The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography

SEVEN. Magicians, Masters, Shamans, and Charlatans

My first encounter with magic and madness combined into art was during my childhood. I was about five or six years old when Cristina came to work as our maid. With my childish eyes I saw her as an old lady, though in fact she was only forty years old; the air, doubly salt-laden from the sea and from the nitrate dust of the desert, had made furrows in her forehead and cheeks. All her clothes were brown, like the habits of Carmelite nuns. Her hair, stretched and tied back to form a bun, looked like a helmet. It was she, clean, quiet, and friendly, with large but sensitive hands, who gave me the touches that my mother withheld, who rubbed my feet when I had a fever, who dressed me in the morning to go to school, who baked my favorite pastries filled with dark caramel that we called manjar blanco. How I loved Cristina! My need for my mother was very affective and painful, I was united to her absence, but Cristina, with her rustic humbleness, was balsam for my wounded heart.

I was surprised when my father, seeing me in the arms of my beloved maid, said in front of her with a cynical, self-satisfied smile, as if she were deaf: “I’m the only one who will give work to a madwoman.” Those words pierced my soul like a knife. I blushed, struggling to hold back my tears. Jaime shrugged his shoulders with a look of contempt, and left. Cristina began to rock me in her arms until I fell asleep. At about three o’clock in the morning, I woke up in my bed. I heard my father’s loud snoring and my mother’s breathing, which sounded like grumbling. I had gone to bed without my supper. Hungry, and with a dry mouth, I got up to get a glass of water and a fruit. The rooms were dark, but from the kitchen came the faint glow of a candle flame. At first, Cristina seemed not to notice my arrival. With strange concentration, she was sitting on a stool before the bare table, gently and precisely moving her hands in the air. She seemed to be shaping something, creating forms, smoothing invisible matter, going over and over imaginary surfaces with her fingers. A long time passed, maybe an hour. I stood there, mesmerized, transfixed, watching something that I could not understand and that corresponded to nothing I had known. At last, tired, hungry, and thirsty, I could hold back no longer.

“What are you doing, Christina?”

She slowly turned her head and, still stroking the air, looking at me with glazed eyes, said anxiously, “Do you see? I’m finishing. When God took my son, the Virgin of Carmen came to me and told me, ‘Make me a sculpture of me from the air. When it’s finished and everyone can see it, your child will rise from his grave, alive again.’ You see it, right? Tell me!”

What could I say? I did not know how to lie. It was the first time I had been in contact with madness, the first time I had seen a person acting as a unit without observing herself, without a social mask. Terrified, I felt frozen to the spot. The cold night wind, blowing down from the mountains, started sighing. Cristina embraced her invisible sculpture, distraught. “No, I don’t want you to take him, damn you!” She seemed to be struggling against a hurricane, then, sobbing, put her face on the table with her arms dangling as if her hands were empty. After some seconds, she returned to being the person I knew. She gave me a glass of water, peeled an apple for me, and took me to bed. She stayed by me until I dissolved into sleep.

My second encounter with magic was in Santiago. Our group of young poets attracted many older homosexual intellectuals. Sometimes they were painters, sometimes writers, sometimes university professors. They had a unique culture, spoke several languages with French being the preferred one, and were very generous. Knowing us to be heterosexual they fell in love platonically, revered us in silence, and in order to enjoy our youthful presence often invited us to the German pub to drink beer, eat sausages, and listen to a string trio accompanied on the piano by Pirulí (Lollipop), a lanky effeminate man with hair dyed a violent yellow who played Viennese waltzes. Among these men was Chico Molina, about fifty, short in stature with a broad chest, slender legs, and tiny feet, who seduced our minds with his encyclopedic knowledge. He was a polyglot, could read Sanskrit, and knew every author or artist that one could name. One day, apparently more drunk than usual, he revealed to us that his intimate millionaire friend, Lora Aldunate, owned a magic mirror made in the fourteenth century. He had apparently bought it in Italy, in Turin, a city consecrated to the devil. If certain secret rituals were performed in front of it, the mirror would stop reflecting reality and would show old reflections. Molina swore to us that he had seen, more clearly than on film, a night scene in a forest in which naked women kissed the anus of a billy goat beneath the light of the full moon. Excited by such revelations, we rushed him out of the German restaurant and took him to the home of Lora Aldunate, which was very close by. We started yelling, asking him to let us in, demanding to see the magic mirror. A tall, distinguished, deathly pale man opened the blinds on the second floor and emptied his bedpan full of urine onto our heads. “You indecent drunks, don’t play with magic! You will never see my mirror! When I die, I’ll take it to the grave, locked in my coffin with me!” Molina looked at us with a wide smile on his simian face. “See? It’s true. I never lie. As Neruda said, ‘God forbid me from making things up when I’m singing!’”

Some time later, we learned that he was a pathological liar and fraudster. For months he had sparked our admiration by reading us chapters from his magnificent novel The Swimmer without a Family in exchange for invitations to dinner, until one of our friends, a philosophy professor, discovered that it was a translation of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, which had not yet been published in Spanish. Well then, did the magic mirror exist, or was it a lie made up with Lora Aldunate’s complicity? His anger had seemed sincere when he opened the blinds, but Lihn raised a doubt: no one fills a chamber pot with urine in a single night; it was hard to believe that such a distinguished man would accumulate so much of the yellow liquid just for the pleasure of collecting it. But countless depravities exist.

I have encountered this kind of certainty exhibited by Chico Molina, claiming something reason cannot accept is the truth, in almost all people who say they have had contact with higher planes. It was after this that I began to consider that lying, apart from its despicable quality, also has a mystical utility. In the Bible, in Genesis, Jacob cheats his brother Esau by persuading him to sell his birthright for a meal of lentil stew. He then takes advantage of his father’s blindness to impersonate his brother and get his blessing. Later, it became clear to me that lying, or “sacred trickery,” as I called it, is a technique used by all masters and shamans.

Thanks to Marie Lefevre, in 1950 I had my first encounter with the optical language that is the Tarot. At what age had Marie arrived in Chile? She never wanted to tell us. When we knew her, she was over sixty years old. A small woman made up and dressed like Dracula’s daughter with her long gray hair dyed with a blue rinse, she lived in a basement with her lover Nene who was an unemployed and uneducated youth of eighteen years, but of an angelic beauty. After having heated metaphysical discussions at Café Iris, we poets would arrive drunk around three in the morning at her basement, knowing that a pot full of tasty soup would be waiting for us there, heating up on a slow fire. Nene, naked as usual, with a pink silk ribbon tied in the shape of a butterfly around his penis, slept soundly. She, who never slept, got up to serve us cups of the delicious soup made from all the leftovers that the nearby restaurant gave her in exchange for reading the Tarot to customers. Lefevre had drawn her own deck of seventy-eight cards. Instead of cups, swords, wands, and coins, she shuffled sopaipillas (coins), gourds of maté (cups), Shivalingams, male and female genitalia forming a unit (wands), and eyes above a triangle (swords). I remember some of her major arcana: she had a cowboy and a beautiful cowgirl in place of the Emperor and Empress. The Priestess was a Mapuche machi. The World was a map of Chile. Despite the ingenuousness of this deck, she gave readings of a surprising psychological accuracy, her very Chilean language contrasting with her strong French accent. I had removed money from my life without feeling poor, surviving on adventure, caught up in the present without ever thinking about tomorrow; for me, she predicted hundreds, thousands of trips all around the world. It was hard for me to believe her, and yet her prediction came true. To Carlos Faz, an exceptionally talented painter, she said, “Never travel by sea!” A year later on his way to America at a stop in Ecuador where the passengers were forbidden to disembark Carlos, drunk as usual, jumped from the ship toward the dock, misjudged the distance, fell into the water, and drowned. He was twenty-two. For me, this lady was an example of generosity, freedom, and subtlety. She did not tell Faz that he was going to drown, which would have become an order to commit suicide (the mind tends to fulfill predictions), but warned him of danger, leaving him the possibility of either confronting it or not. She also taught me that one can create miracles for others: somewhere in this world, there was a well-intentioned woman who would receive you at any hour with a humble smile on her lips, give you a bowl of soup, and read the cards for you, for free, just out of love for human beings.

Another teacher who changed my worldview was Nicanor Parra. When I met him I was a teenager, he a grown man, a mathematics professor at the School of Engineering. As a revolutionary reaction against the emotional poetry of Neruda, Pablo de Rokha, García Lorca, and Vicente Huidobro, he had declared himself an anti-poet. For us young people, his emergence in the literary world was akin to that of a messiah. After my awkward encounter with him at Café Iris, my pathological shyness kept me from visiting him. Stella Díaz had to help me. Making what for her was an immense concession, she covered the flames of her hair with a beret. “Nica doesn’t want me to show up with my hair uncovered. He says that redheads drive the students mad.” And she took me into the territory of the great anti-poet. Parra was an unassuming man, and the admiration of young poets encouraged him. We met many times, also with Enrique Lihn present. We talked in a small bar near the National Library, over that wonderful drink that is sweet chicha. One day Nicanor handed me a large envelope full of typewritten sheets of paper of different sizes. “They’re various writings, a sort of literary journal. Can you organize them for me? I’ve reread them so many times that I can’t see their value. I labeled them ‘Notes on the edge of the abyss.’” To receive such a gesture of confidence from a consecrated poet was like a spiritual explosion for me. I spent many nights locked away, reverently reviewing these unpublished texts, sorting them by subject, eliminating repetitions. In a concise style—“I want a clinical-photographic art”—the poet described his inner life in prose. After fifteen days I returned the notes to him, copied onto regular size sheets of paper, in an order that seemed perfect to me. Parra never published them, nor did he ever speak of them again.

With a university education far superior to that of his predecessors, who were all self-taught, Parra had specialized in the study of the Vienna Circle and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Galileo interested him just as much as Kafka, whose diary he admired above all else. He had his own interpretation of the famous phrase from the Tractatus, “What one cannot speak about, one must be silent about.” For him metaphysics, like religion, was forbidden territory; likewise the expression of personal feelings. “The poet should not exhibit himself: the strings must be pulled from outside.” Neruda and his followers presented themselves as great justices, great lovers, great humanists, with sublime anxieties and hopes — in short, as inflated romantic egos. Parra hid behind his intellect, then assumed one mask, then several. The poet was a professor with his tongue eaten away by cancer, a little man crushed by society, by women, a tragic clown; later he spoke through an ingenuous character who believed in Christ; then an old skeptic; and finally, he became a translator and took on the personality of Shakespeare. Lyricism was replaced by acerbic humor. “Knowledge and laughter become confounded.” Ultimately, he invented himself. As I write these lines, Parra must now be eighty-six years old, and like Castaneda—“the warrior leaves no footprints”—I am sure that no one can boast of knowing him intimately. The anti-poet has made his heart into an impenetrable fortress. The words of Jesus, “By their works ye shall know them,” cannot be applied to him.

The memories I have of Nicanor Parra, over a bottle of chicha, date from half a century ago. At the age of twenty, I had his theories burned into my mind as if by a red-hot iron. But this concealment of the ego, this veiling of personal emotions, this impersonality of the creator, led me toward magic rather than distancing me from it. In magic, the same principles apply, but go further: the magician accepts the cutting of the ties that bind him to external influences, but knows how to receive, from the inside, the essential, impersonal being that has its origin beyond our solar system.

Parra was present in one of my happy dreams in 1998: in the helicopter I am piloting circling around the mouth of an erupting volcano Nicanor, as a young man, gives a lesson in poetry to a group of elderly poets. “Do not describe your experiences; the poem should be experience. Do not show what you are, but what you are going to be. Do not show your feelings; create a new feeling with the poem. Do not reveal what you know, but what you suspect. Do not seek what you desire, but what you do not desire. So, now that you are a dream, stop dreaming.” Then I woke up.

When I got to Paris, not having been able to establish the immediate contact I so much desired with André Breton and being always in search of metaphysical aspirin that would comfort me for being mortal, I found two teachers in books. One was Gurdjieff; I read everything he had written or dictated, as well as the works about him written by his disciples. The other was Gaston Bachelard, whose book La philosophie du non endeared me to philosophy and proposed new visions of reality that overwhelmed me. I gradually came to know excellent artists who, although they enriched me aesthetically, never suggested the idea of entering into the territory of magic or therapy. Quite the contrary, their quest was to escape from the Essential Being in order to exalt the power of the personal “I.” I do not mean to imply that I despise this; unlike some extemporaneous gurus, I believe that the part of our spirit with which we often identify ourselves — the ego — should not be destroyed or neglected. When well-managed, the egotistic personality can become an admirable servant. It is for this reason that the Buddha is depicted meditating on a sleeping tiger, Jesus Christ riding a donkey, Isis stroking a cat. The gods have steeds, and these represent the ego. The personal “I” is admirable if it is surrendered to the cosmic will. If it disobeys the Law, it becomes a nefarious monster that devours consciousness.

