Today’s The World Around Us will be presented in Italian and English, with subtitles in Arabic, Aulacese (Vietnamese), Chinese, English, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Thai.

Greetings and welcome to The World Around Us on Supreme Master Television. Today our show takes us on a fabulous underground journey into the Damanhur Temples of Humankind. Nestled in the foothills of Italy’s Northern Italian Alps, the temples represent a modern day wonder that pay tribute to the divine in each one of us.

The subterranean works of art in the Temples of Damanhur are the creations of a small spiritual community, Damanhur, with a grand vision. Damanhur is a society of those sharing the same ethical and spiritual values. They were once awarded by the United Nations as a model for a sustainable future.

The Damanhurians have their own constitution. It reads: “Citizens are brothers and sisters who help one another through reciprocal trust, respect, clarity, acceptance, solidarity and continuous inner transformation.”

The community’s founder, Oberto Airaudi, who is known as “Falco,” actually began dreaming of the temples when he was only about ten years old. From an early age, Falco had the ability to be transported in his mind’s eye to a place of grandeur, an image from a past life. Damanhur, in fact, means “city of light,” named after an Egyptian city with a temple dedicated to the god Horus.

In 1992, what had been a secret building project came into the light of the public attention. Today, Italy claims the temples as the “Eighth Wonder of the World” with thousands of visitors coming to enjoy the beauty and inspiration offered here. Let’s now join our Damanhurian guide, Esperide Ananas.

I am here today with Esperide Ananas, in the “Temples of Damanhur.” actually the “Temples of Humankind” in Damanhur, and we are in one of the halls right now. Could you describe to us what this hall is?

Yes. We are now in one of the lowest points of the Temples. We are 30 meters below ground and this is the Hall of the Earth, dedicated to our planet. And we are sitting right in front of a door, a glass door dedicated to our star, the Sun.

Beautiful! Amazing artwork in here! Could you tell us a little bit about how these temples began, the vision that the founder had, and a little bit of the history?

So the temples’ building started in 1978 in the summer and there is a beautiful story about that, because the founders of Damanhur were sitting outside and they saw a shooting star, and they thought that that was a very good omen and to start digging the temples. The idea was to create temples dedicated to humankind, to the reawakening of the Divine inside every human being.

So what we represent here is really the journey of our soul in the world of forms and beyond. So the temples are dedicated to this new awakening of consciousness that we hope will take place if human beings take action. Because our philosophy is very much based upon action, the idea that spirituality has to be turned into something concrete, so that we have to be able to use everything that we have: our soul, our spirit and our hands together in unity to create and build a different world.

Currently, the Damanhurian Temples feature nine underground rooms which are connected by a series of labyrinths. The winding paths are dedicated to the relationship between humanity and the divine. The windows that grace the labyrinth depict divinities. Visitors are accompanied by a guide as they could otherwise get lost. Let’s go visit some of the rooms:

The Blue Temple is the oldest hall and serves as a place of inspiration and reflection.

In the form of a chalice, the Hall of Water is dedicated to water and the feminine principle. Blue is the prevalent color.

The Hall of the Earth is dedicated to the male principle and the circular room rises in a cone shape toward the ceiling. It is dedicated to all living things.

The Hall of Mirrors is dedicated to music and the sky.

The Hall of Spheres is the center of the complex and features a ceiling decorated with 24-karat gold leaf.

Esperide told us more about the creation of the incredible Temples of Damanhur.

Everything is being created by hand. We dug out about 3 million buckets of rock that we took out by hand. Everything has been done by hand, yes! And also everything has been done by the people who live here, so very few people started the temples. There were no more than a dozen and we’ve never been more than a couple of hundred really, working on the temple.

So maybe that’s a little bit what you call the miracle. For us it is a way to demonstrate that a small group of people can accomplish beautiful things that seem impossible if they are moved by the same ideal.

Amazingly, none of those involved was a professional artist.

