Damanhur: Living legacy, living legend
Possibly the worlds most intriguing and successful intentional community has returned it’s founder to ubiquity. Damanhur’s “Falco, Oberto Airaudi, founder and inspiration of Damanhur, passed away on Sunday, June 23, 2013.” This is a story of what he shared.
Coming from an age of ownership and fragmented family and peer groups whose members are sprawled out over large areas and living a life where we commute so many miles to and form our jobs it seems just about hopeless that we could find the energy to put into building a caring community. Though it is possible, and it’s happening. It’s happening all over the world. Places like Auroville in south india, The Farm in Tennessee, Occidental Arts and Ecology in northern California, and Findhorn Foundation in northern Scotland. These are a few of the more well known communities. Many smaller and lesser known are popping up all over the world. The term Intentional Community sometimes conjures images of dancing Back-to-the Earth hippies dreaming childishly of utopia, and in some cases images of covens of witchcraft, devilish debauchery, and free love and polyamory. Where does this come from? Most of us born into western society forget that much of the world’s population still lives in small community based social structures, and anybody who has ever visited to 3rd world cultures can see that the people there, despite their poverty, seem to be happier that the folks you see on the subway. What would happen if we could bridge the 3rd world sense of community, commons, and family structure, with 1st world wealth and technology? The possibilities are so vast it almost hurts to imagine. I would, however, like to share one possibility that was imagined by a guy named Oberto Airaudi. Oberto ‘Falco’ Airaudi, as a child of 8 or 9 years of age he says, began to imagine building a subterranean temple. As his imagination wandered, the temple became a mysterious work of art hidden underground for only it’s creators to see; mosaics, paintings, stained glass, secret passages, and tunnels connecting rooms. There is even a staircase where each step falls a little further than the next to create a gateway to an even more subterranean sacred space. It was not until the mid 70's that he began to find people that shared his vision, and as the years went by, together they gradually created a Community in the foothills of the italian alps called Damanhur. For years this community lived and worked together chipping away at their secret temple in their free time. they raised children, and built schools and houses. They learned tradeskills, and grew gardens. they built municipal buildings that house an organic food coop, art gallery and studios, a lecture hall, and others. they decorated their communities not with traffic lights and street signs, but with sculptures, murals on all the buildings, megalithic stones that protrude up out of the earth, and spiral labyrinths of painted stones that they call ‘Circuits’. In fact, one of the few street signs to be found is one posted in front of the coop that encourages people to drive less. It says, ”If you stand here for sure you’ll get a ride:
SYNCHRONIC RIDES”. The Damanhurians created and printed their own currency as well as wrote and agreed upon a constitution. They continued to grow and flourish as they cultivated a quaint lifestyle that, until recently, was largely uneccepted in the western world. They were living together, they were sharing! About 15 years went by, when in 1991, their secret temple was disclosed. The Italian carabinieri descended in choppers and ascended with foot soldiers. Their work of art was somehow viewed as a threat to society. No one knew what would happen next as the anticipation rose so high that even fear had lost it’s purpose. It is said by some that community founder, Falco, Italian for Falcon, fearlessly and with a calm demeanor simply welcomed the State Prosecutor in for a temple tour. After Falco showed the man around and briefly explained what it was that He and the Damanhurians were doing there, the man walked out with tears in his eyes and proclaimed to do what ever he could to thwart any more troubles from the authorities. From this point forward, Damanhur has been public. The Italian government gave permission to continue work on what had come to be known as The Temples of Humankind, and their legacy lives on. The Damanhurians have created a spiritual belief system unique to Damanhur that is based on personal discovery through experimentation and opposed to dogmas. Largely based on alchemy and the mythos of ancient Atlantean culture Damanhur has created a unique new way to view ourselves and each other. By Definition I suppose it would be considered a cult, but perhaps the idea of a cult is too becoming less faux pas, and more accepted as freedom to create your own reality and express the divine. A way to bring an impossible dream into tangible corporeality. Damanhur is an internationally renowned community whose social, economic, and spiritual structures are all experimental and different than virtually all others on the planet. You should be informed that Damanhur is not exactly an intentional community, but intentional communities. There is a philosophical understanding here that when people, related or unrelated, live in close quarters as a family unit, life becomes more challenging. As you endure these challenges you become more aware of yourself and those around you. you begin to view the world and it’s people, in a larger more unified way. When an individual community in Damanhur, which are called ‘nucleo-families’, becomes too large, this aspect of the community becomes diluted. To keep this from happening it was decided and added into the constitution that there shall be many communities, and none over a certain number of people. These nucleos (coming from the word nucleus) form cells that form the body of the Federation of Damanhur. The citizens of Damanhur are free to explore and achieve without the limiting boundaries of even etiquette. After induction as a member of the community all citizens are asked to choose a new name. An animal for a first name, and a plant for a surname. Piovra Café for example, which sounds nice in Italian (and although it might give rise to the same cartoonish imagery, Octopus Coffee would not have been my first choice in the English language). Citizens then take this new identity as a blank slate and a new world of possibilities. No one is idle here, no time for slack, their alchemy is a process, an eternal continuum of discovery. And discover they do. There are many rumors circulating of time travel to past and future. Even travel to some sort of time-not-time world where they have contacted entities that they call ‘tempo vegetation’ (time vegetation). It has been said that Damanhur is the first place that DNA was extracted from saliva and that they have grown meat artificially to use as food.
