The Police Raids Against MISA in France, November 28, 2023. 4. The MIVILUDES Behind the Raids
by Susan J. Palmer
To understand what occurred to MISA it is crucial to reflect on the anti-cult role of the controversial governmental agency.
Part 4 of 5. Read 1st part, 2nd part, and 3rd part.
The investigation on MISA and Bivolaru that culminated in the November 2023 multipronged raid arose from a report of July 2023 from the MIVILUDES that cited twelve testimonies from former members of MISA. The Paris Prosecutor’s Office then opened a judicial investigation.
The MIVILUDES was created on 28 November 2002 under President Jacques Chirac, as the successor of the MILS (Mission interministérielle de lutte contre les sectes, Inter-ministerial Mission for Combating Cults). The French government acknowledged the criticism that the MILS had received from outside France for certain activities that could be considered in violation of religious freedom. The 2002 decree thus repealed the decree of 7 October 1998 establishing the MILS.
When the MILS (whose purpose was literally to “fight cults”) was replaced by the MIVILUDES in 2002, the latter found it expedient to revise its mission. Most of France’s smaller persecuted spiritual movements were no longer visible on the French landscape due to the vigorous intense anti-cult persecution and had either relocated to other countries or disbanded as legal “associations” to operate under the radar or had transformed into cultural centers. For this reason, MIVILUDES could no longer rely on picturesque sectes like the Mandarom, or on violent groups like the Solar Temple to regularly commit spectacular crimes, to justify its ongoing government funding. Therefore, instead of rooting out and cracking down on “sectes,” MIVILUDES’ new mission was to focus on “dérives sectaires” (cultic deviances, “going off the rails,” “cultic harm,” etc.)
“Dérives sectaires” is a concept that is conveniently vague and nebulous. It purports to mean the harm resulting or emanating from “les sectes.” It has been translated variously and ineptly as “cultic harm,” “sectarian drift” or “sectarian deviance.” This new concept was in essence based on the assumption: “Cults are bad. Ergo, bad aspects come out of cults.”
A MIVILUDES spokesperson admitted in a March 2003 interview that the current French law lacked a definition for a “secte” therefore the law cannot define “dérives sectaires.” However, he predicted that the MIVILUDES would contribute “to defining what could simply be an administrative jurisprudence.”
The MIVILUDES’ social construction of a new social problem that they have dubbed “dérives sectaires,” and how this applies to MISA, should be analyzed, as well as the strategies of this anti-cult “Mission” to root out, expose, and prosecute the “gurus” held responsible for the “cultic deviances.” In recent years, the MIVILUDES has conducted annual training workshops on the “phenomenon of cults” to sensitize the judges of France to the dangers of “les sectes.” This was already stated in the 2004 MIVILUDES report to the Prime Minister, reporting that for seven years, the National School for Magistrates (ENM) had organized a one-week workshop on “cults,” conducted by the head of the “cult section” of the Department of criminal affairs. This workshop was aimed at magistrates and the personnel of various legal administrations. The MIVILUDES also noted it was in regular contact with magistrates designated as its correspondents within each Court of Appeals. If France’s magistrates are indoctrinated into anti-cult attitudes and biased perspectives to prepare them for cases involving “cult leaders,” it appears reasonable to assume that many of the latter are unlikely to receive a fair and impartial hearing in court.
The MIVILUDES is bound to write an annual report in which it justifies its government funding, demonstrates its usefulness to the Republic, and attempts to expand its jurisdiction. A review of the MIVILUDES’ annual activity reports reveals its dedication to rooting out the latest spawning grounds for “dérives sectaires,” which might lurk in seemingly respectable and benign secular institutions like public schools or sales motivational workshops. In 2021, the MIVILUDES began to target yoga schools as potential “domaines d’infiltration” for the “gourous” and their “dérives sectaires.”
In 2020, MIVILUDES had recorded 160 complaints about yoga and its “component,” meditation. In the MIVILUDES 2021 report, Alerte sur le yoga et ses dérives, they warned the public: “Yoga, perceived in the West as a healthy and moderate practice, is however not free from cultic abuses, [since] yoga and meditation are often associated with unconventional healing practices, personal development techniques or belief systems, this generates an increase in the risk of cultic aberrations.”
