The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

  These two experiences of LSD and mushrooms changed my perception of myself, and reality, forever. I felt that my mind had opened up like a flower bud. These events coincided with a gift that Ejo Takata’s teacher Yamada Mumon, who had come to visit from Japan after Takata left Fromm’s disciples, sent me via one of his students in gratitude for my having offered Takata my house for founding his new zendo. The student, of typical Mexican appearance, dressed like a Japanese monk, his forehead and cheeks invaded by the pimples common to all aspiring students of the Buddha, handed me a folded handkerchief. “Sit down and open it,” he exclaimed, standing beside my chair with his back bent, the palms of his hands together at chest height, and his eyes narrowed as if trying to look oriental. I opened the handkerchief. It was folded in such a way as to reject symmetry. There were multiple folds, all beautiful, large and small, diagonal, horizontal, vertical, each one ironed with devotion. It had clearly taken the teacher a long time to achieve this effect. Opening this true work of art, which required me to use my fingers respectfully, brought me deep aesthetic enjoyment. Once the handkerchief was spread open, I saw that in the center, in black ink, a sentence was written in Japanese. The student, in the manner of a samurai, solemnly read what he seemed to know by heart: “When a flower opens, it is spring in the whole world.” He turned and left without saying goodbye. I tried unsuccessfully to refold the scarf, but I could not. The experience of life is irreversible.

  Reality, in its constant dance, now decided that I was ready to enter the world of operational magic. My neighbor Guillermo Lauder, an agent for popular artists, lived in an apartment building fifty meters away on my same street and invited me to attend a session with the healer Pachita. The lady went there every Friday to “operate” on the sick. I had heard of her. It was said that she opened up bodies with a rusty knife, that she replaced diseased organs with healthy ones, that she could materialize objects, and many other things. All this made me apprehensive, for it sounded like naive inventions, a crude imitation of real surgery. My first contact with folk magic had been at the home of F. S., an Education Ministry official, who hosted a cocktail party in my honor to celebrate my arrival in Mexico to teach pantomime courses. He lived in a luxurious mansion, the walls covered in modern Mexican paintings. These artists were impressively powerful—their works blended muralist expressionism, surrealism, and the abstract schools—but I felt that something was missing. F. S., a very intuitive homosexual who never took his eyes off my face and body for an instant, said, without my having voiced this sentiment, “What our painters lack is the magical root. Searching for the chimera of international acclaim, they have forgotten that the sacred basis of Mexican life is witchcraft. Come with me, I’ll show you a real creation.”

  I followed him down a long corridor lined with cabinets lit by greenish lights, full of pre-Columbian pottery and sculptures. We came to his bedroom. Next to the metal bed (the headboard depicted the tree of good and evil, and the ceiling was covered by a large painting by Juan Soriano that showed a gigantic hand stroking the penis of a headless naked Adonis), there was a chest inlaid with black ivory. When he opened it, the inside of the box lit up. I felt a lump form in my throat. He told me to look inside if I dared. There, on velvet-covered trays, lay all kinds of wax figurines. I immediately felt a sharp pain in my head. Those figurines, the color of rotting flesh, were impaled by multiple needles in their eyes, sex organs, anuses, breasts, and all extremities; the expressions on their putrid faces showed unspeakable suffering. Their open mouths, with some of the teeth pierced by pins, gave forth mute howls. These objects, so full of evil energy, affected my body. I wanted to cry. How could there be beings in the world capable of expressing such evil? F. S. closed the lid, offered me a drink of tequila, and laughed, seeing my astonishment.

  “Welcome to Mexico, mime. If this is the land of light, then it is also the land of shadow. Do you understand? All the paintings in my rooms together do not have the power of a single one of those wax figures. They are authentic objects of witchcraft, intended to harm someone. I obtained them thanks to certain dangerous contacts I have. I hope that one day the government authorities will allow me to organize an exhibition of this great art.”

  A couple of years later, F. S. was found murdered in his bed. After castrating him, the killer had stuffed his bleeding penis into his mouth.