Well that’s another one of the miracles, I would say! We believe that everybody is an artist, and Damanhur gives people an opportunity to really try that out. So, no, nobody who moved here, who came here was already an accomplished artist. They all kind of developed their skills here. Some had some school training but most of our artists moved here when they were very young.

So really their transformation into accomplished artists happened here. One of the peculiar things is that our artists work together. So what you see in the temples, what you see in Damanhur is not the result of just one person’s creative impulse, but it’s always the mingling, the blending of everybody’s talents and ideas.

And for us, this is a collective art, what we call “a people’s art,” because it is the expression of the culture, the dreams, the ideals, the accomplishments of the people of Damanhur.

Damanhurian art is rich with symbolism.

One of the canons, one of the foundations of our art is what we call the Sacred Language, which is an ancient ideogrammatic language. So it’s not an alphabet, but each concept is linked to a symbol that has a specific shape. This is used as the basis for a lot of the decoration.

So when you are looking at things, maybe they look just like beautiful patterns, but what you are seeing is actually writing. So every single thing in the temple, every decoration, every detail has a meaning because it can actually be read.

Also the colors are vibrant. What kind of role does color play symbolically and in the temples?

Colors in every civilization are important to relate to specific things. So also in Damanhur we have different colors to represent the different principles: the masculine, the feminine, the elements of nature, the link with the divine forces.

Just as the artistry of the Damanhurian Temples awakens wonder, so too do the engineering feats that went into their creation. We’ll find out more when we return. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

We return now to the Damanhurian Temples of Humankind, an amazing and beautiful subterranean complex located in northern Italy. Rich in colorful and symbolic artwork, their construction also represents a technical feat.

Now when you were building this, there must have been underground springs and water issues that had to be dealt with. From what I understand that there wasn’t anyone that was a licensed architect or engineer. How did you do your researches to determine how to build these, to mitigate the water and other issues?

We learnt by doing. We read many books. We tried, we started with a small room and then started bigger rooms, and it was a miracle.

Yes. And I understand today that the architects and engineers come in and they are in awe at what you’ve been able to create.

Yes, it’s interesting. We also had a delegation of Italian architects who build subway stations and subway tracks and trains. They wanted to see how we did it for ventilation, because here it’s completely natural. We don’t need any pumps, we don’t need anything. We take advantage of the chimney effect: the difference between the highest and the lowest points, so the air is constantly pushed around by the difference in temperature.

The location of the underground temples in the Piedmont region of Italy has a special significance. It was built at the convergence at lines of energy known as “synchronic lines.”

The synchronic lines are parts of the ancient heritage of the knowledge of humanity, and what is called “the ageless wisdom.” But for a long time, they were kind of lost, the idea that they existed, as many things of importance in the human history. And so the founders of the Damanhur went around the world to complete the map of these energy lines.

The synchronic lines are the energy lines which connect the Earth to the Sun and to the planets where there is life. So they transport energies, ideas, dreams, souls, they’re really the largest spiritual highways connecting the cosmos. And they wanted to build the temples and Damanhur, and the community in a place that would be in contact with this energy, so that everything that you can do can be amplified.

I’ve also heard it’s called “The Dragon Lines,” where does that originated from?

The ancient Chinese called this that for the dragon lines, “the back of the dragon” or “the dragon lines.”

The Damanhurian Temples are holy places which serve to reconnect their participants with the artistic creative process.

That means that not only they are used for arts but also for the performing arts. And so music, dancing, singing are very often performed in the temples and most of our musicians and dancers or composers come here for inspiration. They actually rehearse in the temples.

The vision for the Damanhurian Temples goes beyond what we have currently seen.

Because what you’re seeing now is really only 10% of what we have in mind. So this first part here in this part of the mountain is almost complete. But we want to build a much larger complex which is what we call the Temple of Peoples. We want that to be dedicated to the spiritual and cultural heritage of all the peoples of the world, so that it can become a place for meetings, a place for peace in the world, where people can come and meet.

We thank you for joining us on The World Around Us. Coming up next is Words of Wisdom, up next after Noteworthy News, here on Supreme Master Television. May your days be filled with inspiration from the Divine.