Damonte, John Andrew (1915 – 1975)

John Da Monte
source: Homéopathe International

John Andrew Damonte (16 July 1915 – 5 November 1975) was an important British lay/professional homeopath and teacher who was a direct inheritor of John Henry Clarke‘s initiative to extend lay homeopathy.

John Damonte trained alongside Phyllis M. Speight, Edwin D. W. Tomkins and Thomas Lackenby Maughan, and he is largely responsible for the continued practice of “lay” homeopathy in Britain today.

John Damonte was also a colleague of radionics practitioners Rosemary Russell, Lavender Dower, Malcolm Rae and David Victor Tansley,

 

John Damonte was a Gibraltarian of Spanish, Italian and Jewish descent. His father was the Gibraltarian Ambassador to Morocco. John had started a medical degree at University of Montpellier in France in 1934 and failed to complete his internship as he was called up for the British Army. As a result he never completed his degree and worked throughout the war in British Intelligence, where he met and became friends with Thomas Lackenby Maughan. It is possible that they both met homeopath, anthroposophist and occultist Walter Johannes Stein, who also worked for British Intelligence.

After the war DaMonte came to Britain to study homeopathy and Druidism with Thomas Maughan. His main teacher of homeopathy, apart from Maughan, was Donald MacDonald Foubister.

John DaMonte’s involvement with Radionics was extensive and long standing. Throughout the 1950-75 period, he was a very close friend of Rosemary Russell, Lavender Dower, Malcolm Rae and David V. Tansley, all prominent members of the Radionic Association, and widely regarded as comprising the “inner sanctum” of that organisation. He had also taught homeopathy to a class of healers, during the early 1960’s and 1970s, including Hakim Archuletta. This group included the architect and astrologer Tad Mann, Wimbledon acupuncturist William (Bill) Fletcher, and the late David Victor Tansley, a prominent Radionics practitioner and Chiropractor.

DaMonte also set up and taught study and research groups in Portugal and Zurich in the 50’s and 60’s. The Zurich group did important work collecting data on the side effects of the BCG Tuberculosis vaccine. He also ran a Swiss group to help get people out of cults.

Damonte said homeopathy is an art, not a science. He taught homeopathy as an art, and gave up all the esoteric subjects he had come across.

According to all sources John Damonte was an extremely likeable and pleasant person, who worked and taught very much from intuition and by gaining immense rapport with his students… he had a great warmth and friendliness of personality and a well developed sense of humour.

Homeopathic knowledge was imparted by John Damonte to his students at weekly meetings over a five year period, 1970-75. He was also very knowledgeable about esoteric philosophy, ancient wisdoms of the East, theosophy and the Alchemists. He had many patients, both here, and in many parts of the world, Europe, and the USA.

DaMonte achieved many wonderful cures and helped a great many people. He died on November 5th 1975, at the age of 61, from a massive heart attack. Like Thomas Maughan, he was virtually a chain smoker.

He was greatly missed by the group, who carried on meeting and even took over some of his patients for a short while. Julian Carlyon joined John Damonte’s study group in 1974. Like others in the group, he was a relative newcomer, and had received very little tuition. As a result, the longer serving members decided to collate all the lecture notes and to continue teaching the later members of the group. This process lasted a further three years.

John DaMonte and Thomas Maughan were both rather colourful, charismatic figures, interested in eastern philosophy and New Age thought, in tune therefore with the mood of the times. Both were also enthusiastic and gifted teachers of homeopathy as well as successful homeopathic prescribers.

They are described by those who knew them, with great affection, in glowing terms. Their importance derives from the fact that they both ran separate groups for interested students who wanted to learn homeopathy. Many of these students were patients or ex patients of John Damonte and Thomas Maughan, or members of the Druid order.

The groups of twenty or so members, met weekly in various houses in the London area. John Damonte’s group met on Wednesday evenings in north London, while Thomas Maughan‘s met on Friday evenings in south London. He lived in Dulwich. The two were great friends. It was Thomas Maughan who had introduced homeopathy to John Damonte during the war and got him interested in coming to England to study the subject.

At one meeting in 1970, they formed the Society of Homeopaths, electing Thomas Maughan as Chairman and John Damonte as Honorary Secretary. The Society of Homeopaths was officially formed at a meeting on January 10, 1970. Subscriptions were collected with a view to financing lectures, visits and occasional publications. No events were organised, however, and as a result the subs were returned. This was about 1973-4.

The disappointment here was probably based upon a misapprehension of the main purpose of the Society of Homeopaths, which was largely educational in nature, rather than political. It was designed to produce homeopaths, not to campaign for more of it in the NHS.

