Photo: Juan Manuel Ramos.
She still remembers the text by heart. Many years have passed, but Daniella Scuadroni closes her eyes and says: “In the presence of my immortal soul and that of my companions in the search for wisdom, I commit to serve with loyalty and efficiency and, if I fail to do so, may fate, the gods, and my national command reproach me.”
That is what she said in her pledge of loyalty, when she was admitted as part of New Acropolis’ Living Forces, an organization that presents itself as cultural and philosophical, but is identified by specialists and former members as a sect. And not only here: it was founded in 1957 by the Argentine Jorge Ángel Livraga and his wife Ada Albrecht and, spread across the world, is present in 54 countries. In Uruguay it has two headquarters, one in Pocitos and another in Colonia.
Daniella joined at 14 after a lecture on alchemy, but only at 18 did she become part of the Living Forces. That day she wore a blue uniform and a striking armband, just like everyone around her. She knelt before a banner with an eagle, right hand raised.
She was an acropolitan, as members of the organization are called, for 11 years. She left in 2014, but it took her a long time to process everything that had happened. Now, at 33, she remembers:
—I never planned to leave. They told me it was better to die than to leave New Acropolis, that it would change the world. I was no longer Daniella; I was an acropolitan.
Daniella Scuadroni, former member of New Acropolis’ Living Forces. Photo: Estefanía Leal.
The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Sects, written by the late Spanish priest Manuel Guerra and perhaps the most complete Spanish-language work on the topic, defines New Acropolis as an “esoteric, neo-pagan and paramilitary sect, with a theosophical imprint.”
The façade, it explains, is the offering of courses on varied topics, such as philosophy, martial arts and volunteering. They are “bait,” in Guerra’s words. But over time, some people are encouraged to enter a hidden structure of an organization seeking to build a “new and better world,” through its Living Forces (including male or labor brigades, female brigades, and a security corps). There is also a select group of leaders called hachados, with greater commitment.
To join, members must pay a “tithe,” ranging from 1,200 to 1,700 pesos per month depending on rank, in addition to specific donations and the obligation to work at least three or four hours daily. Most do so in the late afternoon, after work or study. Today there are 112 members.
How brigade members dress
In internal activities, members of the male or labor brigades—responsible for repairs, among other tasks—wear a shirt, light brown tie, black pants and shoes. They hold parades and exercises in mental control and self-defense. They wear an orange armband. Members of the female brigades wear a blue skirt and white blouse. Their armband is dark blue. They mainly handle social activities and preserving the “beauty” of the premises.
The insignia of the “hachados,” who are at a higher level, is an axe. They wear black pants, shirt and tie. They use an axe-shaped pin, to which they add small gold chains as they rise in rank.
Members of the security corps, meanwhile, may carry weapons, according to the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Sects. In Uruguay, in very specific cases, they do, El País learned. Their uniform, says that same book by Manuel Guerra, matches that of the Nazi SS. They wear a red armband with an S and an arrow. The position of intelligence chief may be known, but their activities and contacts must remain secret.
Armband of New Acropolis’ security corps.
Luis Santamaría, a Spanish sect expert, spoke to El País from Zamora and said New Acropolis has “an external appearance of a cultural association” and “an internal reality of an initiatory group with hidden doctrines.”
—Why is it a sect?
—It is a group with a double reality—says this researcher from the Ibero-American Network for the Study of Sects—. Internally, it is an esoteric school that teaches adepts successive mysteries. That is a typical feature of sects: recruitment procedures based on deception and persuasion techniques. The same applies to the progressive break with previous social ties, something that should not happen in a cultural organization. Then the person sees leaving as difficult, or does not even consider it, because the outside world is seen as bad.
—What are the leaders seeking?
—They are the chosen ones. They are convinced of a very elitist truth meant for very few people. They want to build an acropolitan social and political system worldwide, with echoes of ancient Greece and Rome.
Because there are no reports—except in isolated cases—of sexual abuse or financial crimes, it is difficult to identify a specific offense, Santamaría explains. He says psychological manipulation or coercive persuasion “is difficult to prove” and “shameful for those who went through it.”
The secrets
“I invoke the Immortal Gods to grant you all Light and the indispensable capacity for work needed to walk the steep path that leads from Earth to Heaven,” says the Leader’s Manual, written by Jorge Ángel Livraga in 1976. In another section it says there are three fundamental symbols: the eagle, fire and axe. But those symbols are not shown to people who attend philosophy talks.