  This was why, until this moment, I had avoided all contact with folk magic. However, the temptation to see Pachita operate made me decide to face the danger. Urban legends told that black magicians could surreptitiously introduce themselves into the subconscious of a visitor and put a curse on him or her with a delayed effect that, after three to six months, would consume the victim to the point of death. For this reason, before visiting the old woman I protected myself as best I could. In a certain way, without my realizing it, this was my first act of psycho-magic. I felt that I had to hide my identity so that her curses would be misdirected by my anonymity. So I dressed in new clothes and shoes. In order that I might not be judged by my tastes, it was important for these clothes not to be chosen by me. I gave my measurements to a friend and asked him to buy all the clothes. I also created a document of identification under a false name (in this case, Martin Arenas) with a different place and date of birth and a photograph of someone else (the face of a dead actor). I bought a pork chop, wrapped it in foil, and put it in my pocket. Every time I put my hand there, the unaccustomed contact with the meat would remind me that I was in a special situation and at all costs must not let myself become captivated. Before heading out the door, I took a shower and rubbed lemon juice all over my body in order to remove as much of my personal scent as possible. Trembling, I walked the fifty meters between my residence and Guillermo Lauder’s apartment.

  Pachita.

  It must be noted that it was a privilege to be received there by Pachita. When the witch went to operate in other cities, thousands of people would attend. One time they had to pull her out of a pestering crowd using a helicopter. On the other days of the week, she worked on the outskirts of the capital city, serving the poor. On Fridays she healed well-to-do people at Lauder’s residence, including powerful politicians, famous artists, sick people who came from far-off countries, and urgent cases.

  The door was ajar. I did not hear any voices or footsteps. The place seemed empty. Trying to walk silently, I slipped inside. Everything was dark. The windows had been covered with blankets. Trying not to trip over any furniture, I made my way to the meeting room. Three candles granted a little light to the darkness. Several bodies lay on the floor, wrapped in bloody sheets. Women and men knelt next to them, reciting prayers. Comfortably seated in an armchair was the old woman, wiping blood from her hands. Despite the half-darkness and some distance, I seemed to see her in full light due to the intense magnetism that emanated from her body. She was small, plump, with a long sloping forehead and one eye lower than the other, as if it had fallen down, veiled by a white membrane. I tried to blend in among her acolytes. It was useless. Like a cobra hypnotizing a monkey, she fixed her flashing eye right on my silhouette and, boring into me, said with a voice of great sweetness, “Come, dear child. Why are you afraid of this poor old woman? Come sit next to me.” Slowly, I moved toward her, stupefied. This woman had found the right words and tone to direct toward me. Although I was nearly forty years old, I had not matured emotionally. When I fell in love, I behaved like a nine-year-old child (corresponding to the age at which I had been abruptly uprooted from Tocopilla; the loss of the place I loved had dammed up my heart, preventing me from growing up emotionally). For all that I held my pork chop, still I fell into full fascination. I approached Pachita feeling like a son who had finally found his lost mother. She smiled at me with the universal love with which I had always hoped a woman would smile at me. “What do you want, muchachito?” The response came from my lips before I could think about it.

  “I would like to see your hands.”

  To general surprise—everyone w
ondered why she was treating me so preferentially—she put her left hand in mine. The palm of that hand had the softness and purity of a fifteen-year-old virgin! I was invaded by a sensation that is difficult to describe. Before this old woman with her disfigured face, I had the impression of being in the presence of the ideal woman whom the adolescent in me had always sought. She laughed. She withdrew her hand from mine and raised it to the level of my eyes, leaving it there, extended and still. A murmur arose from the attendees: “Accept the gift.”

  “What gift?” I thought at full speed. “She’s making the gesture of giving me something, invisible of course. I’ll play along. I’ll act as if I’m taking an invisible gift . . .”

  I stretched out my fingers and brought them close to her palm as if to grab something. To my surprise, a very small metallic object glinted between the base of her middle and ring fingers. The unthinkable was happening. I had just been holding her hand, it was not possible that she had held anything hidden there, and yet here was the gift. I took it. It was a triangle with one eye inside it. That made an impression on me, because an eye within a triangle was the symbol of my film El Topo. (At this moment, believing that the old woman was thinking of me as a cinematographer, I missed a more profound message. On dollar bills, beside the pyramid crowned by a triangle with an eye, is the motto “In God we trust.” Perhaps Pachita, in a nonverbal language, was saying to me, “I’ll help you find what you need: your inner God.”)

