The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

  This successful “operation” opened up a vast field of experimentation. I came to the conclusion that everything that Pachita, machis, Filipino doctors, quacks, and shamans achieve in a primitive, superstitious setting could also be achieved, without deception or illusory effects, with patients born into a rational culture. Just as the subconscious accepts symbolic acts as realities, the body also accepts as real the metaphorical operations to which it is submitted, even if reason rejects them.

  My experiences with what I had called “initiatory massage” served as a basis. When I began studying the body, considering it as a terrain in which the subconscious manifests, I saw that to a certain degree some people moved with gestures that I perceived as “shining.” By contrast, the depressed people, entrenched in their problems, lacking projection, made gestures that were “opaque.” It occurred to me that the past, with its painful memories and the principal fears of being, of loving, of creating, of living, accumulated like a crust covering the skin. I remembered the Mexican “cleansings,” in which the witch would rub the client’s body with a handful of herbs to purge him of his misfortune. I thought that an even more profound psychological effect could be achieved if, instead of lightly rubbing the skin, I scraped it, just as one does with a piece of metal in order to remove the oxidized layer. I acquired a synthetic bone spatula, about twenty centimeters long and two wide, the kind that is used to fold paper, and began to scrape my naked client. This went on for three hours. After being entirely scraped, people felt reborn; many of the old fears that they had carried stuck to their skin dissolved away. But, although it is true that this technique made the patient “shine,” it must be admitted that after a while new sediments accumulated that gradually brought back the “opacity.” However, some progress had been made. The person with feelings of abandonment that caused so many unresolved problems now received physical contact, an indispensable complement to the mental and emotional contact that a psychoanalyst provides.

  In the early 1970s I lived in Mexico City, where trains rolled along the broad Avenida Chapultepec. One morning I saw a group of curious people surrounding one of these vehicles. They were motionless, expressionless, staring transfixed at the front wheels. I made my way through the crowd: the vehicle had trapped a man. It was impossible to remove him manually. A wheel had pinned him at the waist. He was pale, strangely calm. He had abandoned all hope, given himself over to the designs of Providence, awaiting the capricious Red Cross, which could take hours to arrive. What could we do? A crane would be needed to move the heavy train. I felt an immense compassion for the poor man, but then I was overtaken by a peace that I will dare to call, in a good way, abnormal. It was like falling into the ocean of time, where the seconds were like eternity. I knelt beside the injured man, staining my pants with his blood, and took his hand gently, so that he would feel that he had company. He looked at me with gratitude, and we remained there tranquilly, I do not know how long, until the nurses, firefighters, police, and the crane arrived. Before I let go, he squeezed my hand, speaking a thousand silent words with that contact. I could do no more for him. I walked away slowly. When I was a child and cried terrified in the darkness, desperately calling for my parents, who had gone out to the cinema, all I wanted was a loving touch to keep me company. That would have allowed me to accept being devoured by the shadow. The simple company of another, in adverse situations, is as necessary as life itself . . .

  When Bernadette died in the plane crash and our son Brontis came to see me after identifying the remains of his mother in the morgue, I could not find words to comfort him. All I could do was to take him in my arms and put his right ear over my heart so that he could hear it beating. He stayed there, I do not know if it was for an hour or two or three . . . These sad events taught me to keep the patient company, to give all of my time in a limited time, to put my heart into the task, knowing that its beats are mediators between the human and the divine.

  Once the person was scraped, the past removed, and the vital energies recovered—the energies that would drive him or her to embrace the present—I followed up with a session of skin stretching. The deviant, egotistic individual “I” tends to separate from the world and lives under the skin. And in its zeal for possession, it makes that skin into a defensive border. Feeling insecure, afraid of emptiness, it unwittingly draws the skin inward, making it into a corset. In the old days infants were wrapped up, perhaps with the secret fear that their uncontrolled movements would cause them to “spill out.” I felt that I had to teach the skin to expand itself, restoring its elasticity in order to unite it with humanity and the cosmos. I started grabbing parts of skin and stretching them as much as possible. The skin of the back was elastic and stretched surprisingly well; likewise the skin of the chest and abdomen. I stretched the eyelids, cheeks, forehead, scalp, the skin of the neck, arms, legs, feet, hands. The scrotum could be opened up like a fan, sometimes stretching almost as far as the navel. Stretching the outer labia of the vulva, removing them for a few moments from their desire to be absorbed, produced an intense state of freedom. At the end of the session, the patient was no longer separated from the world, knowing that his or her limits were out beyond the stars.

  The next step was to massage the bones. We have a tendency to forget our bone structure: the skeleton reminds us of death. It appears impersonal to us, macabre, inanimate. However, it is a living and responsive structure. In contrast with stroking the skin or putting pressure on the muscles to loosen them up, this involved kneading the bones, exploring their forms, their interstices, their corners. Every phalanx was taken into account, every vertebra, every rib, the long bones, the joints, the different parts of the skull, the orbits of the eyes, the structure of the pelvis. At the end of the massage the patient would stand up and dance, moving like a cheerful skeleton.

