This Is What the New Age Tastes Like
OR:
How we found Italian soul food at Damanhur, an Italian commune with no pretensions to being a cult religion except for having a mystical symbolic language, a range of beliefs in spirits and powers, and a huge underground temple that they kept secret for 16 years.
First, we showed up on the wrong day. We'd driven over from Milan on a rainy Thursday afternoon expecting to tour the commune's grounds and spend the night. And they had us down for a night's stay, then a full day of tours and lectures on the secular religion they practice, then a nighttime tour of the giant underground Temple of Man and another night at the compound dorm.
But I was wigging out after just a half hour on the porch of the compound's main building, looking in the windows of the organic drugstore and the community art gallery and the store full of pastel-colored books and the shop that sold copper spirals wrapped around vials of water. The mist of damp chamomile and multivitamins and other hippie-kid food odors (textured vegetable protein?) swirled with sugar-charged memories of the damp porch outside the canteen at Baptist summer camp. Plus we'd just changed some lire into creditos, the commune's currency (1 CR = $1 or 1 euro at the time), to buy espressos. Jittery and ready to bolt, my husband Neil and I waited as my mom and dad negotiated the visit back down to a night and a tour of the grounds.
They were the ones really into this place. My dad, who's always been interested in alternative communities, had found a book on Damanhur in the States. The group, with its focus on art and spirituality, has been around for 30 years, has something like 300 members, and -- this is important, says my dad -- sends its older kids to school outside the community. He and my mom had arranged this visit, and my husband and I hooked up with them on our post-Silicon Valley freakout tour of Europe.
Our guide turned out to be a hilarious woman called Vultura. She took this birdy name when she joined, in order to be counseled by the corresponding animal spirit -- the same way an American seeker might choose a guiding spirit animal after a night in Sedona. I admired her right off for not being called She-Wolf. Vultura filled Neil and me in on the details that my parents already knew. Damanhur was founded in 1977 by a bunch of people in Turin -- a northern Italian city which is a center for the neospiritual as well as for the Shroud. These guys were caught up in the '70s wave of community-building (which had also swept my parents along); they lived as a group in Turin and discussed spiritual growth as part of a plan to live better on this Earth. Then they bought some land outside the city, on the slope of an Alp.
The land is situated, our guide said, at a junction of spiritual currents. These currents run through the earth, through the air, along the ground; sometimes you have to rise up to catch them, sometimes dig to reach them. But three of them meet at this site, Vultura said. We walked up the hillside to see some of the spiritual equipment the group had built to harness the powers. We passed a stone altar built next to a small, clear stream. Two men stood at the altar in the rain, one with an altarcloth and one working to build a fire. "They are preparing for the Oracle tonight," our guide said. We walked on. Up the hill was a blacktop pad surrounded by tall pillars and oversize statues of humans and gods from a couple of pantheons. This blacktop was where the Oracle would be answering the community's questions tonight, and two guys in a corner were setting up porch umbrellas. To the left of the pad were fields of rocks painted pink, blue, yellow, and arranged in spiraling paths. These were mazes for particular problems or ailments; you walked along a spiral of pink rocks, for example, while seeking powerful help for your chronic headaches, and the spiral you walked would concentrate the spiritual currents and help them enter your mind.
We toured the art studios, where every adult spends some hours each week. We saw mosaic artists who created painterly images using tiny blocks the size of carpet staples. An ironworker was building a decorative window grate that incorporated a character from the sacred language of the commune. His dog was lying just out of the rain near the forge. The copper studio was closed but outside was a lifesize embossed figure of a man, nude, reaching up.
We approached the main building and the head of the office rushed out to meet us. "It's arranged!" she said. "You can visit the temple tonight, in 45 minutes!" This was great -- we had a chance to see the once-secret work of the group, the fruit of two decades of labor as they tunneled into the side of their Alp with hand picks and metal buckets, clearing space for a complex of chapels and labs that numbered at least in the 20s. But we were beat, and we needed food.
We counted our Damanhurian creditos and rushed to the compound cafe. Sorry, it was hosting a reception -- we spotted one of the founders of the group in that crowd. The complex had a restaurant down the road, but this was Italy, and there was no chance for a 45-minute meal. We went up to our rooms and ransacked our bags, then packed into the dorm kitchen and put dinner on the table: an apple, a roll of crackers, a pack of mixed nuts and raisins, a PowerBar and a Quaker Oats bar, two waters and four Pocket Coffees. My mom cut the apple in four, I pried apart the PowerBar, and we sat and ate. The tap water seemed to be good so we drank a lot of that. I found a jar of rock-hard honey on top of the fridge and kind of wedged it onto a cracker, and that helped too. It was strange to be in the middle of this giant complex--with a hotel and a restaurant and houses and temples and rock spirals--and to be smashing honey on a cracker for dinner.
