From a Turin Study Group to a Federation

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Before he was known as Falco Tarassaco, Oberto Airaudi worked as an insurance agent in Turin, which makes the scale of what he built afterward more striking rather than less. In 1975 he opened the Horus Center with about twenty five collaborators, a small study group organized around his own synthesis of esoteric philosophy, art and healing practice. The group did not stay small or stay a study circle. Airaudi steered it toward land in and around Vidracco in the Piedmont countryside, where the founding members began building an actual residential community rather than continuing as a city-based society, and that community grew over the following years into the Federation of Damanhur, an eco-village with its own currency, constitution and government structures. The trajectory from a Turin study group to a self-governing federation happened inside roughly a decade, and Airaudi remained its acknowledged spiritual authority for the rest of his life, directing its expansion long after the original twenty five founders had become thousands of residents and affiliated members worldwide. Airaudi was born on 29 May 1950 in Balangero, a small town near Turin, and later took the name Falco Tarassaco, Hawk Dandelion, under Damanhur's own practice of assigning members plant and animal names rather than keeping the ones they were born with.