  From there I went on to conquer the flesh, muscles, and viscera. Using high quality oil I began with continuous rubbing with both hands, giving a touch without beginning or end. The body ceases to have individual parts; it becomes a whole, a path that does not desire to arrive at any point, only to extend. The hands pass over and over, taking different directions every time, and the body loses its limits and feels infinite. After this, the massager begins to “open.” The hands, on a given region of the body, are placed together, side by side, and then pressed strongly apart from each other, transmitting the idea to the patient that she is being opened up. Accumulated sufferings, withheld love, anger, and resentment all flow out through this metaphorical opening. The entire body is a memory. I remember a woman who began to whimper when I opened her left knee: there she carried the pain of her mother, who had lost her leg in a car crash. Screams and rage arise when the chest is opened. From the back, resentment against betrayals emerges. When the pubis is opened, a mother’s hatred of men might come out, or guilt over an abortion, the anguish of frustrated homosexuality, and so forth. When I opened the soles and heels of an old man he wept, letting out his sorrow at having been taken away from his native village at age six, losing the landscape and his friends forever. A woman whose heart I opened began trembling as if having a seizure. Without reasoning, driven by a strange impulse, I took off her wedding ring and instantly she calmed down. She had been forced to marry because of an unintended pregnancy.

  For a few years I continued investigating every type of massage that could raise the level of consciousness. Marie Thérèse, one of my students, was a nurse. At that time she was working for a Jewish husband and Christian wife whose only son, as a baby, had fallen into a coma for unknown reasons. He lay in a bed in Necker, a children’s hospital in Paris. The boy had kept on living there for five years, motionless as a vegetable. They had opened his skull and closed it again, without remedying the problem at all. Marie Thérèse asked me to do something for him. I refused outright: if the best doctors in France had not been able to do anything, how could I? If I gave the slightest hope to the parents, I would be a charlatan. My student told me that she had an in
tuition that my massage techniques might be beneficial. I saw such sincere faith in her eyes that I agreed to visit the child, in total secrecy, in the presence of his father and mother but hidden from the doctors and nurses at the hospital. I asked her not to promise anything, to say only that I was willing to try a new therapeutic method. At noon, the hour at which the French religiously suspend their activities to go and have lunch, Marie Thérèse brought me through a service door, and we entered the child’s room as stealthily as thieves. The mother and father were no more than thirty years old. He was dressed in black in the manner of religious Israelis, and she had dyed-blond hair, typical of the French middle class. The five-year-old child, his shaved head showing his scars, lay on the iron bed, wearing a large diaper like a baby. On the wall behind his head hung a framed photograph of an old religious man. I asked the father who this man was, and he answered, “He is the rabbi of New York. He works miracles.”

  “Did you visit him to heal your son?”

  “Certainly, but the holy man refused to see him or pray for him; because the boy has a Catholic mother he cannot be considered Jewish.”

  “What? Are you telling me that your son is lying beneath the picture of someone who rejected him, which is equivalent to a curse? If you want me to try to do something for him, take that picture down right away and hide it!”

  My anger was not feigned. I realized that I was in the middle of a racial and religious problem between two families, in which the child was being used as a scapegoat. The man obeyed, shutting the rabbi’s image in a closet. I asked the mother, “Have you ever nursed the boy?”

  “Never,” she replied. I asked her to put the nipple of her left breast into her child’s mouth. She did so. I then asked the father to suck on the big toe of each of the child’s feet. I thought that in this way, the sleeping body would be informed of how to suck. After ten minutes of this activity, much to everyone’s surprise, the boy’s mouth moved and he sucked lightly. Marie Thérèse was moved and shed a few tears. The parents did not. I became hopeful. The following Wednesday, as usual, I gave a lecture attended by between three hundred and four hundred people, told them about the case, and asked for couples to volunteer to give the boy two-hour massages in shifts so that he would be massaged continuously for twelve hours a day, every day for a week. Many benevolent spectators, all students from my seminars, volunteered to do this; Marie Thérèse introduced them into the hospital, and they gave their efforts freely to heal the child.

  After a week, he began to move. I remember Marie Thérèse coming to see me, euphoric, hugging me and saying one word: “Awake!” Three months later, with a sad expression, she invited me to come and see the child. He was now in a private clinic. I found him sitting in a crib, playing with a stuffed animal and manipulating a radio at the same time. “He hears perfectly. Now he is learning to see,” Marie Thérèse said. “Everything is going well; the boy is cured!”

  “Why are you so sad?” I asked her.

  “His parents almost never come to visit him; they have left him completely in my care. And what’s more, they refuse to talk to you. They say you’re a despot, that you treated them badly; indeed they hate you.”

  I was not surprised to receive no thanks. A vegetative child was useful to them for capturing their family curses. The living child obliged them to tackle the issue of their marriage, which was repudiated by each of their family trees. Now, for having healed him, it was my turn to be the scapegoat.

