Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Dance of Reality - A Psychomagical Autobiography

A woman with a limp, who needed to support herself with a cane, wanted me to help her walk properly. I explained that I did not work miracles. I was not Pachita, who would have put in a new leg bone and stretched out her leg for her, but I could make her better able to accept her limp. I asked her where she had gotten such an ugly stick, unvarnished and made out of ordinary wood. “It belonged to my paternal grandfather,” she said.

“And what became of that grandfather?”

“He never communicated with anyone. He lived as a hermit, holed up in his apartment.”

I advised her to burn the cane, take a handful of the ashes, and rub them on her short leg. After that, she should buy the most beautiful cane she could find, made of ebony with a silver handle. She did so. She regained her enjoyment of walking. From prescribing this act, I learned that the places where the body is affected, such as a scar or a hump, should be exalted.

I will conclude these examples by sharing this letter:

“I went to see you at the café where you read the Tarot for free every Wednesday, and consulted you: ‘eighteen months ago I felt a sharp pain in my neck. Can this pain be the effect of a regression from the spiritual point of view?’ I had consulted doctors, acupuncturists, massage therapists, osteopaths, bonesetters, healers, and of course, taken antiinflammatory drugs, cortisone, infiltration, and so forth. Nothing had taken effect. You prescribed a psychomagical act for me: I should sit on my husband’s knees and get him to sing a lullaby to my neck. But what you did not know is that my husband is an opera singer. He sang a song by Schubert. I’m cured, there is no more pain.”

Forming an equation between the neck, the past, and the subconscious, I felt that this client’s relationship with her father had not developed well. By seating her on his knees, her husband would symbolically play the role of her father and she would return to childhood. Moreover, singing a lullaby at the site of the pain would fulfill a childhood desire that had not been satisfied, namely the desire for her father to rock her to sleep and communicate with her on the affective plane.

I continued this first series of recommendations over a period of four years, most often given at the end of a Tarot reading, without daring to resolve more significant problems. (Having solved my financial difficulties thanks to the warm welcome received by my comics, drawn in collaboration with ten artists, I decided to conduct Tarot readings for free at a café for two-hour periods, after which I would give a lecture commenting on the readings. I called this activity the Mystical Cabaret.) Although I never gave the same advice more than once, I set myself some rules. For example, I always made sure that the act had a positive end, never advising anyone to do something that would finish in anger or destruction. In cases where it was necessary to sacrifice animals, they were always edible ones, which were then cooked and served in a banquet to family or friends. When something was buried in order to be dissolved and purified in the earth, a beautiful plant would be planted at the site. Any virulent confrontation over a grave was followed by an offering of honey, sugar, or flowers, or by cleaning the grave with soap and water, then perfuming it. In cases where the family had implanted a castrating vision in the client, I advised that he or she appear before them in disguise, first as the vision the family imposed, then as the person the family prevented him or her from being. Many women who had disappointed their fathers by not being born as boys and had been forced to masculinize themselves, resulting in subsequent frigidity and sterility, were advised to show themselves to their fathers wearing a fake pregnant belly, erotic female clothing, ample makeup, and a long wig.

A woman who had lived with her widowed father and four brothers, a “harem of men,” had been treated as a decorative but worthless being and had always masculinized herself in order to seek acceptance from her father. I suggested, “Go to see him dressed as a man, bringing him a gift of a bottle of mezcal, his favorite type of alcohol. If he wonders why you came dressed like that, tell him, ‘Let’s drink a glass first, then I’ll tell you.’ After drinking, go to the bathroom and transform yourself into a seductive woman with a long wig, false eyelashes, scarlet lips, miniskirt, and so forth. Present yourself before him and say, ‘Look, this is an aspect of me that you do not know. I have shown you two extremes: the man you want me to be and the exaggerated woman I do not want to be. Now I’ll show you who I really am.’ Then dress like a decent woman with good taste. Show yourself to your father and tell him, ‘Look at me; I’m not a butch or a slut. This is the woman I am. Being a woman does not mean being an idiot. Accept me as your daughter.’”

Regarding the idea of appearing before ones parents, obeying to the letter the images that they have pasted onto us, by common consensus my son Cristóbal and I performed an act that he says changed his life. I must admit when he was born I was still what I call a “psychological barbarian.” I was interested only in my own artistic achievement, not caring to heal my own psychological problems or anyone else’s. I thought that people were what they were and took a critical stance toward them. I was an insensitive, stern, competitive father. I remember having a fit of jealousy when I saw him sucking milk from the breasts of “my” woman. That is to say, I behaved toward him exactly the way my father had behaved toward me. In the mist of my neurosis, I gave him two names: Axel, so that he would be an exact imitation of me (Alex), and Cristóbal, so that he might discover a new world. Axel Cristóbal, subject to this double desire, seemed to grow up with a double personality. Every time he did something “satisfactory” (imitating me), he was Dr. Jekyll. When he did something “bad” (attempting to be himself), he was Mr. Hyde. This conflict caused him to have kleptomania. (Also, I took away his toys to punish him, as Jaime had done to me.) For years he could not overcome his impulses to steal. Although as time went on our relationship emerged from psychological barbarism to become one of conscious love (we both worked to smooth out the roughness of the past through multiple confrontations, which finally resulted in Axel making way for Cristóbal), he continued to feel these urges to steal things. The struggle to restrain the urges distressed him. He asked me for a psychomagical act to cure it. I told him to dirty his hands with mud collected at the foot of a tree. I knelt before him, placed his dirty hands on my face, and asked him for forgiveness. Then, at my bathroom sink, slowly and with concentrated attention, I washed and perfumed his hands. Following this he rubbed his palms on a Mexican postcard that showed Saint Christopher carrying the Christ child. Finally, I recommended that he have some business cards made that read, “I am Axelito, the thief child. I could have stolen this, but I decided not to. Thank me and bless me.” Whenever Cristóbal went into a shop, as soon as he felt tempted he would deposit a card there, taking care that no one saw him do so. Sometimes he would leave more than ten cards. He was so good at this that nobody ever caught him at it. His kleptomania disappeared completely, definitively.

Some time afterward, he came to see me, bringing a suitcase. I sat in the living room while he disappeared into a bedroom and dressed as Dr. Jekyll. With superhuman strength, he let loose his anger and tore apart the disguise, kicking it on the floor. Thus naked, he went back to the bedroom and came back out again dressed as Mr. Hyde, with his hat, cape, stick, and long teeth. He lay in my arms and cried, uttering deep and heartbreaking cries. I understood what I had to do. Also weeping, I began to strip him of his disguise. Then we put the clothes, those of Jekyll and those of Hyde, into a package together and walked out to the Seine. There, with our backs to the river, we threw the package in and without looking back went to celebrate his liberation at a good restaurant.