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

You have said that Pachita showed a lot of tenderness, in spite of her big knife. You were treated by her yourself, weren’t you?

Yes, I had a pain in my liver, and I was curious to try having an “operation” myself. Pachita told me that I had a tumor on my liver, and she agreed to treat me. I decided to make a game of it, telling myself that she couldn’t possibly kill me. Because, of all the people she had operated on, there had not been a single mishap. The time had come to put myself on the hot seat.

And you weren’t afraid, about the pain?

No, because for me it was all theater. I wanted to undergo an operation to see what would happen. But when I found myself on the bed in front of Pachita, with a huge knife in her hand and surrounded by her praying followers, I did begin to feel afraid. I would very much have liked to get up and leave, but it was too late. I realized that she was cutting me with her scissors . . .

I felt the pain of my flesh being cut with scissors. Blood ran, and I thought I was going to die. After she made the cut in my stomach, it felt like my belly had been ripped open. I had never felt that bad in my life. For about eight minutes, I suffered atrociously, and I went completely white. Pachita made me drink some herbal tea, and then I could feel blood rushing through my body again. Then she acted like she was pulling out my liver . . . Finally, she passed her hands over my stomach to close the wound. And the pain instantly disappeared! If it was sleight of hand, the illusion was perfect. Not only did those present see the blood running and my opened belly, but they also felt the same pain as the patient. Since then, my liver has never bothered me. Leaving aside the cure, that was one of the greatest experiences of my life. That woman was something spectacular, as impressive as a mystical Tibetan lama. Never had I felt so much pain, nor so much gratitude, as in that moment when she told me I was cured and that I could go. In that instant, I saw in her the Mother Goddess. What a psychological shock! Pachita was a great psychologist; she knew the human soul.

Were you ever afraid with Pachita again?

Oh yes, she knew very well how to use terror therapy. On this subject, I would like to cite, as written testimony, my ex-wife, Valérie Trumblay, who was assistant to the healer at the same time I was:

After suffering a miscarriage—I lost the baby from dancing too much during a theatrical tryout—I had pain in my ovaries. The doctors did not find the cause, and they saw in the symptoms psychosomatic effects from feelings of guilt. Whatever the cause, the pain was real, unbearable, and lasted for months . . . I decided to consult Pachita. She touched my stomach, without even having me undress, and she told me, “You were pregnant with twins. You still have a dead fetus inside you. I will have to operate—soon. Come back on Friday in the afternoon with a package of cotton, a bandage, and a liter of alcohol. Drink this tea for the three days preceding the operation.” On Friday, Pachita, in trance, had me assist with an operation before my appointment. The Little Brother opened a body, took out a beating heart, and put in another (which she said had been bought at a hospital). Pachita had me touch the entrails, close the wound with a single sweep of my hand, and organize the helpers to bring the patient into the recovery room. “Now you,” the witch then told me. I started to shake from head to toe, my teeth chattered, I was sweating. When I saw her lift the bloody knife, I fell on the floor, and I stayed there terrified. So the Little Brother told me, severely, through the mouth of Pachita, who suddenly acquired the hoarse voice of a man: “Calm yourself and lie down here. If not, I cannot do anything and your ovaries will catch gangrene.” With a lot of difficulty, I got up and laid myself on the folding bed. While a helper raised my skirt to show my stomach, the others began to pray under a painting of Cuauhtémoc, the adored emperor who, according to them, was none other than the spirit who possessed the witch. She soaked the cotton with alcohol and put it on my stomach, around the area marked to be cut. Then, very quickly, with the cold blow of a surgeon, she opened my stomach. I felt a live pain, I heard sounds of liquid, I perceived the smell of blood, and I believed I was dead. The three minutes of the operation seemed interminable; my heart beat a thousand times per second, my guts were in the open, and my whole body was frozen. But she, or better said, the Little Brother, was unruffled: not a word, not a useless gesture, an incredible precision. Suddenly, I felt a sharp pain, as if they tore off a fragment of viscera, and Pachita showed me a black and viscose thing, which looked like a squid. “This is the fetus. It is rotten.” The smell was unbearable. “Bring me that bag,” she ordered. The helpers ran to the kitchen and returned with a plastic supermarket bag. With great care, Pachita made a package and tied it with a red belt and gave it to her son saying, “Tonight you will throw this into the canal, into the dark waters, with your back turned on it, and you will leave without looking back. Malignant things are caught in glimpses . . .” Then she closed the wound with her hands, and the pain disappeared in an instant, as did the fear. She bandaged my stomach, and she ordered me to rest for three days and to drink a liquid prepared especially for me. As I was the last patient of the day, at this time Pachita had to restore her own body and have the Little Brother return to his kingdom. I began to cry so hard that my sobs seemed to take over the little room. While the helpers prayed that Pachita would return to being a woman, I heard a little voice crying, shouting in the corridor, “Mommy, mommy . . .” It seemed to me that only I could hear it, and I exclaimed, “Outside there, there is a child calling for her mommy.” They ordered me, severely, to quiet down and to let the vampire go. After a month, I could walk normally. A very sharp pain perforated my stomach at the tiniest sudden movement. But the result of the operation was unequivocal: I never again suffered pain of the ovaries, after so much agony. Since then, I converted into a faithful follower of Pachita and, in the company of Alejandro, I have assisted many operations. I cannot affirm categorically if what I saw was real or an illusion, but regardless of what I saw, this woman cured those who had faith in her and, above all, in the Little Brother. Pachita dedicated her entire life to those who suffer. If that was a trap, it had to be a “sacred trap” as Alejandro would say.

