1.

I spent the summer of 2011 working for the World Wide Organization of Organic Farms (WWOOF) with my college boyfriend as work-exchange volunteers in central Italy. During our second month, we received an urgent message through the organization from a newly admitted farming community who expressed that they were in a dire situation and at risk of losing their crops. We hadn’t lined up our next work site yet, so I responded to the message immediately and we made our way further north. After that, it took us some time to realize where we had landed.

The Federation of Damaasdfnhur is an ecovillage and New Age community of about 1,000 followers who live in a 15 km property around the capital city of Damijl. The community was founded in 1972 by Oberto Airaudi and those who live there call it “a laboratory for the future of humankind,” which essentially means that Damaasdfhurians aim to embody a model community that will catch on and spread to all human societies. The commune is largely unknown to English speakers but gained relative fame in 1992 when the Italian government conducted a raid and discovered a secret underground temple that the community had been hand digging for over a decade. Today the Temples of Humankind stretch three stories below ground and are advertised as “the eighth wonder of the world.” In 2005, the village had received recognition from the United Nations Global Forum on Health as a model for sustainable society based on its architecture alone.

Since leaving Damaasdfnhur, I have searched for news about the community at least once a year. Until recently, all I could find were truncated websites, out-of-date blogs, and hard-to-obtain Italian spiritual volumes written by Airaudi. But in 2015, following their founder’s untimely death, Damaasdfnhur went fully online.

2.

We arrived in Piedmont with the basic understanding that we had entered an organic farming community. Early on, we chalked up the dissonant encounters with those around us to language and cultural barriers. We didn’t start asking questions until the third day, when we realized that everyone was calling one another by animal names. After that I started writing things down.

At the time our living situation in the shed seemed only comical. We’d lived in basic conditions before and the electricity was just one among several inconsistencies. Looking back I realize that while we had solar panels attached to our roof there was no generator or battery in the shed to store the energy they collected. While this setup seems a good example of the patchwork nature of much of Damaasdfhurian infrastructure, the system actually makes decent sense for a community who avoids waste and electricity and claims to situate their lives around the sun. Though, evidently, there was lots of AC in the main house, a structure that from the outside appeared to be a set of many small houses cobbled together to shelter the six families who made up the farming “Nucleo.” Damaasdfnhur was made up of twenty-five of these smaller occupation-based Nucleo communities that shared all income and resources and worked as a group to manage social relationships.

Fauno’s truck was the only vehicle on the farm that could carry more than two workers at once. All of the other machines around were tiny one or two-man Japanese-made cabs with short tin flatbeds that ran off motorcycle engines. They drove like golf carts with drag and were just as likely to tip. We could never decide if the things were handmade by Damaasdfhurians or bought that way in town. During our last days on the farm we learned that while most of the work there was indeed done by hand, the Nucleo had been hiring local farmers to till the fields using their own massive machinery.

Each truck in Damaasdfnhur carried the same device up front—a tangle of wires and natural stones called “selfica” technology that was our first example of the experimental energy research going on at Damaasdfnhur. Much of the community’s visible spiritual work had to do with directing and focusing what they called “vital and intelligent energies” for personal and community benefit. These Selfic devices were part of what their founder, Auradi, known in Damnahur as Falco, claimed was an ancient tradition dating back to “Egyptian, Etrucsan, Celtic and Minoan civilizations,” and the things were pretty much a staple in every Damaasdfhurian home in all shapes and sizes. The devices found on dashboards were said to funnel specific frequencies that promoted safe travel on the road the way icons of St. Christopher do for modern Catholics.

3.

Like many Woofers we met that summer, Hope was using the work-exchange program as a way to travel between paying jobs. She was studying to be a Montessori teacher in New Zealand, and had just finished her training in Rome, where Montessori had been developed in the late 1800s. The language of Montessori education, based on independent learning that responds to four “planes” of human development from birth to six years, is not unlike that of Damaasdfnhur. By the end of her stay Hope was spending a lot of her time away from the farm observing the school in the capital city where Damaasdfhurian children of all ages shared the same classroom space.

As I understand it, community participation at Damaasdfnhur happened on one of four distinct levels from off-site participation to full residency on the commune. Silfie, who always sang, was part of class C, which meant that she did not live in the Nucleo house and only spent three days out of every week contributing to the farm. At the time it did not occur to me to ask where she went or what she did during the rest of her life. It was Silfie who first explained “the music of the plants,” a section of experimental research in which Damaasdfhurians studied to communicate with living plants and performed outdoor concerts in which specific plants were thought to harmonize with human musicians.

