ALEXANDRO JODOROWSKI

Donca Vianu

Life surpasses art. If someone were to write a novel with Alejandro Jodorowsky as the main character, nobody would believe that such a man truly exists.
I discovered him less than three months before writing this. Searching online for information about David Lynch’s Dune, I came across a fragment of Frank Pavich’s documentary on Jodorowsky’s own unfilmed Dune — extravagant drawings, a voice saying that Jodorowsky’s imagination no one can surpass. I was curious enough to follow the thread. Within days I had seen all his films, both documentaries, read all his autobiographical books, his books of interviews, his books on his own methods. I watched every interview and masterclass available in English. I bought a Marseille Tarot deck and began learning about it.
That level of dedication over two months requires explanation. And the explanation is not, in the end, about his films, or his Tarot, or his healing methods — extraordinary as all of these are. It is about something else.

I have met beautiful spiritual teachers. One of them is known and loved far beyond his own tradition: Thich Nhat Hanh, whose student I was from 1990 to 1996. I learned psychotherapy from wizards — Milton Erickson, to name one. I met the writers Michael Ende and Edgar Hilsenrath, and the iconic artists Joseph Beuys and Marina Abramovic. I have encountered saints: Swami Chidananda Maharaj and Yogi Ramsurakumar.
If someone had told me there was a very erudite, flamboyant genius walking on this earth who had integrated all of these qualities — Seer, Sage, Saintly person, great Artist, great Thaumaturg — I would have found it difficult to believe. But Alejandro Jodorowsky is exactly this.

He is, first of all, a Zen master. After years of intensive training with the Japanese Zen master Ejo Takata, his teacher recognised him as a Zen master in his own right. He wrote about this period extensively in The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky, the last chapter of which is the summit of his spiritual insights — among the most beautiful things I have read. The same book describes three other crucial teachers, each one reuniting him with the Feminine Principle: the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, a saintly Mexican bruja named Doña Madalena, and Reyna d’Assia, the daughter of Gurdjieff and the heiress of his teachings.
He is also one of the most original artists of the twentieth century. Beginning as a puppeteer and avant-garde theatre director — he coined the term Panic theatre, from the pagan god Pan — he spent five years as an assistant to Marcel Marceau before going on to make the cult films El Topo, The Holy Mountain (sponsored by John Lennon), and Santa Sangre. He is the director of what may be the greatest film never made: his Dune, for which Moebius, H.R. Giger, Dan O’Bannon, and Chris Foss worked for two years; Orson Welles and Salvador Dalí were to play leading roles; Pink Floyd had agreed to compose the music. When Dalí received Jodorowsky at the bar of the Hotel St. Regis in New York, surrounded by his court, he greeted him with the question: “Picasso and I, walking on different beaches, used to find many watches in the sand. Did you also find many watches?” Jodorowsky answered: “I did not find even one, but I lost many.”
After twenty-three years without making a film, he appeared at Cannes in search of sponsors for The Dance of Reality. A journalist asked whether he wasn’t too rusted for a new film after all those years of cinematic inactivity. He answered: “A rusted knife has a double action: it cuts and poisons.” He found his sponsors and stole the show at successive Cannes festivals with The Dance of Reality and Endless Poetry. His books — three autobiographies, graphic novels including The Incal and The Metabarons, works on the Tarot — form a body of work of extraordinary range.
What makes his art so compelling is the reconciliation he found between two apparently opposing principles: the rigour, discipline, and emptiness of Zen Buddhism on one side, and the inexhaustibility of shapes, colours, textures, and creative freedom of what I call Lady Imagination — the Great Goddess of the Manifest — on the other. His mind is the mind of the androgyne, poised at the point of balance between the masculine and the feminine, containing both and fixed to neither.
He does not fantasise. He imagines. Fantasy has no mythical dimension — only Imagination has. This is why so many techniques for change are ineffective: they are fantasies. Imagination can transmute the present by projecting the past into a new and unthinkable myth, in a spiral rather than a linear future. This is the thaumaturgic art at the heart of his last book, Where the Bird Sings Best — which is a masterpiece, and which I cannot adequately describe. More I cannot say. It is a mystery.