The Canadian sculptor Jean Benoit, a fervent surrealist, invited me to spend a few days of vacation in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, a small town in southern France. Across from his house was that of André Breton, built of wood and carved stones. My friend laughed at my shyness and dragged me over to the home of the poet. His wife received us, saying she did not know where André was but that he would return soon and that we could wait while she was in the kitchen. I waited there with Benoit, who, joyously anticipating the future encounter and certain that it would be “electric,” began emptying a bottle of wine. I trembled from head to toe. The idea of seeing the mythological creator of surrealism in his private home caused me a nervous excitement, a mixture of panic and euphoria. After ten minutes I had an irresistible need to urinate. Benoit, enjoying the wine, made a vague gesture toward the stairs leading to another floor. “It’s on the left.” I climbed the stairs looking for the bathroom, feeling like an intruder but at the same time possessed by an extreme curiosity. On the second floor, I saw a small wooden door to the left. My pressing need to relieve myself caused me to open the door immediately. There I was, face to face with the master, sitting on the toilet, pants down below his knees, defecating. Breton, his face contorted and deep red, gave a tremendous yell as if his throat were being cut. His cry must have been heard not only throughout the house but also in the surrounding houses, because several dogs started barking. I slammed the door instantly and flew down the stairs, fled to the station, and got on a bus that was going to Paris. The scene had lasted only a few seconds, but I had committed sacrilege by seeing the exquisite poet shitting. Would it be forgiven someday? Doubting so, I decided to emigrate to Mexico.

The National Institute of Fine Arts, led by the poet Salvador Novo, hired me to teach pantomime in its theater school. My arrival in Mexico’s capital aroused much enthusiasm, and I had hundreds of students. My goal was to move from pantomime into theater — why not talk? — and thence into film, for which I had to train capable actors. I set up a laboratory for the study of bodily expressions at a private site, freeing myself from the stereotypes of pantomime. I was surprised to see the arrival of a group of doctors, all disciples of Erich Fromm. This renowned psychiatrist and essayist, suffering from heart disease, lived very near the capital in the pleasant city of Cuernavaca, which at that time was not yet sullied by pollution, enjoying the mild climate, lush vegetation, and low altitude close to sea level. A group of Mexican psychiatrists and two Colombians, drawn to his radical humanism, had asked Fromm to accept them as disciples. I suppose that Fromm found them to be caught in the traps of intellect, and in keeping with his atheist mysticism—“God is not a thing, and therefore cannot be represented by a name or an image”—invited them to free themselves from all mental chains, all “idolatries,” and to lose their individual limits in order to surrender peacefully to a happy relationship with nature. Of course, the body was the nature that was nearest, and for this reason, having learned of my courses in bodily expression, he recommended them to all. These psychiatrists, extraordinarily well educated after many years of intensive study, were skillful at handling theories but awkward when moving their bodies. Stiff, tense, and inexpressive, they identified with words and did not control their gestures. The first thing I did was to have them visit different spaces to feel how their attitudes changed depending on the dimensions of the place and the location of their bodies. They saw that they felt better or worse in certain places than in others; they understood that communication is not only oral but also spatial; they learned that their brains functioned on the basis of a territory, real or imagined. They noticed how rigid their spines were and how unbalanced their gait. They took the work very seriously and made great progress. I was asked by Dr. Millán to accompany them to the Tlalpam Sanatorium to help them investigate the body language of mental patients. I did so. Pleased with the results, they finally decided to invite me to Cuernavaca to meet their teacher.

Performing in a pantomime (Santiago de Chile, 1950). (Was I a precursor to Iggy Pop?)

Fromm received us in a beautiful bungalow with bougainvillea-covered walls. He had white hair and gentle blue eyes, a voice free of aggression, often quoting the Torah to affirm his atheism, and wore white pants and a light blue jacket so brightly colored that it gave him the appearance of an orchestral musician in the style of Tommy Dorsey. This kind Jewish man seemed to bear no resemblance to the stern father image that he projected to his Mexican students. As his wife served an appetizer, Fromm asked me to describe the techniques of pantomime, especially those related to the expression of weight. “The man who has not realized his freedom, that is to say who has not cut his incestuous ties to his mother and the ties connecting him to his family and his homeland, experiences all these as a burden without knowing that he carries that weight,” he said to me. As our conversation continued, Fromm suggested that we go to lunch at a restaurant on one of the hills on the outskirts of Cuernavaca. “I will go by car with the mime,” he announced to his students. “My heart does not allow me to take the pleasure of that delightful climb. But I advise you to go on foot, in complete harmony with nature and one another. All love is based on knowledge of the other; all knowledge of the other is based on shared experience.” When we arrived at the restaurant Fromm asked for a jug of tamarind water and said to me with a blissful smile, “Let’s drink this healthy liquid in tranquillity. My collaborators, talking to each other and enjoying the beautiful scenery, will take at least an hour to get here.”

The master was wrong: his disciples arrived in less than twenty minutes, perspiring, pale, and short of breath. One of them fell down half-conscious in a chair, another vomited, and the others ran to the cold drinks, imbibing them in large and desperate gulps. After a short time, ashamed, they confessed their mistake. They had started out completely calm on the road that led to the mountain restaurant. By common agreement, in order to better commune with Mother Nature, they had decided to march in silence. After a few minutes, they had noticed that the two Colombians, subtly speeding up their pace, were walking ten meters ahead. The rest of them hurried to catch up. A competition of long strides began, each one trying to prove that he was stronger than the other. This degenerated into a race. The last hundred meters were taken at a sprint, leaving them almost totally exhausted. Fromm burst into laughter, tinged with sadness and compassion. He said, “The beginning of freedom lies in the capacity of man to suffer. And man suffers if he is oppressed, physically or spiritually. Suffering moves him to act against his oppressor, seeking to end the oppression rather than seek a freedom of which he knows nothing. Your greatest oppressor, my friends, is the individual ‘I.’ No therapist can cure it on your behalf. Remember what Hindu medicine tells us: the physician prescribes, God heals. It seems essential that you continue meditating with the Zen monk.” I was surprised, a Zen monk in Mexico? I had not heard any news of it. I knew that Erich Fromm had invited Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki to Mexico and had published a book with him, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, but I was excited to hear of the existence of this monk, whose name was Ejo Takata. I had read every book on the topic that I could get my hands on, but direct contact with a Zen master bore more weight than a ton of printed pages.

On the return bus trip, I asked them where I could find the monk. Some minutes of embarrassed silence passed before they answered me: “It’s a secret. Apart from us, no one knows he is here. We cannot communicate his address. The only one who can give an answer is Dr. F., our treasurer.” Dr. F received me in his large office and said, “Ejo Takata works exclusively for us. We have built a small zendo on the outskirts of the city. If you wish to go there to meditate with us every day at six o’clock (except for Saturdays and Sundays, of course), you must first offer a donation, for example. ” (and without finishing the sentence, he wrote a large sum on a piece of paper. It may not have been so large for him, but for me, it was equal to all my savings.) Without a second of doubt, I signed a check. He gave me a card with Ejo Takata’s address and a map showing how to get there.

At six o’clock the next morning I walked on a path alongside a ravine, the bottom of which was filled with garbage and rats, and came to a modest one-story house surrounded by a garden. With my heart pounding fast, I gave a few timid knocks on the door. It was instantly opened by a Japanese man in monastic clothes: he had a shaven head, a face of indefinable age, a smile showing teeth mounted on steel frames, and small bright eyes. He gave a bow then embraced me with affection as if he had known me for years. He led me to the small meditation room and showed me a box of red cloth with a white circle in the center containing a Japanese word. He translated: “Happiness.” How could I have realized that in that moment, Ejo Takata had transmitted the essence of Zen to me? He searched my face and saw that I had not understood the message. He clicked his tongue a few times, tilting his head from one side to the other. In his Japanese accent he muttered, “Need much zazen.” He handed me a black cushion — a zafu — showed me how to place it under my buttocks and meditate on my knees, corrected the position of my hands and my spine, and sat to meditate in front of me, as still as a wax sculpture. Half an hour passed. My legs hurt atrociously. The psychiatrists began to arrive. Without apologizing for the delay they sat down and, with profound and extraordinary concentration, remained still for an hour and a half. Then, smiling, they made quick bows and left. My body was numb, and I could barely walk. For three months I suffered martyrdom, all my muscles and joints hurt, my legs fell asleep, and my neck sunk into my back, making me feel like a sick turtle. Ejo would give me hard blows on the shoulder blades with his wooden cane to make me regain energy. The doctors, by contrast, were always smiling and could spend hours without moving. Once I conquered the bodily aches, I had difficulties with my mind. Because sitting still was excruciatingly boring, I started imagining poems, stories, sensual images, solutions to all kinds of problems. But I realized that it was foolish to seek the Master’s admiration by imitating the appearance of a Buddha: I had to overcome my mental chaos. I realized that at every moment my mind was invaded by endless dialogues, monologues, judgments, and images that, by giving them names, I compared to other images. I called this “mental chatter.” I started trying not to let words into my mind. I struggled for three years until I was finally able to keep my mind empty of words whenever I wanted to. I was very glad of this victory. However, I realized that in order to keep language out of my mind I had to devote my attention to doing so, making a continuous effort. This is not the correct way to stop the internal dialogue. What I had to do was to stop identifying myself with my thoughts. They were mine, but they were not me. As I meditated, I let the words go through my mind like clouds blown by the wind. The phrases came, nobody would take control of them, they would leave. I arrived at the zendo one misty morning ready to start this new struggle. I found Ejo carrying his few possessions in a cloth sack.

Ejo Takata around 1980.

“Doctors cheat: take pills before meditating. They want to appear, not be. I am leaving.” He walked next to me, very calm, carrying his bag down toward the city.

“Do you have money, Ejo?”

“No.”

“Do you have a place to sleep?”

“No.”

“Do you have friends in the city?”

“No.”

“What will you do?” He shrugged his shoulders and replied quietly, with a big smile, “Happiness.”

He declined my offer to host him, and while I took a taxi to the capital he started walking toward the mountains.

Two years passed before I saw him again. He had been in the mountains teaching the indigenous people to cultivate soybeans. He also taught them how to build hygienic huts with outdoor kitchens, facing the sunrise, and how to make methane gas from their excrement. Because his teaching was free, the local officials at first thought he was a dangerous communist. Many times they threatened to shoot him. Without worrying about losing his life, Ejo continued his work, saving countless families from misery. When he returned to the capital, he and his new students set about healing illnesses with herbs and acupuncture. One day, while I was filming The Holy Mountain on the snowy peaks of Ixtaxihuatl, suffering from the cold and an enormous number of technical difficulties, the monk came to visit me. In desperation I asked him, “When will the mountain stop being white?” He concentrated on his belly for a moment, then answered, laughing, “When it is white, it is white, and when it is not white, it is not white!” I knew that I had to stop setting my hopes on the future and accept the present situation with happiness. Until his death Ejo Takata always lived in borrowed accommodations, subsisting on scant donations.

When I finished writing the script for The Holy Mountain and gave myself the role of the alchemist, a Gurdjieff-style master, I realized that I knew perfectly well the motives of the student, but lacked the miraculous, superhuman experiences that I assumed the gurus had. In this dance of reality, while I was preparing the music and sets for the film, a New Yorker contacted me, wanting to be my secretary. Because his exaggerated insistence bothered me, I hung up the phone in the middle of one of his imperative sentences. He got on a plane and came to visit me the next day. Upon seeing him, so fanatical and brutal, I realized that I had found Axon, the military tyrant who cuts off testicles in my film. When I told him that I did not want to hire him as a technician, but as an actor, he told me, “That’s what I wanted, but since I’ve never acted, I asked for a position as an assistant. But if I have come here and succeeded in joining the cast, it’s because I developed my psychic abilities with just a month and a half of study in Arica Training, founded by a Bolivian master, Óscar Ichazo, who knows all the secrets of Gurdjieff.” I asked him what this teaching had consisted of, and he said, “Óscar says it does not hold any new ideas. What he proposes is a mixture of different techniques, Taoist, Sufi, Kabbalistic, alchemical, and others, which allow one to obtain enlightenment in forty days. If you’re looking for a guru, he’s the one. He currently has 240,000 students.” In fact, contact with a Hindu or East Asian guru — the sort of holy men for which ads abounded in The Village Voice—would not have suited my needs. My character was a Western alchemist. I was won over by the fact that Ichazo was South American and had named his technique after a Chilean port city, Arica, where my father had built a mattress factory. Axon told me that Ichazo had brought a group of fifty-seven American truth seekers, including Lilly and Claudio Naranjo, into the Tarapacá desert to teach them a method that would allow them to levitate in ten months.

I traveled to New York, obtained an interview with Ichazo, and suggested that he come to Mexico to initiate me (three days would suffice) and bring two of his assistants to initiate my actors (this would take six weeks of continuous work for twenty hours a day). We reached an agreement: first class travel for him and his Chilean secretary, a haughty aristocratic lady, two connected apartments in a five-star hotel, plus $17,000.

Óscar Ichazo and his companion landed in Mexico. As soon as they arrived at the hotel she asked me, “Where’s the weed?” Very surprised, I told her that since I did not smoke, I had not thought about that. The lady, furious, began to shout, “It’s stupid and unforgivable to have us come to Mexico without at least a kilo of herb waiting for us! Go now and get some, or you won’t get anything from the Master!” The lady’s despotic tone filled me with rage. I would have liked to take the wind out of her sails, but I held back because I believed the meeting with Ichazo to be essential for the success of my film. In less than an hour, my assistants arrived with a kilo of top-quality marijuana, wrapped in sheets of newspaper. The Chilean calmed down. So did I. A Tibetan sacred text says, “Do not be concerned with the defects of the master: if you need to cross a river, it does not matter if the boat that takes you to the other side is badly painted.” Ejo Takata, for example, smoked cigarette after cigarette, but that did not stop him from showing me the heart of Zen.

