Alejandro Jodorowsky is like a teacher to me at this point. Now I’ve finally had the chance to see his documentary “Psychomagic, A Healing Art”, and I am thrilled with it. To be frank, the book titled Psychomagic was a little beyond the pale for me, but I still thought it was highly stimulating in many other areas.
Some of the more extreme “cures” involved a man cutting the head off of a chicken, pouring the blood on his mother’s grave, and then having intercourse with the soil. Apparently it worked! Now, “Manual of Psychomagic” is something I’ve yet to traverse. I did not get more than a few chapters in before I thought this was a bit psychotic for me.
I’ve read in a review where, allegedly, a woman was told to go to a confessional and tell a priest that she wants to commit terrible acts, and she wants to do them to him! I can imagine that being therapeutic, but also grounds for jail time. I won’t go into the film of his where he portrayed a character that committed rape, and said himself that he actually did commit rape on film. He claimed it healed her, but I’m not seeing her testimony anywhere. I digress!
Nevertheless, Jodorowsky has been integral in my learning Tarot (perhaps through generations) in a way that I don’t find entirely compatible with many other readers, and that extends, to some degree, into creating ideas for courageous artistic acts that heal the subconscious. For this I am eternally grateful. The movie is a reflection of a lot of these things that I’m grateful for, and I found it deeply moving in some areas.
The screenshot is from a scene where a man is partially buried alive, and lots of meat is thrown atop the soil. Then, vultures are summoned to eat the meat, while the man watches with a large glass bowl over his head. There is another instance where a woman whose husband, a skydiver, committed suicide prior to their wedding day for no apparent reason. To heal from this, the woman is instructed to go to a church in her wedding dress, then take it off and place it into a coffin, as if it were a funeral. She is also instructed to go sky-diving.
Additionally, a man with a stuttering problem is painted gold, told to go to Disneyworld dressed as a kid, and (not at the same time) held by the genitals and instructed to cover them with what is probably the blood of a bull, to reinvigorate masculine archetypal principles in him. Near the end of that scene, the man is walking around reciting poetry without any stuttering whatsoever.
I don’t support every one of these metaphorical ideas, but some of them do make sense, and overall, the very principle of taking metaphorical principles into gestalt therapy is a good idea. Although, I wouldn’t recommend placing photos of your estranged family members onto pumpkins and smashing them with a sledgehammer. That’s sort of asking for something to go wrong.