The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography

NINE. From Psychomagic to Psychoshamanism

Psychomagic is about saving time, accelerating the gaining of awareness. Just as a disease can announce itself suddenly, healing can also arrive in an instant. A sudden illness is called unfortunate, while a sudden healing is called a miracle. However, both take part in the same essence: they are forms of the language of the subconscious. Thanks to rapid detection through tarology, a deep understanding gained by studying the repeating patterns in the family tree, and psychomagical actions, we can come closer to the inner peace that is a product of the discovery of our true identity, which allows us to live with joy and die without anguish, knowing that we have not squandered our time in this dream called “reality.” However, valuable as these interventions are, if the client does not put in as much effort as the therapist, no mental mutation will be achieved; all the work will do nothing more than calm the symptoms, seeming to eliminate the pain but leaving unhealed the wound that invades the entire individual with its distressing shadow. The client, at the same time that he or she is seeking help, rejects it. The therapeutic act is a strange fight: we struggle mightily to help someone who puts up all possible barriers and tries to steer the healing toward failure. In a way, the healer is the hope of salvation for the sick person, but at the same time an enemy. He who suffers, fearing that the source of his ill health will be revealed to him, wants to be put to sleep, wants to be made insensible to pain, but wants in no way to change, in no way to be shown that his problems are the protesting of a soul locked in the cell of a false identity. Many clients have come to see me because, despite having achieved what they wanted to achieve — success in love, in material life, in social events — for no apparent reason, they want to die. Some triumphant people die in senseless accidents; others, apparently healthy, succumb to chronic diseases. Astute businessmen are ruined every day. Tranquil beings, surrounded by loving families, commit suicide. Why? When a mother, consciously or not, wants to get rid of the fetus for some powerful reason (because the couple has economic or emotional problems, because the father has fled or died, because the woman became pregnant by accident, because ancestors have died in childbirth, or for many other anxiety-related reasons), then this desire for elimination, for death, is embedded in the intrauterine memory of the new being and acts as an order during his or her earthly life. Without realizing it rationally, the individual feels that she is an intruder who has no right to live. Even if the woman becomes the best of mothers after the birth, the damage is already done. Her son or daughter, even if everything that others consider happiness is at his or her disposal, will have to battle against incessant desires to die.

Moreover, even if the mother joyously accepts the pregnancy, she may not want a real child but an imaginary one who will carry out the family’s plans, even if those plans have nothing to do with the child’s true nature. The offspring is expected to be equal to his progenitor, or to achieve something that the adult could not achieve, or else the mother — whose father, having unresolved homosexual desires, has made her into a failed man, forcing her to suppress her femininity and develop masculine characteristics — dreams of giving birth to a perfect boy whose phallus she will take control of, satisfying her father’s wish. In such cases, it is common for the mother to be single, so that her child is given the surname of the maternal grandfather, metaphorically carrying out the father-daughter incest. Because humans are warm-blooded mammals, in the depths of their animal nature they carry the need to be protected, nurtured, and sheltered from cold by the bodies of their fathers and mothers. If this contact is lacking, the offspring is doomed to perish. A human being’s greatest fear is to be unloved by his or her mother, father, or both. If this happens, the soul is marked by a wound that never stops festering. The brain, having not found its true, bright center that would keep it in continuous ecstasy, lives in anguish. Unable to find true pleasure, which is nothing other than being oneself rather than being an imposed mask, it seeks out the less painful situations. I had a French friend who when asked, “Hello, how are you?” would reply with a smirk, “Not too bad.” Between two evils, the brain chooses the lesser one. Since the greatest evil is not being loved, the individual does not recognize this lack of love, and rather than enduring the atrocious pain of becoming conscious of it, prefers to be depressed, to create a disease, to be ruined, to fail. Because of these unbearable symptoms, the client starts therapy. If the healer wants to heal the wound at its core, a wide range of defenses must be deployed.

A great Italian theater and film actor came to consult me, accompanied by his wife. He had suffered depression in a cyclical form for many years. He was a handsome old man, very tall, robust, with an impressive voice. However, despite his radiant personality, I realized that in his heart he was still a docile child. His wife, a small brunette with a tremendous personality, exercised a virile authority over him. Exploring the actor’s family tree, I saw that his mother, due to the absence of the father, had developed an extremely possessive character, making him into her faithful servant. The famous man did not like acting at all; it was not his vocation. However, wanting to please his mother, who insisted that he must succeed on the stage and screen, he had dedicated most of his life to this. And, of course, becoming an internationally renowned star, racking up one triumph after another without taking any pleasure in it because this was the maternal ideal and not his own, he suffered from one depression after another. He felt that he was not himself, but an individual living a foreign destiny. His wife, who admired him greatly, was in a way a copy of his mother, now deceased. I proposed a psycho-magical act: the obedient child should rebel against both his mother and his wife. To assert his independence, he should go to visit his mother’s grave, carrying a rooster. Standing on the slab, he should slit the animal’s throat, let the blood fall on his penis and testicles, and with his crotch thus bloodied, he should return home and have intercourse with his wife, without any prior foreplay, with intense movements, while shouting to release his anger, which up until then had been repressed.

The man was not surprised or frightened. He simply said, “I’m sorry, Alejandro, I cannot do that. I’m. ” (He pronounced his famous name with emphasis and a touch of desperation). “If I were an unknown person, I would probably do it.”

How could I explain what he at all costs did not want to see? If his mother had made him into this famous person against his will it was because she had never loved him; she had only loved herself, or perhaps her own father. The act that would have overthrown his dependency, and perhaps would have prolonged his life (he died a couple of years after this consultation), could not be carried out because he was a prisoner of an image of himself, all the more painful because he knew it was false, but yet respected it, as a turtle respects its shell, because it had completely replaced his essence. Without it he would have felt empty, nonexistent. This defensive system caused any attempt at real healing to fail.

The human brain reacts like an animal, defending its territory, which it identifies with its life. The brain delineates this space with its urine and feces. Parents, siblings, spouses, co-workers, and above all, the body are all part of this space. The one who is in charge has limitations that correspond to his or her level of consciousness. The higher the level of consciousness, the greater the freedom, but to reach this level — where the territory is not just a few square meters or a small group of people, but the entire planet and all of humanity, and indeed the entire universe and all living beings — it is first necessary to heal the wound and get rid of the fetal conditioning, then the family conditioning, and finally the social conditioning. In order to reach this mutation in which he abandons the orders he has been given and lives in gratitude for the miracle of being alive, the client must be made aware of his defensive mechanisms. These are mechanisms that all animals use to escape their predatory enemies. They know how to shut themselves off and how to play dead. They roll up, they cover themselves with chitinous shells, they bury themselves in the mud, and they shut down their breathing and heartbeat. The human being does the same thing: she becomes paralyzed, encloses herself in a repetitive system of gestures, desires, emotions, and thoughts, and vegetates within these narrow limits, rejecting all new information, mired in an endless repetition of the past. To avoid sinking into the depths, she lives floating in a net of superficial sensations, anesthetized most of the time. Animals know how to camouflage themselves, to make themselves similar to the environment in which they live. The chameleon changes color, some insects look like tree leaves, and certain mammals have skin that resembles the terrain that they inhabit. Likewise, a great many human beings, discarding their natural uniqueness, make themselves the same as the world that surrounds them. They forbid themselves the slightest trace of originality, they eat what everyone else eats, they dress according to the latest fad, they speak with accents and idioms that indicate that they indubitably belong to some social group, and they form part of the masses that march along all brandishing the same red book, making the same salute with an outstretched arm, or wearing the same uniform. They depend entirely on appearances, relegating their true being to the darkness of their dreams. When animals feel attacked, they can fight back. The fear of knowing oneself, coupled with the fear of being deprived of what one believes oneself to possess, including one’s way of life — which would involve a painful encounter with the essential wound — can turn humans into murderers. In other animal species, before attack the primary defense is flight. According to the ancient Chinese treatise the Thirty-Six Stratagems, “Flight is supreme politics. To keep one’s forces intact, avoiding confrontation, is not defeat.” These people do not want to know anything of themselves, they abandon treatment halfway through, they constantly justify themselves, they struggle to always be right and to prove that others are wrong, they succumb to vices, and they develop infatuations and obsessions; sometimes, they move to a foreign country in order to not confront their problems, using distance as a painkiller. Flight is sometimes accompanied by self- mutilation: the lizard escapes by detaching its tail. My friend G. K., a great French science-fiction writer, was disappointed in love at the height of his literary success: the woman of his dreams married somebody else. G. K. decided to stop writing forever. In a metaphorical sense, he was castrated. Van Gogh cut off his ear. Rimbaud expelled poetry from his life. Some people turn away from their loved ones or their favorite things, others mutilate themselves through cosmetic surgery, squandering their fortunes.

