You Are the Hero: Voices, Divinities, Legends of the Damanhurian Mythology

YOU ARE THE HERO

Stambecco Pesco (Silvio Palombo)

ISBN: 978-88-7012-107-0

1st English edition DHORA srl, Impresa Sociale

Vidracco (TO), Italia

(1st Italian edition: Ed. Devodama 2018)

COPYRIGHT 2021©Stichting Damanhur Foundation

Translation: Beira Hamamelis (Tiziana Redoni) and Pterodattilo (Thomas Gibbons)

Cover: Temples of Humankind (The Labyrinth Hall), by courtesy of the Association Temples of Humankind.

All right reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations to be inserted in reviews.

Printed in Italy in February 2021

YOU ARE THE HERO

Voices, Divinities, legends of the Damanhurian mythology

INTRODUCTION

A book on myths like You are the Hero, author Stambecco Pesco, is narration, enchantment, encounter with oneself, philosophy. In dealing with the universal language par excellence—myth—this book touches on very different themes, ranging from the cultural and spiritual traditions of the peoples of the past, to what every reader lives and thinks today, at this very moment, from the far off to the nearby, from the macrocosm to the microcosm, from science to poetry, as is typical of the Damanhur experience and of the Falco Tarassaco school.

The mother of all myths is the story of Genesis, the creation of the world, of which there are hundreds of versions scattered throughout the cultures and peoples of our planet. We find the oldest Genesis story in the Vedanta, which was given to us by the Hindu civilization. In that version the universe is born from the primordial atom paramanu, an atom that breathes and becomes as large as the entire Creation and small as a Planck space, a minimum unit of measurement according to the scale of the physicist Max Planck; (I hope I may be forgiven the digressions into physics, my field of research, author´s note). This is apaurusheya, wisdom not thought by the human mind but drawn from the Absolute.

What better myth than one not even written by human beings?

Universal language also means that there are many myths, too many to give an exhaustive picture. After all, since in many respects they chase one another (just as in nature where every form has spillover effects into the existence of the others) the important thing is to connect with any of the links in order to be connected to the whole chain.

The epic writings of Hinduism, which I referred to as the Vedanta, are formed by itihasa. The two main itihasa are the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, two sets of myths so profoundly part of the Hindu tradition that they have guided the whole story for millennia. The power and depth of these myths represent the inner voice of an entire people, inspiring it now as it has done so for at least the past 5,000 years.

The foundations of Hindu culture, arts, sciences and spirituality were all born by listening to that inner voice. The Sanskrit word itihasa means „what really happened", a statement that myth is simply an effective way of telling a true story.

In Egyptian mythology Seth kills his brother Osiris, the future father of Horus, dividing his body into fourteen parts that are dispersed throughout Egypt. Isis, sister of Osiris and Seth, finds thirteen of the fourteen pieces and puts them together, but the phallus, the creative power of Osiris, is lost in the Nile, making its waters fertile. Made whole again, Osiris will be reborn as the god who finds his way back to life from the kingdom of the dead and therefore with power over the Underworld.

He will be able to recover his virility and with his sister Isis conceive a son, Horus, who can avenge him.

Horus will fight with Uncle Seth, but will lose an eye in combat, which Seth pokes out of him to divide it into six parts.

Horus reassembles all the pieces of his eye, but those pieces, separate fragments, are no longer enough to have the initial unity, and so Toth, with the power of numbers, must intervene to return the sixty-fourth of the eye that Horus was missing. Father and son thus experience the separation of death and defeat from which we can be reborn, if we have the strength and courage to go beyond. So it was that the Egyptians gave the world the magical power of fractions and converging series.

Let‘s stop here.

The inner voice that we humans need is the one capable of going beyond, powerful enough to overcome human vicissitudes and constant enough to overcome eras: the voice of myth. You cannot kill the inner voice, because with symbols and numbers it can pass from mouth to mouth, escape the transience of bodies and become immortal. It must not be translated, because it comes before words and therefore speaks all languages. The doubt arises that it is not human, that it is truly apaurusheya, therefore itihasa! But today we keep our feet on the ground, having lost the habit to observe the sky from which our ancestors and our myths arrived, so we should welcome new stories that help us to raise our eyes and imagine again. Descartes succeeded where Seth had failed: he observed the separation in the world by marking an abscissas (horizontal axis) and an ordinate (vertical axis) on a plane using thick lines, thus writing for us the width of the world, the height of the sky and the myth of reason. In doing so he created order, but he forced us all to always see one thing or another, never both together.

The impending danger, then, is separation, that which haunted Horus and Osiris, that of Lower and Upper Egypt, that of Good opposed to Evil, that of rationality as the alternative to emotion. The danger today is our ostentatious rationality, the rational analysis of myths that makes them crumble to dust and escape through our fingers like sand, so we believe that the beach does not exist. We chose to observe every single grain instead of looking at the sands, thus losing the ability to admire miles and miles of beach.

