Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

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^*1 who, 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.

This Chilean of Russian origin, who lived many years in Mexico and is now rooted in France, is a character that the overly cautious novelists of today could not create, a being who infuses the power of the imagination into all the recesses of his multidimensional existence.

His residence, an erudite alloy of order and disorder, organization and chaos, is the spitting image of its owner, if not simply the image of life itself. It is an experience in itself to surrender to this seedbed strewn with books, videos, toys. . It is a place where you could run into the cartoonists Moebius, Boucq, or Bess, as well as a cat or a woman from who knows where who appears for a moment to take care of the household. . It is a place of poetic power, a concentration of excess, yet controlled, energies.

To be more precise, to work with a panic character is not a sinecure. This is because, above all, Jodo superbly ignores schedules, agendas, and other temporal constraints that govern terrestrial life. When we had completed La Trampa Sagrada [The Sacred Trickster] and he proposed to help me put his psychomagic adventure to paper, I understood that I would have to totally dedicate myself and suspend all business. With him there are no advance arrangements, no fixed dates, no well-noted meetings — all is done spontaneously. Everything is on the order of the dazzling. Not that he is incapable of submitting to discipline or to a schedule, quite the contrary; but finally, there is the mystery: how could this man (who, as soon as our interviews were finished, left to direct a film with the evocative title The Rainbow Thief, a big-budget shoot) tame sacred monsters like Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, or Christopher Lee and impose his sensibility on producers (who are, at the same time, enthusiastic and worried) and accept, in September, a conference for March, without the least effort in the world to jot anything down on any written agenda? It is always necessary, as an intended date approaches, to track him down for fear that he totally forgot and has disappeared to the other side of the world.

Convinced of the convulsive character of reality, Alejandro has that fascinating and exhausting aspect that makes him excessive in all manifestations. When in front of the public, he rarely resists the temptation to go to the limit. Notably very South American, this exceptional being knows how to be, in private, kind and most humble, and he can, in the blink of an eye, transform himself into a baroque opera, in the same vein as his films, where the grotesque competes with the grave, the obscene with the sacred. He is always on the fringe: he dances on the subtle edge separating creation from gratuitous provocation, innovation from savage attacks on good taste, audacity from indecency. . Familiar with his methods after more than fifteen years of collaboration, Moebius, the genius cartoonist of El Incal, sees all this as “the technique employed by Alejandro in order to undermine the resistances of the universe.”

Whatever the case, with Jodorowsky things always end up arranging themselves, regardless of the traumas inflicted on the nerves of the organizers. He has no rival when it comes to spinning a situation presented under the worst auspices into a new direction, and he changes reality as easily as if it were a glove.

Why not mention here a representative anecdote, which will appear again later in the book. It clearly illustrates this capacity to give reality a spin — something you’d better be prepared for if you have the audacity to accompany him on his trajectory.

Motivated by an annual fair, we had agreed to appear together. The fair included an organic vegetable market, vendors of whirlpools, and all sorts of the esoteric: poets of Mother Nature, editors and doctors in alternative medicine. . Was it a tactical error? What happened was this: When I arrived at Vincennes in search of my hero, I found him immersed in the development of a comic strip and little disposed to detaching himself from his focus to go talk at “the marjoram”^*2 (as he sweetly called it).

I insisted, however, arguing that they were waiting for us and that we must keep our word, until finally Jodorowsky consented to get into my car, repeating all the while, “I don’t feel it, all this. . I don’t believe we should go to the Marjolaine. .”

Upon arriving at our destination, we found the worst: a hall open to the four winds, without microphone or chairs for the panelists, and a crowd of about a hundred people who had come to listen, not to Jodorowsky, because of an error in programming, but to Dr. Woestlandt, the nice author of esoteric-medicine bestsellers. .

While I was furious, my genius companion, after capturing at a glance the magnitude of the catastrophe, threw at me, in a fatalistic tone, “You see? I already told you!” and he turned to leave.

My friend ran behind Jodo and advised him to talk anyway. Obviously being sensitive to feminine reasoning, Alejandro turned again and said, “Alright, these people want to hear Dr. Westphaler. Why not introduce me as if I were him? Tell them I am Dr. Wiesen-Wiesen and that I’m going to talk to them.”

Perhaps today I would rise to this challenge, but I was, at the time, still too immersed in the conventional idea according to which Dr. Woestlandt is Dr. Woestlandt, Gilles is Gilles, and Jodorowsky is Jodorowsky. . My reality principle forbade me from aiding in this masquerade. So I mumbled some polite words to introduce my dangerous friend, who planted himself solidly in front of the disconcerted audience and spoke in a sweet tone, “Listen, I am not Dr. Westphallus, but that doesn’t matter. The person is not important! So, take me for Dr. Wiesen-Wiesen and ask me all your questions. It makes no difference the person. I will respond to you as if I were Dr. Wouf-Wouf. .”

Dumbfounded at first, the audience did not take long to give in to the spell and enter into Jodorowsky’s game, with which he, before my incredulous eyes, achieved great success. Soon enough he invited his improvised audience to tell him their problems, and in a singsong tone he urged them to take full advantage of the fortune granted by destiny’s whim, “Hark! Ask well your questions. This is the last time I will come to Marjolaine. .”

After stopping at the Dervy Publishers booth to buy Dr. Woestlandt’s book (“All the same, I must know who this Dr. Westphaller is, no?”), Alejandro returned to the lunchroom where he held court at the center of a vast circle of admirers, continuing with endless kindness to distribute advice and enlightened comments. This was how an afternoon that began as a fiasco ended as an apotheosis.

We should also recall his striking intuition. It is not rare that Alejandro meets a person for the first time and delivers point-blank some hidden truth, thus giving the interlocutor the disturbing impression of being in the presence of an omniscient magician.

A friend — we’ll call Claude Salzmann — has not forgotten the evening after a conference, which was already epic, while sitting on the terrace of a café at Saint-Sulpice, Jodo proceeded, incongruously but not without delicacy, to give one of his small revelations: “Listen to me, Salzmann, can I talk to you? You are a friend of my friend, so I permit myself to talk to you. Listen, Salzmann, if I look at you, I see a man divided into two natures — your upper lip is very different from your lower lip.” Glancing at Claude, I noticed for the first time, this striking facial feature. “Your upper lip, very thin, is that of a serious man, spiritual, almost rigid! It is the lip of an ascetic. But your bottom lip, a lot bigger, fleshy, is the lip of a sensual man, a lover of pleasure. Yes, you have these two natures in you. You must reconcile them.” Albeit in itself very simple, this observation affected my friend, who was applying himself more than ever precisely to unifying in himself these two tendencies: contradictory, according to traditional logic; complementary, according to profound, spiritual logic.

How many people have I heard give similar reports that Jodorowsky had, with the aid of a tarot card or solely with the power of observation, summed up their current difficulty in a word and exposed some arcane secret of their nature to broad daylight?

During a visit one day, I was shocked to witness Jodorowsky, who had never previously met the friend I had brought along, and without her formulating a question or drawing a card, sum up in a few sentences the essentials of the situation in which she found herself. No surprise then that our man inspires such passion and devotion.

The king Jodorowsky sits enthroned in his court, surrounded by swarms of followers for whom the Mystical Cabaret is like a very holy mass. There are those who for years have not missed a service, gathering with devotion to follow the master’s most unusual sermons. .

I would like to make it clear that I am not part of the flock. To use the terms Jodorowsky uses in the postscript to La Trampa Sagrada, the “nearly young man” that I am has more to learn from the “nearly old man,” and it is, above all, as friends that we have conversed. It is with a healthy confusion that I sometimes oppose his stories, and this has the positive result of obliging him to clarify his thoughts.

Because of his dazzle, which always provokes fascination, one can also become doubtful or even irritated; for, as exact as they often are, these right-out-of-the-box intuitions sometimes seem a bit hasty. After seeing him indulge in his lightning treatments in the framework of the Cabaret where, in the space of one evening, he boasts about unraveling old psychological knots as a result of the genealogy tree embellished with the zest of “Psychomagic,” the spectator, sympathetic but having conserved a wisp of critical sense, cannot help but swing between admiration and skepticism, amazement and doubt. Admiration and amazement, at the breathtaking performance of this actor par excellence, his ability to manage and to guide the energy of a hall of five hundred people, and the iron relevance of his observations. Skepticism and doubt, as these evenings are garnished with laughter and emotion while human woes are staged with a mad audacity in which complexes and traumas are exposed to broad daylight then treated by the “master” with a clever combination of keenness, outrageousness, and benevolence. . ushering in a new genre, that of spiritual-analytical “reality show.” One leaves the hall both seduced and worried, wondering about the real consequences and the long-term effects of this jumble of artistic therapy.

There is something of the old-fashioned tooth puller and snake oil peddler in this visionary of Vincennes who describes himself as a “sacred trickster.” But this facet of “transcendental charlatan,” an integral part of the Jodorowsky character, is in the final analysis at the service of a rare compassionate energy. One can also very well say that Alejandro is a bodhisattva à la South American salsa — a spicy salsa, very spicy. .

He is not a sacred trickster simply because he claims to be; under the excess and the apparent ease of this unconventional artist is a lot of rigor (a particular rigor, but rigor all the same), an inexhaustible creative potential, a profound poetic vision, and, I believe, a lot of kindness.

Our man has a pure heart. If he is king, Jodo doesn’t abuse his absolute power, which some of his subjects have granted him. His Majesty is his own fool, never hesitating to put his teachings on trial and through a good measure of buffoonery. Although he doesn’t disregard homage from his disciples, he also has no desire to become an idol. Fundamentally disinterested — as I myself have had numerous occasions to verify — Jodorowsky remains, in my opinion, a lucid being, made of his talents as well as of his limitations.

Having had the chance to be in contact with some true masters, such as the Japanese Ejo Takata who marked him with the red iron of Zazen, he knows not to be a guru in the strict and noble sense of the word but rather to be a kind and disturbing genius with whom anyone can walk a stretch of the way.

“Grow up a little,” Jodorowsky yelled one day to his daughter Eugenie, aged twenty; and she replied: “Why don’t you grow down a little!” The fact that Alejandro himself, not without pride, related this to me — his progeny’s fine response — says a lot about his character.

Servant of the truth, although at times with the air of an impostor, a brazen acrobat who asks no more than to be silent and bow down before those who surpass him, Jodorowsky is very much a crazy shaman. If the mystical clown indeed has what it takes to immediately inspire fascination or repulsion — and sometimes both — there is much to be gained by knowing him in all of his interior richness.

Even though he has published several novels and countless comic strips, Jodo waited for retirement age to put down on paper what he holds closest to his heart. Following the thread of our conversations, Alejandro took me on a magical journey with all the art of a Castaneda writing for the theater. It is this journey to which you are now invited. This book is as much an artistic-spiritual autobiography as it is a guide for a new therapy. As an open window to a world in which poetry embodies riots, in which theater transforms into ritual sacrifice, and in which a real witch, armed with a kitchen knife, cures cancers, transplants hearts, and nourishes dreams, it is my hope that this book will remain as the legacy of a far from ordinary individual’s journey among us.

GIILS FARCET

PARIS, 1989–1993

ONE

THE POETIC ACT

I suppose the birth of what you call Psychomagic responded to a need. .

Exactly. During the time of my life that marks my activity as a tarologist,^*3 I received at least two people per day to read their cards. .

You predicted their future?

Not at all! I do not believe in the real possibility of predicting the future, insofar as from the moment you see the future, you modify it or you create it. To foretell an event is to provoke it; in social psychology this is called “self-fulfilling prophecies.” I have here a text by Anne Ancelin Schutzberger, professor at the University of Nice, which evokes precisely this phenomenon:

If one carefully observes the pasts of a certain number of terminally ill cancer patients, one will notice that many times it has to do with people in infancy predicting something about themselves, which developed into an unconscious “life script” (of themselves or of their families) related to their life and death, at times including the date and time, their age, the very moment that they actually find themselves in the position of dying. For example, at thirty-three years (Jesus Christ’s age at death) or at forty-five (the age of the person’s mother or father at the time of their deaths) or when his son turned seven years old (because this person was orphaned at seven). . These are examples of a kind of automatic realization of personal or family predictions.

In the same way, according to [Robert] Rosenthal, if a professor predicts (in his own head) that a poor student’s performance will remain so, it is certain that it will not change. By contrast, when the professor considers that the student is intelligent but timid and predicts (again, only in his own head) that the student will make progress, the student begins to progress. It is a surprising discovery but verified often and sufficiently enough to inspire a serious distrust of those who, under the pretext of possessing supernatural gifts, take the liberty of predicting events that their client’s unconscious will translate into personal desires with the purpose of obeying the soothsayer’s orders. As a result, the client assumes the work of realizing these predictions, many times with fatal consequences. All predictions are a seizing of power whereby the soothsayer takes pleasure in writing destinies, thus high-jacking the normal course of a life.

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 nails

and my hair and my shadow.

It so happens I am sick of being a man.

Still it would be marvelous

to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,

or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.

It would be great

to go through the streets with a green knife

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):

Sir! You who taught, forgive that I teach; that I bear the name of teacher as You did here on Earth. .

Teacher, make my fervor everlasting and disillusionment temporary.

Tear from me this impure desire for laws which disturbs me still, this stingy insinuation of protest

that overtakes me when they hurt me. .

Make me enemy of all power that is not pure, of all pressure that isn’t your ardent will over my life. .

Give me simplicity and give me depth; release me from being a complicated person or banal in my everyday lessons. .

Lighten my hand in punishment and soften it more for caresses.

The fourth major Chilean poet is Pablo de Rokha. He also was an exuberant being, a kind of boxer of poetry about whom the craziest rumors circulated. They attribute to him two anarchist attacks, frauds. . He was actually a Dadaist expressionist who imported cultural provocation into Chile. He was rowdy and unruly and could be terribly insulting, and he had a terrible, dark aura in literary circles. These loose phrases that emerge like echoing salvos should suffice to give you an idea of his furious ardor:

Incinerate the poem, decapitate the poem. .

Choose whatever material, as the stars are chosen from worms. .

When God was still blue inside man. .

You, you are precisely in the center of God, like sex, precisely in the center. .

God’s furious corpse howls from my bowels. .

I am going to beat Eternity with the butt of my pistol.

Finally, the fifth was Nicanor Parra. A native of the pueblo, he climbed the university echelons to become a professor at a large school and to embody the intellectual figure, the intelligent poet figure. He introduced us to [Ludwig] Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, Kafka’s private diary. He had a very South American sex life. .

That is to say. .

South Americans are crazy about blonds. From time to time Parra went to Sweden and returned with a Swede. It fascinated us to see him with a stunning blond. . Then they would divorce, and he would go back to Sweden and return with a new creature. Apart from his intellectual influence, he brought humor to Chilean poetry; he was the first to introduce a comedic element. In creating antipoetry, he reduced the art form. Here I have a fragment of Parra’s “Warning to the Reader”:

My poetry may very well lead nowhere:

“The laughter in this book is canned!” my detractors will argue,

“Just crocodile tears!”

“These pages bring yawns instead of sighs”

“He kicks and screams like a baby crying for the breast”

“The author sneezes to make himself understood”

All right: I invite you to burn your ships,

Like the Phoenicians, I’m trying to develop my own alphabet.

“Why bother the public then?” the reader friends will ask:

“Then why give the public such a hard time?” my friendly readers will ask:

“If the author himself begins by putting down his own work,

How good can it be, after all?”

Watch out, I don’t put anything down

Or better yet, I’ ll praise my way of seeing things,

I’m proud of my shortcomings

I’ ll praise my creations to the skies.

Aristophanes’ birds

Buried the corpses of their parents

In their own heads.

(Each bird was actually a flying cemetery)

The way I see it

The time has come to bring this ritual up-to-date

So I’ ll bury my quills in the heads of my readers!

[TRANSLATED BY DAVID UNGER]

I understand then that these five characters greatly marked the young man you were.

They were alive. Alive and fighters! They were the best enemies in the world; they spent their days fighting, exchanging insults. . Pablo de Rokha, for example, published an open letter to Vicente Huidobro in which he exclaimed: “I am beginning to be annoyed with this story, my little Vicentito. Apart from that, I am not one of those cowards who beats up a clucking chicken because she says she has laid an egg in Europe.” Do you know what he said about Neruda? “Pablo Neruda is not a Communist, he is a Nerudaist — the last of the Nerudaists, or probably the only one.” These people exposed themselves; they were not afraid to live their passions. As for us, we embraced one cause and then the other. . We were immersed in poetry from morning to night. It was truly in the center of our existence. For us, these five poets formed an alchemist mandala: Neruda was water, Parra air, de Rokha fire, Mistral earth, and Huidobro, in the center, quintessence. We wanted to go beyond our predecessors who had done no more than anticipate our quest.

And this, how was it?

All of these poets had a public role. Huidobro said, “Poets, why sing about the rose? Make it bloom in the poem”; Neruda seduced a woman from the pueblo promising a marvelous gift and then showing her a lemon the size of a pumpkin. They had begun leaving literature to participate in acts of everyday life, taking the aesthetic and rebellious positions typical of poets.

You and your friends then wanted to go further in this direction.

I was lucky to be the same age as the famous poet Enrique Lihn, now deceased. One day, he and I and other friends found in a book about Italian Futurism an illuminating phrase by Marinetti: “Poetry is an act.” And from that moment on, we decided to pay attention to the poetic act. For three or four years, we dedicated ourselves to carrying out poetic acts, thinking about them all day long.

What did these acts consist of?

For example, Lihn and I decided one day to walk in a straight line, without ever wavering. We walked down the avenue, and we came to a tree. Instead of going around it, we climbed up and over it; if a car crossed in our path, we climbed on top, walking on its roof. In front of a house, we rang the doorbell, entered through the door and exited where we could, sometimes through a window. The important thing was to maintain the straight line and not pay any attention to an obstacle, as if it did not exist.

This should have caused more than one problem. .

Not at all, why? You forget that Chile was a poetic country. Remember, having rung the bell of a house and having explained to the lady of the house that we were poets in action and that our mission required us to cross her house in a straight line — she understood perfectly and had us leave through the back door. For us, this crossing of the city in a straight line was a grand experience, the way we managed to avoid all the obstacles. Little by little, we went about inventing more extreme acts. I was studying psychology. One day I was really fed up and decided to find a way to physically express that I had a bellyful. I left class and went calmly to urinate in front of the door of the office of the rector. Of course, I ran the risk of being permanently expelled from the university. A magical thing: no one saw me. I carried out my act and left incredibly relieved — in all senses of the word. Another day, we put a large quantity of coins in a bag full of holes and traveled to the center of the city. It was extraordinary to see everyone crouching down behind us, the streets filled with doubled-over bodies! We also decided to create our own imaginary city within the real city. For this we needed to celebrate inaugurations. We headed for the foot of a statue, a famous monument, and we began an inauguration ceremony, in accordance with our fantasy. We transformed the National Library into an intellectual café. Without a doubt, this became the seed of the Mystical Cabaret. What we call things is important; by giving things different names, it seemed to us that we transformed them.

Also, we dedicated ourselves to very innocent acts that were no less powerful, like putting a beautiful shell in the hand of the conductor when he came to take our bus tickets. The man stood there stupefied for a long time without saying anything.

You were scarcely twenty years old. What did your family think of these eccentricities?

As you know, I come from a family of immigrants who spent eight hours a day working in a store. When poetry entered my life in this form, they were aghast. One day my friends and I took a mannequin and dressed it with my mother’s clothes. Then we laid it out like a corpse, surrounded by candelabras, and we held a wake in the living room. Since we were involved in theater, we had all the necessary props, and it made an eerie impression. When my mother arrived, she saw herself being veiled! All my friends came to give their condolences. It naturally had an enormous impact on my family. Another time, we filled my parents’ bed with worms.

But this is very cruel, you were a hateful son.

I loved them, but I wanted, with all the insanity of youth, to break out of the confines. These acts shook them up, forced them to open. What else could they do before the unforeseen? Life is like that, you understand? Totally unpredictable. You think things will happen this way or that way and, in reality, while standing on the corner talking to a friend, you can be run over by a truck; you can run into an old lover and go to a hotel to make love; or the roof can fall on your head while you work. The telephone can ring to announce the best or the worst of news. Our acts as young poets were performed to prove this, to swim against my parents’ rigid world. To get into bed and find yourself with a swarm of worms powerfully symbolizes what happens to all of us, every day.

My father practiced Psychomagic without knowing it: He was convinced that the more merchandise he had, the more he would sell. He had to give shoppers the image of superabundance. Once he had behind him a row of drawers supposedly full of socks. He would stick a sock out of one of the drawers so it looked like the drawer was jam-packed, when there really was absolutely nothing inside. One day, when the store was full of customers, one of my friends, drunk, started opening all of the drawers. Then he wrote a poem proclaiming that my father was an exceptional man, comparable to the great mystics — equal to those who sold pure emptiness!

Your father must have been furious.

Actually, no. Every time something like that occurred, my family suffered a huge impact followed by silence and colossal perplexity. They were completely overwhelmed, and the results were so extraordinary for them that they thought they were living a dream, outside of the usual limitations of their existence. All of these acts had a dreamlike quality, imbued with madness. Remember Lihn and I set strange objectives. When we were fed up with the university, we would take the train to Valparaíso, determined not to return until an older lady had invited us to drink a cup of tea. Successful, we returned to the capital victorious.

One day, with a friend of a friend, we went to a fine restaurant. We were both dressed very elegantly and ordered steak au poivre. Once served, we rubbed the meat all over our bodies, staining our clothing. When we had finished, we again ordered the same and repeated the act. We did it five or six times back to back until the whole restaurant was seized by panic. A year later, we returned to the same establishment, but the maître d’ proclaimed: “If you are thinking to repeat what you did the other day, no way! I will not permit you to enter this restaurant.” The act had made such an impact that time found itself stopped. It had happened a year earlier, but for him it was as if it had happened a week ago.

Your words remind me of an episode when I was fifteen or sixteen years old. I was absorbed in Dostoevsky and the impassioned Russians who passed from despondency to exaltation in an instant, inflamed with a cause, knocked to the ground; they fascinated me. One day I asked my friends: Why continue progressing? What would happen if the whole world decided to stop moving? Where would we go? And we decided to throw ourselves on the ground in the middle of the street and not move. The pedestrians walked over us; some made comments. If I’m not mistaken, this was a poetic act.

Of course! And I am sure that our readers, if they think about it, will remember similar moments of questioning consensus reality. We also lay down in front of a park bench, filthy and dressed in tatters, to remind people that an economic crisis is always possible, that misery can emerge at any moment. But remember, all of this happened in Chile, in a country subject to a form of collective insanity. Surely we could not have gone so far in another environment. The majority of the Chilean bureaucrats lived politely until six o’clock in the evening. Once out of the office, they got drunk and changed their personalities, almost changing their physical bodies. They abandoned their bureaucratic and social identities to assume their magical identities. The party was everywhere — the entire country was surrealist without knowing it.

Could only the Chilean temperament itself explain this atmosphere?

People who are thought to be reasonable, those who believe in the reality and the soundness of this world, do not plan crazy acts. But in Chile the earth trembles every six days! The country’s floor itself was, literally, convulsive. This meant that everyone always was subject to a tremor — either physical and existential. We do not inhabit a robust world ruled by a bourgeois order supposedly well ingrained, but we live in a trembling reality. Nothing remains fixed, everything trembles. (Laughter.) Everyone lived precariously, as much in the material plane as in the relational. No one ever knew how to end a party: the couple married at six o’clock in the afternoon could dissolve at six o’clock in the morning, the guests could throw the furniture out the window. . Naturally, anguish was at the heart of all this craziness. The country was poor, the social classes very differentiated.

Forty years have passed. In retrospect, how do you see these acts? Beyond being picturesque, what did they teach you?

Boldness, humor, an aptitude for questioning the postulated mediocrity of ordinary life, and a love for the free act. And what is the definition of the poetic act? It should be beautiful, aesthetic, and without any justification. It can also lead to some violence. The poetic act is a call to reality: One must face one’s own death, the unforeseen, our own shadow, the worms that swarm inside of us. This life that we want to be logical is really crazy, shocking, marvelous, and cruel. We claim our behavior is logical and consistent, but it is, in fact, irrational, crazy, contradictory. If we lucidly observe our reality, we would affirm that it is poetic, illogical, exuberant. In those times I was, without a doubt, immature, a young, harebrained, insolent kid; this does not deny that that particular period taught me to perceive the crazy creativity of existence and to not identify with the limits the majority of people enclose themselves in until they cannot bear it anymore and burst.

Poetry does not respect a preordained stereotype of the world.

No, poetry is convulsive! It’s bound up in the earth’s tremors! It denounces appearances; it pierces lies and conventions with its sword. I remember one day we went to the medical school and, with the help of a friend, stole an arm from a cadaver. We hid it in a coat sleeve and amused ourselves by shaking hands with people, touching them with the dead hand. No one dared remark that it was cold, without life, because they didn’t want to face the crude reality of this dead member. By telling you now, I realize that I am almost confessing. I know that all of this seems far-fetched. For us, it was certainly a game, but a profoundly dramatic game. The act created another reality in the same sense as ordinary reality. The act allowed us to access another level, and I am still convinced that with new acts we can open the door to another dimension.

So the act conceived in this manner does not have a purifying and therapeutic value?

Of course it does. If one thinks so. Our individual histories consist of words and acts. Most of the time people are content with small innocuous acts, until one day—“crack”—they lose control, they get furious, they break everything, hurl insults, they succumb to violence, sometimes committing a crime. . If a potential criminal were familiar with the poetic act, he could sublimate his homicidal expression by staging an equivalent act.

All the same, there is still an outrageousness, which is, without a doubt, dangerous.

That’s right. Society has put up barriers so that fear and its expression, violence, do not spring up at every moment. Which is why when one carries out an act different from ordinary and codified actions, it is important to perform it conscientiously, measuring and accepting the consequences beforehand. Carrying out an act is a conscious process that aims at voluntarily introducing a fissure into the dead order that permeates society; it is not the compulsive demonstration of a blind rebel. One should agree to not identify oneself with the poetic act, to not be driven by the energies that it releases. For example, Breton fell into a trap when he, taken by his enthusiasm, declared the poetic act could entail going out on the street armed with a revolver to open fire on people. He really regretted that later, even though he didn’t actually do it. His declaration in itself was an attack on society. The poetic act allows for expressing energies that are normally repressed or asleep inside us. The unconscious act is an open door to vandalism, to violence. When the crowds erupt into violence, when the demonstration deteriorates and the people begin to set cars on fire or throw rocks, it is also about a liberation of repressed energies. For this reason, acts of violence do not merit the title poetic act.

Were you and your friends conscious of this?

We ended up being so, after observing some dangerous acts perpetrated by hot-tempered individuals. These experiences shook us up and made us question ourselves seriously. A Japanese haiku provided a key for us. A student brought the master his poem, which stated:

A butterfly:

take away the wings

and it turns into a pepper!

The master’s response was immediate: “No, no; it is not like that. Let me correct your poem”:

A pepper:

add wings

and it turns into a butterfly!

The lesson here is clear: the poetic act must always be positive; it must be constructive and not destructive.

However, many times it is necessary to destroy to be able to build later.

Yes, but be careful with destruction as an end in itself! The act is an action and not an uncouth reaction.

In this regard, how do you categorize some of the “acts” you have mentioned?

Indeed, many of them were nothing but reactions or, let’s say, more or less clumsy attempts in the direction of a dignified act worthy of the title: so much so that I gave myself over to self-examination. I saw very clearly that instead of emptying all of my father’s drawers, we could have arrived in procession loaded up with socks and let him fill his boxes so that his dream would become reality. Instead of putting worms in my parents’ bed, we should have upholstered it with chocolate currency wrapped in gold paper. Instead of simulating my mother’s wake, we could have depicted a scene in which she would have been admired in all her glory, like the Virgin ascending. The shock caused by the act must be positive.

Through all of this, did you and your friends feel guilty? Did you experience any remorse?

No, and I continue to say guilt is useless. A mistake is permitted if it is committed only once and as part of a sincere search for knowledge. This is the human condition: man seeks knowledge. And what is a man in search of something if not, by definition, an erratic being? Error is an integral part of the journey. We abandon the negative experience, but without any remorse. We have opened the door to the true poetic act. To make the tortilla, you have to break the eggs.

TWO

THE THEATRICAL ACT

We have discussed the metaphysical dimension of the act, but let’s go back to its artistic aspect. If, before all else, poetry is action, what place should writing occupy? Did you and your friends write or were you content to only execute acts?

Lihn continued to write and became one of the country’s greatest poets, so much so that today no one remembers his acts. Chileans would be surprised to know what kinds of games their national poet devoted himself to. As for me, I abandoned poetry as such to dedicate myself to theater.

How did this transition take place?