  I began to draw conclusions from this amazing experience. “This woman is an exceptional prestidigitator. How did she manage to make that triangle appear out of nowhere? And as a villager without any background in film, how could she tell that this was the symbol of my movie? Is Guillermo Lauder her dishonest accomplice? Whatever the case, I want to see how she heals people.” I then asked her if she would permit me to view her operations. “Of course, darling child of the soul. Come next Friday. But it is not I who operate, it is Brother.”

  The following Friday I arrived on time. Pachita was waiting for me. The small apartment looked like a full bus: there were at least forty patients, some on crutches, others in wheelchairs. She asked me to follow her to a small room where there was nothing but a chromolithograph depicting Cuauhtémoc, the deified hero.

  “Today, my boy, I want you to be the one who reads the poem that my Lord loves so much.”

  She put on a yellow robe that was saturated with blood clots in between the gemstones and Indian designs that adorned it. She sat on a wooden bench and handed me a handwritten sheet of paper. She appeared to fall asleep. I read the verses:

  You were King on this earth

  you were great Majesty

  and now you are Eternal Light

  in the celestial throne.

  Come quickly Blessed Child

  come to comfort us

  come to give us your counsel

  and rid us of all evil.

  The poem was long. Pachita occasionally yawned. Then she twisted around as if her body were receiving a being. And suddenly, what had looked like a tired old woman gave forth a raucous cry, raised her right arm, and began to speak with a man’s voice: “Dear brothers, I thank the Father for allowing me to be with you again! Bring me the first sick one!”

  Patients began to file in, each with an egg in one hand. After rubbing the egg all over the patient’s body, the witch cracked it into a glass of water, then examined the white and yolk to discover the evil. If she found nothing very serious, she recommended infusions of olive, mallow, or sometimes a variety of strange things such as coffee enemas, papaya poultices, termite eggs, stewed potatoes, or human excrement. She also prescribed the tongues of certain birds, a glass of water in which rusty nails had been soaked, and remedies that were actions: one sick person was advised to find a stream, put a red flower into it, and observe how the water carried it, then put a bowl of water under the bed to absorb evil thoughts. When the problem seemed serious, she proposed an “operation.”

  That first Friday, Brother Cuauhtémoc carried out ten operations. I witnessed incredible things. Dressed in my new clothes, I wanted to grip my pork chop. Pachita’s assistants, half a dozen of them, immediately ordered me to keep my hand out of my pocket. They also forbade me to cross my legs or arms, requiring me to look at Brother without turning my head. It was astounding to see this possessed woman wielding her great knife and plunging it into the flesh of the patients, making the blood spurt out. Although something in me was saying that this was all theater, an act of prestidigitation designed to impress using terror as the principal healing element, the woman’s personality dominated me. Lauder told me that one day the wife of the president of Mexico, having heard so much about her, invited her to an evening reception in the courtyard of the Governor’s Palace, where there were many cages containing different varieties of birds. When Pachita arrived, those hundreds of birds awoke and began chirping as if they were greeting the dawn. The medicine woman did not use her charisma alone. Several assistants would also contribute by giving their energy to the operation. These persons were not complicit in a hoax; they all had immense faith in the existence of Brother. In the eyes of these good people, what mattered was the action of the discarnate being. They saw Pachita only as its “flesh.” She was a “channel,” an instrument used by the god. When not in a trance, she was respected but not worshiped. For them, the discarnate being was more real than the person through which it manifested. This faith that enveloped Pachita generated a sacred atmosphere that contributed to convincing the sick that they had the possibility of being cured.

  The patients, sitting in the darkened room, waited for their turn to enter the “operating room.” The aides spoke in whispers as if they were in a temple. Sometimes one of them would leave the operating room, hiding a mysterious package in his hands. He would go into the bathroom, and through the door, left ajar, one could see the glare of fire consuming the object. An assistant advised in a whisper, “Do not go until the harm has been consumed. It is dangerous to approach it while it is active. You could catch it . . .” What was this “harm,” really? The patients ignored it, but the mere fact of having to refrain from urinating while one of those immolations took place produced a strange impression: they were gradually leaving habitual reality to immerse themselves in a totally irrational parallel world.