Some of the people of Damanhur build little metaphysical machines that they call Selfs. Most consist of coiled wire sometimes with glass balls filled with alchemical liquid or pieces of glass with ‘circuits’ painted on them. There are machines for your car to help you stay focused on the road, bracelet selfs for to promote good relationships, or good health. One of these machines was designed to demonstrate self technology. The way it works is that one person writes their flavor on a piece of paper, places it on the machine, and then the whole room gets the sensory experience. In many respects Damanhur is a New Age sci-fi version of the Crazy Wisdom of Tibetan Buddhism. There are no rules here, only guidelines. Some of the citizens of this amazing place have been enveloped in an oversized game of Risk for 15yrs. the school children,wearing white, play war-games with squirt guns filled with different colored liquid. Meanwhile, you can hear blast after blast coming from a shooting range no more than a couple of miles away. Falco writes,” This is a society of warriors, not peacemakers. Because the Enemy is inside. It’s there, what we have to fight.” What is it that makes Damanhurians so industrious? I have wondered what it is exactly that motivates people to all work together on a common goal if they are not getting paid for it, especially when the work involves moving thousands of tons of stone out of a mountain. We may never know what it was that Falco did or said to achieve such lofty goals with his friends right there by his side. However, he did mention that he has a Smurfs app on his smartphone, and that the goal is to get all the surfs to work to create the village. Perhaps Damanhur is just as much a mystery to him as to the rest of us? in addition to all the volunteer labor, the people of Damanhur do have ‘normal’ jobs also. Jobs such as a doctor, food service jobs, construction, massage therapy, etc. Some of the communities’ members have been so lucky as to have been able to make a living out of the skills they learned building the Temples. Jobs like painting tile and tile mosaic, photo realist and mural painting, stained glass and even welding or hardworking iron gates that spiral with symbols of the’ Sacred Language’ of Damanhur. Most all of more than the 1000 folks at Damanhur seem to be working class citizens. Falco himself drives a nice Audi station wagon that he may have paid for through selling his pseudo-psychadelic paintings, some of which are on display under changing color lights if the community gallery (rumor says he has sold nearly 20,000 of them and still has time to read a book every day). If he were, he does not show himself to be wealthy by any means. Albeit, he certainly is not opposed to become so. When asked what Damanhur should do to protect itself from capitalists, real estate or otherwise, he replied,” We should all become capitalists.” the room bursted out in laughter. Maintaining his composure with a straight face he spoke again, “I’m not joking”. As if to say that money has been the root of all evil, but it doesn’t have to remain that way. We can only hope that the powers that be will divulge the mysteries of Damanhur upon the rest of the world, but until then the Piemonte of northern Italy is where the secret stays. So if you are headed that way or are just curious enough to schedule a trip, even if you were not allowed to visit the sizable occult library, or see the laboratories reserved only for alchemists, the smiling faces of Damanhur alone are well worth your visit. And of course, there is the tour of the Temples of Humankind tour every sunday.