Love for the act required creating props. Among other things marionettes, with which I quickly fell in love. Straightaway, I saw in the marionette a highly metaphysical form. I loved to see an object fabricated by my own hands escape from me. From the moment I put my hands on the marionette to animate it, the character began to live in an almost autonomous way. I witnessed the development of an unknown personality, as if the doll made use of my voice and my hands to take on an identity that was entirely his own. It seemed that I became a servant more than a creator.

Finally, I had the feeling of being directed by — manipulated by — the doll! This very deep relationship with the marionettes gave birth to a desire to become a marionette myself, in other words a stage actor.

You really think an actor is like a marionette? That’s debatable.

In any case, this was what I thought of theater and acting. I never liked psychological theater, dedicated to imitating “reality.” For me, this realistic theater was a vulgar expression in which, under the pretext of restoring something real, the most obvious aspects are re-created as well as the most hollow and the crudest, just as it is perceived normally. What is generally called “reality” is just a part, an aspect of a much greater order. This so-called realistic theater appeared to me — and it still does — to wash its hands of the unconscious dimension, the dreamlike magic of reality. Because, I repeat, reality is not rational, no matter how much we want to believe that it is to reassure ourselves. Human behavior is in general motivated by unconscious forces, those to which we can attribute rational explanations later. The world itself is not a rigid place but an amalgam of mysterious influences. To retain from reality no more than the immediate appearance is a betrayal, a surrender to illusion disguised as “realism.” Hating, as I hated the realistic theater, I began to feel repulsion toward the notion of author. I did not want to watch actors rehearse a previously written text; I would prefer to attend a theatrical performance that had nothing to do with literature. I asked myself: “Why call something a play that’s based on a text? Everything can be acted by direction. I could stage the daily newspaper, raise a marvelous drama from the front page of the newspaper.” That’s how I began to work and to experience an expanding freedom. Since I did not try to imitate reality, I could move as I fancied, make the most extravagant gestures, howl. . Very quickly, the stage itself appeared to me as a limitation. I wanted to remove the theater from theater. For example, I imagined a piece staged on a bus. The public waited at the stops and got on the bus, which traveled through the city. Suddenly, one had to disembark and enter a bar, the maternity ward, a slaughterhouse; in essence, to get in there where something was happening before setting off again. The events that I enacted were taken up again later by others. When it was announced that my piece would take place in a theater, sometimes I would take the audience to the cellar, to the rest rooms, or to the rooftops. Later, the idea occurred to me that the theater could do without spectators and should not involve more than actors. So I organized big parties at which everyone could perform. Finally, interpreting a character seemed useless to me. The actor, so I believed, should try to interpret his own mystery, to externalize what he carries inside. One does not go to the theater to escape from himself, but to reestablish contact with the mystery that we all are. Theater interested me less as a distraction than as an instrument for self-knowledge. For this reason, I replaced the classical “performance” with what I called “the ephemeral panic.”

What is “ephemeral panic” exactly?

At this point in our discussion, I should refer to a passage published in 1973 in a book conceived by [Fernando] Arrabal titled Le Panique. This book allowed me to formulate the essential concepts of my process and my theatrical conceptions: “To attain panic euphoria, one must liberate oneself from the theater structure — this is a necessary precondition.” From the architectural point of view, whichever form they have, theaters are designed for actors and spectators; they obey the primordial law of the game, which amounts to delimiting a space, that is to say, isolating the stage from reality, and that is why they impose (such imposition being anti-panic) an understanding a priori of the relationship of the actors and the space. Before everything else, the actor must serve the architect and then the author. Theaters impose corporeal movements, even though, in general, it is a human gesture that determines the architecture. By eliminating the spectator from the panic party, one automatically eliminates the “seat” and the “interpretation” from the unmoving stare. The place where the “ephemeral” takes place is a non-delimited space in which one does not know where the stage ends and where reality begins. The “panic company” will choose the most attractive place: a useless terrain, a forest, a public place, an operating room, a pool, a dilapidated house, or even a traditional theater, but using all of its spaces: euphoric demonstrations between the seats, in the dressing room or the restrooms, going beyond the long corridors, in the cellar, the foyer, the roof, and so on. One can also make an “ephemeral” act in the ocean, in an airplane, in a very fast train, in a cemetery, in a maternity ward, a slaughterhouse, a nursing home, a prehistoric cave, a gay bar, a convent, or at a funeral. Since the “ephemeral” is a concrete manifestation, it cannot call up problems of space and time. The space has its real measurements and cannot symbolize another space; it is what it is in that moment. This is also true for time: there can be no depiction of aging. The time that passes is truly the time during which the actions last. In this real time and this objective space the ex-actor moves. An actor divides his activity between a “person” and a “character.” Before panic, one could describe, in a clear and precise manner, two theater schools. In the first, the person-actor subsumes himself totally in the “personality,” lying to himself and to others with such precision that he ends up losing his “person” to turn into an other, a character with more concise restrictions and more precise definition. In the second school, one learns to act in an eclectic manner, in a way that the actor in being the person was simultaneously the character. The actor should never forget being in the process of acting, and the person, during the performance, could criticize his character.

The ex-actor, panic man, does not act a performance and has totally eliminated the character. In the “ephemeral,” this panic man tries to bring to the person what he is trying to be.

Playwrights love to force a performance. It often happens that atop one stage another stage is staged where other actors perform before the first actors. Panic man thinks that in everyday life the “majestic” go around disguised, interpreting characters, and that the mission of the theater is to quit interpreting characters facing other characters, to eliminate that in order to ultimately get closer, little by little, to the person.

It is the inverse path of the old theater schools: Instead of going from the person to the character — as the old schools believed — panic man tries to begin with the character, which is (according to the anti-panic education implanted by the “majestic”) the person he carries inside himself. This “other” who wakes up in a panic euphoria is not a puppet made by definitions and lies but a being with fewer restrictions. The euphoria of the “ephemeral” drives the totality, to the liberation of superior forces, to a state of grace.

To conclude: Panic man does not hide behind “characters” but tries to find his mode of real expression. Instead of being a lying exhibitionist, he is a poet in a trance state. (We understand by poet, not the office writer but the athlete creator.)

How did you put this program-manifesto together?

I promoted among the spectator-actors the practice of a radical theater act, which consisted of interpreting one’s own drama, exploring one’s own intimate enigma. It was for me the beginning of the sacred theater and was almost therapeutic. Then I came to realize that if I had, in my theatrical expression, shattered form, space, the relationship between actor and spectator, I had not yet attacked time. I was still a prisoner of the idea that the show must be repeated, performed many times. At the time when “happenings” were taking place in the United States, on my part in Mexico, I had invented what I called the “ephemeral panic,” which consisted in staging a show that could be presented only once. It had to be accomplished by introducing perishable things: smoke, fruits, jelly, live animals. . It had to do with accomplishing acts that could not ever be repeated. In summary, I wanted the theater, instead of tending toward the fixed, toward death, to return to its uniqueness: the instantaneous, the fugitive, the only moment forever. This way, theater is made in the image of life where, according to a saying by Heraclitus [of Ephesus], one never bathes in the same river. Thus, to conceive the theater was to carry it to the extreme, to go to the paroxysm of this art form. Through the happenings, I rediscovered the theatrical act and its therapeutic potential.

How did you pull it off? What were the ingredients for the happening?

Well, I would rather choose an ordinary place than a theater: the School of Fine Arts, a psychiatric ward, a sanatorium, a school for people with Down’s syndrome. . I chose existing places and placed the action there.

You really wanted to set up the “ephemeral panic” in these places?

Yes, that’s the marvel of Mexico! Discipline does not exist; they let you do this kind of thing. One day, we performed a large ballet in a cemetery. It was a strong act, the dance of the living among the dead. . So then, once a place was selected, I made calls to a group of people who wanted to express themselves. In no way did I direct actors. These people came to carry out a free, public act. All the conditions were thus brought together for the coming of the ephemeral.

The ephemeral, such as what you practiced, had, if I’m not mistaken, something impressive: it had all the ingredients of a sumptuous party. How did you find the means to finance such events?

I always found the money. For me the ephemeral panic had to be precisely a party. Now, when one throws a party, one does not charge his guests for the drinks or food they consume. I always gave that free. I received money from royalties, from staging more classical pieces, many times under another name. The fact is that, like [Ivanovitch] Gurdjieff, I never had financial problems, which, seeing as it always worked out, is truly a miracle! Apart from that, I believe in miracles, or rather in the existence of a law that if my intentions are pure and I do what I must do, the money will follow, in some way or another. Maybe I will never be what a person calls rich, but I will always arrange the financial means that are required each moment. When I had money in my safes, I would invest it in a happening. I asked acquaintances if they wanted to express something, then I gave them the means to do so. This method of approaching the happening already had a therapeutic value. It was also a way to continue in line with the poetic acts we have talked about.

What lessons did you extract from your happenings?

I realized that many people carry an act inside, which ordinary conditions do not let them materialize. When someone is offered the concrete possibility and favorable circumstances to publicly express the act asleep inside him, it is very rare that the person hesitates. If I asked you what act you would like to carry out in public, I am sure that an answer would occur to you immediately, and if I brought together the favorable conditions for actualizing this expression, you would treasure participating in the game.

Okay. .

I’m going to give you some examples. In the 1960s, I founded a panic group in Mexico, not with actors and other artists, but with enthusiastic people in search of an authentic way to express themselves, far from conformity. I had obtained the main playground of San Carlos school. I proposed that my friends envision an act that they would like to carry out, and I would find the means to make it happen. The celebrated painter Manuel Felguérez joined the panic demonstration and decided to execute a chicken publicly and make an abstract painting with the animal’s guts and blood, while his wife, dressed in a nazi uniform, devoured a dozen chicken tacos at his side.

What a good show. . Really delicious. Are there more?

Hundreds! A young woman wanted to dance naked to African rhythms while a bearded man covered her body with shaving cream.

Another wanted to be a classical ballerina, with a tutu but without underwear, and urinate while interpreting Swan Lake.

An architectural student used a mannequin and hit it violently with an ax in its stomach and privates. Once the mannequin was destroyed, he took from its insides various casings of sausage and hundreds of crystal balls.

Another student appeared dressed as a math professor with a big bag full of eggs. As he recited his algebraic formulas, he broke one egg after the other on his forehead.

Another arrived with a tin bowl and several liters of milk. With a foot in the bowl, he began to recite a classic Mother’s Day poem while he emptied the milk over his head.

A woman with long blond hair, dressed in black stockings decorated with pearls on the ankles and walking with crutches, yelled at the top of her voice: “I’m innocent! I’m innocent!” while she took from between her breasts slices of raw meat and lanced them at the public. Then she sat in a child’s chair and a hairdresser completely shaved her head. In front of her was a baby carriage filled with doll heads of all sizes, without eyes or hair. Once shaved, the woman began to throw the heads at the public while screaming, “I am me! I am me!”

A young man wearing a tuxedo jacket pushed a bathtub covered by a towel toward the center of the stage. By its weight, one could guess it was full of liquid. He left the stage and returned carrying in his hands a young woman dressed as a bride. Without putting her down, he removed the towel from the tub. It was full of blood. Without letting go of the woman, he began to stroke her breasts, her crotch, and her legs, becoming more and more excited about submerging her in the blood. Then he started to rub her with a live viper while she sang an opera melody.

An exceedingly attractive woman, with the air of a Hollywood vampiress, wearing a long golden dress that clung to her body, appeared onstage with a pair of large scissors in her hands. Several dark-skinned men crawled toward her, each offering her an enormous banana, which she cut with her scissors roaring with laughter.

These are sufficient examples. One can see in these baroque descriptions a panoply of images. You speak in the first place of the therapeutic value of these acts. But isn’t there a risk of sinking into perversion?

In Mexico I was prohibited from carrying out in public acts that had openly sexual connotations. Since I did not want to have problems with the law, I exercised some control and excluded people whose acts could have been viewed as attacks on modesty. Likewise, I always tried to keep myself far from drugs. But, to be sure, censorship was only exercised in two cases. One day a lunatic was determined to eat a live dove onstage. His act produced a commotion. Some people fainted, and articles of protest appeared in the newspaper. But they couldn’t put me in jail, which would have happened had it been a sex scandal. Outside of sex, everything is permitted.

You speak of a limit imposed outside the country’s law. What would happen if this restriction did not exist?

In the United States it was common, in the framework of the happenings, to give oneself up to a kind of collective orgy in which the participants stroked themselves while smoking marijuana. I was invited on multiple occasions to this type of celebration in New York or in other places, but I always declined the invitation because I quickly realized that this way was a dead end. All of this finally translated into a kind of shifty pornography. Now, pornography is not constructive but destructive: under the appearance of liberty, what is really presented to us is another form of slavery.

Let’s go back to the story of the pepper and the butterfly. If the act is an action and not a reaction, where is the boundary between the releasing of monsters sleeping deeply inside us, with the consequent risk that they will devour us, and the conscious materialization of a liberating act?

This has to do with a subtle border, which is precisely where the danger of this type of practice is located. I was soon approached by people to whom pornography and vandalism constituted acts. I did not encourage them, because the experience of poetic acts had taught me to direct only positive things. However, it is very difficult to achieve the “positive,” that is to say, something that creates a feeling of life and of expansion; by the “negative” I mean “acts” that, when brought to the stage, create a feeling of death and destruction. The act itself implies connecting with the dark and violent, the unutterable and repressed, that we carry inside ourselves. As positive as it is, all acts carry a certain “negativity.”

What is important is that this destructive energy, which, when allowed to stagnate, eats at us from the inside, can release itself as a channeled and transformed expression. The alchemy of the successful act changes the darkness to light.

Your responsibility is, at the very least, overwhelming! Don’t you run the risk of playing the apprentice wizard?

Not anymore. I am not safe from all risks, because danger is part of life. If one wants to remain surrounded by his little world without questioning his function, it’s not worth it to try an act that entails risk! Better to stay at home watching television. But the work that I propose actually is founded on a lot of experience, experience that I did not have in that long-ago time of the happenings. Apart from that, it wasn’t my place to be a therapist. I was, first in the quality of an artist, a man of the theater in search of a total expression. As I explored this art form, I saw in it, in addition, therapeutic effects. It is necessary to restore this experience in context. That being said, I admit to having committed some failures during this time. For example, the public devouring of the dove seems to me today an all-around error, a purely destructive act. But I didn’t expect it! I did not imagine the man could manifest something like that. He had never stated to me that this was his intention. When I saw him arrive with this live animal, it had a strong impact on me, and I was overwhelmed. I recognize my insanity at that time. But, what can I do? One becomes wise only in measures, as he goes through his own insanity.

Was there a time when you felt afraid of losing control of an energy you had generated? Were there moments in which the ephemeral panic transformed into panic pure and simple?

(Laughter.) There were extreme instances, but I believe them to have always been mysteriously protected. To see Jerry Lee Lewis burn his piano at the end of his concerts really affected me; this influenced me to set fire to a piano and to generate a panic movement in a theater. On another occasion, in the American center of Paris, during an ephemeral that made history, I had a basket full of vipers, which I planned to throw on the audience. Can you imagine the apocalypse that would have caused? But just as I was going to act, a kind of sixth sense warned me of the danger. I suddenly had the vision of a horrific panic, heart attacks, people trampled or crushed in the stampede for the exit. . It could have been a real catastrophe. .

Can you give me an example of an extreme happening that you value as an initiation?

At the time, I was very young and quite handsome. So, I had a few admirers. Four of them wanted to stage a strange show. In Mexico, it is customary to drink tequila with a kind of spicy tomato juice called sangrita. There are, therefore, always two bottles: one of tequila and one of sangrita. The young ladies came onstage to offer me a bottle of tequila, asking me to drink it. Once I had done it, a doctor came and extracted a bit of blood from each one of them. This blood was spilled in a glass that they presented to me saying: “Now drink the sangrita: drink the blood of your disciples.” For me this was a real shock. I went off on a long speech about bread, wine, supper, the Last Supper, all the while telling myself that since I had been so crazy as to organize these happenings, I would now have to face the consequences of my own acts. When I finally decided to drink the blood, it had coagulated! As creator of the ephemeral panic, it was impossible to draw back: I therefore had to not drink but eat the blood of my flock.

Beyond the outrageous or scandalous character of such experiences, they have value as initiation rites. They force you to go, if only for a moment, beyond attraction and repulsion, beyond cultural conditioning, beyond the criteria of beauty and of faith.

These women put me up against a wall, and I had to abandon speech and pure aesthetics. It was a lesson. I admit that these acts were not always conscientiously conducted and that they were part of this experimental period, but you have to get into the cage if you’re going to tame the tiger.

From the artistic point of view, these practices earned you a rather changed reputation.

The polemic was considerable. I received a lot of letters in which the dithyramb rubbed shoulders with an insult, even a threat. The world of Mexican theater found itself revolutionized. From Mexico, I came to Paris, where this extraordinary Central American happening took place.

Maybe you can talk to us about that, about the extent to which it was a kind of apotheosis for you, a convulsive act and purifier.

Yes, it was a grandiose party, a celebration where the forces of darkness emerged from the trap to fight out in the open with the forces of light, a battle between angels and beasts, a ritual saturated with insanity and with wisdom. . This panic show had been meticulously prepared. I had acquired certain experience, and nothing tempted me. The risks were assumed with full knowledge of the cause. Putting on this event, I was aware of heading toward a death, a rite of passage from which I would come out either destroyed or transformed. . For me, it was not about amusing myself by surrendering to a little intellectual masturbation in front of a select public. I didn’t care in the least about the avant-garde flights of fancy coming from the deteriorated brains of some self-satisfied pseudo-artists. I did not worry then, any more than I do now, about the little apprehensive “spirituality” milieu, or about the opinions of those perpetually frightened people who see refuge in a cheap junk nirvana in an effort to avoid facing the monstrosities of life, the daily panic dimension. . It was not a question of staging a nice little show whose audacity would be applauded in trendy reviews, but to question myself completely. I wanted to expose myself: to put life, death, madness, wisdom in a game and to undertake a kind of ritual sacrifice.

What happened?

The first part was based on creations by Topor, Arrabal, and Alain-Yves Leyaouanc. Topor gave me four drawings, which I staged with Graciela Martínez’s ballet company, with suits made of white fabric on which the artist himself drew, and figures carved in wood. That way the public could attend Topor’s ballet, which took place slowly on a black platform. It portrayed the stages of initiation of a very young girl: her first pair of stockings, brought in a little wheelbarrow by an elderly lady without legs; her first pair of shoes; her first bra (two Chaplinesque characters came throwing kicks on an enormous plaster breast, lifting up a cloud of dust); her first lipstick; her first jewelry. .

Arrabal entrusted me with a little four-page comedy: the story of a princess in love with a dog-faced prince who ends up by deception with a bull-faced prince. For this scene, I filled the stage with a thousand chicks chirping deafeningly. The princess masturbated a bullhorn until a stream of milk gushed out. To me, these first two parts constituted understanding the comic-poetic prologue of the “Sacramental Melodrama.” Some of the more well-known American Beat poets, like Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, attended the event. The latter was so impressed that he asked me for a written description of “Sacramental Melodrama” for his City Lights Journal, an article that would be preceded by a little explanatory preface. The simplest is to let you read this document, composed immediately after the event and published in San Francisco in 1966. It conveys all the craziness and the beauty of this ephemeral panic, better than my memory could today.

The goal of theater is to provoke accidents. Theater should be based on what has been called “errors”: ephemeral accidents. In accepting its ephemeral character, theater will discover what distinguishes it from other arts and consequently opens it to its own core. Other arts leave written pages, recordings, canvas, volumes: objective traces that time erases very slowly. Theater itself should not last even a day in the life of a man. Just born, it should immediately die. The only traces it will leave will be carved into the interior of human beings and will manifest in psychological changes. If the objective of other arts is to create oeuvres, the goal of theater is specifically to change man. If theater is not a life science, it cannot know how to be an art.

SACRAMENTAL MELODRAMA

A panic ephemeral presented May 24, 1965, at the Second Festival of Free expression in Paris

A scene from which all the twists, cords, pretenses, and decorations had been removed. In other words, a stage cleaned of all the refuse and triviality: nothing but naked walls.

Everything is painted white, including the floor.

A black automobile (in good condition); the windows are broken so it can shelter things, to be used like a dressing room, a place to rest, and so forth.

Two white boxes on which objects are arranged.

A butcher’s block, a hatchet.

A pot of oil boiling on an electric hot plate.

Before the curtain is raised, large quantities of incense are burned.

All the women are topless.

Two of them, spread out on the ground, are painted entirely in white.

Another woman, painted in black, is atop the roof of the black automobile. At her side, another, painted pink. Both have their feet in a basin of money. A woman dressed in a long silvery dress, her hair arranged in a half-moon, leans on two crutches. Her whole face is masked, including her nose and mouth. Two holes in the dress reveal her nipples; another reveals her pubic hair. She carries a large pair of silver scissors.

One more woman, wearing an executioner’s hood, high leather boots, a thick belt. She holds a whip. Her breasts are covered with a black shawl.

A rock band: six guys with hair to their shoulders.

No one must have taken drugs, except the musicians.

A handrail connects the stage to the public. The objects and costumes used during the show will be thrown at the spectators.

Sudden and rowdy opening of the curtain. The calm before the storm. I appear, dressed in a shiny black plastic suit, high trousers like those of a garbage collector, rubber boots, leather gloves, large plastic glasses. On my head, a white motorcycle helmet, like a big egg.

Two geese. I cut their throats. The music explodes: a cascade of electric guitars.

The birds ramble, dying. Feathers fly. Blood squirts on the two women in white. Trance. I dance with them. I beat them with the dying birds. Noise of death. Blood.

(I had anticipated cutting the birds’ throats on the butcher’s block. But, in my trance, carried away by a strange force, I ripped their necks with my bare hands as easily as if uncorking a bottle.)

The woman in pink, her feet still in the basin, moves her hips, while the woman in black, like a slave, begins to cover her body in honey.

I destroy the geese on the butcher block.

The woman in silver violently opens and closes the scissors. Ah, that metallic sound!

She gives the scissors to the two women in white who begin to cut the black plastic off me.

She destroys my suit. I lose my boots and gloves. Curiously possessed also, the women tear up my suit with their bare hands.

My body is then covered with twenty pounds of steak stitched onto me like a shirt.

Howling, the women hurl the red meat and tear it to shreds piece by piece. They give the pieces to the woman in silver. With an enormous silver knife, she calmly throws the steak into the boiling oil. (The proximity of the hot plate to the sweating bodies of the women produces electric shocks.)

Each piece of meat once fried is put on a white dish; the two women put the dishes in the public’s view.

I remain dressed in black leather pants. A phallus made of the same material is hung perpendicular to the floor. I have leather bracelets on my wrists and ankles: homage to Maciste, the Hercules of the Italian peplum (sword and sandal films). Concentration. Karate-kata.

I take the hatchet and cut my leather phallus into slices on the butcher’s block.

The woman in black, conscious of the skeleton, dances; she moves the bones like a marionette while I break the white dishes with a hammer in one blow.

The women in white dance without stopping. When they feel tired they take the Zazen posture.

I bring a metal frame. Slowly, I lift the black shawl covering the breasts of the executioner. Her skin is not painted. She has a sound and strong chest, a powerful body.

I put the frame around my neck while turning my back to the public.

The woman gives me a lash of the whip.

I trace a red line on her right breast with lipstick.

Second lash of the whip. The line begins at her solar plexus and descends to her vagina.

(The first lash was strong but not so much: I needed more. I sought a still-unknown psychological state. I needed to bleed to transcend myself, to break my own image. The second lash branded me instantly. Then the executioner lost control, for she had often dreamed of flogging a man. The third time, very excited, she lashed me with all her might. The wound took two weeks to heal.)

The woman wants to continue to beat me; she pushes me with all her strength. With the apparatus around my neck, I whirl around and fall to the ground. (I could have broken my cervical vertebrae but, in the strange emotional state where I found myself, time slowed down, and as if I were in a movie in slow motion, I lifted myself up without the slightest injury.) I pinch her breasts to bring her back to herself. Calm.

The woman in black brings me lemons. Ah, this yellow color!

I lay them down in a circle. I kneel in the middle.

A professional hairdresser, nearly paralyzed with fear, approaches to cut my hair.

The woman covered in honey comes down from the roof of the car. I dance with her.

Sexual desire with dreamlike force. Her tights seem to summarize all of social hypocrisy. I remove them without preamble. They slip down her honey-covered thighs. Bees. Its impact on her black pubic hair. The submission of woman. Her eyes half-closed. Her naturally accepting nudity. Liberty. Purity. She kneels next to me. On her body, starting from the stomach, I glue the hair cut from my head.

I want to give the impression that these pubic hairs grow like a forest and invade the whole body. The hands of the hairdresser are paralyzed by anxiety. It is the executioner who must manage to shave my head.

Two models of Catherine Harley, strangers to all that has happened and panicked at the idea of soiling their very expensive silk clothing (rented for the occasion) come and go, carrying two hundred fifty baguettes onto the stage.

Now my brain is on fire. I take four black snakes out of a jar of money. At first, I try with tape to stick them onto my head to substitute for hair, but I finish with trying to put them on my chest like two live crosses. Perspiration impedes me.

The snakes move around my hands like living water. Marriage.

I chase the woman in pink with the snakes. She hides in the car, like a turtle in its shell. She dances inside. She makes me think of a fish in an aquarium.

I frighten the model dressed in green. She drops her bread and jumps back.

A spectator laughs. I throw the bread at her face. (During a reception, some days later, this woman approached to tell me that receiving the bread in the face seemed like communion, as if I had presented her with a gigantic sacramental bread upside the head.)

Suddenly, lucidity: I see the public seated there in the chairs, paralyzed people, hysterical, excited, but immobile, nonparticipatory, terrorized by the chaos, which is about to engulf them; I want to throw the snakes on them or to blast them.

I restrain myself. I refuse the easy scandal of a collective panic.

Calm. Violence of the music. Amplifiers turned all the way up. I put on pants, a shirt, and orange shoes. The color of a Buddhist burned alive.

I exit and return with a heavy cross made with two wooden beams. On the cross, a crucified chicken upside-down, with two nails in its claws, like a decapitated Christ. (I had let it rot for a week.) On the cross, two road signs: on the lower part, a sign with an arrow stating “exit on top”; above the chicken, a sign stating “no exit.” I give the cross to the silvery woman. I bring another. Two signposts: always the one on the bottom indicates the exit at the top; always the one on top prohibits exiting.

I give the cross to a woman in white. I bring a third cross. I give it to the other woman in white.

The two women straddle the crosses, transforming them into gigantic phalluses; they fight; with one of the two sticks at the end of the cross in the car window, they simulate the movements of a sexual act achieved with the vehicle.

I put the basin in front of the cross. The crucified chicken is shaken off over the spectators’ heads. We let the cross fall.

Among the musicians, I choose the one with the longest hair. I lift him. He is as stiff as a mummy. I dress him in priest’s clothing. I cover him with stoles.

The women, on their knees, open their mouths and stick out their tongues as far as they will go.

A new character appears: a woman dressed in a tube-shaped suit, like an upright worm. This suggests the idea of a “papal form” in decomposition — a pope becomes a Camembert.

The musician, imitating the gestures of a priest, opens a can of fruit in syrup. He places half of a yellow apricot in each woman’s mouth. They swallow it in just one mouthful.

Sacramental bread bathing in syrup!

A pregnant woman makes her entry. Stomach made of cardboard. The pope notices that she has a plaster hand. He takes the hand and breaks it into a thousand pieces. He opens the stomach using a pickax. (I must control it to prevent him from truly wounding her.)

He puts his hands on the interior of her stomach and takes out light bulbs. The woman screams as if she is giving birth. She gets up, tears a baby made of rubber from her breasts and hits the pope in the chest. The doll falls to the ground. The woman leaves. I pick up the baby. I open its stomach with a scalpel and take out a live fish convulsing in anguish. End of the music. Brutal drum solo. The fish continues to wriggle; the drummer shakes champagne bottles until they explode.

Upon seeing the froth covering everything, the pope has an epileptic attack. The fish dies. The drummer is silent. I throw the animal over the handrail; it falls in the middle of the spectators. Presence of death.

Everyone leaves the stage except me.

Jewish music. Dreadful hymn. Slowness.

Two huge white hands hurl a cow’s head at me. It weighs eight kilos (seventeen pounds). Its whiteness, its dampness; her eyes, her tongue. .

My arms feel its coldness. I myself get cold. In an instant, I become this head.

I sense my body: a corpse in the form of a cow’s head. I fall to my knees. I want to yell. That is impossible because the cow’s mouth is closed. I stick my index finger in her eyes. My fingers slip on the pupils. I don’t feel anything but my fingers — sensible satellite turning around a dead planet.

I feel myself like the cow’s head: blind. Desire to see.

I pierce the tongue with a hole punch; I open the jaws. I take out the tongue. I direct the head, mouth open, toward the sky, while I myself also look up, mouth ajar.

