Alejandro Jodorowsky - Manual of Psychomagic: The Practice of Shamanic Psychotherapy

Praise forAlejandro Jodorowsky and His Works

Jodorowsky is a brilliant, wise, gentle, and cunning wizard with tremendous depth of imagination and crystalline insight into the human condition.

DANIEL PINCHBECK, AUTHOR OF BREAKING OPEN THE HEAD

Alejandro Jodorowsky seamlessly and effortlessly weaves together the worlds of art, the confined social structure, and things we can only touch with an open heart and mind.

ERYKAH BADU, ARTIST AND ALCHEMIST

His films El Topo and The Holy Mountain were trippy, perverse, and blasphemous.

WALL STREET JOURNAL

The best movie director ever!

MARILYN MANSON, MUSICIAN, ACTOR, AND MULTIMEDIA ARTIST

An autobiographical work by an octogenarian, The Dance of Reality begs to be read as a culminating work....

LOS ANGELES TIMES

The Dance of Reality [film is] a trippy but big-hearted reimagining of the young Alejandros unhappy childhood in a Chilean town....

NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

Rather than clarifying the meaning of his imagery, [The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky] only inspires readers to enjoy its mystery... a worthy read, filled with growing pains and crises that end in artistic triumph and achievement of wisdom and compassion.

SCENE4 MAGAZINE

Introductionto Psychomagic

Freeing the Shackles of Memory

After having studied and memorized the seventy-eight Arcana of the Tarot of Marseille, I signed a contract with myself: Once per week, in whatever popular caf, I will give free Tarot readings. This I will do until the end of my life. I have been completing this promise for more than thirty years. I turned the Tarot reading into a kind of synthetic psychoanalysis that I call tarology. Essentially, the goal of tarology is not to guess the future but rather, guided by the Arcana, question the consultant about the past in order to help him or her solve current problems. People of all ages, nationalities, and social, economic, and consciousness levels come to the caf where I read their Tarot. There is no lack of those who ask for my advice (the background being a need for permission to do what one dares not do) or for a divination (as positive as possible). I must, therefore, frame each question.

Am I going to meet a man?

I cannot tell you if you are going to meet a man, but I can tell you why you havent met one.

Should I leave my wife and children for a lover?

I cannot tell you if you should or should not do this or that thing, but I can tell you the reasons that you have to continue living with your family and the reasons that you have for going with the other. Weighing the advantages and disadvantages of both, you must choose what most suits you.

All predictions and advice are takeover attempts designed by the Tarot reader to convert the consultant into the magicians subject. When the consultant no longer considers the unconscious an enemy and loses the fear of being him- or herself, the consultant can uncover the trauma causing the suffering. When this happens, he or she tends to ask for the solution.

Okay, finally I know I am in love with my mom, which impedes my forming a stable relationship. Now, what do I do?

Yearnings to give old men oral sex torment me because, when I was a child, my grandfather put his penis in my mouth. How do I liberate myself from this?

Having confirmed to myself that sublimating the undesirable urge either through an artistic activity or through acts of social service does not eliminate repressed desires, I invented psychomagic.

Psychoanalysis is a technique that heals through words. The consultant, who is called the patient, sits back in a chair or on the sofa. The psychoanalyst is, at no time, allowed to touch the patient. To free the patient from his or her painful symptoms, he or she is only asked to recall dreams, take note of slips and accidents, separate from the language of the will, and say, without breaks, whatever comes to mind. After a long time of confusing monologues, the patient sometimes manages to revive a recollection, buried in the depths of his or her memory.

They changed my nanny.

My little brother destroyed my dolls.

They forced me to live with my smelly grandparents.

I surprised my father making love to a man, and so on.

The psychoanalystwho helps the patient progress by converting the messages sent by the unconscious into a reasoned discoursebelieves that, once the patient discovers the cause of his or her symptoms, the patient can eliminate them. But it does not end like this! When an unconscious urge emerges, we can only be released by fulfilling the urge.

Psychomagic proposes that we act, not just talk. The consultant, following a path contrary to that of psychotherapy, instead of teaching the unconscious to speak a rational language, learns the language of the unconscious, which is composed not only of words but also actions, images, sounds, smells, tastes, or tactile sensations. The unconscious is capable of accepting symbolic or metaphoric fulfillment: a photograph of someone can represent the actual person or a part can represent the whole (such as witches casting a spell with hairs of their potential victim). The unconscious projects, from memory, the person onto another being or object. The creators of psychodrama realized that someone who agrees to play the role of a relative can provoke deep reactions from a consultant, as if the relative were standing there in person.

Punching a cushion produces relief from anger toward an abuser. But to achieve good results, the person who punches the cushion must, in a way, free herself from any morality imposed by the family, society, and culture. If the consultant does this, she can, without fear of punishment, accept her (always amoral) inner urges. For example, if someone wants to eliminate his little sister, because she attracts the mothers attention, and pins a photograph of the little one onto a melon and busts the fruit apart with a hammer, his unconscious assumes the crime is done. This way, the consultant feels liberated.

It is understood in psychomagic that those who populate the internal world (the memory) are not those who populate the exterior world. Traditional magic and witchcraft work with the exterior world, believing in the ability to acquire supernatural powers by way of superstitious rituals in order to influence things, events, and beings. Psychomagic works with the memory. Given the previously cited case, it is not about eliminating the flesh-and-blood little sister (who is now an adult) but about eliciting a change in memoryas much in the image of the hated one when she was young as in the accumulated feelings of helplessness and rage in the one who hates. To change the world it is necessary to begin by changing ourselves. Images retained in the memory are accompanied by perceptions of ourselves at the moment when we had the experiences. When we remember our parents just as they acted during our childhoods, we do so from an infantile point of view. We live accompanied or dominated by a group of egos at different agesall of them manifestations of the past. The goal of psycho-magic is to convert the consultant into his or her own healer and to assure that the consultant is placed within his or her adult ego: the ego that cannot occupy any other place but the present.