We scheduled the private meeting with Ichazo for the following day at six o’clock in the afternoon at my house. There, on the third floor, I had a large study with the walls lined with books and the window looking out onto Río de Janeiro Plaza. The previous night when we dined together the master had told me where his powers came from:

“I was born in 1931 in Bolivia. The son of a Bolivian soldier, I was educated in La Paz, at a Jesuit school. One night when I was six years old I was in bed reading a fairy tale when I was seized by a strange attack, like epilepsy. I passed out immediately and left my body in the astral state. I saw myself dead, lying on the bed. Thus dematerialized, I learned the mysteries of the hereafter. When I returned to my child’s body, I had the mind of an adult, of one who knows truth. When the priest who was my teacher described hell I thought, ‘I’ve been to hell and it was not like that.’ I abandoned my children’s stories and started reading, fully understanding all kinds of scientific, philosophical, and sacred books like the Bhagavad-Gîta, the Tao Te Ching, the Zohar, the Upanishads, the Diamond Sutra, and many others. I was also interested in the writings of Gurdjieff and his disciples. When I was nine years old I was already taking classes in hatha yoga, hypnotism, and martial arts with a real samurai. At age thirteen some Bolivian healers initiated me in their magical rites, giving me ayahuasca to drink. At nineteen, I met an old man who was interested in my great spiritual development. In 1950 he invited me to Buenos Aires, where I got in touch with a group of old sages, many of whom were eighty or older. They had come from all over the world, especially from Europe and the Orient, to exchange their spiritual techniques. I arranged to work for them, cleaning the rooms, doing the shopping, cooking, and serving them in everything they needed. That way, they could devote themselves unhindered to discussing techniques, yoga, Hindu and Tibetan tantra, the Kabbalah, the Tarot, alchemy, and so forth. I would get up at four in the morning to prepare their breakfast, and would discreetly remain among them. Little by little, they got used to my presence and began to use me as a guinea pig to test the effectiveness of their knowledge, such as a particular kind of meditation or a recitation of mantras. After two years, possessing all of the techniques, I knew more than any of them. Proud of my synthesis, they gave me valuable contacts with Eastern brotherhoods. They opened the doors of the most secret sites to me, places very difficult to enter, almost impossible. I started traveling. Everywhere I went, I was received not as a student but as a master. I visited India, Tibet (places where I corroborated my knowledge of tantra), Japan (where I solved all the koans), Hong Kong (where the secrets of the I Ching were revealed to me), Iran (where the Sufis showed me the true meaning of the enneagon and the secret name of God). I returned to La Paz to live with my father and digest this knowledge. After meditating for a year, I fell into a divine coma that lasted seven days. Ecstasy kept me motionless, as if dead. Thus I knew how the universe was created, the mathematical relationships between things, the sickness of the current civilization, and how to cure it. When I was able to move again, I knew I was enlightened. I realized that instead of helping myself, I must try to help God.

Óscar Ichazo. Photo: Peter Schlessinger.

Ichazo told me all this with the same conviction with which Chico Molina claimed to have seen a magic mirror at work. It was the same conviction with which Carlos Castaneda had told me that, while walking with Don Juan along the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City, he had become distracted looking at a passing woman and stopped listening to the old man, who had then given him a slap that sent him fifty kilometers away in less than a second. It was the same conviction with which Ichazo later told me that he had been by Jesus’s side at the moment when he “suffered” his transfiguration. Did he want to tell me that he could travel through time or that he had memories of previous incarnations? The latter possibility is consistent with the fact that Ichazo claimed to possess a prodigious memory: he claimed to remember all his experiences with total clarity starting at one year of age.

At six o’clock that evening, Ichazo knocked on the door of my house. As if he had been there many times, he went ahead of me up the stairs to the third floor and sat in the comfortable chair that I had bought for him that very morning. He smiled with satisfaction at smelling the new leather.

“Bravo. this furniture has no past. It’s like me. I am the root of a new tradition. Forget all the Christs, forget all the Buddhas; personal fulfillment does not exist. Now, I myself will teach you how to tame the ego. I’ll show you the path to return to the impersonal power that breathes us, the force that exists beyond the level of our conscious mind.” And without more ado, from his pocket he pulled a packet of caramel sweets, a tube of vitamin C tablets, a lighter, a joint, and a mysterious little piece of paper. He asked me to bring him a glass of water. He opened the slip of paper; it contained an orange powder. He poured it into the water.

“It’s pure LSD. Drink it.”

Although it was fashionable, I had never wanted to undertake psychedelic experiences. In my interviews, I stated that I did not need them because my films gave me such powerful images. I gulped and, overcoming my fear, drank the brew. We waited in heavy silence. An hour passed. There was no effect. He lit the joint.

“Smoke it. It will speed the process.”

We shared the joint. A few minutes later I started to have my first hallucinations. I was overcome with a childlike joy. Through the large window of the study I saw the Río de Janeiro Plaza, with its trees and its bronze copy of Michelangelo’s David, change appearance as if it were a collection of paintings by artists I liked — Bonnard, Seurat, Van Gogh, Picasso, and so on. Suddenly I heard a cracking that seemed to split the house in two, and I exclaimed, “This isn’t any use, it’s like watching a Walt Disney movie. Also, I’ve lost control of my movements. If someone attacked me now, I couldn’t defend myself.”

“Stop criticizing and have confidence in me. Enough paranoia. Wherever you go, you can come back from there. Also know that in the state you’re in, you can handle yourself perfectly well in everyday reality.”

At that moment, the phone rang. “Answer it,” he ordered. As if descending from another galaxy, I approached the phone and took it off the hook. It was one of my actors asking for certain information. Without any great difficulty, I answered his questions.

“See?” Ichazo said, satisfied. “Now that your fears have calmed down, let’s see if your images are as childish as you say.”

He told me to go to the bathroom and observe my face in the mirror. So I did. I saw myself a thousand different ways, in continuous change. One after another of my personalities appeared: the ambitious, the egotistical, the lazy, the choleric, the murderer, the saint, the vain genius, the abandoned child, the indolent, the melancholy, the resentful, the usurping jester, the fake madman, the coward, the proud, the envious, the complex-ridden Jew, the erotomaniac, the jealous, and many others. My flesh cracked, my features swelled, my skin was covered with sores. I saw my mind and matter rot. I was disgusted with myself. I started to vomit. Ichazo gave me candy, then a vitamin C pill. A wave of warmth, carried by my blood, inundated my body. I felt better.

“If you have ever felt compassion, true compassion for someone, remember it.”

I began to cry like a three-year-old child. I held Pepe, my gray cat, in my arms, dying: my father had poisoned him. His glassy eyes and dangling tongue broke my heart. I would have given my life to save him.

“Make that emotion grow, compassion for all animals, for the world, for humanity. There. Now look at yourself in the mirror again, but with mercy. That being with so many dark sides is your poor ego, dying. If you can now reach this high level of consciousness, it is thanks to it, its incessant suffering in search of unity. Its monstrousness engendered you; its defects were the roots that have nourished your essence. Have compassion for it; give your hand to your ego. The butterfly is not disgusted with the caterpillar that gave birth to it.”

I pressed my face to the silver surface, absorbed my image through my skin. When I drew back, the mirror reflected everything in the room except for me. Despite realizing that this invisibility was a hallucination, I knew I would never again live criticizing every one of my steps. The harsh inner judge had melted away. For the first time, I felt at peace with myself.

“Don’t just stand there!” Ichazo exclaimed. “Keep going!” He made me take out all the photographs and play programs that I kept in my desk drawers and scatter them on the floor. “Those were your plays, your couple of films, your actors, your friends, yourself, wrapped up in the comedy of fame. In the state you’re in now, how do you see it all?”

I saw everything with an extraterrestrial mind, without desires, without ties; the anguish of separation was present in every detail, the truth could be felt, but it was far away, like an irreparable mystery, a painful hope. There, where life was suffering, ignorance became pride, and the “I” was in a prison without doors or windows.

“Do you understand? You’ve lived searching in the distance for what was inside you, for what was you.” I lay down on those pictures, those newspaper clippings that mentioned me, those programs and recordings, as if they were all an old skin that I was shedding from my body. Óscar said, “There are three centers in the human animal: the intellectual, the emotional, and the vital. My teachers called them the Path, the Oth, and the Kath. As long as the ego is false and the consciousness distorted, they sleep without performing their task of relating us to the immediate world, surpassing the obstacles that are illusory but deadly. Let’s wake them up!”

First, I had to concentrate on a point in my belly about four inches below my navel. I perceived an immense force there.

“Don’t observe it from the outside. Don’t define what you feel. Enter the Kath, become this center.” Ichazo’s voice sounded distant. I dissolved into — how can I describe it? — a dimension of inexhaustible energy, like an opening in a rock where a torrential stream flows out. “You can send this energy, in the form of invisible tentacles, as far away as you want. You can use it to enter other people’s bodies and give them life or death.” He gestured to the people outside walking across the plaza. “Launch the Kath. Penetrate them.”

I gave a push and felt as if a stream of energy was coming from my belly, invisible and long, which would tie itself to the bodies of the pedestrians. I immediately felt united to them; I understood their minds, grasped their emotions, and knew — or imagined? — much of their past. After following them for a hundred meters they became friends for whom I felt an immense pity, such was the pain that filled them.

“They suffer because they are not conscious. Don’t stay there. Look for the union that best suits you, without giving yourself limits.”

I climbed up to the roof and lay naked on the concrete surface.

Night had fallen, and the sky was full of stars. I sent out a long tentacle and joined myself to the brightest star. I did not feel it to be indifferent. This celestial body was a being that recognized our link and sent me a form of energy that enriched my soul. I decided to tie myself to other stars. My invisible beam split into innumerable branches. I noted with surprise and fascination that each star had a different “personality.” They were all distinct, each one with its own type of benevolent consciousness. This seemed natural to me: creation never repeats itself. I had always lived with cats and had never known one with the same character as another. Similar yes, but not the same. Every snowflake that falls is unique. And so are the stars. Up there was a mass of individual beings like the countless facets of a single diamond, sending me their energies. At the same time, I received the strength that the Earth sent to me. My center of gravity was joined to the center of the planet and from there went back up to the Kath of every living being. I was afraid. The temptation of power was compelling. Just then, Ichazo asked me, “What will you do with that power?”

“Help my neighbors!” I said, and the fear vanished.

“How does your heart feel?”

“Like an enemy, an unrelenting muscle, an indifferent clock marking the running out of my time, an executioner threatening at every moment to stop and end my life,” I answered.

“You’re wrong. Enter it. There you will find the Oth.”

In the state I was in, thinking of something meant doing it immediately. Right away, I found myself immersed in my heart! The beats rumbled like thunder, the sound of rain determined to penetrate everything, to demolish any illusion of personal existence. I remembered an afternoon when, alone on the terrace of my hotel in Bangalore, India, I had watched the cloudy sky agitated by a strong storm. Every rumble seemed to speak the sacred syllable Ram. In the same way, those beats shaking my heart and then agitating my body, the room, the city, the world, the entire cosmos, seemed to be the voice of God the creator. It was the repeated echo of the first word: Ram, Ram, Ram. There I was, innocent as a newborn, in the middle of a gigantic golden temple that throbbed with devotion, repeating the divine name. And that thunderous rhythm, once my fear and mistrust had disappeared, became a constant explosion of love, organized in waves spreading out from the center to the infinite edges and from the infinite edges back to the center. That nucleus was my consciousness, transparent as a diamond, protected by the golden temple, a metaphor for the universe. I began to feel the immeasurable love that the heart felt for me. I finally knew what it was to be loved. There was no longer an executioner residing in my chest, but a wonderful friend, mother, and father at the same time, a bridge between this material world into which the spirit is born and the spiritual world that produces matter. In that immense golden cradle, floating in an ocean of infinite joy, lulled by the waves of love, like a happy child who had found his family and his rightful home, I began to fall asleep. I woke to Ichazo’s fierce order, “Don’t be self-indulgent. Happiness is a beautiful trick. Go further away. Sail the sea of crazy ideas. Submerge yourself in the mental energy. Find the Path.”

We returned to the terrace. There was a large neon Coca-Cola advertisement with a luminous circle revolving around a vertical axis.

“We do not need Tibetan mandalas or esoteric symbols. This sign, if you concentrate your attention by removing the words from your mind and not taking your eyes off it, will become the portal.”

I watched as the rotating sign transformed into an oval, into a line, back into an oval, into a circle, and so on. It was swallowing my rational borders, my will to exist, and. suddenly, without intending to, as if I had taken an immeasurable leap, I felt myself outside the world of sensations. How to explain this? The strength of the Kath and the happiness of the Oth were thrown into an immutable transparency, the Path. I had lived in a world of compact gray clouds, and now I rose up to float in a translucent sky. Without desires, without definitions, in pure continuation, free from any beginning or end, exempt from time and space, I immersed myself in bliss. How many hours did I lie there motionless? When I recovered my body, my name, my rational island, I was alone in front of the flashing Coca-Cola circle. I felt ridiculous, but also euphoric. I had not imagined what I remembered; I had experienced it. That experience became my guide. I had been shown the goal, now it was up to my perseverance to actually reach it. Ejo Takata, when I asked what the Buddha was, had replied, “The mind is the Buddha.”

The following morning I received a phone call from Óscar’s lofty partner, who told me it was urgent that I find someone to inject the Master with a dose of morphine for he was suffering excruciating pain. I was speechless and considered refusing. She shouted, “Idiot, do what I ask!” I needed to continue my experience, and Ichazo had promised me two sessions: I swallowed my anger and ran to the house of Dr. Toledano, a friend who had acted in Fando y Lis, extracting a vial of blood from the actress’s arm and drinking it greedily in front of the camera.