A howling that does not come from me but from the corpse. One more time, I see the public. Immobile, frozen, made by the skin of a dead cow. All of us are the corpse. I throw the head to the middle of the stage. It becomes the center of our circle.

A rabbi enters (the huge white hands were his).

He wears a black coat, a black hat, a white Father Christmas beard. He walks like Frankenstein. He is standing on a silver basin. He takes three bottles of milk from a leather suitcase. He dumps them into his hat.

I rub my cheek against his. His face is white. We take a milk bath. Baptism.

He grabs hold of my ears and kisses me passionately on the mouth. His hands take hold of my buttocks. The kiss lasts several minutes. We tremble, electrified. Kadish.

With a lead pencil, he traces two lines from the corner of my mouth to my chin. My jaw now looks like a ventriloquist’s doll. He is seated on the butcher’s block. One of his hands rests on my back as if he wants to pass through, to cut my spinal column, to put his fingers in my rib cage and squeeze my lungs and make me scream or beg. He makes me move. I feel like a machine, a robot. Dread. I must stop being a machine.

I slip my hand between his legs. I open his fly. I put my hands in and with a keen force I take out a pig’s foot (similar to the one that I imagined to be the phallus of my father when I was five years old). With the other hand I take out a pair of bull’s testicles. I spread my arms out in the form of a cross. The rabbi screams as if he were castrated. He appears dead.

The Jewish music becomes stronger; each time, it becomes more and more melancholy.

A butcher appears, wearing a hat, a coat, a black beard, his apron covered in blood.

He spreads the rabbi out and begins the autopsy: he puts his hands in his coat and takes out an enormous cow’s heart. Odor of meat. I nail the heart down to the cross. Long pieces of gut. I nail it.

The butcher leaves. Terrified, I lift up the rabbi’s hat. I take out the cow’s brain. I squash it against my head.

I take the cross and put it near the rabbi. I take from the suitcase a long plastic red ribbon and attach the old man to the cross, covered in guts.

I lift up everything — wood, meat, clothing, body — and I throw it all along the length of the ramp that descends to the public. (Everything weighs nearly 125 kilos: in spite of the shocking violence, the man feels nothing and has not a scratch on him.)

The women in white, black, pink, and silver enter.

They kneel.

Waiting.

A new person enters: a woman covered in black satin cut in triangles: a kind of spiderweb. A three-meter rubber dinghy is attached to her suit and resembles an enormous vagina. Orange plastic filled with air. The bottom of the raft is made of white plastic.

Symbol: the hymen.

Dance. She signals to me. When I approach, she dismisses me. When I move away, she follows me. She mounts me. The raft covers me completely. I take the ax. I split the white bottom. Hurling. I split the web and take refuge in the vagina. I stay between her legs, hidden by the black satin. From a bag hidden near her stomach, I take out forty live turtles and throw them at the public.

They seem to gush from the enormous vagina, like live stones, one could say.

I begin to be born. Cries from a woman giving birth. A woman sobs. I fall to the ground in the middle of the glass lightbulbs, bits of plates, feathers, blood, pieces of firecrackers (while he shaved my head, I lighted thirty-six, one for each year of my life), puddles of honey, pieces of apricot, lemons, bread, milk, meat, rags, wood splinters, nails, sweat: I rebirth in that world. My cries resemble those of a baby or an old man. The old rabbi, making a desperate effort, hops from here to there, attached to the cross like a pig in agony. He frees himself from the plastic ribbon. He exits.

The woman-mother pushes the woman in black toward me. I lift her. I bring her to center stage, her arms are spread open. A corpse-cross. The black paint suggests a cremation: my own death.

Giving me life, the woman threw death into my arms. Defiled with the makeup of my partner, I begin to turn completely black. My face looks as if it were burned.

The women attach us, one to the other, with bindings. I am tied to her by the waist, the arms, the legs, and the neck. This bony cadaver is encrusted in me, and I am encrusted in her. We look like Siamese twins: we nearly make one. Slowly, we improvise a dance. We sprawl on the ground. The movements are not hers or mine, but both of ours at the same time. We can control them.

The women in white and pink splashes us with mint, black currant, and lemon syrup. The gooey liquid, green, red, and yellow, covers us; mixed with the dust, it creates a kind of mud.

Magma.

The curtain begins to fall slowly. Our united bodies cling one to the other, like pillars. We want to rise; we fall.

The curtain is down.

(All the ingredients employed in the “Sacramental Melodrama” were thrown at the public: suits, axes, containers, animals, bread, auto parts, and so forth. Big altercations between those present who fought like birds of prey to salvage the relics. Nothing remained.)

Ahem, I ask myself if I regret having missed the “Sacramental Melodrama” or if I am glad to have missed it.

Wait! It’s not over yet! The audience then argued over the live turtles, the internal organs, the steaks, the hair, and so forth. I returned to the stage and addressed them: “Generally, one pays a high price for one’s place at a theater to receive very little. Today, there was no charge, you didn’t pay anything, and you received a lot. It is midnight. In order to present to you the last part of this poem, I need two hours of preparation. Go get some coffee and come back at two in the morning.”

Everyone applauded and left the theater. At two in the morning, the theater was again full. I began the ceremony that Alain-Yves Leyaouanc had proposed to me. I got dressed in a suit from the 1920s; I shaved the pubic hair of his young wife to the sound of sacred music. On her body, she had glued dominoes. It was a very moving act, and the spirit in which it was accomplished quickly generated a religious atmosphere. There was also a copy in plaster of Rodin’s Penseur in which we made holes with blows of a hammer. Jets of China ink came out of the head of the thinker, then we let two thousand little birds loose in the theater. As I told you, I was at the end of the happening, so cleaned of myself that the birds came and landed on my head without my paying any attention.

What was the meaning of this public demonstration?

It was like an ordination, the ritual sacrifice of what had, for a long time, molded my life. This happening, at the same time that it made history, ended a period of my life. I left exhausted, battered, and I thought a lot about it. I had always seen, prowling around me, the ghost of darkness, and I felt more than ever that theater should go toward the light. However, I told myself, never forget that the lotus grows out of the mud. One must explore the muck, stir death and dirt to go toward clearer skies. My main concern from then on was to promote positive, enlightened, and liberating theater. So I realized that I needed to become completely different, and I began to practice theater counseling. If someone — no matter who — desired to do theater, I would communicate the following theory: The theater is a magical force, a personal and a nontransmissible experience. It belongs not only to actors but also to the whole world. A decision, a rough resolution, is enough for this force to transform your life. It is time for human beings to let go of conditioned reflexes, hypnotic systems, erroneous self-concepts. World literature devotes many pages to the theme of the “double,” which, little by little, expels a man from his own life, takes over his favorite places, his friendships, his family, his work, until it makes him an outcast and, at times, his own assassin, according to some versions of the universal myth. For my part, I believe that we are the “double” and not the original.

You want to say that we identify ourselves with a person who is but a mere caricature of our deeper self?

Exactly. Our self-concept. .

In other words, the idea that we make of ourselves. .

Yes, our ego. It doesn’t matter the name that we give to this agent of alienation; it is never more than a pale copy, an approximation of our essential self. We identify ourselves with this double that is as erratic as it is illusory. And suddenly, the “original” appears. The ruler begins to take back the place that belongs to him. The limited “me” then feels persecuted, in danger of death, and rightly so. For the “original” will, in the end, dissolve the double. As much as humans identify with the double, we must understand that the frightening invader is nothing but ourselves, our own deeper self. Nothing belongs to us; everything belongs to the “original.” Our only chance is that the Other arises and eliminates us. We do not suffer from this murder, but we will take part. It acts as a sacred sacrifice in which we give ourselves entirely to the master, without anguish.

How can theater help someone return to the, using your expression, “original”?

Because we live enclosed in what I call our autoconcept, the idea one has of oneself, why not adopt a completely other point of view? For example, tomorrow, you can be Rimbaud. You will wake up as Rimbaud, and you will brush your teeth; you will dress like him, you will think like him, travel the city like him. . For one week, twenty-four hours a day, and for no other spectator than yourself, you will be the poet, acting like him with your friends and acquaintances without providing them with any explanation. You will achieve being an author-actor-spectator, producing yourself not in a theater but in real life.

If I understand right, you explain this theory to your clients, then you create a program for them.

That’s it! I establish a program, an act or a series of acts to accomplish in life in a given time frame: five hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hours. . An elaborate program based on their problem, designed to crack the character with whom they have identified themselves in order to help them reunite with their deeper self. For an atheist, I made him adopt the personality of a saint for a few weeks. For an indifferent mother, I assigned the duty of imitating maternal love for a century. To a judge, I gave the task of disguising himself as a tramp and go begging at a restaurant. From his pockets, he should take out handfuls of glass doll eyes. I thus created a character intended to establish itself in daily life and to better it. This is how my theatrical research gradually began to take on a therapeutic dimension. From being a director, I turned into a theatrical counselor, giving people their directions to take their place as a character in the comedy of existence.

I confess that I’m skeptical about the effects of this theatrical therapy, although the idea in itself is very interesting. How can an indifferent mother adopt the character of a loving mother and above all manage to achieve it during her lifetime?

First of all, do not forget that my clients all suffered being dominated by their double. If they came to me, it was precisely because they felt bad in their role and sensed a completely different nature in themselves than the “original.” The process is founded, then, in a client’s real desire to change. The indifferent mother, for example, suffers from not being able to transmit love to her son. In addition, I believe in the virtues of imitation, in the good sense of the word. A saint engages himself in the “imitation of Jesus Christ.” Why cannot an atheist, in his disbelief, begin to imitate a saint?

Why not? Exactly. So, all imitation of this type — which is equivalent to what is also called asceticism or spiritual practice — is really not that easy to implement day after day. .

I grant you that. But if the mother could be a little less indifferent thanks to this approach and if the atheist took a step toward saintliness, isn’t that marvelous in itself?

THREE

THE ONEIRIC ACT

The interpretation of dreams is a major part of the work of the artist-shaman-director theater-clown mystic in the search for that other form of madness, which is wisdom.

Yes, although the interpretation of dreams is a practice as old as the world. With time, the only thing that has changed is the forms of interpretations, from a simplistic system, which consists of systematically attributing a concrete symbolic significance to this or that image, to Jung’s concept, which holds that one should not explain the dream but rather continue living it, by means of analysis, in the enlightened state, for the end result of seeing where this leads. The next stage, situated beyond all interpretation, consists of entering the lucid dream, in which you know you are dreaming; this knowledge gives you the ability to work on the contents of the dream.

It is the practice made popular through the writings of Carlos Castaneda.

He popularized it, but he didn’t invent it. Actually, the first book dedicated to lucid dreaming that I know of was published in France: Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger [Dreams and How to Direct Them] by Hervey de Saint-Denis. As early as 1867, this author hit on the essential question, as you can appreciate in this excerpt that I want to read to you:

As a dream is like a reflection of real life, the events that appear to take place in it generally follow, even in their incoherence, certain coherent chronological laws within the normal sequence of all true events. I want to say that if, for example, I dream that I have broken my arm, it will appear to me that I wear it in a sling or that I use it gingerly, or if I dream that they close the bedroom shutters, it will seem to me that the light is blocked and that darkness is all around me. From this perspective, I imagined that if, in dreams, I make the gesture of putting a hand over my eyes, I should obtain, in the first place, a similar illusion to what really happens if I do the same thing while awake; that is to say, I would make the images of objects, which appear to be placed in front of me, disappear. Then I asked myself if, after producing this interruption of preexisting visions, my imagination could not more easily evoke new objects, ones that I would fix in my thoughts. Experience follows closely with this reasoning. The placing, in my dream, of a hand on my eyes erased, in that moment, the vision of the countryside during harvest time which, beforehand, I had uselessly tried to change using only the strength of my imagination. I did not see anything for a moment — exactly what happened to me in real life. I then made another energetic call to the memory of the much talked-about eruption of the monster and, as if by magic, this memory, nicely placed now in the focus of my thoughts, suddenly appeared clear, brilliant, stormy; and before I woke up, I had an understanding of how the transition itself operated. . If we manage to establish a conclusive way for the will to conserve enough strength during the dream to direct the course of the spirit through the world of illusions and reminiscences (as it directs the body during the day through the events of the real world), we will realize that certain habits of exercising this faculty — joined with being conscious, within our dreams, of the true state — can lead us gradually, through persistence of effort, to very conclusive results. Not only must the dreamer recognize above all that the directing action of his will is reflected in lucid and calm dreams, but he will soon perceive the influence of this same will in his incoherent or passionate dreams. The incoherent dreams will sensibly coordinate themselves under this influence; as for the passionate dreams, full of stormy desires or painful thoughts, the result of this consciousness and of this acquired freedom of spirit will put the painful images aside, favoring, by contrast, happy hopes. The fear of having disagreeable visions will decrease as a result of becoming aware that they are wrong, and the desire to see pleasant images appear will become more effective through recognizing the capacity to evoke them. The desire will soon be stronger than the fear, and since the dominant thought is what makes the images crop up, the agreeable dream will prevail. This, at least, is the way I understand it, in theory, a perceived phenomenon, one that I practice constantly.

Fascinating, right? I don’t know if Castaneda would be inspired by this book or if his discoveries coincide with those of the author by chance. What is certain is that this late-nineteenth-century text shows clearly the method that Castaneda would later elucidate. It was André Breton who recommended this reading to me.

Did you begin to have lucid dreams after having read it, or were you already familiar with the experience?

I had the great luck of having my first lucid dream at seventeen years old. In this dream, I was in a movie theater watching an animated film worthy of Dali. Suddenly I saw myself seated in the center of the theater, and I knew that I was dreaming. I looked toward the exit, but, as I was not more than an adolescent lacking spiritual training or psychoanalytical ability, I thought: “If I cross this door, I will enter into another world and I will die.” And I panicked! My only solution was to wake myself up, and I made enormous efforts to leave the dream, until I felt that I could ascend from the depths toward my body, which seemed to be situated on the surface. I reintegrated into my physical shell, and I woke up. That’s how my first experience went, and frankly, it left me terrified. From then on, I began to familiarize myself with the lucid dream.

How can a person be sure that he is dreaming? After all I also could decide right now, while talking to you, that I am dreaming.

In the beginning I made a test. I supported myself in the air with my two hands as if on an invisible table, and I propelled myself upward. If I floated, I knew I was dreaming. Quickly, I looped around and began working on the dream. I will read you a lucid dream written in my yellow notebook in 1970, which covers for me an important detail: I made an effort for the first time to practice the technique described here.

I am alone in an unknown home. Everything seems completely real, but without knowing why, as nothing indicated that, I think, “Maybe I’m dreaming. If I am dreaming, I can fly.” I make an effort. I support myself in the air with the palms of my hands, and I propel myself up. I float in the room. “It is a dream!” I tell myself. I decide to take advantage of the opportunity to perfect my flight, and not only to see myself fly but to feel myself fly. I turn over; I go up and down. I am satisfied. I decide to plane glide around the whole house. I fly through a corridor, and I arrive in a dark living room. In the corner, I see two five-year-old boys. I go toward them to see them better: they are not boys but old gnomes, skinny and wrinkled. They laugh and hide. They are the spirits of the house. They have a disturbing air. They avoid me. They disappear in the shadows and laugh at me. They don’t dare me to look for them. The dream absorbs me; I lose lucidity. . I travel in a bus without a conductor or passengers. I look out the window and see a petrified forest. I tell myself, “This is probably a dream. I am going to confirm it.” I fly. I get out of the bus by passing through the window glass, and I glide through the forest. I lose lucidity again. . Now I find myself in a cellar, before an opaque window. I don’t hesitate to realize that I am dreaming, and I tell myself, “Surely, this is a dream.” I try to exit flying out the window, but I don’t achieve this. I have the feeling that the walls have various meters of thickness. But I must get through them. I feel this is impossible. I force myself to try. I pass through the wall without difficulty, and I exit the space. Outside there is a blue sky; I float between the clouds. While I let myself be taken by a soft breeze, I think, “I must take advantage of this dream to see my interior God.” Suddenly, I feel a profound exhaustion invade me, obviously caused by a terrible fear. I give myself explanations: “It is too hard a test. I am still not prepared for this meeting; I will leave it for another day.”

And I wake up. On the one hand, I feel content to have discovered this technique that lets me know if I am dreaming, but, on the other hand, I am irritated because of my inability and my lack of value. In my dreams notebook, I write this commentary:

I believe the moment has arrived to go further in the lucid dream: to run risks. But I’m still scared of dying; I do not dare. . I cannot have entered into my unconscious until I find the interior God: trust in Him. . I must pursue the gnomes, confront them, speak to them without confusing myself with their mockery and establish a real contact with them, to know their secrets. I must create worlds, cross Death’s path, get to the center of my being, defeat the monsters and the terrors. . I want to be more courageous next time and overpower my fear. Also, I have to find allies and accept them, not always do all the work alone.

I suppose your lucid dream practice passed through different phases.

I began directing the game. I told myself, “I want to see elephants walking by in Africa.” And in a few seconds I was in Africa, seeing a herd of elephants. I could change the set, desire to go to the South Pole and then to see thousands of penguins. . This gave me such joy that I stopped waking myself up. I have experimented with all kinds of adventures with myself. Once, I wanted to know what it was like to die: I threw myself from the top of a building, and I smashed against the wall. Immediately, I found myself alive in another body, among the multitude that looked at the suicided corpse. This is how I discovered that the brain doesn’t know death. Another time, I decided to let myself be possessed by a mythological god.

Did you have a female orgasm?

The experience of being penetrated was more complete than that of a usual sexual relation. Don’t forget that I worked with oneiric images that exceeded the limits of reality. So that you understand better my practice, I can read the dream exactly as I wrote it down, in detail, in my notebook, with the date April 9, 1978.

I am in a dorm, spread out between two twin beds. I am supporting my back against the wall. In front of my feet appears an Invunche. .

An Invunche?

Yes. I’ll explain: The afternoon before the dream, I had been at a café with a Chilean exile whom I asked about the mapuche folklore. He told me that, according to the legend, the witches of Chiloé stole children and mutilated them so that, converted into monsters, they would serve as helpers with the name “Invunche.” I’ll continue:

. . a blind dwarf, naked, hairless, with a bird’s beak, stumps for arms, a deformed torso, and bowlegged: a kind of large fetus, as horrible as it was disturbing. And so I think, “It is a god with whom I have to have relations. His faith should breed something in my spirit.” Now I know I am dreaming and that I have the power to guide my dream. I decide to work on this monster with the objective of transforming it into a positive deity. I achieve this. The Invunche acquires good posture, normal features, and turns into a beautiful being, indescribable, like a live statue. I get out from between the beds, and I lay down with my mouth to the sky in the middle of the bedroom. I know that I must be inseminated by a god. I look for my femininity, lifting my legs to do so. A transparent tube, some forty centimeters long, comes out from between the legs of the god. I decide to surrender myself without resistance so that he can introduce the tube between the sex and the anus, this space, the perineum, in Tantra called chakra muladhara. I know that I do not have a vagina, and I am not trying anal penetration. The god kneels down between my open legs and begins to penetrate me. His organ rises up my spinal column until I feel it enter my brain. My awareness shatters.

Impressive. .

If you call this cataclysmic explosion “female orgasm,” yes, Gilles, I have experienced it, and it was a marvelous feeling. I felt very emotional letting myself be possessed by this god created from my own monstrosity. Then I dedicated myself to achieving unreachable desires in the state of wakefulness, especially sexual desires, of course. In dreams, I gave myself to fantastic orgies with half-human, half-panther women. Allow me to read to you another annotation made after one of these dreams. Although I want to clarify a point: Before achieving the lucid dream, in which I controlled the images, I had to overcome a series of obstacles that appeared like so many other tests of initiation. Only then could I claim the right to be the owner and god of my dreams. This passage taken from my notebook shows well this aspect of the process:

I am in an industrial world, without nature, only made up of buildings. It is a border. I do not have identification documents. Three soldiers prevent my passage. I jump the barrier and take off running, pursued by the soldiers. After opening a garage door, I find myself in front of a well a thousand kilometers deep. At the edge of this abyss, I realize that I am dreaming. The pursuers have ceased to exist. I decide to throw myself to the bottom, knowing already that nothing can happen to me. I jump and I fall with a great velocity. I am not afraid. I feel the desire to stop the fall. The fall stops. On the wall there appears a door. I enter and now I am at the entrance of a cathedral.

Understand that I have the magical power to make whatever I want appear before my eyes. So, I feel the desire to conduct an erotic experience. I create three women-creatures, half-panther and half-human, crouching or on all-fours. I kiss one on the mouth, and her long lips seem like the vulva’s labia. I try to put my index finger in their sex, under the tail. I possess one while the others scratch me agreeably, and I try to reach orgasm. But inevitably I quit being lucid, and the dream absorbs me and, finally, it turns into a nightmare. I wake up with palpitations. .

Where do these experiences reside in the initiation dimension?

In the special feature of which, at the moment that I began making love with those women animals, the desire overtook me, making me lose lucidity, and the dream escaped my control. I forgot I was dreaming. The same thing happened to me with wealth. When I quit being fascinated by money, my dream quit being lucid. Each time I tried to satisfy my human passions, the script absorbed me and I lost lucidity. It was a big lesson: I finally understood that, in life as in dreams, in order to remain lucid it is necessary to distance oneself, to not identify oneself with the action. It is an old spiritual principle that the lucid dream made me remember. Desire and fear are, as all traditions affirm, the two faces of our identity.

Justifiably, the dream also showed me how to behave in the face of my fears. There was a period in which I often had the same nightmare: I found myself in a desert when a psychic entity surged from the horizon like an immense cloud of negativity with the intent to destroy me. I woke up screaming, soaked in sweat. One day, I got fed up and I decided to offer myself in a sacrifice to this entity. Stronger than the dream, in a state of lucid terror, I told myself, “Okay, I’m going to stop wanting to wake up. You don’t have to do anything but come and destroy me.” The entity approached and suddenly disappeared. I woke up for a few seconds to return to a light, very pleasurable, and refreshing sleep. So I understood that we ourselves nourish our own terrors. What scares us loses all power over us when we loosen our grip. It is one of the classic events of lucid dreaming. I, thus, made several attempts to control my fear of the final passage while crossing my own death.

Can you give me other examples of this process?

Well, it suffices to consult my notebook. Listen:

I have a strong desire to urinate. I feel the accumulation of liquid in my bladder. In a white bathtub, I piss a huge jet of blood. I know it is serious, but I don’t worry. I tell myself, “The liquid is red because I make too much effort. I cannot stop urinating; to change this, I can relax and, with my will, transform the red into yellow.” At no moment did I let myself be beat by the anxiety. Little by little, I transform the color. Then the nightmare dominates me again, and again I urinate blood. I take back control of my dream, without losing my cool, and the jet definitely turns amber.

Another dream:

I am at a café, in a public plaza. I sit in a corner among the other clients. Suddenly, in the middle of the terrace, a bearded man, crazy and aggressive, takes out a gun. With a burst of frightening laughter, he points the gun at a colleague’s temple. Indignant, I rise and tell him he should prove himself with greater delicacy. I remind him that my friend previously attempted suicide by firing a bullet into his head and risks being traumatized by this detestable joke. The madman looks at me and takes aim while murmuring in a sadistic tone, “Fine. Now what?” He waits for me to start to tremble, but I am not afraid. The madman walks around me. I do not move. I know he will not shoot, and I tell him, “You won’t do it.”

“And why not?” he asks.

“Because I am too little for your delusions of grandeur.”

Indeed I know this madman, obsessed by his own spirit, cannot truly be interested enough in me to seek to annihilate me. I wake up happy. This, which could have been a nightmare, did not scare me.

Another dream in which I tame my monster:

I walk upon unknown territory and reach a hole like the mouth of a huge sewer. A horrible, giant monster about twenty meters high springs up. I immediately subdue my distaste, because I know this hideous creature is part of me, an obscure energy of my spirit. I decide not to destroy it but to transform it. So it covers itself with white feathers, turns luminous, deploys six wings, and rises. Turned into a very beautiful angelic entity, he proposes to take me along with him into the cosmos. I overcome the temptation. The angel is the luminous energy of my spirit that I must absorb. I arrange for him to cover me as I sweat from all of the pores in my skin. Now it is I who has turned into a being of light and energy. I rise calmly. I wake up full of joy.

Now, listen to this very poetic dream where I see myself entering, eyes big and open, the kingdom of the dead:

I am in the anteroom of death. Seated in front of me on a bench is the singer Carlos Gardel, deceased for forty years. I say hello and he says, “Go ahead, have courage, decide to die.” We pass into another room where a door going directly to death is found. A gloomy doorman touches everyone present and decides who will go through the last door and who will not. Before us, two adolescents arrive. After they are frisked, the doorman forces them back, and they go, sorry to still have to live. Gardel is declared dead; it is now my turn. The doorman touches me and declares me deceased. Carlos Gardel hesitates, he is afraid, and I tell him, “What does it matter! Good! Now we are going to truly know what is behind this door!” Firmly decided, I push him so that he passes into this dimension with me. Upon passing through the door, the singer disappears into an explosion of light. Having barely crossed the border of death, I find myself in a green landscape. I am in the company of very agreeable people. I throw blank paper envelopes into the air. They fall down again full of sweets and precious objects. I can perform miracles as I dominate this dimension, and I know that the tossed envelopes will always fall back down full. I offer the gifts to the people who accompany me, and I wake up feeling very content.

Finally, a last dream among many others where I find myself once again confronted by monsters:

I must cross the dark underground on a dirt floor. A stranger waits to let me pass. I divine in the shadows the presence of an animal. I know that it acts like a black panther and that the unknown is the trainer. He signals me to cross directly, without fear. I follow his instructions, but the panther jumps on me, throws me to the ground, and, with his claws, first immobilizes my head. It nibbles at my cranium without hurting me, the way a cat does playing with a mouse. I see the decomposed face of the trainer who watches me at the mercy of his big cat; he feels powerless. The animal never frightens me. Without moving, I let it caress my hair with its mouth. I know I must abandon myself, become one with her, accept the situation with love, dissolve into the panther. I begin to vibrate with love, and I become one with her. At this instant, the panther disappears. I get up, cross the underground, and go on my way. I wake up full of joy.

If I understand right, you have applied what you’ve learned in your dreams to the course of your daily life, and you have afterward integrated these lessons into the practice of Pyschomagic.

Exactly. I have forced myself from day to day to be faithful to what has been given to me to understand in the dream. For what good is it to receive the lessons without applying them to the core of daily troubles? A lesson doesn’t become operative, does not acquire its transformative force, until it’s applied.

Can you give me an example of application in daily life of a principle perceived in a dream?

Well, as I have said, the lucid dream taught me to confront the monster. It’s okay to run away if one does not feel strong enough to face it; but the moment comes when one must look it in the eyes. Sometimes, the disguised monster turns into an ally. Our fear nourishes the adversary’s hostility while our will to face him with love disarms him, causing his purpose to change. While I shot The Holy Mountain in Mexico, there were two scandalous rumors. Because I was shooting in front of a cathedral, they said I celebrated black masses. They also whispered that I ridiculed the army and the Mexican police. . One day, two police officers called out to me and said, “Such and so minister wants to see you.” So they brought me to the office of this minister, who said, more or less, “Listen, Jodorowsky, the president knows you very well. He admires what you do; you have a friend in him. But be careful: Just as a government can be a very good friend, it can, if you displease it, turn into a formidable enemy. Do not show any uniform in the film, erase all of the religious symbols, and you will live in peace.” In Mexico, such remarks by the minister were the equivalent of a death threat. Upon returning home that evening, I heard voices in the garden, “Attention, Jodorowsky! We are going to skin you.” There was at the time in Mexico a paramilitary group of young people called “the Falcons” who were in charge of the dirty jobs. I understood that all this could turn out badly, so the next day I took all my family to the United States and decided to finish shooting there. However, I did not want this minister to become an enemy, nor did I want the ghosts of any death threats on my conscience. Once the film was finished, I assembled all of The Holy Mountain’s good reviews from Europe and the United States. I went back to Mexico, and I asked for a hearing with the minister who remained angry with me for having taken my team and left Mexico. Offering the press clippings, I told him, “See what my film did for Mexico? They talk about it around the world.” Aware that I had again put myself in the mouth of the wolf, he smiled and gave me a pat on the back. “It’s good, Jodorowsky. You are brave. I applaud you.” Not only did he not present any more problems for me, but he even gave me presents! So there is the true antidote, which shows to what point it is sometimes beneficial to dare to brave the monster. The essential principle is, as often as possible, never leave an account unsettled with an enemy. Because, the more things stay at the latent stage, the more hate nourishes it, at the risk of growing. A bomb with a long fuse can be lit years before it explodes, but the day when the detonation occurs, the harm is considerable. It’s better to defuse the bomb, to not let the threats of death linger around us or in the unconscious. One never needs to kill the adversary; it works better to transform it, to make it an ally.