In a consultation, the defenses begin as soon as the Tarot reading starts. “I already knew that.” In saying this, the client believes he is denying importance to something that he knows but keeps in his subconscious regions. As soon as the reading is over, the client forgets what he saw clearly, in the same way that we forget our dreams when we wake up in the morning. Sometimes, although he speaks clearly and distinctly, he seems not to hear; this is psychological deafness. If he is shown a painful point in the structure of his family tree, he will appear not to see it; this is psychological blindness. If you propose an act, he will haggle as much as he can. Sometimes it seems too difficult, sometimes too long, too expensive, or he will ask to change the details or be afraid of the others’ reactions: “If I do this my father might die, my mother will go mad.” Once he does decide to carry out the psychomagical act, he will put it off. He might wait for years. Or he may declare that during the time of waiting, he has been cured: he no longer needs a solution because there is no problem! Suddenly, a word offends him or a revelation brings on an attack of vomiting, crying, or shaking, requiring the therapist to calm him, thus diverting the therapy from its objective. If asked to provide useful information, he will start telling interminable anecdotes, or will speak much faster than usual, as if fleeing from his own words, or else will lie, or will be stubbornly silent about important memories, or will appear to be collaborating but will make mistakes with dates and names. Finally, trying by all means possible to be the therapist’s friend, he will fall in love with the latter, making sexual advances, offering gifts, invitations to dinner, and will end up disappointed, feeling betrayed, and speaking ill of the therapy.

Ejo Takata said, “For a chicken to be born, the hen should peck at the eggshell from the outside, while the chick pecks at it from within.” However, in many cases, however well-intentioned the client may be, his unconscious defenses are so great that he cannot collaborate on his healing. No word, no advice, can break through the barriers of his false identity, no attempt at bringing awareness can separate him from his childlike point of view, and his negative feelings dominate him, driving him away from the path that could lead to self-discovery. When this happens, in order to release the client from his problems, we must treat him as a patient.

For the primitive healer death is always a disease, an injury, caused by envy of others. The patient is invaded by a foreign entity, and instead of being cured she must be liberated, expelling what has been sent from her soul and body. To this end, as we have seen, the charlatans of the city turn to cleansing rituals or the imitation of surgery. In these cases of powerlessness (in which the person creates a tumor, a persistent physical pain, a paralysis, or a depression in order to avoid confronting the cause of her suffering, which might be a family secret, incest, social shame, embarrassing diseases, etc.), no success will be achieved through oral language, analysis, the recommendation of an act, or the gaining of awareness. The only possibility for relief is to eliminate the symptom. However, most of the symptoms are manifested by the body, which is the dumping ground for unresolved problems, so the therapist comes in to expel the problems, treating the patient as “possessed.” In the Gospels, we are told that the first thing Jesus Christ did after spending forty days fasting in the desert was to enter a temple and with loud cries expel the demons from a possessed person.

A machi with a branch of cinnamon, a sacred tree for the Mapuche.

Photo: George Munro.

On my trip to Temuco, a city in Chile a thousand kilometers from the capital, I had the opportunity to accompany a kind ethnologist on the muddy roads that wind through the mountains. We traveled in a powerful Jeep loaded with “needs”—commodities that these poor people lack such as coffee, fruits, soft drinks, flour, cookies, and so forth — that would allow us to be well received by a Mapuche healer. In a tiny valley between three peaks we found a modest hut surrounded by a garden with small trees and medicinal plants, where pigs, chickens, three dogs, and four children roamed about. Very near the door was a rehue, a sacred altar about two meters tall made from the trunk of a tree, with seven steps cut into it and surrounded by cinnamon sticks. In a manner of speaking, the rehue is a vertical altar on which the machi stands. Using it as a base, the machi utters her incantations in a language that comes from the depths of time. Thanks to the shipment of “needs,” we were kindly received. The woman, who was pregnant, wore a simple skirt and sweater vest. Over these humble clothes she wore a long silver necklace and spiked silver bracelets on her wrists. Despite her wrinkled face, she was no more than thirty years old.

The ethnologist had told me that this woman, married very young to a man who was a heavy drinker, had dreamed one night that a white serpent came to her and gave her the power to heal. She woke up distraught, feeling ignorant, too burdened by the weight of her husband and children to deal with the ills of so many people. But her body started to become paralyzed, and she found it more and more difficult to breathe, until she was at the point of dying in atrocious pain. The white serpent came to her in a dream again, and this time she told it that she would agree to be a machi. The snake immediately gave her the power to recognize the healing value of plants and taught her to heal using ancestral rites. She awoke speaking the mysterious language of the machis, and the first thing she did was to cure her husband of his vices and make him her assistant.

She allowed us to attend a healing session in a small, very clean room decorated with fabrics woven in geometric patterns and a photo of her with her husband, their children, and their dogs. She received a sick man covered with a wool blanket who was carried in the arms of his wife and his mother. He was pale, with fever and pain in his stomach and liver, and his legs were so weak that he was unable to walk.

“An envious man, we’ll soon see who, has paid a sorcerer to send you this ill. I will chase it off of you,” the machi said to him as she laid him down on his back on a small rectangular table, with his feet flat on the dirt floor on each side. She struck the kultrung, a small drum with cosmic significance, and while hitting it began an incantation to each of the four cardinal points. Then, apparently in a trance, she flogged the air around the sick man with a handful of herbs, as if banishing invisible entities. “Evil spirits, leave this place! Leave this poor man alone!” Then, in a resounding voice she said, “Bring me the white hen!” Her husband, a broad-chested, short-legged man, his face embellished by respectful love, brought her the bird. The healer tied its legs and folded its wings so that it could not flutter or escape. She put the hen on the patient’s chest. “Look well, poor man. The life you see in those eyes is your life. The heart that beats is your heart. Those lungs that breathe are your lungs. Do not blink; do not stop looking at her.” She struck the drum rhythmically, crying with surprising authority, “Get out, bad bile! Get out, devil fever! Get out, stomach pain! Set free this good man, this brave man, this handsome man.” Then, gently, she took the white hen and showed it to the sick man and his family, who trembled in surprise. The hen was dead!

