Jodorowsky, Alejandro - Psychomagic - The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

This therapy did not come to me as a sudden illumination but was perfected, step-by-step, over the course of many years. In the beginning, it seemed very extravagant, so scarcely “scientific” that I could only experiment with friends and relatives. From time to time, in my conference in Paris, I made references to it. Once, I was invited to the study center founded by the spiritual teacher Arnaud Desjardins. He had learned of my experimentations and asked if I could resolve an illness his mother-in-law suffered: eczema on the palms of her hands. When the lady showed me her affected hands, I thought she made a request-like gesture, as if she felt excluded by her daughter’s marriage. I asked that Desjardins and his wife, in front of the patient, spit abundantly over a mound of green clay and then apply the resulting paste over the eczema. The trouble disappeared quickly.

Gilles Farcet, a young disciple of Desjardins, came to see me on the advice of his mentor. Using the pretext of an interview, he wished to familiarize himself with my strange theories. Based on our encounter, I developed a brief “biography” entitled La Trampa Sagrada [The Sacred Trickster], which consisted of a large number of readings. Gilles suggested that I develop my ideas more extensively. At the same time, wanting to confirm the effects of my treatments, he requested a psycho-magic session to help him become “a profoundly spiritual writer.” I suggested that he write a book of interviews with me that would be called Psychomagic, subtitled Sketches of a Panic Therapy. My young friend was dubious: not knowing the theme at all, he felt incapable of providing me with interesting questions.

That’s exactly why I’m suggesting this. The bird of the spirit must liberate itself from the rational cage. So we will reverse the logical order. Instead of you asking me questions and I answering, first I will respond to you and then you will ask me . . . This is to say, the effect will come before the cause.

And that is exactly what we did: Farcet sat down in front of me with a recorder, and I went along giving responses to nonexistent questions for the next ten hours. There were moments when my young interviewer slept anchored to his machine. Gilles then divided this material into organized sections with questions for headings. Since he was going deep into unknown territory (he had told me, “I don’t know if the artistic path and the therapeutic path can be reconciled”), he wrote in an objective tone declaring: “I am not one of the faithful. I do not write this book as an apprentice but as a friend. At times, a healthy perplexity opposes words, which, by happy effect, forces one to be specific about his thoughts.”

When Marc de Smedt, director of the collection “Free Spaces” at the French publisher Albin Michel, agreed to publish the book, he did so on condition that the title be changed. “No one knows the word ‘psychomagic.’ Better to call it: Le théâtre de la guérison, une thérapie panique [The Theater of Healing: A Panic Therapy].”

El teatro de la sanación [The Theater of Healing] appeared in 1995. It drew widespread interest. I received a healthy correspondence asking me to prescribe psychomagic acts. To develop this technique, until then practiced exclusively intuitively, I decided to accept two advice seekers per day, from Monday through Friday, in one-and-a-half hour sessions. After establishing their genealogical trees—siblings, parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, great-grandparents—I advised them on psychomagic acts, which would produce notable results. This was how I developed a certain number of guidelines, which permitted me to teach this art to a large number of students, many of them already established therapists. I granted private sessions for two years, at the end of which I began to write La Danza de la Realidad [Reality Dance]. Gilles Farcet fulfilled his career as a spiritual writer, and today, a noble father of a family, he drives back straying spirits, collaborating with Arnaud Desjardins in these arduous tasks.

After the publication by Siruela in Spain of La Danza de la Realidad (2001) and thanks to numerous television interviews by Fernando Sánchez Dragó, the greater public learned about Psychomagic. There was no shortage of enthusiasts who, though lacking creative ability, wanted to counsel without ever having performed an honest artistic or therapeutic act and who gave a naive imitation of my techniques.

In 2002, I gave a conference at a university in Madrid for a group of six hundred people. Skillfully directed by my facilitator, the young Javier Esteban, the students presented their problems soliciting psycho-magic advice to resolve them. At the end of the conference, Javier gifted me with a sample of his book, Duermevela [Doze], in which he describes his dreams. (“I go to a shop where they sell thousands of gigantic fish tackle items. A fishhook gets me in the knee. The man who accompanies me taught me to fish, but he tells me there’s no need for a rod or any other tackle. I throw everything away, and we go through the woods until we arrive at a river. The fish jump into our hands.”) I consider that his writings have a healing aspect. Javier, in turn, expresses his support of my ideas and requests an appointment, for the purpose of asking me again the questions the students posed, questions to which the actual education system doesn’t respond. “Students have changed, but unfortunately their professors continue to maintain the archaic way of thinking,” he tells me. I travel to Paris, and he interrogates me for several days. “Think without limits; talk for the young mutants.” And that is how the second and third parts of this book were born.

PART ONE

Psychomagic

Sketches of a Panic Therapy

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST IN PANIC CHARACTER

by Interviewer Gilles Farcet

(From Psychomagie. Approches d’une thérapie panique ) I am no drunkard, but I am no saint either. A medicine man shouldn’t be a saint. He should experience and feel all the ups and downs, the despair and the joy, the magic and the reality, the courage and fear of his people. He should be able to sink as low as a bug or soar like an eagle. You have to be God and the devil, both of them. Being a good medicine man means being right in the midst of the turmoil, not shielding yourself from it. It means experiencing life in all its phases. It means not being afraid of cutting up and playing the fool now and then. That’s sacred too.

JOHN (FIRE) LAME DEER (SIOUX MEDICINE MAN OF THE LAKOTA TRIBE)

After many evenings spent in his library discussing Psychomagic, I asked Alejandro Jodorowsky if he intended to prescribe a psychomagic act for me. He retorted that the mere act of producing this book in his company constituted a sufficiently powerful act. Why not?

To tell the truth, Jodorowsky himself is a walking psychomagic act, an elevated and definitely “panic” character whose vibrational frequency introduces some cracks into the organization of our seemingly predictable universe.

A director who, with his accomplices Arrabal and Topor, has marked the history of theater with his (rightly named) “panic” movement; a maker of cult films like El Topo or The Holy Mountain, to which unpaid Americans devote theses and scholarly studies; an author and comic-strip writer who can afford the luxury of working with the best cartoonists; an attentive father of five children, with each of whom he actually maintains a prismatic relationship to this day; “Jodo” is also an unconventional tarot reader whose dazzling intuitions have left more than one person speechless; the convulsive clown of the Mystical Cabaret *1who, when the Parisian public was generally boycotting events like this, regularly packed his conferences by word-of-mouth promotional power only; an international magician—one could say interstellar (as influenced by Moebius)—whom rock stars and artists from around the world have consulted.