The Secret Corridors of Time

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.
Rod Serling

No, this was not the early 1960s and I was not trapped inside an episode of The Twilight Zone, but there were times at Damanhur when it seemed like I should be. Times when things just slipped a little bit sideways, and the parameters of the everyday gave way to the territory of the unexpected.

This was one of them. I was standing in the central control room of the Temples of Humankind when I suddenly got the feeling I had somehow landed on the set of a sci-fi adventure serial in the early days of color television. Flasks and tubes for distilling alchemical liquids huddled on a workbench. Beakers and bottles of ingredients crowded the shelves on two walls. The room was lit only by black light, the contents of said beakers and bottles being susceptible to breakdown from regular incandescent light. Just outside the door was the Hall of Spheres, where nine crystal globes filled with said alchemical liquids stood on pedestals under a ceiling covered in twenty-three-karat hammered gold leaf. Perfume-filled chalices rested between them, a gallery of grails my tour guide went so far as to suggest included the honest-to-goodness holy one. Across the Hall of Spheres was Damanhur’s infamous time cabin, where some twenty or thirty Damanhurians claim to have traveled back to visit the Stone Age. And on the wall of the control room right in front of me, there was what you might call, for lack of a better word, the master computer. Made up of countless circuits of spiral wire, arcane symbols and schematics, a tenth liquid-filled crystal globe, and one nine-key crystal keypad, this command panel extraordinaire purportedly offered its operator full control over the cosmic flows of energy and information passing through the entire complex of the temples.

Standing there at the nexus of what I was told were numerous kilometers of specialized copper circuitry, I was actually standing at the center of Damanhur itself—not just at the physical heart of their temple structure but also at the heart of all their myriad forms of esoteric research, and even at the heart of the overarching utopian mission that brought them to build the temples here in the first place. You see, these subterranean chambers were located in this particular place on this particular mountain in this particular valley for a very particular reason. It all dates back to the days when Falco was a teenage occultist wunderkind living in Torino . . .

Of all young Oberto Airaudi’s many research projects, perhaps his most important involved what he called the “synchronic lines,” which he described as a planetwide system of subtle energy and information currents that encircles the globe and links it to the universe. “Synchronic lines are like rivers in which an infinite amount of knowledge is stored,” he says, “as if they were a library containing all that humankind has ever thought.” He actually spent his late teens and early twenties mapping this global akashic network, first by “projecting” his mind along the length of its astral highways, then by blazing the trail physically on an extended seven-continent-wide adventure. By the time he was finished, he’d found but two places on earth where four major synchronic lines intersected one another—supercharged regions he called “shining knots,” which allegedly served as access points for the entire system. The first was high in the Tibetan Himalayas, and the second, to his apparent surprise, was in a little valley in the Piedmont Alps just fifty kilometers north of home. Its name was Valchiusella.

“By carefully studying the flow of these energy channels,” Falco writes, “one can foresee what will happen in the future and thus modify the present.” By carefully studying the flow of these energy channels, the Damanhurians seem to believe they can do just about anything. The synchronic lines are the linchpin of their esoteric philosophy and the lifeblood of their esoteric research. If you ever ask them where the “information” they’re working with comes from—where they got their sacred language, for instance, or their knowledge of alchemy, or lost Atlantean technologies, or healing, or divination, or any of the rest of it—they’ll say it came from the synchronic lines. And it is the synchronic lines, in turn, which they believe allow them to transmit all the fruits of their spiritual experiments and all the insights they gain from research projects like the Risk game back out into society, the world, the galaxy, and the universe at large. As Falco’s theory has it, these akashic superconductors are attracted to natural features like mountains, rivers, and caves, both natural and manmade. That, in a nutshell, is why he came to Valchiusella to build the Temples of Humankind. Essentially, the chambers are like hollow synchronic antennae, deliberately excavated spaces within the mountain that ostensibly pick up and draw in these rivers of infinite knowledge and infinite potential, forming a living gateway through which the Damanhurians can directly manipulate this cosmic power and by which their efforts to evolve consciousness and transform the world can be magnified a millionfold. Or something like that.

But that’s not all. They say the synchronic lines are also gateways through time. And at that very moment, I was essentially standing right on top of their main junction box. No wonder I felt like I was phase-shifting back to the sixties and hearing Rod Serling’s voice in my head.

Falco moved to Valchiusella with a dozen or so of his closest students in 1977, and they broke ground on the temples in 1978. The workers proceeded in secret and often in silence—camouflaging the entrance to the main passageway, masking the sounds of their hammers, removing dirt and rock one small bucket at a time, and scattering it carefully and inconspicuously about the forest floor so the neighbors wouldn’t notice. The labor was intense, yet they saw it as a meditative pilgrimage, an active metaphor for the journey deep within themselves. The seventy or eighty Damanhurians who took part in this work over the thirteen years their secret lasted speak convincingly of the power it had in their lives. But then came the day in the fall of 1991 when the authorities descended on them, with soldiers in helicopters, threatening to dynamite the mountain unless they divulged the hidden location of the temples. A disgruntled former community member had turned them in.

Falco was unfazed. He simply showed the state prosecutor in through the front door, and when the man emerged an hour later, he had tears in his eyes and vowed to do whatever he could do to help them stave off further trouble. It took them four years, but eventually they got the Italian government’s seal of approval, and the temples were legalized and opened to the public in 1996.

Inside the Temples of Humankind, it was abundantly clear how proud the Damanhurians were of their rich collective history, because it had been recorded everywhere. The walls were like history books adorned with paintings of many of the same people I met while I was there and many of the same stories I just told you. These walls bore cosmic histories also, panoramic visions of the birth and evolution of the universe and allegorical scenes of war between good and evil in the hearts of men. There were mosaics and statues of the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome, Sumer and Babylon, Hindu and Zulu, Aztec and Algonquin. And of course, the omnipresent motifs of Egypt and Atlantis—shifting sands and swimming dolphins, warriors and dragons, scarabs and hieroglyphs, Osiris, Anubis, and the falcons of Horus. These artists’ marvels were not just mythological but technological as well. They had eight-meter-wide domed ceilings of stained glass, backlit by neon. They had secret doors like those in the pyramids of the pharaohs, except these were motorized. Secret motorized drawbridges dropped from walls and hidden motorized stairs dropped from the floor at the touch of unseen remote controls. They even had strange subtle-energy healing beds that looked like a cross between a CAT scan machine and the bench Dr. Frankenstein used to bring his monster to life.

According to my tour guide, these particular beds had brought countless cancer patients into remission, but if there was actual evidence for it—evidence, for that matter, for any of Damanhur’s esoteric claims—the Damanhurians weren’t telling. A few bits and pieces of information had slipped out about purported archaeological finds allegedly verifying traces of their visits to ancient times. A fellow named Gorilla is even said to have returned from a foray through the secret corridors of time with a large clump of prehistoric grass in his hand, understandably one of their more celebrated bits of evidence. But the evidence I found most convincing was the evidence that was literally all around me, writ large across the temple floors, columns, stairs, and walls in mortar and glass, metal and stone. According to Falco, most of what he needed to know to build these underground halls came to him via esoteric insight, through the quiet whispers of his intuition. And to my eyes, the miracle was really that a group of laypeople—none of them architects, none of them engineers, none of them even professional artists—had built the temples in the first place. “I had a very big head, so I thought I could do it,” Falco remembers. “In the Middle Ages, they built cathedrals without being engineers or architects. So if they made such things, why not us?”