Life surpasses art. If someone would write a novel having Alejandro Jodorowski as the main character, nobody would ever believe that such a man truly exists.
I discovered him recently, less than three months ago. Searching on YouTube for information about David Lynch’s ‘Dune’, I saw a fragment of Frank Pavich’s documentary on Alejandro Jodorowski’s ‘Dune’, showing extravagant drawings and someone’s voice saying that Jodorowski’s imagination no one can surpass. This made me curious.
I met beautiful spiritual teachers. One of them is known and loved: Thich Nhat Hanh, whose student I was 1990 – 1996.
I learned psychotherapy from wizards. Milton Erickson, to name one.
Many years ago, I met personally, on different occasions, the wonderful writers Michael Ende and Edgar Hilsenrath, and the iconic artists Joseph Beuys and Marina Abramovic.
From time to time I consulted a clairvoyant. For example, Annette vd Berg, founder of the School for Effective Intuition, whose three years course I followed.
I met saints: Swami Chidananda Maharaj and Yogi Ramsurakumar.
If someone would have told me that there is a very erudite flamboyant genius walking on Earth who has integrated all these qualities, who is a Seer, a Sage, a Saintly person, a great Artist and Thaumaturg specialised in healing, I would have hardly believed her.
But Alejandro Jodorowski is exactly this:
A Zen Master
After years of intensive training with Japanese Zen Master Ejo Takata, his teacher recognised him as a Zen master in his own right.
About his teaching years with Master Ejo Takata Jodorowski wrote extensively in his book ‘The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowski.’
Many years later Jodorowski wrote ‘The Finger and the Moon: Zen Teachings and Koans’.
In his book ‘The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowski’ he describes also three other teachers he encountered, each one reuniting him with the Feminine Principle: the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, a saintly Mexican bruja named Dona Madalena, and Reyna d’Assia, the daughter of Gurdieff and heiress of his teachings.
There was another important teacher, also a bruja, Pachita, about her he writes in another book, ‘The Dance of Reality’.
The last chapter of the book ‘The Spiritual Journey….’ is extremely beautiful, the summum of his spiritual insights.
A great artist
After studying philosophy of mathematics and cultural history, Jodorowski chose for art, starting his artistic carrier as a puppeteer and a theater director of avant garde plays, which soon evolved into theater improvisations which he called ‘Panic theater’ (‘panic’ from the pagan god Pan.)
He was also a mim. As a mim, he assisted five years nobody less than Marcel Marceau (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5RLTZSrr4A;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAZLDn8or3M)
He became famous with the cult movies ‘El Topo’, ‘The Holy Mountain’ (sponsored by John Lennon) and ‘Santa Sangre’.
He is the director of the greatest movie never made: ‘Dune’, after Frank Herbert’s novel (http://www.duneinfo.com/unseen/jodorowsky/;
Frank Pavich’s documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mYG-uNPkrQ)
Moebius, H.R. Giger, D. O’Bannon, C.Foss worked at it for two years. Orson Welles (the role of Harrokenan) and Salvador Dali (the role of the Mad Emperor of the Galaxy) were supposed to play in it.
Pink Floyd agreed to make the music.
About the contribution of Dali the following anecdote: Dali, surrounded by his court, received Jodorowski at the bar of the hotel San Regis in New York, and greeted him with the question: ‘Picasso and me while walking on one or other beach used to find many watches in the sand. Did you also find many watches?’ To which Jodorowski answered: ‘I did not find even one, but I lost many.’
For twenty three years Jodorowski did not make any movie. After this intermission, he appeared in Cannes in search of sponsors for ‘The Dance of Reality’. At the press conference, a journalist asked him: ‘Are you not too rusted for a new movie after all these years of cinematic inactivity?’ To which Jodorowski answered: ‘A rusted knife has a double action: it cuts and poisons.’
Jodorowski did find sponsors and stole the show at the next Cannes festivals with ‘The Dance of Reality’ and ‘Endless Poetry’.
Jodorowski is also the author of many graphic books, some famous: ‘The Incal’, ‘Metabarons’, ‘The Technopriests,’ ‘The Borgias’, and more.
I read only ‘Madwoman of the Sacred Heart’, illustrated by Moebius.
He wrote three autobiographies:
‘The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowski’, ‘The Dance of Reality’ and the breathtaking ‘Where the Bird Sings Best’.
His style both in movies as also in his books could be described as surrealistic and magic realistic. The imagination he displays in them is indeed spellbinding. The beauty is breathtaking. He is a lover of Beauty, a seeker of Beauty, a worshipper of Beauty.
What makes his art so fascinating is the reconciliation he found in his mind between two extreme qualities, attitudes: the rigor, rigid discipline, dryness, maleness, emptiness / absence of all objects of Zen Buddhism and the succulence, the inexhaustibility of shapes, forms, patterns, colours, smells, textures, sounds, the freedom to create of Lady Imagination, the Great Goddess of the Manifest, the Empress governing our lives.
His mind is the Mind of the Androgyne, at the point of balance between the male and the female, the point which contains both and is neither.
His last book: ‘Where the Bird Sings Best’ is a masterpiece.
He integrates in it his artistic imagination with his thaumaturgic art.
The thaumaturgic art in it is this: he imagines the past not into a linear future, but in a spiral formed future; the future becomes the new unthinkable myth; the myth transmutes the present.
More I cannot say, it is a mystery.
He does not fantasise, he imagines. Fantasy has no mythical dimension, only Imagination has (this is why so many New Age techniques for change are ineffective, they are fantasies.)
