Established in 1975, the Federation of Damanhur is one of Europe's most significant New Age commune movements. Its abundant cultural production over the past half a century caught the attention of several renowned scholars (Massimo Introvigne, PierLuigi Zoccatelli, Peter Jan Margry, Jeff Merrifield, Stefania Palmisano, Nicola Pannofino). Their works have detailed this "federation's" religious and artistic output, their innovative ideas about social structures, and their ways of maintaining communal growth in the face of external and internal challenges.
Of these challenges, the most recent - and certainly most impactful - was the 2014 passing of the movement's founding visionary, Oberto Airaudi (a.k.a. Falco Tarassaco). Although Airaudi's death wasn't unexpected, his passing shook the movement considerably. Their constitution, social power structures, internal authority channels, and even religious narratives were all affected by the death of a prophetic leader, who - opposingly to his untimely death - had longue durée visions for Damanhur on a cosmic scale. In this paper, I will focus on this - so far underexposed - segment of Damanhur's developmental history and explore how Damanhur's myths, communal self-narratives, and social structures changed since the passing of the founder and how the movement challenged its former interpretation of death and re-incarnation, inheritance of power, social empowerment and artistic inspiration to deal with the apparent loss of their prophet, visionary, teacher and "Envoy of the Stellar Masters."