We arrived at the hotel. The ogress, fearing that the doctor would leave with me if she expelled me from the room, accepted my presence with a smoldering glare. Ichazo lay in bed, writhing, curled up. His muscles, bones, guts, everything hurt. Toledano quickly injected him with a dose of morphine, and the affliction died down. Rising from the bed in full possession of his faculties, he explained, “I am intimately attached to my school. We form a collective body and spirit. Because of my absence, serious disputes and problems have erupted back in New York. The students are not yet ready to manage themselves alone. For this reason, I felt the catastrophe in my body. I’m very sorry, I have to return immediately to New York!” The woman had already packed their bags. They coldly took their leave and, without more ado, took a taxi to the airport.

The end of the encounter with Ichazo resembles the end of my meeting with Carlos Castaneda. The writer, surrounded by an aura of sulfur, was impossible to track down. During the time that he was most famous, hundreds of North Americans went to Mexico in search of him, greedily desiring that he introduce them to Don Juan, the mythological peyote master. I did not have to look for him. He came over to my table at El Rincón Gaucho, the restaurant that the former wrestler Wolf Rubinsky had opened on Avenida Insurgentes in the capital, where I was eating an Argentinean beefsteak in the company of a television actress who, after taking a training course at a church of Scientology,^*6 had decided to change her Mexican name to Troika. “In the Russian valleys, covered by a blanket of snow which is a symbol of purity, a troika glides without effort or obstacle: as my mind does now.” I was not interested in her mind, but in her lush curves. At first, when Castaneda approached, I thought he was a waiter. In Mexico, it is easy to determine the social class to which an individual belongs merely by seeing his or her physique. He was short and solidly built, with curly hair, a flat nose, and slightly pockmarked skin — in short, a humble native. But when he spoke, I knew from the relaxed tone of his voice, his delicate pronunciation, and the luminous vibration of his intellect that he was a man of high culture. His personal charm made me instantly consider him a friend.

“Excuse me, Alejandro, for interrupting. I have seen your film El Topo several times, so I am happy to greet you. I am Carlos Castaneda.”

He could have been a con man — nobody knew the face of the writer — but I believed him. Later I found through a drawing in a book and a photo published by his ex-wife that it was indeed he. Troika also believed him. Although she had never read his works, she seemed intoxicated by his fame. With an offhand gesture, as if the heat was bothering her, she opened her neckline, showing the tip of one of her two magnificent promontories, and inflated her lips as if kissing an invisible phallus to whisper, “How interesting!” Castaneda, after casting a falcon’s eye on the living flesh that was being displayed above a bloody beefsteak, smiled: “If we have met, it must be for some reason. I would like to talk to you in a quieter place.” I suggested to Castaneda that we go to his hotel, but he insisted on coming to mine. I, being a successful producer, was staying at the luxurious Camino Real. What better place to meet with Castaneda than a Camino Real (Royal Path)! We agreed that he would come the next day at noon.

I waited impatiently. At five minutes to twelve, the phone rang in my room. I said, “He must surely be calling to tell me he can’t come.” I answered. In a respectful tone, he asked me if it would bother me to receive him slightly before the scheduled time. Such tact was touching to me. As soon as he entered, I offered him a chair. We sat face-to-face and locked eyes, scrutinizing one another like two warriors, but certainly without any aggression and of course with much hope of finding a pleasant interlocutor. How long did this last? An eternity. He was the first to speak. Soon I arrived at the question we were interested in:

“In your books you have revealed a way of seeing the world differently, you have revived the concept of the spiritual warrior, you have made the topic of lucid dreams current again, and yet I do not know whether you are a madman, a genius, or a liar.”

“Everything I tell is true. I have not invented anything,” he replied with a bright smile.

“Reading your works I have the impression that, based on actual experiences in Mexico, you have developed and introduced concepts drawing on the universal esoteric tradition. In your books one can find Zen, the Upanishads, the Tarot, Hervey de Saint-Denys’s work on dreams, and so forth. However, I am sure of one thing: it’s evident that you have traveled all around this country to do your research. It seems likely that, bringing together all your findings, you have created the figure of Don Juan.”

“Absolutely not. I assure you, he exists. ”

And as he continued he told me how the shaman (with whom he had been walking on the Paseo de la Reforma, the central artery of Mexico City) had, with a simple slap on the back, projected him several kilometers away because he had been distracted by a woman passing by. Then he talked about the sexual life of Don Juan, who was capable of ejaculating fifteen times in a row. I remember he also told me that his master despised those human beings who “manufactured” children, sacrificing their magical abilities. “Every child steals a piece of the soul.” He introduced the topic of Saturnine cannibalism. But, perhaps seeing my look of horror, he changed the subject:

“Why have circumstances brought us together? Could it be for us to make a film? Hollywood has offered me several million dollars to bring my first book to the screen, but I don’t want Don Juan to be played by Anthony Quinn.”

We were starting to agree on the possibilities of filming at the real sites, showing true miracles, real shamans, without using special effects and stunts that would turn all those teachings into banal fairy tales, when Castaneda began to have stomach pains, something that he said, between moans, never happened to him. In the mountains he drank water from streams without any ill effect, but in the city, where the water was ostensibly potable, he suffered from diarrhea. He began to squirm more and more. I called a taxi and accompanied him to his hotel, the Holiday Inn. Due to the usual traffic congestion, it took us almost an hour to get there. As soon as we had shaken hands, he ran off. I never saw him again. At the same time that he suffered those stomach cramps I had been struck by a violent pain in my liver that kept me in bed for three days. Once recovered, I called the hotel. He was gone and had left no address. When I stopped by there, the porter I questioned told me that the gentleman had been accompanied by an attractive woman, and his description matched the appearance of Troika. For a long time, Castaneda’s diarrhea caused me no suspicion. This malady, which the Mexicans call “Moctezuma’s revenge,” attacks a great many tourists, but little by little, recalling the details of our meeting, I began to have some doubts. Diarrhea requires speedy evacuation. Why hadn’t Castaneda used my bathroom? That would have brought him quick relief. If he needed to shit, how did he resist the urge in the taxi for over an hour? Moreover, this obnoxious illness tends to make people curl into a knot around the abdomen, rather than squirming, which can bring on an attack of nausea. Besides his stomach, intestines, and viscera hurting, he also seemed to be feeling pain in his muscles and bones. Perhaps some spirit sent by other sorcerers attacked both of us at the same time in order to prevent us from realizing the project, which would have meant revealing certain secrets to the entire world. or else his body, running out of its usual drug, needed a morphine injection, like Ichazo. I have never solved this mystery. Troika disappeared from the soap operas. Someone told me that she had signed a contract to work for five thousand years on L. Ron Hubbard’s ship.

Óscar Ichazo’s withdrawal had left me frustrated. I felt that I had lost the opportunity to have an essential experience. However, the dance of reality granted me that opportunity. Francisco Fierro, a painter and friend of mine, came back from Huautla, where he had gone to eat mushrooms with the famous Mazatec curandera María Sabina. He came looking for me at the house where I had already been holed up for a month with my group of “actors,” preparing to film The Holy Mountain. Ichazo had left us two instructors, Max and Lydia, who, certain that they possessed the supreme secrets, managed us like tyrants. She was an American of short stature, nearsighted and fat, and he a thin and gangly man, his face invaded by pimples. We were allowed to sleep only four hours a night, from midnight to four, and the rest of the time we had to spend on all manner of pseudo-Sufi, pseudo-Buddhist, pseudo-Egyptian, pseudo-Hindu, pseudoshamanic, pseudo-tantric, pseudo-yogic, and pseudo-Taoist exercises. These exercises ultimately were no use to us whatsoever. Francisco Fierro brought me a jar full of honey in which there were six pairs of fungi.

“It’s a gift from María Sabina. She saw you in her dreams. It seems that you are going to accomplish something that will help our country. When? What? She didn’t say. What she did say was that she, and others like her, want to help you. Eat them all. They are males and females. Those that aren’t of use to you, your body will reject and vomit up. She said to eat them at night, so that you will advance toward the light and see the dawn for the first time.”

While my actors went to sleep, awaiting the gong that would sound four hours later to invite them to take their cold shower, I lay on the roof, naked in a sleeping bag, and ingested the mushrooms. The hallucinations were not just visual this time. The ensemble of all my senses acquired fantastic characteristics. I began to realize that what I considered to be “myself ” was merely a mental construct obtained on the basis of sensations. “I only feel how I think I am.” The toxins in the mushrooms then began to show me other possibilities. I understood that I constructed myself from the intellect: “this is a hand,” “this is my face,” “I am a man,” “here are my limits.” Now something was telling me, “When you speak of limits, you actually mean unknown infinities. You can be something more than a human.”

I squatted, and little by little I became a lion. “This is not a hand; it is a paw.” “This is not my face; it is the savage countenance of a feline.” “I am not a man; I am a powerful beast.” My animal strength had awakened. It was a bodily sensation; every muscle acquired the strength of steel and an intoxicating elasticity. Like a folded fan that quietly opens, my senses extended themselves. I could distinguish the different scents carried by the air, listen to a countless array of noises, see unsuspected details, feel the power of my jaws. Before this, I had been almost blind, deaf, and mute with no sense of smell. The Kath seemed to boil in my belly: I was a predator, a thousand prey were calling to me to offer me their vital energy, but something stopped me. The pure mental strength, which I perceived as penetrating, subtle, delicate like a woman, was confronting the beast with intense love. I now understood the deeper meaning of card XI of the Tarot, Strength, which shows a woman with a hat in the form of a figure eight lying sideways — an infinity symbol — opening or closing the muzzle of a lion. Until this moment I had lived repressing my animal nature with contempt and fear, while at the same time my rationality limited the infinite extent of my mind, making it into a logical island. In the Oth, the heart, I was a human; in the Path, the spirit, I was an angel; and in the Kath, the body and sex, I was a beast. I stayed there, lying in wait, not for some small prey but for all of life. The stars shone brighter than ever, bestowing inexhaustible energy on me, and the Earth was manifested first in the form of a limited territory, the rooftop I was on, and then spread out like a woman giving herself, over the city, the country, the continent, the entire planet. I squatted down, clinging with my claws to the terrestrial globe, traveling through the cosmos. Dawn began to break. I felt the movement of the planet, turning to offer its surface, little by little, to the caress of the sun. I felt the Earth’s pleasure at receiving this light and vital warmth, the sun’s euphoria at giving its unceasing and engendering gift, and all around, the joy of the other planets and stars, crossing the firmament like iridescent ships. Everything was alive, everything was aware, everything from explosions to births to catastrophes was dancing, enthralled by the marvel of this moment. These were the mysterious alchemical weddings: the union of heaven and Earth, the fusion of the animal-vegetable-mineral with the intangible spirit in the human heart, the spring from which divine love flows forth in torrents.

These two experiences of LSD and mushrooms changed my perception of myself, and reality, forever. I felt that my mind had opened up like a flower bud. These events coincided with a gift that Ejo Takata’s teacher Yamada Mumon, who had come to visit from Japan after Takata left Fromm’s disciples, sent me via one of his students in gratitude for my having offered Takata my house for founding his new zendo. The student, of typical Mexican appearance, dressed like a Japanese monk, his forehead and cheeks invaded by the pimples common to all aspiring students of the Buddha, handed me a folded handkerchief. “Sit down and open it,” he exclaimed, standing beside my chair with his back bent, the palms of his hands together at chest height, and his eyes narrowed as if trying to look oriental. I opened the handkerchief. It was folded in such a way as to reject symmetry. There were multiple folds, all beautiful, large and small, diagonal, horizontal, vertical, each one ironed with devotion. It had clearly taken the teacher a long time to achieve this effect. Opening this true work of art, which required me to use my fingers respectfully, brought me deep aesthetic enjoyment. Once the handkerchief was spread open, I saw that in the center, in black ink, a sentence was written in Japanese. The student, in the manner of a samurai, solemnly read what he seemed to know by heart: “When a flower opens, it is spring in the whole world.” He turned and left without saying goodbye. I tried unsuccessfully to refold the scarf, but I could not. The experience of life is irreversible.

Reality, in its constant dance, now decided that I was ready to enter the world of operational magic. My neighbor Guillermo Lauder, an agent for popular artists, lived in an apartment building fifty meters away on my same street and invited me to attend a session with the healer Pachita. The lady went there every Friday to “operate” on the sick. I had heard of her. It was said that she opened up bodies with a rusty knife, that she replaced diseased organs with healthy ones, that she could materialize objects, and many other things. All this made me apprehensive, for it sounded like naive inventions, a crude imitation of real surgery. My first contact with folk magic had been at the home of F. S., an Education Ministry official, who hosted a cocktail party in my honor to celebrate my arrival in Mexico to teach pantomime courses. He lived in a luxurious mansion, the walls covered in modern Mexican paintings. These artists were impressively powerful — their works blended muralist expressionism, surrealism, and the abstract schools — but I felt that something was missing. F. S., a very intuitive homosexual who never took his eyes off my face and body for an instant, said, without my having voiced this sentiment, “What our painters lack is the magical root. Searching for the chimera of international acclaim, they have forgotten that the sacred basis of Mexican life is witchcraft. Come with me, I’ll show you a real creation.”