We assembled in the parking lot at 7:45. Vultura was behind the wheel of a white van, and a pretty Italian woman sat in the passenger seat. We drove past a village which, Vultura said, had just elected a Damanhurian as mayor. At the top of some one-lane blacktop we parked down a dirt driveway, got out into the rain and pitch dark, and met a third guide whose face I never saw clearly. All of us ducked down a dirt hallway lit by bare bulbs, where we saw a frog. Smells coming up the hallway mixed earthy dampness and strong chemicals. We stepped into a dark room that echoed, and someone turned on the lights.
The round room was wrapped in a bright mural of gardens, the deep ocean, the mountains and countryside, filled with animals and with people in white garments. Each human figure had a carefully painted face; it was clear they were meant to be particular Damanhurians. Some faces on the mural were still flesh-colored blanks. The ceiling was starred and the stars circled around a stained glass canopy rising from the central pillar. At the foot of the pillar was more of that minuscule mosaic work, unfinished and powdery. The third guide walked over from the tap in the corner and dumped a bucket of water onto the ground. The mosaics lit up in color. They were pictures of squirrels.
The next rooms were a riot of more or less naive art, in wild colors and bearing images of the great struggle of giant nude humans against a gray machinelike figure who represented "anti-life." Inside and around these images was more writing in the group's sacred language, which reminded me of that Zeppelin album the kids call "Zoso." Room after room like this: Bright murals full of big nudes, mosaic floors and stained glass windows, copper plaques, and around the edges of each room hundreds of clay totems that represented each member of the group "so they are always present here," the Italian guide said and Vultura translated. The walls seeped with white calcifications, and the floors were not entirely dry, but mostly the place was livable, with human proportions and plenty of air. One problem was, from the moment I stepped into the Temple, I had to pee. The images of bursting life -- in particular one painting of a giant pregnant woman -- seemed to press directly on my bladder.
The rooms were connected by complicated trapdoors and mechanical staircases, rotating darkroom doors, hydraulic gangplanks, and, in one room, six stone planks that slowly lowered themselves to form a staircase. It must have been fun to build; the group seemed to have plenty of engineers. They also conduct experiments in there, in time travel (we were not allowed into that lab) and in physics, in influencing world conditions by means of globes of colored fluids and chalices of scented materials, and in alchemy, which Vultura, German-born, called a very Italian obsession.
And in cancer research. The machine they use for tumor studies looks like a '70s-era Xray machine with a metal bed, and the Xray camera is wired up to thousands of springs and spirals of copper -- spirals concentrate the bodiless animistic spirits the Damanhurians wish to focus on the tumorous tissue -- and tiny globes filled with colored liquids, all illuminated by little trainset lights. It looked like the head of Cleo Laine, but I couldn't see the joke right then. At some point when you tour a place like this, after hearing many things that you wouldn't do yourself but that you would respect another person for choosing -- like group living, or painting in this naive style -- there usually comes some part that you just reject with all your heart and soul. This was it for me. I smelled laetrile, desperation, wasted time during critical periods of treatment. Here in the middle of a mountain, surrounded by cult symbols, imagining someone hooked onto this terrifying copper-covered cancer machine, I wanted to throw up.
We rolled back down the hill with not much to say. We tourists were still in the grip of the tight good manners each of us had put on when we entered, ready to ask intelligent questions on technique and intent without drawing fire. It was a brittle feeling, and a hungry one. Then our guide turned and told us she thought the restaurant near the hotel might still be open.
Oracle night was breaking up as we pulled into the compound, and we ran over to the restaurant to beat the crowd. There wasn't one. We had our choice of two floors. A copy of the Damanhurian bylaws lay by the cash register. Given the food co-op odors of the rest of the compound, I waited for the choice of seitan steak or TVP chili. Our waiter spoke a little English and told us all the pasta was made there at the restaurant. Then we looked at the menu and ... chestnut gnocchi, tagliatelle with chestnut and squash and homemade sausage, fresh pesto? I guess you can take the lire out of the community but you can't take the Italian out.
We ordered with hope and asked for an opinion on wine, which was a phrase I hadn't even bothered to look up beforehand. The waiter suggested a regional variety known as dolcetto. In an effort to appear sophisticated I asked, "Es dolce?" "Si," the waiter said, "es very good." And it was, not too sweet at all but meltingly rich and nutty. And our pasta came and it was the greatest pasta I have ever had. Not heavy, completely fresh, a mix of wintery flavors that were so welcome on that rainy night. And warmed by the dulcet wine, we let our minds free from the clutch of forced politeness and shock that had colored our last hours underground. We talked about what it meant for these people to live a new kind of life, how many people seemed willing to do it, and what it must be like to be surrounded by all this bad art. My parents talked about their experiences with group living, which I remembered most as an intrusion on my sisters' and my right to walk around in our underpants. And we sat in a glow of good food and good wine, by that rainy road in the middle of that Italian-speaking, credito-using, underground-temple-digging family of 300, and we felt like our own little alternative community, which is the whole point of a good meal, isn't it?
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