In the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Sects, Guerra says that when acropolitans deny aspects of their internal structure attributed to them, they do not consider themselves to be lying, because “they limit themselves to defending one of their principles: keeping the secret to avoid sharing it with those unprepared for it or with those who may defile it.” The internal, esoteric layer is reserved for “the wisdom of the chosen.”
What can be communicated to everyone—“the exoteric”—is “like the mask with which one must present oneself to the uninitiated.” Revealing an acropolitan secret is “classified as betrayal.”
It is not a religion, but it resembles one. One secret is that acropolitans believe life is shaped by “elementals of nature.” What are they? The fire elementals are salamanders; the air elementals are sylphs and elves; the water elementals are nymphs; the earth elementals are gnomes. They also believe in the emergence of a new race, the “sixth subrace,” endowed with “clairvoyance or perception of what is invisible and beyond the senses.” They say the planet will soon begin a “prolonged process of disintegration.”
New Acropolis headquarters in Pocitos. Photo: Juan Manuel Ramos.
Guerra describes it as a “paramilitary sect with a neo-fascist character.” In fact, a 1985 report by the European Parliament on fascism and Nazism mentions New Acropolis. Several elements support this definition. The official acropolitan greeting—“in private, never in public”—is the raised arm with palm down, fingers together, at a 45-degree angle to the body. The eagle with wings spread upward resembles the Nazi eagle, says Guerra. And the training, as we will see, is very harsh.
Among acropolitans’ obligations are to “always be available for assigned tasks,” be moderate with alcohol (“have the elegance not to fall into drunkenness, which stupefies people”), smoking and sexuality (chastity is advised, and one founder text says “do not surrender to excess”). Vegetarianism is recommended, as is staying away from politics (“current political positions are empty of spiritual content”), keeping distance “from drugs, homosexuals and thieves,” having little contact with outsiders, recruiting sympathizers, giving talks, and organizing seminars on topics from archaeology and esotericism to India, Plato and the mysteries of Tibet. Taking a public-speaking course and posting flyers around the city are mandatory.
And what does New Acropolis say? On its website, it states that its principles are fraternity, knowledge and human development. Its director is Gabriella Feola, a 66-year-old chemist who held roles in Montevideo’s city administration (IMM) in the last decade, including director of the Resilience Unit and of the Quality Assessment and Environmental Control Service. She learned about New Acropolis in 1994 through an IMM coworker who invited her to participate. She denies all accusations that it is a sect. “We have nothing to hide,” she says, laughing in a phone interview with El País.
We will present New Acropolis’ version at the end of this article. Before that, to better understand the allegations, it is essential to hear testimonies from people who were inside and left.
THE STRUCTURE
The commander and the guardian of the seals
The acropolitan hierarchy has several levels. At the top is the world supreme commander (currently Spaniard Carlos Adelantado), then continental and national command. He carries a solid gold axe with “a multifaceted emerald embedded on one side of the axe head.” Next comes the guardian of the seals, or deputy director general, who carries an axe with an iron head featuring “two golden hands guarding a flame.”
At the other end, the first step is “probationism,” in which the person is tested and receives lessons in philosophy, sociopolitics, reincarnation of souls, Buddhism, Plotinus, the New Middle Ages “that will end democracy,” and Western well-being, among other topics.
The stories
Martín joined as a teenager and found a pleasant world, with smiling faces, where people paid attention to everything he said, although from the start he was surprised that philosophy courses included esoteric topics without room for debate.
—Years later I found out they even have an integration secretariat dedicated to analyzing people and deciding which activities to propose based on personality, in order to hook them in—says this former acropolitan, in an interview with El País at a downtown Montevideo bar. He asks not to be identified by his real name: he fears reprisals—. You are very unprotected in that structure; there is a strong manipulation mechanism.
He learned it was more important to go to New Acropolis than to spend time with friends and family, and was taught that the right thing for “an evolved being” is to do things they do not want “for the common good.” Although he felt good and supported at the time, he says they subtly began to instill ideas such as doubt being negative, typical of “kama-manas,” the selfish mind. He also learned “the ideology of obedience.”
—Those who know, know, and I do not question them.
A few years later he was told that Jorge Ángel Livraga is a “semi-divine being, one of those figures who, through spiritual development, grasped eternal truths.” And that his followers are also special beings. That the world is in “brutal corruption” and should be “like in there,” like New Acropolis.
