Francis Bacon, Model Damanhurian?

It would be an unsound fancy and self-contradictory to expect that things which have never yet been done can be done except by means which have never yet been tried.
Francis Bacon

I love this quote by Francis Bacon because it captures what I love the most about Damanhur. It’s the spirit of the place. It’s the adventurousness, the frontier mentality, that certain je ne sais quoi of creative exuberance and curiosity and seemingly endless goodwill, that in the end, I think, defines them better than anything else. Truth be told, their lives are so wildly multifaceted—and in many ways, so ambiguous and so hidden—they’re a bit hard to define otherwise. That’s not going to stop me from trying, but I thought I should at least warn you: When I first drove up that twisty little road from the Piedmontese village of Castellamonte on a muggy afternoon in July, past dark-canopied forests and skinny lanes and fields the colors of an impressionist painting, I scarcely appreciated how big a whirlwind of wonder and confusion I was getting myself into.

That being said, whatever it was that I was getting myself into, I think Francis Bacon would have approved. He’s the type of guy who seemed wildly multifaceted himself, especially if you believe the stories that say that in addition to being a trendsetting seventeenth-century philosopher, ethicist, lawyer, statesman, scholar, and astrologer, he was also the enlightened founder of the esoteric Order of Rosicrucians and the true author of the plays published under the pseudonym “William Shakespeare.” Bacon had a curious and adventuresome spirit, too, as befits the man who invented the revolutionary theory of observation and experimentation we know today as the modern scientific method. What’s more, he was a dyed-in-the-wool utopian idealist who penned one of the great classics of the genre, The New Atlantis (1627). In a nutshell, he was inventive, industrious, artistic, determined, and spiritually conscious—all in all, a pretty good model of the perfect Damanhurian. And this statement of his could be their motto: “By far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to the undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this—that men despair and think things impossible.”

When I arrived at the broad marble steps of the Olami welcome center, I was met by a keen-eyed woman named Gufo (Italian for “owl”) who took me for a walk around the capital of Damanhur. There, the Federation’s earliest inhabitants had built an open-air temple with statues of sylvan gods in red clay and pillars of white marble from Tuscany and ornate iron gates shaped in the symbols of a sacred language purportedly from Atlantis. I saw shops and homes and offices, solar arrays and old bits of Greek-looking statuary, chic electric cars in the parking lots, jungle gyms and eco-friendly water systems and spiral labyrinths of painted stone, and everywhere, signs of construction and work in progress. They seemed to be building and growing so fast, I felt like I was on an archaeological site, with different eras of Damanhur’s history visible in the different planes and angles of the landscape. “It has been difficult to write a book about Damanhur,” Gufo admitted, “because by the time the book is finished, Damanhur is different.”

The people we passed were casually dressed, more or less, perhaps with a preference for vibrant colors and flowing lines, and a few wore sashes of bright fabric at their waists. Their smiles were warm, their manner relaxed yet purposeful. We came to a building and entered a room probably twenty feet square that was dominated by a kingly central table covered in white cloth. Gufo peeled it back with a flourish, surprising me with what had to be the world’s most colossal board game, a lavish homemade version of Risk. She told me a group of thirty people had been playing at least three nights a week for—no joke—fifteen years running! It was a long-term political, social, economic, and historical case study, she said, an in-depth exploration of the mechanisms of population growth, migration, crisis, and war. And the esoteric twist—there is always an esoteric twist at Damanhur—is that supposedly everything the gamers were learning about human relationship and human conflict was being “transmitted” psychically into the collective knowledge banks of the race as a whole.

I’ll try to explain more about the psychic transmission thing a little later on. For now, what’s important is that Gufo was showing me an example of what the Damanhurians call spiritual “research,” a word I heard a lot while I was there. Research is the key to their spiritual lives, she said. It is the practice of ongoing study, experimentation, and transformation they apply to themselves and, more importantly, share with each other every single day. They have research groups in the School of Meditation, she explained to me, Damanhur’s very own esoteric mystery school; there are the seven so-called Spiritual Ways, different paths for integrating their research with their daily lives and livelihoods; then there are the temples themselves, which I soon found out were chock full of spiritual research laboratories of their own. And so on. It was all a bit complicated, but Gufo—perhaps noting the slight glaze in my eyes—said not to worry about it. In order to help me understand just how central the spirit of research really is to the spirit of Damanhur, she said, she was going to tell me the story of their founder—a man named Oberto Airaudi, aka Falco (falcon), an esotericist and philosopher-poet and multidimensional Renaissance man who reminded me, it just so happened, of that other esotericist, philosopher-poet, and multidimensional Renaissance man I’d been thinking about . . . a man named Francis Bacon.

Gufo’s tale, as recorded that day in my notebook, slightly embellished:

Oberto Airaudi was born in 1950 in Torino. An unusual city. Home of the shroud Jesus is said to have worn at the time of the resurrection. Onetime residence of the world’s most famous soothsayer, Nostradamus. One of three cities (with San Francisco and London) known to occultist lore as the corners of an infamous triangle of black magic and paranormal energies.

Whether or not Torino was the reason for it, Falco was definitely not your average kid. Allegedly rolled eggs across the kitchen floor as a toddler using only the power of his thoughts. Remembers conjuring up ghostly apparitions to frighten his opponents on the soccer field and attaching rockets to the sides of his bicycle to see if he could fly. As the years went by, started having visions of large subterranean cathedral dedicated to evolution of cosmos and spiritual rebirth of human race. Tried (unsuccessfully) to build one by himself out back in the family garden.

Key point: Over time, began to funnel his interests in the further reaches of human potential in more and more practical directions, incorporating the language and attitudes of science into his investigations of psychic and spiritual phenomena.

By age fourteen, experimenting with hypnosis, levitation, and out-of-body travel; giving lectures on physics, math, music, and esoteric philosophy to crowds of eighty or a hundred people; and laying out the first rough principles used later to guide development of Damanhur. Knew he was on to something when able to convince two of his Jesuit teachers at school to quit in order to come study with him . Opened center in Torino named after Horus, falcon-headed Egyptian sky god whose name he also took for his own, where he managed as many as thirty-six different esoteric research groups at once, all of them pursuing independent projects simultaneously.

Ran successful insurance business and developed pranatherapy clinics and psychic healing courses all over Italy. Made a rule for himself that he would 1) invent at least one new thing per day and 2) read at least one book per day—a rule he has kept ever since. Established Damanhur, naming it after an Egyptian city that was the site of a temple to Horus. Has now written over three hundred books and countless articles, stories, and plays; sold in excess of fourteen thousand of his own paintings; still gives at least two lectures a week.

I think Francis Bacon would definitely have liked the guy. In his own time, Bacon’s innovative methods of research and experimentation had yet to become the foundation for science as we think of it today but were instead associated with hermeticism, alchemy, and the occult—a connection echoed by Falco’s own empirical approach to esoteric philosophy. Bacon’s New Atlantis even tells the story of a utopian society ruled by a group of enlightened inventors who study alchemy, healing, and life extension in caverns deep underground and whose ultimate goal is “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”

Bacon wrote about it. But by all appearances at least, Falco has actually tried to build the place.