Another principle of the lucid dream consists in consciously changing the content of the dream. How have you applied this in the course of your daily life?

Well, for example, I have told you that in my dreams I loved to change the scene, to go from Africa to the United States, for example, to transform the environment. . In the same way, I understood that I should not, in any way, allow myself to be a prisoner of my surroundings in my everyday life. Daily reality is not rigid, or no more so than the conceptions we have in our heads. If we feel ourselves pressured, we can always evolve within the given environment — we’re free to change! Who says it is impossible? The lucid dream taught me to move within a subtle reality, where all the mutations, all the transformations can serve at every moment. That depends entirely on my intention. In the lucid dream, the single intention of finding myself in Africa among a herd of elephants transported me there. In this other dream mode — which is “reality”—it is also my brain, the representation that I make in the world, which controls the game. “Reality” does not exist in itself, instant after instant. I create my reality, happy or nightmarish, monotone or passionate.

Example?

The other day, when you came to visit me at my home, you noticed I had changed everything. I was tired of the old decor. I bought new furniture, and everything in the house that I did not want anymore I put out on the street. My cleaning out turned into a kind of neighborhood party; people began to help themselves. . Some days later, the neighbors heckled me, “Ah! We know you!”

“Go on,” I replied. “How do you know me? By my comics, my films?”

“By your garbage!” they replied. “We recovered incredible things from in front of your house!”

In short, I not only changed my decor, but I also transformed a bit of the atmosphere of my neighborhood.

All the same, Alejandro, it is easier, if one has money, to change the furniture than to transport oneself among the African elephants.

No, the fundamental principle is the same; this all takes place in the head, in our conception of reality! One can see reality as a nightmare, and God knows that in the worst situation, anything can happen. But it is in this same reality that one can develop lucidity and accomplish responsive acts to transform the negative into positive.

Some might say this is a question of the purse: if you have a large sum of money, you can effectively take a jet and go to Africa or New York.

Yes, but one must attract life! Your life corresponds to the conception that you make of it. Well, for example, I have never been a millionaire or even very wealthy, but I have always applied the lucid dream principle to my daily life: why not go there? Thus, I have attracted favorable circumstances when I have had real need. The other day, I had the desire to treat myself to a little escapade. I had been invited to a film festival in Chicago, so I went there secretly for three days. I left on Friday; I came back on Sunday. No one knew. (Laughter.)

I remember one day, a billionaire friend asked me, “What are you doing this weekend?”

“Nothing,” I told him.

“You want to go to Acapulco?”

And there it was! His private jet brought us to Acapulco for the weekend.

As you tell this, it seems very simple, but not everyone runs with billionaires.

Listen, you are trying to make me a liar, but you know as well as I do, from your own experience, that each person creates his own reality.

I needed to leave for the other side of the world for the weekend. I was intimately convinced of the flexibility of reality, and this sent me a billionaire with a private jet. That’s all! As for you, what you loved in life was meeting sages and listening to rock ’n’ roll. You really wanted to reconcile these two seemingly rather different aspects of your existence. And then, since you did not have a rigid idea of reality, you attracted the adequate circumstances, and you finally found, in Arizona, a true sage who, not content with having created an ashram, is also leader of a rock band. Without a doubt, he is the only such person on the planet. He was then very little known in the United States and totally unknown in Europe, but the magic of life sent him to you all the same. (See Gilles Farcet’s L’Homme se leve a l’Ouest: Les nouveaux Sages de l’Occident [The Man Rises to the West: The New Wisdoms of the West].)

Also when you were a youngster, you went to see my films and collected articles about me; and then, here we are! Friends! And we amuse ourselves making books together. In your innocence and determination, you attracted these statistically improbable circumstances.

Fine. .

Listen, let me tell you another story. In 1957, long before I theorized all this, I asked my wife, “Where do you want to go for vacation?”

“I would really like to go to Greece,” she replied.

“Very well,” I replied. “We will go to Greece.”

“But how? We don’t have a penny.”

“We are going to Greece!”

At that moment, someone knocked on the door of the garret where we lived. It was a friend and member of Francisco Marín’s well-known (at the time) South American music group, Los Guaraníes. He said to me, “Listen, we have to leave on tour to Greece in three days to give a show at a folk festival, and one of our dancers has fallen ill. Would you replace him?”

“But I do not know these dances. .”

“It doesn’t matter. My wife is going to teach you!”

Right away I learned two dances, Bailecito and Carnavalito. Then, sure as you please, we left for Greece. After that, how can I not consider reality like a dream that belongs to me to create as I go along?

I agree on the principle; but your anecdotes and the way in which you express them appear to me to be open to confusion. After all, the earth is populated with people who don’t ask for anything but to realize their dreams without effort. Experience shows that to desire is not enough; one must also merit it.

What you say here appears very important. Of course, these things that I’m telling you happened to me, so I can say that my life is commensurate with my craziest dreams. I truly believe in the magic of reality. But for this magic to operate, it is befitting to cultivate in oneself a certain number of qualities that are at times contradictory, at least in appearance: innocence, self-control, faith, bravery. . Putting this magic into motion requires a lot of audacity, and also purity, and a lot of work on oneself. So I insist that I devote my existence to perfecting myself, to knowing myself, and to making myself internally accessible. It is important to never lose sight of all the discipline without which this approach to existence would be but an illusion. Life is not there for satisfying the desires of the first sloth that was created! Life is wonderful to us when we abandon ourselves to it and when we overcome our egocentrism.

Does this asceticism work then include an application of lessons received by means of the lucid dream? Because, in brief, asceticism requires a great deal of effort, unlike the lucid dream where it is enough just to hold the intention for something to be achieved.

Believe me! To remain conscious within the dream requires a considerable effort.

In addition, the perceived emotions during the dream are very real. If you are terrorized, you really are; you perceive the terror, and it is difficult to face up to things. Finally, the greatest lesson of the lucid dream does not reside as such in the demand for lucidity. So, do not forget that without lucidity, nothing is possible. Thus, as I said, from the instant when one lets oneself be caught up by the experience one crosses into, the dream absorbs us, and the lucidity that was the only guarantor of this initiation dimension ends. The magic we have called forth does not operate except by detachment. What makes the game possible is the lucidity of the witness, whereas identification with consensus reality, on the contrary, shrinks existence and reduces the realm of possibility. In dreams, as in daily life, the same laws operate: The more one is detached, the more one can enjoy perceiving all of existence as a vast playground. The less one is detached, the more life turns into a dead end. Dreaming thus taught me, paradoxically, to wake up and maintain a lucid current as a thread of existence, even if this requires a major effort. Because God knows how marvelous life can be when one is, above all, open to its magic! The danger of identification is the temptation to let oneself be captured by the spell as one opens up. On the other hand, lucidity strengthens itself with practice.

Another lesson of lucid dreaming, which we have already made allusion to, another facet of magic: the flexibility of the real. Not only do you not hold back life in a rigid process, but you train yourself to be flexible.

Yes, I pay close attention to not allowing too much self-definition, to not caging myself into a narrow-minded self-vision. In the dream, I can perceive myself as a sixty-year-old man, but also as a young boy, or as an elder, you see, or as a woman, why not? Diverse facets of my being manifest. In reality, I try to let these facets express themselves while responding to the demands of the situation without clinging to a preconceived idea of what I am or what I should be. When I travel, people often ask what is my nationality. If someone strikes up a conversation on an airplane and they say to me, “Are you Italian?” I respond, “Yes.”

If someone takes me for Greek, French, Russian, Israeli — whatever — I always respond with the affirmative. Delighted to have guessed, the person then relates to me as an Italian, a Russian, a Greek, or a Chilean, and that does not change anything. Our adventure the other day at the Marjolaine is a good example of this attitude. When we arrived, the public was not waiting for us; they had come for Dr. Westphaler.

Dr. Woestlandt, Alejandro.

Yes, Dr. Wiesen-Wiesen.

In brief. .

I asked you to introduce me as Dr. Westphallus, but you did not dare. Yet, I could have given two hours of lecture under the provisional identity of Dr. Wouf-Wouf. I would have spoken about health and conveyed my message. Little matter who broadcasts it! Little matter who I am! I always behave according to what one desires to see in me. If she expects a filmmaker, I play the filmmaker; if he expects a comic strip writer, I play the writer. . I accept whatever role, while knowing in my inner conscience that I do not reduce myself to what another perceives of me, to what someone else believes me to be.

Have you explored other aspects of the lucid dream?

Later, I wanted to explore other, more metaphysical dimensions: I put myself to the search for my inner master. Permit me, again, to read to you a dream in this decisive respect:

I am in the company of two ordinary, fat Mexicans whom I sense to be friends although I do not know them. We cross a courtyard and go to the stone wall, which could equally likely be that of a school, a temple, or a government palace. Everything is very spacious. We walk, hugging the wall. Suddenly an enormous telluric hum bursts out. The noise really alarms the Mexicans. One of them exclaims, “An earthquake is coming!” They study the stones, anxiously awaiting the first tremors. Beginning to realize then that I was dreaming, I told them, “Do not be afraid; nothing will happen to you. It’s a dream.” Everything seems, however, so real that I begin to doubt. But, in making the deafening noise stop by force of will, I acquire a certitude that I am really dreaming. Right away, I suggest to myself to make good use of this lucidity. “This time,” I tell myself, “I am going to ask to gaze at the Divinity.” Although I would be seized by a deep terror, I decided to do it. “Help me to face God,” I say to my friends. They place themselves under each of my armpits, resembling human crutches, to help me move toward a staircase of black stones, which comprises twenty-two steps and rises up in the middle of the courtyard like a pedestal. “I now feel capable of facing the Divinity alone,” I say to my friends. Knowing they are parts of the dream, I make them disappear with a push, and I begin to climb the steps. Again I am prey to terror. Maybe I am going to see a horrible image stand before me. . I glide up the stairs, which are covered with water, and I make enormous efforts to avoid sliding. Then an animated photograph appears on which a gigantic actor grimaces like a clown. I can’t believe it. “A photo, a role-player, the Divinity. . this is not possible!” The actor disappears, and I take his place. I am sixty years old and dressed in a cashmere suit. I have the appearance of an old university professor, with glasses on the tip of the nose. I know that this immense image of myself is a necessary veil, the projection of bygone ideals, and that it let me survive without anguish my first meeting with the Divinity. The photo animates itself and begins to speak to me with sympathy. It communicates a message to me; it gives me a lesson. I retain very little of it, not more than a few words: the treasure of humanity. I often replay this first experience, which allows me to make a first step in the search for the inner God, the guide, the master inside of me, the impersonal me — little matter the name that one attributes to it — and this without being in terror. I muster my strength, take support in the air, mount, and put myself to floating. Like a ram, I throw myself against the screen and cross it to topple over into the vault of heaven, a vast infinity spotted with stars. I want to again contemplate my inner God. In front of me appears, huge like Cheops, two interlocked pyramids resembling the Star of David in relief. I tell myself that I must not be content to just look at them — one is black, the other is white — but that I must melt into them. So I penetrate their center, and I explode like a universe on fire.

There you have it: the dream, just as I recorded it. It is from this memorable experience that I wrote the screenplay, El Incal.

So the practice of lucid dreaming consists of planting an act or intention within the oneiric script. Can you go further than the lucid dream?

Yes, it is possible to go to what I call the therapeutic dream, in which the lucidity is utilized to heal a wound, to make up for a deficiency in the enlightened state. I want to give you four examples taken from my notebook:

I find myself in the company of Theresa, my paternal grandmother, whom I never had the occasion to meet, following some family quarrels. She is a plump little woman, with a big forehead. In the dream, I realize that we do not really know one another: we have never spoken or even once taken a walk together. I ask her, “How is it possible that you, my grandmother, have never taken me in your arms?” I realize that I’m verging on tactlessness, and I correct myself, “Or rather, how can it be, Grandmother, that I, your grandson, have never hugged you?” I suggest that I do it, and she accepts. We embrace. I wake up in the clear memory of the dream, happy to have found this family archetype.

Second example:

I am in my bedroom, such as it is in reality, standing face to face with my father. I say to him, “All my life, you never hugged me like a father. You gave me your fear, and nothing else. But now that I am an adult, I am going to take you in my arms.” With that, and without fear, I hug him, kiss him, and rock him. Cradling him this way, I feel with my hands the amazing vigor of his back. With pleasure, I exclaim, “You are ninety years old, and you are still strong!” I continue to cradle him, with audacity and tenderness, and I tell him, “Just as you never communicated with me by touch, I also have deprived my son Axel of physical contact.” Axel appears, at the age he is now, twenty-six. I take him in my arms and ask him to rock me as I have just done with my father. I wake up.

During the day, I chat with Axel, and I tell him joyously that he was part of the dream. I ask him to embrace me and cradle me. A bit shy and bothered at first, he does it by forcing himself and, progressively, the act touches him. We end up having a contact from which we draw a feeling of well-being and peace. Thus, I achieved in a dream something that was missing in my relationship with my father, which then gave my son the possibility of having it in reality.

Third example:

I have financial problems and dream that they are going to hire me as an actor in a theater company. I am going to see the producer to discuss my salary. I explain to him that he must pay me very well as “knowing me as I know myself” I am not going to be happy to just act but to also make sure his show goes very well. I will supervise the lighting, the music, the costumes, my comrades’ roles, and so forth. Briefly, I am going to occupy myself with everything. The producer understands me and agrees to give me a good salary, what I deserve. I wake up reassured, my confidence in myself regained. I know that my material difficulties are going to be resolved.

Finally, fourth example: For three days, I suffered strong pains in the stomach, probably an intestinal infection. I couldn’t sleep, and I did not want to take antibiotics. I went to bed and dreamed:

I lie in my bed, prey to the same pains I had while awake. The healer Pachita arrives. She lies on top of me and begins to suck the right side of my neck while saying, “I am going to heal you, little brother.” In a supreme effort, she slides my left hand between us and puts it on my stomach. Then she rises in the air without separating from me. We levitate a moment, horizontally, then we descend to the bed. She slowly fades. I wake up cured, without ever feeling any pain again.

It occurs to me to say that I have thus incorporated healing and that I have access to an inner doctor, a kind of Divinity. I remember that in Mexico, before dying, Pachita made a ring appear in the palm of her hand, and she put it on my left ring finger, then said, “I will come visit you in your dreams.”

As you can imagine, dreams like this are tremendously beneficial. They are truly repair dreams, in which the unconscious channels its power to effectively dress the wound.

If it is possible to use this knowledge acquired in the practice of lucid dreaming to unblock in the therapeutic dream, can you go further, to touch in the dream a dimension of knowledge?

Yes, and this other stage, I call the humble dream. One day, I stopped planning scenarios, preferring to attend a dream only as an observer. I let it roll, follow its own course, but because I wasn’t caught up by it, everything remaining lucid. I am spectator of my own dream, and I abstain from all intervention. In fact, I believe I have recently passed to another level even more subtle that I call the wise dream. At present, the protagonist of the dream I attend, as spectator is a sage. He pronounces speeches, which I take note of upon waking up, which are not original and may be extracts from some sacred text. But from the deepest place in my unconscious, these texts surge just as I observed lucidly during the dream.

Can you recount some from these “wise dreams”?

Yes, but not without reluctance. .

Why? Are you now going to play modest?

It does not have to do with that! I simply fear not being believed. (Alejandro extracts from his library an immense notebook that resembles a golden book.) You see it is in this other notebook that I note my most positive dreams. I can open it and read you an example of a wise dream; but will our readers be ready to admit that a man is able to have such dreams? Maybe you should, first, give me your word of honor. .

Why not? This could be kind of surreal: I declare on my honor that you have wisely dreamed. .

Okay. I certify then on my honor to have actually had the following dream! Each is free to believe me or not.

These dreams are that extraordinary?

No, in fact, they are very simple. What is unusual is precisely the element that makes them sage dreams. Everything is in the interior climate of the dream. (Jodorowsky reads from his big notebook, translating simultaneously as all of his dreams are written in Spanish):

I find myself in the company of a master in martial arts who is teaching me. He tells me, “Let yourself fall into my arms without tensing up at all.” The thought comes to me, “Well, I am going to reach an absolute relaxation,” and I let myself fall without tensing up at all. The master receives me, then lays me on the studio floor and tries a capture. I am so relaxed that he does not succeed. He then says to his assistant, “Impossible to fight with him. He is as if dead, and against the dead, one can do nothing.”

You see? An example of a sage dream in which I achieved absolute relaxation. Another example:

I go out on the street in a tight suit that makes me appear extremely puny. So I tell myself, “It is good that people see me as weak, as I know me and I feel myself so strong on the inside.”

Or, more, this other dream:

I attend a class of a professor of philosophy who declares, “The secret is to be in thought.” And I respond, “If you have not accepted death, you have achieved nothing. Only the acceptance of death delivers us from the thought of death.”

Permit me to give you another reading of two sage dreams:

Gypsies brought me to their warehouse where they have amassed all sorts of furniture. They want to consult with me, and they show me a cardboard box and a big cutout that looks like the Ace in the Tarot of Marseille. With it, they think to devote themselves to alchemy and discover the universal solvent, the material capable of dissolving all other materials. I smile at them and ask them, “Do you know what the universal solvent is?” Seeing they have no response, I tell them, “It is the blood of Christ. One drop of the blood of Christ on your heart dissolves all other feelings. So only love lasts.”

A depressed child tells me, “I am insignificant. I have no value. God does not see me. He is occupied with more important things.” I respond, “You represent the surface of a sphere composed of infinite points. Imagine now the center of this sphere: it is a lone point, which is, at the same time, communicating with all the other points.”

I was expecting your dreams to be a bit more crazy, a proliferation of symbols of initiations, like in your films or comic strips. The dreams that you tell of here are a bit more sober, unusual for you.

Well, my comic books and my films correspond with the lucid dream.

As you have seen, these dreams are often very short. Their special character resides in their impact and in the sensation that I have of myself in them. In the dream, I am a sage, detached, happy, and this sensation persists for a time upon waking.

I would like for you to now give some examples of the “ humble” dreams.

Here is a typical dream in which I admire the value of others:

I find myself in the home of friends. I am in the company of an undistinguished woman who, however, has a very distinguished style. She can’t have been more than fifty-eight years old. I find her very perceptive, extremely kind, and understanding. After a moment, she asks me, “Do you know who I am?” I reply in the negative. “I am Christine,” she says. “It is I who cared for you when you were an infant.” I realize then that I’ve found myself in the presence of my first nanny. I then say to my friends, “Understand this! She is the first woman I ever loved!” Knowing that she is still living and has reached such a degree of evolution gives me great joy. Christine and I embrace, then she goes. My friends then say to me, in a very affirmative tone, “She is eighty years old and yet she seems so young!” I wake up with joy in my heart.

Another example:

I am surprised in the middle of the road by a student rebellion. The youths burn cars, and there are police officers everywhere. Someone shoots a machine gun, so I lie on the ground without feeling any fear. A policeman takes me in. I am interrogated: I remain calm. I have in my pockets heaps of antimilitary tracts as well as newspaper clippings of rather funny facts showing the police and military in their ridiculousness. I explain to them that I am a professor of the tarot, and they release me. I walk the streets. My suit is a wreck, and I have even lost my shoes. Instead of shoes, I slide the tips of my feet into an eyeglass case. I enter a café to ask directions. Among the clients, a plump-enough woman of the popular kind, who seems full of goodness, looks sadly at me as she takes me for a hobo. She murmurs, “Look what a state this poor man is in. Something must be done.” She takes me for a derelict. I find her to be so good, and I am so touched by her charity that I decide not to set her straight. I resolve to accept the role that she gives so as not to disappoint her, and I permit her to freely give course to these good feelings. I open my black leather suitcase and look for a little game of tarot that I can offer her. Among the tarots, there is a bottle of pills. They are vitamins, but the woman is persuaded that I transport drugs, and she experiences even greater pity. Without knowing anything about the tarot, she takes a card, that of the Magician. “Bad,” says she. “You should not carry this card. Look: the young man has a pill between his fingers.” She actually takes the yellow circle from between the Magician’s fingers. I tell her thank you for her good intentions, and I promise to no longer use drugs. I leave the café. At no point do I have the intention to make myself seem important; to the contrary: it is with joy that I am abased.

Do you make distinctions among other kinds of dreams?

Of course! There are “generous dreams” in which the dreamer shares with the rest of humanity what he has learned. For example:

I find myself in an immense space, flying over a peace march of millions of demonstrators. I suddenly realize that I am dreaming. I go around in the air in order to attract their attention. The public reacts in admiration upon seeing me levitated. I ask them all to join hands and form a huge chain so they can fly with me. Upon touching them, I make them rise and try to make them fly by force of my thoughts, but they do not move. I must touch them with tenderness, hang on to them. They then fly toward me, and we give ourselves up to the exercise of drawing figures in the sky, all together in a chain, until I wake up.

To know not only how to give but also how to receive, to accept the service that another can give, is equally part of the art of generosity. This I understood from the following dream:

I am in Paris. The newspapers have a problem with the government, as it did not provide the raw material for printing. France-Soir feels obligated to publish with a typewriter and print according to a primitive process using sugar. At the side of a newspaper stand, seated in front of a wooden table, is Bernadette, the deceased mother of my eldest son, Brontis. I sit facing her, and I find her beautiful, happy, as she rarely was in her life. Unlike before her death, she is totally positive toward me. Now, she inspires my self-confidence; I know I can count on her. Realizing that I am dreaming, I tell myself, “Bernadette is dead, but in the dream she lives. To speak with the dead does not scare me. I trust her. It is an archetype, which can be useful to me, since she knows politics (in which I am totally ignorant) and will always be available whenever I want to consult her on this subject.” Bernadette begins to explain why the situation is so tense, and why the president is wrong to trust the minister he has just named. Then she speaks to me of the future, “We live,” she tells me, “in the idea that the future does not belong to us, that it is not for us. . although we are totally tied together with the future. In the future, we will be very active.” I think she makes reference to the future in general, the millions of years remaining to know the universe.

After this dream, I very lucidly delighted in this reconciliation with the mother of my son, all the more so as we lived with so much conflict. Bernadette became an ally who proposed to collaborate on the perfecting of my spirit while adding the best of herself. I have thus accepted her new presence in my life, through the dream.

Lucid dream, therapeutic dream, sage dream, humble dream, generous dream. . What is for you the ultimate dream, the oneiric ne plus ultra?

The magical, creative dream. All these years of oneiric exploration, I have only known one. Here it is:

I am in my bedroom. Supporting myself in the air with my hands, I take off. I decide to feel all the power of my voice. Letting the song come to me, I emit, with an almost limitless force, sounds, which go well beyond those of the opera. The voice does not depend on me: I invoke it and it comes. I don’t have to do more than let it out through my mouth to discover it, living magic. . Very touched, I feel I have opened a dimension of myself unknown until now. In plain lucidity, I open my eyes, and I wake up. I note that my heart beats fast. Without moving, I recall all the details of the dream. Suddenly, a song not far and not close comes to my ears. It is not emitted from a human voice, but it cannot be less than human resonance — as if all the neighborhoods in the city were singing. This song seems to arise out of another dimension. I tell myself that I am still half asleep, and I must observe more lucidly what happens. The phenomenon repeats, and I abandon myself to listening, especially since this totally new and extraordinary experience alters the rhythm of my heart. On the one hand, I believe myself prey to hallucination; on the other hand, it appears to me that a little door opens that could be called the third ear, like one speaks of the third eye, a door of clear hearing. . I sleep deeply and, in another dream, I see myself on a street in Montmartre. I walk murmuring, “It was a divine voice, the voice of a goddess. She does not come from a throat but was exhaled by reality itself. She comes from the streets, from the homes and from the air. .”

Superb! Now, come back to the dream called reality. Can we, as some sages affirm, envision our life like a dream from which we must wake up?

I would say rather that one must turn this unconscious dream that is more often our life into a lucid dream. At one time, I had the habit of, before going to sleep, reviewing all the events of my day. I replayed them like a film from first to last then in reverse, according to the advice of an old book of magic. This practice of “walking backward” allowed me to distance myself from the incidents of the day. After having analyzed, judged, and taken part in the first exam, I would return to pass through the day again in reverse, and so I found myself in a detached state. Reality thus captured takes on the same qualities as a lucid dream. Through this activity I saw at what point, like everyone, I dream my dream! To review my day at night compares to remembering my dreams in the morning.

The sole fact of remembering a dream is already like organizing it. I do not see the dream again just as it was, but I see selected parts of it. On the same note, seeing again the last twenty-four hours, I do not have access to all the events of the day but only to those that I have retained. This selection already constitutes an interpretation on which, additionally, I patch my judgments, my appreciations. . To become more conscious, we can begin to distinguish our subjective perception of the day from the objective reality. When one does not confuse these anymore, one is able to attend as a spectator the unwinding of the passing day, without being carried away by judgments and appraisals. From this position as witness, it becomes possible to interpret one’s life as one interprets a dream. Permit me to give you an example of the application of this approach: One of my students, named Guy Mauchamp, one day asked me for advice. He did not know how to take some young dishonest punks squatting in the house that belonged to him. Surprised that he had not called the police, since the law was on his side, I told him, “In a certain way, this situation suits you. Thanks to it, you are expressing an old distress. I suggest the following approach: Consider this situation as a dream. Try to interpret it as you would a dream you had the previous night. Do you have a younger brother?” He responded in the affirmative, and I asked him then if, in his infancy, he had not felt betrayed by this baby capturing the attention of his parents. He, of course, confirmed that he had. I quickly interrogated him about the relationship he maintains today with the brother in question. As I expected, Guy confessed to me that they had a bad rapport and never saw one another. I explained to him that it was he himself who maintained this encroaching situation with the squatters in order to express the distress caused by the arrival of his brother. I added that he needed to forgive his brother, treat him well, and make peace with him if he wanted the situation resolved. I gave him psychomagic advice and, a week later, I received a post card from Strasbourg, “Firecrackers over the cathedral — big explosion of sacred joy,” with the following message: “Following my question, you prescribed a psychomagic act, and I give you the end results. It resulted that I gave my brother a bouquet of flowers and treated him to a bite to eat as we renewed our fraternal rapport and put the past, when I felt betrayed by him, aside. The goal was to obtain the departure from my house of the fraudulent and illegal renters. I offered the flowers to my brother and spoke with him Friday noon. Friday night, the two squatters left — with my furniture! But finally they are gone, and I can return to my home. Thank you.” Interesting, no? Taking the furniture was like taking some of Guy’s past.

So, you had asked this young man to interpret an existential situation as if it were a dream filled with symbols to decipher.

Exactly. Since we dream our life, we will interpret it and discover what it wants to say to us, the messages that it wants to transmit to us, as if transforming it into a lucid dream. Once the lucidity is reached, we are free to act in reality, knowing that if we seek only to satisfy our egotistical desires, we will be taken, we will lose all detachment, all control, and all possibility for a true act. To live amusing and effective lives — as much in the nocturnal dream as in the diurnal dream that we call our life — we must become less and less involved.

This detachment, which does not prevent action or compassion and does not authorize greed or sentimentality, looks a lot like wisdom.

Of course! What good is it to live with the dreams and to make an effort at lucidity if not to move toward wisdom? Reality is a dream on which we must work in order to progressively pass from the unconscious dream, lacking all lucidity, and which can be a nightmare, to what I call the sage dream.

And the Enlightened? The spiritual traditions say those that are Enlightened. .

To wake up is to stop dreaming, to vanish from this oneiric universe, to become the dreamer.

FOUR

THE MAGIC ACT

How does one pass from the oneiric act to the magic act? Above all, what is the magic act according to Jodorowsky?

As I have said, it was in Mexico where I acquired a true command of the oneiric act. If Chile was, in the past, a poetic country, Mexico is an absolutely oneiric country where the unconscious flourishes. Any person just a little bit sensitive feels this dimension there, understands this dream presence in the very texture of Mexican reality. On the other hand, you could travel there for ten years without ever catching a glimpse of the Mexico magic. Mexico City comprises a whole world of sorcerers, a world that is very costly for uninformed foreigners to enter. When people are in bad shape or when things are not going well, they pay a call to a sorcerer who carries out a kind of purification. She scrubs the whole body using a heap of herbs soaked in holy water. This is an extremely common practice, and not only among the peasants. Intellectuals and politicians do not hesitate to devote themselves to it; so much is witchcraft part of Mexican life. Among these sorcerers, there are, of course, healers expert in hallucinogenic mushrooms and medicinal plants. Some are acquainted with up to three thousand herbs. Others use animal excrement exclusively. There are also bizarre creatures presenting phenomena that may be swindle or may be magic. For example, I remember a woman from a remote village who always went about scantily dressed in a nightshirt: steel spikes came out of her whole body.