  A much more pleasant experience was what I achieved with Moebius. After watching him work for four years, drawing The Incal, I noticed that he was tired at the beginning of the fifth volume. To give him new energy I suggested that he draw his family tree, and when he had finished I realized that each person in our comic corresponded to one of his family members. For example, the Metabaron was his deaf grandfather, elevated to mythic proportions. I believed that the supreme emotional fulfillment of an individual consisted of being loved unconditionally by the members of his or her family tree, from parents to the great-grandparents. Receiving this affection would heal the scars left by previous suffering. These scars can eventually accumulate and form a depressive weight that makes the artist unable to enjoy creating. I visualized Moebius naked in the midst of his family members, also naked, receiving an affectionate massage from all of them. After my friend accepted this idea, I summoned twenty of my best students from my initiatory massage courses and convened them in my library. These men and women, of various ages, agreed to carry out this experience for free. What a luxury: a massage from forty hands! When I asked Moebius to relate the memories he had of this event, he sent me the following testimony:

  “Having attended a number of your Wednesday lectures, I decided to accept your proposal to analyze my family tree. Since I was your friend and collaborator, you offered at the end of the analysis to organize a massage tailored to my history. Despite my perplexity, I agreed without voicing doubts. Some days later, entering your library, I found myself surrounded by about twenty people (I recognized some of them from your lectures), smiling politely and waiting for me. With the air of cheerful gravity that characterizes you, you introduced me to my massage group, and then you added sardonically, before vanishing, ‘They embody the members of your family tree: give them roles and make them live.’

  “Overcoming my shyness, I began to choose carefully who my father, my mother, my grandfathers, my brothers, my aunts, and uncles should be. All of them, loved or unknown, near or far, were gradually embodied by these strangers. They were truly professional, knew the process of identification very well, and soon, without the least doubt, my family was there. After immersing the room in semi-darkness we all undressed and began the massage. Many hands were placed on my body, gentle, strong, hesitant, affectionate. I was touched with luminous and tender attention. I felt the contact that all the children in the world dream of: the vigilant love of the adult for the innocent. Suddenly, through these people, who became a channel, my real family was present; the spirit of my ancestors was there. The emotion that possessed me was so intense that I felt myself projected into the region of impassivity. From there I saw myself cry and laugh at myself.

  “Next, ecstatic at this new consciousness, protected by my family from the assaults of darkness, I decided to take advantage of that window of power. I became the central organizer: I had to rebuild the group into what every family really is, a wonderful space-time-ship sailing the infinite ocean of life in search of the promised Father. I was the captain of that ship! I distributed the roles without hesitation, and they all happily took their places. One was the indefatigable engine, another was the protective hull, another was the radar, another the control panel, and so forth. This fantastic voyage across the universe was a unique experience insomuch as our collective imagination was freed, for a few moments, from the comfortable and illusory rational prison, entering into a marvelous dimension, so subtle, so true, so perfect, that in the end, upon returning to our habitual reality, we rejoiced with the excitement of a crew that has successfully completed an important mission.

  “The years have passed, and this moment, far from being forgotten, continues to be a source of inspiration and allows me to remain absolutely certain of the incredible power of love and imagination when they are thus mixed in the crucible of bodily sensation.”

  Moebius drew volumes five and six of The Incal with superhuman creative enthusiasm. Making the most of my collaborator’s experience, I had written an adventure in which the main characters, forming a family, combined themselves into a spatial-temporal ship and crossed the universe to find Orh, the Supreme Father.

  It seemed important to me to give the same attention to the feet that is given to the hands. These extremities, driven to insensibility by spending most of their time imprisoned in shoes, are keepers of important information by virtue of their receiving the weight of the entire body. With massage the patient can be led to completely experience the consciousness of her feet, made to penetrate
deeper and deeper into them with the sensation of touch until she feels her soul. The heel is strengthened in order to prevent retreating from life. The toes are stretched toward the infinite future. The entire surfaces of the feet are tenderly kissed in order to release the child that is a prisoner in them.

  Despite these investigations, and many others (for example, massaging not only the body but also its shadow and the objects the shadow touches, such as the floor, furniture, other objects, or another person, treating them all as a unit; experiencing a perfect birth in the arms of a man and a woman, on the “mother’s” belly, protected by the “father,” covered by a warm damp sheet, feeling oneself emerge into life amidst loving touches, simulating development, growth, and finally birth with ease and joy; or massaging the space that surrounds a body, imagining that it is an aura that belongs to it; etc.), I felt that there was still an essential aspect that had not yet been discovered. I began to ask myself, “Who is massaging?” I realized when observing my students that the patients did not offer objective bodies but images, according to how they felt and conceived themselves. Although it seemed incredible, some of them were living without sex organs, others without backbones or without feet, while others were a head from which a sort of fetal body hung. Most of them perceived themselves as their relatives had perceived them. Moreover, the massagers were not massaging with their whole being. Sometimes they would act seductively, sometimes like cold doctors, sometimes like sadistic children, and so on. Their frustrations, complexes, insecurities, and interests slipped into every movement. I concluded that I was not working with beings with a single body, but with many. The vision of one’s body changes according to the “I” that is dominant at the moment.