When Marc de Smedt, director of the collection “Free Spaces” at the French publisher Albin Michel, agreed to publish the book, he did so on condition that the title be changed. “No one knows the word ‘psychomagic.’ Better to call it: Le théâtre de la guérison, une thérapie panique [The Theater of Healing: A Panic Therapy].”
El teatro de la sanación [The Theater of Healing] appeared in 1995. It drew widespread interest. I received a healthy correspondence asking me to prescribe psychomagic acts. To develop this technique, until then practiced exclusively intuitively, I decided to accept two advice seekers per day, from Monday through Friday, in one-and-a-half hour sessions. After establishing their genealogical trees — siblings, parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, great-grandparents — I advised them on psychomagic acts, which would produce notable results. This was how I developed a certain number of guidelines, which permitted me to teach this art to a large number of students, many of them already established therapists. I granted private sessions for two years, at the end of which I began to write La Danza de la Realidad [Reality Dance]. Gilles Farcet fulfilled his career as a spiritual writer, and today, a noble father of a family, he drives back straying spirits, collaborating with Arnaud Desjardins in these arduous tasks.
After the publication by Siruela in Spain of La Danza de la Realidad (2001) and thanks to numerous television interviews by Fernando Sánchez Dragó, the greater public learned about Psychomagic. There was no shortage of enthusiasts who, though lacking creative ability, wanted to counsel without ever having performed an honest artistic or therapeutic act and who gave a naive imitation of my techniques.
In 2002, I gave a conference at a university in Madrid for a group of six hundred people. Skillfully directed by my facilitator, the young Javier Esteban, the students presented their problems soliciting psycho-magic advice to resolve them. At the end of the conference, Javier gifted me with a sample of his book, Duermevela [Doze], in which he describes his dreams. (“I go to a shop where they sell thousands of gigantic fish tackle items. A fishhook gets me in the knee. The man who accompanies me taught me to fish, but he tells me there’s no need for a rod or any other tackle. I throw everything away, and we go through the woods until we arrive at a river. The fish jump into our hands.”) I consider that his writings have a healing aspect. Javier, in turn, expresses his support of my ideas and requests an appointment, for the purpose of asking me again the questions the students posed, questions to which the actual education system doesn’t respond. “Students have changed, but unfortunately their professors continue to maintain the archaic way of thinking,” he tells me. I travel to Paris, and he interrogates me for several days. “Think without limits; talk for the young mutants.” And that is how the second and third parts of this book were born.
PART ONE. Psychomagic Sketches of a Panic Therapy
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST IN PANIC CHARACTER by Interviewer Gilles Farcet
(From Psychomagie. Approches d’une thérapie panique) I am no drunkard, but I am no saint either. A medicine man shouldn’t be a saint. He should experience and feel all the ups and downs, the despair and the joy, the magic and the reality, the courage and fear of his people. He should be able to sink as low as a bug or soar like an eagle. You have to be God and the devil, both of them. Being a good medicine man means being right in the midst of the turmoil, not shielding yourself from it. It means experiencing life in all its phases. It means not being afraid of cutting up and playing the fool now and then. That’s sacred too.
JOHN (FIRE) LAME DEER (SIOUX MEDICINE MAN OF THE LAKOTA TRIBE)
After many evenings spent in his library discussing Psychomagic, I asked Alejandro Jodorowsky if he intended to prescribe a psychomagic act for me. He retorted that the mere act of producing this book in his company constituted a sufficiently powerful act. Why not?
To tell the truth, Jodorowsky himself is a walking psychomagic act, an elevated and definitely “panic” character whose vibrational frequency introduces some cracks into the organization of our seemingly predictable universe.
A director who, with his accomplices Arrabal and Topor, has marked the history of theater with his (rightly named) “panic” movement; a maker of cult films like El Topo or The Holy Mountain, to which unpaid Americans devote theses and scholarly studies; an author and comic-strip writer who can afford the luxury of working with the best cartoonists; an attentive father of five children, with each of whom he actually maintains a prismatic relationship to this day; “Jodo” is also an unconventional tarot reader whose dazzling intuitions have left more than one person speechless; the convulsive clown of the Mystical Cabaret*1 who, when the Parisian public was generally boycotting events like this, regularly packed his conferences by word-of-mouth promotional power only; an international magician — one could say interstellar (as influenced by Moebius) — whom rock stars and artists from around the world have consulted.
This Chilean of Russian origin, who lived many years in Mexico and is now rooted in France, is a character that the overly cautious novelists of today could not create, a being who infuses the power of the imagination into all the recesses of his multidimensional existence.
His residence, an erudite alloy of order and disorder, organization and chaos, is the spitting image of its owner, if not simply the image of life itself. It is an experience in itself to surrender to this seedbed strewn with books, videos, toys. . It is a place where you could run into the cartoonists Moebius, Boucq, or Bess, as well as a cat or a woman from who knows where who appears for a moment to take care of the household. . It is a place of poetic power, a concentration of excess, yet controlled, energies.
To be more precise, to work with a panic character is not a sinecure. This is because, above all, Jodo superbly ignores schedules, agendas, and other temporal constraints that govern terrestrial life. When we had completed La Trampa Sagrada [The Sacred Trickster] and he proposed to help me put his psychomagic adventure to paper, I understood that I would have to totally dedicate myself and suspend all business. With him there are no advance arrangements, no fixed dates, no well-noted meetings — all is done spontaneously. Everything is on the order of the dazzling. Not that he is incapable of submitting to discipline or to a schedule, quite the contrary; but finally, there is the mystery: how could this man (who, as soon as our interviews were finished, left to direct a film with the evocative title The Rainbow Thief, a big-budget shoot) tame sacred monsters like Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, or Christopher Lee and impose his sensibility on producers (who are, at the same time, enthusiastic and worried) and accept, in September, a conference for March, without the least effort in the world to jot anything down on any written agenda? It is always necessary, as an intended date approaches, to track him down for fear that he totally forgot and has disappeared to the other side of the world.
Convinced of the convulsive character of reality, Alejandro has that fascinating and exhausting aspect that makes him excessive in all manifestations. When in front of the public, he rarely resists the temptation to go to the limit. Notably very South American, this exceptional being knows how to be, in private, kind and most humble, and he can, in the blink of an eye, transform himself into a baroque opera, in the same vein as his films, where the grotesque competes with the grave, the obscene with the sacred. He is always on the fringe: he dances on the subtle edge separating creation from gratuitous provocation, innovation from savage attacks on good taste, audacity from indecency. . Familiar with his methods after more than fifteen years of collaboration, Moebius, the genius cartoonist of El Incal, sees all this as “the technique employed by Alejandro in order to undermine the resistances of the universe.”