Black magic is also practiced, and a number of sorcerers operate with evil spells. You can ask these sorcerers to cast an evil spell on an enemy. I have personally been witness to some things. For example, in one of my shows, I made fun of an influential woman whom everyone called la Tigresa and said she was the president’s mistress. My actors refused to perform, convinced that la Tigresa had cast a spell over the theater. So I agreed to have a sorcerer’s assistant come to lift the spell. I have to admit that I laughed when I saw him splash the theater with holy water. But then, while we had a coffee, he began to complain, and an immense boil pushed its way out onto his anus. This sudden eruption grew to such proportions that he had to go to the hospital. There was no doubt in his mind that he had absorbed into his body the bad spell cast over the theater.

Psychosomatic reaction?

It’s possible. But in any case, sometimes strange things happen. . One day, a director of a fine arts school with whom I had just signed a contract told me, “You are naive. You swear by Mexico. Everything seems wonderful to you. But if you dare to look here in this drawer, you will discover there another aspect of this country.” So I moved near the drawer, opened it, and straightaway was overcome by an atrocious headache.

What then did this infernal drawer contain?

Horrible wax statuettes used by sorcerers to torture from afar the designated victims of their clients. Their features were, in themselves, so horrible to look at that I felt faint. If they were exhibited at Beaubourg or the Louvre, the public could see what power an art object can have, beneficial or maleficent. A work bearing such energy directly affects the organism of anyone who contemplates it. Although strongly disagreeable in itself, this experience made me wonder. I asked myself what could a beneficial artist be: the good magician whose works of art would be charged with such a positive force that they would push a spectator into ecstasy. It is a principle that served me thereafter in Psychomagic.

Can you give me an example?

I received a visit one day from a mother whose son was homosexual. This woman had never accepted her son’s difference. While continuing to devote a real affection to him, she felt real shame. The son wanted to become a pianist, but each time he took an exam or gave a concert, his mother panicked fearing his failure. The poor boy felt it and was so disturbed that he indeed failed. I quickly realized that this woman saw the pianist profession as an effeminate activity, one of homosexual character. So I gave her an exercise. The sorcerers who cast spells make little effigies of their victim then riddle it with pins. I asked this mother to proceed in the same way. So she made a figurine in the image of her son and used bitten fingernails, hair, and a piece of the boy’s clothing so that the object would be truly soaked with his energy. In accordance with my instructions, she glued a gold Louis under each foot and sprinkled a drop of white wine on each of the chakras. She splashed the statuette with holy water and placed it on the side of a piano with honey-coated keys — symbol of smoothness, sweetness. She left a candle constantly burning in the room, and for one hour each day, she came to pray for the success of her son. The following concert was a success, and the pianist’s relationship with his mother was transformed.

Is that good magic?

No, it is Psychomagic! Later, we will get back to the principles of Psychomagic, but I gave this example to show how I was inspired by the standard practice of black magic in Mexico. I wanted to reverse the process: if it can do evil from a distance, why not do good?

Okay, but it is not enough to have good intentions and simulate the reverse of popular evil spells. How do similar practices work?

Son and mother are connected psychically. If the mother had not made a step in the direction of adopting a different attitude — and performing the psychomagic act with the effigy came to embody the change, to confer a solidity, a materiality that would have otherwise been absent — the son would feel it, even if he were far away. He cannot but react. As the mother could not rationally accept the homosexuality of her child and forgive him, I gave her the concrete possibility of making a step in that direction by complying with a prearranged meticulous ceremony. That is the language the unconscious can understand. In the traditional analysis, it has to do with detecting messages sent by the unconscious and interpreting them into everyday language. Me, I do the reverse: I send messages to the unconscious using appropriate symbolic language. In Psychomagic, it is the unconscious that deciphers the information transported by the conscious.

If I understand you well, one must, in Psychomagic, learn to speak the language of the unconscious in order to consciously send it messages.

Exactly. And if one directly addresses the unconscious in its own language, in theory it is going to answer. But we will get to that. For now, I would like to explain how the magic act contributed to the advent of Psychomagic. While in Mexico, I found myself confronted with the power of harmful sorcery. I, very naturally, asked the same power of beneficial sorcery. If those forces could be put to the service of evil, couldn’t they be used for the service of good? I also searched for a good wizard. Then a friend spoke to me of the famous Pachita, a small, good eighty-year-old woman. People came from far away to consult her in the hope of being healed. I was very moved by the prospect of meeting this famous sorceress, so I prepared myself for this.

What do you mean “moved”?

I had my guard up. After all, nothing guaranteed me that this woman wasn’t also evil. In Mexico, there are very dangerous sorcerers who can covertly introduce a little soreness into the unconscious of a visitor and trigger a delayed reaction. You see, at first you don’t feel a thing, but at the end of three or six months, you’re in agony. . I therefore protected myself when I visited Pachita. You understand, she wasn’t just any sorceress: her consultations could easily attract three thousand visitors. I tell you, it was sometimes necessary to evacuate her by helicopter. So it suited me to take precautions.

How does one protect oneself from the influence of a sorcerer?

It was in a way my first psychomagic act. Above all, I felt that at all costs, I had to disguise myself. To go to her in the fullness of my old identity was to expose myself to the worst. So I began by dressing myself in brand new clothing from head to toe. It was important that my clothes not be chosen by me. I gave money and my measurements to three friends and asked them to go buy all the clothing they wanted to.

Why three friends?

For depersonalization and so that the outfit thus obtained did not reflect the taste of any particular individual. Socks, underwear, everything had to be absolutely new. It was not until I departed for the meeting with Pachita that I put on these new garments. In addition, I prepared a false identity card: another name, another birth date, another photo. .

I bought a slab of pork, wrapped it in silver paper, and put it in my pocket as a reminder. So each time I put my hand in my pocket, the rather unusual contact with the meat would remind me that I was in a special situation and that I should avoid letting myself get caught up, no matter what happened. I arrived at the apartment where Pachita was operating that day, and I found myself in the presence of about thirty other people, some of whom occupied important social positions. I should point out that I met her under relatively privileged conditions, far from those crazies who press around her while she operates in a public place. I made myself part of the intelligentsia. Although she had never been to the cinema, Pachita knew that I was a filmmaker, director of the film El Topo, which had been talked about a lot. I approached and saw a tiny old woman, stocky and nearly blind. Her forehead was rounded and her nose fell downward giving her the appearance of a monster. I had just entered when she tossed me a piercing look and heckled me, “Boy, my boy!”—it was a little strange to hear myself called “boy” at more than forty years old—“What are you are afraid of? Get closer to this poor old lady.”

Slowly, I got near her, stupefied. She had used the right expression to address me. At this age, indeed, I was not mature. While I was no child, my level of maturity was not really that of a forty-year-old man. At heart, I had remained an adolescent.

“What do you want from me? What do you want from this poor old lady?” she asked me.

“You are a healer, right?” I responded. “I would like to see your hands.”

To general astonishment — everyone wondered why she suddenly granted me so much importance — she put her hand in mine. This old lady’s hand had such softness, such purity. . It could have belonged to a young girl of fifteen. I couldn’t believe my senses.

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “You have the hand of a young girl, of a beautiful young girl!”

At that moment, instantly, I was invaded by a feeling, difficult to describe. Facing this deformed old woman, I felt myself in the presence of an ideal adolescent, the girl that the young man in me had always searched for. She had her hand raised, palm toward me, and it clearly appeared to receive something. I was completely lost, and I did not know what to do. From her assistants a murmur arose. “Accept the gift,” they all told me, “accept it!” I thought quickly: the gift of Pachita is of an unspeakable nature; but I wanted to act like I accepted the invisible gift. So I made a gesture as if taking something in my hand. But as soon as I approached her, I saw something shining between her ring finger and middle finger. I seized the metallic object that was nothing other than an eye on the inside of a triangle. Now, it was precisely the symbol of El Topo. . I began to draw some conclusions from this — at the very least — striking experience: “This woman is an exceptional magician. When she first put her hand in mine, I clearly felt that she was not hiding anything. She had prepared her blow, but how did she make this eye emerge from out of nowhere? How did she know this object was the symbol of my film? In any case, she had me.” I then asked her if I could serve as her assistant, and she immediately accepted.

“Yes,” she told me. “You will be the one to read the poem that will cause me to go into trance.”

So I began to recite a consecrated poem to the divinized Mexican hero, Cuauhtémoc. Suddenly, this shriveled old lady let out an enormous cry, close to the roaring of a lion, and she began to speak in a man’s voice, “My friends, I am happy to be among you. Bring me the first of the sick!”

The patients began to line up, each holding an egg in his hand. After rubbing their whole bodies with it, the sorceress broke it and examined the white and the yellow to detect the evil. . If she found nothing grave, she prescribed infusions, or sometimes stranger things like café au lait enemas. It happened that she advised eating termite eggs and making a plaster with mashed potatoes and human excrement. . When she judged the problem serious, she proposed a “surgical operation.” Witnessing these interventions, I saw incredible things; compared to these operations, the work of Filipino healers would seem innocent.

Example?

Oh! I could tell you of hundreds of operations. Later, indeed, I continued to serve as her assistant. I wanted to be the first to scrutinize the phenomenon, and thus I was witness to the most unprecedented things. I’ll first describe the ambiance. The majority of the time Pachita operated at her home at the rate of one or two sessions per week. This apartment was pervaded by a pestilential odor because she gathered up all the sick animals in the neighborhood to live there for a time and do their business. . It was torture to wait in this place breathing in the dog, cat, parakeet droppings. . Yet, as soon as Pachita entered the room to operate, the odor seemed to disappear just from her presence. Without a doubt, it was her incredible presence, the allure of a queen who made us forget these nauseating fragrances. This little old lady had the aura of a great reincarnated lama.

What do you believe made her so impressive?

I often asked myself. . Because in the end Pachita impressed the disbelievers as well as the followers! What is certain is that she was disposed of an energy superior to the normal. One day, the wife of the president of the Republic of Mexico invited her to a reception given on the patio of the government palace where a number of cages held a great variety of birds. When Pachita arrived, these hundreds of sleeping birds at once woke up and began to chirp as if to greet the dawn. There were a number of witnesses there to confirm this incident. But she did not leave it to her charisma alone. She knew how to create an ambiance around her appropriate to captivating the guest and the patient alike. Her house was kept in semidarkness; thick curtains prevented any light from entering and were so effective that arriving from outside, one was plunged into a world of darkness. Some assistants — all of whom were convinced of the objective existence of the “ hermanito” (little brother), as Pachita had named the spirit that she supposedly contacted and who, in her opinion, worked the healing — led the newcomer down the hall in his sudden blindness. These assistants played, it seems to me, a key role in the smoothness of the “operations.”

You mean to say they helped the sorceress execute the conjuring?

It could be that Pachita was a genius conjurer. . In fact, it will never be known. What’s for sure is that all these assistants, in the role they played, were not accomplices to trickery; all of them had an immense faith in “the Little Brother.” In the eyes of these brave people, the hermanito was the one that mattered. Pachita was but an excellent healer; a “channel,” as one would say today, an instrument of God. They respected the old lady, but they did not venerate her until she was in trance. For them, the disembodied being was more real than the person in the flesh through which he manifested. This faith by which Pachita was surrounded generated a magic atmosphere, which contributed to persuading the patient of his chances for a cure.

How would an ordinary consultation with Pachita proceed?

Seated in an obscure hall, a group of clients waited their turn to enter the room where the sorceress operated. All the assistants spoke with low voices, like in a temple. At times, one left the “operating room” concealing a mysterious bundle in his hands. He went into the bathroom, and by the half-opened door, those in the waiting area could see the glow of a burning object. The assistant came out and murmured, “Do not go in there before the evil is burned. As long as it is active, it is dangerous to approach. You could catch it.” What was this “evil”? The waiting clients didn’t know anything, but knowing they had to hold their urine as long as the immolation lasted created a strange impression. Little by little, they were leaving consensus reality, to topple over into a completely irrational parallel world. Then suddenly, from the operating room, four assistants appeared carrying an inert body wrapped in a bloodstained cloth. They put the body down like a corpse. Indeed, once the operation was over and the bandages in place, Pachita required the patient’s absolute immobility for a half hour — or sudden death. Fearing being crushed by magic forces, the recovering patients do not make even the slightest movement. Immobile as a rock, they definitely appear dead. It goes without saying that this clever staging puts the next candidate into a state. When Pachita calls in a deep voice, always using the same expression, “It is now your turn, darling child of my soul,” that generally makes them shake and regress into childhood. In this sense, this sorceress does not treat adults but children, and all are treated as such, whatever their age. I once saw her give a bonbon to a minister and ask him in a serious and tender voice, “What hurts you, my little boy?” People give up body and soul to her, taking her as an antidote for their terror.

You have described the ambiance and the preliminaries, which is certainly very important; but I would like to know how the operation itself proceeds in general. As “assistant,” you were a privileged witness.

Only up to a point, because I was, like the others, captivated by the magical ambiance! Pachita always had the patient lie on a cot, by the light of a candle, because the internal organs in her opinion faced damage from electric lights. She marked the place on the body where she was going to “operate” and surrounded it with alcohol-soaked cotton. The odor filled the room, enhancing the “operating room” atmosphere. The healer was always followed by two helpers — I was often one of these two assistants — as well as half a dozen followers who were forbidden to cross their legs, arms, or fingers, so that energy could circulate freely. At her side, I saw her finger sink almost entirely into the eye of a blind man. . I watched her “change the heart” of a patient: with her hands, she seemed to open his chest; the blood ran. .

She made me plunge my hand into the wound. I felt the flesh wriggle, and I withdrew my fingers, bloodied. From a jar to the side, I passed her a heart from who knows where — from the morgue or the hospital — that she “transplanted” to the patient in a magical way. Soon after being placed on the chest, the heart seemed to be absorbed and disappeared just like that, as if inhaled by the body of the patient. This phenomenon of “inhalation” was common with all of the “transplants”: she would place a piece of intestine on the person being operated on and no sooner would it disappear into him. I saw her open a head and put her hands in it. There was an odor of burning bone, the sounds of liquid. . The operations were not lacking in violence and constituted a rather shocking show, in Mexican fashion, but Pachita showed, at the same time, an extraordinary softness.

What was the role of the followers present?

The sorceress relied on their presence. Should an operation seem to be going badly, both Pachita and the patient would solicit the active help of all the people present.

Can you give me an example?

I remember an operation during which El Hermanito screamed sharply from Pachita’s mouth, “The child is getting cold! Quick, heat the air or we are going to lose him.” A second later, we were all running, on the verge of hysteria, in search of an electric heater. As soon as we plugged it in, we realized the electricity was out! “Do something or the child is going to be in agony!” growled the Little Brother, while the patient, on the verge of cardiac arrest from actually seeing his stomach opened and the guts in the air, whimpered, frozen in terror, “My brothers, I beseech you, help me!” And we all gathered around and put our mouths against his body, blowing on it with all our might, worried, forgetting about ourselves, trying frantically to warm him with our breath. “Very good, my children, my dears,” the Little Brother cried suddenly. “The temperature is back up, and the danger is passed. I can continue.”

Did you ever lose a patient?

No. To my knowledge, Pachita has never killed a person while trying to heal him, even if the operations often had critical moments. That seemed in a certain way to be part of the process.

Did the patients suffer?

In general, yes. The operations could be painful. When Pachita died, her gift was transferred to her son Enrique, who operates like his mother. When I assisted him, I noticed that the hermanito spoke more sweetly and that the knife no longer caused pain.

I remarked about this to one of the assistants who responded, “From incarnation to incarnation, El Hermanito makes progress. He has learned recently to not make his patients suffer.”

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.

It could be that a person had faith but did not desire to recover their health. I remember, for example, a woman named Henriette, the patient of a doctor friend of ours, who was told she had no more than two years to live. Henriette was sick with cancer, and they had already removed her breasts. At the request of her doctor, who supported trying anything, she traveled with me to Mexico. Although very depressed, she agreed to an operation by Pachita, who suggested purifying her blood by injecting two liters of plasma that arrived from another dimension, made by El Hermanito. The day arrived and, after the usual ceremony, Henriette found herself lying on the bed. El Hermanito stuck a knife in her arm, and we heard the blood fall into a metal bucket. It was a thick, stinking stream. Then El Hermanito introduced into the wound the end of a meter-long plastic tube, lifting the other end into the air to connect it to the invisible. We could hear the sound of liquid pouring smoothly from an unknown place, while El Hermanito said, “Receive the holy plasma, little daughter, do not reject it.” The day after the operation, not believing in the effects of the “transfusion,” Henriette was sad and listless. I tried to get her to respond, but it was impossible. She was smug like a kid, gruff, egotistical. She accused me of wanting to take her to Calvary. Two days later, a huge infected abscess appeared on her arm. Very afraid, I called Enrique, Pachita’s son, who, after consulting his mother, told me, “Your friend has faith in medicine, but she rejects it. She wants to undo the holy plasma. So tonight have her do her business in a bedpan, and tomorrow morning apply the excrement to her arm to explode the seat of the infection.” I gave the message to Henriette, who closed herself in her room. I do not know if she followed the advice or not, but the truth is that the abscess exploded leaving a very large scar, so deep the bone was visible. Immediately I took her back to Pachita who, converted into El Hermanito, said to the patient in a man’s voice, “I was waiting for you, daughter. I am going to give you what you desire. Come. .” The healer took her by the hand like a little girl and brought her to the bed and surprisingly started humming an old French song, while swinging a knife before the open eyes of the patient. I had the impression that she was hypnotizing her. So she asked her, “Why did you want them to cut off your breasts?” To which Henriette answered, in a child’s voice, “To not be a mother.”

“And now, my dear girl, what do you want them to cut?”

“The glands that swell in my neck.”

“Why?”

“To not have to speak to people.”

“And then, little daughter?”

“For them to cut the glands that swell under my arm.”

“Why?” “To not have to work.”

“And then?”

“That they cut those that swell near my sex, so I can be alone with myself.”

“And then?”

“The glands in my legs, so that they cannot force me to go

anywhere.”

“And then what do you want?”

“To die. .”

“Very well, my little daughter, now you know the path your illness will take. Choose: follow this path or heal yourself.”

Pachita put a dressing on her arm, and three days later the wound had healed. Henriette decided to go back to Paris, and she died two weeks later. When I told Pachita the sad news, she replied, “El Hermanito does not come only to heal. He also helps those who desire it, to die. Cancer and other grave illnesses present themselves like warriors, following a plan of precise conquest. When you show an ill patient, who seeks to wipe himself out, the path the illness takes, he will hurry to follow it. For this reason, the French woman, instead of spending two years suffering, quit fighting. She yielded to the illness and helped it realize its plan in two weeks.” Before this I had believed that it was enough to make someone conscious of self-destructive impulses in order to save them. From this case, I learned the lesson that such knowledge could also accelerate the person’s death.

Valérie’s testimony is indeed really interesting in that it concerns the relationship between healing and faith, as well as the importance of the desire to live. For your part, what do you think, Alejandro? To heal, is faith necessary?

Not necessarily. Everything Valérie recounts is rigorously exact, but one cannot draw a generalization from it. Without a doubt, it would be preferable to have faith, but this is not a requirement. Moreover, Pachita appears to know exactly how to shake the skeptics who come to her, as she did by putting the symbol of my film in her hand. One day, I brought her the French stuntman Jean-Pierre Vignau. He was a giant karate champion who did not believe in these things and did not intend to be tricked by an old Mexican woman. He had hurt his leg, and I urged him to go with my wife to Pachita’s house. He was very hesitant, but as I accused him of being afraid, he finally consented while swearing he would not be duped.

And what was the result of this confrontation between the old sorceress and this stuntman no one messes with?

It happens that Vignau himself, very touched by the episode, tells of it in Corps d’acier, his memoirs published through éditions Robert Laffont in 1984. So I am going to read the related passage. This testimony of a skeptic cannot but add weight to what I have already told you about Pachita:

During that visit to Mexico, to the home of Alejandro, I was to meet the strangest person I had ever met. The strangest and the truest of beings. I had lived with a muscle tear in my thigh for months. Not a little tear either. A huge thing like two closed fists with a hole in the middle. I had searched for weeks in Paris, going from quack doctor to specialist, trying to find someone who could repair this. No luck. They advised me simply to completely quit karate because it was irreparable. One evening, Jodorowsky asked his wife Valérie if she would take me to see Pachita, an old-style Mexican healer. Here, one would call her a sorceress. And like that, one early morning, I left for Pachita’s house with Valérie carrying a raw egg in her hand, something that had to do with the treatment.

We come to a narrow little lane. A big, wooden carriage entrance. Valérie knocks. The door half opens on an old chap to whom Valérie explains the nature of our visit. He lets us in. The courtyard is full of people. Men, women, children, from all social classes but mostly the poor, Indians, mestizos, very typical Mexicans with baskets, snacks, babies strapped to their backs — all that, that discussion, that debate, endless talking. At the heart of the courtyard, on a heap of wood, a little eagle stares at it all with his sharply serene eye.

We wait. After about twenty minutes, a door opens to the house at the end of the courtyard. A little old woman comes out, an old lady. She looks like a lot of the women in the courtyard. Except that she is very small, fat, round, with a white eye, which seems to see better than the other one: to see what the good one can’t see anymore. Impossible to guess her age. She could be one hundred or fifty. She is there, in the courtyard; she looks at everyone and chooses a chap, extending a hand to him.

“You. .” The guy gets up and follows her into the house. A long moment later, he comes out. She again looks about the people gathered there, and she points her finger at me. “You. .” It is me. I realize that I’m adopting a mental attitude of openness in front of this strange person. I tell myself, “I do not know anyone or anything. So, I open myself. Anyway, she cannot damage my leg anymore than it already is.”

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.

I don’t doubt it, Alejandro, but how does this relate to his money problems?

First, a symbolic relationship: pee is yellow, like gold. But, at the same time, it is waste. Producing waste proceeds from a natural need; the need to urinate or to defecate is a consequence of another need: to eat and to drink. Yet, to sustain these needs, one must earn money. Money, because it is a form of energy, must circulate. . And that person could not earn a living because he felt a repulsion toward money, considered it dirty and vile. . The money energy was, in this case, blocked. It was a necessity, but he did not want to be involved in its manipulation. A part of this person refused to take part in the movements of money, its coming and going, its transformation into food or other necessities of life. He was averse to recognizing the legitimate place of “gold” in this web that constitutes all of existence. Pachita forced him to domesticate this fear. Finding himself each night alone with his stagnant pee, the patient subtly understood that nothing becomes “dirty” unless it does not circulate. If one refuses to see it and puts it under the bed, the troubles begin. . “Gold” stinks only because it was allotted a disgraceful place. Finally, as I have already mentioned, the sole fact of practicing the exercise from the beginning forced him to show will, an indispensable quality for earning a living, normally.

By the way, Pachita asked her patients to pay her?

No, she did not ask for fees, but the people made donations. When she operated, there was always a nearby basket with a deep pouch in which the patients deposited what they wanted. One could not accuse her of running a “business.” It happened that those who had the means to pay, paid her well; it was, in effect, an invaluable experience to be healed by this woman. She didn’t heal people to earn money; she earned money because she healed people.

Let’s go back to your experience and to what this encounter provided, from the viewpoint of Psychomagic.

I’ve already recounted the operation that I myself underwent. So I won’t go back there. In fact, Pachita deserves a book devoted entirely to her.

Her contribution to Psychomagic is as simple as it is essential: observing her, I discovered that when one goes through the motions of operating, the human body reacts as if it underwent a true operation. If I tell you that I am going to open your stomach to take out a piece of your liver, and I put you on a table and exactly reproduce all the odors and all the maneuverings, if you feel a knife on your skin, if you see blood spurt, if you have the feeling that my hands rummage through your entrails and take something out, you are then “operated on.” The human body accepts directly and naively the symbolic language, in the manner of a child. Pachita knew this and was accomplished in the art of using this vocabulary in an operational — no better way to say it — an operational manner.

So, to you, she was above all an expert in symbolic communication?

Absolutely. She was, moreover, very attentive to objects, to the jewelry a person wore, for example. I remember a woman wearing an oval bracelet. On the inside of it, in a little hole, also oval-shaped, a watch was inset. It was evidentially a gift from her mother, and Pachita quickly saw that this woman would not settle her problems as long as she was not disengaged from the influence of her mama. It’s important to note that the hole symbolized the mother; in the sense that it was still the mother that made the daughter-watch tick. . Pachita instinctively deciphered the symbolic message and recommended a complete ritual to get rid of the object. For her, nothing was innocent; the world was truly a forest of symbols in constant interaction. It is through this contact that I was opened to the language of objects, to the significance that they take on. For example, the gift: anything given has an essence, registered in the dynamics of possession and communication. In the same way, leaving something behind at a friend’s house or in a public place is not an accident. Primitive sorcery knows the mechanism of these interactions and has more or less mastered them. But, of course, it has to do with an intuitive wisdom, not an intellectual or a scientific one. The sorcerer or shaman would probably be incapable of having an elaborate discussion on his own practice; for that, it would be necessary to be positioned on the outside, to watch oneself acting and decipher one’s own performance.

The sorcerer or shaman is not the unconscious “objective” spectator but an integral part of the subjective universe in which everything is alive. Pachita, too, saw ailments as animated beings: the tumor was an evil creature that deserved to be burned alive — and right away you hear birds chirping. At times, she removed from a sick body a moving shape that seemed to fidget like a marionette in the half-light. She materialized the sickness, which thus lost its status as an invisible enemy — which had made it seem all the more menacing — to embody a vaguely grotesque figure that deserved to die. From the stomach of a homosexual patient, a black phallus blowing like a toad was removed.

Worthy of your happenings! They are “panic” scenes that you describe.

Worthy of Goya! I do not know how she succeeded in leading us to that baroque world. . Trance, collective hallucination, brilliant conjuring? Anyway, if there was a trap, it was a sacred trap. I want to say that her magic acts proved effective. She actually relieved the majority of those who came to her. That is why I wanted to observe her and learn from her.

You position yourself, though, somewhat differently; unlike Castaneda, who, having received the teachings from Don Juan, became himself a shaman, you do not claim to be a sorcerer. You content yourself in assimilating fixed universal principles, making them not magic but “Psychomagic.”

Yes, for I am not, in the end, from a culture called “primitive.” In my opinion, with few exceptions — and I do not give an opinion in the case of Castaneda, whom I met in Mexico during this time — one cannot become a shaman or sorcerer if one is not born into a primitive context. Even with the strongest will and the biggest opportunity in the world, one does not disconnect so easily from all of the rational mainstream baggage.

Castaneda is an elusive character whom few can boast of having seen. Under what circumstances did you meet him?

At that time, in the seventies, I was well known in certain circles, thanks to the film El Topo, which, to many, was an example of film magic. Castaneda had seen it twice and liked it. I found myself in Mexico in a restaurant at which they serve a splendid steak and good wine. Castaneda was there in the company of a Mexican actress whom he had met in the dive of a lady friend who was also there with a man. Castaneda — for it couldn’t have been anyone else — upon learning who I was, sent his friend to our table. The woman asked me if I wanted to meet Castaneda. “Of course,” I replied, “I am a great admirer of his!” She said that he would come sit at my table, but I insisted on going to his.

A fantastic coincidence. .

Life is fantastic! I proposed to Castaneda that we go to his hotel, but he wanted to come to mine. We were like two Chinese, competing in politeness. He did not cease to give me preference, and I did the same, of course.

And you didn’t wonder if in fact you really were in the presence of Castaneda?

Not for an instant. Later, in the United States, he published a book in which a portrait appears, a drawing. And it is the portrait of the man I met.

What was your first impression?

In Mexico, it is easy to determine the social class to which a man belongs simply by looking at him physically. Castaneda has the appearance of a truck driver.

What!

Yes, he looks like any other man on the street. He is not fat, but very stocky, with curly hair and a nose slightly flattened: a Mexican of the popular class. But, as soon as he opens his mouth, he is transformed into a prince; behind each of his words one senses a huge culture.

It gives the impression of wisdom?

More than wisdom, of friendliness. Quickly we became friends. He dressed simply and was having a nice fillet, washed down with a Beaujolais. . It seemed like it wasn’t Don Juan but rather Castaneda who was featured in the books. I found myself caught up again in his tone, his voice, that was how it seemed. .

In your opinion do his books narrate real stories or fiction?

It is difficult to say. My impression is that they are based on a real experience except for the parts that elaborate and introduce concepts extracted from universal esoteric literature. In his books you find Zen, the Upanishads, the tarots, work with dreams. . One thing is for sure: he went all over Mexico in order to do his investigations.

Do you believe in the existence of Don Juan?

No. I believe that this character is a genius invention of Castaneda, who, of course, has met a number of Yaqui witches.

How did the conversation in the hotel room develop?