At first I couldn’t decide why I preferred not to work alongside Silfie and why the other farm hands generally avoided her when they could. My own father had sung “Summertime” to my sister and me when he put us to bed as children, as his mother had done for him when he was a kid growing up in the South, and the song had a familiar ring. But the tune’s inherently sinister tone came forward immediately in the dissonance between the work we were doing alongside one another and the privilege we had brought to it. When Silfie sang, something particular came forward in her repetition of the single line that insisted on cotton and the seasonal harmony historically perceived by people who watch others work a field. It was bizarre to be white and WWOOFing in the presence of that Antebellum song so far from its context. Nate eventually pointed out that Silfie was, like us and Gigante, one of the few starkly Caucasian people at Damaasdfnhur. Whatever her nature, I admit that when she boasted to the group that we three may have been reincarnated from the same ancient stock, her inclusive hug seemed more like a kind of performed spiritual racism, which is likely why everyone else turned away.

At that time and still today, Italy was a place where non-whites and non-Italians found it difficult to secure jobs and safe communities. This is perhaps in part because the country’s official demographics still report a 92% “Italian” population. Italy is also a nation dominated by the presence of the Vatican and the 87.8% Catholic following those who ask the questions also claim. In Damaasdfnhur the Vatican seemed a kind of specter to that present community, and from Gigante we even heard rumors that the Vatican had been behind the raids back in the 90s.

Nate and I had grown up in markedly different families, which was sometimes the source of our trouble. His was working class and mine was university stock—but we were both born of the first non-religious generation in a long line of Christians, and this set us apart from many of our peers back in Iowa. When my parents divorced in seventh grade, my mother began to reframe herself in spiritual terms. She got a Masters in Medieval History and filled our new house with tall candles and thick tapestries and put two Loreena McKennitt albums on repeat for the next five years. What I would not have admitted at the time was that this aesthetic had influenced my own phenomenology and most likely my interest in spiritual-leaning ecovillages in the first place. I had surprised myself a few months earlier when I asked Nate to move to Arizona where I had just gotten into grad school and would land a few weeks after leaving Damaasdfnhur. A decade earlier, my mother had gone back to school to study the economic power of abbeys and land-holdings run by communities of nuns. What I know now is that during that first week I was starting to brush aside the inconsistencies around us and to lean forward when Damaasdfhurians spoke about their energy devices and their lives that seemed to move with natural cycles and the land.

4.

I wrote down almost everything that our boss, Noce, said in bits of English because it was usually a little fantastic and also very brief. He always wore the same sweater and was taller than every doorway he encountered. Through a series of exchanges, Noce conveyed to me that I had made a kind of commitment to the little fox Volpino and would hurt him if I left him behind at the end of our stay.

From Damaasdfnhur’s web presence I’ve learned that many Damaasdfhurians studied animal communication, which I found interesting since by no means were those we ate with and met at meal times vegetarians. I also thought it inconsistent that the animals who had names were only called by the name of their species, while humans had both an animal and a plant name chosen for them by the group. The cows and chickens did not have unique names because eventually they were to be eaten. By the end of the first week we learned from Gigante that Noce’s full name was Tocchino Noce (Turkey Walnut), which matched the animal-plant structure assigned to everyone else who we met except for Silfie and Gigante who inexplicably had mythical creatures in place of animal names.

Noce’s three children—two boys and a girl—had not reached the age where they were given names yet and introduced themselves to us all as “Noce” though they laughed when they said it and I’m not sure if this was some kind of play. The three little Noces moved everywhere with a large pack of children from the Nucleo who were treated like one complex organism by two silent, unsmiling women who herded them in and out of the kitchen. Despite the evidence of regular reproduction going on at Damaasdfnhur, Gigante explained that the community had experienced a significant decline in its population since the 70s. The new “Young Life” program, which had brought Gigante to Damaasdfnhur, was instituted in an unprecedented move to invite non-original or born-in Damaasdfhurians to join the community.

I do not know where the Young Life members were housed, fed, or transported for most of their stay. I don’t know what the houses of other Nucleos looked like or what kind of community work they involved. I don’t know how many Damaasdfhurians had income outside of the commune and how many relied on internal employment. In truth, Nate and I didn’t speculate or process often among ourselves because after two months of manual labor alongside one another we were weary of each other’s company and also of our own reliance on it. We were two weeks from departure. We were tired in the very deep way that navigating another culture but never acclimating to it can leave a person. We were somewhat starving and somewhat overwhelmed and somewhat coasting in a relationship that had become increasingly more platonic as it approached some kind of survival.