This was the second such group that John Damonte had formed in England and he had previously trained mainly older students who were predominantly Healers.

In the case of John Damonte’s meetings, they took the form of informal discussions about homeopathic philosophy and the drug pictures of remedies. They also involved deeper discussion of actual case histories in which John DaMonte would give advice about the selection of a remedy, how to handle the progress of a case and the choice of potency.

However, the teaching style of Thomas Maughan was quite different, he being a severe bearded Scot with strong views about who should be doing all the talking and who the writing. However, the general subject matter covered was the same in both groups.

John Damonte had a colourful past, by all accounts, having lived and worked in Paris, North Africa, and Barking and having been involved with Radionics. He had also taught homeopathy to another class, of healers, during the early 1960’s.

John Damonte, being a Radionics practitioner, was keenly interested in the use of geometrical patterns, both to treat disease and to make remedies. He may have been involved with Malcolm Rae in the invention of the Rae Potentiser, a device that can produce homeopathic remedies from geometrical patterns on card and a bar magnet. This device was first produced in the early 1960’s by Malcolm Rae, a noted Radionics practitioner.

John Damonte and Malcolm Rae were such close friends that it is possible for John Damonte to have been involved in the design and its development, though he is not officially credited with this in the published works on the subject. It is possible as in many highly creative friendships, that the two dreamed up some of the devices from extensive discussions. A kind of creative rapport such as often develops between dynamic like minded individuals.

John Damonte was born in July 1915, smack in the middle of the First War. His father, Nicolas, was the Ambassador to Morocco and John studied medicine at the University of Montpellier in southern France. Of course, the University of Montpellier boasted the finest medical school in the world, dominating medical thought, along with Padua, throughout the Middle Ages.

Whether he qualified or not is in some doubt. However, he thought and behaved entirely like a doctor. He had numerous close contacts within the medical fraternity and was both a frequent and a welcome visitor, both to the Faculty of Homeopathy and to the upstairs private apartment above Nelson’s Pharmacy in Duke Street. He was an intimate friend and colleague of Donald MacDonald Foubister and of Dudley Wooton Everitt, head of Nelson’s Pharmacy.

It is thought that he met and became friends with Thomas Maughan during the Second World War, and that John Damonte then came to England both to study homeopathy in greater depth, and to continue his friendship with Thomas Maughan. They shared so many interests.

He also married an English girl, Phyllis, and had four children. He had an earlier marriage that bore no children.

To what extent Thomas Maughan was the teacher of John Damonte, or the other way around is still not certain.

John Damonte was the ‘Scribe’ or second in command of the Druid Order of which Thomas Maughan was Chief or Hierophant. Rumour has it that Thomas Maughan split the Druid Order because he took the Chief’s post after being Scribe – a custom disallowed by centuries of convention. Rumour also has it that John Damonte was offered the Chief’s position first, but turned it down to become Scribe under Thomas Maughan.

John Damonte was a naturally gifted at Radionics. He could dowse hen’s eggs as a boy and knew what the sex of the resultant chicken would be. However, it is not know with any certainty where he obtained his other skills. It is clear that he must have received extensive formal training in many things in order to have become so proficient. It may never be known where he got his vast therapeutic knowledge from.

John Damonte emphasised a range of 8 or 9 different diagnostic and therapeutic tools, and of which he was an unquestioned master. These include, Jungian psychotherapy, astrology, Egyptian ideas, Kabbala and Tree of Life, Radionics, face analysis based upon 12 archetypes, homeopathy, theosophy and Druidism…. He was a perfect master of them all.

What this means is that he used them freely and interchangeably with any and every patient he saw. Now that is talent enough for one person, but he was gifted probably even more in yet another way.

Like the best anthropologists, he had a certain human quality that enabled him to attune to the needs and problems of a person (to get inside their head) within minutes of meeting them. That was undoubtedly his greatest and most unusual gift. This gift has been variously referred to by those who knew him as ‘intuitive’, ‘warm’ and ‘loveable’. He was certainly all three, but his gift was probably that of a born healer in the fullest sense, who could ‘see’ the suffering a person had and could address it directly.

What it meant on the practical level was simply that he would meet a person and within only a very short space of time was absorbing intuitively an enormous amount about them, such that, as he felt his way along, a programme of ideas for their healing would be forming in his mind. This also meant that for any one person he would use a unique blend of the above tools.

For some Radionics treatment would be applicable, for others a homeopathic remedy. For others long therapy sessions would be applicable. For another the method was to train in esotericism or to study the face analysis system.