In the first place, he called to tell me he would arrive five minutes early. Such gentlemanliness affected me. Then, when he arrived, I said, “I don’t know if you are a madman, a genius, a swindler, or if you tell the truth.” He assured me that he said only the truth, and immediately afterwards he told me an incredible story, of how Don Juan, with a simple slap on the back, projected him forty kilometers away — because he had been distracted by a woman who passed by. He also talked to me about the sex life of Don Juan, who was capable of ejaculating fifteen times in a row. On the other hand, it appeared to me that Castaneda himself liked women a lot. He asked me if we might make a movie together. Hollywood had offered him a lot of money, but he didn’t want Don Juan to be Anthony Quinn. . Then he began to have diarrhea, with a lot of pain in his stomach, something that, he said, never happened to him, ever. I also had strong pains in the liver and in the right leg. It was strange that those pains came when we started to make plans for a joint project. The pain made us crawl about the room. I called a taxi and accompanied him to his hotel. Then I went to have Pachita operate on me. I had insisted that Castaneda go meet that exceptional woman, but he did not appear. I had to stay in bed for three days. Once recovered, I called the hotel, but he had left. I did not ever see him again: Life separated us. A warrior doesn’t leave footprints.

That is to say, he seemed to be at the same time a con and a very interesting person. .

He told me his stories of Don Juan with such conviction. . I am accustomed to the theater, to actors, and he did not seem to be a liar. Maybe he’s both crazy and a genius?

In your opinion, what has been Castaneda’s contribution?

His contribution has been immense. He created a fountain of different knowledge, a South American fountain. He revived the concept of the spiritual warrior. He put into motion the present notion of waking dreams. Without a doubt, he published too much, but the American publishers made him sign contracts for hundreds of books. And he always, in spite of everything, had something new to say. His books reveal a lot of forgotten things. In this regard truth or fantasy is of little importance. If it is a trap, it is a sacred trap.

As a Chilean with Russian roots, having lived a long time in Mexico, you are truly not the prototype of the western worshiper of the Goddess Reason.

It is true. I am relatively crazy, as you know.

Oh, yes. . (sigh)

But my madness, my excesses, remain rooted in a culture that is nevertheless very modern. Like it or not, I am the product of a materialistic society, which claims to maintain an “objective” rapport with the world. My most extreme boldness is always placed within this context; we can’t get away from that. I exaggerate, maybe, to emphasize the contradictions and the dead ends, but that doesn’t make it false. To be a sorcerer or a shaman is to live in a shamanic world. For my own part, I do not believe enough in primitive magic for me myself to become a magician.

That is why, while I wanted to learn from Pachita, I never envisioned receiving her gift in order to take my turn to become a healer. I would even say that I always refused.

Without a doubt, you don’t believe enough in magic to become a magician; but you believe all the same. .

The fact is that I can’t say what is truth and what is fantasy. But I quickly realized that to learn from Pachita, it was necessary to adopt a clear stance and to act as if I absolutely didn’t believe at all.

Why?

If I had come from the principle that all this could be true, that magic as such could be a reality, I would very quickly have found myself at a dead end. I would have endeavored to follow her magic trail, to become myself a magician, and I would have achieved only partial or mediocre results because one cannot become a shaman by saying, “All this could be true.” So I forced myself to act as if this could not be anything but false. By “false,” I do not want to say nonexistent — one was well obliged to acknowledge the healing and the strange phenomena that arose around Pachita — but better if it could be explained by an ensemble of psycho-physiological laws. I thus found myself able to truly learn from this woman something that I could then reuse in my context.

To. .

To know the way to use the language of objects and the symbolic vocabulary in order to produce certain affects in people; basically, how specifically to direct the unconscious in its own language, be that by words, by objects, by acts. That’s what I learned from Pachita!

Pachita was truly exceptional, but she was part of a tradition.

Of course, and that is why, after having met her, I concerned myself with the function of magic in all primitive cultures. I read hundreds of books on the subject to try to glean some universal elements that I could use in a conscious way in my own practice. I do not want to belabor this, but I want to give you some examples. All cultures have an idea of the power of the word, the conviction that desire expressed in a healthy way leads to fulfillment. But often, the name of God or the spirit is reinforced by its association to an image. The ancients knew intuitively that the unconscious is receptive not only to the oral language but also to shapes, images, and objects. In addition, the Egyptians accorded a capital importance to the written word. It was more about what was written than about what was said. In Psychomagic, I often ask people to draft letters, not so much for where the letters go or what they say as for the mere act of writing and of instilling these missives with therapeutic virtues. Another universal practice is that of purification, ablution rituals. In Babylon, during the healing ceremonies, the exorcists enjoined the patient to undress, to throw all their old clothes away (symbolic of the old me), and to dress anew. The Egyptians considered purification a prerequisite to the reciting of magic formulas, as is witnessed in ancient texts. I’ve forgotten the exact source, but this greatly inspired me: “If a man recites this formula for his own use, he must be coated in oil and ointment, the censer in the hand and filled with burning incenses; he must have a good quality natron in the mouth; he must be dressed in new clothing, after washing in flowing waters, to be wearing white sandals, and to have painted the image of Ma’at in fresh india ink on the tongue.” According to this, it is not unusual that I ask those who come for a consultation to take a bath, to have an enema, because I know that this act, in innocent appearance, greatly influences their psychology; it puts them in a different disposition. If someone dreads going to see his mother, I suggest rinsing the mouth seven times before the meeting and filling pockets with lavender. These details suffice to make them approach the meeting in a different way.

The ancients also attributed a role of the ally to a number of symbolic objects: the magic texts were recited over an insect, a small animal, or even a collar. Also bands of flax, wax figurines, feathers, or hair were used. . Finding in the texts traces of these practices, I gave myself up to reflecting on the projections people make onto objects, and I asked myself how to use this in a positive way. Magicians would engrave the names of their enemies on vases, which then were shattered and buried, causing similar destructions and disappearances for their adversaries. The portraits of the “bad guys” were painted on the soles of royal sandals, so the king trampled the potential invaders every day. In Psychomagic, I have often resorted to the same “primitive” principles — but exclusively to a positive end. I advise people to “bring evidence against” an object, to assign it a name. . Along the same line, from the Hittite sorcerers, I learned the concepts of substitution, replacement, and identification: the magician, in effect, does not shatter evil by finding its origins, but rather ends it, eradicating it from the victim’s body or spirit and sending it to hell. Based on an old text, “an object will be attached to the right hand and foot of the officiant, then withdrawn and attached secondly to a mouse, while the officiant says: ‘I remove the evil and I attach it to this mouse’; and then frees the mouse.” In the same way, Pachita removed the evil by attaching it to a plant, a tree, or a cactus, which had the effect of making the plant die before our very eyes. It is also possible to replace the victim with a lamb or a goat: it is the old concept of sacrifice by substitution where the animal takes the place of the patient. One ties a turban on the head of a goat and then slits its throat with a knife that has previously been put to the throat of the suffering patient. . According to Jewish magic, an evil force can be a mistaken hoax, induced by error. To do this, one disguises himself as the person on whom he wishes to vent his anger, changes his name. . I have myself had the occasion to verify how to change a name, even a handwritten one could prove effective. I also apply this principle to a tarot card: as a rule, the Tower reflects a catastrophe; but why not call it the “Soul and Its God” and, in this way, change it positively? All of these old rituals taught me to use burial as an act of purification.

These are only a few examples of the universal principles of magic acts that I use in Psychomagic, in other words: in therapeutic actions.

FIVE

THE PSYCHOMAGIC ACT

After the magic act, we come to the psychomagic act. In the context of magic that surrounds a sorceress like Pachita, faith plays an essential role. Yet you said earlier that faith is not a prerequisite.

Then, rather than speak of “faith,” let’s use the word “obedience.” I would like simply to say that even if one does not believe in the power of the sorcerer, it is appropriate to remain impartial and to leave an opening for the sorcery to work. Otherwise stated, faith or not, a patient must show enough integrity to follow to the letter the instructions received. If you consult a doctor and, once gone from her office, you do not put the least effort to buying the prescribed medicines, how can you then evaluate the effectiveness of the treatment? If Pachita prescribes whatever act, the person believes it and completes it without seeking to understand. Obedience, that’s all, because of the mysteries that the suggested practice can encompass. As we have already emphasized, all this is part of a culture radically different from ours. The editor of an important Parisian monthly magazine got cancer and asked me if I could introduce him to Pachita. So I brought him to her house; she operated on him and said, “You are healed, but be careful: let six months pass before telling anyone!” He did not obey. As soon as he was back in France, he had exams by a battery of doctors in the hope of confirming the sorceress’s verdict. They old him that he was not healed, and he died three months later. On the other hand, one of my French friends, a reporter for a big film syndicate, already the victim of several heart attacks, under my insistence, was brought to Pachita’s house so that she could “change” his heart. The operation complete, the sorceress asked him to wait three months to tell. After this time had passed, he submitted to exams and an EKG to reveal great improvements. Years have passed, and he is still alive to this day. I can also cite the case of the assistant to the director François Reichenbach. Following a traffic accident, she seemed condemned to be paralyzed. Pachita operated on her, and she began to walk. Some time has passed, and she even has come to thank me for having introduced her to the sorceress. I profited from the occasion to ask her to testify at a conference I gave at the Sorbonne before an audience of about five hundred people. Let me read to you a part of her testimony, as it was recorded and then transcribed:

Jodorowsky: I’m going to interview you. What’s your name?

Claudie: Claudie.

J: You were the assistant to which French filmmaker?

C: I was Reichenbach’s assistant.

J: You had an accident?

C: Yes, in Belize. My vertebral column was smashed, nerves split in my back and nine vertebrae broken. I was in a coma for three months. When I came out of it, they told me I was paralyzed and would never walk again. So Reichenbach called me and said, “I am with Alejandro Jodorowsky. He wants to speak with you.” For me, Jodorowsky was, at the time, someone who had made a completely crazy film. He asked me, “What’s wrong?” and I told him, “I am paralyzed.” He told me this was not serious. “You must go to Mexico to see the sorceress Pachita.” So I went to be operated on without believing any of it. I did not believe in the knife; I did not believe anything at all. She did something that hurt like hell. It was very, very painful. She cut me open from the neck to the coccyx. I had given her a hundred bucks to buy vertebrae.

J: Yes. She buys the vertebrae from the hospital or the morgue, I don’t know. . At times, she brings a heart in a flask. .

C: So that was that! But I must tell you one thing: I was sure that one day I would get up and walk. I did not believe in Pachita; I took Alejandro for a madman. But, at least, I was sure of walking again, and I achieved that. Before anything else, I believe in myself.

J: Tells us about your operation!

C: Well, she opened up all of my spine with a knife. I very well felt that. Then I felt her tapping like with a hammer. Then, she returned to me. . Ah no, she first held a bottle of alcohol over me at ninety degrees. There was a revolting odor of hot blood. The alcohol burned me terribly. An arm passed in front of me, and I didn’t miss the chance. I bit it. Yes, I bit it! At that moment, I fainted. That was not really because of the pain but because of the smell of blood that I couldn’t bear. She turned me over. I asked myself, “But what is she doing?” and I did not see her hands anymore. They were gone. She was inside my stomach, and I didn’t feel anything.

J: That is what you saw. .

C: That is what I saw.

J: There you go! Sometimes, it is like a transfer, my friends. I do not know if you saw a program on Aikido [a Japanese martial art used as a personal defense; it consists of using the attacker’s own energy to defeat him]. The master arrives and, with the Ki, he is nearly invincible. This is not because against another who is not his own student he cannot do anything. A transfer is necessary. That is to say, we transfer to certain archetypal strengths what we carry inside us, and because we operate this transfer, we make this person a master, a guru, someone who has immense power. He is invisible. It is our transfer. It is completely useful and necessary, but it is a transfer. With Pachita, what is curious is that everyone who comes to see her makes such a transfer.

Interesting. . Claudie did not believe, but she allowed it, unlike the magazine editor who let it go to his head.

Yes. For the practice to work, it was necessary, above all, to participate in the game without seeking to understand. For my part, however, I tried hard to take hold of some of the mechanisms at work in the process of healing and to be able to use them later. I remember, for example, one of my friends who felt extremely weak. Pachita told him to stop taking vitamins. She ordered him to go to the butcher, to steal a piece of meat and eat it. He should perform this ritual once a week. Of course, he recovered all of his energy, in my opinion, for one very simple reason: commitment to a weekly crime was for this poor timid man an act of unheard of audacity. He had to mobilize all of his energy. He discovered himself stronger and decided to believe it, and his life changed from the instant that he developed another perception of himself. This, at least, is how I explain it.

Between capturing certain subtle psychological mechanisms at work in the sorcery practiced by Pachita and prescribing psychomagic acts there is a big gap. How did you cross it? How did you go from reflecting on a magic act to the practice of Psychomagic?

As you know, I studied the tarot a lot, and I enjoyed a certain reputation as a tarologist. Author of comic books, filmmaker, and stage director, I never looked to earn my living through the cards; however, I wanted to, at one time, study the tarot further. For that, it was necessary to communicate with others, to practice giving readings. So I went to rue des Lombards to the bookstore called Arcane 22 that specializes in the tarot. Because the owners respected me, I suggested that they outfit a little room in the rear of the boutique and hire me to receive two people per day for six months to give professional readings. They posted an ad, and clients came. I am not going to exaggerate my idea of the tarot. Suffice it to say, I do not read the future but I content myself with the present and focus the client on self-knowledge, starting from the principle that it is useless to know the future if one ignores who one is here in the moment. In short, I gave these consultations, which aroused in me certain thoughts. The more I advance, the more I notice that all problems stem from the genealogy tree.

What do you mean to say by that?

To enter into a person’s difficulties is to enter into his family, to penetrate the psychological atmosphere of his domestic milieu. We are all marked, not to say contaminated, by the psychomental universe of our people. A number of people have associated with them a personality that is not theirs, one that is borrowed from one or more members of their emotional environment. To be born into a family is to be, if I may say it this way, possessed.

This possession is transmitted from generation to generation: the enchanted becomes the enchanter in projecting onto his children what was projected onto him — unless an awakening comes to break the cycle. At the end of their two-hour consultation, a number of people exclaimed, “I have not discovered so much in two years of analysis!” So I was happy with myself, convinced that only an awakening sufficed to eradicate problems. Yet that was not true. To undo a difficulty, it is not sufficient to clearly identify the problem. An awakening that is not followed by some action serves nothing. From that, little by little, I glimpsed that I had to advise people. And yet, I refused. What right had I to intrude into people’s lives, to try to influence their behavior? I did not want to become a sorcerer myself! It was a difficult position, because the people who came to see me asked for that: I would have had to become their father, their mother, their husband, their spouse. . But I was not disposed to become a director of consciousness, to interfere in anyone’s existence. So, something was imposed on me: for the awakening to become operable, I must make the person act, lead them to commit a very precise act, but I must do so without taking charge or assuming the role of guide regarding their life. Thus, the birth of the psychomagic act in which I joined together all that I had absorbed over the years and all that I had talked about in interviews.

How did you proceed?

First of all, I would thoroughly study the person, compel him to tell me absolutely everything. Instead of trying to divine, by way of the tarot, what could be well hidden, I subjected him to a very simple interrogation. I would question my clients about birth, parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, sexual life, relationship with money, emotional life, intellectual life, health. .

A true confession.

Absolutely, and I quickly became a record holder of dreadful secrets! Thefts, rapes, incest. . A man confessed a childhood secret: At the end of one school year, he waited for a hated teacher, planning to throw a big rock at his head from the top of a wall. Maybe the teacher died, but the boy didn’t stick around to find out. . One day, I received the father of a Belgian family, and I immediately guessed him to be homosexual. “Yes, I confess, and I have sexual relations with ten people a day at the saunas, every time I come to Paris. And do you know what my problem is? I would like to be able to do it with fourteen, like my friend.” The skeletons began to come out of the closets. I gathered up the blackest, most extravagant secrets. Incest erupted: a woman confessed to me that the father of her daughter was no other than her own father; a boy seduced by his mother told me everything. . Sadomasochism, homosexual fixations, masturbation. . Everything has happened! People were free to tell all because they trusted me, and they judged me capable of proposing a therapy adapted to their cultural and social heritage.

Why do you have to receive such a detailed confession?

Because, before taking on whatever the problem may be, it is most important to know the situation. This principle I learned from the author of The Book of Five Rings, Mijamoto Musachi. He says that before combat, one must surrender very early to the situation and acquire a perfect knowledge of it. Certain doctors also apply this method. A familiarization with a person’s psycho-emotional state appears to me to be a prerequisite for the prescription of a psychomagic act.

How does the tarot play in all of this? If a person confesses, you don’t need to guess at anything.

People usually make only partial confessions. They guard the best, if I dare say, for later. The tarot helps me to expose certain shameful secrets right off the bat. Then, working with all the elements, I’m ready to recommend an irrational and, at the same time, rational act: irrational in its appearance but rational in that the person knows why it has to be done. On the other hand, all psychomagic acts have perverse, that is to say, uncontrollable, effects — which are precisely what gives Psychomagic its richness.

Please explain.

I’m going to give you an example. One day I received a visit from a Swiss woman whose father had died in Peru when she was eight years old. Her mother had erased all traces of this man, burning his photos and letters. So my client had remained emotionally eight years old. In her forties, she still talked like a little girl and had big problems. I prescribed an act to her: she must go to Peru to the places where her father had lived and bring back something, a souvenir, a palpable trace of his existence. Upon returning to Europe, she had to place whatever mementos she brought back in her room, light a candle, then go to her mother’s home and slap her across the face. Specifically because her mother had always mistreated her and poured insults on her. As you will see, accomplishing the act required a real commitment. She went to Peru and found the boarding house where her father had lived and, by one of those synchronicities which reveal what I call “Reality Dance,” found letters and photos. Her father had entrusted them to the owner of the boarding house in the hope that his daughter would come one day to take possession of them. My patient found, several decades later, the mementos he had left, and thanks to them, she was able to “resurrect” her father. Reading these letters and looking at the photographs, she stopped seeing her father as a ghost and ended up feeling that he had been a flesh and blood being. Upon returning to her home, she placed the letters and photos in her room, lit the candle, and went to see her mother with the intention of really smacking her. Mother and daughter ordinarily had a very difficult relationship. Yet my patient was surprised to discover that her mother — to whom she had announced her visit — was waiting for her and, for the first time, had prepared a meal. Stupefied to see her being so nice, she was embarrassed at the idea of slapping her, especially since her mother gave her no cause. But the psychomagic act supposes a closed contract that she had to respect. So, at the moment of dessert, she smacked her mother by surprise and for no apparent reason, already anticipating a furious reaction because she had always felt terrorized by her mother. So, the mother contented herself to simply ask, “But why did you do that?” Before such an opening, the daughter finally found the words and could express all the grief that she held toward her. Do you know what the mother concluded? “You smacked me,” she said, “and, as well, you should owe me another.” Through this act, a friendship finally formed between these two women.

Like a miracle.

I can give you the name and address of the person if you want to verify the story. I told you this to show how the act follows its own logic. One does not foresee how it is going to unwind nor what the effects are going to be. But it is prescribed on the basis of a good knowledge of the situation. The result, whatever it may be, cannot be anything but positive.

You then went from tarot readings to prescribing psychomagic acts.

I quickly had to face a big demand: people who came to consult me as a tarologist, those who had followed my massage training, and those who attended my weekly conferences at the Mystical Cabaret — it was mad. So I adopted three formulas for work: individually, in groups of thirty or forty, and in the framework of the Mystical Cabaret, where there are between four and five hundred. The essential procedure, however, does not vary: someone explains a problem to me, and I prescribe an act. But it was in private interviews that the majority of acts were prescribed.

In prescribing an act, you make a contract with the person. .

Yes. And this mutual agreement is very important. First of all, the person promises to complete the act in the exact way that I prescribe it, without changing one iota. To avoid any misunderstandings and due to the betrayal of the memory, the person must immediately write down the act and the procedure to follow. Once the act is accomplished, she must send me a letter in which, first, she transcribes the instructions received from me; second, she tells me in detail how she applied them, the circumstances, and the adventures that arose during the process; third, she describes to me the results. The sending of this letter constitutes my only fee for prescribing the act.

Then you do not receive money as a psychomagician?

I have always held that the acts be prescribed for free, at least from the strictly financial point of view, the writing and sending of the letter being a form of payment. In making the effort to write to me at length, the person pays the price that I receive.

How do your clients react when faced with these demands?

There are, of course, so many different reactions from my clients, but it is possible to distinguish certain types of attitudes: there are people who take a year to send the letter; others who do not want to do exactly what I tell them and haggle. . They find all kinds of excuses to not follow the instructions to a tee. Yet, if the prescription is changed in any way, the necessary conditions for the success of the act are not respected, and the effects can even prove to be negative. It must be said that to speak in such a direct way to the unconscious amounts to, in some way, exerting on it a kind of pressure: one seeks to make it obey. Now, we only have the problems we really want to have. We are attached to our difficulties. Nothing comes as a surprise. So, those who pussyfoot around and arrange to sabotage the act do not truly want to cure themselves. To get out of my difficulties implies that I deeply modify my relationship with myself and with all of my past. Under these conditions, who is truly ready to change? People really want to cease suffering but they are not ready to pay the price, that is to say, to mutate, to no longer define themselves by their precious suffering. As to my advice, the less I accept the haggling, the more I render a service to others. It is up to my client to position herself to accept or refuse my conditions.

That your yes be yes, that your no be no. .

Exactly!

One knows that the psychotherapist authorizes himself to see patients. What happens with the psychomagician? How are you authorized to prescribe acts that address the unconscious?

I am going to give you an irrational response: in the moment when I prescribe the act, if I don’t doubt it, I am justified.

That you feel justified I don’t doubt, but how can you be so sure of it? At the end of the day, there is a lot at stake.

In this regard, there is, in fact, but one and only one question to ask: who prescribes the act? I have worked so much to disidentify myself from my “I,” that in dispensing psychomagic advice, it is not I who speaks, but my unconscious.

Everyone is like that! We all react, just like marionettes lead by unconscious drives.

True, but in the case of the person acting automatically, there is not any disidentification. I do not claim to have reached wisdom, because I am not disidentified twenty-four hours a day; but while I’m prescribing an act, that is, playing my role as psychomagician, I find myself in a trance or in autohypnosis — whatever you wish to call it — this is no longer my little “I” who speaks. I feel that what has to be said is raised from the depths. I feel that I have worked enough with myself to be capable of this timely disidentification. Of course, we move in a subtle and subjective domain, one that no longer has any relationship to reason but only to faith. A saint knows that he does well; deep within himself, he knows it authentically, and he is lead by a positive force — even if some people criticize him or see something harmful in him. Each time I give psycho-magic advice, I am convinced that it is the appropriate response to the person’s problem. It is only in the second phase that I lay it open and explain it in a rational manner. The advice rises from just one stroke of my unconscious in direct contact with the unconscious of the client.

This aptitude of speaking from the depth is not given to everyone.

In my case, it is the fruit of the work of my whole life! I spent a good part of my existence meditating and studying traditional teachings to, little by little, find in myself an impersonal space. I’m not speaking of saintliness but rather of impersonality, of a state situated beyond or below my little “me.” So that it is not Alejandro but the nonperson in me who prescribes the appropriate act. I feel myself, then, animated by a totally positive and disinterested feeling. It is the nature of the “psychomagician” that I look to do only good. Of my patients, I do not ask for their money but their effort. The will to change constitutes my compensation, and that is why Psychomagic has not become an industry. Believe me, it would have been easy to live abundantly from my consultations, so strong was the demand. People are more ready to pay, to take out their wallet, than to give a little bit of themselves. My living came through cinema and comic books; I prefer, for my services as psychomagician, that my clients remunerate me other than in dollars.

Isn’t this activity gratifying? At least, you feel recognized.

I do not use Psychomagic to become recognized!

In that case, why have you hoped for a publication of the consecrated book in this discipline?

My motivation in this respect is something else. Though I write books and screenplays or comics, I do not feel that I must, myself, compose a draft for Psychomagic. On the contrary, it would be too bad if this method disappeared after my death — that no trace would remain. It seems to me that the time has come to put this to paper and to disseminate it a bit further. More and more people talk about Pachita; they write, with more or less talent and sensibility, books and relevant articles, inspired by me, by these energies with which I find myself directly in contact. Also, I feel I need to tell how I went from the poetic act, the theatrical act, the oneiric act, and the magic act to Psychomagic — in the first place, to give testimony to a certain approach focused on reality which results from the practice of Psychomagic, and second, to give interested people some bearing, a text to reference. After all, it was you who came to find me for La Trampa Sagrada! I never asked.

I agree.

I told myself then that you, as a writer and a friend, could give form to this knowledge to which I am only a servant. I insist then on this dimension of service. Oh, I know, it sometimes happens that I am unbearable: I am a mystical clown, a surrealist of spirituality, a panic provocateur. . But I have truly, sincerely worked on myself. You may think me an exuberant charlatan, but I am nothing less than an honest man, a creator touched by the suffering of beings who wanted, all of their lives, to serve the beauty that frees them. Psychomagic is part of the best I have in me. What I aspire to, in all honesty, is sharing — for my good and for the good of others. If this book brings a degree of recognition, that is extremely good, but that is not my business. It is truly in a spirit of service that I conceive this book with you.

Briefly, Psychomagic is a purely spiritual approach. .

Exactly. I concentrate on action — on relieving suffering by prescribing an act — without worrying about the fruits that I could personally harvest. Because of this, Psychomagic could not be relegated to a medical or paramedical approach. It rests before everything on detachment from the practical.

Will it always be possible to remain detached? A number of therapists fall into the trap. When they earn their living by their practice, material necessity makes them take on more and more patients nonselectively.

Even if demand forces me to make Psychomagic a professional practice, I will never find myself financially dependent on it, for the good and simple reason that comic books and cinema suffice for me to live well. And yet, I do not have any intention of abandoning the artistic creation. From the material point of view, detachment comes from knowing that I can stop at any time and not find myself without resources.

Can you clarify what you understand as “ detachment,” not only from the material point of view but in respect to the practice of Psychomagic itself?

To be able to help a person, it is necessary to never expect anything of him and to penetrate all aspects of his privacy without getting personally involved. I will give you an example. A participant in one of my massage courses could not bear to have someone touch her chest. As soon as a man, even a man whom she desired, pretended to brush her breasts, she would start screaming. This caused a lot of suffering, and she wished deeply to be free of this irrational panic. I proposed that she take off her shirt. This she accepted, revealing beautiful breasts, which were not monstrous or unusual. I asked her, “Do you trust me?”

“Yes,” she responded.

“I would like to touch you in a particular way, which is unlike both the touch of a desirous man playing with your body and the cold medical examination. I would like to touch you with my spirit. Do you think I could touch you, establish an intimate contact with you which is not sexual at all?”

“Maybe. .”

I then put my hands three meters from her breasts and spoke to her softly, “Look at my hands. I am going to approach you slowly, millimeter by millimeter. As soon as you feel attacked or bothered, tell me to stop, and I will not advance any farther.”

Then I very slowly moved my hands closer to her. I found myself ten centimeters from her breasts when she asked me to stop. So I obeyed. Then, after a long moment, I got really close to the painful zone. Slowly, very slowly, I again began to move my hands toward her, very much listening to what was happening with her. Reassured by the quality of the attention I showed her, feeling that I operated very kindly, she did not emit the least protestation. In the end, my hands were on her chest, to her amazement, without her feeling any pain.

Why I have I told this story? Because this example shows the kind of “detachment” that is, I believe, indispensable to anyone who truly wishes to help others. I could touch, feel the breasts of this woman by being something other than my sexual “I,” without thinking for one second of taking pleasure from this touch. In fact, it was with my soul that I touched her. At that moment, I was no longer a man but an entity. It is necessary to be able to touch the body of another in order to contact the spirit, without this proximity awakening unresolved issues in ourselves. I cited you the case of a pretty woman but, without a doubt, I should make clear that I have touched all sorts of people, old, young, beautiful, ugly, at times deformed or sick. . What is important is to position oneself in an inner state that excludes all temptation to profit from the other or to abuse the power that one has over the other. Because, at the end of the day, whether through tarot, massage, or Psychomagic, nothing acquires sense but by a unique force, a detached energy that, at times, stirs a human being to help another human being. It has to do with a pure energy, very pure, very simple, and very subtle. In the instant that personal will, desire, or fear comes into play, the relationship of help loses its justification and becomes a masquerade. I do not say that, in me, these manifestations of the ego can’t surge when I act, but if I recognize them immediately for what they are and I let them pass as thoughts, pass as in Zen meditation, then they can fade straightaway without influencing the relationship with the person who gave me an opportunity to help. I am very conscious of the necessity for inner purification, ritual ablutions that have been preconceived well enough by tradition and that release not only attachments of the body but, above all, those of the heart and the soul. Looking at it another way, what good does it do to beat my head against the wall if I am not purified, sufficiently transparent? I remember a Zen story along this line: Walking in snowy country, the disciple asked the master, “Master, the sidewalks are white; when will they lose this color?” The master did not respond right away. He concentrated in his hara, and then said, in a harsh voice, “When the sidewalks are white, they are white; when they are not white, they are not white!” What a great response! The essential is to accept oneself. If my present condition bothers me, that’s a sign for me to correct it. So, more or less consciously, I try to be distinct from what I am; in short, I am not me. If, on the other hand, I accept my state at the moment, I am at peace. I do not whine under the pretext that I must be more of a saint, more beautiful, more pure than I am — here in this moment. When I am white, I am white; when I am obscure, I am obscure. That’s it! That does not prevent me from working on me, to seek to become a better instrument; this acceptance of myself does not limit my aspirations but rather sustains them. Because one can only advance from where one truly is.

