One might ask himself what could possibly be of any interest in learning about the history of a near-dead French micro “sect” ? Through this article, we hope to provide a resounding answer, as it may permit us to understand the difference between the French laïc perception and the secular system we can observe in the rest of Europe. We might be able to also learn about the institutions surrounding sects, the legislator’s clash with academics and the theological bases of the Mandarom. You might not resist a laugh, supposedly it is good for your health, embrace it.

Let’s first give a quick overview of the history of this not-so-well known religious movement. Gilbert Bourdin, a jack of all trades in the spiritual realm, after traveling India, started to amass followers in the south of France around the early 1960s. He initially was teaching and wrote multiple books about yoga. Gilbert Bourdin started accumulating names and titles, lived in a cave for a while and created a monastery, the Mandarom, in the Holy Place of Aumism, at the lake of Castillon in the Alpes de Haute Provence. The Mandarom’s location proved to be a huge mistake. In 1990, Gilbert B. took a new title as “His Holiness Lord Hamsah Manarah , he crowned himself ’Cosmo-planetary Messiah‘, a reincarnation of Christ. This was a major change as it cemented the group as guru-centric, which had a huge impact down the line, as, since the guru has died in 1998, Aumism lost an important fraction of its members^1,2. In 1995, it roughly had 2000 members³.
Aumism is purely a French sect, as it has never held any international headquarters. In France, Ausmism got somewhat famous through its many court trials. We will delve into those after a giving a scrutinizing look to its cultural and practical “traditions”.

I. A syncretic movement

Aumism is a syncretism of Hinduist inspiration, mixed mostly with Christian elements but their website states that they believe in the “multiple faces of God”², therefore they try to incorporate elements from Twelve branches of religions, each associated with a color. Aumism is hence a syncretism rather than a apocalyptic movement. Aumism focuses on individual balance of body and mind, as, the movement recommends vegetarianism, naturopathy, hatha yoga, martial arts, and breath control to its members. Recommend is a key word here, Aumism seems to distance itself from common conceptions of sects on its liberality; even its most opposed adversaries admit, you can leave Aumism freely, you can continue practice of any other religion (as any god is God, it will do) and women and men are strikingly equals. That being acknowledged, where Aumism rejoins the common conception is in its guru, here is an insightful extract from a TV broadcast:

Full English transcript of the video available here

“Mandarom adept (female voice): He (the Mandarom) destroys the demons disrupting the earth’s balance; tenth, he is the arbiter of the kingdoms of nature.

Gilbert Bourdin: If one day you are interested—those of you who have doubts, even if you are superior army officers—you will see what I can tell you. I will listen to you with great respect; I also want to learn. I know how to set aside what I know, but when I take you on a tour of the Battle of China, the Battle of Formosa, the Battle of the Philippines, I will give you, I will tell you the techniques I apply.

Reporter: A warlord, Gilbert Bourdin has planned for everything: a totem to chase away demons, a sword in the hand of Christ, laser cannons for the Virgin (Mary). Atlanteans and Lemurians, creatures from elsewhere, had better watch out (ironic).

Gilbert Bourdin: Once, I sent 10 billion Atlanteans elsewhere and 10 billion Lemurians, so as not to inflame the situation…

Reporter: And the work has to be done well, because the demonic creatures, especially those from Pluto, are masters of camouflage.

Gilbert Bourdin: One of the emissaries of the entity from Pluto was occupying the body of one of our dogs at the time. “Hello”—and it was what? A Lemurian general, and not just any one.

Mandarom adept (female voice): (unintelligible words)

Gilbert Bourdin: Mars, a thousand billion entities in the underworlds of Mars.

Reporter: He (still the Mandarom) intervenes to contain the forces that might want to rush down upon the earth.

Gilbert Bourdin: We must form the shield of the earth with all the methods that some must have heard of here and there, so that the entities cannot pass. Of course, we’ve seen cases where kamikazes throw themselves at us—2,000, 3,000, 5,000 of them—on the earth’s shield. They force their way through. It’s up to us to close it up, to seal the breaches.

Reporter: And it’s especially at night that Lemurians and Atlanteans launch their assault. Gilbert Bourdin then decrees a general mobilization to repel them. Under the blinking eye of the Bouhda, the battle rages.

