McGee on Alejandro

Note: In the interest of transcontinental harmony and friendship we asked our pal from across the pond Ellen Mary McGee to do a write up on our favorite tarot card reading, psychedelic film making, Marilyn Manson and Dita von Teese marrying Chilean, Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Ms. McGee went to town and gave us this essay that on one hand makes Hexedjournal.com a little bit smarter but also is one of the finest pieces we have read on one of the 20th and 21st centuries most amazing figures.

Just for the record, the place "across the pond" Ellen Mary is from is indeed England. Ms. McGee spends her time creating some of the most enchanting and haunting folk music around today. I have a feeling that PJ Harvey took some notes before recording her last album.
An album is coming out sometime soon.

You can keep dibs on her here.


Alejandro Jodorowsky and the Collective Unconscious

Alejandro Jodorowsky's narratives are at once linear and convoluted, combining Eastern philosophies and psychedelic imagery with a fairly conventional format, such as the the Spaghetti Western heroism of El Topo. In Fando Y Lis, The Holy Mountain and El Topo, we are our protagonist's traveling companions and we are awoken as part of a Collective Unconscious, an unconsciousness that pre-dates the individual. The genesis of Jung's work is echoed within the films of Jodorowsky - the spiritual and the mythological unraveled through ritual and symbolism, passing through the mind's strata- through consciousness, the personal unconscious and finally, the collective unconscious. It is through this symbolism that a universality is attempted. By the collective unconscious, Jung referred to all that comes before the conscious or the Ego including myth and spirituality.

The filmmaker would boldly assert in Constellation de Jodorowsky that true enlightenment doesn't exist, for we are already enlightened. Humanity is (as it has always been) concerned with the pursuit of a state of enlightenment. Fando and Lis searching for the the mystical city of Tar and the quest for the mountain itself in The Holy Mountain. But it is the very act of being alive that Jodorowsky wants us to question. For him, this, the corporeal is enough of a mystery and it is the violence of humanity, which he seeks to reveal as natural and intrinsic rather than abhorrent. 'This mythology of primeval violence coexists, as is well known, with the myth of the noble savage and with the dream of a natural primitive society lacking the evils that modern civilization has brought.' (Bartra 2002, p27) The artifice of modern society and the futility of any search for enlightenment is tackled with the breaking down of the fourth wall at the end of The Holy Mountain. By revealing the devices of the film-making process Jodorowsky exhibits a postmodern skepticism towards metanarratives and an awareness of an intrinsic chaos thus challenging accepted legitimising power structures which seek to impose order. 'Is this reality? No it is a film. Zoom back camera.' By forcing the viewer to question the nature of reality, they are also forced to question notions of truth, knowledge and an existing hegemony.
There is something of the death drive in the actions of Lis, El Topo and the Thief in The Holy Mountain: an inherent drive towards repeating the traumatic events of our birth. Jodorowsky himself would explain and rationalize the violence in his work by alluding to the manifold violent acts the human body inflicts upon itself from childbirth, through to the heart pumping blood around our bodies until the final violent act- death itself. Our bodies through our life cycles are in a perpetual state of violence and this is evoked by the primitive codes of honour in El Topo. According to Roger Bartra 'one of the most unsettling tendencies of contemporary thought is the curious re-valorisation of so-called primitive cultures, seen as spaces where peculiar forms of violence flourished that have now been overcome in modern societies by civilized forms of exercising legitimate force.' (Bartra 2002, p26) Jodorowsky exposes these more primitive codes of violence in tandem with more modern manifestations such as that alluded to in Isla's weapons factory in The Holy Mountain. 'Bombers, hydrogen bombs, rayguns, deadly bacteria, anti-matter waves [and] carcinogenic gases' are produced within the factory. Coming just two years after the significant deployment of Agent Orange in Vietnam, it's easy to trace the social commentary at work here.
In The Holy Mountain, the Thief, abetted by the Alchemist (alchemy being a subject on which Jung wrote heavily in later works) and seven variously skilled and powerful yet ultimately mortal individuals seek a kind of enlightenment beyond worldy goods, at once denying and desiring everything. As Umberto Eco would have it, man is 'infinite, capable of desiring in an unlimited fashion. But he realises that he is incapable of achieving what he desires and therefore he must prefigure an Other, to whom he delegates the job of bridging the gap between what is desired and what can be done.' (Eco 1987, p91). This crisis of ideology is confronted by Jodorowsky's capricious representations of religion and spirituality and posits the 'Holy Mountain' as the Other, transcendence, bridging desire and denial; the conscious and the unconscious. In particular, the collective unconscious, in which reside the archetypes of religion, symbolism, spirituality and myth. Eco sees a return to the sacred as a 'the autonomous product of a crisis in secular thinking.' (ibid 1987, p92) Both The Holy Mountain and El Topo represent the sacred as a realization that 'there is something not produced by man and towards which the human being feels at once attraction and repulsion.' (ibid 1987, p93) and a 'desire for expiation and suffering.' (ibid 1987, p93). Jodorowsky confirms Eco's 'religiosity of the Unconscious, of the Vortex, of the Lack of Center, of Difference,'(ibid 1987, p94) illuminating Eco's theory of secular mysticism and a decentralized sense of the sacred arising from ideological exigency and metaphysical ruin. We are presented with a trans-personal world of higher or divine archetypes. Jung himself described a 'collective unconscious as consisting of mythological motifs or primordial images' (Storr 1998, p16) It is from this point he developed the idea of archetypes which become rooted in the psyche. These archetypes inform ideologies.
Jung saw the process of alchemy in which base metals are changed into gold analogous with a psychological process, or individuation aimed at perfecting man. Echoing the themes in The Holy Mountain, Jung would assert that 'Individuation is essentially a spiritual journey.' (Storr 1998, p19) In part due to recurrent religious dreams and visions from his childhood, Jung saw religion as a personal journey to be experienced outside of the conventional church. Again this asserts a post-structuralist rejection of meta narratives and alludes to the futility of the search for abitrary concepts of 'truth' and 'knowledge' exemplified in Jodorowsky's work. To quote the Alchemist at the end of the The Holy Mountain, 'If we haven't obtained immortality, at least we have obtained reality'

Roger Bartra and Mark Alan Healey: Blood, Ink and Culture: Miseries and Splendours of the Post-Mexican Condition, Duke University Press, 2002
Umbert Eco: Travels in Hyper-reality, Picador 1987
Anthony Storr: The Essential Jung: Collected Writings, Fontana Press 1998