This, you say, carries the possible risk of misrepresentation: if I understand you, only a person who has already worked a lot on his own problems can give psychomagic advice. I would go as far as to say that this approach is yours alone, the fruit of your very specific journey, and it appears difficult for others to apply it. Perhaps, some could be inspired by it, but no one could know how to play it the way you do. Yet, we know well enough that you have been a role model. Your nights of Mystical Cabaret attract a range of people, some of whom believe themselves more advanced than they really are and use your lessons for their own benefit.

Alas, this is true. I will cite but one example of this kind of attitude. After hearing me talk a bit about Psychomagic, a guy quickly authorized himself to practice it. He organized a stage and, with a lot of confidence, prescribed some women to do the same act: each must buy a big pair of scissors and send it as a gift to her mother! What a catastrophe! Actually, there is much more advice than there are people, and it would not be possible to prescribe acts en masse. The psychomagic supermarket is an aberration. Each act is “tailor-made,” based on listening deeply and, as I have already explained, on a spontaneous contact with the unconscious, which is the only way to render this specific disidentification possible — only as the fruit of long spiritual work. To prescribe the same act to a group, without really listening and without true love, seems criminal to me. One can image the reaction of the mothers receiving the scissors by mail. . That can only have a negative effect. When I prescribe a seemingly aggressive act, I only do it having the certitude that the consequences will be positive. It is always about an essentially creative act. This man, on the contrary, has exercised a destructive influence.

The same individual asked his victims to identify themselves with a doll, to transfer to them all of their pain, then deposit them at his house in a big bag. One of these women soon came to me in a panic, prey to psychosis, persuaded that the man held a power over her. . Besides, he could not even reassure her by returning the doll because, once the people left, he threw them all in the garbage. Briefly, he is a retailer who makes money by exploiting my work and the credulity of some women. So I take advantage of our dialogue to denounce publicly all those who claim to practice Psychomagic.

It is a serious pitfall. How can these kinds of corruptions be avoided?

The solution may be to train some people in whom I truly trust, whom I have known for a long time. Maybe I will do it. I have trained some people in massage, tarot, and even in psychogenealogy, among others psychologists and psychoanalysts. But it seems trickier to teach Psychomagic. To exercise this discipline, one must have conducted truly profound spiritual work, to be detached from one’s passions, at least not be at their mercy anymore. Once again, it has been the work of my entire life.

SIX

EXAMPLES OF PSYCHOMAGIC ACTS

This will be the last segment of our dialogue, and I’d like for it to be a bit more relaxed. Let’s dedicate it to a description of some psychomagic acts.

That’s fine with me, but a warning: to describe a psychomagic act is to enter directly into the language of the unconscious. It is not an innocent walk. You might be shocked — not to mention our readers. .

Well, I’ ll cling to my chair so I won’t be blown away by the power of the descriptions.

Go ahead and laugh, but I’ve warned you! Not that, by these acts, I tried to solve extraordinary enigmas; I am satisfied dealing with small, simple human problems. But what is more mysterious, more irrational, than our little problems? Our daily difficulties conceal an abyss; they’re just the tip of the iceberg.

I agree. Give some examples.

Okay. We take the case of a dancer friend of mine. She had a child with a man who has the same name as her father. That is already very significant. Yet, it turns out that this dancer has the same name as her lover’s mother!

It’s as if each one of them was searching for their father and mother, respectively, in the other.

Curious, huh? In fact, people often fall in love with a name or a profession that reminds them of their mother or father. In her childhood, this dancer was left alone with only her mother at an early age and never had any more contact with her father. Not only did she find a man with the same name as her father, but she also arranged for him to abandon her and disappear, so she arranged for her daughter to have the same kind of relationship she had with her own father. Of course, she did not scheme all of that consciously; it has to do with a completely crude, unconscious strategy. Beginning to understand the extent of her havoc, she came to ask me to prescribe an act that would allow her to forgive her father and thus overcome her hatred of men. I asked her to tell me at what moment her father had broken off relations with her. “When I started menstruating,” she responded. It is common for a father to break relations with his daughter when she becomes a woman. He feels that he’s lost his little girl who sat in his lap, and he has a hard time giving up that kind of intimacy, that contact. Right away I asked her where her father was buried; then I suggested that she go to his grave. “There,” I told her, “you bury, as close as possible to the body, cotton soaked in your menstrual blood, as well as a jar of honey.”

Blood and honey. .

The honey is there to breathe in life with sweetness, to signify that it is not an aggressive act but rather a loving one, an attempt at communication. There! An example of a very simple psychomagic act that allowed the reactivation of a brutally broken relationship and at the same time the resumption of an emotional evolution interrupted by a shock. Although an adult, this woman remained at the emotional stage of the young girl confronted with her first menses and the divorce from her father.

Another example.

A young Chantal, at four years old, found herself placed in a school directed by the sister of the mother of her mother.

In other words, her great-aunt.

Precisely. This great-aunt sadistically tyrannized the child. In working with me, Chantal discovered all the hate she held toward this woman. She could not forgive her, and she had no way to avenge her because the torturer was no longer in this world. So I advised her to go to the grave of this woman and, once there, give free reign to this hate: that she kick, scream, piss, and defecate on the tomb, but provided that she dedicate herself to paying close attention to her subsequent reactions to her demonstrations of vengeance. She followed my advice, and after letting off some steam atop the sepulcher, she felt a deep desire to clean it up and cover it with flowers. And, little by little, she couldn’t help but surrender to the evidence that she, in fact, felt love for her great-aunt.

Had you expected that?

Of course. It was evident that all this hate was nothing but the deformed face of a scoffed-at affection. I knew that Chantal still held the long bottled-up love toward this woman who, even as the sinister headmistress, had represented Chantal’s only link to her family. Following the expression of her hate-filled urge, Chantal would have to allow this long-contained love to come out.

Another example.

A woman had persistent vertigo. Simply drinking a bit of water made her feel bad. I advised her to place her feet between the thighs of another woman and rub the sole against her vulva.

Ahem. . What was the result of this shock treatment?

The execution of this act provoked a crisis of tears followed by a saving awakening. There was a symbolic significance of her vertigo: fear of being swallowed by her mother, fear in relation to the female sex, and so forth. As you can see my technique is somewhat bizarre.

To say the least, yes. How do you get such crazy ideas?

They come. That’s all! The truth is that I am an artist. That is indeed why I have taken the pain to explain my journeys. The diverse creative stages of my existence shaped me and developed my imagination.

Has it ever happened, facing a patient, that nothing comes?

Up until now, this has not happened to me. A response has always come. I suppose that my advice varies in quality and effectiveness; but that, I cannot say. It is up to the people who come to consult me to carry out the act and judge for themselves. But, in fact, I can hardly imagine myself mute in front of someone. Either it is magic or it is not! If you address me, I will inevitably have something to tell you. My prescription will always be well intentioned and will never be totally lacking in efficacy. To say what my accuracy rate is would be impossible. One thing must be clear: I do not place myself on scientific ground but on an artistic map. Psychomagic wants nothing of science but a kind of applied art possessing therapeutic virtues, which is absolutely different. Picasso produced more than ten thousand drawings. All of them more or less good. None is totally devoid of value; still not all of them are masterpieces. But, at the same time, each one is by Picasso, in other words, a product of the talent of a whole artist. “I do not look for, I find,” said Picasso rightly; to find is a habit, a second nature. Anyone who has not developed the habit “To Find” has not felt this spontaneous spurt coming from the depths, but anyone connected to the creative fountain lets it flow, simply. Imagine a Zen master who does not accept a challenge posed by a student’s question. Such assurance is rooted neither in science nor in megalomania but in faith, in the obvious.

Let’s continue. Give me other examples.

A young man complains of “living in his head.” He explains that he is unable to “take hold of reality” and to “advance” in the direction of financial autonomy. I take his word for it and advise him to find two pieces of gold and paste them to the soles of his shoes — he’ll walk on gold all day! This should allow him to leave his head, put his feet in reality, and advance. In this example, I took hold of the terms used by the client himself.

I would also like to tell you of an act that involved my eldest son, Brontis.

I’m listening.

Brontis, at seven years old, played in my film El Topo. Before I tell the story, some clarifications need to be made. First of all, Bernadette, his mother, never really lived with me. When he was conceived, I had believed myself sterile. My father hated his own father and never signed his name “Jodorowsky.” Not having any desire to carry on the family name, he had succeeded in convincing me in a subtle way that I would never have children and that I was thus the last Jodorowsky.

An actress with whom I was working said to me one day that she was convinced of my fecundity, to which I replied that procreation was not part of my destiny. We ended up sleeping together and, some time later, she announced that she was pregnant by me. Trusting her and knowing then that this child was definitely mine, I went through a kind of intimacy revolution, both inside and outside. The woman with whom I had been living had left, and I found myself alone, faced with this responsibility for which I was not prepared at all. I accepted the coming of the child — abortion was ruled out — but I felt that I would be handicapped for a very long time filling the role of father. In addition, I did not have resources, and I could not really lend any financial support to the woman and her child, although at Brontis’s birth, I did give him a teddy bear. A while later, this actress went to work in Europe and took the child with her. Six or seven years later, although I told this story in La Trampa Sagrada, I went through a deep awakening and made contact again with the mother of my son, telling her that I would from then on earn a good living and that she could, if she wanted to, send Brontis to me. He arrived with his teddy bear and a photo of his mother. I then decided to have him play in El Topo. Here’s how the film begins: I arrive playing a flute. I am accompanied by a little boy, and I tell him solemnly, “Now, you are seven years old; you are a man. Bury your toys and your mother’s picture.” The child does it, buries the teddy bear in the sand, putting the photo in the hole with it. After the filming, we moved away together.

As the years passed, I realized that Brontis and I were communicating badly on the spiritual level. I had to admit that I had committed errors, and I sought to repair them. Brontis had often spoken of the toy that I asked him to bury when he came to live with me. That teddy bear was his very first toy, the one that I had given to him at his birth, before we were separated from one another for seven years. After the filming finished, we did not go back to get the teddy bear that Brontis had buried in the sand according to my script. I realized that I had brutally cut him off from his childhood and from his mother. After burying the portrait next to the toy, he did not speak again about Bernadette and quit writing to her. Later, he made this confession: “I did not suffer, because I imagined that the ants would go to live inside the teddy bear, that it would be their home.” This thought was what had consoled the child at the time. One day, a long time after, when Brontis was twenty-four years old, I imagined a new act to repair the old act. On his birthday, I told myself, “I am going to bury a teddy bear in our garden and cover it with sand beside a picture of his mother.” Then I put on a black hat, similar to the one I wore in El Topo, and asked Brontis to disrobe and come to the garden — in the film, the child was naked — to dig up the teddy bear and the photo. I made these remarks to him: “Today, you are seven years old, and you have the right to be a child. Come dig up your first toy and the portrait of your mother.” When I decided to carry out the act, I came across some stumbling blocks. My idea had been to buy a teddy bear as similar to the first one as I could find. It had been a hard toy, filled with straw. But the industry had progressed, and all the teddy bears are now soft and flexible. So the old rigid teddy bear turned into a beautiful, supple, delicate teddy bear. As for the photo, the one that Brontis buried when he was seven years old was in black and white; but when I looked for a picture of his mother to use in the act — she had perished in an airplane accident — I only found one in color, so that having buried a gray snapshot, my son would dig up a colored image. These modifications, caused by “coincidence,” greatly contributed to the act’s success. What I want to tell you is that the stumbling blocks, the elements that one cannot control, also play an important role in Psychomagic. It is appropriate to try hard to accomplish a prescribed act following the given instructions and in the best conditions, but once one finds oneself in the situation, unpredictable incidents and other changes independent of our will become part of the process. In El Topo, I sheltered Brontis under a black parasol to protect him from the sweltering desert sun. The day when, here in Vincennes, we accomplished the act, it rained, so that I had to shelter him under a black umbrella. He did not really know what I was going to do, but he suddenly understood when he saw me imitate the clippety-clop of the horse and make like I was on my horse with him behind. He climbed on my back, and we went through the rain to the place where I had buried the teddy bear. He told me, curiously, “Today, I did not take the umbrella. I knew you would wait for me and shelter me,” as if he had sensed what was going to happen. He dug up the teddy bear and the colored photograph of his mother, we fell into each other’s arms, and he cried for a long time with his head on my shoulder, cries of gratitude, like a child full of tenderness. From that day forward, he decided to mail a poem to me every day. Since that time, I have received some text from him every day. I keep these poems in a special box. I have to say that the communication between us is much better. As I speak to you now [1993], he is thirty years old, and we have a really beautiful relationship.

That is a very beautiful story. Through this act, you voluntarily overturned a difficulty from his childhood.

Yes, but in just the right way. I took the same elements associated with a negative emotional charge and breathed a positive charge into them. And in so doing, I also paid my own psychological debt.

SEVEN

PSYCHOMAGIC LETTERS

Once an act is completed, you told me, the only payment you ask is that the client sends you a letter reporting the execution of the act. I would like to have specifics on the subject of this psychomagic mail.

I demand this letter for two reasons: the psychomagic act, having all the characteristics of a dream, is very quickly forgotten if one does not put it immediately to paper; and what one receives must be shared. The best way to show retribution to a therapist is to report back on one’s healing, the result of the therapist’s efforts. It is a great sign of spiritual health to know how to thank. These letters are an integral part of the psychomagic act. They sanction and conclude it, so to speak.

Whoa! That intrigues me. Would you consider reading some of them to me?

With pleasure. Since I cannot show an actual act, the letters will give you a taste of it. For you to really know the process, I am going to comment on the first letter, sentence by sentence. Afterward, while I read the others to you, I will leave it to you to guess the hidden reason behind each act. Remember, they seem irrational at first glance.

Let’s go. .

Do not forget as I read these letters, that it is not me speaking but the person to whom I prescribed an act, the person rendering an account to me. This is the first letter, then, that I will comment on as I go along:

(Alejandro’s comments are between brackets in the text. Some minor corrections in grammar have been made to the letters. Most of the originals are in Alejandro’s possession and can be verified.)

I am a psychologist and I came to see you because I have not succeeded in working in my profession. I cannot earn a buck. You gave me the following psychomagic act: Take a double square flowerpot [I told her to take a double square flowerpot, like the tarot cards. Double square magic, also known as the spirit and the body. It was necessary to work with the two.] of a color chosen as an initiatory color. [What color? The person chooses the color that has symbolic strength for him, so that the object speaks to the person.] Then, divide the flowerpot into two parts and plant wheat! [There, I play with words. When you plant wheat, you put wheat in your pocket. It is not by coincidence that in French one sometimes calls money “wheat” (“dough” in English).] One part of the wheat is planted on one side of the double square flowerpot in order, in four lines, two lines of even possibilities and two lines of odd possibilities. [For me, to make the lines even and odd symbolizes the recognition of the man and woman inside oneself. In every initiation ceremony, the odd is masculine and the even is feminine. Giving the same attention to man and to woman, we recognize the couple, man and woman, inside each of us.] On the other side of the double square flowerpot, the wheat is scattered randomly. [There is an ordered side, which symbolizes the necessity of the intellect to work methodically, and a side in disorder, indicating trust given to the unconscious. This spatial condition demonstrates that perfect order only exists next to disorder.] You told me to put potter’s clay on the other side, the sterile side, and water it in the evenings with holy water [For me, clay is the human body. God made Adam by taking clay from the four corners of the earth — north, south, east, west. And with this clay from the four corners, he made a balanced man. So, the four corners reside equally inside us. If a person has not established equilibrium between his physical needs, his desires, his emotions, and his intellect, he cannot feel good. In a well-adjusted human being, these four energies are balanced. Concerning the holy water — that was prescribed so that the body is blessed. That is the first thing to do in an effort to recover contact with the feminine dimension inside oneself. In asking this woman to bless her body, I invited her to make it sacred and thus to no longer despise it, to recover possession of it.] then to make little hearts of wire and put them in the four corners of the room; you told me to then pray to my female ancestors. I buy green potter’s clay. I put it on the left side and, at night, I water it with holy water (water I had beforehand kept on my altar next to my Buddha). I likewise obtained the wire to make the little hearts. [I gave her work to do because in order to find work, it is necessary that one learns how to work. These little markers should fulfill her and mean: learn to love work, or you will never work.] February 20. I make the little hearts and put them where indicated. I also add more potter’s clay and holy water, and I pray to the women of my genealogy tree so that they will help me. The 24th, I continue adding the potter’s clay, the holy water, and prayer. For a month, nothing happened. [In fact, everything has already happened.] Some little sprouts appear on the left, but not like the right side. [Here, she expresses a refusal to see the differences between the left and the right. She puts them in a competition. It is as if she says, “A woman is not like a man. She is weak, inferior.” And while she remarks, “It is not like the right side,” one cannot but reply, “Of course not! Because the left side is the left side!” What a mystery! We know that in our patriarchal society, the left side is the feminine: the symbol of the passive side of the body. In India, the right hand is the hand of God (the hand used for eating) and the left is the hand of Earth (the hand used for cleaning the backside). And when one spits, one has to do it toward the left, never toward the right. In this case, we should understand the message transmitted to the inner woman: negate your femininity. And the Psychomagic, which operates through synchrony or, if you will, poetry, becomes apparent through these squares of wheat: guard your femininity, do not neglect your intuition, attend to your inner woman! As if the wheat said, “I do not grow because you do not love the earth. And you do not love the earth because you do not love yourself in your feminine dimension.”] After having added potter’s clay and holy water from time to time, I saw that the wheat had sprouted. [Interesting. Supposedly nothing happened, yet wheat sprouted!] The sterile side is less dense than the other. [Always the comparison. . But even if only one tiny plant had sprouted, in a handful of earth stolen from a cemetery in the dead of winter, that would still be a miracle. Wheat sprouted in her bedroom — what a miracle!] I have two rows of six plants and two of five. [Adding them up makes 22. We remember I had her use a double square flowerpot so that this forms a tarot card. So, in this square, in the shape of a tarot card, are twenty-two plants, as many as are in the Major Arcana — another miracle!] I found work on March 2, and I am still working at the moment. I thank you for having helped me.

Success. So. . I would be curious to hear another letter.

So, here’s another one, but I will not add any comments. The author is an American writer by the name of R. M. Koster. He had gotten writer’s block and began to sink into alcoholism. His wife knew of my work, and feeling that I could help him recover his creativity, she encouraged him to make a trip from Panama — where he was living then — to Paris so that I could prescribe a psychomagic act for him. I noted that he had not written a book in more than ten years. I’ll read the letter that he sent me after he was free of alcoholism and had started to write again. He describes a done deal.

This should be good.

In this writing, Koster adopts a humorous style that does not mask the tragedy that he has lived through. Listen:

Situation early March 1987: During the 1970s, I wrote three novels, all three very good, whose subject is an imaginary country of Central America, a metaphor of Panama, and my reactions to this country. Without my knowing it, these books would prefigure the story of the Republic of Panama because once these books were written, God decided to plagiarize me and turn my imaginings into reality. An artist predicts the future because, unlike others, he knows the present. While working on the third novel, I lost heart and became nervous when in the presence of soldiers. I had decided to not write any more about this imaginary country that was called Ténèbre and, in the last pages, I destroyed it by an earthquake. Since this book was finished in September 1978, I have not written anything more. I lost all confidence in my literary aptitude and began to drink. When I met you, I said: “Without confidence, you are not able to work. In order to write a novel, it is necessary to throw yourself off the top of a building. At that moment, you are writing without knowing where you are going. Maybe the firemen will catch you, maybe not; but if your chief concern is security, you have to go down using the stairs. One is secure but one does not write a novel. When one claims to be living life, but takes the stairs, one does not truly live. The moment comes when you have to take a leap.” Your response was, “You are possessed by an old ‘I.’ When you wrote the book, it was another ‘I’ who wrote it, other characters who spoke. But these characters exist in your unconscious; they are part of you. And what do you do? You broke with them; you assassinated them. So, these beings are angry with you because you did not bring your novel where it was to go. In creativity, one must obey. When one is in the process of creating, it is necessary to give in, let the creation sprout like a mushroom. We must obey what sprouts inside of us, and you did not do that, you cut off your creativity.” I accepted your analysis, having always been convinced that it is the book that searches the writer, the same way the female seeks the male, and not the reverse. You recommended I:

Burn my four projects that followed the third novel, those that I never could conclude. Which must take place in the room where I write.

Use an alcoholic drink to light the fire, this in order to remedy my excessive consumption of alcohol.

Since the room is on the first floor and since I had used the metaphor of the writer jumping from the top of a building, that is to say, giving his whole self to his book, you suggested, once the act was completed, to exit through the window rather than taking the stairs.

You specified other details, which will appear as we go through the description of my act. I gathered all the necessary material, and I put it in a cast iron cauldron: samples from the four incomplete manuscripts, a liter of vodka, the green string to attach the sheets of paper, a needle to prick my finger and then put a drop of blood on each of the manuscripts. . I set it all ablaze. Immediately the room became horribly smoky. I took the cauldron — although it was really hot — and put it in the bathroom for fear that soot would cover the room and because I did not want anyone to see the smoke and call the fire department. I closed the door in the bathroom, putting the cauldron on the basin, and I began to cough and to suffocate. I ran out, I closed the door behind me and, for the next fifteen minutes, I went back from time to time to make sure it was still burning. Meanwhile, I began to prepare the window for my exit. Like all windows in this tropical country, it had glass, shutters, and a screen. First of all, I unscrewed the screen and glass, then I took down part of the shutter so I could pass through, a delicate operation that necessitated removing the metal supporting the glass. Finally, once the manuscripts were burned and the door opened, another thick smoke cloud surrounded me. Unable to take anymore, I took the cauldron and put it out the window. I placed it on the ledge just outside the window, then I ran to close the bathroom door to avoid the smoke spreading into the whole house. I went out through the window, crossed over the roof, and got down into the courtyard. I threw what was left of the manuscripts into the garbage. The next day, when I entered the bathroom, I noticed that, for some mysterious reason, a leaf of paper remained on the basin lid. Smoke remained in the bathroom and the walls, originally white, had turned black. When I picked up the sheet of paper, I saw that underneath it, the basin lid remained very white. I cleaned the bathroom but even today, six months later, one can still smell smoke and see the difference in the white rectangle on the basin top. Results of your Psychomagic: I have written an article about Panama, and I write with great success about Panamanian events. It seems that your magic concerns itself little with the genre and is only guided by the theme.

I sent Koster a postcard to congratulate him, pointing out that he did not burn the remaining sheet of paper. I also told him that if he wanted to write fiction, I could propose another psychomagic act. And he responded, “For now, I do not desire another act because I have a lot of work: a lot of ideas bustling in my head, cinema, and so forth. One knows when one is empty. Right now, I am full. Thank you.”

Whether or not one has faith in this “Psychomagic,” you give verifiable facts here, which, I have to say, is really impressive. Do all your clients respond by letter in such detail as R. M. Koster?

In general, yes. But it sometimes happens, within the framework of a friendly conversation that I propose an act without having been asked. In these cases, I almost never get a response, simply because it is rare that the act is completed. The person did not solicit it, the person heard it in passing, maybe with an amused curiosity, but without attaching any importance to it.

Let’s return to the importance of motivation, central to all kinds of therapy. It is important that the person truly desires to change.

Of course. From the instant when the desire is truly there, and also the trust, everything becomes possible. I am going to read a long letter that illustrates well the principle that an extremely simple act can take a miraculous dimension if it is accomplished with faith:

My name is Jacqueline. I told you my father committed suicide when I was twelve years old, overdosing on pills. I also told you that with all my problems with money for so many years, I have had suicidal thoughts. You explained to me that my father committed suicide in a calm way and that I was, myself, slowly committing suicide, following my father’s footsteps. I also told you that my mother died three weeks after my father’s death, after several years of cerebral degeneration. I needed to express, in an act, something that was certainly suppressed for a long time. I needed liberation and, I believe, a miracle.

You assigned me the following act: buy a dozen beautiful oranges (firm, heavy ones), go to a nursing home, and give the oranges as gifts to a dozen residents. For twelve minutes each, chat with these twelve people. Then to remember to tell you the effect I felt. My father died on a Saturday, so you told me to complete the act on a Saturday. I tried to understand this task that you gave me. I thought that the nursing home would make me reflect on my father’s age (at first, I did not dream about associating this act with my mother), that the oranges were a symbol of fertility and that in going to see people roughly the same age as my father, I would no longer reject him. If, on this occasion, I gave him life, I equally authorized myself to live and to no longer feel pressured to reproduce his act. Besides, twelve oranges, twelve people, it was for me the symbol of the twelfth arcana, the Hanged Man, in the tarot. It was necessary then that I follow through, that I go to the extreme of my pain in order to find joy; maybe it is necessary that I die one good time to be reborn and occupy my true place.

The days before I performed this act were not very agreeable. I felt bad in my body, I had palpitations, anxiety, I felt I was suffocating. I looked for a public nursing home, thinking the people I would find would perhaps be more needy, less enclosed than the elderly living in private institutions. So, I found myself forty-three kilometers away from the city where I reside, in a city sharing a name with my husband! To gain access, I had, under the advice of my friend, called the director to explain that I was a psychologist doing work on the loneliness of the elderly and that I wished to speak with a dozen people.

Arriving at this place, I quickly understood that I faced something for which I was ill-prepared. All the people I met seemed to have, in effect, curious, abnormal behavior. They were all, for the most part, “mentally insane.” I had a closed heart as I found there an element of my past, which had made me suffer a lot: my mother, some years before her death had also “lost her head,” and I had always rejected her, though I was never able to admit it. I found there something very painful. I had not chosen this place by coincidence. In spite of the pain, there was no question of turning around. I needed to do this; I had to do it. The pain clenched me; there had been so much suffering in these people’s lives. . I had the impression that they had thrown me a cry for help. I felt a lot of love for all these “elders.” It was difficult for me to pay attention to the time that passed with each person. I know that the whole psychomagic act must be scrupulously respected, under penalty of “rotting.” You prescribed me twelve minutes per person; in consultation, I spent about five hours with the first person who came to see me and I did not look at my watch; there, it was necessary to concentrate (like a hanging) but it was good, without a doubt, indispensable, for me. That forced me to place myself in the present moment, to be vigilant, for me to realize that love given is felt by the other, that transmitted messages are not necessarily stronger because they are longer.

There were people who no longer had teeth, who could not eat the orange and did not want to take it. I told them to offer it to whomever they wanted. Others did not like oranges, and I told them also to give it as a gift to someone. That happened four or five times. Once, I was very afraid because a man who did not have his head anymore refused to take the orange even to give it to someone. As I chatted with him, I did not know if I could count him as one of the twelve people (since his orange remained with me). All that complicated my act a lot, and I was afraid of failing. This man followed me while I chatted with the others and, finally, I was able to convince him to take the orange. Suddenly, the man fell. He had deformed legs and could not move without the help of an apparatus on which he supported himself. Everyone looked at him, but no one moved. I helped this man as well as I could to get up but he did not want to sit up while I went for a nurse. Once he was up again, he absolutely wanted to move forward. There were people who told me he wanted to go to his room located in another wing. I continued to support him up the stairs where he wanted to go. While he went up the steps, I was behind him so that he wouldn’t fall back and break his back. That may seem strange, but I was not afraid that he would fall on me and make me slide down the stairs. I felt this force of love surrounding us. Finally, this gentleman was able to go where he wished to go. It was lunchtime, and I still had an orange, I still had one person to see, and yet, I felt my act would not be valid. It was necessary to interrupt the act for an hour so that then I would return to chat with the last person and offer the fruit. And if all of it rotted because of this interruption?

Leaving, I found my husband who was waiting for me, and we talked about all of it. I gave twelve minutes per person, and I felt like I had left a lot of happiness, having contributed to easing a bit of suffering. But these eleven people — how much had they also given me! That might seem strange because it came from insane people, but they all thanked me for having come to visit them. Each time I said good-bye, the person said thank you. I believe that even if the intellect loses all or part of what we call a “sense of reality,” the heart still senses the love it is offered. That is, more or less, what I felt there.

At one o’clock, I returned to see my twelfth person with the twelfth orange. It was a man in a wheelchair, who had had a leg amputated. I then left, aware that this act had made me conscious of the fact that there are so many places where an enormous amount of suffering reigns, and everyone can, in his own way, contribute to easing this suffering. In going to this nursing home, I found myself facing my mother and my father. In closing, my parents both died in a three-week interval. I felt like a totally abandoned child; thanks to my visit to the nursing home, I felt I had given life to them both again.