Having said that, however, there are three or four which he relied upon most. These were homeopathy, Radionics, psychotherapy, Theosophy, and face analysis. He relied on these more than any of the others to assess a case and to give some therapeutic assistance to the patient.

Again, we are out of the normally accepted boundaries of what we term ‘therapy’. John Damonte saw all people as having problems of health or mind or being unhappy, unfulfilled or incomplete in some way and thus saw it as his job to tune in to that and to try and help them. It didn’t matter who they were, whether they were down and outs, TV stars, drug addicts or minor royals. He tried to help them all.

He was a great optimist, a great humanist and while he saw the faults in people, he also saw the good in them. He ignored the bad, refrained from judging, saw the wider picture and developed the good; he saw all people as having ‘great potential’.

It is also of interest that he was raised by Jesuits and knew the Bible intimately.

John Damonte was very interested in colours and often gave people instructions and advice about how to change and integrate colours into their lives. This applied as much to their dress and garden as it did to their bedroom and study. He used colour as an archetype through which a person could be directed to bring about healing changes in their life.

This meant increasing their under use of one colour that was ‘good for them’ and decreasing their over-use of another colour that was ‘harmful’ to them. In this way, he could help subtly change a person’s life for the better. This was often done through very jocular comments like ‘You don’t want to use so much yellow! Try wearing blues more. What colour is your bedroom? Try increasing the red in it and see if that makes you sleep and feel better.’ Suggestions of this type were then reported on in later sessions and discussed in depth.

John Damonte was very interested in psychology in all its forms. He was interested in it as a tool for understanding people and the various problems they have. He was probably more of a Jungian than anything else. But he also incorporated into that basic Jungian position various other strands and threads from other traditions, such as Sigmund Freud and humanistic psychology.

He wanted people to tell him their problems in a free flow method, such as in psychoanalysis, and he also followed a method like Thomas Maughan‘s, of allowing someone to psycho-dramatize their problems during therapy. This allowed him to point out to a person some possible interpretations of things people said to them or events in their life so as to allow a reintegration of past traumas.

He used psychology both in a traditional sense and in its more esoteric form. What this meant is that he listened to people very compassionately and neutrally to just ‘tell their story’ – and recognised the immense therapeutic value of just doing that.

But the esoteric aspect came in when he then initiated a narrative or commentary about what they had said and placed it all into a more longitudinal context. For example, he would discuss why they had said what they said, why they had become upset by a certain person, who that person was from their past, how different events and types of event repeat themselves throughout one’s life and the deeper spiritual significance of their life.

He stressed repeatedly the power and opportunity of life and of the mind and attitude. He stressed that people can become free of the hurts and problems of their past and can attain greater peace, love and freedom as well as improved health.

The system of face analysis which John Damonte used was based upon the four elements of earth water fire and air, combined into couplets like earth-water, air-fire, etc. By deleting combinations of the same element (eg fire-fire, water-water), out of a possible maximum range of 16 (4 X 4), you get a range of 12.

The colour pictures for these 12 ‘face archetypes’ were painted by a London-based artist called Tammo in 1967. John Damonte commissioned from him the twelve archetypes and then had them photographed for use.

John Damonte used this system of face analysis in two main ways. First it could be used for general discussion about which of the faces are more or less attractive to an individual and thus revealing aspects of their underlying fears and aversions. This might be seen as a ‘straight’ use of them. Second he used them to illustrate what tensions and relationship upsets were going on in a patient’s life.

He would get the person to directly identify a troublesome person from their life in the terms of the archetypes, until such an individual was clearly identified. Then John Damonte would offer a detailed description of that person’s motives and psychology as well as their likely comments and actions. He would reveal to the client a plan of action based upon the archetypes so as to enable them to deal with these people and so improve their life.

Thus the archetypes offered in simplified form an access point into the complexity of relationship- based traumas within a patient’s life. By laying bare their relationship problems in this way – through the system of face archetypes – John Damonte was then able to draw out from the patient immense detail of their relationship problems in real life.

And, by juxtaposing the face archetypes and discussing them in great depth, he could help transfer problems and solutions from the realm of faces out into the person’s real life. By so doing, he enabled the person to re-gain control of their damaged relationships and so begin to develop strategies to heal their lives in the wider sense.

One of the many interesting things about John Damonte was that he used all these systems on the same client! So while they were having their Radionics or homeopathic treatment, for example, they would also be having these long winded discussions with him about their hurts and traumas and exploring through face analysis many aspects of their life of relationships.

In this way he seemed to mount a sustained attack on the patient’s problems, on many fronts – simultaneously. Or they would rotate through various techniques. But usually it meant at least two techniques being used in tandem. Rarely, if at all, did he use only homeopathy or only psychotherapy. He saw them as largely inseparable systems that would achieve maximum benefit from multiple and parallel use.

