s society.