The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky: The Creator of El Topo

Prologue

Though I have written these memoirs in novelistic style, all the people, places, events, books, and quotations by sages are real.

I was raised by a merchant father. All the wisdom he had to offer me could be summed up in two proverbs: “Buy low and sell high” and “Don’t believe in anything.” I had no teacher from whom I could learn to love myself, others, and life. From adolescence on, driven by the thirst of an explorer lost in the desert, I sought a master who could show me that there was some meaning in my useless existence. A voracious reader of literature, I found only self-absorbed and pretentious meanderings there. A very cynical phrase by Marcel Duchamp led me to flee that sterile world: “There is no finality; we construct from tautology and arrive at nothing.”

I sought consolation in books of Eastern philosophy, holding for dear life onto the notion of enlightenment or awakening. I learned that Shakyamuni Buddha awoke while meditating under a tree. According to his disciples, the holy man perceived the deepest truth by ceasing to preoccupy himself with the question of his survival after death. Twenty-eight generations later, in China, Bodhidharma sat in silence for nine years in front of a stone wall until he discovered in his consciousness that fathomless emptiness, like a pure blue sky, in which neither truth nor illusion can be distinguished. . The longing to free myself from the terror of dying, of being nothing, of knowing nothing, had dragged me implacably into a quest for this mythic awakening. Striving for silence, I ceased to be so attached to my ideas. To further this goal, I wrote all of my beliefs in a notebook, then burned it. After this, requiring calm in my intimate relationships, I shunned the vulnerability of any sort of self-abandon, always setting up aloof relationships with women, thereby protecting my individualism behind panes of ice. When I met Ejo Takata, my first true master, I wanted him to guide me to enlightenment by purifying my mind of the last illusions I had not yet succeeded in uprooting. I saw myself as conqueror of both mind and heart.

“Feelings no longer dominate me. Empty mind, empty heart.” When I solemnly proclaimed these words before my Japanese teacher, he burst into laughter, which was quite disconcerting.

Then he answered: “Empty mind, empty heart — intellectual raving! Empty mind, full heart: That is how it should be.”

This book is a story of two practices. The first, with the master, was that of taming the intellect. The second, with the magical women, was that of breaking down emotional armor so that I would finally come to see that the emptiness I longed for was a flower rooted in the ground of love.

In this book I tell the stories of four magical women, but there are three others whose portraits are absent. One is the healer (curandera) Pachita, whom I have previously described at length in Le Théâtre de la Guérison and La Danse de la Réalité. In these books, I tell of the life-changing experiences I had with her. Yet there is one event that I omitted from those books (perhaps out of a sense of caution). It happened when I was participating in a séance featuring one of her magical operations. The hermanito (“little brother,” Pachita’s trance-controlled personality) was about to use a hunting knife to cut into the chest of a sick man and remove his heart. The replacement heart was waiting in a large jar. (Where on earth had the sorceress found that organ? And why did we, the entranced onlookers, find it perfectly natural that she should propose curing a sick, living heart by replacing it with a dead one? A mystery.)

Suddenly, in the very midst of the dramatic operation (moving shadows, blood everywhere, a horrible stench in the air, the screams of the patient), Pachita seized the ring finger of my left hand and, with a single, swift movement, slipped a gold ring onto it. It fit perfectly, as if it was made for my finger. Without pausing to observe my reaction, she continued with the operation: she pulled a palpitating mass of bloody flesh from the man’s chest (which her son hurriedly wrapped in black paper and took away to be burned in the toilets), she placed the dead heart in the bloody wound, and she closed the wound by pressing her palms upon it. Then we rubbed the man’s chest with alcohol, noticing that there was no scar at all, just a small, triangular bruise.

I returned home, totally overwhelmed, and slept deeply. When I awoke, the ring was no longer on my finger. I spent hours searching for it in vain. What was the meaning of Pachita’s gesture? Was it some sort of spiritual marriage? Perhaps. Thanks to my relationship with her, years later, in Paris, I was able to create what I call psychomagie (psychomagic) and psychochamanisme (psychoshamanism). Did the curandera foresee that this would happen? Or was she doing something to make it happen, because she intended it to? A mystery.

Maria Sabina, the mushroom priestess, is also absent from this book’s account. How old was she when we began our dream relationship? A hundred years? Possibly more. .

I never met her in the flesh. In order to do that, I would have had to undertake a ten-hour drive into the Mazatec Sierra and then a climb through a narrow pass surrounded by dizzying precipices in order to reach Huautla.