This approach had the advantage that he could discuss for example, the psychological impact of a remedy they had taken or the beneficial effect of their last interview upon their emotions and relationships. He could at the same time discuss how the remedy affected their emotions and their relationships with certain key person’s in the client’s life.

Or he could discuss any changes to the face pattern in that person’s life and see if any further predictions could be made about the behaviour of certain key people. He could also explore possible likely remedies for those people who had been identified as causing problems for the client. In this way, John Damonte could ‘mix and match’ the various therapies he was using to a remarkable degree and all to the ultimate good of the client’s life and happiness.

Of course, this approach stands in very marked contrast to the situation today, in which all therapies have splintered into their own little factions and people rarely use more than one technique. Indeed, as in allopathy, most therapists today operate and are trained in only one therapy – they have become specialists.

While it is true that some homeopaths do use a little psychotherapy, dowsing or manipulation, MOST do not. Same applies to other natural therapists. Being trained and licensed in only one technique, they tend to stick to that….

John Damonte was also heavily into Scientology for a time, and on close terms with Ron Hubbard down in East Grinstead. But later he withdrew from all that, after seeing the darker side of it. Once out of Scientology, he helped many other people to get out and to get over the ordeal and to re-orientate themselves after getting out. He led just such a group in Zurich.

Towards the end he was doing a lot of groundbreaking new work on the twelve elements and new remedies based upon the periodic table of elements and linking them into psychological types and organs and pathognomic links.

These ‘synthetic compounds’ was a system he was still developing and was therefore ‘work in progress’ when he died. It is broadly similar to what James Compton Burnett did with Johann Gottfried Rademacher‘s and Paracelsus‘ teachings on signatures, organ remedies and drainage remedies, combined up with homeopathy and tissue salts. John DaMonte made extensive use of the tissue salts and also linked that into his system of the twelve archetypes too.

Towards the end of his life John Damonte began to give more detailed teachings upon Theosophy, which before that he had never mentioned. He also tended to just ‘deliver lectures’ upon these topics rather than give info in his own unique style of discussions and witty stories.

John DaMonte’s life took a major downward turn soon after some flash-floods in 1975, when his house in Hampstead became flooded; the water ran in the top of the split level house and flowed right through and spilled out the other end into the garden. This event greatly upset and depressed John DaMonte and he freely admitted that it had unsettled him and from which he never recovered. He died in the November from a heart attack.

John Henry Clarke encouraged and supported the study of homeopathy by those who were non medically qualified.  The nature of British Common Law is such that anyone can practice any therapy on humans, but not on animals, as long as they do not claim to be able to cure: cancer, TB, Aids etc.

There was and still is no limitation on the practice of homeopathy or any other type of therapy  by the non medically qualified public in Britain.  Encouraged by John Henry Clarke, and later by Donald MacDonald Foubister as well as other doctor members of the Faculty of Homeopathy, lay homeopathy began to gradually grow in strength as the 20th century progressed.

Before, during, and following  WW II the primary active energy input into spreading the knowledge of homeopathic prescribing became centred  in a small but dedicated circle of non doctor homeopathic practitioners.  These committed people engaged in home study, attending lectures of doctor homeopaths, and open meetings of the British Homeopathic Association.

In turn they held homeopathy classes for interested members of the public. On the 10th of January 1970, Thomas Maughan, John Damonte, Edwin D. W. Tomkins and others met and formed a Society of Homeopaths. In 1978, the students of Thomas Maughan and John DaMonte, gathered together to [re]found The Society of Homeopaths that become a major organisation for registration and standards of practice for homeopaths in Britain.

As the profession grew in numbers so did the a number of professional registering organisations including the Homeopathic Medical Association and the Association of Registered Homeopaths…. and the evolution of the South London and North London Homeopathic Groups.

During WW II, and in the years following it, Thomas Maughan and John Damonte held homeopathy classes in various people’s homes in the Greater London area. During the 1960’s, the number of people attending these classes began to increase. By the early 1970’s, they had attracted a highly committed ongoing nucleus of students.

Thomas Maughan’s group later became known as the South London Group and John Damonte’s as the North London Group.

Many of these students also chose to become members of the Druid Order. Thomas Maughan was also Chosen Chief of the Druid Order as well as being a homeopathic healer.

Through referral by word of mouth, patients came to him for treatment from all over the world.  John DaMonte was a long time friend of Thomas Maughan, a Radionics practitioner and homeopath with patients from many countries as well.  John Damonte was also a member of the Druid Order and an active participant in its on going meditative healing circle.

