Faces of the Crystal Damanhur (eBook)

FALCO AND DAMANHUR, BETWEEN ESOTERISM AND PHILOSOPHY

What do individuals need? If we disregard material needs for the moment, the answers are diverse because the quantity and quality of human relationships are difficult to measure.

By nature, communities have the numbers to satisfy many demands, and in some respects, they seem to be distinguishable in two historical categories: communities based on religions that are recognized, appreciated or criticized for their interpretation of religious precepts, and lay or ethical communities that give great importance to a material vision of life, even from a perspective of guaranteeing constitutional rights with respect to dominant social patterns. There is also a third category which includes spiritual communities, which usually do not want to be categorized in the other two definitions. For many reasons including this one, they are difficult to frame in normal sociology.

An example for everyone is Damanhur, which has always laid claim to originality in its spiritual and social research. Social life is part of spirituality because it enables individuals to realize the evolution of the human soul on the material plane. Falco spoke about this widely during his first public talks in Turin during the first half of the 1970s, when Damanhur only existed in his vision of the future.

A few years later he collected his ideas, as if to give order to the theoretical and practical steps for the creation of a new society. The idea of a spirituality in perpetual motion fits very well with community life, always struggling with variable human relationships, including intense and beautiful moments as well as divergences with authorities, who often have a hard time contextualizing the nature of a community group. Falco spoke about this in dozens of talks and interviews, during which he elaborated on his idea of spiritual evolution.

Living together is an art form that we can manage in different ways. Knowing how to live together is more than just the sum of economy and social life, it is an archetype that has been removed from human beings to slow down our evolutionary path.

Yet it is still possible to recover this memory, regaining the foundations of communication and social life in order to build a creative and peaceful existence through paths of individual and collective growth. Innovators always incite fear.

With bureaucracy, the institutions that should be guiding the growth of a nation become the cancer that destroys the organism.

Communities rise among thousands of problems. They fight for ideals, as has always occurred, much more today in a non-violent way. But they are still dangerous, because they change the backdrop of static conditions, the social stagnation in current and historical development.

Perhaps the laws and institutions are in part responsible for overcoming the economic crisis and inflation? Or was it instead thanks to the small business owners, the little lively companies, and adversaries of this nation? What is history, if not the clash between what is static (like the “State”) and what is vital?

We do not want to be part of any political system or feud. We want respect for the freedom that is so well-expressed by the Italian Constitution, and so disregarded.

We are a social experiment, and we have chosen to experience it in first person. No one is obligated to follow our example.9

In essence, Falco believed that there is a connection between a spiritual path and social life, with the recommendation to set relationships through example and innovation and not through intense declarations, even though to stimulate the growth of individuals, you need strong ideals: “Community is going beyond yourself, doing something that leads to an ideal and not just security, doing something more than what you could even do with a company, a village, with other people. To build something together, you need to have a common ideal. You need to know how to maintain it, you need to have someone who is engaged with these aspects.”10

The birth and growth of a group, just like the relationships among the individuals who comprise it, have always been subject of observations and reflections, even before they were codified by the study of these experiences.

In indigenous peoples, knowledge is handed down through tribal channels, non family ones. The concept of family is not extremely recent, but it is not as ancient as it seems. When families were formed, blood relatives who shared knowledge of the environment and experiences could hand down and therefore maintain this knowledge within their groups.

In the traditions of all the populations, there is the figure of the grandmother who passes knowledge along the feminine lineage to her granddaughter, and that means passing on those powers that are represented in different forms and based on traditions. This is not knowledge in the strict sense, but expressions of an energy of the family group.

In the past, the family was a tribe in which there were husbands, wives and children. They were always extended groups that instinctively took on aspects of a tribe with a defined number of individuals. We can explore critical numbers later on, because we need to consider them at some point. So, there was a patriarchal expression, historical knowledge, the power affirmed over the family, the grandchildren; in the feminine lineage, during or after the stage of puberty, if the right combination was created, this transmission could occur, a transmission of knowledge, energy and what we define as power.

Years ago when I was doing research to verify if expressions of personal power were real or not, for example the “masche”11 or objects that move and walk, like knives that throw themselves into doors and other phenomena, I noticed that these potentials were almost always manifested in a natural way when there was a woman who went into menopause and a young girl who had her first menstrual cycle.

When this combination occurs, there is a different fluidity created in the mind. At that time, the formation changes, the connections we have in ourselves change, and as a result of this, while the connections are modified creating new codes, a new passage can be formed.

In various indigenous peoples, tribes are families that are extended for interests, land and traditions. The same thing happens in animism with the cult of the ancestors, the presence of entities in plants, in water sources, in the trees, on the land, and with a succession of Initiations, preparations that are suitable for the generations that gradually mature.

In these contexts, the transmission of knowledge not only takes place with direct experience, teaching someone to do something, it is mostly an oral tradition because it must be danced, sung and mimed. It must pass through sweat and pleasure; it must pass through a rhythmic connection, because it is spoken.

This happened in other times not because the peoples did not know how to write or use signs to serve as a mnemonic element in order to remember various things, but because the oral tradition has the advantage of always being renewed and transferred through the primary act of magic: the word.

All this is part of the maturity trials that are often painful, and that make it possible to test the individual’s strength and their ability to connect with their own people, their own tradition, their own tribe, through scarification, isolation in the forest, or physically distancing and going to live in places other than those they are familiar with and feel good in.

In the condition of being a popolo (people) like the one in Damanhur, we aspire to be as much as possible fast in adaptation, in formation, in preparation, in historical changes. When a person is ready, they are prepared to do all that is necessary for the greater good, which they identify with.

So at an individual level, they never really lose anything; they always gain a new balance, and then it depends on what everyone develops, believes and sees. These are the problems that each one of us faces at different times, depending on our states of mind.12

So, we see how the word “community” may take on different meanings that change over time depending on the culture of the moment. Falco has always had very clear ideas about the characteristics and the concept of the development of a community group.

I consider that a community is a small village or town, as can be guided and conducted according to national laws. Communities are distinguished by territorial continuity, by a sufficiently expanded way of communication, by common interests of various kinds. In the end, the community is a land to be safeguarded that often has a familiarity and interests that stem from different motivations, that allow people to collaborate together rather than obstruct each other. All this can become something broader, also in reconsidering the often fossilized parameters in established human communities, cities, villages, and even countries.

If we extend this reasoning to the concept of peoples, we could speak of identity, of cultural and artistic convergence, of the extended interests that go in the direction of a spiritual people, instead of a territorial people. We also need to consider the value of critical numbers, which allow us to see what level of relations people can have with each other, where the effort of developing and maintaining these relationships is less than what would otherwise be necessary to avoid conflict.

Communities...