“The evil in your husband, your son, passed into this hen. She died so that you might live. You are healed. Go to the yard, gather dry wood, and burn her.”

Seeing that his illness had passed to the hen, the sick man’s imagination allowed him to believe that he was healthy. His fever and pains vanished. He got up without any help, went smiling out to the garden, gathered dry twigs, skillfully lit a fire, and burned the bird. For my part, I imagined several ways in which the machi could have managed to kill the bird surreptitiously. Perhaps she thrust one of the spikes on her bracelet into its neck, pressed on a nerve center, or, in complicity with her husband, poisoned it beforehand. What did it matter? The point was that she was able to affect the patient’s mind, making him believe that his illness had been removed. Are all diseases a manifestation of the imagination, a kind of organic dream?

Some time later in a course that I taught to doctors and therapists in Sanary, in the south of France, I applied this primitive concept to the removal of evil from the body, coming closer to what I call “psycho-shamanism,” taking a few minutes to cure a woman of a tic that she had had for forty years. Constantly, every two or three seconds, in a broken rhythm, she would shake her head from side to side. I called her up in front of a hundred students and proceeded to interrogate her, using a friendly voice that instantly made me a paternal archetype for her. Applying Pachita’s technique, despite her forty-eight years, I spoke to her like a child. “Tell me, little girl, how old are you?” She fell into a trance and replied in a childlike voice, “Eight years old.”

“Tell me, little one, who are you saying no to all the time with your head?”

“The priest!”

“What did this priest do to you?”

“When I went to confess to prepare for my first communion, he asked me if had sinned mortally. Since I did not know what a mortal sin was, I said no. He insisted, asking me if I had touched myself between my legs. I had done it without knowing it was wrong. It gave me great shame, and I lied with a resounding ‘No.’ He kept on insisting, and I kept denying it. I left there and received the sacred host feeling that I was a liar, in a state of mortal sin, condemned forever.”

“My poor child, you have kept on denying for forty years. You have to understand that this priest was sick, that you did not have to feel guilty: it is normal for children to investigate their bodies and touch themselves; the sex organs are not the seat of evil. I will remove the useless ‘No!’ from your head. ”

I had the woman write “NO!” on masking tape with a black marker and stuck it to her forehead. I asked her to lie on her back on a table and shook my outstretched hands all around her body as if severing invisible bonds, shouting, “Go away, you stupid priest; leave this innocent child alone! Out! Out!” Then, acting as if it was a great effort, I began to tear the tape with the “NO!” off her forehead. I pretended that it was very difficult. I exclaimed, “It has deep roots! Push! Push it out! Help me, girl!” She began to push, screaming in pain. Finally, I triumphantly pulled off the masking tape. She covered her face with her hands and burst into tears. When she raised her head, she no longer had the tic. I told her to go out to the garden and burn the “NO!” I told her to take some of the ashes, dissolve them in honey, and swallow it. She did. Her head shaking never returned.

This successful “operation” opened up a vast field of experimentation. I came to the conclusion that everything that Pachita, machis, Filipino doctors, quacks, and shamans achieve in a primitive, superstitious setting could also be achieved, without deception or illusory effects, with patients born into a rational culture. Just as the subconscious accepts symbolic acts as realities, the body also accepts as real the metaphorical operations to which it is submitted, even if reason rejects them.

My experiences with what I had called “initiatory massage” served as a basis. When I began studying the body, considering it as a terrain in which the subconscious manifests, I saw that to a certain degree some people moved with gestures that I perceived as “shining.” By contrast, the depressed people, entrenched in their problems, lacking projection, made gestures that were “opaque.” It occurred to me that the past, with its painful memories and the principal fears of being, of loving, of creating, of living, accumulated like a crust covering the skin. I remembered the Mexican “cleansings,” in which the witch would rub the client’s body with a handful of herbs to purge him of his misfortune. I thought that an even more profound psychological effect could be achieved if, instead of lightly rubbing the skin, I scraped it, just as one does with a piece of metal in order to remove the oxidized layer. I acquired a synthetic bone spatula, about twenty centimeters long and two wide, the kind that is used to fold paper, and began to scrape my naked client. This went on for three hours. After being entirely scraped, people felt reborn; many of the old fears that they had carried stuck to their skin dissolved away. But, although it is true that this technique made the patient “shine,” it must be admitted that after a while new sediments accumulated that gradually brought back the “opacity.” However, some progress had been made. The person with feelings of abandonment that caused so many unresolved problems now received physical contact, an indispensable complement to the mental and emotional contact that a psychoanalyst provides.

In the early 1970s I lived in Mexico City, where trains rolled along the broad Avenida Chapultepec. One morning I saw a group of curious people surrounding one of these vehicles. They were motionless, expressionless, staring transfixed at the front wheels. I made my way through the crowd: the vehicle had trapped a man. It was impossible to remove him manually. A wheel had pinned him at the waist. He was pale, strangely calm. He had abandoned all hope, given himself over to the designs of Providence, awaiting the capricious Red Cross, which could take hours to arrive. What could we do? A crane would be needed to move the heavy train. I felt an immense compassion for the poor man, but then I was overtaken by a peace that I will dare to call, in a good way, abnormal. It was like falling into the ocean of time, where the seconds were like eternity. I knelt beside the injured man, staining my pants with his blood, and took his hand gently, so that he would feel that he had company. He looked at me with gratitude, and we remained there tranquilly, I do not know how long, until the nurses, firefighters, police, and the crane arrived. Before I let go, he squeezed my hand, speaking a thousand silent words with that contact. I could do no more for him. I walked away slowly. When I was a child and cried terrified in the darkness, desperately calling for my parents, who had gone out to the cinema, all I wanted was a loving touch to keep me company. That would have allowed me to accept being devoured by the shadow. The simple company of another, in adverse situations, is as necessary as life itself.

When Bernadette died in the plane crash and our son Brontis came to see me after identifying the remains of his mother in the morgue, I could not find words to comfort him. All I could do was to take him in my arms and put his right ear over my heart so that he could hear it beating. He stayed there, I do not know if it was for an hour or two or three. These sad events taught me to keep the patient company, to give all of my time in a limited time, to put my heart into the task, knowing that its beats are mediators between the human and the divine.

Once the person was scraped, the past removed, and the vital energies recovered — the energies that would drive him or her to embrace the present — I followed up with a session of skin stretching. The deviant, egotistic individual “I” tends to separate from the world and lives under the skin. And in its zeal for possession, it makes that skin into a defensive border. Feeling insecure, afraid of emptiness, it unwittingly draws the skin inward, making it into a corset. In the old days infants were wrapped up, perhaps with the secret fear that their uncontrolled movements would cause them to “spill out.” I felt that I had to teach the skin to expand itself, restoring its elasticity in order to unite it with humanity and the cosmos. I started grabbing parts of skin and stretching them as much as possible. The skin of the back was elastic and stretched surprisingly well; likewise the skin of the chest and abdomen. I stretched the eyelids, cheeks, forehead, scalp, the skin of the neck, arms, legs, feet, hands. The scrotum could be opened up like a fan, sometimes stretching almost as far as the navel. Stretching the outer labia of the vulva, removing them for a few moments from their desire to be absorbed, produced an intense state of freedom. At the end of the session, the patient was no longer separated from the world, knowing that his or her limits were out beyond the stars.