The theme in all his art, running like a red thread through his movies, graphic novels, autobiographical books is soteriological in nature.
A great thaumaturg, specialised in healing and Tarot
Alejandro Jodorowski developed the following healing methods: Psychomagic, Metagenealogy and Psychoshamanism.
He wrote about his methods in ‘Psychomagic: the Transformative Power of Psychoshamanism’, ‘Manual of Psychomagic’ and ’Metagenealogy: Self Discovery through Psychomagic and the Family Tree’.
About Tarot he wrote ‘The Way of Tarot: the Spiritual Teacher in the Cards.’
His work as healer and Tarot reader is public and for free. Hundreds of people did not miss for years even one session.
Psychomagic and psychoshamanism teach the Conscious Mind the language of the vast and symbolic Unconscious Mind, in order to address and change it directly. All psychotherapy until now either addresses the conscious rational mind, like the CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), or offers different ways to access the unconscious mind, extracting from it material for the conscious mind to decipher, interpret, and then try, with more or less success, to influence the unconscious mind with the help of the insights gained by the conscious mind (all forms of psychoanalysis).
As already stated, Psychomagic and Psychoshamanism short circuit the conscious mind altogether. They speak directly the symbolic language of the unconscious mind. They solve all kind of suffering, conflicts, handicaps, frustrations, misfortunes. Psychomagic prescribes a ritual act with a strong theatrical flavour which turns the unconscious around, setting the subject free of her predicament. Psychoshamanism entails interventions on the subtle astral body.
An example of a psychomagic act: a man, not capable to have a satisfying love relationship, had to break two water melons with an ax. Then bury the broken, juice oozing melons in a forest and plant on top of them flowers.
After the ritual his relationship to his mother improved and he met a woman with whom he fall in love, engaging this time in a happy relationship.
For the rational mind, living in the consensus time and space, in the consensus reality, the prescription is mostly incomprehensible. It does not make sense. Sometimes it is outrageous, and almost always weird. The subject does not understand why it has to do what. But the unconscious understands it flawlessly, and answers. The answer consists in the alleviation of the problem.
For the unconscious mind, symbols and symbolic acts are real.
For a baby the melons are as big and as round as the breasts of the mother. By breaking the melons and let their red juice flow, the man murders the mother who did not give the emotional nourishment he needed as a child. The use of force releases the anger and resentment. The burial of the melon gives control over the situation. The planting of the flowers: a new life is allowed to grow over the old expired one.
Hence the improved relationship with the mother and the successful love.
Metagenealogy involves in the healing ritual four generations of the family tree. We are ourselves and our ancestors, our family tree, as the adult we are now grew out of the child we were before. The adult is the child of his inner child – as the inner child has formed him to a high degree. And as we know, a family tree carries both happiness as sorrow. And many secrets: incest, murder, ruin, theft, prostitution, victim. The family tree is the closest expression of the fundamental dynamic on Earth: the dynamic of interchangeability between the perpetrator and the victim. Through meta genealogy the pattern of the family tree / heritage as expressed in the destiny of the subject is revealed, and subsequently, healed.
In his work as a healer, Jodorowski uses often the Tarot.
Already as a child he was interested in the Tarot. He had a collection of more than 1500 Tarot decks. At a certain point, he chose the Tarot de Marseille. Together with Philippe Camoin, direct descendent of the Marseilles family that had printed the Marseille Tarot deck since 1760, he later restored the deck to its original designs and colours.
Jodorowski does not read Tarot cards. Tarot, an omniscient being, speaks through Jodorowski.
As a healer and tarologist Jodorowski is a Seer and a Sage. Through the years – he is now 88, and he does this work twice a week for the last fifty years, he has helped thousands of people. The testimonies are impressive, mind blowing.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BpUFpncXFM;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B95y1uX3x18;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-bKFEuXYZ0;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MryHZHQVw8Q;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRTr_WiRfNs;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lDIfS75WY8;
the documentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsHjdy8GvM4)
A saintly person
I cannot judge if he is a full blown Saint or has only fundamental saintly traits. But ethics is a cornerstone of his philosophy and attitude. He introduced the concept of ‘civic sanctity’ and lives by it. He believes that art has to heal.
Hereby I have to mention that Jodorowski had a very difficult childhood and that his family tree is ridden with tragedies. The healing work he did on himself to transform the trauma’s into such luminous brilliance is extraordinary.
In these two months I saw all his movies and the two documentaries about him, read all his books, the autobiographical ones, the books with interviews and the books about his methods (from the graphic novels I read only ‘Madwoman of the Sacred Heart’), I saw on YouTube all interviews and masterclasses translated into English, bought a Tarot deck of Marseille and started to learn about it.
Are my fascination and dedication only due to his Imagination and Thaumaturgy?
No. What ‘hooked’ me to Jodorowski is the impression 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, which is, according to the Veda’s and the Tantra’s, the Ultimate Reality.
This unconditional joy, free of cause and effect, this Bliss can be attained only through a leap of faith. To dare the jump requires consequent, continuous dwelling in the present.
Jodorowski is free: free of conditioning, conventions, biases, prejudices, guilt, false-ties, like false modesty, false respectability, false pretensions. This freedom makes him also fearless.
To be in contact with his mind changes the vibration of own’s mind.
His Bliss is contagious. Every time I see him on a video or read something he wrote, I become joyful, I feel uplifted, my heart is lighter.
This short essay is a tribute to him. In awe and wonder.
