The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography Read online

  Praise for

  Alejandro Jodorowsky

  and His Works

  “. . . The Dance of Reality [film is] a trippy but bighearted reimagining of the young Alejandro’s unhappy childhood in a Chilean town . . .”

  NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

  “The best movie director ever!”

  MARILYN MANSON, MUSICIAN, ACTOR,

  AND MULTIMEDIA ARTIST

  “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

  2012: THE RETURN OF QUETZALCOATL

  “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, SINGER-SONGWRITER,

  ACTRESS, ACTIVIST, AND ALCHEMIST

  “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

  Alejandro Jodorowsky with one of his cats.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER ONE: Childhood

  CHAPTER TWO: The Dark Years

  CHAPTER THREE: First Acts

  CHAPTER FOUR: The Poetic Act

  CHAPTER FIVE: Theater as Religion

  CHAPTER SIX: The Endless Dream

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Magicians, Masters, Shamans, and Charlatans

  CHAPTER EIGHT: From Magic to Psychomagic

  CHAPTER NINE: From Psychomagic to Psychoshamanism

  APPENDIX I: Psychomagical Acts Transcribed by Marianne Costa

  APPENDIX II: Brief Psychomagical Correspondence

  Footnotes

  About Jodorowsky and The Dance of Reality Film

  About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company

  Copyright & Permissions

  Index

  There are problems that knowledge cannot solve. One day we will come to understand that science is nothing but a type of imagination, a specialized type, with all the advantages and all the dangers that specializing brings with it.

  GEORGE GRODDECK, THE BOOK OF THE IT

  ONE

  Childhood

  I was born in 1929 in the north of Chile, in a region conquered from Peru and Bolivia. Tocopilla is the name of my birthplace. It is a small port city located, perhaps not by coincidence, on the 22nd parallel. Each of the 22 arcana of the Tarot of Marseilles is drawn in a rectangle composed of two squares. The upper square may symbolize heaven, the spiritual life, while the lower square may symbolize Earth, material life. A third square inscribed at the center of this rectangle symbolizes the human being, the union between light and darkness, receptive to what is above, active in what is below. This symbolism, found in the ancient myths of China and Egypt (the god Shu, the “empty being,” separates the earth-father Geb from the sky-mother Nut), also appears in Chilean indigenous Mapuche mythology: “In the beginning, sky and earth were so close together that there was no space in between them, until the arrival of the conscious being, which liberated humankind, raising the sky.” In other words, establishing the difference between animals and humans.

  In the Andean language of Quechua, Toco means “double sacred square” and Pilla means “devil.” In this case, the devil is not the incarnation of evil but a being of the subterranean dimension who gazes through a window made of both spirit and matter—that is, the body—in order to observe the world and share his knowledge with it. Among the Mapuche Pillán means “the soul, the human spirit arrived at its final destination.”

  At times I have wondered whether it was the influence of having been born at the 22nd parallel, in a place called Double Sacred Square—a window through which consciousness emerges—that caused me to be so absorbed by the Tarot for much of my life, or whether I was born already predestined to do what I have done sixty years later: to renew the Tarot of Marseilles and to invent psychomagic. Does destiny really exist? Can our lives be oriented toward purposes that surpass the individual interest?

  Was it a coincidence that my good teacher at the public school was called Mr. Toro? There is an obvious similarity between “Toro” and “Tarot.” He taught me to read with his own personal method by showing me a deck of cards, each of which had a letter printed on it. He then told me to shuffle them, take a few from the deck at random, and try to form words. The first word I spelled—I was no more than four years old—was OJO (eye). When I spoke the word in my high voice, it was as if something suddenly exploded in my brain; thus, in one fell swoop, I learned to read. Mr. Toro, a great smile dawning on his dark face, congratulated me. “I’m not surprised that you learned to read so quickly. You have a golden eye (ojo d’oro) in the middle of your name.” And he arranged the cards like so: “alejandr OJO D ORO wsky.” This moment marked me forever, first because it broadened my view by introducing me to the Eden that is reading, and second because it set me apart from the rest of the world. I was not like other children. Eventually I was placed in a higher grade with older boys who became my enemies because they could not read with my level of fluency. All these boys, most of them sons of out-of-work miners (the stock market crash of 1929 had reduced 70 percent of Chileans to poverty), had dark brown hair and small noses. But I, descended from Russian-Jewish immigrants, had a large, hooked nose and very light hair. This was all it took for them to dub me “Pinocchio,” and with their mockery to dissuade me from wearing shorts: “Milky legs!” Perhaps because I had a golden eye, as well as in order to mitigate my awful lack of friends, I cloistered myself in the recently opened town library. At the time, I paid no heed to the emblem above the door of a compass crossed with a square; the library had been founded by Masons. There, in the quiet shadows, I read for hours from the books that the kind librarian allowed me to take from the shelves: fairy tales, adventure stories, adaptations of classics for children, and dictionaries of symbols. One day while browsing among the shelves I ran across a yellowed volume: Les Tarots by Eteilla. All my efforts to read it were in vain. The letters looked strange and the words were incomprehensible. I began to worry that I had forgotten how to read. When I communicated my anguish to the librarian, he began to laugh. “But how could you understand it; it’s written in French, my young friend! I can’t understand it either!” Oh, how I felt drawn to those mysterious pages! I flipped through them, seeing many numbers, sums, the frequent occurrence of the word Thot, some geometric shapes . . . but what fascinated me most was a rectangle inside which a princess, wearing a three-pointed crown and seated on a throne, was caressing a lion that was resting its head on her knees. The animal had an expression of profound intelligence combined with an extreme gentleness. Such a placid creature! I liked the image so much that I committed a transgression that I still have not repented: I tore out the page and brought it home to my room. Concealed beneath a floorboard, the card “STRENGTH” became my secret treasure. In the strength of my innocence, I fell in love with the princess.