The next step was to massage the bones. We have a tendency to forget our bone structure: the skeleton reminds us of death. It appears impersonal to us, macabre, inanimate. However, it is a living and responsive structure. In contrast with stroking the skin or putting pressure on the muscles to loosen them up, this involved kneading the bones, exploring their forms, their interstices, their corners. Every phalanx was taken into account, every vertebra, every rib, the long bones, the joints, the different parts of the skull, the orbits of the eyes, the structure of the pelvis. At the end of the massage the patient would stand up and dance, moving like a cheerful skeleton.

From there I went on to conquer the flesh, muscles, and viscera. Using high quality oil I began with continuous rubbing with both hands, giving a touch without beginning or end. The body ceases to have individual parts; it becomes a whole, a path that does not desire to arrive at any point, only to extend. The hands pass over and over, taking different directions every time, and the body loses its limits and feels infinite. After this, the massager begins to “open.” The hands, on a given region of the body, are placed together, side by side, and then pressed strongly apart from each other, transmitting the idea to the patient that she is being opened up. Accumulated sufferings, withheld love, anger, and resentment all flow out through this metaphorical opening. The entire body is a memory. I remember a woman who began to whimper when I opened her left knee: there she carried the pain of her mother, who had lost her leg in a car crash. Screams and rage arise when the chest is opened. From the back, resentment against betrayals emerges. When the pubis is opened, a mother’s hatred of men might come out, or guilt over an abortion, the anguish of frustrated homosexuality, and so forth. When I opened the soles and heels of an old man he wept, letting out his sorrow at having been taken away from his native village at age six, losing the landscape and his friends forever. A woman whose heart I opened began trembling as if having a seizure. Without reasoning, driven by a strange impulse, I took off her wedding ring and instantly she calmed down. She had been forced to marry because of an unintended pregnancy.

For a few years I continued investigating every type of massage that could raise the level of consciousness. Marie Thérèse, one of my students, was a nurse. At that time she was working for a Jewish husband and Christian wife whose only son, as a baby, had fallen into a coma for unknown reasons. He lay in a bed in Necker, a children’s hospital in Paris. The boy had kept on living there for five years, motionless as a vegetable. They had opened his skull and closed it again, without remedying the problem at all. Marie Thérèse asked me to do something for him. I refused outright: if the best doctors in France had not been able to do anything, how could I? If I gave the slightest hope to the parents, I would be a charlatan. My student told me that she had an intuition that my massage techniques might be beneficial. I saw such sincere faith in her eyes that I agreed to visit the child, in total secrecy, in the presence of his father and mother but hidden from the doctors and nurses at the hospital. I asked her not to promise anything, to say only that I was willing to try a new therapeutic method. At noon, the hour at which the French religiously suspend their activities to go and have lunch, Marie Thérèse brought me through a service door, and we entered the child’s room as stealthily as thieves. The mother and father were no more than thirty years old. He was dressed in black in the manner of religious Israelis, and she had dyed-blond hair, typical of the French middle class. The five-year-old child, his shaved head showing his scars, lay on the iron bed, wearing a large diaper like a baby. On the wall behind his head hung a framed photograph of an old religious man. I asked the father who this man was, and he answered, “He is the rabbi of New York. He works miracles.”

“Did you visit him to heal your son?”

“Certainly, but the holy man refused to see him or pray for him; because the boy has a Catholic mother he cannot be considered Jewish.”

“What? Are you telling me that your son is lying beneath the picture of someone who rejected him, which is equivalent to a curse? If you want me to try to do something for him, take that picture down right away and hide it!”

My anger was not feigned. I realized that I was in the middle of a racial and religious problem between two families, in which the child was being used as a scapegoat. The man obeyed, shutting the rabbi’s image in a closet. I asked the mother, “Have you ever nursed the boy?”

“Never,” she replied. I asked her to put the nipple of her left breast into her child’s mouth. She did so. I then asked the father to suck on the big toe of each of the child’s feet. I thought that in this way, the sleeping body would be informed of how to suck. After ten minutes of this activity, much to everyone’s surprise, the boy’s mouth moved and he sucked lightly. Marie Thérèse was moved and shed a few tears. The parents did not. I became hopeful. The following Wednesday, as usual, I gave a lecture attended by between three hundred and four hundred people, told them about the case, and asked for couples to volunteer to give the boy two-hour massages in shifts so that he would be massaged continuously for twelve hours a day, every day for a week. Many benevolent spectators, all students from my seminars, volunteered to do this; Marie Thérèse introduced them into the hospital, and they gave their efforts freely to heal the child.

After a week, he began to move. I remember Marie Thérèse coming to see me, euphoric, hugging me and saying one word: “Awake!” Three months later, with a sad expression, she invited me to come and see the child. He was now in a private clinic. I found him sitting in a crib, playing with a stuffed animal and manipulating a radio at the same time. “He hears perfectly. Now he is learning to see,” Marie Thérèse said. “Everything is going well; the boy is cured!”

“Why are you so sad?” I asked her.

“His parents almost never come to visit him; they have left him completely in my care. And what’s more, they refuse to talk to you. They say you’re a despot, that you treated them badly; indeed they hate you.”

I was not surprised to receive no thanks. A vegetative child was useful to them for capturing their family curses. The living child obliged them to tackle the issue of their marriage, which was repudiated by each of their family trees. Now, for having healed him, it was my turn to be the scapegoat.

A much more pleasant experience was what I achieved with Moebius. After watching him work for four years, drawing The Incal, I noticed that he was tired at the beginning of the fifth volume. To give him new energy I suggested that he draw his family tree, and when he had finished I realized that each person in our comic corresponded to one of his family members. For example, the Metabaron was his deaf grandfather, elevated to mythic proportions. I believed that the supreme emotional fulfillment of an individual consisted of being loved unconditionally by the members of his or her family tree, from parents to the great-grandparents. Receiving this affection would heal the scars left by previous suffering. These scars can eventually accumulate and form a depressive weight that makes the artist unable to enjoy creating. I visualized Moebius naked in the midst of his family members, also naked, receiving an affectionate massage from all of them. After my friend accepted this idea, I summoned twenty of my best students from my initiatory massage courses and convened them in my library. These men and women, of various ages, agreed to carry out this experience for free. What a luxury: a massage from forty hands! When I asked Moebius to relate the memories he had of this event, he sent me the following testimony:

“Having attended a number of your Wednesday lectures, I decided to accept your proposal to analyze my family tree. Since I was your friend and collaborator, you offered at the end of the analysis to organize a massage tailored to my history. Despite my perplexity, I agreed without voicing doubts. Some days later, entering your library, I found myself surrounded by about twenty people (I recognized some of them from your lectures), smiling politely and waiting for me. With the air of cheerful gravity that characterizes you, you introduced me to my massage group, and then you added sardonically, before vanishing, ‘They embody the members of your family tree: give them roles and make them live.’

“Overcoming my shyness, I began to choose carefully who my father, my mother, my grandfathers, my brothers, my aunts, and uncles should be. All of them, loved or unknown, near or far, were gradually embodied by these strangers. They were truly professional, knew the process of identification very well, and soon, without the least doubt, my family was there. After immersing the room in semi-darkness we all undressed and began the massage. Many hands were placed on my body, gentle, strong, hesitant, affectionate. I was touched with luminous and tender attention. I felt the contact that all the children in the world dream of: the vigilant love of the adult for the innocent. Suddenly, through these people, who became a channel, my real family was present; the spirit of my ancestors was there. The emotion that possessed me was so intense that I felt myself projected into the region of impassivity. From there I saw myself cry and laugh at myself.

