Alejandro Jodorowsky - Psychomagic - The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

A professional hairdresser, nearly paralyzed with fear, approaches to cut my hair.

The woman covered in honey comes down from the roof of the car. I dance with her.

Sexual desire with dreamlike force. Her tights seem to summarize all of social hypocrisy. I remove them without preamble. They slip down her honey-covered thighs. Bees. Its impact on her black pubic hair. The submission of woman. Her eyes half-closed. Her naturally accepting nudity. Liberty. Purity. She kneels next to me. On her body, starting from the stomach, I glue the hair cut from my head.

I want to give the impression that these pubic hairs grow like a forest and invade the whole body. The hands of the hairdresser are paralyzed by anxiety. It is the executioner who must manage to shave my head.

Two models of Catherine Harley, strangers to all that has happened and panicked at the idea of soiling their very expensive silk clothing (rented for the occasion) come and go, carrying two hundred fifty baguettes onto the stage.

Now my brain is on fire. I take four black snakes out of a jar of money. At first, I try with tape to stick them onto my head to substitute for hair, but I finish with trying to put them on my chest like two live crosses. Perspiration impedes me.

The snakes move around my hands like living water. Marriage.

I chase the woman in pink with the snakes. She hides in the car, like a turtle in its shell. She dances inside. She makes me think of a fish in an aquarium.

I frighten the model dressed in green. She drops her bread and jumps back.

A spectator laughs. I throw the bread at her face. (During a reception, some days later, this woman approached to tell me that receiving the bread in the face seemed like communion, as if I had presented her with a gigantic sacramental bread upside the head.)

Suddenly, lucidity: I see the public seated there in the chairs, paralyzed people, hysterical, excited, but immobile, nonparticipatory, terrorized by the chaos, which is about to engulf them; I want to throw the snakes on them or to blast them.

I restrain myself. I refuse the easy scandal of a collective panic.

Calm. Violence of the music. Amplifiers turned all the way up. I put on pants, a shirt, and orange shoes. The color of a Buddhist burned alive.

I exit and return with a heavy cross made with two wooden beams. On the cross, a crucified chicken upside-down, with two nails in its claws, like a decapitated Christ. (I had let it rot for a week.) On the cross, two road signs: on the lower part, a sign with an arrow stating “exit on top”; above the chicken, a sign stating “no exit.” I give the cross to the silvery woman. I bring another. Two signposts: always the one on the bottom indicates the exit at the top; always the one on top prohibits exiting.

I give the cross to a woman in white. I bring a third cross. I give it to the other woman in white.

The two women straddle the crosses, transforming them into gigantic phalluses; they fight; with one of the two sticks at the end of the cross in the car window, they simulate the movements of a sexual act achieved with the vehicle.

I put the basin in front of the cross. The crucified chicken is shaken off over the spectators’ heads. We let the cross fall.

Among the musicians, I choose the one with the longest hair. I lift him. He is as stiff as a mummy. I dress him in priest’s clothing. I cover him with stoles.

The women, on their knees, open their mouths and stick out their tongues as far as they will go.

A new character appears: a woman dressed in a tube-shaped suit, like an upright worm. This suggests the idea of a “papal form” in decomposition — a pope becomes a Camembert.

The musician, imitating the gestures of a priest, opens a can of fruit in syrup. He places half of a yellow apricot in each woman’s mouth. They swallow it in just one mouthful.

Sacramental bread bathing in syrup!

A pregnant woman makes her entry. Stomach made of cardboard. The pope notices that she has a plaster hand. He takes the hand and breaks it into a thousand pieces. He opens the stomach using a pickax. (I must control it to prevent him from truly wounding her.)

He puts his hands on the interior of her stomach and takes out light bulbs. The woman screams as if she is giving birth. She gets up, tears a baby made of rubber from her breasts and hits the pope in the chest. The doll falls to the ground. The woman leaves. I pick up the baby. I open its stomach with a scalpel and take out a live fish convulsing in anguish. End of the music. Brutal drum solo. The fish continues to wriggle; the drummer shakes champagne bottles until they explode.

Upon seeing the froth covering everything, the pope has an epileptic attack. The fish dies. The drummer is silent. I throw the animal over the handrail; it falls in the middle of the spectators. Presence of death.

Everyone leaves the stage except me.

Jewish music. Dreadful hymn. Slowness.

Two huge white hands hurl a cow’s head at me. It weighs eight kilos (seventeen pounds). Its whiteness, its dampness; her eyes, her tongue. .

My arms feel its coldness. I myself get cold. In an instant, I become this head.

I sense my body: a corpse in the form of a cow’s head. I fall to my knees. I want to yell. That is impossible because the cow’s mouth is closed. I stick my index finger in her eyes. My fingers slip on the pupils. I don’t feel anything but my fingers — sensible satellite turning around a dead planet.

I feel myself like the cow’s head: blind. Desire to see.

I pierce the tongue with a hole punch; I open the jaws. I take out the tongue. I direct the head, mouth open, toward the sky, while I myself also look up, mouth ajar.

A howling that does not come from me but from the corpse. One more time, I see the public. Immobile, frozen, made by the skin of a dead cow. All of us are the corpse. I throw the head to the middle of the stage. It becomes the center of our circle.

A rabbi enters (the huge white hands were his).

He wears a black coat, a black hat, a white Father Christmas beard. He walks like Frankenstein. He is standing on a silver basin. He takes three bottles of milk from a leather suitcase. He dumps them into his hat.

I rub my cheek against his. His face is white. We take a milk bath. Baptism.

He grabs hold of my ears and kisses me passionately on the mouth. His hands take hold of my buttocks. The kiss lasts several minutes. We tremble, electrified. Kadish.

With a lead pencil, he traces two lines from the corner of my mouth to my chin. My jaw now looks like a ventriloquist’s doll. He is seated on the butcher’s block. One of his hands rests on my back as if he wants to pass through, to cut my spinal column, to put his fingers in my rib cage and squeeze my lungs and make me scream or beg. He makes me move. I feel like a machine, a robot. Dread. I must stop being a machine.

I slip my hand between his legs. I open his fly. I put my hands in and with a keen force I take out a pig’s foot (similar to the one that I imagined to be the phallus of my father when I was five years old). With the other hand I take out a pair of bull’s testicles. I spread my arms out in the form of a cross. The rabbi screams as if he were castrated. He appears dead.

The Jewish music becomes stronger; each time, it becomes more and more melancholy.

A butcher appears, wearing a hat, a coat, a black beard, his apron covered in blood.

He spreads the rabbi out and begins the autopsy: he puts his hands in his coat and takes out an enormous cow’s heart. Odor of meat. I nail the heart down to the cross. Long pieces of gut. I nail it.

The butcher leaves. Terrified, I lift up the rabbi’s hat. I take out the cow’s brain. I squash it against my head.

I take the cross and put it near the rabbi. I take from the suitcase a long plastic red ribbon and attach the old man to the cross, covered in guts.