  I thought of, dreamed of, and imagined this friendship with a peaceable beast so much that reality brought me into contact with a real lion. My father, Jaime, had worked as a circus performer before settling down and opening his shop, Casa Ukrania. Trapeze stunts were his specialty, and later hanging by his hair. In this town of Tocopilla, built up against the mountains of the Tarapacá Desert where it had not rained for three centuries, th
e warm winters were an irresistible attraction for all manner of spectacles. Among them was the great circus of the Human Eagles. My father took me to this circus, and afterward brought me to visit the performers, who remembered him well. I was six years old on that day when two clowns—one who went by the name of Lettuce, clad in green with a green nose and wig, and another called Carrot, clad similarly in orange—placed a lion cub in my arms that had been born just a few days earlier.

  Holding a lion that was small but stronger and heavier than a cat, with its broad paws, large snout, soft fur, and eyes of an incommensurable innocence, was an immense pleasure. I took the little animal to the sawdust-covered ring and played with him. I simply became another lion cub myself. I absorbed his animal essence, his energy. Later, as I sat cross-legged on the floor of the ring, the lion cub stopped running back and forth and came to rest his head on my knee. It seemed to me as if he remained there for an eternity. When he finally left, I burst into disconsolate tears. Neither the clowns, nor the other performers, nor my father could quiet me down. Jaime, now in a bad mood, led me by the hand back to our house. My lamentations continued for at least another couple of hours.

  Later, once I calmed down, I felt as if my hands had the strength of the lion cub’s large paws. I went down to the beach that was a couple of hundred meters from the main street, and there, feeling infused with the power of the king of beasts, I challenged the ocean. The waves that lapped my feet were small. I began to throw pebbles at the waves in order to make the ocean angry. After about ten minutes of stone throwing, the waves began to grow bigger. I thought I had enraged the blue monster. I continued throwing stones with all my might. The waves started to get violent, some of them very large. Then a rough hand grabbed my arm. “Stop, foolish child!” It was a homeless woman who lived by a dumping site; people called her the Queen of Cups, just like the Tarot card, simply because she was often seen falling down drunk, wearing a corroded brass crown on her head. “A little flame can burn down a forest, and one stone can kill all the fish!”

  The house in which I lived during my childhood in Tocopilla.

  I, six months old, when actor and spectator were not yet separate.

  I struggled free from her grip and shouted scornfully at her from the height of my imagined throne. “Let go of me, you old stinker! Leave me alone or I’ll throw stones at you too!” She recoiled, startled. I was about to return to my attacks when the Queen of Cups, uttering a catlike yowl, pointed toward the sea. An enormous silvery cloud was moving toward the beach, and following above it was a thick dark cloud! In no way do I pretend to claim that my childish actions were the cause of what happened next, and yet it is strange that all these events occurred at the same time, bringing with them a lesson that would never fade from my mind. For some mysterious reason, thousands of sardines began to wash up on the beach. The waves threw them, already dying, onto the dark sand, which gradually became covered by the silver of their scales. This brilliance quickly vanished, for the sky began to turn black, full of voracious seagulls. The drunken mendicant, fleeing toward her shelter, yelled at me. “Murderous child! Torturing the ocean like that, you killed all the fish!”

  I felt as if every fish was staring at me accusingly in the agony of its death throes. I filled my arms with sardines and threw them back into the water. The ocean responded by throwing an army of dead fish back at me. I kept throwing them back in. The seagulls snatched them from me, uttering deafening shrieks. I sat down on the sand. The world was offering me two options: I could suffer with the anguish of the sardines or rejoice at the good fortune of the seagulls. The balance tilted toward joy when I saw a crowd of poor people—men, women, children—chasing away the birds and gathering up every last fish with frenetic enthusiasm. The balance tilted toward sadness when I saw the seagulls, deprived of their banquet, pecking dejectedly at the few morsels that remained on the beach.

  Naively, I told myself that in this reality—in which I, Pinocchio, felt like an outsider—all things were interconnected in a dense web of suffering and pleasure. There were no small causes; every action produced effects that extended beyond the confines of space and time.

  I was so affected by this carpet of beached fish that I began to view the crowd of poor people (who lived in a slum of shacks called La Manchurria, built from rusty corrugated iron, scraps of cardboard, and potato sacks) as the stranded sardines and the upper class of merchants and electric company workers to which I belonged as the greedy seagulls. Thus I discovered charity.