“Next, ecstatic at this new consciousness, protected by my family from the assaults of darkness, I decided to take advantage of that window of power. I became the central organizer: I had to rebuild the group into what every family really is, a wonderful space-time-ship sailing the infinite ocean of life in search of the promised Father. I was the captain of that ship! I distributed the roles without hesitation, and they all happily took their places. One was the indefatigable engine, another was the protective hull, another was the radar, another the control panel, and so forth. This fantastic voyage across the universe was a unique experience insomuch as our collective imagination was freed, for a few moments, from the comfortable and illusory rational prison, entering into a marvelous dimension, so subtle, so true, so perfect, that in the end, upon returning to our habitual reality, we rejoiced with the excitement of a crew that has successfully completed an important mission.

“The years have passed, and this moment, far from being forgotten, continues to be a source of inspiration and allows me to remain absolutely certain of the incredible power of love and imagination when they are thus mixed in the crucible of bodily sensation.”

Moebius drew volumes five and six of The Incal with superhuman creative enthusiasm. Making the most of my collaborator’s experience, I had written an adventure in which the main characters, forming a family, combined themselves into a spatial-temporal ship and crossed the universe to find Orh, the Supreme Father.

It seemed important to me to give the same attention to the feet that is given to the hands. These extremities, driven to insensibility by spending most of their time imprisoned in shoes, are keepers of important information by virtue of their receiving the weight of the entire body. With massage the patient can be led to completely experience the consciousness of her feet, made to penetrate deeper and deeper into them with the sensation of touch until she feels her soul. The heel is strengthened in order to prevent retreating from life. The toes are stretched toward the infinite future. The entire surfaces of the feet are tenderly kissed in order to release the child that is a prisoner in them.

Despite these investigations, and many others (for example, massaging not only the body but also its shadow and the objects the shadow touches, such as the floor, furniture, other objects, or another person, treating them all as a unit; experiencing a perfect birth in the arms of a man and a woman, on the “mother’s” belly, protected by the “father,” covered by a warm damp sheet, feeling oneself emerge into life amidst loving touches, simulating development, growth, and finally birth with ease and joy; or massaging the space that surrounds a body, imagining that it is an aura that belongs to it; etc.), I felt that there was still an essential aspect that had not yet been discovered. I began to ask myself, “Who is massaging?” I realized when observing my students that the patients did not offer objective bodies but images, according to how they felt and conceived themselves. Although it seemed incredible, some of them were living without sex organs, others without backbones or without feet, while others were a head from which a sort of fetal body hung. Most of them perceived themselves as their relatives had perceived them. Moreover, the massagers were not massaging with their whole being. Sometimes they would act seductively, sometimes like cold doctors, sometimes like sadistic children, and so on. Their frustrations, complexes, insecurities, and interests slipped into every movement. I concluded that I was not working with beings with a single body, but with many. The vision of one’s body changes according to the “I” that is dominant at the moment.

Recalling my youthful experiences, I began to work on massage teaching the imitation of holiness. The greatest desire of a patient in search of consolation is to be taken in the arms of a saint or a Buddha. However, one who surrenders to such contact must be cleansed, like a sacrificial animal, of all egotism. Someone who can give everything is powerless before someone who can receive nothing. In many cases, the patient suffers from inhibitions or irrational antipathies. Then he or she must be touched like a son or a daughter. That is the secret of the Christlike laying on of hands. If it is difficult to give and the person pushes us away with her hands, we love those hands and start our massage by caressing them. We must respect the defenses and advance with parental love, starting at the fingertips, millimeter by millimeter, with extreme delicacy and total attention, into the heart of the other person, dissolving the tension muscle by muscle, giving sturdy support to each limb so that the patient will never have the impression that a part of her is being neglected, however small that part may be. In order to massage in this way, one must breathe deeply and calmly; one must be at the service of the other person, completely attentive. One must act as an empty vessel with nothing to seek and nothing to impose. One must be a refuge without limits, an infinite and eternal companion, not invasive but discreet, a companion who becomes invisible at the slightest movement of rejection.

However, although this massage is effective at calming, it does not heal the essential wound. In the depths, the patient guards his suffering like a treasure. I thought to myself, “It isn’t fair to abandon someone who can’t receive. As a society, we are all responsible for their ills. Not only the tree is sick, but the entire forest. This string of diseases, this reproduction of harm from generation to generation, has to stop someday. There must be a way to make those without eyes see, to make those without ears hear, to communicate love to those whose hearts are closed.”

Just at the moment when I was in need of some valuable new information, dancing reality put a book into my hands by psychotherapist Catherine Lemaire titled Membres fantómes (Phantom Limbs, published in 1998), with a preface by Gérald Rancurel, a professor of neurology at the hospital of Salpêtrière. The subject of this book is one of the most fascinating mysteries of clinical neurology: the “phantom limb,” a phenomenon whereby the patient continues to perceive the presence of a limb that has been lost. However imaginary it may seem, the phantom limb is very real, practically flesh, insofar as it can be felt and described. Even if it does not exist, it can cause pain. Even an amputated limb imposes itself on the consciousness, continuously or intermittently, for many years in some cases. The subject feels his or her leg or arm as if it were actually there. The eyes see through the phantom, but in the dark it is there again, sometimes larger than ever. Touching it is impossible. The missing part is there, perceived but invisible and untouchable. Not only legs and arms produce phantoms, but also the breasts, nose, penis, tongue, jaw, and anus. Jean-Martin Charcot observed a patient who felt not only the phantom of his hand but also the wedding ring on his finger. Some people who were born without certain limbs, and therefore have no sensory experience of them, also develop phantoms. How? I found the answer in another phenomenon observed by neurologists: some people, when they relax their muscles and lie still with their eyes closed, sometimes feel an immaterial limb in a position different from that of the physical limb. Phantom limbs can exist without amputation!

It appeared to me that the scientists spoke mostly of phantom parts of the body, such as limbs, and never of a whole phantom body. I allowed myself to consider that we might have a whole phantom body: an immaterial body veiled by the flesh that exists before any amputation takes place and that has sensations. The experimenters had also encountered blind patients who saw phantom sights and deaf patients who heard phantom sounds.

Some amputees feel excruciating pain in their absent limbs. The neurologists, thinking that the perceived but intangible body parts were not real, could not alleviate these pains, even though they performed operations, desensitizing the cutaneous areas over the stump and also on the torso, where they believed the topological sensations creating the phantom limb originated. I wondered, “What if we were to accept the phantom limb as real and soothe its pain by operating on it? If the limb can feel the presence of a ring or a watch, could it not feel the touch of a scalpel?” I understood the aspect that was missing from my initiatory massages: we do not perceive the body as it is; we are only aware of a material representation of it that is adulterated by the views of others. We do not feel everything we feel, we do not see everything we see, and we do not hear everything we hear; there are tastes and odors that are captured by the tongue and sense of smell but not by the consciousness. With the initiatory massage, I had dedicated myself to cleansing the tangible body without acting on the phantom body. I concluded that Pachita and other witches, when they operated, did not do so on the material body, but acted on the intangible phantom body. Except that with their tricks, they added visible elements such as blood, entrails, and so on, so that the patients would believe that they were operating on their “real” bodies.