Now I would like to relate a failure that, seems to me, was due to a lack of faith or the bad faith of a patient. I knew a rich American divorcée who suffered from a persecution complex. She was convinced that death pursued her; that it circled around her using her as a channel. Her cleaning lady had drowned in the pool; her mother had died in an airplane accident on her way to visit her; a friend of hers committed suicide . . . I advised Pachita that I was going to introduce her to someone possessed. I tried to persuade her to believe, but she was closed in distrust toward the white woman who visits an Indian village. The American arrived at the witch’s house in an ambiguous mood. She entered the room with a repugnant, disdainful air. Upon seeing her enter, El Hermanito, embodied in Pachita, went red in the face and, expelling foam from the mouth and brandishing the knife with the expression of an assassin, attacked her, determined to kill her. Between the eight of us present, we held the witch, who fought with a force that seemed nearly impossible to subdue. We sang a spell, and after several minutes of complete panic and rage—a crisis bordering on an epileptic fit— El Hermanito calmed down. Pachita began to caress the head of the American, who was suddenly very submissive, like a frightened child. “Now I see, my little daughter,” murmured El Hermanito through Pachita’s mouth. “You are possessed by a criminal demon. Without knowing it, you give death. You want to kill. Don’t deceive yourself, be sincere and realize that you, because of fear of the world and out of resentment, you are full of a thirst for destruction. If you want to free yourself, you must follow my instructions to the letter . ” El Hermanito ordered her to go to the herb market and buy seven belts of different colors and a piece of coral. For twenty-one days, while sleeping, she should wrap her body with the seven belts and sleep covered like a mummy, with the coral on her chest, like a medallion. For me, the message was clear: she should have slept every night wrapped in the rainbow, symbol of an alliance with God, and purified by the humble beauty of the coral. But the patient did not see it like that. She terminated the consultation, again assumed her old personality, and created every obstacle imaginable in order to not follow the instructions of going to the market. First she broke a toe. Then she suggested she buy the belts in a store in the metropolitan area, because the herb market seemed like a dirty place to her, full of filthy Indians . . . After two or three weeks, I convinced her to go with me to the market. Once we were there, she proved to be absurdly mean; she haggled on the price of the coral and the belts until she was angry over a few pennies. Finally we left the market with the package in her hand, but she almost forgot it in the taxi and didn’t show the least interest in taking it with her. That was it! I decided to cut our ties, and I never saw her again. I left her in that world, her world without faith and without love, a victim of herself. Years later, I was informed by the press that she had killed her lover. Pachita was right: that woman was an assassin. El Hermanito, trying to leap on her to kill her, acted as a mirror. The American, moored in her suffering, did not want to change, which was reason enough for her not wanting to benefit from the knowledge transmitted by Pachita, to whom she had gone for a consultation only because I asked her to, although she had no true faith in the power. My point is that it is necessary to collaborate with a sorcerer. El Hermanito could not heal someone who did not deeply desire it or who refused to collaborate.