—They believe we are in the Middle Ages, that civilization will collapse, and that only New Acropolis will survive.
It did not happen overnight, but eventually he only related to people in the organization, became radicalized, and looked at outsiders “as twisted”:
—The problem is that the darkest things are introduced four years later, when you have broken ties with everyone and your life is completely in there.
—What is the darkest thing?
—You enter through philosophy and open-mindedness and in the end they talk to you about obedience. And I have to accept it, because the cost of leaving is too high. It is a gradual process where your rationality is cut down and they make it clear that questioning anything is a fault. Then you read the founder’s texts—he admired Hitler, Franco and Mussolini—how is it possible that only years later I discover what he really thought?
A room at New Acropolis headquarters. Photo: Juan Manuel Ramos.
The invitation to join the internal circle, the Living Forces, was a long process that ended in so-called “field tests,” which in some cases (not all) can be traumatic. In Uruguay, they are done at the “Roman villa,” a country house in Pirarajá, Lavalleja.
The trip is in strict silence, without knowing the destination. Upon arrival, writings by the founder are read and then their eyes are covered. Among other tests, where aspirants are naked, they are made to hold a rope representing “the path of the masters, that is, New Acropolis,” and are pulled from side to side; they are buried for a while in a pit with one centimeter of soil above their heads until a horn sounds; they are taken to a lake and forced under water; they are made to climb and jump into a void without knowing where it ends, until they fall into water. And so on.
—The most humiliating part is that I accepted it—he says, resigned.
At the end, once already a member of the Living Forces, he spent two hours staring at the armband, then entered a room where everyone stood in formation and the famous pledge had to be made. They then asked him not to betray “the ideal and the masters” and gave him a symbolic slap.
—They educate you through terror. They use candy and stick, but over time there is less candy and more stick. At one point it is all stick: every time you do something that does not suit the sect, you are selfish and do not think about others—Martín says—. I remember exactly the moment I first thought of leaving, and I was terrified by my own thought.
And when he finally left, he says he went through a personal “martyrdom” to move on: he cried every night and had to seek psychological help.
Ana’s story, age 35, whose name was also changed to protect her identity, is very similar, but happened in Spain. She joined after a lecture by a psychiatrist and stayed 10 years. She left six years ago. She tells El País her story while riding the subway:
—I was very fanatical. I went every day, Monday to Sunday. I had left friends, family and studies. I only thought about the sect. All my time outside work went there.
She did everything from cleaning headquarters to handling the website and public relations. Later she taught classes, and there she had her first problems, clashing with her instructors.
—At first you are in a dream and think you are chosen to save the world—she explains—. You end up believing leader Jorge Ángel Livraga is an envoy of spiritual beings called the white hierarchy. But you entered for something else and end up there; so yes, it is 100 percent a sect. There is a lot of psychological coercion.
Her field-test experience was as hard as, or harder than, Martín’s. She says they hit her and made her slap another girl (“and if you did it softly, they shouted at you to hit hard”), and she was not allowed to show pain. Worst of all, she says, was when in winter they took her to a mountain, covered her eyes, stripped her, and put her in a freezing river.
—For what purpose?
—They did not tell us. You just had to obey. Later I found out it was to control emotions.
When she left, they told her her soul was “going dark.” She had to rebuild her life: she was alone and 29. “It is hard, because you leave believing the world is bad,” she says. “It was hard for me to trust again.”
Back in Montevideo, at her Old City home with her boyfriend and three cats, Daniella recalls she tried to recruit all her friends.
—Luckily I failed. I invited them to talks and recitals. They went to support me but did not stay because they were not interested—she laughs—. But in New Acropolis they began speaking badly about them, saying they were weird, that I was always going out... They almost consider me a traitor for having friends outside.
Daniella Scuadroni. Photo: Estefanía Leal.
She says they also interfered in appearance, asking her not to dress sloppily, to be more feminine and elegant, without “showing too much, without being sexy.”
And she sums up:
—They pressured you all the time, about everything: how you dressed, what you did, what you said.
But she interpreted those “pressures” as tests. Years after leaving New Acropolis—an exit that accelerated after someone posted Facebook photos of her drinking alcohol at a camp and dressed as a vampire with friends, and after a severe depression she suffered—she publicly shared her bad experience through videos on social media. So much so that she became a reference on the subject, and in the last year dozens of people from all over the world wrote to her. She says leaving was “a shock of freedom.” Today she works as a personal trainer.