I decided to eliminate everything that was intended to deceive the primitive, superstitious spirit and to proceed to operate in all honesty without any kind of gimmick. In the same way that a state of mind changes the body’s attitude, a bodily attitude modifies the state of mind. Moreover, just as what happens to the material body affects the phantom body, what is done to the phantom body affects the material body. Based on this belief, I imagined a psychoshamanic ritual. The shaman acts in his medium, using his surroundings, plants, and animals as elements of power. But the psychoshaman, not imitating that which he is not and which belongs to a different culture, uses the elements provided by his environment, namely the city. A mobile phone, a vacuum cleaner, a car, or supermarket products are as magical as a snake, a fan of feathers, or a mushroom. The psychoshaman does not wear exotic clothes, necklaces, or other ornaments. A typical suit, preferably black for neutrality, will suffice. He does not operate in the shadows, lit by a single candle. He appropriates the words of the poet Arthur Cravan: “mystery in broad daylight.” And, since the act is metaphorical, he does not wield any knife; if it is necessary to symbolize one, a wooden ruler suffices. He never operates in his own name, an attitude consistent with psychoanalysis. Lacan told his students, “You can be Lacanians, I must be a Freudian.” Pachita operated in the name of Cuauhtémoc, Carlos Said in the name of Doña Paz. Every shaman is inhabited by mythical allies, and a psychoshaman can choose his allies from his own familiar urban mythology: He can operate in the name of a famous singer, a film star, a boxing champion, a prominent politician, a dead relative, or a children’s character such as Pinocchio, Popeye, or Mandrake the Magician. He can choose to be assisted by a person of his religion such as Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, the Pope, Stalin, Gandhi, Moses, Allah, and so forth. To create a magical setting, it is enough for the psychoshaman to simply pass his palm over the floor drawing an invisible circle and then, indicating the four cardinal points, the nadir, and the zenith with precise gestures, to say, “There is the north, there is the south, there is the east, there is the west, there is the upper world, there is the lower world, we are in the middle. All paths arrive here, and all paths depart from here.”

After having the patient stand barefoot in the middle of this imaginary circle, he proceeds to fortify it. Witches rub the body with an egg or two, sometimes three, because eggs are considered to be seeds that contain great power. The psychoshaman, bending his thumb inward and enclosing it with the other four fingers, makes a fist symbolizing the seed, a hand position that can be observed in the human fetus. He rubs the patient with this fist, giving him or her energy. Then the patient lies down, prone or supine, on a table, on a cot, or on the floor. Some patients can be operated on while sitting or standing. With an open hand held rigid, wielded like a knife, the psychoshaman slices the air around the patient, cutting away hostile influences.

(To prepare our spirits for the intensity of the operations, my son Cristóbal — who worked with me on many occasions — decided that we should recite in our minds, “There is no being here and now, because here is all space, now is all time, and being is all consciousness. Being, space, and time are the same thing.”)

Thus, without any decorative objects, without any conjurer’s tricks, with the patient aware that it is her phantom body that is being operated on and not her material body, aware that we are undertaking metaphorical actions, and aware that as psychoshamans we do not have supernatural powers but are imitating such powers in a form of sacred theater, we can achieve the “miracles” performed by Pachita and all manner of saints and primitive healers. We can metaphorically extract tumors, cut bones, implant new limbs, cleanse the heart of its sorrows, change the negative ideas in a brain, purify the blood, and so on.

I applied this new technique in my psychomagic courses, and amazing healings took place. As usual, I began cautiously with small operations. Then, as they became complicated during the last three years I enlisted the help of my son Cristóbal, who put his youthful energy at the service of psychoshamanism.

Knowing how anxious sick people can be to find quick solutions, we never operated in a professional manner and never charged fees. All the examples given below were performed during courses for therapists who proposed to their patients that they try these experiments.

The first operation was practiced on an Algerian woman of about forty years old who was suffering from eye pain for which doctors had been unable to find any organic cause, and thus had been unable to find a cure. After the ceremonies described above, I had her close her eyes. I put a small bandage over each eyelid. With a voice full of authority I said, “These are the terrible things that you have seen and that have damaged your eyes. I am going to remove them forever.” Acting as if it took a great effort, I peeled the bandages off. She surprised me by screaming with intense pain, as if something glued to her body were really being ripped off. Then, with great care, I pressed my fingers into her eye sockets and, with calculated pressure, gave her the impression that I was holding her eyeballs. “Now I’m going to take out your eyes, wash them, and put them back.” I pretended that it took a great effort to take her eyes out, and she cried again, in real pain. I stuck my fingers in a glass of water and made a noise as if I were washing her eyeballs. Then, with wet hands, I pretended to return her eyes to their sockets. “Now you can lift the eyelids. Your view is clear, finally free of your painful memories.” She opened her eyes and wept: the pain that had tortured her for so many years had ceased.

On another occasion I was introduced to a young man with a stutter. His family tree revealed his father to be indifferent, selfish, childish, capricious, and unjust. The boy, not being loved by him, felt that he had no virile strength. I told him to take down his pants and sit on the edge of a chair. “I’m going to inject the energy of the Father. Breathe deeply.” Then, with my right hand, I took his testicles, and without squeezing but exerting a very solid contact, I made him feel that I was injecting an immense paternal strength. I imitated this injection with my lips narrowed, blowing out a long and intense jet of air. Without releasing him, I said with complete conviction, “You are cured. Breathe deeply, relax, think of your voice coming from your powerful testicles, and speak.” The young man spoke correctly. His stutter was gone.

With Cristóbal’s aid, I then began to perform more complex operations. Our years of theatrical practice were essential: the psychoshaman must use a voice that is never for an instant tinged with doubt or weakness. The feigned certainty must be total. To exorcise a “possessed” person, the cries must be impressive. It is very helpful to imagine a mythical ally acting through us. Whenever we encounter an invading spirit, we imitate the authority of Jesus Christ in Mark 9:25: “When Jesus saw that the people came running together, he rebuked the foul spirit, saying unto him, Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him.”

A thirty-five-year-old woman who suffered because she was six kilos overweight showed us her thighs, affected by cellulite. For fifteen years, despite all sorts of treatments, she had not been able to get rid of it. Examining her family tree, we understood that this affliction of the cellular tissues symbolized her possessive mother. The woman felt that her mother, with her hatred of men, had prevented her from having a satisfactory sex life. We propose to operate to remove these six kilos of material and also to liberate her from her mother. We proceeded to wrap each thigh in a large sheet of paper, which symbolized the cellulite. Then we told her to choose a woman to represent her mother from among the course participants. She chose one. We asked the chosen woman to cling to the patient’s body and put up as much resistance as possible. We began to give orders, demanding that the impure spirit leave the body of her daughter. We tried to detach her, and she clung tight. Finally we tore her off the patient, who during this theatrical scene had wept, shouted insults at her mother, and let out her anger. Once liberated, she calmed down. We then had her lie down, simulated the opening of a channel in her thighs, and with great effort, tore off the paper that surrounded them. The woman screamed with authentic pain. We gave her the paper, crumpled into a ball. “Here’s your cellulite. Go to the bathroom, burn it, throw the ashes in the toilet, and flush it.” She did. Four months later, I received a letter from her telling me that she had entirely lost those six kilos.