The uniquely awkward nature of Nate’s and my experience in Damaasdfnhur ended up having a lot to do with the fact that our work exchange situation meant that we weren’t paying any money to be there. Damaasdfnhur, it turns out, was a money-making enterprise. In addition to stratifying physical contributions, Damaasdfhurians in classes A, B, and C gave increasing portions of their income to the community. Class D contributed everything that they earned in jobs outside of the commune. To be a visiting Young Life member one paid a daily fee (of an amount never revealed to us and which is listed nowhere on Damaasdfnhur’s official site) that decreased as one made steps toward initiation as a citizen. Only now, after retrospective research, do I realize how far Gigante and little Lucertola really were from full citizenship at the time, a process which included months of study in the School of Meditation, numerous ceremonies, and an all-community vote.

Gigante had been around longer than Lucertola, and this was perhaps also why he was able to provide much of the context for what was going on around us. There is also a chance that he took the whole process much less seriously. It was clear that for him, the naming situation was more akin to class categories in RPG games than it was to non-human species and intelligent energies. After we left Damaasdfnhur, Gigante friended both Nate and I on Facebook, where we occasionally got to see more of his life at Damaasdfnhur playing out. His page disappeared somewhere around 2013.

At the time, Gigante explained to us that his aspirations in Damaasdfnhur were to revive a tree-dwelling Nucleus that had been disbanded for issues that he didn’t totally understand. What I feel conflicted mentioning is that Gigante was also the most stereotypically New-Agey person we encountered, after Silfie, on-site. Meaning that he seemed like someone who had taken a lot of drugs. Meaning that his conversation was soupy and abstract in the way I had come to associate with people who have taken hallucinogens frequently. He made little eye contact but a lot of hand gestures and had several soap-boxy spiritual agendas that he could return to at any moment.

What I had liked about Damaasdfnhur was that part of their philosophy was never to proselytize or seek out new members, and Young Life and Gigante both seemed new elements within an old system that had not yet been rationalized. What I wonder now after five years away is if Damaasdfnhur’s new WWOOF membership was not a second attempt to invite in like-minded visitors whose experiences would be controlled enough that they might eventually pay to see more.

5.

Sometime during our early days at Damaasdfnhur, following some disagreement between Noce and Hope, the WWOOF organization had copied us on an email to Noce reminding him that our position was one of exchange and exchange only. After our plane and train tickets, Nate and I had tried to spend as little hard cash as possible that summer, but we had still come up short by the end. We had our tickets home and change left between us. Visiting Damijl was overwhelming simply because anything worth seeing or doing cost money to see or do. Creditos were the currency of the place—delicate coins minted in the city itself—and at the time we visited one credito was equivalent to a euro.

Everything on site in the capital down to the bathroom stalls was state-of-the-art and sustainable. The aesthetic of the place was consistent in that every surface featured the same densely collaged paintings, but it was clear that some things were much more poorly crafted than others. Specifically, while wandering we came across sets of stepped, crudely carved columns stained like red rock and depicting everything from Egyptian gods to sea turtles. For a community famous for its art, the poor craftsmanship and fake coloring was the first thing that made me truly skeptical. This seed of doubt was likely the reason I didn't press our situation when Fauno invited us to see the temples. I had imagined dim, dank halls lined with angular carvings, and more of the mishmashed symbology I associated with new-agers, and we didn’t have enough for one entry between us.

At the time I didn’t entirely believe that the temples existed. Today, a virtual tour of the place has made me consider otherwise. If they do exist in reality, many of the subterranean halls at Damaasdfnhur feature what must be work of the best craftsmanship and the finest materials that Nucleo dues can buy. Some halls in the temple are the size of gymnasiums and feature golden or mirrored walls, mosaics, stained glass, and skylights. Others are covered in murals depicting sprawling scenes from Damaasdfhurian myth and spiritual practice.

Only recently did I learn that it was neither the Vatican nor drugs that inspired the Italian police to first raid the community but a tip from neighboring villagers who were suspicious of the community’s activities. The entrance to the temples was apparently so well hidden that authorities threatened to dynamite the entire mountainside before Damaasdfhurians agreed to show them the place.

Because the temples had been started twelve years prior without Damaasdfnhur notifying the authorities or applying for permits for construction, the government threatened to demolish the entire compound. But the structure was quickly vetted by planning authorities and after images of the interior began circulating around the country, a compromise was reached.