I followed him down a long corridor lined with cabinets lit by greenish lights, full of pre-Columbian pottery and sculptures. We came to his bedroom. Next to the metal bed (the headboard depicted the tree of good and evil, and the ceiling was covered by a large painting by Juan Soriano that showed a gigantic hand stroking the penis of a headless naked Adonis), there was a chest inlaid with black ivory. When he opened it, the inside of the box lit up. I felt a lump form in my throat. He told me to look inside if I dared. There, on velvet-covered trays, lay all kinds of wax figurines. I immediately felt a sharp pain in my head. Those figurines, the color of rotting flesh, were impaled by multiple needles in their eyes, sex organs, anuses, breasts, and all extremities; the expressions on their putrid faces showed unspeakable suffering. Their open mouths, with some of the teeth pierced by pins, gave forth mute howls. These objects, so full of evil energy, affected my body. I wanted to cry. How could there be beings in the world capable of expressing such evil? F. S. closed the lid, offered me a drink of tequila, and laughed, seeing my astonishment.

“Welcome to Mexico, mime. If this is the land of light, then it is also the land of shadow. Do you understand? All the paintings in my rooms together do not have the power of a single one of those wax figures. They are authentic objects of witchcraft, intended to harm someone. I obtained them thanks to certain dangerous contacts I have. I hope that one day the government authorities will allow me to organize an exhibition of this great art.”

A couple of years later, F. S. was found murdered in his bed. After castrating him, the killer had stuffed his bleeding penis into his mouth.

This was why, until this moment, I had avoided all contact with folk magic. However, the temptation to see Pachita operate made me decide to face the danger. Urban legends told that black magicians could surreptitiously introduce themselves into the subconscious of a visitor and put a curse on him or her with a delayed effect that, after three to six months, would consume the victim to the point of death. For this reason, before visiting the old woman I protected myself as best I could. In a certain way, without my realizing it, this was my first act of psycho-magic. I felt that I had to hide my identity so that her curses would be misdirected by my anonymity. So I dressed in new clothes and shoes. In order that I might not be judged by my tastes, it was important for these clothes not to be chosen by me. I gave my measurements to a friend and asked him to buy all the clothes. I also created a document of identification under a false name (in this case, Martin Arenas) with a different place and date of birth and a photograph of someone else (the face of a dead actor). I bought a pork chop, wrapped it in foil, and put it in my pocket. Every time I put my hand there, the unaccustomed contact with the meat would remind me that I was in a special situation and at all costs must not let myself become captivated. Before heading out the door, I took a shower and rubbed lemon juice all over my body in order to remove as much of my personal scent as possible. Trembling, I walked the fifty meters between my residence and Guillermo Lauder’s apartment.

Pachita.

It must be noted that it was a privilege to be received there by Pachita. When the witch went to operate in other cities, thousands of people would attend. One time they had to pull her out of a pestering crowd using a helicopter. On the other days of the week, she worked on the outskirts of the capital city, serving the poor. On Fridays she healed well-to-do people at Lauder’s residence, including powerful politicians, famous artists, sick people who came from far-off countries, and urgent cases.

The door was ajar. I did not hear any voices or footsteps. The place seemed empty. Trying to walk silently, I slipped inside. Everything was dark. The windows had been covered with blankets. Trying not to trip over any furniture, I made my way to the meeting room. Three candles granted a little light to the darkness. Several bodies lay on the floor, wrapped in bloody sheets. Women and men knelt next to them, reciting prayers. Comfortably seated in an armchair was the old woman, wiping blood from her hands. Despite the half-darkness and some distance, I seemed to see her in full light due to the intense magnetism that emanated from her body. She was small, plump, with a long sloping forehead and one eye lower than the other, as if it had fallen down, veiled by a white membrane. I tried to blend in among her acolytes. It was useless. Like a cobra hypnotizing a monkey, she fixed her flashing eye right on my silhouette and, boring into me, said with a voice of great sweetness, “Come, dear child. Why are you afraid of this poor old woman? Come sit next to me.” Slowly, I moved toward her, stupefied. This woman had found the right words and tone to direct toward me. Although I was nearly forty years old, I had not matured emotionally. When I fell in love, I behaved like a nine-year-old child (corresponding to the age at which I had been abruptly uprooted from Tocopilla; the loss of the place I loved had dammed up my heart, preventing me from growing up emotionally). For all that I held my pork chop, still I fell into full fascination. I approached Pachita feeling like a son who had finally found his lost mother. She smiled at me with the universal love with which I had always hoped a woman would smile at me. “What do you want, muchachito?” The response came from my lips before I could think about it.

“I would like to see your hands.”

To general surprise — everyone wondered why she was treating me so preferentially — she put her left hand in mine. The palm of that hand had the softness and purity of a fifteen-year-old virgin! I was invaded by a sensation that is difficult to describe. Before this old woman with her disfigured face, I had the impression of being in the presence of the ideal woman whom the adolescent in me had always sought. She laughed. She withdrew her hand from mine and raised it to the level of my eyes, leaving it there, extended and still. A murmur arose from the attendees: “Accept the gift.”

“What gift?” I thought at full speed. “She’s making the gesture of giving me something, invisible of course. I’ll play along. I’ll act as if I’m taking an invisible gift. ”

I stretched out my fingers and brought them close to her palm as if to grab something. To my surprise, a very small metallic object glinted between the base of her middle and ring fingers. The unthinkable was happening. I had just been holding her hand, it was not possible that she had held anything hidden there, and yet here was the gift. I took it. It was a triangle with one eye inside it. That made an impression on me, because an eye within a triangle was the symbol of my film El Topo. (At this moment, believing that the old woman was thinking of me as a cinematographer, I missed a more profound message. On dollar bills, beside the pyramid crowned by a triangle with an eye, is the motto “In God we trust.” Perhaps Pachita, in a nonverbal language, was saying to me, “I’ll help you find what you need: your inner God.”)

I began to draw conclusions from this amazing experience. “This woman is an exceptional prestidigitator. How did she manage to make that triangle appear out of nowhere? And as a villager without any background in film, how could she tell that this was the symbol of my movie? Is Guillermo Lauder her dishonest accomplice? Whatever the case, I want to see how she heals people.” I then asked her if she would permit me to view her operations. “Of course, darling child of the soul. Come next Friday. But it is not I who operate, it is Brother.”

The following Friday I arrived on time. Pachita was waiting for me. The small apartment looked like a full bus: there were at least forty patients, some on crutches, others in wheelchairs. She asked me to follow her to a small room where there was nothing but a chromolithograph depicting Cuauhtémoc, the deified hero.

“Today, my boy, I want you to be the one who reads the poem that my Lord loves so much.”

She put on a yellow robe that was saturated with blood clots in between the gemstones and Indian designs that adorned it. She sat on a wooden bench and handed me a handwritten sheet of paper. She appeared to fall asleep. I read the verses:

You were King on this earth

you were great Majesty

and now you are Eternal Light

in the celestial throne.

Come quickly Blessed Child

come to comfort us

come to give us your counsel

and rid us of all evil.

The poem was long. Pachita occasionally yawned. Then she twisted around as if her body were receiving a being. And suddenly, what had looked like a tired old woman gave forth a raucous cry, raised her right arm, and began to speak with a man’s voice: “Dear brothers, I thank the Father for allowing me to be with you again! Bring me the first sick one!”

Patients began to file in, each with an egg in one hand. After rubbing the egg all over the patient’s body, the witch cracked it into a glass of water, then examined the white and yolk to discover the evil. If she found nothing very serious, she recommended infusions of olive, mallow, or sometimes a variety of strange things such as coffee enemas, papaya poultices, termite eggs, stewed potatoes, or human excrement. She also prescribed the tongues of certain birds, a glass of water in which rusty nails had been soaked, and remedies that were actions: one sick person was advised to find a stream, put a red flower into it, and observe how the water carried it, then put a bowl of water under the bed to absorb evil thoughts. When the problem seemed serious, she proposed an “operation.”

That first Friday, Brother Cuauhtémoc carried out ten operations. I witnessed incredible things. Dressed in my new clothes, I wanted to grip my pork chop. Pachita’s assistants, half a dozen of them, immediately ordered me to keep my hand out of my pocket. They also forbade me to cross my legs or arms, requiring me to look at Brother without turning my head. It was astounding to see this possessed woman wielding her great knife and plunging it into the flesh of the patients, making the blood spurt out. Although something in me was saying that this was all theater, an act of prestidigitation designed to impress using terror as the principal healing element, the woman’s personality dominated me. Lauder told me that one day the wife of the president of Mexico, having heard so much about her, invited her to an evening reception in the courtyard of the Governor’s Palace, where there were many cages containing different varieties of birds. When Pachita arrived, those hundreds of birds awoke and began chirping as if they were greeting the dawn. The medicine woman did not use her charisma alone. Several assistants would also contribute by giving their energy to the operation. These persons were not complicit in a hoax; they all had immense faith in the existence of Brother. In the eyes of these good people, what mattered was the action of the discarnate being. They saw Pachita only as its “flesh.” She was a “channel,” an instrument used by the god. When not in a trance, she was respected but not worshiped. For them, the discarnate being was more real than the person through which it manifested. This faith that enveloped Pachita generated a sacred atmosphere that contributed to convincing the sick that they had the possibility of being cured.

The patients, sitting in the darkened room, waited for their turn to enter the “operating room.” The aides spoke in whispers as if they were in a temple. Sometimes one of them would leave the operating room, hiding a mysterious package in his hands. He would go into the bathroom, and through the door, left ajar, one could see the glare of fire consuming the object. An assistant advised in a whisper, “Do not go until the harm has been consumed. It is dangerous to approach it while it is active. You could catch it. ” What was this “harm,” really? The patients ignored it, but the mere fact of having to refrain from urinating while one of those immolations took place produced a strange impression: they were gradually leaving habitual reality to immerse themselves in a totally irrational parallel world.

Suddenly, four assistants emerged from the operating room carrying a lifeless body wrapped in a bloodied canvas, depositing it on the floor as if it were a corpse. Once the operation was finished and the bandages were in place, Pachita required the patient to be absolutely still for half an hour, under penalty of instant death. The surgical patients, afraid of being killed by magical forces, did not make the slightest move. Needless to say, this clever arrangement served as preparation for the next patient. When Pachita called them in her low voice, always using the same formula, “It’s your turn, child of my soul,” the patient would start trembling from head to toe and reverting to childhood. I remember that on this day she gave a caramel candy to a minister while asking him in her low and tender voice, “What hurts, little one?” The man replied in a child’s voice, “For weeks I have not slept. I have to get up to urinate every half hour.”

“Do not worry; I will change your bladder.”

Pachita, after turning into Brother and always with her eyes closed, called the men first, stating that since they were weaker than the women, their pains had to be soothed first. There was nothing but a narrow bed with a plastic-covered mattress in the operating room. Each patient had to bring a sheet, a liter of alcohol, a pack of six rolls of cotton, and bandages. The assistants would remove his shirt, and if necessary — for example, for an operation on the testicles — his pants. All manipulations took place in half-darkness, by the light of a single candle, because according to Pachita electric light could damage the internal organs. The patient would cover the bed with his sheet and then lie down. An assistant would ceremoniously hand the healer a long hunting knife. The handle was wrapped in black electrical tape, and the blunt blade bore an Indian engraving with a plume. At Brother’s indication of which place on the body was to be opened, an assistant surrounded the area with cotton and liberally poured on alcohol. The smell of the substance filled the room, creating a hospital-like environment.

The first patient was the minister. Brother asked, “Enrique, have you prepared the bladder?” Pachita’s son produced a flask containing something resembling organic tissue. The man lay trembling, frozen with fear. I took his hand. The healer made an incision in his belly about fifteen centimeters long. I struggled not to pass out as I saw the blood flow. The old woman palpated the abdomen, raised her hand, made a gesture, and a pair of scissors materialized. She cut something that produced an unbearable stench. She pulled out a mass of stinking flesh, which Enrique wrapped in black paper. Then she took the new bladder from the flask. She placed it next to the wound, and to my great surprise, I saw it absorbed, without anyone pushing it, into the interior of the body. She placed the alcohol-soaked cotton wool over the incision. She pressed down for a moment, then she cleaned away the blood, and the wound disappeared without leaving a scar. “My dear child, you are cured.” Her assistants blindfolded the man, wrapped him in his sheet, and carried him out to lay him down in the waiting room. Another assistant ran to the bathroom to burn the black packet.

Despite my disbelief, this act had seemed so real that my reason began to falter. Was she a brilliant prestidigitator or a saint who performed miracles? I was ashamed of myself. How could I not believe that this old woman was a trickster? By light of a single candle, one can hide a myriad of fraudulent manipulations. And if she could perform miracles, why did she need a knife? Did she want us to believe it was a magical instrument? To prove that there was no trickery, she had an assistant hand it to her — but — did she use the same knife that was handed to her? Perhaps, in the darkness, she switched it for another knife with a rubber handle, concealed by the electrical tape, full of dog or chicken blood. It was said that she took in stray dogs out of good will, but what if instead of being a saint she was an impostor who killed these animals in order to extract their vital fluid? And why did she put cotton around the wound? The knife was never disinfected. so what was the alcohol for? Pachita, although it was said that she never ate, looked fat, with a large paunch. She always wore an apron over her clothes. What if this belly were false? Was it full of plastic bags containing blood and objects that appeared “magically”? Was she a madwoman? A pathological liar? Like Ichazo, like Castaneda, she told of things that no person of average intelligence could believe. “I know who will die here, and when. I know how many days everyone who comes to visit me has left to live.” “Do not worry about the drought. Tomorrow I will make it rain.” “I just give a push and I leave my body. Sometimes I visit places, Siberia, Mont Blanc, Mars, the moon, Jupiter.” “A cyclone was approaching the Cora Indian Territory, so I went to ask the Father for protection for them, and I got it: the cyclone was blown off course.” “When I fall into a trance, I live in the astral world. If someone destroys my body, Brother reconstructs it.” Pachita also claimed to travel in time, predicting future events or going back into the past to retrieve some object or other.

