Cult: World won't end Thursday after all

Leader of French sect of six says it 'could be in a month or two'

Atlanta Journal-Constitution/October 23, 2002
By Lisa Bryant

Paris --- Mankind has been granted a reprieve of sorts, since a tiny French cult rolled back a reported Thursday doomsday deadline to ''sometime before Christmas.''

''We've told everybody --- including the police and reporters --- that Oct. 24 was not the date,'' said Arnaud Mussy, head of the New Lighthouse sect, as he criticized French media for misinterpreting his earlier remarks.

''It could be in a month or two,'' Mussy added during a telephone interview from the western French city of Nantes, ''but absolutely not Oct. 24.''

Listed among dozens of government-designated sects, New Lighthouse shot from obscurity to media limelight this summer after a member committed suicide July 14 --- coinciding with another botched end-of-the-world deadline set by the group. Two other members tried unsuccessfully to follow suit.

This week, Mussy and his five remaining disciples --- including his mother-in-law, Veronique, and brother Olivier --- remained holed up in a two-story house in Nantes, under apparent close watch by police.

French authorities fear New Lighthouse members may follow the fiery path of other apocalyptic sects, including the Order of the Solar Temple, whose members staged a series of spectacular suicides in the mid-1990s in France, Switzerland and Canada.

But Mussy, 36, argues his followers are pacifists who shun weapons. ''We live normally,'' Mussy said. ''We go shopping, we go to the beach, we eat oysters and lobsters, we pay taxes.''

A former salesman for the telecommunications giant France-Telecom, Mussy found a loftier vocation two years ago when, he said, he realized he was the reincarnation of Jesus.