Based on the data provided in the bulletins of the anti-cult organization UNADFI (Union nationale des associations de défense des familles et de l’individu, National Union of Associations for the Defense of the Families and the Individual) and media reports, it appears that in 2021–2022 yoga became a new focus for France’s anti-cult movement. One French yoga practitioner described it as a “chasse aux sorcières” (witch hunt). On July 13, 2022, the UNADFI bulletin featured the report, The Declining Reputation of Yoga (La réputation du yoga en baisse). In 2021, MIVILUDES warned of a “growing increase in cultic risks in movements focused on health, well-being, and pure food.” MIVILUDES is also concerned about the gurus who offer “sacred feminine” workshops, or “discussion and meditation groups reserved for women,” where the risks of “psychological influence exerted on vulnerable female members” is higher.
Before the November 2023 arrest of Gregorian Bivolaru, three other yoga teachers had been arrested in France on charge of “abus de faiblesse.” In 2011, Gabriel Loison (b. 1940), described in the media as a “Tantra sex guru,” was captured in a raid by CAIMADES. A self-styled psychologist and alchemist, Loison is the founder of L’Université de la nature et de l’écologie de la relation. In 2022, he was found guilty of “abus de faiblesse,” “escroquerie” (fraud), and the rape of a “vulnerable person” (a 14-year-old girl who enrolled in one of his Tantra workshops in Morocco). Loison was condemned to 15 years in prison. His female companion was initially prosecuted as his accomplice in “abus de faiblesse” and other crimes but while she was held in “garde à vue” the charges against her were dismissed since she was considered as a victim of Loison. CAIMADES took full credit for liberating her from his “emprise.”
In 2016, Christian Ruhaut, a yoga teacher was arrested and charged with “abus de faiblesse” and forcing his yoga students to participate in sexual rituals “outside the norm.” The investigators determined that Ruhaut and his wife had allegedly subjected a dozen people to “cultic” psychological subjection with physical violence and forced sexual practices. These “forced sexual practices” appear to have been nothing more than private sexual fantasies Ruhaut’s students shared in a therapeutic setting. He didn’t literally force them to have sex with eels and deer, as the media claimed. Ruhaut was sentenced to four years in prison for abuse of weakness and money laundering, and his wife was sentenced to two years in prison—both sentences were suspended.
On October 19, 2023, just one month before Bivolaru was arrested, Jean-Louis Astoul, the director of Amrit Nam Sarovar, a kundalini yoga school in Michel-les-Portes, was taken into “garde à vue.” He had been accused of sexual aggression, forcing disciples to work without salary, and “abus de faiblesse” within a context of “dérives sectaires.” Astoul is a Sikh and teaches techniques of kundalini yoga. He was accused by four women of inappropriate touching during private yoga sessions. The “travail dissimulé” in this case concerned the tasks performed by volunteers as part of the yoga student’s “seva”—a “selfless service” tradition that is common among Sikhs, and at this ashram took the form of unpaid household services. The case is still pending.
These cases indicate that the MIVILUDES has been monitoring yoga teachers since 2011 but has recently moved yoga to the top of its list of “domaines d’infiltration.” Also, it identified those yoga teachers who “mix” different yogic systems, such as kundalini or Tantra, with the regular and harmless “sport” of yoga asanas as being suspects of particular interest.
On July 13, 2022, France’s main anticult group UNADFI published an article that described the “brainwashed” state of a yoga instructor in training: “She decided, a few months ago, to follow professional yoga training. She seems anesthetized, robotic sometimes. And she has memory loss, she searches for words as she goes along. And she seems elsewhere, disconnected from everything, except her approach to becoming a yoga teacher.”
This passage echoes one in the 1960 book by Edward Hunter, a CIA agent whose cover job was that of a reporter and who coined the word “brainwashing,” Brainwashing, from Pavlov to Powers. Hunter describes how Mao Zedong’s Red Army allegedly used terrifying ancient techniques to turn the Chinese people into Communist automatons without reasoning: “The intent is to change a consciousness radically so that its owner becomes a living puppet—a human robot—without the atrocity being visible from the outside. The aim is to create a mechanism in flesh and blood, with new beliefs and new thought processes inserted into a captive body. What that amounts to is the search for a slave race that, unlike the slaves of olden times, can be trusted never to revolt, always to be amenable to orders, like an insect to its instincts” (p. 309).
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About the author
Susan J. Palmer is an Affiliate Professor in the Religions and Cultures Department at Concordia University in Montreal. She is also directing the Children on Sectarian Religions and State Control project at McGill University, supported by the Social Sciences and the Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). She is the author of twelve books, notably The New Heretics of France (Oxford University Press, 2012).
yogaesoteric
March 16, 2024
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