  There was a short pole by the door of Casa Ukrania with a handle embedded in it, used for raising and lowering the shop’s metal shutters. Sometimes, Gadfly would come and scratch his back on it. He was thus named because he had two stumps in place of arms that, according to those who mocked him, wiggled like the wings of an insect. The poor man was one of the many nitrate miners who had been the victim of a dynamite explosion. The white bosses threw out the injured miners without pity, with empty pockets. One could count by dozens the mutilated men who drank themselves into insanity on methylated spirits in a squalid warehouse by the harbor. I said to Gadfly, “Would you like me to scratch your back?” He looked at me with the eyes of a thrashed angel. “Well . . . if I don’t disgust you, young sir.” I began scratching with both hands. He let forth hoarse sighs similar to the purrs of a cat. A smile of pleasure and gratitude dawned on his face, which was weathered by the implacable desert sands. I felt liberated from the guilt of having murdered the sardines. Suddenly, my father emerged from the shop and chased off the armless man. “You degenerate roto!*1 Don’t come back here again or I’ll have you thrown in jail!”

  I wanted to explain to Jaime that it was I who had suggested this much-needed remedy for the unfortunate man, but he would not let me speak. “Be quiet, and don’t let those abusive bums take advantage of you! Don’t ever get near them; they’re covered with lice that spread typhus!”

  Indeed, the world is a fabric of suffering and pleasure; in every action, good and evil dance together like a pair of lovers.

  Today, I still have no idea why I embarked on this folly: one day I got out of bed saying that I would not go out in the street unless I had red shoes. My parents, accustomed to having an unusual son, urged me to be patient. Such footwear was not to be found in the small shoe shop in Tocopilla. They were more likely to be found in Iquique, a hundred kilometers away. A traveling salesman agreed to take my mother, Sara Felicidad, to that large port city in his automobile. She returned smiling, bringing with her a cardboard box containing a fine pair of red boots with rubber soles.

  Putting them on, I felt as if wings were sprouting from my heels. I ran to school, taking agile leaps along the way. I did not mind the torrent of mockery from my classmates, I was used to that. The only one who applauded my taste was the good Mr. Toro. (Did my desire for red shoes come directly from the Tarot? In it, the Fool, the Emperor, the Hanged Man, and the Lovers all wear red shoes.) Carlitos, my desk mate, was the poorest of all the children. After school he would sit on benches in the town square, equipped with a little box, and offer shoe-shining services. It embarrassed me to have Carlitos kneel at my feet, brushing my shoes, applying color and polish to make the dirty leather shine again. But I had him do it every day in order to give him the opportunity to earn a little money. When I placed my red shoes on his box, he gave a cry of joy and admiration. “Oh, those are so nice! It’s lucky I have red dye and neutral polish. I’ll make them shine like they’re varnished.” And for almost an hour he slowly, carefully, profoundly, caressed what for him were two sacred objects. When I offered him money, he did not want to accept it. “I’ve made them so shiny you’ll be able to walk in the night without needing a lantern!” Enthused, I began to admire my splendid boots while running around the square. Carlitos furtively wiped away a tear or two, murmuring, “You’re lucky, Pinocchio, I’ll never be able to have a pair like that.”

  I felt a pain inside my chest, and I could not take another step. I took the shoe
s off and gave them to him. The boy, forgetting my presence, hastily put them on and took off running toward the beach. He forgot not only me, but also his box. I kept it, intending to give it to him the next day at school.

  When my father saw me return home barefoot, he was furious. “You say you gave them to a shoe shiner? Are you crazy? Your mother went a hundred kilometers out and a hundred kilometers back to buy them for you! That brat’s going to come back to the square looking for his box. Go there, wait for him as long as it takes, and when he shows up, take your shoes back, by force if you need to.”

  Jaime used intimidation as a method of education. The fear of being clobbered by his trapeze artist’s muscles made me break out in a cold sweat. I obeyed. I went to the square and sat down on a bench. Five interminable hours passed. As night was falling, a group of people came running along, surrounding a bicyclist. The man was pedaling slowly, leaning down as if an enormous weight was breaking his back. Bent double over the handlebars, like a marionette with cut strings, was the dead body of Carlitos. Through the rips in his clothing I could see his skin, formerly brown, now as pale as my own. His limp legs swung with each pedal stroke, drawing red arcs in the air with my boots. Behind the bicycle and the curious group of mourners, a rumor was fanning out like a ship’s wake. “He was playing on the slippery rocks. The rubber soles on his shoes made him slip. He fell into the sea and was battered against the rocks. That’s how the imprudent boy drowned.” Imprudent he may have been, but it was my generosity that killed him. The next day, everyone at the school went to lay flowers at the site of the accident. On those precipitous rocks, pious hands had built a miniature chapel out of cement. Inside it was a photograph of Carlitos and the red shoes. My classmate, having departed this world too early, without accomplishing the mission that God gives to every incarnated soul, had become an animita (little soul). Trapped in this state, he was now devoted to bringing about the miracles that believers requested of him. Many candles were lit behind the magical shoes that had once brought death but were now dispensers of health and prosperity.