The truth is that I had never harbored any intention of seeking out the abuelita (little grandmother), as she was known. It was she who sought me out. As I was preparing for the shooting of my movie The Holy Mountain, I had also created a marionette show, Haut les mains (Hands Up), which depicted visions produced by the seeds of a plant known colloquially as “seeds of the Virgin” (ololiuhqui—“round thing”—in Nahuatl), a sort of natural, LSD-type hallucinogen that Toltecs and Aztecs regarded as a divinity worthy of worship.

One day, I was chewing a handful of these seeds while perched on a ladder to adjust some spotlights for the stage in the Casa de la Paz (House of Peace), and I had a vision: I saw the totality of the universe as a compact mass of light having the form of a round body in perpetual expansion, and in full consciousness. This was so powerful that I emitted a guttural cry, lost my balance, and fell from the ladder. I landed hard on my feet, dislocating both ankles. In a few hours they were very swollen, causing me great pain. After taking several sedatives, I fell asleep and dreamed I was a crippled wolf dragging two wounded hind legs. Maria Sabina appeared to me. She showed me a very large, white book surrounded by light.

“My poor animal! This book is the perfect word, the language of God. Don’t worry about knowing how to read it. Just enter its pages and merge with them.”

I moved toward the light. My whole body except for the paws of my hind legs entered it. The old woman then caressed me with such tremendous love that I woke up in tears. I saw with astonishment that my ankles were no longer swollen, and I felt not the slightest pain.

In those days I certainly did not believe that it was the Mazatec curandera herself who had literally come to heal me. I attributed her image to a construction of my unconscious, and I was gratified by my ability to heal myself alone, thanks to a therapeutic dream.

Some time previously, Maria Sabina had apparently initiated contact with me through the intermediary of a painter friend, Francisco Fierro. Returning from Huautla, where he went to eat mushrooms with the curandera, Francisco had brought me a jar of honey in which were embedded six pairs of the niñitos santos, or the “sacred little children.”

“These are a gift to you from Maria Sabina. She saw you in a dream. It seems you are going to accomplish a work that will help the world realize the true values of our culture. Nowadays, the hippies are destroying the ancient traditions. Huautla is overrun by tourists, drug dealers, journalists, doctors, soldiers, and police agents. The niñitos santos have lost their purity. But these twelve apostles are special, because they have been blessed by abuelita. Eat all of them.”

I have already recounted my experience with these magic mushrooms in La Danse de la Réalité, but I must confess that at first I had doubts about my painter friend. Perhaps the old woman had not really dreamed of me; perhaps, with all the best intentions, Francisco had concocted the story himself. I found it difficult to believe that someone could influence reality through dreams, yet Francisco insisted that these mushrooms contained all the wisdom of ancient Mexico. He ate them often, and he did not hesitate to feed them to his young daughters — two strange creatures who were five and six years old, with large, adult eyes.

Hence my utter astonishment when, on the same morning that I woke up with my ankles healed, I received a phone call from Francisco Fierro: “Tonight, abuelita visited me in my sleep and told me that she was going to heal you. How were you feeling when you woke up this morning?”

Coincidence? Telepathy? Could Maria Sabina really enter into my dreams and heal my body in that dimension? My intuition said yes, my reason said no. This is why I have not included Maria Sabina as one of the characters in this book: I cannot exclude the possibility that she is a sort of illusion personal to me. In any case, whether illusion or reality, Maria Sabina continued to appear in my dreams until the time of her death — always in difficult moments, and always in a way that was very helpful to me.

The third person absent in this account is the Chilean singer Violeta Parra. Her fame is so great — she is praised by poets such as Pablo Neruda (“a saint of the finest clay”), Nicanor Parra (“a bird of earthly paradise”), Pablo de Rokha (“subterranean simplicity”), and so many others — that what I could add would be superfluous. I met her in Paris, where she resided during two periods: first in 1954 for two years, then in 1961 for three years. During the first period she was not yet famous, and she earned her living singing in a small cabaret in the Latin Quarter called L’Escale. Her miserable wages were just enough to pay for a room in a one-star hotel. There, she often cooked a simple Chilean meal of char-grilled meat, cornbread, and tomato and onion salad, which she would share with her six main friends, of whom I was one. She refers to this in her autobiography, written in verse:

As the law commands,

justice must be rendered in all things;

obeying this with delight,

I hereby name six

archangels, who, you see,

protect me with their friendship,

offering me affinity in this distant world;

and when their hands reach out to me,

my darkness lights up.