In some operations in which a patient felt devalued or not accepted by his or her parents — for example, because the parents wanted a child of the opposite sex or told their child that he or she was ugly — we used a special powder to color the patient’s entire body gold or silver after the operation. We would then ask the person to go home, painted like this, for others to see. It changed the patients’ perceptions of themselves and made them feel worthy of admiration.

For a woman whose lover had left her and who could not stop suffering because of it, we ripped a piece of paper off her chest on which the man’s name was written, then simulated sinking our hands deep into her and exchanging her heart for a new one. While we were simulating pulling out the old heart with enormous strength, she cried from immense sadness combined with physical pain, which was alleviated as soon as we pretended to put in the new heart. Before closing the imaginary wound, we told her that we were going to tattoo a word on her new heart. Poking her chest with a finger dipped in gold paint, we wrote “Love.” She felt relieved and now had the energy to resume her love life.

For a fifty-year-old man who had undergone a surgical intervention to remove a tumor from his left ear and who now needed surgery on his right ear because it had also developed a tumor, we tried a psychoshamanic operation to see if we could bring about healing without the intervention of surgeons. We symbolized the growth with a ball of cotton soaked in condensed milk, which we inserted into his ear canal. Then we seated the patient on a chamber pot. Next, twelve women lined up on his right-hand side. One by one, they put their lips to his ear and whispered in a sweet voice, “My son. I love you.” When they had all spoken these words they gathered around him, and while Cristóbal extracted the symbolic tumor with a pair of tweezers, pretending that it took great effort, the women sang a lullaby. Some time later we received a letter of thanks: the tumor had disappeared.

A sixty-year-old man had a sore right knee that gave him a limp. X-rays had not revealed any anomalies. Thinking that the right leg could be associated with the father and noting that the French word for knee is genou, a word that can sound the same as je-nous (“I-us”), we asked him what kind of relationship he had with his father. The patient was deeply moved. His father had always rejected him, staying shut away in his problems. Only when he was in the hospital, suffering from a terminal illness, did the father consent to call his son in order that they might disconnect him from the machines and thus finally let him die. Our patient felt obligated to comply with his father’s wish. It was for this reason that he carried the guilt of having killed his father, which caused him to feel a rage that he repressed. This was when the pain in his knee began. Before operating on him we stuck several layers of tape onto his knee to symbolize the knee bone. We laid him down on his back, placing a participant whom the patient had previously chosen to symbolize his father on all fours on the floor on his right side, with a cushion on his back to protect him. While we “opened” the flesh and “extracted” the bone, acting as if it took a great effort to tear off the mass of tape, we asked him to express his anger by hitting his “father” on the back. He did, and amid cries of pain from the operation and insults shouted at his progenitor, he let loose his fury while dealing tremendous blows to the cushion. I put in a “new” bone and painted the knee gold. After the operation, the patient went to the participant who had received the beating and, weeping, embraced him for several emotional minutes. From that moment on, his pain was gone.

A young man was attending the course along with his wife. He loved her deeply, but had a problem: when they made love, his penis only became semierect, halfway between hard and soft. This defect was ruining the couple’s sex life. Luckily, the man’s father and mother were also attending the course. Looking at the family tree, we saw that all the men were childish and committed the sin of being absent and that the women were invasively possessive and considered sexuality sinful because of the religious prejudices of their upbringing. We also saw that there was tension between the man’s wife and his mother: the wife thought that the mother had not loved her son, causing him to be stuck at a childish level and, as her husband, to be dependent on her. The four participants, in a genuine search for a balanced life, let down their defenses and became conscious of the root of the problem. We then proceeded with the operation: the man lay down on a table, naked, on his back. I held one leg, Cristóbal held the other, and two other participants held his arms; his mother lay on top of him, clinging to his body. Outside the room, behind a closed door, his father waited. His wife, leaning near to his left ear, whispered constantly, over and over again, “I love you.” The patient’s task was to try to shake his mother off, but the people holding his arms and legs would not let him move. Then he was to shout for his father to get help. The father struck the door with great violence, then opened it, rushed at the mother, and after simulating an intense struggle, removed her. The mother then had to blow as if inflating a balloon, with all her affection, on the region of her son’s heart, and the father had to blow similarly on his perineum, to breathe new manly strength into him. Meanwhile I pretended to cut off his sex organs, placing my fingers around the penis and testicles. I held the sex organs and gave the impression of pulling them off. I then implanted new imaginary sex organs. After the procedure we sprinkled the operated area with holy water, then had the father and mother take their son and place him in his wife’s arms. At that moment, the four of them burst into tears and embraced each other in relief and affection. The next day the couple happily came to tell us that the erection was now perfect.

Psychoshamanic sex change operation (Mexico, 1997). My assistant is an actual surgeon.

An older woman had lumps of fat on many parts of her body. Upon studying her family tree we observed that her maternal grandmother had suffered from the death of a pair of twins during childbirth, a girl and a boy. She had never recovered. Our patient’s mother had watched her own mother being consumed by inconsolable sorrow for many years. When our patient was born, her mother had given her the name of the dead female twin, unconsciously wishing to relieve the grandmother’s suffering. Her grandmother had effectively raised her, but in an atmosphere of sadness: the male twin had never been replaced. When we told her that the lumps of fat were the representation of the dead child within her she said, “I always thought I had a twin brother somewhere.” We proceeded with the operation. We pretended to push all the lumps into one location, in the belly. Then, as if they were all in a single packet, we pushed them up toward her throat and, with implacable authority, we ordered, “Vomit the twin! You do not need him in order to be loved!” I put a plastic bag under her mouth. She retched strongly and began vomiting. When finished, we tied the bag shut and told her to go with her mother to bury it by her grandmother’s grave. In a letter, she told us that she had done this and that her lumps of fat had begun to disappear. But she wondered if it was because of the operation or because she was following a strict diet. How difficult it is to be grateful!

A young man, twenty-five years old, asked us for help because he felt incapable of loving. He had come to the course accompanied by his mother. We had asked him to do so because he had a symbiotic relationship with her. His father, a weak man and an alcoholic, had been expelled from the home, and the son, very young at the time, had taken on his role. He and the mother had been in Lacanian psychoanalysis for five years, which had enabled them to become aware of their Oedipal bond but not to solve the problem. We told the mother to wrap a thick red silk cord around the man’s neck seven times, as we knew that he had been born with the umbilical cord wrapped seven times around his neck. We had him write on a piece of paper, “Mama, you are the only woman I will ever love in my life. Yours forever. ” and his signature. We slathered this contract with gum arabic, slid it under his shirt, and stuck it over his heart. We wrapped him from head to toe in a wet sheet and tied him up with the remainder of the red silk cord, wrapping it around him. Then we gave his mother a pair of tailor’s scissors and told her to start by cutting the red silk, saying “Free!” with each cut, louder every time. Then we tore off the sheet, as if removing a noxious aura, and removed him from the cocoon. The man, almost motionless, in a kind of trance, let himself be carried. Simulating a huge effort, we removed the sticky contract. He shouted with physical and mental pain and wept like a child. Then we asked his mother to cut the seven rings of silk that were wrapped around his neck, saying, “Ring one: for you, my son, pure love and love of life. Ring two: for you, my son, love of the mother and love of the father. Ring three: for you, my son, love of yourself and love of another. Ring four: for you, my son, love of the family and love of humanity. Ring five: for you, my son, love of all living beings and love of the planet. Ring six: for you, my son, love of the stars and love of the universe. Ring seven: for you, my son, love of all creation and love of the Creative Consciousness.” When she had finished reciting these words, which we had been whispering in his ear, the mother and son fell into each other’s arms, sobbing and forgiving one another. After a while, they separated, happy, both feeling liberated.

