There’s just too much to say about this book, let alone about one of the world’s great living masters in Alejandro Jodorowsky.
He is magus and renaissance man—playwright, filmmaker, composer, mime, psychotherapist, tarot scholar and master, comic book and graphic author, and beyond.
I just stumbled upon the very recent release of a new documentary on the visionary director’s revolutionary Psychomagic, a new theory of trauma therapy. His unique concept of healing uses performance art as a vehicle to counter deep, debilitating psychic suffering with literal “acts of confrontation” in real world applications.
Jodo draws from a life-long study of philosophy, psychology, ethnology and world religions, from Freud to shamans, from Kabbalah to Gurdjieff and everything in between, to work directly with suffering people who are eager to face, resolve and transcend their personal dilemmas through the use of this radical and performative art therapy.
While I yet plumb the depths of his centuries-in-the-making restoration of the Marseilles Tarot deck and his magisterial book on the subject, I look forward to the film’s inclusion in a new 4k box set of his ultraworldly films due later this year.
I became a believer many years ago when I read The Spiritual Journey Of Alejandro Jodorowsky, as mind-blowing a read as I’ve enjoyed in a great many, many moons. His tales of the most extraordinary experiences with many of the most famed initiates of the age—including doña Magdalena, La Tigressa, Maria Sabina, and a most unforgettable chapter on Reyna D’Assia, Gurdjieff’s daughter who taught him profoundly empowering commandments that her father taught her among so many other illuminations and physical transcendences—are each life changers.
Would require an entire set of lengthy papers to cover what I want to begin to say about Jodo, his films, his tarot and tarology, his books and his Psychomagia. There are precious few living masters of the old ways who are yet also making new ways among us. In the western world, Jodorowsky stands alone. Savor these precious works, they will make you stronger, happier, and more alive.
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