Standing at her side, I saw her pour an egg white over the eye of a blind man, then stick her index finger, with its long red-painted nail, into the eye. I saw her change a patient’s heart, seeming to open the chest with a single blow, letting loose a stream of blood that stained my face. Pachita made me put my hand into the wound to feel the torn flesh. (When I told Guillermo that it felt cold like a raw steak, he said it was because Brother performed this work in an astral dimension, distinct from our own.) I felt the new heart arrive in the hole; it had allegedly been previously purchased by Enrique; I did not know where or from whom, perhaps from a corrupt morgue employee. The muscle mass was implanted in the patient in a magical manner. This phenomenon was repeated in each operation. Pachita took up a piece of intestine that, as soon as she placed it on the “surgical patient,” disappeared into his insides. I saw her open up a skull, remove cancerous pieces of brain, and put in new gray matter. These tactile and optical illusions, if that is what they were, were accompanied by olfactory effects — the smell of blood, the stench of cancers and wounds — as well as auditory effects: the aqueous sound of viscera, the clatter of bones being cut by a carpenter’s saw. By the third operation, everything began to seem natural to me. We were in another world, a world in which natural laws were abolished. If a transfusion was needed because the patient had lost too much blood, Brother put one end of a tube in her own mouth and the other end into a hole in the patient’s arm, and began to spit out liters of reddish liquid. On two occasions I saw the illness transformed into a kind of animal that seemed to snort and moved excrescences that were like limbs. I returned to my home at midnight, astounded and covered in blood. The world would never be the same to me. I had finally seen a superior being performing miracles, whether true or false.

I decided to attend the operations every Friday. The healer’s work had gained my deep admiration. She was not getting rich with this activity. Upon leaving, the patients deposited however much money they wanted to give in a saucepan. Most left only coins, and the richest ones, those who had come from other countries, showed a strange stinginess. One man, whom she had supposedly cured of paralysis, said, “I have no money to pay you.” She replied, “Very well, pay me nothing now. When you are healed, you will return to work. Then you will pay me what you want to.” Lauder told me that Pachita lived in a modest house on the outskirts of the city surrounded by dogs, parrots, monkeys, and an eagle. Apart from supporting her children, the little money she could save went to a small school in her neighborhood. “In the poor settlements of Mexico people see nothing but nastiness. It’s almost impossible to straighten up a jerk once he’s grown big. They have to be taught good things while they’re still little.” Obviously, healing was Pachita’s vocation. If she was performing trickery, it was sacred trickery. Deception with a charitable purpose is accepted in all religions. The mystic Jacob deceived his brother and his father. In Islamic tradition, lying is forbidden, but clever solutions are accepted. A fugitive passes along a road where a sage is sitting on a stream bank. “Please,” he says, “do not tell my pursuers that I went this way.” The sage waits until the fugitive disappears from his sight, then goes and sits on the opposite bank. When the persecutors come and ask him if he saw anyone pass, he responds, “I haven’t seen anyone pass the whole time I’ve been sitting here.” For a miracle to occur, faith is necessary. Shamans know this. They perform false miracles in their ceremonies with neophytes so that the students’ rational vision will rupture and thus, convinced that there are other dimensions beside their rigid reality, they will begin to have faith. Thanks to this new vision, exceptional events can occur. Was Pachita a great creator of sacred tricks?

I attended countless surgeries over the course of three years. Many were healed. Others died. For example, two people suffering from incurable diseases came from Paris. One, a prominent journalist, had cancer of the hip. The other, who had serious heart disease, was the public relations manager of a film company. Both of them were accompanied by a Dominican priest, Maurice Cocagnac (who later wrote a book about these experiences), and were operated on by Brother. One had his heart changed; the other had a new bone inserted into his hip. Before they returned to France, Pachita said, “Dear children, you are healed. Stop taking medicines, and whatever you do, do not consult a physician before six months have passed.” As soon as he returned to Paris, the journalist assembled a meeting of doctors. The results were clear: the cancer was still there. He died a month later. The other man, however, stopped taking his pills and saw no doctors for six months. Then, when they examined him, they were speechless: the heart was healthy, working like that of a young man. I realized that in the magical world, not only faith but also obedience played a vital role. Even if one did not believe in the witch’s power, it was desirable to give that power every chance to act by following her instructions to the letter.

I later applied this idea in psychomagic. A psychomagical act must be performed to the letter, as a contract. The client must promise to obey. If he does not, or if he deviates from the instructions, out of prejudice, fear, or desire for comfort, then the subconscious realizes it can disobey, and the healing will not be achieved. When I was shooting Tusk near Bangalore, India, one of the acting elephants, perhaps unnerved by the heat, destroyed a set. Its mahout^*7 (or cornac) began to punish it with an iron bar. It was impressive to see this elephant, trembling like a child, urinating on itself with fear of its vulnerable master. The man beat it until it bled. I protested. It seemed inconceivable to me that one should punish an animal with such intense cruelty. The official who was in charge of the elephant colony said, “Please do not intervene. The trainer knows what he is doing. If you let your elephant disobey, even in something small, it will feel free to do what it wants, and later will end up killing humans.” The subconscious behaves in the same way. The trainer has to teach it to obey. This is difficult; in fact, people fall ill because they have a painful problem that they cannot solve or become conscious of. They want to be treated — that is, they want their symptoms eliminated — but not cured. Although they ask for help, they then struggle to stop that help from being effective.

Brother required unconditional collaboration between the patient and all the assistants for these operations. Sometimes the work seemed to become complicated; at those times, the surgeon and the patient himself would request the help of all those present. I remember operations during which Cuauhtémoc suddenly exclaimed through Pachita’s mouth, “The child is getting cold; warm the air quickly or we will lose him!” We all ran around hysterically in search of an electric heater. Upon plugging it in, we discovered that the electricity had been cut off. “Do something, you wretches, or the child will go into agony,” growled Brother, while the sick man, frozen with terror and on the verge of cardiac arrest, no doubt from seeing his belly opened up and his guts in the air, moaned, “Brothers, I beg you, help me.” We all brought our mouths close to his body and anxiously breathed on him, forgetting ourselves, trying desperately to warm him with our breath. “Well done, dear children,” said Brother suddenly. “The temperature is rising, the danger is over, I can continue now.” I realized that all healing is collective, tribal. The shaman does not act alone — he or she is always surrounded by invisible allies — and the sick person is not alone either. When I had the opportunity to interview the principal machi at a machitún^*8 in Temuco, Chile, I asked what methods he used to heal the sick. He replied, “The first thing I do is to ask them who is their owner.”

“Their owner?”

“That’s right, all sick people belong to someone: their spouse, their family, their employer. Those who have no owner cannot be cured. Once that is known, I discuss the price. To cure, one must organize a meal and invite friends who will help to drive away the devils with noises, drumbeats, or gunshots. Once the place is clean, I can operate accompanied by beneficent spirits. We work for the sick person here on Earth while they do the same in heaven.”

Since my meeting with Castaneda I had continued to feel a sharp pain in my liver. So, armed with an egg, I went to see Pachita. She rubbed the painful region and said, “Dear child of the soul, you have a tumor there. I will operate on you to remove it.” Seeing the pallor on my face, she laughed. “Fear not, little boy, I have been operating for over seventy years, thousands of people have been opened by the knife of Brother. If an accident had happened to any one of his patients, I would have been put in prison long ago. Listen: when I was ten years old, I saw a commotion near the tent at a circus because the pregnant elephant could not bear her baby, which was positioned sideways. There she was, in agony, lying on a carpet of sawdust. The poor performers were weeping. That elephant was the star of their show, and if she died, they too would die, from hunger. The elephant suddenly began to scream deafeningly. I do not know what happened to me then. I fell asleep, and when I woke up I was covered with blood. They told me that I had taken one of the knife thrower’s knives, opened the animal’s belly, removed her child, and then closed the wound, laying on my hands, without leaving a scar. Since then, I have never ceased to operate on both humans and animals.”

I considered what she was telling me to be a therapeutic story, completely untrue. But, seized by an irresistible curiosity, I decided to undergo the experience to see what it felt like to be in such unusual circumstances. I removed my shirt as if I were doing something funny. But once I was lying on the bed, with Pachita brandishing her knife before me dressed as an Aztec hero and surrounded by praying fanatics, I began to feel afraid. Maybe they were all crazy. Panicking, I exclaimed, “My pain is gone, Brother. It is not necessary to operate.” I tried to get up. The possessed woman, with irresistible authority, obliged me to remain lying down, placed the tip of the knife behind my left ear, and slowly lowering it said, “If you do not want me to operate on the liver, I’ll begin by opening you from here, I’ll take your heart out”—she continued lowering the knife—“then I’ll cut through your stomach, and finally, I’ll remove that bothersome devil from your liver!”

It was incredible psychological subtlety: she was forcing me to choose the less atrocious of two atrocious possibilities. Forgetting the third possibility, which was to jump up and run away, I said that she should only operate on the liver, please! A pair of scissors appeared in her hand; she pulled up a roll of my skin, and she made an incision. I heard the noise of the two steel blades. The horror began. This was not theater. I felt the pain of someone whose flesh is being cut with scissors! The blood flowed, and I thought I was going to die. Then she gave me a cut in the belly with the knife, and I had the sensation of my guts being exposed to the open air. It was horrible! I have never felt such pain. For minutes that seemed eternal, I suffered terribly and turned white. Pachita gave me a transfusion. As she spat the strange red liquid through the plastic tube that she had pushed into my wrist, I gradually felt a pleasant warmth come over me. Then she lifted my bleeding liver (mine or a calf ’s, what do I know?) and started pulling an excrescence from it. “We will pull it out at the roots,” Brother said. And I endured, in addition to the odor of the blood and the horrifying sight of my crimson viscera, the greatest pain I had ever felt in my life. I squealed shamelessly. She gave one final pull. She showed me a piece of matter that seemed to move like a toad, had her assistant wrap it in black paper, put my liver back in place, ran her hands over my belly closing the wound, and at that moment the pain disappeared. If it was an illusion, it was executed perfectly: not only I, but all who were present, among them the film producer Michel Seydoux, saw the blood flow and the belly being opened. I was blindfolded, wrapped in a sheet, carried to the waiting room, and laid down among the other surgical patients. I lay there perfectly still for half an hour, glad to be alive. Then Pachita, wiping off blood, knelt beside me, took my hands, and asked me what my name was. She embraced me in her arms, and I surrendered to my thirst for mothering. The more I asked for, the more she gave; I wanted infinite tenderness, I received infinite tenderness. This woman was a mountain, as impressive as a mythical Tibetan master. I never felt so much gratitude as at the moment when she told me I was cured and that I could and should leave. Indeed, Pachita knew the human soul and knew very well how to use a therapy that mixed love and terror. In this regard, I am reminded of the words of Maimonides at the beginning of the Treatise Berachot in the Talmud: “Gather, sages, and wait in your seats. I will give you a beautiful gift: I will teach you the fear of God.”

It is necessary to collaborate with the healer in order to free oneself from disease. Despite believing in the power of Brother, some people may very well not have wanted to recover their health. I remember a brilliant phytotherapist named Henriette, a patient of my doctor friend Jean Claude, who had been told she had no more than two years left to live. Henriette had cancer, and both her breasts had been removed. At the request of Jean Claude, who wanted to try everything, she traveled to Mexico. She stayed with us in our house. Although very depressed, she declared that she was ready to let Pachita operate on her. Pachita proposed replacing all her blood and injecting two liters of plasma from another dimension, materialized by Brother. The day came, and after the usual ceremony, Henriette lay on the bed. Brother cut her arm, and we heard her blood trickling into a brass bucket. It was a thick and foul-smelling stream. Then, as in other operations I had seen, Brother inserted the end of a plastic tube into the wound, this time raising the other end up in the air to connect it to the invisible. We heard the sound of a liquid slowly emanating from who knows where, and Brother said, “Receive the holy plasma, daughter; do not reject it.”

The day after the operation Henriette was sad, downhearted. We tried to bring her around, but to no avail. She was like a child, surly and selfish. She tried to make us feel guilty for wanting to save her from her ordeal. Two days later, a large purulent abscess appeared on her arm. Very scared, I called Enrique, who, after consulting with his mother, said, “Your friend has faith in medicine, but she rejects it. She wants to rid herself of the holy plasma. Tonight she should relieve herself in a basin and apply the excrement to her arm tomorrow morning.” I conveyed the message to Henriette, who shut herself in her room. I do not know if she followed the advice or not, but what I do know is that the abscess burst, leaving a huge hole, so deep that one could see the bone. We immediately brought her to the house of Pachita, who, as Brother, said in her masculine voice, “I have been waiting for you, my child, I will give you what you want. Come. ” The healer took her by the hand like a child, led her to the bed, and surprisingly, began to hum an old French song as she moved the knife back and forth before the patient’s wide eyes. It seemed to me that she had hypnotized her. Then she asked, “Tell me, my dear, why did you want them to cut off your breasts?”

To which Henriette, who spoke Spanish, answered in a childlike voice, “To not be a mother.”

“And then, my dear child, what do you want them to cut out?”

“The ganglia that swell up in my neck.”

“What for?”

“So that I won’t have to talk to people.”

“And what next, my child?”

“I would like them to cut out the ganglia that will swell under my arms.”

“What for?”

“So that I won’t have to work.”

“And what next?”

“I would like them to cut out the ganglia that swell around my crotch, so that I can be alone with myself.”

“And what next?”

“The ganglia in my legs, so that I won’t have to go anywhere.”