A couple asked us for help. They quarreled continuously over futile causes, but once they started, they could not stop: they kept on intensifying their insults and raising their voices. He was exasperated with her because she would not stop shouting until he started to strangle her. He was afraid he would kill her someday. She felt attached to him and, despite the danger, could not leave. Studying their family trees, the wife mentioned that her three brothers had raped her when she was twelve years old. To stop her from protesting, they had held her down, strangling her. The husband recalled having seen his father strangle his mother during their fights. Now he had to struggle against his own desire to strangle women, while his wife had to struggle against her desire to be strangled. We proceeded with the operation. We asked her to choose three men from among the attendees to represent her brothers. We explained to her that after the rape, she had remained possessed by them. The three men clung to her, holding her by the neck. All the women in the course, about twenty of them, had to make them release their prey by shouting insults and ordering them to leave this “girl” alone. The men pretended to resist, then finally let her go. The victim’s sobs were convulsive. We laid her down and proceeded, metaphorically, to remove her vagina and replace it with another one. We painted her outer labia and pubic hair bright silver. For her husband, who said that he felt he had the hands of a murderer, ten men and ten women “detached” his “father” and “mother” from him, then “cut off ” the hands that he so detested and put on “new” hands, painting them gold. From their letter of thanks, we learned that their fights had ceased.

These operations, due to their extremely unusual nature, produce a state of attention so intense that therapists, patients, and observers enter a psychological dimension in which their sensations of time and space change, as was the case with Pachita. They are entirely “there,” in the “moment.” The actions and reactions are intertwined in a perfect form, and because all are a product of this intense moment, there is no possibility of error. The world is concentrated on the operation. One can compare this to moments that occur in a traditional bullfight. In that deadly ceremony, at a given moment the bullfighter and the bull enter the ring, they merge, they join, the charge and the deception become a single thing, and this dance becomes a magnet that irresistibly attracts the attention of the public. The healer’s hands are rooted in the world. It is not an individual who operates; it is all of humanity. It is not the bullfighter that makes passes; it is the very audience. In one case, life is given, in the other, death. The essence of that similarity must be discovered.

Fundamentally, every illness is a lack of consciousness saturated with fear. This unconsciousness is rooted in a prohibition imposed without prior conviction, which the victims must accept without understanding. It requires the child to be what she is not. If she disobeys, she is punished. The greatest punishment is not being loved.

The psychoshaman, like the primitive healer, should operate by circumventing not only the patient’s defenses but also his or her fears. Purely rational education prohibits us from using the body to its full extent, making the skin the limit of our being, making us believe that it is normal to live in a reduced space. This education strips sex of its creative power, giving us the illusion that we live only for a short time, denying our eternal essence. By means of a devaluing philosophy, sublime sentiments are extirpated from our emotional center. We are instilled with a fear of change, and we maintain an infantile level of consciousness in which we venerate toxic security and detest healthy uncertainty. By all means possible, supported by political, moral, and religious doctrines, we are made ignorant of our mental power.

If reality is like a dream, we must act in it without suffering from it, as we do in lucid dreams, knowing that the world is what we think it is. Our thoughts attract their equivalents. The truth is what is useful, not only for us but also for others. All the systems that are necessary in a given moment will later become arbitrary. We have the freedom to change systems. Society is the result of what it believes itself to be and what we believe it is. We can begin to change the world by changing our thoughts.

The skin is not our barrier: there are no limits. The only definite limits are those that we need, momentarily, in order to individualize ourselves while at the same time knowing that everything is connected. Separation is a useful illusion, as when the healer places a loop of rope around the patient’s neck in order to tell him to take responsibility for his disease and not propagate it. Miraculous healing is possible, but depends on the patient’s faith. The psychoshaman must subtly guide the patient to believe in what he or she believes in. If the therapist does not believe, no healing is possible.

Life is a source of health, but this energy comes forth only where we concentrate our attention. This attention must be not only mental but also emotional, sexual, and corporeal. The power does not lie in the past or in the future, which are the seats of illness. Health is found here and now. Toxic habits can be abandoned instantaneously if we cease to identify ourselves with the past. The power of the “now” grows with the sensory attention. The patient must be led to explore the present moment, to become aware of colors, lines, volumes, sizes, shadows, spaces between objects. One should feel every part of one’s body in order then to unite the parts into a whole; breathing should become pleasure, and one should capture its warmth and energy flowing in and out and understand that to love is to be happy with what one is and with what others are. Love grows to the extent that criticism decreases. Everything is alive, awake, and responding. Everything gains power if the patient bestows it. A mother using a phytotherapeutic treatment to heal her baby, in which she had to give him water to drink with forty drops of a mixture of essential oils added, found that the disease continued. I told her, “What is happening is that you do not believe in this medicine. Since your religion is Catholicism, say the Lord’s Prayer every time you give him the drops to drink.” She did this, and the boy was quickly cured. If we do not give spiritual power to medicine, it does not act.

Here, it is necessary to emphasize the importance of imagination. In a certain way, I have undertaken an exercise of imaginary autobiography in this book. This was not in the “fictional” sense, since all the characters, places, and events are real, but by virtue of the fact that the profound history of my life is a constant effort to expand the imagination and widen its boundaries in order to grasp its therapeutic and transformative potential. Along with intellectual imagination are emotional imagination, sexual imagination, physical imagination, sensory imagination, and economic, mystical, scientific, and poetic imaginations. It acts in all areas of our lives, even those considered “rational.” It is for this reason that one cannot tackle reality without developing the imagination from multiple angles. Normally, we visualize everything according to the narrow limits of our conditioned beliefs. We perceive nothing more of the mysterious reality, so vast and unpredictable, than what is filtered through our limited point of view. Active imagination is the key to a broad vision: it permits us to focus on life from angles that are not our own, imagining other levels of consciousness that are higher than ours. If I were a mountain, or the planet, or the universe, what would I say? What would a great teacher say? And what if God spoke through my mouth, what would the message be? And what if I were Death? The Death that revealed a dog to me that deposited a white stone at my feet, that separated me from my illusory “I,” that made me flee Chile, that drove me to search with desperation for a meaning in life — that Death has changed from a dreadful enemy to my amiable companion.

Alejandro Jodorowsky, age 72. Photo: Roger Farin.

To conclude this book, I would like to return to my youth, sitting once again on the branch of a tree next to my poet friend, and, as on that memorable occasion, deduce from the many things that we do not know what precious little we do know:

I do not know where I’m going, but I know who I am going with.

I do not know where I am, but I know that I am in myself.

I do not know what God is, but God knows what I am.

I do not know what the world is, but I know it is mine.

I do not know what I’m worth, but I know not to compare myself.

I do not know what love is, but I know that I rejoice at its existence.

I cannot avoid blows, but I know how to resist them.

I cannot deny violence, but I can deny cruelty.

I cannot change the world, but I can change myself.

I do not know what I make, but I know that what I make makes me.

I do not know who I am, but I know that I am not the one who does not know.