The world seems to be increasingly more insane every day. Between the AI takeover, rise of literal Nazis, and Monsanto poisoning the earth; abandoning it all to live in a commune sounds awfully appealing.
But it seems pretty risky, too. If you’ve seen Wild, Wild Country or Midsommar, you know things can get very intense very quickly. One day you think you’re joining a free love utopia, next thing you know, you’re in a murderous sex cult on drugs. No one wants to get tricked into drinking the Kool-aid.
But are there communes out there doing things right? A documentary called The Village of Lovers, that was released in the last couple years, offers a peek into a notable intentional community in Portugal. Interviews from residents in the film paint a utopian vision of free love and full acceptance.
It sounds too good to be true, but is it?
A healing biotope and poly utopia
Shaped by the anti-war movement of the 60s, Tamera was an experiment aimed at developing a culture of peace. They consider themselves to be a research and education center where they are researching how to create what they call a healing biotope – an environment where all the inhabitants, including plants and animals, can heal and thrive. They teach workshops and courses that focus on personal development and freeing love from the restrictions of fear.
In Tamera, love and eros are to humans as water is to the earth. The ways industrialised society has treated water – by restricting it to lined pools and channels, rather than allowing it to flow freely and naturally – are similar to how we’ve controlled and restricted love and eros. Polyamoury is in the majority, and there is a sense that monogamy is the less desirable relationship style.
This culture shift is radical, and not everyone who visits Tamera is up for experiencing it as a resident. However, if you’ve been in the poly community for a while and are looking to take free love to the next level, Tamera sounds like a utopia. Not only can you feel free to express your poly love publicly and without shame, but there is support in your own personal expansion. But be aware; there are some red flags.
Tamera’s sex cult past
In the 1980s, the group known as Bauhütte, whose members would later go on to found Tamera in Portugal, was accused in the media of being an abusive sex cult. The claims seem to be groundless. At that time, they were still in Germany giving workshops and living a free love lifestyle on a farm.
This accusation led to losing their permit to hold workshops. Eventually, it got so bad that they weren’t even allowed to continue renting the farm. After disbanding for a bit, members of the group found a new place in Germany (an old Nazi military base) and founded ZEGG, which is still going strong today.
In these early days, there was a lot of experimentation. Free love was appealing to explore, and the idea of building a strong sense of eros, the sensual energy believed to be the foundation of life, was a high priority. When the group was reborn as ZEGG, they were having sex everywhere, with everyone, all the time. While ZEGG was founded on the same ideology as Tamera, the originator of this ideology, Dieter Duhm, was not personally involved in its creation. Instead, he created Tamera.
Dieter Duhm: Tamera’s charismatic leader
One of the defining features of most cults is the presence of a charismatic leader. Now, not every charismatic person who finds themselves in a leadership role is starting a cult. Some people are just cool and inspiring, and that’s fine. The real trouble is when this leader oversteps and abuses their power to control or manipulate others.
Tamera has a charismatic leader. Dieter Duhm is a German psychoanalyst who has started many intentional communities before ultimately sticking with Tamera. Descriptions of Dieter in the early days of starting Bauhütte, was that he was very charismatic and he really saw people. Some people at that time even feared he would know things about them that they themselves didn’t yet know.
Dieter has written many books about love, peace culture and the nature of the universe. Residents of Tamera study his works and often quote him.
There were some red flags raised by former residents of Dieter’s earlier communities. He wasn’t a fan of closed relationships and really encouraged people to open up and allow eros to flow wherever it wanted. He was also influenced by Osho, the leader in Wild, Wild Country, who notoriously abused his god-like status. In Dieter’s earlier community, Bauhütte, many residents felt pressure to be more radical than they actually were, and to uphold this radical persona in the frequent public forums.
The forum: a powerful social technology for change
Every day in Tamera, there is a community forum where people share whatever is on their minds. Their struggles, their fears, their confusions; whatever inner conflict arises is resolved through creative performance in the public forum. The goal is to build a healing environment of trust, through honest communication about everything.
Sharing and resolving struggles collectively can not only help us to heal both personal and collective trauma, but can also help us feel seen in community. And as they say in Tamera, to be seen is to be loved.
This process is facilitated by elders in the community who now have many years of experience in supporting people through their struggles. In the wrong hands, this process could be ineffective or even harmful, but according to a report from a visiting researcher, this tends to be overwhelmingly helpful and positive in practice.
Conscientious free love
While lots of intentional communities fail, Tamera has been going for decades and will soon celebrate their 30th anniversary. No doubt part of this success stems from their ability to adapt and learn from past mistakes.
While ZEGG (and likely Dieter’s previous communities) were having sex everywhere all the time with everyone, Tamera has created a temple of love, as well as several identified spaces for sexual encounters. Sex isn’t hidden and shamed like it tends to be in the western world, but it also isn’t a free for all.
One major criticism of hippy culture is that they leave things undefined and “go with the flow”, which can lead to major conflicts. Tamerians meet conflict head-on and, through experimentation, honesty, and feedback, have established systems and tools for navigating the complexities of human interactions. The community has matured more than most, and it shows.
Growing up without sex shame
The really cool part about all this is that Tamera has been going long enough now that there are people who have grown up in an environment that doesn’t shame sex. In the documentary, there are teens who talk openly about their sexual explorations.
In a community where sex is accepted as this powerful life force that is beautiful and consensual, youth are able to consciously choose how they want to explore it. That means that they can enlist the help of community members to make their first time *just right*.
So many of us experienced some form of sex shaming. As a result, we know how challenging it can be to overcome that shame. Imagine if you were never shamed. Imagine if your sexuality was celebrated. Imagine how different your sex life would be.
Criticisms from within Tamera
From what can be found online, most people seem to be pretty happy with Tamera.
There’s a lot of awe in the descriptions of the place, and for good reason. They’ve transformed a desert into a lush landscape with water-retention initiatives. They provide a huge amount of support for personal development and exploration. They have changed and adapted over decades as they have learned and grown from their past. Still, there is room for improvement.
In terms of day to day living, residents reported having very full schedules between work, forum and other activities. Alone time can be a bit challenging to get. If visitors are unfamiliar with Tamera’s way of life, there can be significant culture shock, particularly around how public everyone’s intimate life becomes. They are still working towards permission to build permanent structures on the land, so most people are living in caravans and other temporary structures. This can give a sense of rootlessness.
As a community, Tamera was built on experimentation, but there is a sense that rigid adherence to established ideas may be stagnating the community and preventing younger leaders from stepping up with creative innovations. They restrict their public messaging to only what is working. However, this undermines their commitment to transparency and honesty.
Free Love Revolution
We can learn a lot from Tamera. Not everyone is going to move to an intentional community like this, but we can all invite a little more honesty and connection into our lives. Tamera really highlights the importance of truth and honesty in love, and offers tools and road maps of how to do it.
It may not be the only path to happiness, but on the surface, it sure does seem to be an effective one.
To learn more, watch their documentary here.