“And what do you want after that?”

“To die. ”

“Very well, my child, now I know the path of your illness. Choose: either you advance on this path, or you heal.”

Pachita put a plaster on her arm, and after three days the abscess had healed. Henriette decided to return to Paris and died two weeks later in the arms of Jean Claude. The last gesture she made was to put a wedding ring onto her doctor’s ring finger. When I told the sad news to Pachita, she told me, “Brother comes not only to heal. He also helps those who want to die. Cancer and other serious diseases present themselves like armies of warriors, following a precise plan of conquest. When you reveal to a patient who wishes to destroy herself the path that her illness is taking, she will quickly follow that path. This is why the Frenchwoman stopped fighting instead of suffering for two years. She surrendered to the disease and let it carry out its plan in two weeks.”

It was a great lesson: before this, I had believed that it was sufficient to make a person aware of their self-destructive urges to save them. Pachita made me understand that this discovery could also hasten death.

The first thing Pachita did with anyone who came to see her was to touch them affectionately. From the moment they felt this old woman’s warm hands she became the Universal Mother. Pachita knew that in all adults a child sleeps, eager for love — even those most secure in themselves — and that physical contact is more effective than words for establishing trust and putting the subject into a receptive state. This contact also seemed to allow her to make the diagnosis. I remember the day I brought a French friend, Jean Paul G., to her. He had been feeling pain for some time, and it had taken the French doctors six months to find a polyp in his intestine. Pachita ran her hands over his body and immediately exclaimed, “My boy, you have a bad lump in your insides.”

My friend was stunned! But apart from showing these almost divinatory abilities, the sorceress also gave advice that seemed to me like acts of psychomagic: one day she received a man who was on the verge of suicide because he could not bear the idea of going bald at age thirty. He had tried all possible treatments without success and could not accept that he was bald. Brother asked him, through the old woman’s mouth, “Do you believe in me?”

The man replied in the affirmative, and indeed he did have faith in Pachita. The spirit then gave these instructions: “Gather a kilo of rat excrement, including the urine, and mix it well into a paste that you will apply to your head. That will make you grow hair.”

The man protested weakly, but Pachita insisted, saying that if he wanted to avoid baldness, he had no choice. Three months later, he came back to see the old woman and said, “It is very difficult to find rat droppings, but I finally found a laboratory where they breed white rats. I persuaded one of the workers to save the droppings for me. Once I had a kilo, including urine, I made the paste, and then I realized that I did not mind having no hair. So I did not apply the ointment and decided to be content with my fate.”

Pachita had asked him to pay a price that he was not willing to pay. When he found himself confronting the act, he realized that he could accept his lot perfectly well. Faced by the reality of the difficult act that was required, he discovered that he preferred to remain bald. He left his imaginary world and stared the real world in the face. These instructions, initially seeming absurd, gave him cause to mature, putting him through a process that finally made it possible for him to accept himself as he was.

I remember one person for whom money posed a serious problem: he was unable to make a living. The old woman prescribed a strange ceremony.

“You should urinate in a pot every night until it is full. Then leave the full container under your bed for thirty days and sleep above your pee.”

I witnessed the consultation, and of course, I wondered what her intent could be. Slowly, I began to make sense of it: if a person who does not suffer any physical or intellectual disability cannot earn a living, it is because he does not want to. Some part of him could not tolerate money. Following Pachita’s prescription would expose him to some real torture; it does not take long for a pot of urine, kept under a bed, to start smelling terrible. The patient, forced to sleep above the pot, steeped in his own vapors, would unconsciously establish a symbiotic relationship: urine is yellow, like gold. But at the same time, it is waste. Producing waste is a physiological need, and the need to urinate and defecate is itself a consequence of another necessity, eating and drinking. To provide for this, one must earn money. Money, insofar as it represents energy, needs to circulate. This person was not earning a living because he felt repulsed by money, considered it dirty, vile, and did not want to be involved in handling it. He refused to participate in the movement whereby money goes in and out, turning into food. It disgusted him to acknowledge the rightful place of “gold” in the network that constitutes all existence. Pachita forced him to master that repulsion. When he found himself alone with his urine every night, he had the revelation that money is dirty only when it does not circulate. The problems had begun when he refused to look at money and stuck it under the bed. Moreover, the requirement that he continue the exercise until its end forced him to prove his will, an indispensable quality for earning a living normally.

On another occasion, a woman from whom Brother had removed lung cancer in a previous operation came back complaining that she still had severe respiratory distress. Pachita told her with great severity, “Your cancer is cured, and you have not understood that. When one thinks one is sick, the body becomes sick. You are well, but you do not want to cooperate. Do not think that you are sick and you will stop feeling discomfort.”

One must live in a world in which superstition becomes reality in order to be a witch or shaman. For my part, I did not have sufficient belief in primitive magic to become a healer. I was sure those bloody tumors that moved and snorted were just animals, lizards, frogs, whatever. Thus, although I did want to learn from Pachita, I never expected to receive her gift of making me a healer, and I realized that in order to learn from Brother I had to assume that all the miracles were faked. If I had started with the assumption that it was all genuine, I soon would have found myself at a dead end, straining to make myself into a magician with no success, or with only partial or mediocre success, because, in my belief, one cannot change one’s skin, free oneself from rational culture, and play at being a “primitive.” Thus, I found myself mentally disposed to learn something that would later serve me in my own context; for example, how to use symbolic objects in order to produce certain effects in others, or how to address myself directly to the subconscious in its own language, whether through words or actions. Later, thanks to the example of this remarkable woman, I became interested in learning about the role of magic in history. I read a good number of books on the topic, trying to identify universal elements worthy of being used in my own practice in a conscious and nonsuperstitious manner. All ancient cultures believed in the power of incantations, the idea that desires that were expressed in words in the required form would be realized. But the name of the god or the spirit was often reinforced by its association with an image; the ancients also knew intuitively that the subconscious is receptive to forms and objects. They attached great importance to the written word when it was transformed into a talisman. Another universal practice was purification, or ritual ablutions. In healing ceremonies in Babylon the exorcists would order the patients to undress, throw away their old clothes — symbols of the sick “I”—and put on new clothes. The Egyptians considered purification a preliminary prerequisite for the recitation of magical formulas, as this text illustrates: “If a man pronounces the formula for his own use, he should anoint himself with oils and salves, and hold a full censer in his hand; he must have a certain kind of natron behind his ears and a different kind of natron in his mouth; he must put on new garments after washing himself in the waters of the flood, wear white sandals, and have the image of the goddess Maat painted on his tongue with fresh ink.” The ancients also attributed the role of ally to numerous objects: magical texts were recited over an insect, a small animal, or even a necklace. Linen bands were used, and wax figurines, feathers, hair, and so forth. The mages engraved the names of their enemies in vessels that were then broken and buried; a similar destruction and disappearance was supposed to happen to their adversaries. Effigies of “evil ones” were painted on the soles of royal sandals so that the king could trample on potential invaders every day. Along similar lines, studying the Hittite witches led me to discover the concepts of substitution and identification: the mage does not destroy the evil but takes control of it, discovers its origins, removes it from the body or spirit of the victim, and returns it to the underworld. According to an ancient text, “An object is tied to the right hand and right foot of the patient, then untied, and a mouse is tied there, while the officiant says: ‘I have removed the evil and tied it to this mouse’; then the mouse is released.” Pachita extirpated evil and sent it into a plant, a tree, or a cactus, which would then slowly die. She would substitute the sick person with a lamb or a goat; the patient’s turban would be put on the head of the goat, then she would cut its throat with a knife that had previously touched the patient’s neck. According to Jewish magic it is possible to cheat, deceive, and mislead the forces of evil. Therefore, the person who is attacked by these forces goes in disguise or changes his or her name. If one wishes to purify an object, one buries it in the ground.

Pachita had told me, “I’ll visit you in your dreams.” It happened that, probably because of an intestinal infection, I had abdominal pains that went on for several days because I wanted to heal myself with herbs and not antibiotics. I slept badly for three nights, but on the fourth night I had a dream: I was in my bed, suffering the same pain that I was having when awake. Pachita came, lay down next to me, and sucked on the right side of my neck, saying, “I will heal you, my boy.” With some effort, she slid her left hand between our bodies and put it on my belly. Then she rose in the air without separating from me. We levitated horizontally for a moment, then returned down to the bed. She slowly faded away. I woke up healed, feeling no pain.

When Pachita died, Guillermo Lauder told me that the doctor could not immediately sign the death certificate because the corpse’s chest was warm. This warmth lasted for three days. Only then could he declare her dead. Some time later her gift passed to her son Enrique, who, possessed by Brother, began to operate as his mother had done. Claudia, an assistant to the film director François Reichenbach, had been in a car crash during a filming in Belize (known as British Honduras at that time) in which several nerves in her back were severed and nine vertebrae were broken. She spent three months in a coma. When she regained consciousness, she was told that she was paralyzed and would not be able to walk again. As a last resort, she traveled to Mexico and was operated on by Pachita, who, according to Claudia’s account, opened her up from the neck to the tailbone and replaced the damaged vertebrae with others that she had bought from the morgue. The following week, she was walking. This “miracle” changed her life and led her to become interested in Mexican magic. She had a strong desire to help her friends in France, for which purpose she invited Enrique to come to Paris to operate. He agreed to come.

At that time, my daughter Eugenia was suffering from an almost exclusively French disease: spasmophilia, involving very painful involuntary stomach muscle contractions. She had lost her appetite and was skin and bones. No doctor could cure her. Despite her having a university degree and a rigidly rational education — she had been raised until age sixteen by her German mother in Düsseldorf — I proposed that Brother should try to heal her. Although she did not believe in these “frauds,” she agreed out of sheer desperation. When we arrived at the apartment a Mexican assistant who had come with Enrique opened the door. Placing his finger on his lips, he indicated that we should enter in silence. The rooms were dark, the windows covered with blankets. We groped our way into the living room and sat down. Our eyes adjusted to the darkness. The silence was impressive. Suddenly, the assistant rushed to the bathroom door and opened it. A burning object glowed there, and the man murmured, “It’s an evil. Don’t go in until it is consumed. Otherwise, it can fall upon you.” And he left. Eugenia, with a contemptuous smile on her lips, grumbled, “Stories for mental retards.”

After a while the back door opened and two people came out carrying a third person who was quite pale, wrapped in a bloody sheet, apparently asleep or dead. They laid her down on the floor next to us. Horrified, my daughter asked that we leave immediately, and trembling from head to toe, she stood up to flee. A strange figure appeared, a man who had stayed hidden in the shadows, and asked Eugenia to come closer. All at once, she calmed down and followed him meekly.

I witnessed the operation. There was only one bed, as before, and the room was barely lit by a candle. A woman was lying on the floor, covered in blood, with a cheerful expression on her face. Brother, wearing an Aztec emperor’s robe, was a terrifying site. Although he wielded the hunting knife, the healer never stood up. He remained seated in the shadows. All we saw of him was his hands. The “flesh” had become impersonal. He listened to my daughter’s belly, told her that a great anger against her father had accumulated there, and that he was going to cure her of a disease that was not an injury. The knife sank into her flesh, the blood flowed, and he placed his hands in the wound, seeming to put the organs in place. Then he removed his hands, kneaded the skin, and left no trace of a cut. Eugenia never complained. Brother spoke sweetly this time and did not cause pain. As we were leaving, I remarked on this to the assistant, who told me that Brother was progressing from one incarnation to the next and that he had finally learned not to make his patients suffer. Eugenia never had spasms again, returned to her normal weight, and soon after, met the man who would be the love of her life.

After inventing psychomagic and psychoshamanism I went back to Mexico City several times to study the methods of so-called charlatans and curanderos. They are very abundant. At the heart of the capital there is a large market for witchcraft. All manner of magical products are sold there: veils, devil fish, pictures of saints, herbs, blessed soaps, Tarot cards, amulets. There are some women in gloomy back rooms with a triangle painted on their foreheads who will “clean” your body and aura. Every neighborhood has its own witch or wizard. Thanks to the faith of their patients, they often achieve a cure. Doctors trained at the universities despise these practices. For sure, this medicine is not scientific, but it is an art. And for the human subconscious, it is easier to understand the language of dreams — from a certain point of view diseases are dreams, messages revealing unresolved problems — than to understand rational language. The charlatans develop very personal techniques with great creativity, I compare them to painters: anyone can paint a landscape, but the style in which an individual does it is inimitable. Some have more imagination or talent than others, but all are useful if faith is placed in them. They speak to the primitive human that still lies inside each and every one of us.

Don Arnulfo Martinez is a soccer player turned sorcerer. I had a hard time finding him. He lives in a poor, chaotic neighborhood. The houses have numbers out of order: eight is next to sixty-two, then thirty-four, and so on. I found him by asking among his neighbors. Don Arnulfo waited for me at the end of a narrow passageway, the walls of which were covered by canary cages. I had to go through a room where his wife, his mother, and his numerous offspring were. Behind plastic curtains shone a little sacred space with shelves full of statuettes representing Christ and the Virgin of Guadalupe, many lighted candles, colored liquids in various types of bottles, and photographs from his soccer-playing days. At the center of the altar reigned a soccer ball, with its black and white pentagons. Rather than hiding the passion of his youth, the healer used it in his magical practices. To diagnose my ailments he first rubbed me all over my body with a bouquet of red and white carnations, then did the same with the soccer ball. He predicted economic problems. He carved my name on a candle with his long fingernails and told me to burn it in my room until it was consumed. By chance, because he wanted it to happen, or by means of some trick, the canaries began to sing when he placed one of his hands on my forehead and the other on my heart to release me from my preoccupations. Nothing is better than a chorus of canaries for calming the soul. Don Arnulfo tells us, “Everyone should be healed with what he loves most, without worrying about what others think. Objects are receptacles for energy, positive or negative. They are not evil or sacred. It is the hatred or love you place in them that transforms them. A soccer ball can become holy.”

