COLUMN ONE : Sects Find Haven With Quiet Swiss : The tradition of privacy that made Switzerland a banking center has drawn more than 600 religious groups. But scholars note cult tragedies like the one last week could happen almost anywhere.

In this tiny Swiss village, farmer Claude Torche personifies the national character. Sure, he said, he had seen some of the people who lived in the farmhouse on the hill. But he minded his own business. And he had no idea it was a cult until firefighters found 23 bullet-riddled bodies there.

Cheiry, population 240, “is a quiet place,” Torche explained the next day as he milked his cows. “And something like this, well, it’s especially strange for Switzerland.”

A few days later, though, Torche admitted that he had more than a passing acquaintance with that farmhouse. His own sister-in-law and nephew had been living there, and were probably among the dead.

As investigators continue their worldwide search for clues in the deaths of 53 people aligned with Luc Jouret’s Order of the Solar Temple, one thing has become clear: The white-collar sect found Switzerland a country tailor-made for secretive cult operations.

This nation of 7 million people, a mountainous gem smaller than San Bernardino County, has a well-founded image of peace and prosperity. But growing furiously amid the bucolic green pastures, where cowbells echo off snowcapped peaks, are more than 600 religious sects, experts say. And that number, the most of any European country, represents a fourfold increase in the past 30 years.

Those gnostic groups, many of which trace their ancestry to pagan and early Christian sects, “find a safe place in Switzerland,” said Massimo Introvigne, head of the Center for Studies on New Religions, an international organization of scholars based just over the Alps in Turin, Italy.

In fact, the two bases of Jouret’s sect--Geneva, Switzerland’s third-largest city, and Montreal, Canada’s second-largest--”have the richest variety of esoteric and gnostic groups in the world,” Introvigne added.

The organizations, which count about 200,000 members in Switzerland, find comfort in this nation’s renowned banking privacy laws and its international flavor, as well as its three official languages--French, German and Italian.

But the country also is fertile ground because of its centuries-old tradition of religious tolerance and the very nature of its people. The Swiss are fiercely independent and intensely private; it came as little surprise to many here that a cult could flourish in the smallest of villages without being noticed.

Many Swiss also are wealthy and, as in other Western nations, spiritual searchers, increasingly dissatisfied with organized religion and preferring small groups to Europe’s ornate churches.

“It’s a worrying trend,” said Joachim Muller, head of the Swiss (Catholic) Bishops Conference study group on sects. “Our people are looking for a sense of life, but they are very individual. And there are quite a number creating their own religious movements.”

That was how the Order of the Solar Temple began, in the early 1980s, with Luc Jouret’s homeopathic medical practice in Geneva. It ended last week with what the group itself said was both suicide and murder--suicide for the inner circle of true believers and murder for those not yet “fully evolved,” for their own good.

In Geneva, an international crossroads, Jouret came in contact with the occult world and a range of foreigners, many of them well-heeled. He became a popular lecturer in alternative medicine and ecology in Geneva, as well as Montreal, Martinique and, later, Australia.

He used those lectures to recruit followers to an organization he called Club Amenta. Later, he formed a new group, Club Archedia, with initiation rites and a clear hierarchy, for those truly committed to his gospel of apocalypse.

Then, the most devoted members of Club Archedia were invited into the secret inner circle, which became known as the Solar Temple. Like many similar organizations, it traced its roots to the Knights Templar, a 12th-Century Catholic religious and military order that became powerful during the Crusades but was persecuted by the king of France and then dissolved by Pope Clement V in the early 14th Century.

Basically, Jouret’s adherents believed that in 1981 a “hidden hierarchy” of the “Universal Solar Temple” had manifested itself to Jouret and a select few in Geneva. Seven “entities” from that hierarchy, which had been hidden in the Great Pyramids in Egypt, left Earth in 1993. And the last three left Australia earlier this year, paving the way for the group’s “transit” to “the absolute dimension of truth.”

Jouret’s role, according to the documents, was to lead the group.

Police are investigating allegations that the group laundered money and engaged in international arms dealing. However, experts say those activities, even if proven, were probably simply part of the group’s efforts to raise money and protect itself.

“These people believed in their ideology,” said Introvigne, who has written 24 books on religious sects. “It wasn’t just a front for making money. I doubt this esoteric mishmash of ideology was built just to cover a money-laundering operation.”

Seemingly supporting that thesis has been the discovery among the victims of the bodies of Joseph di Mambro, 70, Jouret’s chief aide, and Camille Pilet, the group’s financial controller.

Jouret’s body has not yet been identified and, officially, an international warrant for his arrest remains in effect.

