Jacques Breyer

[1] His secondary education was interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War; he joined the French Resistance, where he was a second lieutenant helping the Comet Line.

[1] Following the liberation of France, he was ill with tuberculosis – visiting the Pyrenees for treatment, his mother gifted him a few items that had belonged to her father, one of which was a grimoire of herbal medicine.

Breyer viewed this as the start of a rebirth of the Knights Templar (later called the "Arginy Renaissance"), the medieval Order of the Temple.

[3][2] Breyer's actions in Arginy lead to a second, independent branch of neo-Templar groups (compared with the main OSMTJ organizations that had existed for many years).

[2] Breyer claimed that he had discovered a document dated to the 1700s in the French BnF, which allegedly stated that the final Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Jacques de Molay, had passed on his authority to his nephew; further, he identified Arginy as the original location at which the Templars had been founded.

[6] He claimed these writings related directly to knowledge possessed by the original Knights Templar,[7] though he later denounced these works as "incomplete" and "inaccurate".

[4] He then left Arginy and moved to Paris in 1959, where he encouraged the founding of a conference center, workshops and a publishing house.

He was made Master in the Willermoz Lodge of Lyon (related to the Grande Loge Nationale Française) two years later; however, he was never a formal member of any Masonic group.

[2] He was also a contributor to the La voix solaire magazine, for which he wrote articles,[9][2] and published a play based on Tarot cards, Oubah.

[12] In late 1987 he dissociated himself from the group and its two leaders, Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret, as their ideas and doctrine were growing increasingly incompatible with his.

[2] Later, the OTS changed some of its doctrine, drawing away from aspect's of Breyer's work, through lessening the emphasis on Christianity.

[13] Following the mass suicides and murders by members of the group in 1994, he strongly condemned their actions, saying what they had done was incompatible with his system of belief and his works.

[16] Lawyer Alain Leclerc, who was also involved in the OTS trial, represented Breyer's family after his death.

[9] Occultism scholar Serge Caillet described his "most important" work as being 1972's Terre-Omega, described as a "metaphysical thesis based on lines".