The need to count all the grains of sand is likely to prevent us from collecting the most precious gems of those ancient tales. Fortunately, we are still all attracted, fascinated, as if we were perceiving something that our mouth cannot articulate, while our heart grasps its meaning without any effort. After all, what is reality without myth?

That´s why Damanhur came into being: because someone was still able to hear that inner voice and looked for others who could hear it and find out if the story it tells is itihasa.

Falco Tarassaco gathered these people together with a strong wish that Damanhur should be in this world and not on its fringe, and thus also capable of counting grains of sand. Not all of them fortunately, but enough to have that measure of rationality to help them feel part of that vast creature called humanity. Thus Damanhur‘s project was born as three distinct grains: Spiritual Physics, which counts the grains; the School of Initiates, which distinguishes grains and knows how to choose the best among them; the social experiment, where grains mingle with each other.

But Falco, who never lost sight of the beach and the sand, in the first place expressed the one really important thing: the importance of listening to the inner voices, those that suggest observing the beach first and the grai ns of sand later, the complexity before the division.

Thus, many Damanhurian myths were born, often around a fire, observing the stars and hearing the sound of the waves. Even when geographically there were none there- so are we or are we not immersed in myth? Osiris came together once again and the waves were fertile once more.

In Damanhurian mythology, of which this book speaks, we happen to find, next to the ad hoc mythological figures such as the Primeval Divinities, Vadusfadamo, Aria, Psor and Anansal, others well known in many myths of the world: the Demiurge, the Grail, Lucifer, to cite just some.

There is also the Prime Mover, which in this vision is a close relative of the Immobile Engine of Aristotle, an assumption rather than a myth, the undisputed protagonist of the status quo but that leaves us with the question: what was there before the beginning?

As Stambecco rightly points out, often the myth answers the questions by posing other questions, which move everything a little further and produce the only alternative to truth, the motion of the search for truth. The emotion of rrneymyth transforms weapons into wheels, the mysteries into fuel, words into compasses, and spurs us on to face the journey// our journey. It warns us against simply enjoying the reality of the world to come to a full stop here, like shipwrecked people on a beautiful sunny atoll in a remote ocean. Myth tells us that there is much more and better elsewhere and drives us to do something: to build a boat and get back on the road. He tells us that we are part of a Primeval Divinity, which once broken up, cut into pieces as Osiris was, has lost the integrity and the memory that would allow us to build not only sunny atolls, but entire planets only by imagining them. It reveals to us that the Primeval Deity never lost its nature, it was only buried within each of us, becoming a small spark of light that continues to shine like the stars in the sky, patiently waiting to win the game of divinization of the whole universe. Light, we need light! writes Falco in his Dying to Learn(1): that light that surpasses any divided one, because it is the simulacrum of both the magician god and the speed of the clock.

That cosmic clock that Falco, with his spiritual Physics, described by linking together relativity and the Absolute. A myth not yet written perhaps will tell, a thousand years hence, how an untiring love of light drove an unknown employee of the patent office in Berne, a certain Albert Einstein, to bend the plane drawn by Descartes until it became a ball, so that magically the two lines that apparently divided the world found themselves in the same place. The myth is that extra dimension, that heat capable of bending and molding reason enough to make it curve. Seamless, part of a single coherent tissue of light, myth obviates the need for good and evil because it gives us something more: the meaning of the whole story, which the writer will be careful not to define, analyze or subdivide. Myth is. Full stop.

Gnomo Orzo(2)

PART ONE -

THE ‘WHY’ BEHIND MYTH

WHAT WE WANT TO BE

A myth is a fictional image which describes something real in order to make it more understandable. It is the most spoken language in the history of humanity: classical culture was developed on myths and since current cultures have developed from classical culture—and not just in the Western world: every hemisphere has its own classical age—our current way of thinking and of feeling emotions springs from ancient myths. In different ways and depending on the latitude in which we were born and raised, we are all descendants of Arjuna, Quetzalcoatl or Achilles, son of Peleus, and we all carry within us the experience of a flood, a journey through a thousand difficulties and a meeting—or clash —with the gods. Whether our lives are adventurous or sedentary, whether or not we believe in a superhuman dimension, whether or not we are versed in the ancient stories from which our civilization developed, or ignore them, does not actually matter: we all descend, in some part of us, from ancient myths.

Every myth already existed before it was written down and thus fixed in time: it could be found in the stories of the peoples, in their legends, in the beliefs spread by the priesthood, until little by little this created a kind of cultural and spiritual DNA in every ethnic group, until we reach our times. Even if we have never read, for example, Pisander’s Heraclea (and we will not have read this text, of course, since it was lost!) Hercules completes his twelve labors also within us, and his sweat and strength are present in our soul as an archetypal legacy. Knowing how to draw on this is another matter.

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