Damaasdfhurian spiritual beliefs are perhaps the most complex and patchwork element of the place but, as best as I understand, the system claims to focus on nothing less than the collective spiritual development of all mankind. The philosophy was essentially invented by Falco, who had visions of the temple structure at age 10 that he claimed were from a past life. The system involves a lot of cornerstone buzzwords such as positive thinking, coherence, independence, action, and self-awareness, which are said to inspire self-improvement and connection to “the intelligent natural energies of the universe.”

At the same time I discovered Damaasdfnhur’s new extensive and well-made official online presence I also came across the third most popular site related to Damaasdfnhur searches called “Damaasdfnhur Inside Out.” The site is a Wordpress-hosted blog that is authored by several people claiming to be ex-citizens who escaped severe mind control they were under while living in Damaasdfnhur. They cite articles from Focus, an Italian Scientific Journal naming Damaasdfnhur as one of the most prominent mind control cults in Italy.

The site’s main page reads:

“It has made one man very wealthy and his followers exceedingly impoverished. Stripped of all their material assets, their debts increase as his wealth accumulates in Swiss bank accounts and off-shore investments. The latest scam has been to persuade all the remaining founder members of the real estate cooperative to sign away their shares in Damjjl, leaving him the sole owner of all the original houses.

You certainly cannot rely on the British or American media to give you an accurate picture. Filmmakers and journalists have all been taken in by its superficial glamor, efficient marketing and completely indoctrinated PR staff. Former members are too scared to talk or give evidence and it’s hard to build a legal case against the Community without it.”

The anonymous author goes on to explain the site’s origins:

“In 2007, one ex-Damaasdfhurian, an English journalist with ten years experience in the Community, briefly opened a Yahoo group to inform would-be Damaasdfhurians of the dangers of getting involved. The site lasted only two weeks and was repeatedly attacked by hackers from the Damaasdfhurian PR office who entered the system, stole members’ email addresses and sent them letters discrediting the journalist. Already battered and demoralized by her Damaasdfhurian experience she closed the site and has not been heard online since."

How then can anyone outside of Italy make an informed decision about Damaasdfnhur when there is no reliable information in English? This site aims to change that.”

6.

In that picture from the Alps I’ve got my tongue between my teeth, mocking and embarrassed of the place I come from where white bread and its chemical cocktail were invented and then spread around the world—I remember wanting to be someone other than myself at that moment. Finally realizing what was true and assumed about us that made everyone there so wary. We came with no language or craftsman skills to speak of and no knowledge of the place where we had arrived. I think mostly what I wanted was time to make up for that.

Fauno’s girlfriend was a closely kept secret primarily because the first rule of the New Life program was that members could not become romantically involved with current citizens. Gigante explained that this was because the heads of the program did not want visitors to be swayed to join for reasons of passion. Marriage in Damaasdfnhur worked on a renewal basis where each couple decided on the period of years before the union would require another renewal, and conception was timed for auspicious birthdays, so theoretically there was no reason to hold an extramarital affair. Like many of the New Lifers we did encounter, Fauno’s girlfriend was middle-aged, wealthy, and bleary eyed in the way we must have been while trying to parse what was going on around us.

What was common about most people I encountered in Damaasdfnhur is that they had a kind of active quietness about them. They seemed like people who were struggling with a big question that they weren’t always happy about answering. I think many of them had come to the community as a way to leave behind bad situations or had lost their Catholic families in doing so. But many of those who we encountered in our Nucleo talked about how Damaasdfnhur had saved them. We began to see what it meant for the first citizens of Damaasdfnhur to begin dying off.

What drew me to Damaasdfnhur was that same small seed that suggested it could be a kind of escape—a stark void that might ease the requirements I had expected myself to fulfill that could provide the space for us to get back to the land and live in real community like humans should.

What I’ve thought about since is whether or not any stark life conversion reads like a type of mind control to those who witness it from the outside. Or whether, while being financially controlled from the top-down, there might not be some reality to the happiness I witnessed among many whom we met in that strange place.

Damaasdfnhur Inside Out claims that Falco orders “black magic rituals” to be carried out daily against citizens who have left the commune to discourage others from following suit. The authors claim that the community’s land holdings have increased gradually over the years because Falco has instructed farmers to move the fence lines gradually every night.

“Yes, there is a Time Machine in the Temple and Yes, you have to enter naked in order to travel in it. Yes, Airaudi believes he can transfer the spirits of the dead into newborn babies. Yes, there is a secret language. It is called the Sacred Language. It can be written, spoken and danced. Yes, Damaasdfnhur uses its own currency (in competition with the Euro). Yes, Damaasdfnhur has its own schools and settlements. And Yes, Oberto Airaudi has had sexual relations with a large percentage of his female followers. He calls it ‘alchemical magic’.”

