Alejandro Jodorowsky - Psychomagic - The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

Whatever the case, with Jodorowsky things always end up arranging themselves, regardless of the traumas inflicted on the nerves of the organizers. He has no rival when it comes to spinning a situation presented under the worst auspices into a new direction, and he changes reality as easily as if it were a glove.

Why not mention here a representative anecdote, which will appear again later in the book. It clearly illustrates this capacity to give reality a spin — something you’d better be prepared for if you have the audacity to accompany him on his trajectory.

Motivated by an annual fair, we had agreed to appear together. The fair included an organic vegetable market, vendors of whirlpools, and all sorts of the esoteric: poets of Mother Nature, editors and doctors in alternative medicine. . Was it a tactical error? What happened was this: When I arrived at Vincennes in search of my hero, I found him immersed in the development of a comic strip and little disposed to detaching himself from his focus to go talk at “the marjoram” *2(as he sweetly called it).

I insisted, however, arguing that they were waiting for us and that we must keep our word, until finally Jodorowsky consented to get into my car, repeating all the while, “I don’t feel it, all this. . I don’t believe we should go to the Marjolaine. .”

Upon arriving at our destination, we found the worst: a hall open to the four winds, without microphone or chairs for the panelists, and a crowd of about a hundred people who had come to listen, not to Jodorowsky, because of an error in programming, but to Dr. Woestlandt, the nice author of esoteric-medicine bestsellers. .

While I was furious, my genius companion, after capturing at a glance the magnitude of the catastrophe, threw at me, in a fatalistic tone, “You see? I already told you!” and he turned to leave.

My friend ran behind Jodo and advised him to talk anyway. Obviously being sensitive to feminine reasoning, Alejandro turned again and said, “Alright, these people want to hear Dr. Westphaler. Why not introduce me as if I were him? Tell them I am Dr. Wiesen-Wiesen and that I’m going to talk to them.”

Perhaps today I would rise to this challenge, but I was, at the time, still too immersed in the conventional idea according to which Dr. Woestlandt is Dr. Woestlandt, Gilles is Gilles, and Jodorowsky is Jodorowsky. . My reality principle forbade me from aiding in this masquerade. So I mumbled some polite words to introduce my dangerous friend, who planted himself solidly in front of the disconcerted audience and spoke in a sweet tone, “Listen, I am not Dr. Westphallus, but that doesn’t matter. The person is not important! So, take me for Dr. Wiesen-Wiesen and ask me all your questions. It makes no difference the person. I will respond to you as if I were Dr. Wouf-Wouf. .”

Dumbfounded at first, the audience did not take long to give in to the spell and enter into Jodorowsky’s game, with which he, before my incredulous eyes, achieved great success. Soon enough he invited his improvised audience to tell him their problems, and in a singsong tone he urged them to take full advantage of the fortune granted by destiny’s whim, “Hark! Ask well your questions. This is the last time I will come to Marjolaine. .”

After stopping at the Dervy Publishers booth to buy Dr. Woestlandt’s book (“All the same, I must know who this Dr. Westphaller is, no?”), Alejandro returned to the lunchroom where he held court at the center of a vast circle of admirers, continuing with endless kindness to distribute advice and enlightened comments. This was how an afternoon that began as a fiasco ended as an apotheosis.

We should also recall his striking intuition. It is not rare that Alejandro meets a person for the first time and delivers point-blank some hidden truth, thus giving the interlocutor the disturbing impression of being in the presence of an omniscient magician.

A friend — we’ll call Claude Salzmann — has not forgotten the evening after a conference, which was already epic, while sitting on the terrace of a café at Saint-Sulpice, Jodo proceeded, incongruously but not without delicacy, to give one of his small revelations: “Listen to me, Salzmann, can I talk to you? You are a friend of my friend, so I permit myself to talk to you. Listen, Salzmann, if I look at you, I see a man divided into two natures — your upper lip is very different from your lower lip.” Glancing at Claude, I noticed for the first time, this striking facial feature. “Your upper lip, very thin, is that of a serious man, spiritual, almost rigid! It is the lip of an ascetic. But your bottom lip, a lot bigger, fleshy, is the lip of a sensual man, a lover of pleasure. Yes, you have these two natures in you. You must reconcile them.” Albeit in itself very simple, this observation affected my friend, who was applying himself more than ever precisely to unifying in himself these two tendencies: contradictory, according to traditional logic; complementary, according to profound, spiritual logic.

How many people have I heard give similar reports that Jodorowsky had, with the aid of a tarot card or solely with the power of observation, summed up their current difficulty in a word and exposed some arcane secret of their nature to broad daylight?

During a visit one day, I was shocked to witness Jodorowsky, who had never previously met the friend I had brought along, and without her formulating a question or drawing a card, sum up in a few sentences the essentials of the situation in which she found herself. No surprise then that our man inspires such passion and devotion.

The king Jodorowsky sits enthroned in his court, surrounded by swarms of followers for whom the Mystical Cabaret is like a very holy mass. There are those who for years have not missed a service, gathering with devotion to follow the master’s most unusual sermons. .

I would like to make it clear that I am not part of the flock. To use the terms Jodorowsky uses in the postscript to La Trampa Sagrada, the “nearly young man” that I am has more to learn from the “nearly old man,” and it is, above all, as friends that we have conversed. It is with a healthy confusion that I sometimes oppose his stories, and this has the positive result of obliging him to clarify his thoughts.

Because of his dazzle, which always provokes fascination, one can also become doubtful or even irritated; for, as exact as they often are, these right-out-of-the-box intuitions sometimes seem a bit hasty. After seeing him indulge in his lightning treatments in the framework of the Cabaret where, in the space of one evening, he boasts about unraveling old psychological knots as a result of the genealogy tree embellished with the zest of “Psychomagic,” the spectator, sympathetic but having conserved a wisp of critical sense, cannot help but swing between admiration and skepticism, amazement and doubt. Admiration and amazement, at the breathtaking performance of this actor par excellence, his ability to manage and to guide the energy of a hall of five hundred people, and the iron relevance of his observations. Skepticism and doubt, as these evenings are garnished with laughter and emotion while human woes are staged with a mad audacity in which complexes and traumas are exposed to broad daylight then treated by the “master” with a clever combination of keenness, outrageousness, and benevolence. . ushering in a new genre, that of spiritual-analytical “reality show.” One leaves the hall both seduced and worried, wondering about the real consequences and the long-term effects of this jumble of artistic therapy.

There is something of the old-fashioned tooth puller and snake oil peddler in this visionary of Vincennes who describes himself as a “sacred trickster.” But this facet of “transcendental charlatan,” an integral part of the Jodorowsky character, is in the final analysis at the service of a rare compassionate energy. One can also very well say that Alejandro is a bodhisattva à la South American salsa — a spicy salsa, very spicy. .