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

A bit surprised anyway to pass by everyone—but Alejandro explained to me that she thinks men should go ahead of women because men deal less well with suffering; women can wait—so I enter behind her, accompanied by Valérie who explains my case in Spanish.

Suddenly, this little old lady turns toward me and does two or three very quick karate moves while looking at me with her white eye. Right then, I would have said she was twenty years old if someone had asked her age. So she takes the raw egg Valérie brought, breaks it and rubs it all over me, on my face, on my sleeves, on my shirt, on my pants. Then she takes a kind of white liquid in a big bottle behind her and does the same as with the egg. Voilà! Completely whitewashed. She touches my leg on the knots left from the tear. Then she goes back to an altar, like a little nativity scene with figurines and candles, and she begins to pray, to mumble. I listen. I don’t understand anything, but I listen. The room is shadowy, only lit by three or four candles; there is an operating table, two or three assistants who are here to learn or to whom she relays the gift, and Pachita, who prays. Then she stops, she moves toward her assistants and dictates a list of products, herbs, plants. They give the list to Valérie for me. I turn toward her.

“What do I have to give her for all that?”

“You give what you want, a peso, two pesos . . .”

I took out by chance the first bill in my pocket, which was I don’t know how many pesos, I forget, and we again crossed the courtyard. Then we went out to the big, colorful Mexican market, filled with shouts and agitation, where people bustle about in such a way, one could say, like in Africa, as the heat did not affect them. In this mad market we bought everything we had to. Upon returning to their home, Valérie made a stew with everything, which she put on my thigh as a poultice. I kept it there for three weeks. I lived normally; I trained with it. And at the end of three weeks, she took it off. It was gone! The only pain I felt was when taking off the poultice; it pulled out hairs. My tear had disappeared, completely. And I never had another problem with it. Of course, those who have never lived through something like this could question the veracity of the minority who have. But Pachita really cured me.

There you have it. The testimony of Jean-Pierre. Interesting, no?

True. According to you, what must one conclude?

I will never confirm that Pachita’s manipulations were true operations; but I will never confirm the contrary . . . And I concluded that it was not important. It is our belief in an “objective” world, our modern, self-stylized rational mentality that makes this kind of question torment us. We always allege to place ourselves as detached observers of a supposed exterior phenomenon, and so the mechanisms should be clearly defined. In the “shamanic” mentality, to contrast, this kind of problem is not even posed. There is not a subject-observer and an object-observed; there is the world as a dream swarming with signs and symbols, a field of interaction where multiple forces and influences meet. In this context, to know if Pachita’s operations are “real” or not proves illogical. What is real? From the time you move into the energetic field of the sorcerer, you incorporate yourself into his reality and he enters into yours; you both move inside the real where the practices of healing are revealed operative. And the fact is that a number of people have been made well and truly healed! In addition, if I return to the said “objective” point of view, I could never describe the “thing” even if I stayed with her week after week, for hours . . . Whatever the case may be, one cannot but recognize Pachita’s genius. If it were theater, what an actress! If it has to do with conjuring, this good woman was the greatest illusionist of all time! And what a psychologist . . .

What did she teach you? What did you keep for your future psycho-magic practice?

First of all, I learned how to treat people. Thanks to her, I understood that everyone—or almost—is a child, at times an adolescent. Each time someone went to her, she began immediately by touching hands with them, establishing a sensory relationship and putting people in her trust. It produced a strange phenomenon: from feeling this old lady’s hands, she appeared like the universal mother, and there was no way to resist her. I testify to this all the more since I was, at the time, extremely rebellious with teachers, and I refused to subject myself to anyone. But with her contact, my resistances melted like snow in the sun. Pachita knew that within every adult, even the most secure, slept a child eager to be loved and that touch would do more than words to immediately establish trust and put the subject in a state of receptivity. This first touch also allowed her to establish a diagnosis. I remember, for example, the day when I brought my French friend to her. He had suffered for some time, and it had taken six months with the French doctors to discover the presence of a polyp in the bowels. Pachita passed her hands over his body and pronounced straightaway the presence of a thickness in the intestines. My friend was astonished!

But in addition to these quasi-divine faculties, this sorceress sometimes performed what appears to me today to be marvelous psycho-magic acts. One day she received a man who was on the verge of suicide because he couldn’t bear losing his hair at thirty years of age. He had tried all the treatments possible without success, and he could not allow himself to be seen bald. El Hermanito asked him through the mouth of the old lady, “Do you believe in me?” He responded in the affirmative and, in fact, that he had faith in Pachita. So the spirit gave him the following instructions, “Get a kilo of rat excrement. Pee on it. Mix it all together to make a paste that you will apply to your head. This medicine will make your hair grow again.” The man vaguely protested, but Pachita insisted, telling him that if he wanted to avoid baldness, he would have to do it this way. He bowed and decided to submit to the illogical treatment. Three months later, he returned and addressed the old lady, “It was very difficult to find the rat excrement, but I tracked down a laboratory raising white rats. I gave a lab assistant a tip, and he consented to saving the excrement to give me. When I had the kilo, I pissed on it and made the paste, then suddenly realized that it made no difference to me whether or not I had hair. As it turned out, I did not apply the mixture. I decided to be content with my fate.”

I saw it as an essential psychomagic act. Pachita asked for a payment he was not really ready to pay. Finding himself there, at the moment of performing the act, he realized that he could perfectly accept his fate. Confronted with the reality of the difficult act that was asked of him, he saw that he preferred to remain bald. He left his world of thoughts, of his imagination, to look the real in the eye. These directives, absurd at first glance, gave him the opportunity to mature; they made it possible to pass through a whole process that resulted in making it possible for him to accept himself as he was.

It is just as I conceived Psychomagic. It was not rare that Pachita lead people on a bizarre walk destined, in the final analysis, to reconcile them with an aspect of themselves. I remember a person who had a big problem with money and was incapable of earning his living. The old lady imposed on him a strange ceremony: The “patient,” each night, had to urinate in a chamber pot until it was full. He must then leave the pot under his bed and sleep over his pee-pee for thirty days. As witness to this consultation, I, of course, wondered what could be the significance. Little by little, I began to glimpse the sense of it: If a person does not suffer any particular handicap from the physical or intellectual point of view and cannot earn a living, the truth is that the person does not want to. A part of the person opposes it and comes into conflict with money. Yet, following the directives of Pachita quickly exposes a person to a truer torment: it does not take long for the urine, preserved day after day under the bed, to let out a pestilential odor. Forced to sleep above the pot, the patient becomes saturated in his own stench; he sleeps in the fragrances of his own waste. Such an exercise requires a spirit of sacrifice and develops the will. He must have these in order to bear the nightly get-together with his pee-pee.