Mandarom adept (male voice): I found myself in a kind of war frenzy; we were killing. It wasn’t a little war, “La guerre des boutons” (a reference to a French novel). We were killing entities, we were massacring them, especially the shadow entities that were dying by the billions. But it was war; it was fire, blood. We were killing; there were drums, foghorns. Naturally, the great victor was our master, the cosmic Christ, because he is at the same time the cosmic Christ and the cosmic Bouhda. He was God, in fact.

Gilbert Bourdin: One day, in barely 20 minutes, we annihilated 15,000 aircraft launched by the Atlanteans from the southwest of France toward us—15,000! Oh, of course, we were in the middle of a high combat. We had to get a team and say, “Attention, we are going to do what is necessary.” In 15 to 20 minutes, we annihilated 15,000… aircraft.”

Atlantes and Lemurs it is then, this bellicist rhetoric clearly enable us to get the sense of purpose felt by the adepts. So how do they (used to) fight these billions of enemies ? Most notably by repeating the sound “Om Ah Hum” which supposedly disables the occult force’s power. There is two type of adepts in the clergy, such as in Catholicism, monks and priests. Monks live at the Mandarom and took chastity vows. Priests are secular members, which are allowed marriage and temporal life. There is also “knights” which are not part of the clergy but make up the lowest rank members. Lastly, the most important symbol of Aumism is the ‘Hexamid’, a hexagonal pyramid in rainbow colors with ‘OM’ on top, it represents religious unity. As for everything else involving this religious movement, it looks as kitsch as it could.

II. The sect label debate

Sect is a pretty open word, especially in the case of the French language, as it actually has no judicial definition. This is creates two problems. Firstly, the laïc state is hardly able to give a precise idea of what they limit themselves to when investigating “sectarian groups” as we will observe in the commissions and Mivilude’s notes. Secondly, the use and abuse of the word sect by politicians, medias and the public is problematic as it is pejorative and more often than no unfair. Here is the Littré‘s definition: ‘A group of people who profess the same doctrine.’ and ‘A group of people who follow an opinion accused of heresy or error.’ Hardly the Committee of inquiry on sect’s³: “Mental destabilization; the exorbitant nature of the financial demands; the disruption caused to the original environment; physical harm; the recruitment of children; more or less anti-social discourse; disturbances to public order; the extent of legal disputes; the possible diversion of traditional economic channels; attempts to infiltrate public authorities. The Committee’s website might looks like it was made during the Commune but it holds interesting historical data, although the prolix assembly did not produce an easy read. We do learn that the French law states : “No one shall be disturbed on account of their opinions, even religious ones, provided that their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law’ hence the state also has to guarantee religious freedom. This report does a good job at presenting different approaches to defining sects such as the dictionary’s, the sociological (taken from Max Weber) and from everyday use. Hence our question, does Aumism qualify as a sect in the Committee’s definition and in the sociological perspective?