A major contribution that Thomas Maughan and John Damonte were to bring to homeopathy was the integration of Samuel Hahnemann, Paracelsus, Emanuel Swedenborg, Johann Gottfried Rademacher, James Tyler Kent, and James Compton Burnett along with a study of ‘Subtle Anatomy’  the science of the treatment of the endocrine glands and the Chakras or vital energy centres that are associated with them.

Their approach was to utilise homeopathy not merely to match the outer physical, emotional, and mental symptom picture of the patient but to match remedies to the state of the energy field surrounding the physical body and the condition of the endocrine system which is its biological counterpart.

Thus was opened a new dimension for homeopathy whose surface has only been scratched. John Damonte suffered a heart attack in September of 1975 and died in October. Many of his group began to attend Thomas Maughan’s classes. Then in June of 1976, Thomas Maughan died of lung cancer.  At this point some of the group had only been studying homeopathy for a short time.  Many had not yet attained to a deep understanding  or appreciation of the depth and breadth of homeopathy that these two homeopathic healers were teaching. Both South London and North London groups continued to meet and study homeopathy.

During 1977, Robert Davidson, Martin Miles, Peter Chappell, Karen Whitney, Jennifer Maughan (wife of Thomas Maughan), Lynn Lovell, Mary Titchmarsh and Margaret Koolman of the South London Group began a series of discussions for the purpose of setting up a homeopathic society.  Later they invited Misha Norland, Kay Samuel, and Michael Haggiag of the North London Group, to share in the dialogue…

The document that became the reference point for their discussions was the Constitution of the earlier 1970 Society of Homeopaths of which Thomas Maughan was Chairman and John DaMonte, Secretary. On July 26, 1978 the Constitution of the Society of Homeopaths was signed by Robert Davidson, Martin Miles, Misha Norland, Peter Chappell, Kay Samuel, Mary Titchmarsh, Michael Haggiag, and Lynn Lovell. Martin Miles was elected the first Chairman.

Misha Norland explains:

A word about my beloved teacher, John Damonte, to whom I owe a debit of deepest gratitude: he entered my life in 1970 when I prayed for direction.

He gave freely and generously of his heart and from the font of his wisdom. He anchored me in the philosophy of healing and homeopathy and reawakened my love of psychology and the hermetic wisdom teachings.

He put the teachings of the classical Greek philosophers into a modern context of healing. His knowledge embraced astrology, theosophy, Jung and the teachings of the four elements, as well as the chakra system of the orient and its connection with the endocrine systems in our bodies. These teachings help to integrate our understanding of spirit, mind, emotions and body.

Of interest:

John Damonte’s son, Jonathan Damonte, is a homeopath in Canada.

Jonathan Damonte opened the first Be Well Now centre in Toronto in 2001 and the Bowen Therapy Clinics chain in 2008. He is the founder of Bowen Therapy College also in 2008, an accredited member of The North American Society of Homeopaths (NASH) and a Certified Classical Homeopath as per the Council for Homeopathic Certification (CHC) since 1998. Damonte is a founding member of the Canadian Council for Homeopathic Certification and was the founder of the Bowen Canada Registry in 2001. Also, was key to the formation of the first Canadian Equine Bowen Instruction, Equi-Bow™ Canada. He first learned Bowen Therapy from Ossie Rentsch and has now created an online training system for Bowen Therapy called Bowen-Online. His is the only college in the world endorsed by the family of Tom Bowen, who developed the therapy named after him. He currently teaches Bowen Therapy across Canada & the US as well as maintaining a busy practice with locations in both Vancouver and White Rock, British Columbia. He is active in many volunteer roles related to both his profession and with his favourite cause, The Prem Rawat Foundation (TPRF). He remains instrumental in the growth and success of Bowen Therapy in Canada. His practice provides a rich source of experience to bring to his enthusiastic and encouraging teaching methods. Most clients come at the time of a health crisis and it is in that moment that Damonte shines brightest. His clients high praise comes from the many referrals he receives from them. Notable to his practice is his ability to target the real issues in a persons health concern. His caring and compassion are clearly evident when he speaks and the pragmatic approach to the health and progress to health of each person he works with is refreshing in the world of healthcare. Damonte treats many patients suffering from chronic pain and multi-symptomed diseases with an approach that utilizes Bowen Therapy for almost all of his patients’ structural and postural problems, followed by homeopathy and if necessary or applicable a dietary and nutritional approach to their disease. He assesses a patients’ needs for these through in-depth assessments. His father John Damonte was a renowned British Homeopath and is credited with the current resurgence of homeopathy in Britain.