A Temple in the Green: What the Sacred Woods Temple is and what it represents

By Stambecco Pesco

Since time immemorial the woods are the home of life.
The Damanhurians have transformed their Woods into a sacred place, a meeting point for the different worlds of existence which hosts meditation paths, altars, pyramids, as well as plants, animals, spirits of nature and human beings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DEVODAMA
• Release date: Mar 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9788899652333

Book preview

Circle

The city of the world

Awood is the true city of the world. It was perhaps our species—at first living in the savannah, as it seems—that in time has gradually transformed the world.

I like the idea of a wood acquired by us, defended, physically and ritually regenerated; I intend to put in some ponds, to acquire birds and get them accustomed to the areas they abandoned in the past.

Plants carefully reintroduced that have become rare: squirrels, small animals to protect the woods and be protected by them.

I imagine blueberries, wild mushrooms and blackberries, firewood to collect to keep the territory clean and healthy. Pure waters. Grafted chestnut trees, firebreaks.

A cleansing, an area truly regenerated.

Here is a valid objective, a ritual worthy of a reawakened Pan. Why, otherwise, would we have thought of buying these territories?

This was what Falco Tarassaco, the founder of Damanhur and its spiritual guide, wrote in June 1989, in one of the many little internal magazines that Damanhurians enjoyed publishing in those days. It was in the second half of the eighties that the dream of a Damanhurian woodland began to take shape. Many of the Damanhurian communities had several hectares of woodland on their property, although in different areas widely separated from each other: in particular, in a region known as Tentyris, about a dozen kilometers (7.5 miles) from the central area, and in another region known as Etulte. The latter lay at the top of the hill above Vidracco where Damanhurians were excavating the Temples of Humankind, at that time in total secrecy. Here, starting from the acquisition of one piece of land after another—frequently a case of pocket-handkerchief sized plots argued over by squabbling brothers or cousins, with whom the major task, other than actually putting the money down, was getting them to reach an agreement—a stretch of woodland was obtained, populated mostly by chestnut trees, oaks and birches.

Almost 30 years on, Damanhur’s woods, in the area of Etulte alone, covers about 35 hectares (86 acres), representing the Sacred Woods Temple in which there are currently six communities: Cibele, Sidalte, Ognidove, Porta del Sole, Tin and Sorgente.

In the Woods, there are various areas for meditation, hundreds and hundreds of meters of energy circuits marked out with colored rocks and a ritual circle where—similarly to what happens in Damjl, the original community—the great rites of the Solstice and Equinox are celebrated.

Year after year, the Woods have been assuming an ever-greater value for the Damanhurians, so much so that the name with which everyone refers to it is the Sacred Woods Temple and the Damanhurians who live there call themselves the People of the Woods.

We never asked Falco what he meant by the term city of the world but seeing the way the Sacred Woods have developed suggests that it is an ideal place for the meeting between people, different animal and plant species, minerals, energies and—why not?— with aliens.

The Woods are truly the great agora, the great forum, where the world meets with itself; and it is, once again, a Temple in the most powerful sense, an element that links different dimensions.

Thus, just as within the human body, the chakras (which Damanhurians prefer to call adonajba) constitute the point of contact between the body and energies of different densities and functions, the Woods can be considered as a meeting point of communication between the different intelligences that populate the world of nature. The city of the world (according to