I say it and repeat it:

a little heart of coriander

for my friend Alejandro,

who comforted me in Paris

with a clove-scented flower

and a friendly smile.

His hand was a delight

down there in that absent life;

yesterday, you planted some seeds;

today, they flower and bear fruit.

She says that I comforted her in Paris, but it was she who helped me, inspiring me with her tenacity and energy. Violeta would sing from ten o’clock at night until four in the morning, then get up at eight o’clock and rush off to record Chilean folk songs (“to the human and to the divine”), which she had collected and learned directly from the lips of old peasants. She recorded these for the Chant du Monde ethnomusicology library, and for the Phonothèque Nationale at the Musée de l’Homme.^*1

I was indignant: “But Violeta, they are not paying you a centime for this! You must see that they are exploiting you in the name of culture!”

“I’m not stupid. I know they’re exploiting me, but I do it with pleasure. France has one of the greatest museum cultures, and I know they will always conserve these songs. I’m saving an important part of Chilean folklore. For the good of my country’s music, it doesn’t matter if I work for free. In fact, I’m even proud not to be paid for it! Sacred things should be protected from the power of money.”

Thus Violeta taught me a lesson I never forgot. It was her example that inspired me always to offer tarot readings and psychomagic counseling free of charge.

When she returned to Paris seven years later, it was as a singer who was famous and respected in Chile not only for her art but also for her precious research in forgotten folklore. Now she recorded her own songs on the famous Barclay label (including the celebrated Gracias a la Vida). She also sang at the huge annual festival of popular music organized by l’Humanité, the French communist daily newspaper. In spite of this success, she remained a simple woman, resembling a humble peasant. Yet her delicate frame was inhabited by a soul of superhuman strength.

One day, she and I walked together along the banks of the Seine and arrived at the Louvre.

“What an incredible museum!” I exclaimed. “The weight of so many great works of art, so many great civilizations. . we poor Chileans are crushed by it. Our traditions are mere straw huts compared to pyramids, mere clay pots compared to the Sphinx. .”

“Be quiet!” she commanded me with an imperious tone. “The Louvre is a cemetery. But we — we are alive! Life is more powerful than death. I’m just a tiny woman, but this huge edifice doesn’t impress me. Mark my words: Before long, you’ll see my works exhibited here.”

I didn’t know whether to consider her crazy or just the victim of an extremely naive vanity. Besides, she was a singer, not a painter or sculptor!

Violeta had very little money. She bought some iron wire, some cheap rag cloth, some wool of different colors, some clay, and some tubes of oil paint. With these modest materials, she began to fashion tapestries, jugs, little sculptures, and oil paintings. They were her own works, yet they also were an expression of a Chilean folklore that had disappeared from history but was still alive in my friend’s unconscious. In April 1964, Violeta Parra inaugurated her great exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at the Marsan Pavillion attached to the Palace of the Louvre!

This incredible woman taught me that if we desire something with the totality of our being, we will finally achieve it — perhaps not always as rapidly as in this instance, yet Violeta showed me that the impossible becomes possible through patience and commitment.

I saw another example of this immense patience and perseverance in the Spanish writer Francisco Gonzalez Ledesma, who, under the pseudonym Silver Kane, wrote more than a thousand cowboy novelettes for the popular market. He began producing them in 1951, when he was twenty years old, in order to earn his living. He continued until 1975, at the rate of one book a week. After that and continuing to the present, he began to write under his real name. These were the books he really wanted to write: a type of detective novel written in high literary style. These works earned him the Planète Prize in 1984 and also the French Mystère Prize for the best foreign novel.

Under the Franco regime, writers were treated as lowly workers, receiving no royalties and only a meager salary. They were required to arrive at an office early in the morning and to work for ten hours at a stretch. When Francisco returned home, having spent the whole day writing plots for comic books and working on the publisher’s accounting as well, he worked on his Silver Kane books. Very late in the night, he spent time on what he really wanted to write: books that he could sign with his real name. He was also assigned the task of researching the American West. His integrity caused him to refuse the temptation to use the same theme twice, and he always based his books on historical facts. Furthermore, he found time to study for the exam that allowed him to earn a diploma of attorney, a profession at which he succeeded brilliantly. When I asked this titan how he was able to accomplish all this (to say nothing of being married with children), he replied: “By sleeping very little — almost not at all.”

The publisher’s rules for his Silver Kane work were so extreme that if he did not hand in his manuscript when the office opened on Friday mornings, he could lose his job. One night, when there was an electrical failure, he sat on the roof and wrote by the light of the moon.

