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

But why does this phenomenon have to have necessarily harmful consequences? What do you think then about those soothsayers who predict happy things, prosperity, fertility, and other wholesomeness?

In any case, there is a seizure of power, a manipulation. Moreover, I am firmly convinced that under the label of “professional fortune-teller” hide, with rare exceptions, unstable, dishonest, harebrained individuals. At heart, only the predictions of a genuine saint would be deserving of trust. This explains, for example, why I refuse to dedicate myself to clairvoyance.

Let’s go back to the origins of Psychomagic and your activity as a tarot reader. What was your practice?

I considered the tarot as a projective test to facilitate locating a person’s needs and knowing where his or her problems reside. It is well known that the mere recognition of an unconscious or poorly understood problem already holds a key to the solution. Working with me, people become aware of their identity, of their difficulties, of what causes them to act. I make them walk through their genealogy tree to show them the ancient origin of some of their discomfort. Nevertheless, I realized immediately that no true healing could take place if one did not take some concrete action. For the consultation to have a therapeutic effect, a creative action accomplished in reality would have to come out of it. To manage this, I had to suggest to those who came to see me one or two specific acts to carry out. The person and I had to, by common consent and with full awareness, figure out a very precise program of action. This is how I came to practice Psychomagic.

You practiced this therapy for a decade and achieved quite convincing results. How did you invent it?

Something like this is not invented; one sees the birth through oneself. But this birth has deep roots.

Before going into detail about Psychomagic, to examine its relationship with psychoanalysis, to mention precise acts, to look into the letters written to you by your clients, it would be interesting to return to those roots.

The first thing that came to help me was poetry, my contact with the poets.

At the occasion of our interviews for La Trampa Sagrada [The Sacred Trickster], you told me you saw a lot of the grand poets of your native country, Chile.

Yes, it was during my youth, in the 1950s. As it happens, I had the luck to be born in Chile. After all, I could just as easily have been born elsewhere. If it had not been for the Russo-Japanese war, my grandparents would not have emigrated and I would have surely been born in Russia. The flip side of this is: “Why did the ship on which they embarked bring them to Chile?” I would like to believe that we choose in advance our destiny and that none of what happens to us is the fruit of coincidence. Yet, if there is no coincidence, everything makes sense. For me, it is my introduction to poetry that justifies my birth in Chile.

All the same, Chile has never had sole rights to poetry.

No, poets are everywhere. But the poetic life is a more rare property. In how many countries does a real poetic atmosphere exist? Without a doubt, ancient China was a land of poetry. But I think, in the 1950s in Chile, we lived poetically like in no other country in the world.

Can you explain?

Poetry permeated everything: teaching, politics, cultural life . . . The country itself lived immersed in poetry. This was due to the temperament of the Chileans and in particular the influence of five of our poets, who were transformed for me into a species of archetypes. These poets were the ones who molded my existence from the beginning. The most well known of them was no less than Pablo Neruda, a politically active man, exuberant, very prolific in his writing and who, above all, lived like an authentic poet.

What does it mean to live like an authentic poet?

In the first place not to fear, to dare to give, to have the audacity to live with true excess. Neruda constructed a house in the form of a castle, gathering together around it a whole village; he was a senator, and he nearly managed to become president of the republic. He handed his life over to the Communist Party, for idealism, because he truly wanted to achieve a social revolution, to build a more just world. And his poetry touched all of the Chilean youth. In Chile, even drunks on a full-blown alcoholic binge recited Neruda’s verse! His poetry was recited as much in school as on the street. The whole world wanted to be a poet, like him. I’m not only talking about students, but workers and even drunks spoke in verse! He knew how to capture in his texts all the crazy atmosphere of the country.

Listen to this poem that comes to mind. We would recite it in unison when, in university-student fashion, we intoxicated ourselves with the patriotic wine of our Chilean land:

It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nail s

and my hair and my shadow .

It so happens I am sick of being a man .

Still it would be marvelou s

to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily ,

or kill a nun with a blow on the ear .

It would be grea t

to go through the streets with a green knif e

letting out yells until I died of the cold .

[TRANSLATED BY ROBERT BLY]

Apart from Neruda, who enjoyed worldwide fame, another four poets were of seminal importance. Vicente Huidobro came from well-to-do surroundings, in any case less humble origins than Neruda. His mother knew all the French literary salons, and he received a very thorough artistic education, through which his poetry, of great formal beauty, saturated the entire country with its elegance. We all dreamed about Europe, about the culture . . . Huidobro gave us a great aesthetic lesson. As an example, I will read to you this fragment of a lecture given by him in Madrid, three years before the appearance of the surrealist manifesto:

Apart from the grammatical meaning of language, there is another magical meaning, which is the only one that interests us . . . The poet creates, outside of the world which exists, a world which should exist . . . The value of the language of poetry comes directly from its separation from spoken language . . . Language converts itself in a ceremony of conjuring and presents itself in the luminosity of its initial nakedness, unconnected from all prefigured conventional dress. Poetry, the ultimate horizon, is, at the same time, the edge where the extremes rejoin, where there is neither contradiction nor doubt. Reaching this last border, the usual sequence of the phenomena breaks its logic, and on the other hand, there where the land of the poet begins, the chain is soldered together in a new logic. The poet takes you by the hand to drive you closer to that last frontier, above the point on the great pyramid, toward that field which extends beyond what is true and false, beyond life and death, beyond space and time, beyond reason and fantasy, beyond spirit and matter . . . There is, in his throat, an unquenchable inferno.

Then there was a woman, Gabriela Mistral. Her appearance was that of a dry, austere lady, very separated from sensual poetry. She taught in the low-income school districts, and this little governess succeeded in becoming a symbol of peace for us. She pointed out the moral requirement with respect to the pain of the world. Gabriela Mistral was for Chileans a kind of guru, very mystical, a universal mother figure. She spoke of God but testified to such rigor . . . Listen to these fragments of the “Oration of the Teacher” (the teacher in question was, naturally, the governess):