Maurice Duval is the only researcher which as truly put any effort into getting a better understanding of the movement. The anthropologist has spent four years studying Aumism from within, not without any methodological issues, we will touch upon that. His view opposed radically the media’s, the public and the political stance upon his subject, he as then adopted a strong “pro-religious liberty”. He truly believes Aumism is a legitimate religion, in its birth state, but with comparable institutions to the catholic church.⁴ Unfortunately, M.D. is not exactly impartial and admits strait up to being a militant even though he is an atheist. He feels there is a mistreatment of the sect, to the benefit of both political agents and medias, as they play into clichés of sect with false portrayals. This mistreatment would be directly caused by double-standards in the real of religions, with “established religions” being considered the norm, and anything outside that norm is considered dangerous, suspect and deviant. His main argument is that, theologically, there is no basis to back these argument if we consider established religions as acceptable. He also states that the most extreme act he has witnessed is when “some” members of the movement were asked to mortgage their houses to pay for the temple. He sees otherwise no real money-grab, and states that the mandatory annual contribution was roughly 120€ in 1998 (180€ today). Everyone can judge of quality of these arguments, but I would tend to accept them as valid. Same cannot be stated about some other part of M.D.’s argumentation. M.D. does not give much credit to the detractors of the movement, out of the twenty-three testimonies of his book, only one is from an ex-member of the group, and he discredits the testimony in a vile way. This ex-member has deposed allegations of rape against the guru, which we will talk about later, but, directly after her allegations, in his book M.D. offers us a read of a love letter dating back to her time in the group destined to the guru. This discredits the previous allegations in the mind of reader which is hardly fair. In an interview⁴, M.D. states that he does not believe the allegation and that since there is a love letter, there can’t be mental manipulation. In the same interview, he also states that he believes many of the beliefs of the members of Aumism would be considered true by a large portion of France, such as the “theory of energy which we talk about everywhere”. We therefore kindly ask M.D. to remember to take his peremptory allegations and prove them true or keep them to himself as they do not qualify as any proof but show his lack of objectivity. M.D. then goes on a rent about the movement’s detractors, such as the the anti-sect movement and ecologist groups which really did annoy him during his study of the group. He dared not give them a fair trial and did not try neither to understand their position, such a fair researcher. Why would ecologists attack a micro-religious movement you might be asking yourselves ? Well, as you have guessed, it is not because of theological opposition to the group, rather because of their ecological impact (how annoying !), but we will go into that subject in the second part. Among the detractors, his colleagues and the University which did not deem him distant enough from his study and did not renew his research.⁵ Nathalie Luca, author of the review, does state that there is no better study of Aumism than Maurice Duval’s (hardly a feat when its the only one) and acknowledges the many difficulties encountered by the author, both with the research system of France and with his subject, since it was very hard to get the movement’s approval. She still maintains that M.D. did not do a good job at the representation of the plurality of opinion and that he focused mainly on testimonies, which are only one form of proof, and rarely a good one), that he also did not try to discern between reality and the myth that was presented to him. Whilst Nathalie Luca was gratefull for what he alleged was good sociological work of M.D but opposed the author’s approach to his subject, Raymond Massé⁶ on the other hand is very sympathetic to his sacerdoce, but states the limitations of his analysis. Go figure. ‘While presenting a classic ethnological analysis of a religious ‘sect,’ this book also raises fundamental questions about research ethics and the intolerance displayed by the scientific community (and the general population) towards certain subjects of study.’ By classic, he seems to suggest insufficient: ‘The sociological analysis of the Aumists (members of the sect) presented in Chapter 4 only partially fills this gap, since it is based more on a quantitative analysis of certain socio-demographic characteristics collected from responses to a questionnaire that the author gave to 108 ‘knights’ and 13 residents of the holy city.’
As Jacques Scheuer puts it, ‘However, having been quickly labeled as being close to the group he was studying, the author was unable to meet with former followers and critics. In short, the entire work revolves around the quotation marks which, in the title, adorn the word “sect.”‘⁷ If M.D.’s analysis is somewhat lackluster, it has given us much information which we can critically access to try to give a conclusion to our research of the conditional sectarian nature of Aumism. But first, we have to go and observe the many trials faced by the movement.

III. Judicial entanglements and money

If we quickly dove into the rape allegations Gilbert Bourdin faced, I was careful to evade any monetary considerations, as I believe it is the central topic, the main divide, when it comes to the relationship between Aumism and the rest of society. Firstly, the movement was mostly known -past tense as the group is now invisible to the public- because of the many back and forth with the state. The state itself mostly focused its worries about the ‘sect’ upon its economy (see ³ and⁸). To understand why there is such interest from the state, we can observe the state of the movement’s economics: it is classified as ‘undoubtedly a sect of large fortune³‘, in 1990, it had two hidden bank accounts of respectfully 511.584 and 690.000 francs (roughly 325 218€ in 2024). In 1995, it moved funds between bank accounts for multiple millions of francs. We can add roughly fifteen millions in liquidity hidden in Italy. The Parliamentary Commission on sect and money clearly states that this does not come from the movement’s economic activity (books and services at the Mandarom) but rather from donations. After G. Bourdin’s death, the group tried to go a permit for a gigantic pyramid of unity. This seemingly unimportant permit became the main source of the group’s fame (beyond the rape allegations, which were dropped when the guru died). And there started a very long lasting legal duel between local ecologists like the association interdépartementale et intercommunale pour la protection de la retenue de Fontaine l’Evêque (AIIPRFE), lac de Sainte-Coix et de son environnement des lacs et sites du Verdon. First, there was three primary legal battles, the first in Marseille , the second in the tribunal of Grenoble in 2018 (first instance and appeal), and finally in Paris at the Cassation Tribunal in 2000. In the end the movement was condemned to restore the hills and to a fee of roughly 70.000€ for the damages dealt to the mountain’s side which is located in a national park. A second architectural moment of fame was achieved by the group when the illegally built a statue of Gilbert Bourdin towering at 33 meters The statue was towering at 33 meters tall on the mountain flank above the lake of Castillon, after he died which was towering at 33 meters tall on the mountain flank above the lake of Castillon, the initial cost of the universally recognized as ugly statue was estimated to be around 50 millions francs (12 millions euros). The destruction of the statue was aired on national and some international channels of TV.