When I called you, as you asked, to tell you what I felt, you proposed the following: “Go back to the exact place where you bought the oranges the first time, at noon, twelve o’clock,” you specified, “and buy one orange, the most beautiful.” I asked you what day I should do this and you responded, “What day had you gone there?” It was a Saturday. You said, “Do it Saturday. Then, seat yourself at the door of a church and slowly eat your orange, taking twelve minutes to do it. That’s all.” Saturday, July 14, I went to the market. An old lady informed me that on this holiday the merchants would be there.

At twelve o’clock, very precisely, I took the orange that appeared to me to be the most beautiful, and I bought it. I took my bike, and accompanied by my husband, I found a church where I could sit in front of the door. I knew of the existence of a church named “Notre Dame de la Paix” that I never entered because its modern architecture did not really attract me. It is a bit outside the city. I dreaded only one thing: that the door would be locked — as all churches are now locked outside of normal business hours. So I parked my bicycle, and by a miracle, when I pushed the door, it was not locked. The interior of the church formed a quarter circle. There was a lot of stained glass — modern, of course — but I felt very well. The church was “hot.” I sat down to pray, to give thanks, before starting to eat my orange. The priest arrived. He prayed also, and then he fussed about the church. I waited for the priest to leave because I did not dare to eat my orange right in front of the door. Then I took my bike, and with my husband, who had waited for me outside, we left. Upon leaving the church, I left the door open. For me, my act could not have been completed if the door had been closed; apart from that, I had the impression that the access to happiness was impossible for me.

After a bit, we went back to the church and were comforted to see that the priest’s car was gone. But this time, I was really afraid that the door would be locked. Not only was the door not locked, but it remained grandly open just as I had left it. So I could, with real ease and a lot of pleasure, sit myself in front of the opened door. And at precisely one o’clock, I began to peel my orange. Earlier in the week, I said that twelve minutes to eat an orange would be terribly long — evidently, I do not ever take time to savor it. I inhale. . Twelve minutes after one o’clock was, for me, a beautiful revolution, the way to end this chapter of my life and move toward a total transformation. I began by enjoying the first section. What I felt, I will not forget. As I write these lines, I experience the same emotion. I ate that quarter little bit by little bit. I was moved, I wanted to cry — all the while feeling joy. This time, I felt well and, maybe for the first time, gave myself the right to life. It was life I tasted, that passed through me, that poured into me. I really felt, before, that I had forbidden myself something very strong. Life, without a doubt. . There, I knew God’s door had always been open and that it was only me who closed it. I was in total communion with God. This emotion was intense. I looked at the time after having savored the first section: four minutes had passed. Time passed so fast, I would need to hurry up a bit. The feelings were still strong. After having experienced a certain pain, I went on with a real pleasure to eat my orange. I believe that for the first time, I knew what an orange tasted like. It was a discovery. In fact, it was as if I had eaten my first orange. I wanted the time to flow a bit slower to enjoy it longer. But the act was the act, and at twenty-four minutes after one o’clock, I finished my orange. I then entered the church, and I stayed there for a while without thinking about anything at all. I was empty inside, but happily; the emptiness was certainly a necessity for a new force to enter. Then I left with my husband, who had waited for me on a bench, very close, because it was important that he be near me on this day. And I realize that, in asking me to write, you supply more help. How can I say this? While I ate my orange, I experienced a feeling of acceptance of life inside myself. Perhaps this corresponded with the moment I was born, because as I wrote everything to you — I made several drafts — I had the feeling of giving birth to myself. I want to heal from my past, and I must say that, for the moment, it is my twelve-year-old daughter who helps me move forward. I love her above everything else, and I wish her happiness; but I know she will not find this happiness if I do not reflect an image of someone who wants to live.

This letter is, in many regards, touching. The testimony, above all, of the faith this woman has in Psychomagic. The trouble with the “ difficulty of life” is that it behaves like a very vague evil. After reading this long missive, I rejoice that Jacqueline could feel alive again, but I would have liked to find a shorter letter, one testifying to the resolution of a more precise difficulty, more easily circumscribed, thanks to Psychomagic.

I will let you read the letter by Armelle, a young woman, half-French (by her mother), half-Vietnamese (by her father). She felt complexes among the French, and her femininity was threatened because she did not accept her Asian roots. Very affected by the war, her father renounced Vietnam. I advised her to go to his homeland to find her roots. Beforehand, she should, at Christmas, eat a mango, saving the stone and germinate it in a glass of water, then plant it in an earthenware pot for thirty-three days.

Then it was necessary to take it to Vietnam to plant it in her paternal family’s garden. Here, then, is what she wrote to me once the act was accomplished:

I left for Vietnam on August 5, 1986. When the airplane began to fly over Vietnam, we encountered turbulence, although from the beginning the trip had been very calm. Then, I began to be sick, and I spent this time of flying over Vietnam in the restroom vomiting. It seemed that a part of me refused this country (maybe because of the disgust my father held toward his own race). Arriving there, I felt I saw my father in all the little men with whom I crossed paths (my father left Vietnam at fourteen years old). And then, a strange thing, I was anguished about having my period, and I had experienced the same feeling at the time of my first menstruation. So I think I then recovered contact with my femininity. I could also observe the femininity of the Vietnamese women, so natural, delicate, and gracious. I was shocked that no one took me for a Vietnamese, and it was then that, for the first time, my French roots appeared clearly to me. I arrived August 13 at my father’s city of birth. I was very moved, and I cried almost all night, prey to an immense solitude and a full rage I felt toward my father. The next day, I went to see the house of my great-great-grandmother, and the whole family found itself reunited to celebrate the ancestors. We burned incense before the altars of all the ancestors. I had a strong feeling in front of the tomb of my great-grandmother, though I never met her. Then, I planted my mango tree in the garden, with the whole family’s assistance. This moment was extraordinary: to dig a hole in Vietnam’s yellow earth to plant this tree whose roots were surrounded by black earth from France. The contrast of the two lands was, for me, a fantastic symbol. In addition, strange coincidence, the garden was full of mango trees. The trip was very important for me. It allowed me to acknowledge my femininity, to analyze and give value to the heritage of this culture, to recognize that I had based my racial complex on an illusion. Merci.

Why did Armelle have to wait for Christmas to eat the mango then bury the stone precisely thirty-three days later?

This girl not only experienced a complex face-to-face encounter with her double origin, she also found herself between two religions. I therefore had to persuade her unconscious to accept itself as a gift of the two cultures and to combine them within her. Christ was born on Christmas and died at thirty-three years of age, only to rise from the dead. It is this entire cycle that Armelle transported to Vietnam in the form of a plant.

Have you had the occasion to “heal” other racial complexes?

Yes, of course. One day I went to visit a man with an African father and a French mother and, almost immediately afterward, I saw a woman in the same situation. They did not know one another, and they came to consult me separately. They both experienced a deep sadness toward their mixed race. I decided to unite them in a psychomagic act, one that they would complete together. I told myself that through this act, simultaneously completed by two people of the opposite sex, they were going to embody the inner man and woman, the animus and anima. Their skin was neither very light nor very dark. I asked them to paint themselves one in black, one in white, and go by car to the Arc de Triomphe, then, from there, to walk down the Champs-élysées. You are two tubes of paint. One bears the inscription “flesh” the other “Negro.”

The bathroom is tight, and the girl at my right finds herself ill at ease. She has no energy, no flexibility. She seems about to cry. She chose to paint herself first as a white female. I paint myself then in black. Periodically, I feel my stomach in knots, then I tell myself, “Let’s go. This is nothing. It’s going to be fun.” In fact, there is nothing amusing about this. I remember what pushed me to accept this walk down the Champs-élysées wearing a wig and a Rasta tam. My companion is white and dressed in black. We walk. At first, fast, as if we wanted to run, but soon we slow down. I attract all the attention; no one seems to notice the woman at my side. A lot of people look at me, smiling, and I feel really small, as if I shriveled inside myself. I hear people commenting, “Hey, Rasta man!” I smile. I do not feel my body; I do not feel the ground we’re walking on. It feels like I’m dreaming, and I’m ill at ease. I want to rip off my wig and clean my skin and scream, “This is not me!” We enter a shadowy corridor, and I calm myself a bit. When we go out, I am better. The rest of the distance seems easier, and I notice one thing: whatever the image that the people have of me, this is no more than an image. No one can see me just as I am if I do not decide to really show myself. If even then — who is really capable of seeing me? We arrive at the end of our first trip. In the car, back home, I dream of this notion of image, and I tell myself it would be interesting to play a bit with mine. Back home in the bathroom, I scrub my face and the black color goes away; it drips into the sink. I remember that, all my childhood, I had wanted to see the color of my skin drip into the sink. This time, I played the role of the white man. I find the paint more difficult. I am not as good at imitating the aspect of the white flesh. I have the air of a drag queen. The image that I give myself this time is that of a heavy metal fan with a boom box. Painting myself as a white man gives me the impression of committing a sacrilege. It is interesting because this feeling did not exist earlier. We walk down the Champs-élysées again, but this time, no one seems to notice me. A lot of people, however, observe the girl at my side. She is very black and dressed in white. Throughout the distance, I ask myself if the people would feel as uncomfortable as I do at the moment if they knew what I was doing. . Though, all of this is, in the end, very impersonal. No one saw anything. People are indifferent; each is doing his own thing. A little tour of the Virgin Megastore, and the trip is finished. I feel very light. I have this crazy desire to spend money on new clothes. It is as if a dream has ended.

Very interesting. But the letter does not mention the subsequent effects of the act.

Sylvain and Nathalie had very positive reactions. They both, some time later, found partners, Sylvain with a woman of no color, Nathalie with a man of color. As much as I know, these two couples are doing well.

Up until now, we have mentioned truly painful complexes but, if I can say, purely psychological: a man unable to earn a living, a writer unable to write, people unable to live with their mixed race. . Could Psychomagic aid a person who has undergone a very precise exterior trauma? For example, a traumatic experience unfortunately very common, in my opinion, an abortion?

I will show you a letter relating to this problem. Brigitte felt guilty about an abortion undergone in the absence of her companion, Michel. She was depressed and not resigned to this idea. Her relationship with her friend was in a crisis; they drew it out more and more. I proposed an act so that they could mourn the fetus together and definitively bury it. Brigitte and Michel must collaborate building a box out of fine wood, lined with a fabric of the best quality, the box of course symbolizing a coffin. In addition, they should choose, in mutual agreement, a fruit to symbolize the fetus — they chose a mango. Brigitte, naked, should place the fruit on her stomach and keep it there with a thick bandage. Michel should cut the bandage with a pair of scissors, as if he were a surgeon, and extract the mango. Brigitte should relive all the feelings she had during the operation and express them loudly. After placing the “fetus” in the box, they should go bury it in a very beautiful place. That done, Brigitte should kiss Michel and with her tongue put two stone marbles, one red and one black, into his mouth. This is how I prescribed the act. Here is the letter from Brigitte:

We searched for the material in a bit of haste — like the hour before the termination. I chose the same day as the termination — a Saturday at 6:15 p.m. The event took place at Michel’s house. I took the exact position that I had on the operating table, my legs in the air, naked, the mango fastened to my stomach with a bandage. Michel comes near. He is dressed in white, like a surgeon. He proceeds very fast, and I scream, yell. I again feel the effects in my stomach, I cry a lot, I hate, he mutilates me. Michel cuts the bandages and puts the mango in the box. Right away, I have a doubt: it should be equally necessary to cut the mango with the scissors. Michel wants to do it afterward, but I hurry him. I cry a lot. Michel tells me, “The mango cannot live anymore, anyway, once buried.” Then Michel sits next to me; he caresses my forehead. I feel that he hates me. He is a thousand leagues away. It is necessary to find a place to bury the box. We leave, by motorcycle, and go toward Saint-Germain-en-Laye, through beating rain. The box is in my backpack. I again feel bitterness and, at the same time, a deep relief. Finally, we stop at Marly-le-Roi in the park of the chateau that Louis XIV preferred. The place is absolutely magnificent. I cry a lot. Michel holds me, but he seems distant. We dig a hole with our bare hands, sheltering it from any glances. The evening is near. We kiss. I put the two little stone marbles in Michel’s mouth. Michel spits out one of the marbles, the red one, and it falls to the ground. I immediately sense a crisis; Michel responds and finds the red marble. I put it again in his mouth. As prescribed, he spits out the black marble, kisses me, and gives me back the red marble. I throw the black marble in the park’s fountain, and I feel very relieved. With the red marble, I go, as you advised me, to make a red ring. Psychosomatic reactions took place — intense redness in my cheeks — just like those that appeared after the operation. I felt very liberated from the guilt and my energy restored. I am calm, serene, accepting of what can happen. I found trust again in myself and in Michel. I choose life, whatever happens in it. My internal energies are restored. I do not feel any more morbid panic. Thank you.

What does the kiss with the two colored stones mean?

I employ the symbols of life and death (red and black) as well as chance. Giving him a kiss is a manifestation of love. Brigitte gives Michel the opportunity to give life or death. Spitting out, first, the red marble, Michel manifests his desire to kill the fetus, to not be a father. He, himself, collects the marble and, in introducing it again into her mouth, he gives it another try. And this time, he chooses to spit the red marble — life — which he deposes in his companion’s mouth. He thus manifests his acceptance of another child to come. In tossing the black marble into a fountain, Brigitte returns her urges for death to her unconscious, finds the trust again in Michel, and frees herself of her fears, such as her culpability. At present in her body, life circulates, not death anymore. From now on, her sex is a space for creation — not destruction anymore.

This act illustrates well the consistent technique of “employing the language of the unconscious.” That, if I understood correctly, is Psychomagic’s essential drive.

Yes, but I also give simple and logical advice that anyone can understand.

In this case, how does this advice work?

For it to be effective, I must seize or provoke the occasion, to find the right moment to dispense it. It is a question, so to speak, of “timing.” The same advice given at the wrong moment will not have the least effectiveness. This process is comparable to soccer: If I send the shot in the direction of the goal without there being an opening, my gesture, as precise as it may be, will be futile, because the ball will not penetrate the wall of the defense. However, if I profit from a moment of hesitation, the goalie’s weakness, my shot will hit the bull’s eye. Similarly, when a person lets down their guard a bit, I often try to kick a psychological goal. We understand well that anyone who is prey to a vice continually maintains a position of defense. The ego refuses to yield. I must then seize or provoke a moment of distraction so as to let an order pass through the line of defense, into the unconscious. In order for the client to adopt the advice, it is important to penetrate his stubborn “I” and to touch the much more impersonal zone of the self.

Is there a letter illustrating this principal?

Here, not exactly a letter, but a testimony drafted by someone you know, the celebrated cartoonist, Jean Giraud, a.k.a. Moebius:

I met Alejandro in the seventies. We worked on the film Dune. Every day for two months, he brought me a new surprise in his totally surreal way of approaching the creation of a work, or any thought or situation, for that matter. . One of my most gnawing problems at the time was smoking — how to spend these long hours with this fascinating person without affirming my thoughts through big puffs of “fumoduction,” cheerfully conversing over some refreshments on the terrace at a café, once the magic was implemented. Silence around the table, all the attention turned toward what I had started. Alejandro contemplated me with a discreet and friendly mirth. I thought about this dear smoke, intangible chum, always available, effective, and reassuring, with the merry clacking of the lighter, the scratching sound of the matches. . Was I ready to abandon these apparently indispensable pleasures? But I also thought of the gray ashes, which invade everything, of the shortness of breath, of the phlegm and pain in the mornings. . I decided to take the step! And then, I was very curious. Not only was I going to see Alejandro perform a magic trick, but also I was going to be the object. One last thing incited me to jump: the others sitting around me, waiting for my response. Was I going to disappoint them and deprive them of magic in action? “Okay, I am ready!”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

“Give me your pack of cigarettes.”

I took out my pack of Gauloises, a third of the way gone. Was he going to cast a spell on them, transform them into a pumpkin? After some bizarre incantation, he whispered with seriousness: “My magic is very powerful but very simple. To quit smoking, it suffices to make the decision, and that you have already done. The problem is to remember your decision, and that is where magic takes place. Who has a pen?” I extended to him my ballpoint pen and gazed, fascinated, at the precise gestures of my friend who took apart the cellophane wrapping on the pack. He took the pen. . I was finally going to see into what cabalistic sign, what powerful charm, he was going to transform my opened pack. “It is very simple. On this side, I write this little word — No, and on the other side this little phrase — I can.” Alejandro wrapped the cellophane back around the pack, and he returned it to me as if it were a bomb ready to explode or nothing less than the Holy Grail wrapped in a golden fleece. I should keep this pack a half-dozen weeks until, completely cleared of the least desire to smoke, I make it a gift to a friend in need — one had to wonder what this “no” and “I can” meant. I have not, since, had the least desire to touch a cigarette again.

Well, here again, one says it is faith that saves! And yet. .

You know, it happens that an act that appears absurd heals an illness, because this act “speaks” to the unconscious, which takes symbols for reality. The illness is a symptom of a deficiency. If the unconscious feels that this lack was filled, it ceases complaining through the intermediary symptom. As an example, the following letter is from a woman named Sonia Silver:

I came to see you at the Mystical Cabaret October 30, 1992, and asked you a question. For eighteen months, I had felt an intense pain in the back of my neck. Can this pain be the effect of a decline in the spiritual point of view? I have consulted doctors, acupuncturists, masseuses, osteopaths, bonesetters, and healers looking for a cure, and of course, I took anti-inflammatory medicine, cortisone, underwent injections, and so forth. Nothing worked. The evening of Wednesday, October 30, you prescribed a psychomagic act: I had to sit on my husband’s knees while he sang a kind of lullaby behind the nape of my neck. Although you did not know it, my husband is an opera singer. He sang a Schubert tune! And there, I was healed. How much thanks I would like to be able to give!

So what happened?

It’s simple: I made an equation with the nape, the past, and the unconscious. I had the intuition that the relationship with Sonia and her husband had not bloomed normally. Putting her on his knees, the husband was going to symbolically play the role of the father while she symbolically became a little girl again. In addition, because he sang a lullaby to her at the level of this painful point, she would fulfill a never truly satisfied childhood desire: to know her father comes to put her to bed and communicates with her on an emotional level.

Abandoned by my father, my mother destroyed all of his photos and discarded all of the souvenirs of my progenitor, who had died when I was three years old. So I had no mementos. I experienced a deep anger at the idea that I would never know his face. I attended one of your conferences, which dealt with the genealogy tree. I asked you what I could do when I had not met my father and did not possess any photograph of him. You noted that while my father had not acknowledged me, I did know where he was buried — my mother had told me — so I should go to the gravesite and identify myself as his son by sliding a photo of myself into the grave. That is what I did, after some hesitation. Little by little, my anger disappeared. I accepted the idea of never knowing his traits. After fifteen days, my mother, who thought she had destroyed all memory of this man, found a big photograph and gave it to me. This “meeting” with my father was and still is a great happiness. For the first time in my life, I am aware of my identity. Now I feel reconciled and full of love toward my two fathers, as I do toward my mother. Your advice was providential. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

This example is a good illustration of one of my convictions: to know that reality functions like a dream. At the very moment when Patrick put a photo of himself in his father’s tomb, his unconscious aroused reality to the symbol and united with the father figure. So this can crop up in the dream that is life. Not having been able to prevent this union, that is to say, the appearance of the truth that the mother perpetrated, she finds the photo and gives her son the image that will make him feel complete. You see, for me, all the events are intimately bound to each other. An act well carried-out reverberates on the ensemble of reality.

So the mother collaborated with the act unconsciously.

That is why it is important that the people implicated in the act be informed of its objective so they can participate, with fervor, toward its realization. I will give you an example of a conscious and successful collaboration. I advised Gerard, a man who suffered from feeling a perpetual emotional demand regarding his wife, to buy two big church candles and a ball of red wool to carry out the act with his mother. Here is his letter:

Easter Monday, after having lunch together, my mother and I went to Notre Dame to look for two church candles. There were a lot of people. Then I invited her to have dinner at a Chinese restaurant. We talked a lot, about God, about life, our family. Then we came back. A bit before midnight, we went to her room — she has her room, and my father has his. We positioned the lit candles on the mantel.

They were oriented north to south. I had them to my back, one to my left and one to my right. Then we tied ourselves firmly together with the red wool. We were tied together completely: feet, legs, pelvis, body, arms, hands, head. . We ended up in an embrace, our arms around each other, and when one moved, the other had to follow. At this moment, I revived the events lived in my early childhood, then my adolescence, with my mother. I had believed in those days that I always had to follow her instructions, to see things as she saw them, to do as she did, to think as she did. . I then felt a heat in the level of my stomach, then this feeling disappeared. We stayed attached until midnight. We were both very calm. At midnight, I began to cut the wool. First, on the bottom, the feet, the childhood. . We each cut half of the knots, the lines, but she had me cut a few more than she did. When we could separate ourselves, I thought, “Now, from this instant, I am free.” I told her thank you, and I hugged her. We then talked again for a long time, but she was tired. So I blew out the candles, took one, and returned home. The last part of my act consisted of making her a gift, which I should first dream. One day, something imposed itself on me: the only gift worthy of compensating for the gap provoked by the act was to thank her for what she gave me. Saturday, May 9, at midnight, I wrote with my blood, “I thank you for everything you have given me. I love you. God bless you.” Then I sealed this letter with wax from the Notre Dame candle, which I had lit while writing. This act transformed my life. I ceased hanging over my wife like I had in the past due to an emotional demand coming from my childhood.

I would like to now show you another letter relating to a problem of identification to the mother. The author is a painter, the victim of strong asthma attacks. Here, I used the oneiric element handled by the artist — his own painting. In addition, this letter is interesting because it presents the case of a person who has already had recourse to Psychomagic and apparently found himself healed, until a relapse, which sparked the need for another act. An act can sometimes make a difficulty disappear without exactly eradicating it in its depth. It is appropriate then to prescribe a new act:

. . I asked you why, following a visit to a pestiferous ossuary in Naples, I had a strong asthma attack, after a year without any relapse. I also asked you why, since the day of my art opening of the exhibition of the “angels” (the opening, by coincidence, being June 8, the eve of the twentieth anniversary of my mother’s death), I had started to have asthma attacks again, and again required daily medication, which I thought I’d never need again. In fact, I believed myself definitively healed after having, under your advice, buried all my medicines under my mother’s tomb exactly one year earlier. Actually, I had not had one attack until this day in Naples. . You told me that, maybe, I do not allow myself success in the profession I love because my mother had died after a long sickness without having been able to blossom. You advised me to paint a skeleton and to draw over it an angel so the opaque dress would completely hide the bones. You proposed, in a way, to raise my mourning by giving my mother the status of angel. This idea meant a lot to me. I followed your advice and, in spite of my current inability to paint, I forced myself to go to my studio to make the drawing. I painted the skeleton, but as I did not like it, I made another one over it. Then I made the white angel. Some days later, I had a strong asthma attack with bronchitis, which took a while to get over. I was in despair and so tired that I was forced to go to the mountains for a rest. The biggest confusion prevailed in me, as did a great doubt about everyone and everything. Why did Psychomagic fail this time, to the point of provoking a reverse result to what I wanted? A mystery. . I was very disconcerted until I thought about it, and it occurred to me that in drawing the angel, I had made two skeletons — two skeletons for one angel! I understood that unconsciously I still had a strong attraction to mourning, this mourning that even made me sick. Upon my return, I remade the Psychomagic. This time, I drew a skeleton, then an angel. The next day, I decreased to half the dose of the medicine. The day after, I actually ceased taking anything. I was cured! Thank you!

Alejandro, we must be careful to not drown our readers in an avalanche of acts. The letters we’ve read manifest different facets of Psychomagic. Will you choose a last letter in which a common psychological mechanism would be disempowered thanks to this amazing discipline? I think, for example, of fear. It is accepted that fear often masks a refused desire. Have you, in your archives, an updated “case,” which was resolved by this dynamic, in itself very banal?

I, of course, have many! Here is a letter to this exemplary regard:

One night in May, returning from your conference, I was attacked at the entrance of my apartment building by a masked man who tried to rape me. He did not succeed, but I was very afraid, and I have, without a doubt, concentrated my fright in the right side of my body, which, the next morning, was paralyzed. I conceived a living repulsion regarding men: I could not stand contact with them anymore, and sometimes I could not even sit next to them. The fear took hold, and if I returned home late, I would run up six flights of stairs. I, who beforehand never locked the door, isolated myself from the exterior world, barricading myself behind three bolts. But the fear, it did not stop behind the door, it accompanied me everywhere. . So you prescribed this act: “Go to Pigalle and act like a prostitute. Find some pretext to not go with the men who proposition you.” A leaden weight could not be heavier on my shoulders. . I chose July 17, the seventeen corresponding to the Star tarot and to Aquarius, my sign, thus, putting myself under its protection. I went ahead of time to learn the place and to observe the neighborhood, which I did not know. This was not at all an easy role for me to play. The evening of the 17, at 9 p.m., I dressed in a miniskirt, a low-cut shirt, high-heeled shoes with fishnet stockings, and heavy makeup — destination Pigalle! I really wanted to not meet any one of my neighbors on my trip. On the metro platform, a man approached me asking by turns for a light, the time, directions. . I felt like I was in another person’s skin, and I observed what happened inside me. A friend went with me to Pigalle, and his presence was good for me. I sat on the terrace of a café. Some men came toward me, asking me to go with them. I refused, under the pretext of a benign illness. Some believed I had AIDS.

After having dinner with my friend Hervé, I returned exhausted, but I no longer had any fear and was able, hence, to walk alongside a man or climb my six flights of stairs without a problem. I was no longer isolating myself, and I felt at peace.

This act permitted me to see that several personalities live inside of me, to express them, to live my fear, and to go beyond it. I felt liberated and that I was now able to get ahead of it and continue on my way. Without this act, I would be, undoubtedly, completely repressed. Instead I am open.

When returning from a lecture last Wednesday, I realized a man was following me. He wanted to have his way with me. The psycho-magic act returned to my memory, as well as all the strength that I mustered from it. I confronted this man, and in his eyes, I saw fear. I was now aware of my own strength, and he could see this, too. He left the building, and I went home, calm and confident.

I send you my thoughts of love, joy, and harmony for you and your family.

Let this beautiful letter end this sampling of psychomagic epistles!

EIGHT

FROM IMAGINATION TO POWER

Alejandro, isn’t Psychomagic too simple, a bit too short? Analysis often takes years; a number of therapies are spread out over long periods of time. .

You know, a labyrinth is no more than a tangle of straight lines. I ask myself if analysis and therapy do not sometimes have the tendency to introduce curves into straight lines. . And then, an act has a more definitive door than any conversation. However, I should make one thing clear: it is rare that I prescribe an act to a person without having beforehand studied his genealogy tree — his family, parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, and so forth.

So, each act we have reviewed is nothing but an episode in a longer process.

Yes, but a serious episode and decisive. If I walk with a nail in my shoes, my whole world, my sensibility, will be affected. Before trying to go farther, I have to refine my vision, to take out the nail. In the same way, when one suffers a trauma, all of our existence senses it. So it is important to remedy the trauma.

In addition, it seems to me that Psychomagic helps to solve certain very specific, precise problems. I see it more as an isolated intervention rather than, say, a global therapy.

Gilles, there is but one global healing: to find God. There is no other. Only the discovery of our interior God can heal us forever. The rest consists, for better or worse, of beating around the bush. No therapy can be partial.

What do you have to say on the subject of these methodical and, at the same time, insane conversations we’ve been having?

It is important to reaffirm the importance of the imagination. In a certain way, with you I’ve had an exercise in imaginary autobiography. Not in the sense of “imaginary,” since all of the reported facts are true, but in that the deep story of my life is of a constant effort to broaden the imagination, reduce the limitations, to apprehend its therapeutic and transforming potential. If I teach anything, it is the imagination.

Alejandro Jodorowsky, professor of the imagination. .

Exactly. I teach people to imagine. Most of the time we have no idea what the imagination can be, we cannot conceive of the extent of its range. Because, in addition to the intellectual imagination, we also have the emotional imagination, the sexual imagination, the physical imagination, the economic imagination, the mystic imagination, the scientific imagination. . On all levels, including what we call “rational,” the imagination is open. It is at home everywhere. So it is important to train it to approach reality not just from a one-and-only narrow perspective but from multiple angles. Ordinarily, we envision everything according to the very restricted paradigm of our beliefs, of our conditioning. From such a mysterious, vast, unpredictable reality, we cannot perceive more than what is filtered through our miniscule point of view. The active imagination is key to an expanded vision. It allows us to envision a life according to points of view other than our own, to think and sense things from different perspectives. This is true freedom: to be capable of leaving ourselves, crossing the boundaries of our little world to open up the universe. I would like the readers of this book to at least accept the idea of the therapeutic power of the imagination, so that Psychomagic, at the end of the day, is no more than a modest application of this very real power.