  Suddenly, four assistants emerged from the operating room carrying a lifeless body wrapped in a bloodied canvas, depositing it on the floor as if it were a corpse. Once the operation was finished and the bandages were in place, Pachita required the patient to be absolutely still for half an hour, under penalty of instant death. The surgical patients, afraid of being killed by magical forces, did not make the slightest move. Needless to say, this clever arrangement served as preparation for the next patient. When Pachita called them in her low voice, always using the same formula, “It’s your turn, child of my soul,” the patient would start trembling from head to toe and reverting to childhood. I remember that on this day she gave a caramel candy to a minister while asking him in her low and tender voice, “What hurts, little one?” The man replied in a child’s voice, “For weeks I have not slept. I have to get up to urinate every half hour.”

  “Do not worry; I will change your bladder.”

  Pachita, after turning into Brother and always with her eyes closed, called the men first, stating that since they were weaker than the women, their pains had to be soothed first. There was nothing but a narrow bed with a plastic-covered mattress in the operating room. Each patient had to bring a sheet, a liter of alcohol, a pack of six rolls of cotton, and bandages. The assistants would remove his shirt, and if necessary—for example, for an operation on the testicles—his pants. All manipulations took place in half-darkness, by the light of a single candle, because according to Pachita electric light could damage the internal organs. The patient would cover the bed with his sheet and then lie down. An assistant would ceremoniously hand the healer a long hunting knife. The handle was wrapped in black ele
ctrical tape, and the blunt blade bore an Indian engraving with a plume. At Brother’s indication of which place on the body was to be opened, an assistant surrounded the area with cotton and liberally poured on alcohol. The smell of the substance filled the room, creating a hospital-like environment.

  The first patient was the minister. Brother asked, “Enrique, have you prepared the bladder?” Pachita’s son produced a flask containing something resembling organic tissue. The man lay trembling, frozen with fear. I took his hand. The healer made an incision in his belly about fifteen centimeters long. I struggled not to pass out as I saw the blood flow. The old woman palpated the abdomen, raised her hand, made a gesture, and a pair of scissors materialized. She cut something that produced an unbearable stench. She pulled out a mass of stinking flesh, which Enrique wrapped in black paper. Then she took the new bladder from the flask. She placed it next to the wound, and to my great surprise, I saw it absorbed, without anyone pushing it, into the interior of the body. She placed the alcohol-soaked cotton wool over the incision. She pressed down for a moment, then she cleaned away the blood, and the wound disappeared without leaving a scar. “My dear child, you are cured.” Her assistants blindfolded the man, wrapped him in his sheet, and carried him out to lay him down in the waiting room. Another assistant ran to the bathroom to burn the black packet.

  Despite my disbelief, this act had seemed so real that my reason began to falter. Was she a brilliant prestidigitator or a saint who performed miracles? I was ashamed of myself. How could I not believe that this old woman was a trickster? By light of a single candle, one can hide a myriad of fraudulent manipulations. And if she could perform miracles, why did she need a knife? Did she want us to believe it was a magical instrument? To prove that there was no trickery, she had an assistant hand it to her—but—did she use the same knife that was handed to her? Perhaps, in the darkness, she switched it for another knife with a rubber handle, concealed by the electrical tape, full of dog or chicken blood. It was said that she took in stray dogs out of good will, but what if instead of being a saint she was an impostor who killed these animals in order to extract their vital fluid? And why did she put cotton around the wound? The knife was never disinfected . . . so what was the alcohol for? Pachita, although it was said that she never ate, looked fat, with a large paunch. She always wore an apron over her clothes. What if this belly were false? Was it full of plastic bags containing blood and objects that appeared “magically”? Was she a madwoman? A pathological liar? Like Ichazo, like Castaneda, she told of things that no person of average intelligence could believe. “I know who will die here, and when. I know how many days everyone who comes to visit me has left to live.” “Do not worry about the drought. Tomorrow I will make it rain.” “I just give a push and I leave my body. Sometimes I visit places, Siberia, Mont Blanc, Mars, the moon, Jupiter.” “A cyclone was approaching the Cora Indian Territory, so I went to ask the Father for protection for them, and I got it: the cyclone was blown off course.” “When I fall into a trance, I live in the astral world. If someone destroys my body, Brother reconstructs it.” Pachita also claimed to travel in time, predicting future events or going back into the past to retrieve some object or other.