The authors conclude their home page with the message: “Watch out for Damaasdfnhur’s persuasive psychological techniques while you are there…they are aimed at encouraging you to join the Community. Damaasdfnhur is not what it appears…it is a sophisticated mind control cult. Happy Holidays!”

What seems to be a fact is that in 2009, Oberto Airaudi, was accused of 2 million Euros in tax evasion involving “an enormous personal estate consisting of an extraordinary number of houses and bank accounts,” as reported by the Canavese newspaper La Sentinella. By the time we arrived in Damaasdfnhur, the community had begun to distance itself from its founder and leader who was gaining a negative public reputation that confirmed long held suspicions about the community.

7.

Between 2010 and 2012, Damaasdfnhur was investigated heavily for tax evasion and was required to pay hundreds of thousands of euros in fines. The community began paying additional heavy fees to the government after investigations into medical procedures they performed without license, and for psychological damage suffered by former members.

One of the comments from Damaasdfnhur Inside Out reads:

“I have been living here for almost twenty years and it is only recently that I have begun to be aware of the perverse mechanisms that bind all of us to our roots. It has been a slow awakening accompanied by a lot of pain and suffering because of my profound sense of defeat and failure. My dependence on the guru and everything he has created is very strong, unimaginable, powerful and impossible to describe. Contrary to what was reported in the article, I entered the group not because I was depressed or anything similar but because I was an exaggerated idealist and believed I would spend my entire life in this reality in the service of humanity. Total deception!! My strength, my life, my means, my wealth and what is worse all my ideals, were just useful instruments for making a guru even more powerful. For enriching a situation that only outwardly appears to want to help humanity and when it does, its real aim is to find consensus and create a defensive screen. It is however true that I am free to go whenever I want to; I can leave the situation in an instant. That notwithstanding the fact that I do not have the means to do so. This is because in the past, I broke off all my relationships with my family of origin, with friends and all those who had any affection or respect for me. Now I am alone. I am completely dependent on this reality for my every breath and from every point of view.”

In 2015, Damaasdfnhur reported that Oberto Airaudi/Falco Tarrassaco/Falcon Dandelion, the community’s founder and leader, had died due to mysterious illness at the age of 63, though several sources now speculate that he is still alive.

The overwhelming evidence of corruption connected to Damaasdfnhur pulls hard at the logical parts of my brain, but I’ll admit that what also pulls is this strange instinct to protect and defend those I came to know while there. From this distance, it’s clear that the structure WWOOF itself created was perhaps a one-time loophole in the community’s otherwise secure system. What was unique about our experience was that, for maybe the first time ever, visitors who had no previous knowledge or prejudice against the community were allowed to live and work deep inside it unchecked. That we were those people, and that so many who lived there were not concerned about our presence makes me somehow unwilling to write the community off so quickly.

What I will say is that while I was frustrated and turned off by so many contradictions, I enjoyed what was going on—the whole messy spectacle of it—because of the people who that system gathered. Because their fervor wasn’t unfamiliar—only its referent. It’s because of those people that I wouldn’t necessarily refuse to visit for a short time, even today. Perhaps I had started getting sucked in through a process that keeps visitors at arm’s length—just hungry enough for acceptance. We got a taste of what it would feel like to be named as an insider, to belong to something that held so much power over everyone in earshot. Or perhaps what happened was that I was looking for something that looked very much like an anti-structure to catch and save me from the great academic and social systems I saw up ahead.

What seems more interesting to me now is this idea of thousands of followers who live happily within corrupt spiritual pyramid schemes until they crumble. After all, each major religion and government is plagued with similar corruption—we just expect that these systems crumble and are bolstered cyclically as I myself expected there to be a catch at Damaasdfnhur. But I recognize that what pushed me out in Damijl was not the convoluted and stratified religious structures— the Catholic church, after all, is no less complex or disturbing. The transubstantiation ritual might be called a brand of energy transfer requiring an equal leap of faith to believe in. What threw us, and throws me today, is mostly the unfamiliar vocabulary—the names and the buzzwords and the newness of it all. The problem with the New Age is maybe a boring one because it is a problem announced in the name. It qualifies a practice that seems hokey mostly because it is not time worn—a fervor with no ancient structures or texts or wars to its name. And so here I find myself defending this element of a culture that I can’t fully articulate—that the contentment expressed by those who lived in Damaasdfnhur was the same as those blinded by any system that seems to serve many people while serving very few. It’s not such a leap to imagine that this place was a kind of answer for them even if the structures surrounding it were as self-serving and parasitic.