Gloria is an energetic woman dressed in shorts and a t-shirt. She is tall, muscular, and the mother of three children. Her loyal assistant is her husband, a small, thin man. Gloria does not appear to have anything extraordinary about her. She lives in an apartment and sells dolls in the likenesses of characters from children’s television shows. There is nothing on the bare walls but one large portrait of María Sabina because when Gloria falls into a trance she receives the spirit of this sage of the mushrooms. Her patients then address her as Abuelita (Grandma). She does not have a special sacred place. She receives people in her bedroom, which is almost completely filled by a very wide bed and a wardrobe. She sits on a corner of the bed and has the client stand in front of her. She closes her eyes, bends down, and then straightens up transformed into Abuelita, an old woman who speaks broken Spanish mixed with Nahuatl phrases. She examines the person with her hands, after which she begins to dictate a long series of herbs, flowers, and ancient medicines. Her husband religiously writes down these recipes in a school notebook. Finally, “María Sabina” intertwines her fingers and makes a purifying circle with her arms. The patient puts her legs into the circle, draws them back out as if pulling a sword from its sheath, and then does the same with the arms, head, and torso. “You are cleansed, my grandchild.” While Abuelita says goodbye and Gloria begins to emerge from the trance, the husband makes photocopies of the handwritten notes on an old machine. Here is one that advises fumigation for purifying a house to expel negative spirits: “Put a little oil and twenty-one chiles de arbol (seeds removed) into a frying pan, fry them, and burn them. As the smoke from the pan passes through the house, say ‘I cut, I separate, I remove, I destroy everything that is not in harmony with us and every being of darkness.’ Once the pan has passed through the house, leave it in a secure place outside the house for about ten to fifteen minutes. Return to the house and open the windows. Do this on three occasions as close together as possible, but not on the same day.”

Éliphas Lévi, in his book Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual, summarized this in a few words: “To know, to dare, to will, to keep silence.” One could say that Abuelita summarized healing witchcraft in four phrases. I cut: the ties are cut that join the patient to negative desires, feelings, and thoughts. I separate: the spirit is separated from its material prison. I remove: the harm is removed (the disease is seen as a demon sent by envious people or malevolent entities). I destroy: the harm is destroyed outside the patient’s body. The disease has been assimilated into an object and is still considered alive. Gloria, in a trance, adds a new dimension to the act of possession when Abuelita tells the patient, “Now that you have made contact with me, I am also in you. You go, but I go with you. I will not abandon you. When you want to help your fellow humans call for me and, through you, I will help them.” She is telling us that the sublime values of the spirit, once revealed, are irreversible.

Don Ernesto lives in a more affluent neighborhood and has adapted his apartment to use it for his business. The room looks like a little railway station. There are long wooden benches along each side. Clients sit on them, patiently waiting to be cleansed after having previously stopped at the desk by the door and paid his wife the equivalent of three dollars. In the back of the room there is a square on the floor made of white tiles, three by three meters. There Don Ernesto officiates, assisted by his daughter.

The applicant is asked to write what he or she wishes to be rid of on a sheet of paper: illnesses, financial problems, emotional troubles, family tensions, anxieties, and so forth, and to stand at the center of the square. The daughter, squeezing a plastic bottle filled with alcohol, squirts a stream in a circle around the client. Don Ernesto sets light to it. The sheet of paper with the list of evils is consumed in the flames. Once the ring of fire has burned out, he sweeps the client’s body with a bouquet of chrysanthemums. Then he extends his open palms in an act of supplication. He stretches his right hand toward the ceiling, makes as if to take some of the air (the divine world), places it in his open left palm, and has the patient grab hold of the invisible gift. Don Ernesto defines this gift with a single word: sometimes peace, other times love, prosperity, or health. The client leaves with clenched hands as if holding a treasure. From Don Ernesto, one understands that in order to give something, it is not necessary to possess it materially.

Don Toño is a Huichol Indian. His clothes are white with beautiful embroideries mixing yellow, sky blue, black, and white. Once a week, an avid promoter picks him up on the mountain and brings him into the capital so that he can practice his medicine in the back room of an esoteric bookstore. The shop owner, equally avid, charges the equivalent of fifty dollars in advance for each consultation. After bowing and uttering an invocation to the four cardinal points in his language, Don Toño asks what the illness is and where the client feels pain. After pressing his fingers on the exact spot he begins to “sweep” the body with a fan made of stiff feathers, from the outermost points to the center of the pain. He gives the impression that he is gathering up the evil that has spread throughout the body. Then, with arms open like the wings of an eagle, he puts his mouth on that center and starts sucking. Next he looks up and spits out a stone of various colors that range from sepia to black, sometimes small, sometimes larger. He has removed the evil. I had a wart on the corner of one eye. After sucking up and spitting out my evil (a greenish pebble), Don Toño put his hands together as if in prayer. He sucked on my fingertips and spat a beautiful crystal into my palm. Then he gave me a beaded necklace with his four sacred colors. From him, one learns that the purpose of medicine is not only to cure, but also for the patient to see his or her own values revealed.

Soledad is a mature woman, brunette, very strong, an actress by profession, who keeps the doors of her apartment open all weekend giving free massages. She is a medium and is possessed by the spirit of Magdalena. When she saw me coming she recognized me, which did not surprise me since she is part of the world of theater and film. But this was not the reason why she saw me before seeing anyone else. She led me to the small room in which she practices, where there was a small white enameled iron cabinet, like those one sees in hospitals, a black leather massage table, and on the wall a photograph of a woman, looking very Mexican, whose face with strikingly bright eyes was familiar to me.

“She’s my lady, Magdalena. She was Don Juan’s teacher. You knew her; she told me about you. You went to see her because you had a shortage of energy due to a theatrical failure, right?”

Indeed! I had had so much trouble with the vanity of the actors, the meanness of the press, the little interest shown by the public, and the huge economic loss, that both my energy and my joy of living had deserted me. Someone recommended that I visit Magdalena for an energetic massage. I did so. I found her to be an indefinable woman. On the one hand she was primitive, with simple and direct folk wisdom, and on the other hand at times she revealed an educated mind, using phrases worthy of a university professor. The only way I can define her is to say that she was a like diamond, always showing some new and different facet. She had me undress and lie face down on her rectangular table. She showed me a large jar filled with a paste that looked like Vaseline, and told me that the Mayans of Quintana Roo had taught her how to make this ointment. She smeared it all over my back and also my neck and legs. There was no massage, just a gentle application of the paste. Then she put her hands on my head and prayed in a strange language. I felt lighter, more and more cheerful, and had a fit of the giggles. My depression and fatigue vanished. Before I left, I wanted to pay her. She stopped me. “I did very little. The ointment is what helped you, thank it.” I asked what it was made of and, smiling mischievously, she replied, “A few herbs that you wouldn’t know and a lot of marijuana ground into a powder and dissolved in hot petroleum jelly. Marijuana awakens joy in the body. The body transmits it to the spirit, and the spirit realizes that beneath all of your troubles, it remains intact, like a bright jewel. Then the weight vanishes because it was just a bad dream.”

Soledad confirmed Magdalena’s ability to adopt different personalities. On one occasion they had been walking past the Palace of Fine Arts, where a foreign dance troupe was putting on a program, and Soledad had complained sadly that she could not go to see them due to lack of money, because tickets were very expensive. Magdalena had told her to follow her: “They will let us in for free.” They were humbly dressed. Soledad felt self-conscious but followed her teacher. Magdalena changed her attitude, and in a few seconds she looked like a princess. One might have said that she was wearing an invisible evening gown. The doormen bowed to her and let the two women pass through. The ushers, with looks of fascinated respect, showed them to a box. They were able to watch the ballet in complete tranquillity, without anyone bothering them.

The recipe for the ointment was a secret. Soledad did not know that Magdalena had done me the honor of telling it to me. It is true that Soledad’s massages were excellent. Her hands, with the fingertips brought together with the thumb, were like snake heads; her arms like the undulating bodies of the snakes that she made slither over the skin, pressing until she seemed to be massaging the bones, not the flesh. At the same time, for every part of the body on which she lingered, she recited the name of some Nahuatl god and an oration addressed to that god. She divided the body into twenty sections, with twenty gods. At the belly (Kath), instead of naming a god, she sang the patient’s name, converting him or her into the center of the divine group. Then she spread on the paste and the marijuana took effect. It was a mystical euphoria. Disease and drunkenness were forgotten. The patient, feeling healthy, regained faith. When the effects of the ointment ceased, the deceived subconscious continued to believe that the body was healthy, so the healing was accomplished.

Don Rogelio is known as the Rabid Healer. He is an old man, thin, yellow skinned, toothless, dressed in black with a skull ring on each finger. He says, “People are envious, and they act on it. Jealousy entangles the spirit; envy causes damage. So they must be found and driven out.” He cites the Gospel of Luke, in which Jesus healed a man possessed by an unclean spirit, shouting at the demon with compelling authority, “Come out of him!”

“When the spirit is tangled, I follow the example of our Lord and liberate it by force.” Don Rogelio, standing in front of the patient, whips the air around the latter’s body with a red rooster, uttering thunderous cries of rage:

“Get out, you fucking bastard! Go! Go! Leave this Christian in peace!”

From him, one learns that one must proceed with total certainty and absolute authority. The slightest doubt causes failure. There is a Zen saying: “One grain of dust in the blue of midday darkens the whole sky.”

I attended the healings performed by Don Carlos Said at various times throughout the years. Beside Pachita he is one of the most creative healers, in constant development and adding new elements to his sessions. When I visited him for the first time he received me in a room of his large apartment in an old building not far from the city center. People were waiting in the lounge amidst vases of flowers and paintings depicting Christ. Many people told me that Don Carlos had cured them of dangerous cancers. He had a small altar, similar to those in Catholic temples. Beside it was an old Spanish-style wooden chair with red velvet cushions. According to Said, although we did not see her, his teacher, Doña Paz, was sitting there. This wise old lady saw the patients and referred to them as “little boxes”—forms containing different elements, illnesses, pains, and so forth. She dictated the remedies to him that would cure these evils. Years later, Don Carlos Said converted the second floor of his home into a temple.

Upon entering, the hopeful visitors find themselves among rows of chairs, arranged as in a church or a theater. There is room for about fifty people. Before them stands an altar, a platform with twelve steps leading up to it, at the top of which is a rectangular table with seven large altar candles burning on it. At each corner of the altar is a vase of chrysanthemums. The walls are covered with pictures, truly in good taste, showing the Stations of the Cross. Don Carlos officiates dressed in white, like a Mexican Indian, and is assisted by two women in white robes who wear no makeup, their hair cut short or else tied at the neck forming a bun. They resemble nuns. To the left of the participants is a row of mattresses where the patients lie wrapped in blankets with bouquets of fresh herbs applied to their bodies.

As soon as the prospective patient enters another assistant pours a little of a magical perfume called Seven Machos onto his hands from a black bottle, then rubs it all over the patient’s head and body, thus severing the ties that bind him to the outside. He is entering a completely sacred place. Whatever the sick person is wearing, it must all be brought into the temple. Nothing may be left outside in the ordinary world. What is left behind cannot be cured. Devils are waiting, and as soon as the sick person came back out, they would pounce on him again.

The patients are treated in strict order of their arrival. But there are some who have arrived at dawn, selected for special treatment. They are sitting on a bench, their bodies and heads covered by white blankets. Under the bench Said has placed a basin full of burning coals and incense. A dense, perfumed smoke rises from it, enveloping them.

The healer asks the patient to stand barefoot in front of the altar on a triangle of salt that has been dyed black, surrounded by a circle of white salt. The first thing he does is to put a thick piece of rope with a slipknot around the patient’s neck. It sends the message, “This sickness is your sickness, your responsibility. You do not come here to give it to me. Let your spirit recognize it and turn away from it.” To emphasize this Don Carlos folds his arms tightly around the patient with his large hands closed, making a cross, then shuts invisible latches in the air. He takes three raw eggs with his left hand and begins to rub the body of his patient with them. Suddenly, he wraps the eggs in a Mexican handkerchief, a red scarf. He keeps rubbing. Then he throws the package forcefully into a container and listens as the eggs explode inside the fabric. He has removed and destroyed some of the damage. Now, holding a knife, he begins to make fierce cuts in the air around the patient. He is cutting away mad desires, mad feelings, mad ideas. He sprays alcohol in a triangle and lights it on fire. When the flames subside he takes the rope, soaks handkerchiefs in the Seven Machos perfume, and unfolding them moves them over the patient from head to toe, using the perfume as a blessing. Before leaving, he gives the patient a paper cup with filtered water and a slice of lemon dipped in black seeds. The purification must not only be external but also internal. He ends the ceremony by giving the patient a heart-shaped sugar candy to suck on. During this complex act, which varies, adding new details for each illness, Don Carlos speaks as if in a trance, revealing that someone has stuck a doll full of pins or hired a negative sorcerer to send evil. Healing is a struggle against an external enemy in which the healer, assisted by invisible allies who gather around him, is always in danger from negative entities that may attack him for having removed the evil. All healers claim that if some heal and others do not, it is because magical operations are not enough: it is necessary for a change to occur in the patient’s mentality. Those who live in constant request must learn to give.