Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Dance of Reality - A Psychomagical Autobiography

“And if I win?”

“Keep playing, days, weeks, months, years, until you end up losing it all.”

Sometimes very simple advice leads to a good result. I drew one woman out of depression by advising her to go to a tea shop and eat an éclair (a pastry with a phallic shape) with coffee-cream filling every morning before breakfast for twenty-eight days in a row.

The film The Wizard of Oz provided inspiration for advice I gave to clients with social neuroses. The Tin Man wants to have feelings, so the psychomagician places a heart-shaped watch on his chest. The Scarecrow wants to be intelligent, so the psychomagician gives him a university diploma. The Cowardly Lion wants to be brave, so the psychomagician gives him a medal. The subconscious takes the symbols for realities! In traditional Chinese culture if one burns fake bills on the graves of one’s ancestors, one feels that one has made an important sacrifice. A voodoo priest who spits out clouds of rum that evaporate feels that his spirit is ascending to the gods with them. For a doctor whose brother was a tennis champion and who could not get enough patients because he felt anonymous, I recommended placing a photograph of himself with his brother in his waiting room. But using a clever trick, he should switch the heads so that the tennis champion’s head was on his body and his head was on his brother’s body.

In some cases, the archetype that causes the client’s frustration is the mother, backed up by the grandmother and great-grandmother. This coalition is the most powerful of all and can only be overcome by an archetype of divine character. The only one that is psychologically stronger than the mother is the Virgin Mary (assuming the client is Catholic, of course). Often, motivated simply by the desire to help, I have used places that are exalted in popular culture and, at the risk of being branded sacrilegious, elements of sacred ceremonies. An example is a woman from a Protestant background, one of eight siblings, who wanted to start a family but an irrational fear prevented her from marrying. I explained to her that when a family tree has mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers burdened by a large number of children, there is a fear of semen as a diabolical substance that causes unwanted pregnancies as punishment for pleasure. I proposed an act that would make her lose her fear of sperm, giving it its true dimension: a divine substance. “First, make love with your boyfriend, asking him to ejaculate into a glass at the bottom of which there will be a host. After that, fill the glass with melted wax and put in a wick. After the wax has hardened, bring the candle to the crypt dedicated to the Virgin at Lourdes, and place it at her feet. Then light the wick, kneel, and pray nine Our Fathers, one for your father and eight for your eight siblings.”

As my students increased in number, I took on broader problems. Santiago Pando, one of the directors of the advertising campaign for President Fox of Mexico, had attended my seminars in Guadalajara and had applied the principles of psychomagic in his successful campaign. Pando asked me, “If we consider that our country has suffered for seventy-five years from a disease called PRI, *9could you propose psychomagical advice to cure it?” I suggested, first of all, to celebrate collectively at the national level: at the moment when power was handed over, the new president would shout, “Mexico is rising!” and millions of helium-filled balloons (made of biodegradable material), in the three colors of the country’s flag, would be released into the sky.

Secondly, an Internet site called Virtual Mexico would be launched where all citizens would collaborate, ideally to convert Mexico into Eden. The virtual country would serve as a model for the real country.

I considered it of vital importance to change the appearance of the currency. The bills, which had become symbols of corruption and exploitation, imbued with the suffering of the people, had to recover their dignity and become positive talismans. I advised them to print bills with images from popular faith, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe, Saint Simon, Santa Muerte, Saint Paschal Baylon, and María Sabina.

I also suggested covering the entire Pyramid of the Sun with a thin layer of gold leaf and covering the entire Pyramid of the Moon with silver leaf. At the top of the masculine (gold) pyramid, a silver-plated statue of the goddess Coatlicue should be placed. At the top of the female (silver) pyramid, there should be a gold-plated Aztec solar calendar. This phenomenal act would attract millions of tourists. With the money raised, the lake that had been so absurdly dried up, turning the region into a dusty valley, could be restored.

Psychomagic is about saving time, accelerating the gaining of awareness. Just as a disease can announce itself suddenly, healing can also arrive in an instant. A sudden illness is called unfortunate, while a sudden healing is called a miracle. However, both take part in the same essence: they are forms of the language of the subconscious. Thanks to rapid detection through tarology, a deep understanding gained by studying the repeating patterns in the family tree, and psychomagical actions, we can come closer to the inner peace that is a product of the discovery of our true identity, which allows us to live with joy and die without anguish, knowing that we have not squandered our time in this dream called “reality.” However, valuable as these interventions are, if the client does not put in as much effort as the therapist, no mental mutation will be achieved; all the work will do nothing more than calm the symptoms, seeming to eliminate the pain but leaving unhealed the wound that invades the entire individual with its distressing shadow. The client, at the same time that he or she is seeking help, rejects it. The therapeutic act is a strange fight: we struggle mightily to help someone who puts up all possible barriers and tries to steer the healing toward failure. In a way, the healer is the hope of salvation for the sick person, but at the same time an enemy. He who suffers, fearing that the source of his ill health will be revealed to him, wants to be put to sleep, wants to be made insensible to pain, but wants in no way to change, in no way to be shown that his problems are the protesting of a soul locked in the cell of a false identity. Many clients have come to see me because, despite having achieved what they wanted to achieve — success in love, in material life, in social events — for no apparent reason, they want to die. Some triumphant people die in senseless accidents; others, apparently healthy, succumb to chronic diseases. Astute businessmen are ruined every day. Tranquil beings, surrounded by loving families, commit suicide. Why? When a mother, consciously or not, wants to get rid of the fetus for some powerful reason (because the couple has economic or emotional problems, because the father has fled or died, because the woman became pregnant by accident, because ancestors have died in childbirth, or for many other anxiety-related reasons), then this desire for elimination, for death, is embedded in the intrauterine memory of the new being and acts as an order during his or her earthly life. Without realizing it rationally, the individual feels that she is an intruder who has no right to live. Even if the woman becomes the best of mothers after the birth, the damage is already done. Her son or daughter, even if everything that others consider happiness is at his or her disposal, will have to battle against incessant desires to die.

Moreover, even if the mother joyously accepts the pregnancy, she may not want a real child but an imaginary one who will carry out the family’s plans, even if those plans have nothing to do with the child’s true nature. The offspring is expected to be equal to his progenitor, or to achieve something that the adult could not achieve, or else the mother — whose father, having unresolved homosexual desires, has made her into a failed man, forcing her to suppress her femininity and develop masculine characteristics — dreams of giving birth to a perfect boy whose phallus she will take control of, satisfying her father’s wish. In such cases, it is common for the mother to be single, so that her child is given the surname of the maternal grandfather, metaphorically carrying out the father-daughter incest. Because humans are warm-blooded mammals, in the depths of their animal nature they carry the need to be protected, nurtured, and sheltered from cold by the bodies of their fathers and mothers. If this contact is lacking, the offspring is doomed to perish. A human being’s greatest fear is to be unloved by his or her mother, father, or both. If this happens, the soul is marked by a wound that never stops festering. The brain, having not found its true, bright center that would keep it in continuous ecstasy, lives in anguish. Unable to find true pleasure, which is nothing other than being oneself rather than being an imposed mask, it seeks out the less painful situations. I had a French friend who when asked, “Hello, how are you?” would reply with a smirk, “Not too bad.” Between two evils, the brain chooses the lesser one. Since the greatest evil is not being loved, the individual does not recognize this lack of love, and rather than enduring the atrocious pain of becoming conscious of it, prefers to be depressed, to create a disease, to be ruined, to fail. Because of these unbearable symptoms, the client starts therapy. If the healer wants to heal the wound at its core, a wide range of defenses must be deployed.