Love bombing
Thursday, after eight at night. At headquarters reception, people come and go: some arrive for courses, others are members of the Living Forces and devote much of their lives to the organization. Nearby is Angkor, a playful Labrador whom acropolitans say they rescued from the street.
They smile kindly, sweetly. At the Franzini and Scosería house, everything is ordered and spotless.
On one wall stands the huge Plotino library (named after the Neoplatonist philosopher), organized by categories such as sacred texts, Chinese philosophy and esotericism. An acropolitan arranges flowers and then Feola appears—also smiling, of course—accompanied by Mauricio Puente, director of the Pocitos center.
He wears a black T-shirt with the New Acropolis logo. She wears a colorful blouse and a pendant with a small axe. Also an ankh (key of life) and a scarab, two Egyptian symbols. Her smile conveys peace, although her expression changes as the conversation progresses. But not at first: whenever there is a new visitor, they apply what they call “love bombing.”
Gabriella Feola and Mauricio Puente of New Acropolis. Photo: Juan Manuel Ramos.
—I’m going to record this—says Feola, placing her cellphone on the table.
—There are accusations that New Acropolis is a sect.
—As far as we know—Puente replies—there is a blog where five people, with full names, say that.
—There are always dissatisfied people—Feola adds—. Sometimes they do not understand us, or did not find what they sought and became frustrated.
—But there are recurring points in testimonies: that there is a course façade and then attempts to recruit people into the Living Forces.
—First, we recruit no one—says the director—. And we have nothing to do with sects: whoever wants to leave, leaves. Whoever returns, returns.
—They say people are free, but that there comes a point where deciding to leave causes terror.
—Oh, that is an extremely subjective view. I know where that comes from. It is not like that—Feola replies—. People commit to coming. We do not overwhelm them or try to separate them from their families.
—But in one Livraga text it says: “Start breaking useless chains with friends who do not share your ideal despite knowing it, and with anyone, whoever they may be, who opposes your current spiritual vision, because preserving those old relationships will harm you and those people, who have not yet awakened as philosophers; they would be ashamed of you or mock what you hold most sacred: your acropolitan ideal.”
—That is not current—she replies—. The institution adapts to the times.
—But the founder wrote it.
—Yes, in a historical context. Some things are totally obsolete.
—It would be like me citing a 1970 El País article.
—These are different things. Manuel Guerra’s Encyclopedic Dictionary of Sects defines New Acropolis as an “esoteric, neo-pagan and paramilitary sect.”
They laugh.
—Neo-pagan, paramilitary, Nazi—says Puente—. Since you are an investigative journalist: the person who wrote that is a priest and has his own bias. They also classify Freemasonry as a sect.
Regarding harsh initiation tests, both downplay them and call them “symbols and ceremonies,” similar to Catholic baptism.
—No one is stripped naked or put in a pit—Puente says.
—Nor do we mistreat anyone—adds Feola.
—It sounds pretty crazy.
—Out of context, it is not understandable.
—Sabri—someone calls to a young woman at reception—was the earth, water, air and fire test traumatic for you?
—No, not at all. I remember it fondly. We are all adults—she says.
The interview ends and both offer a tour of the two-story house. Upstairs there are three classrooms and, on one wall, a portrait of founder Jorge Ángel Livraga. Downstairs: a cafeteria, a room with four people handling social networks, and another space used for lectures and martial arts.
The tour ends, but something remains.
—Can I see the temple?
—No, that is reserved—they answer—. Our symbols are there.
The friendly smiles are gone.
JORGE LIVRAGA
The founder’s texts
Jorge Ángel Livraga, founder of New Acropolis, says in the Leader’s Manual, which El País accessed: “Care must be taken that ties with dissidents are not maintained for sentimental reasons, because if, while inside, they failed their duties, it is easy to infer that they do not understand or love New Acropolis. Keeping positive and friendly images of them is an invitation for others to follow their path.” It is a clear message to cut ties, but New Acropolis authorities deny this text exists. In one of his core texts, Livraga says: “The pyramidal system is not an option. The judgment of authority cannot be discussed.” On having children: “Even to two excellent acropolitans, children may be born who later devote themselves to drugs, violence, hunting fortunes with their sexuality, or... fighting acropolitans. Therefore, a Hachado must not sacrifice his life to engender possible enemies.”