Alejandro Jodorowsky - Psychomagic - The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

I lift up everything — wood, meat, clothing, body — and I throw it all along the length of the ramp that descends to the public. (Everything weighs nearly 125 kilos: in spite of the shocking violence, the man feels nothing and has not a scratch on him.)

The women in white, black, pink, and silver enter.

They kneel.

Waiting.

A new person enters: a woman covered in black satin cut in triangles: a kind of spiderweb. A three-meter rubber dinghy is attached to her suit and resembles an enormous vagina. Orange plastic filled with air. The bottom of the raft is made of white plastic.

Symbol: the hymen.

Dance. She signals to me. When I approach, she dismisses me. When I move away, she follows me. She mounts me. The raft covers me completely. I take the ax. I split the white bottom. Hurling. I split the web and take refuge in the vagina. I stay between her legs, hidden by the black satin. From a bag hidden near her stomach, I take out forty live turtles and throw them at the public.

They seem to gush from the enormous vagina, like live stones, one could say.

I begin to be born. Cries from a woman giving birth. A woman sobs. I fall to the ground in the middle of the glass lightbulbs, bits of plates, feathers, blood, pieces of firecrackers (while he shaved my head, I lighted thirty-six, one for each year of my life), puddles of honey, pieces of apricot, lemons, bread, milk, meat, rags, wood splinters, nails, sweat: I rebirth in that world. My cries resemble those of a baby or an old man. The old rabbi, making a desperate effort, hops from here to there, attached to the cross like a pig in agony. He frees himself from the plastic ribbon. He exits.

The woman-mother pushes the woman in black toward me. I lift her. I bring her to center stage, her arms are spread open. A corpse-cross. The black paint suggests a cremation: my own death.

Giving me life, the woman threw death into my arms. Defiled with the makeup of my partner, I begin to turn completely black. My face looks as if it were burned.

The women attach us, one to the other, with bindings. I am tied to her by the waist, the arms, the legs, and the neck. This bony cadaver is encrusted in me, and I am encrusted in her. We look like Siamese twins: we nearly make one. Slowly, we improvise a dance. We sprawl on the ground. The movements are not hers or mine, but both of ours at the same time. We can control them.

The women in white and pink splashes us with mint, black currant, and lemon syrup. The gooey liquid, green, red, and yellow, covers us; mixed with the dust, it creates a kind of mud.

Magma.

The curtain begins to fall slowly. Our united bodies cling one to the other, like pillars. We want to rise; we fall.

The curtain is down.

(All the ingredients employed in the “Sacramental Melodrama” were thrown at the public: suits, axes, containers, animals, bread, auto parts, and so forth. Big altercations between those present who fought like birds of prey to salvage the relics. Nothing remained.)

Ahem, I ask myself if I regret having missed the “Sacramental Melodrama” or if I am glad to have missed it.

Wait! It’s not over yet! The audience then argued over the live turtles, the internal organs, the steaks, the hair, and so forth. I returned to the stage and addressed them: “Generally, one pays a high price for one’s place at a theater to receive very little. Today, there was no charge, you didn’t pay anything, and you received a lot. It is midnight. In order to present to you the last part of this poem, I need two hours of preparation. Go get some coffee and come back at two in the morning.”

Everyone applauded and left the theater. At two in the morning, the theater was again full. I began the ceremony that Alain-Yves Leyaouanc had proposed to me. I got dressed in a suit from the 1920s; I shaved the pubic hair of his young wife to the sound of sacred music. On her body, she had glued dominoes. It was a very moving act, and the spirit in which it was accomplished quickly generated a religious atmosphere. There was also a copy in plaster of Rodin’s Penseur in which we made holes with blows of a hammer. Jets of China ink came out of the head of the thinker, then we let two thousand little birds loose in the theater. As I told you, I was at the end of the happening, so cleaned of myself that the birds came and landed on my head without my paying any attention.

What was the meaning of this public demonstration?

It was like an ordination, the ritual sacrifice of what had, for a long time, molded my life. This happening, at the same time that it made history, ended a period of my life. I left exhausted, battered, and I thought a lot about it. I had always seen, prowling around me, the ghost of darkness, and I felt more than ever that theater should go toward the light. However, I told myself, never forget that the lotus grows out of the mud. One must explore the muck, stir death and dirt to go toward clearer skies. My main concern from then on was to promote positive, enlightened, and liberating theater. So I realized that I needed to become completely different, and I began to practice theater counseling. If someone — no matter who — desired to do theater, I would communicate the following theory: The theater is a magical force, a personal and a nontransmissible experience. It belongs not only to actors but also to the whole world. A decision, a rough resolution, is enough for this force to transform your life. It is time for human beings to let go of conditioned reflexes, hypnotic systems, erroneous self-concepts. World literature devotes many pages to the theme of the “double,” which, little by little, expels a man from his own life, takes over his favorite places, his friendships, his family, his work, until it makes him an outcast and, at times, his own assassin, according to some versions of the universal myth. For my part, I believe that we are the “double” and not the original.

You want to say that we identify ourselves with a person who is but a mere caricature of our deeper self?

Exactly. Our self-concept. .

In other words, the idea that we make of ourselves. .

Yes, our ego. It doesn’t matter the name that we give to this agent of alienation; it is never more than a pale copy, an approximation of our essential self. We identify ourselves with this double that is as erratic as it is illusory. And suddenly, the “original” appears. The ruler begins to take back the place that belongs to him. The limited “me” then feels persecuted, in danger of death, and rightly so. For the “original” will, in the end, dissolve the double. As much as humans identify with the double, we must understand that the frightening invader is nothing but ourselves, our own deeper self. Nothing belongs to us; everything belongs to the “original.” Our only chance is that the Other arises and eliminates us. We do not suffer from this murder, but we will take part. It acts as a sacred sacrifice in which we give ourselves entirely to the master, without anguish.

How can theater help someone return to the, using your expression, “original”?

Because we live enclosed in what I call our autoconcept, the idea one has of oneself, why not adopt a completely other point of view? For example, tomorrow, you can be Rimbaud. You will wake up as Rimbaud, and you will brush your teeth; you will dress like him, you will think like him, travel the city like him. . For one week, twenty-four hours a day, and for no other spectator than yourself, you will be the poet, acting like him with your friends and acquaintances without providing them with any explanation. You will achieve being an author-actor-spectator, producing yourself not in a theater but in real life.