“It wouldn’t be the first time that a leader masterminded a suicide and then didn’t kill himself,” Introvigne said. “He could easily find some theological justification for remaining behind.”

There was evidence of dissension in the group before the deaths, although whether it was over money or personalities or theology no one is sure. But it is clear, from the group’s own writings, that murder as well as suicide was on its agenda.

Documents mailed to Lausanne around the time of the killings, to Swiss historian Jean-Francois Mayer, secretary of Introvigne’s center and the leading expert on the Solar Temple, are “materially genuine,” say scholars who have studied them in recent days.

In those writings, the Solar Temple said the true believers intended to voluntarily “translate to another plane,” apparently by mass suicide, and destroy their homes. But the documents acknowledged that some in the group had not yet understood that “leaving this world is necessary” and would need to be gently helped to die for their own benefit.

Lastly, the group wrote that those who intended to betray the Temple leaders would “not escape their just retribution.”

Of the 53 victims, at least 20 were shot to death and one of them, here in Cheiry, had eight bullet wounds. Three in Canada, including a 3-month-old boy, were stabbed to death. Two in Canada were burned alive. And the remainder had either been suffocated with plastic trash bags or killed by injections of drugs.

Investigators believe that at least one person, and perhaps more, were present at all three locations--near Montreal in Canada, at the Cheiry farmhouse and at three ski chalets in Granges-sur-Salvan, Switzerland--just before fires broke out at each site. In fact, the couple believed responsible for the three stabbing deaths in Canada were found dead in Switzerland.

It’s hard for some here to imagine that Jouret and his fellow Temple members could look at the splendor of the Swiss countryside and conclude that the end of humanity was nigh.

“We have quite a special country,” said Muller, of the Swiss Bishop’s Conference. “But for some of these groups, even Switzerland is a rough sea. Their anxiety grows and all logical thinking disappears. They figure that mass murder or suicide is the only way to escape these rough seas.”

When John Calvin formed his church in Geneva in 1541, founded on his Christian Protestant doctrine, he was drawn there by the country’s prosperity, but also its essential characteristics of “conformity, tedium and banality,” as one historian put it. Even in those days, though, Geneva was a hotbed of fanatical religious leaders.

It is especially difficult to apply national stereotypes in Europe, where television and other cultural forces have created a more cosmopolitan environment. But the Swiss remain an independent, politically conservative people. They stayed steadfastly neutral during World War II and, even today, have resisted joining the European Union, defending their place as the world’s Sonderfall , or special case.

Unlike other countries in Europe, Switzerland does not have a single national identity. Rather, it is a collection of highly autonomous communities in 26 separate cantons, or states. In the canton that includes Geneva, for example, the law mandates a distinct separation between church and state.

The states also respect each other’s sovereignty and, perhaps more important, the Swiss respect one another’s privacy. The nation’s unwritten law is that people don’t snoop and they don’t ask questions.

Beyond that, Switzerland has always been a great place to hide, for religious zealots but also for political exiles, artists and shady financiers.

Jean-Luc Godard, the New Wave filmmaker, finds his apartment on Lake Geneva an ideal place for quiet creativity. When Charlie Chaplin was kicked out of the United States, he found solace in Vevey, on the same lake, where he later died.

“Why Switzerland? Because it is a very quiet place known for its cuckoo clocks and chocolate,” said Marie Geneve, of the IKOR Center, which follows religious sects in Europe from offices in Paris. “Switzerland is a landmark because some of these sects are interested in money. And . . . because there is great religious tolerance.”

But scholars believe that such a massacre could have happened anywhere that such little-known sects operate, especially among groups that believe they are being persecuted by the authorities.

J. Gordon Melton, of the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Santa Barbara, says the killings suggest that authorities everywhere should listen more to serious religious scholars and pay less attention to militant anti-cult movements, who focus their attention on law-abiding movements, such as the Unification Church.

“This tragedy should tell governments to keep in closer touch with international scholars, who knew quite a few things about the Solar Temple,” Melton wrote in a paper presented with Introvigne at the Communal Studies Conference in Oneida, N.Y., last weekend.

“Pseudo-experts lead authorities astray, thus diverting resources from watching the small minority of apocalyptic-occult groups where real dangers may be involved,” Melton added.

The growth of small religious sects in Switzerland is reflected worldwide, where experts say more than 800 new spiritual groups appear every year.

“Man doesn’t live by bread alone,” said Jean Vernette, a priest in France and author of 30 books on religious sects. “He needs a spiritual dimension, and that opens the door to all sorts of crazy religions.”