Other infractions from the sect include:
– Changing names to avoid paying debts ‘the two associations that were restructured (the Knights of the Golden Lotus and the Pyramid Temple) having been dissolved to be replaced by the three current associations grouped under the name of Vajra Triomphant”.
– ‘The Mandarom has also set up a professional training branch with the School of Arts and Life Sciences, called Hamsah Institut. This association is based in Aubagne in the Bouches-du-Rhône region. With a registration number that it presents in its advertising brochure as an approval number, it offers a training course entitled ‘Health through mastery of the natural laws governing man and his environment’, which comprises several cycles designed to enable trainees to practice health care and check-ups, and then to specialize in one of the techniques taught by the school (nutritherapy, energetic or aryuvedic medicine, aromatherapy, herbalism, etc.)’³. This constitutes an offense and the French state was considering suing.
– The Mandarom’s head in 1995 was a CNRS researcher which used her laboratory’s means of communication (fax, e-mail, post) for her sectarian activities.
We can also note that Aumism as used the service of a libertarian ex-tax inspector to evade taxes, and to do so, the group has tried to get itself recognized as a congregation, unsuccessfully.

---

Finally, I decided to present the most interesting case last. In which three non-profit associations, which were subject to tax adjustments based on their failure to declare manual donations they had received, ultimately went to the European court of Human Rights. Out of these three associations, two were directly associated with Aumism: l’Association des chevaliers du lotus d’or and l’Association cultuelle du temple Pyramide. These associations claimed their status as “religious” associations in order to benefit from an exemption, the French stated on the other side, considered them regular business association and therefore refused the status.

France was condemned to pay roughly 50.000 euros⁹ to the chevalier du lotus d’or association and 3.599.551 euros to the temple pyramide association as the case was seen as an attack on religious freedom.

Conclusion. :

I matters not that we give an answer to the question ‘is Aumism a sect ?’ as everyone will now be free to make their own well-informed decision on the matter. Nevertheless I do think the study of the movement has been a good way to introduce the reader to the French legal and social system surrounding the idea of sectarianism and to the movement’s history and theology itself.
One of the difficulties encountered by the interested researcher, when tackling the Mandarom, is that information is relatively scarce and any information is mostly coming from partisan sources. Another issue is that almost every website (from Wikipedia to regional journals) are strait up copy pasting information of each other (putting a few more hours into it, we could probably trace back each information to its original source). Therefore media consensuses become hardly of any value, as we have seen with the rape allegations, where almost every website will tell to whom dares read that the guru was convicted, which is simply not true, even if guilty.

Bibliography :

¹– Maurice Duval, Un ethnologue au Mandarom. Enquête à l’intérieur d’une “secte”, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2002, (ISBN 978-2130525721)

^3- Rapport fait au nom de la commission d’enquête sur les sectes du 22 décembre 1995

⁴– Duval Maurice, Boilloux Nicolas. Un ethnologue enquête au Mandarom. In: Autres Temps. Cahiers d’éthique sociale et
politique. N°73, 2002. pp. 81-92

^5- Nathalie Luca, « Maurice Duval / Bruno Étienne, Un ethnologue au Mandarom. Enquête à l’intérieur d’une secte / La France face aux sectes », Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 120 | 2002, 63-126.

^6-Massé, R. (2003). Compte rendu de Maurice Duval, Un ethnologue au
Mandarom. Enquête à l’intérieur d’une « secte ». Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, Coll. Ethnologies, 222p.

^7- Review of Maurice Duval, Un ethnologue au Mandarom. Enquête à l’intérieur d’une « secte » by Jacques Scheuer

^8-Conseil d’État – Mandarom- Légifrance (see download)
^9- France c. l’Association des chevaliers du lotus d’or. European court. (see download)

Sitography:

^2_– https://aumisme.org

File download :