He wrote these cowboy adventures with total humility; he harbored no hope that they would attract educated readers, knew they held no possibility of expounding at length on the deeper aspects of thought, and understood full well that these works would be despised by literary critics. Furthermore, he knew that they would enable him only to survive and never to become rich. This attitude is strangely akin to the philosophy of certain Zen proverbs: “Act without any final goal,” “Do your best at whatever holds your work,” “Seek not perfection, but authenticity,” “Discover the inexhaustible in the silence of the ego,” “Abandon all will to power,” “Practice day and night, without sleeping.”

This is why I have selected phrases from Silver Kane as epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter in this book. They have the same direct language as Zen koans, a purity where rational calculation has no place. Both tragic and comic, they exude the perfume of enlightenment.

Many people know nothing of koans, and even those who do know do not accord them their essential importance. A koan is a question that a Zen master gives to a disciple who is then to meditate and reflect upon it and (sometimes immediately, sometimes years later) offer a response. A koan is an enigma that holds a fundamental absurdity, for it is impossible to reply to one by using logic. And this is precisely its purpose: to open our initial point of view to the universal so that we understand that the intellect (words, words, words, and still more words) is useless in helping us find a response. In fact, we do not really live in the world; we live in a language. We think that we are intelligent because we can manipulate ideas and that things become known and real because we are able to define them — but if we really want our life to change, we must undergo a mutation of the mind, opening the doors of intuition and creative energies so that our unconscious becomes an ally.

Some students take twenty years to find the right response to a koan. Others, instead of searching for a response that engages every aspect of their being (a response far more complex than the words of ordinary language), choose to identify with their intellect, offering a response that is actually a clever explanation. They then imagine that they have become Zen masters because of their cleverness. If our response to a koan leaves us as we were before, then we have resolved nothing. To truly resolve a koan is to undergo a mental cataclysm that causes our worldview, our psychic stance, and any sort of self-concept to crumble, precipitating us into the void — a void that engenders us, enabling us to be reborn freer than before and, for the first time, to be in the world as it is instead of as we have learned it is.

In a certain book on personal development (which I shall refrain from naming) the writer, a Zen disciple, receives a koan from a woman master: “How can you get a goose out of a bottle without breaking the bottle or hurting the goose?” Faced with the student’s total perplexity, the master offers this response: “The easiest way to get the goose out without hurting it is to put the bottle on its side, and place some food outside the opening. Then the goose will simply walk out of the bottle. After all, this koan never mentions how large the opening is, so there’s no reason to assume it’s too small for the goose to pass through easily.” Such an answer serves to show only the student’s stupidity — or cleverness. . but the purpose of a koan is not to test a student’s cleverness. This so-called master cheated by imagining a bottle without a narrow opening. If that was the case, the goose would not be trapped in the bottle in the first place and could enter and leave as it pleased. In the real Zen tradition, the student spends days or months trying to resolve this enigma. One day, he appears before the master, beaming with joy:

“I’ve finally solved the koan!”

“How?” asks the roshi (spiritual leader).

“The goose is out!” exclaims the student.

The goose is a living principle enclosed by rigid, inert limitations. This answer shows that the disciple has actually freed himself from his logical intellect, which separated him from the totality of life to which his being belongs.

But the writer of this book on personal development is convinced he understands it all. He poses to his readers (in rather awkward terms) one of the most classic koans: A monk says to his student, “Observe, my dear student, the sound of a clap,” and the old master claps his hands. Then, watching his student attentively, he says: “Now, dear student, can you demonstrate for me the sound of only one hand clapping?”

Again, the author proposes an extremely naive solution: “We begin with the assumption that it is impossible to clap without using two hands. Yet the sound of a clap can in fact be produced by only one hand whipping the fingers quickly against a part of the palm. . I suggest that the reader practice this movement as if he was playing castanets. He will observe that this can produce the sound of a clap made by only one hand.”

Is this supposed initiate trying to tell us that in order to solve one of the most famous of all Zen koans, it helps to be a good castanet player? We cannot resist conjuring up the image of a severe, ancient Zen master whipping out a sword, cutting off both this initiate’s hands with a single blow, and then asking: “Now what is the sound of no hands clapping?”

I have written this book in an attempt to give an accurate explanation of the nature of the struggle that allows us to understand koans and the beneficial change that occurs when we truly resolve a koan. It is also a summary of the first five years I spent in meditations guided by the most honest human being I have ever known.