As a healer, Jodorowsky developed three methods: Psychomagic, Metagenealogy, and Psychoshamanism. He has practised as a healer and Tarot reader twice a week for fifty years, in public and for free. Hundreds of people have attended his sessions for years without missing one.
What makes these methods genuinely original is their approach to the unconscious. All psychotherapy until now has either addressed the conscious rational mind directly — as in CBT — or offered different routes of access to the unconscious, extracting material from it so that the conscious mind can then interpret and attempt to influence it. Psychomagic and Psychoshamanism do neither. They address the unconscious directly, in its own symbolic language — bypassing the conscious mind entirely.
A man incapable of sustaining a satisfying love relationship was prescribed by Jodorowsky the following act: break two watermelons with an axe. Bury the broken, juice-streaming melons in a forest. Plant flowers on top of them. For the rational mind living in consensus reality, this is incomprehensible. But the unconscious understands it perfectly. For a child, a melon is as large and round as its mother’s breast. By breaking the melons and letting their red juice flow, the man enacts, symbolically, the destruction of the mother who withheld the nourishment he needed. The force releases the anger. The burial restores a sense of agency. The flowers allow something new to grow where the old expired. The result: an improved relationship with his mother, and — shortly after — a happy love relationship for the first time.
For the unconscious, symbols and symbolic acts are real.
Metagenealogy extends this work across four generations of the family tree, on the understanding that we are not only ourselves but our ancestors — that the family tree carries happiness and sorrow alike, and many secrets, and that the pattern of the heritage as expressed in the life of the subject can be revealed and then healed.
He also restored, with Philippe Camoin — a direct descendant of the Marseilles family that had printed the Marseille Tarot since 1760 — the original designs and colours of the Tarot de Marseille. Jodorowsky does not read Tarot cards. Tarot, he says, is an omniscient being. It speaks through him.

But none of this — the films, the healing methods, the Tarot, the books — is the real reason I wrote this essay.
What hooked me to Jodorowsky is the impression — which grew stronger with everything I read and watched until it became something closer to a conviction — that through his arduous inner work he has discovered, or uncovered, the source of joy deeply buried and heavily veiled in the heart. That he has found the Bliss.
Bliss — the Ananda of Sat-Chit-Ananda, Existence-Consciousness-Bliss — is, according to the Vedas and the Tantras, the Ultimate Reality. Not a feeling. Not an emotion. Not a state that arises and passes. The ground itself, which nothing can obscure permanently and nothing can take away. The unconditional joy that is free of cause and effect, that does not depend on what happens or does not happen.
To reach it requires a leap of faith — and the continuous, disciplined dwelling in the present that makes such a leap possible. Jodorowsky is free: free of conditioning, of conventions, of biases and prejudices and false ties — false modesty, false respectability, false pretension. This freedom is also fearlessness. And the fearlessness, I believe, is what Ananda looks like from the outside: a person who has nothing to protect, nothing to perform, and therefore nothing standing between them and the present moment.
To be in contact with his mind changes the vibration of one’s own mind. His Bliss is contagious. Every time I see him or read something he wrote, I become joyful. I feel uplifted. My heart is lighter.
This is, in the end, the rarest thing. Not the films, not the Tarot, not the symbolic prescriptions. The rarest thing is a human being who has genuinely arrived somewhere — and who, by arriving, makes it visible to others that such an arrival is possible.
This short essay is a tribute to him. In awe and wonder.

A note for the reader who wants to go further: Frank Pavich’s documentary on Jodorowsky’s Dune, and the many interviews and masterclasses available online in English, are the most direct way into his world. His three autobiographies — The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Dance of Reality, and Where the Bird Sings Best — can be read in any order.