Alejandro Jodorowsky: Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

“If the author himself begins by putting down his own work,

How good can it be, after all?”

Watch out, I don’t put anything down

Or better yet, I’ ll praise my way of seeing things,

I’m proud of my shortcomings

I’ ll praise my creations to the skies.

Aristophanes’ birds

Buried the corpses of their parents

In their own heads.

(Each bird was actually a flying cemetery)

The way I see it

The time has come to bring this ritual up-to-date

So I’ ll bury my quills in the heads of my readers!

[TRANSLATED BY DAVID UNGER]

I understand then that these five characters greatly marked the young man you were.

They were alive. Alive and fighters! They were the best enemies in the world; they spent their days fighting, exchanging insults. . Pablo de Rokha, for example, published an open letter to Vicente Huidobro in which he exclaimed: “I am beginning to be annoyed with this story, my little Vicentito. Apart from that, I am not one of those cowards who beats up a clucking chicken because she says she has laid an egg in Europe.” Do you know what he said about Neruda? “Pablo Neruda is not a Communist, he is a Nerudaist — the last of the Nerudaists, or probably the only one.” These people exposed themselves; they were not afraid to live their passions. As for us, we embraced one cause and then the other. . We were immersed in poetry from morning to night. It was truly in the center of our existence. For us, these five poets formed an alchemist mandala: Neruda was water, Parra air, de Rokha fire, Mistral earth, and Huidobro, in the center, quintessence. We wanted to go beyond our predecessors who had done no more than anticipate our quest.

And this, how was it?

All of these poets had a public role. Huidobro said, “Poets, why sing about the rose? Make it bloom in the poem”; Neruda seduced a woman from the pueblo promising a marvelous gift and then showing her a lemon the size of a pumpkin. They had begun leaving literature to participate in acts of everyday life, taking the aesthetic and rebellious positions typical of poets.

You and your friends then wanted to go further in this direction.

I was lucky to be the same age as the famous poet Enrique Lihn, now deceased. One day, he and I and other friends found in a book about Italian Futurism an illuminating phrase by Marinetti: “Poetry is an act.” And from that moment on, we decided to pay attention to the poetic act. For three or four years, we dedicated ourselves to carrying out poetic acts, thinking about them all day long.

What did these acts consist of?

For example, Lihn and I decided one day to walk in a straight line, without ever wavering. We walked down the avenue, and we came to a tree. Instead of going around it, we climbed up and over it; if a car crossed in our path, we climbed on top, walking on its roof. In front of a house, we rang the doorbell, entered through the door and exited where we could, sometimes through a window. The important thing was to maintain the straight line and not pay any attention to an obstacle, as if it did not exist.

This should have caused more than one problem. .

Not at all, why? You forget that Chile was a poetic country. Remember, having rung the bell of a house and having explained to the lady of the house that we were poets in action and that our mission required us to cross her house in a straight line — she understood perfectly and had us leave through the back door. For us, this crossing of the city in a straight line was a grand experience, the way we managed to avoid all the obstacles. Little by little, we went about inventing more extreme acts. I was studying psychology. One day I was really fed up and decided to find a way to physically express that I had a bellyful. I left class and went calmly to urinate in front of the door of the office of the rector. Of course, I ran the risk of being permanently expelled from the university. A magical thing: no one saw me. I carried out my act and left incredibly relieved — in all senses of the word. Another day, we put a large quantity of coins in a bag full of holes and traveled to the center of the city. It was extraordinary to see everyone crouching down behind us, the streets filled with doubled-over bodies! We also decided to create our own imaginary city within the real city. For this we needed to celebrate inaugurations. We headed for the foot of a statue, a famous monument, and we began an inauguration ceremony, in accordance with our fantasy. We transformed the National Library into an intellectual café. Without a doubt, this became the seed of the Mystical Cabaret. What we call things is important; by giving things different names, it seemed to us that we transformed them.

Also, we dedicated ourselves to very innocent acts that were no less powerful, like putting a beautiful shell in the hand of the conductor when he came to take our bus tickets. The man stood there stupefied for a long time without saying anything.

You were scarcely twenty years old. What did your family think of these eccentricities?

As you know, I come from a family of immigrants who spent eight hours a day working in a store. When poetry entered my life in this form, they were aghast. One day my friends and I took a mannequin and dressed it with my mother’s clothes. Then we laid it out like a corpse, surrounded by candelabras, and we held a wake in the living room. Since we were involved in theater, we had all the necessary props, and it made an eerie impression. When my mother arrived, she saw herself being veiled! All my friends came to give their condolences. It naturally had an enormous impact on my family. Another time, we filled my parents’ bed with worms.

But this is very cruel, you were a hateful son.

I loved them, but I wanted, with all the insanity of youth, to break out of the confines. These acts shook them up, forced them to open. What else could they do before the unforeseen? Life is like that, you understand? Totally unpredictable. You think things will happen this way or that way and, in reality, while standing on the corner talking to a friend, you can be run over by a truck; you can run into an old lover and go to a hotel to make love; or the roof can fall on your head while you work. The telephone can ring to announce the best or the worst of news. Our acts as young poets were performed to prove this, to swim against my parents’ rigid world. To get into bed and find yourself with a swarm of worms powerfully symbolizes what happens to all of us, every day.

My father practiced Psychomagic without knowing it: He was convinced that the more merchandise he had, the more he would sell. He had to give shoppers the image of superabundance. Once he had behind him a row of drawers supposedly full of socks. He would stick a sock out of one of the drawers so it looked like the drawer was jam-packed, when there really was absolutely nothing inside. One day, when the store was full of customers, one of my friends, drunk, started opening all of the drawers. Then he wrote a poem proclaiming that my father was an exceptional man, comparable to the great mystics — equal to those who sold pure emptiness!

Your father must have been furious.

Actually, no. Every time something like that occurred, my family suffered a huge impact followed by silence and colossal perplexity. They were completely overwhelmed, and the results were so extraordinary for them that they thought they were living a dream, outside of the usual limitations of their existence. All of these acts had a dreamlike quality, imbued with madness. Remember Lihn and I set strange objectives. When we were fed up with the university, we would take the train to Valparaíso, determined not to return until an older lady had invited us to drink a cup of tea. Successful, we returned to the capital victorious.