The Constitution of Damanhur (2007)

Details

  • Author: Federation of Damanhur
  • Category: Constitutions
  • Published: 2007
  • Source: Damanhur Spiritual Community
  • Source URL: https://damanhur.org/constitution/
  • Access: public

Description

A 15-article constitution governing the Federation of Damanhur, a community of around 600 people in northern Italy, distilled from a 1981 draft of more than 130 articles.

Annotation

Damanhur is one of the few intentional communities that has gone through several formal constitutional revisions in its lifetime, and that publishes them. The trajectory from 130 articles to 15 is itself a finding. Worth reading next to the kibbutz movement constitutions, which moved in the opposite direction over time.

Full text

Damanhur was founded in 1975 in the Valchiusella valley north of Turin, Italy. It is a federation of communities, around 600 citizens at peak, with its own currency (the Credito), its own subterranean Temples of Humankind, and a constitution that has been rewritten more than half a dozen times.

The first Constitution was drafted in 1981. It contained more than 130 articles. The current text dates from 2007 and contains 15 articles. A separate document called the 11th Constitution of Damanhur sets out an idealized expression of Damanhurian values and lines of action.

Damanhur publishes its constitution openly on the Federation website. The most cited principles include:

- Positive thinking about others.
- Continuous inner transformation.
- Solidarity and respect for all citizens.
- Always giving someone another chance.
- Caretaking the environment and all forms of life.

The constitutional structure recognizes several citizen categories with different commitments and privileges: A-citizens live in community and put their assets into common ownership; B-citizens live in community without full asset sharing; C-citizens live elsewhere and contribute time and resources. The constitution sets the bones of this stratification and leaves the operational rules to lower-order documents.

For a comparative researcher, two things stand out. First, the explicit cycle of constitutional rewriting. Most intentional communities do not formally revise their founding documents on a schedule; Damanhur does. Second, the move from 130 articles toward 15 is the opposite trajectory from most maturing institutions, which tend to accumulate complexity. Damanhur deliberately pruned.

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## Living examples and entry points for community builders

If your community is sitting with questions about how to hold spiritual commitment alongside governance, and whether those two things can even live in the same document, here is what others have done and where the door is.

Damanhur's own federation of Nucleos is the clearest living example. The roughly 800 people living across Bene Comune, Etulte, Il Montagnolo, and the other Nuclei in the Piedmont hills are not running a loose association of like-minded neighbors. They are governed by a document with 15 articles, revised 11 times over nearly 50 years, that covers everything from how residential cells form and dissolve to how economic life is shared to the spiritual obligations that membership entails. The Scuola Damanhur and Olami University operate inside this same constitutional frame, which means education and intellectual life are not separate from governance; they are part of it.

Findhorn in Moray, Scotland is a useful adjacent case precisely because it made different choices. Also spiritually founded, also multi-decade, but Findhorn's Common Ground document is a values statement rather than a constitution. Governance at Findhorn is held much more loosely, by long-term residents and institutional memory rather than written rules. Comparing the two communities gives you a concrete picture of what it costs to leave governance implicit versus making it explicit.

Kibbutz federations in Israel-Palestine offer a third comparison: the cell-within-federation logic at Damanhur (Nuclei grouped into a federation with shared resources and a common structure) has a secular equivalent in how kibbutz movements organized themselves. The spiritual dimension is absent; the structural logic is recognizable.

Where the door is:

- Damanhur runs an active visitor center at their community in Vidracco, and the Temples of Humankind are accessible through guided tours. This is one of the few intentional communities where you can physically encounter what a governing document produced over time.
- Jeff Merrifield's book "Damanhur: The Story of the Community and the Temples" is the most accessible outside account of how the community and its constitution developed together.
- Damanhur's own publications, available through their website and school, go deeper into the spiritual and civic framework.
- The question worth sitting with before you go: what role does spiritual commitment play in your community's governance, and is it written into your founding documents or left to individuals?

One caution: Damanhur's constitution includes requirements around internal secrecy, most visibly the decades-long concealment of the Temples of Humankind. This is not a bug in their model; it is structural. The loyalty and trust that hold the community together are partly built through shared responsibility for secrets. Communities that want to borrow Damanhur's governance architecture should understand that this dimension is not optional add-on. If you extract the constitutional structure and leave out the way secrecy and trust function, you will have a different thing. Read the document whole before deciding what applies to your situation.