The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography (47 page)

A machi with a branch of cinnamon, a sacred tree for the Mapuche.
Photo: George Munro.

On my trip to Temuco, a city in Chile a thousand kilometers from the capital, I had the opportunity to accompany a kind ethnologist on the muddy roads that wind through the mountains. We traveled in a powerful Jeep loaded with “needs”—commodities that these poor people lack such as coffee, fruits, soft drinks, flour, cookies, and so forth—that would allow us to be well received by a Mapuche healer. In a tiny valley between three peaks we found a modest hut surrounded by a garden with small trees and medicinal plants, where pigs, chickens, three dogs, and four children roamed about. Very near the door was a
rehue,
a sacred altar about two meters tall made from the trunk of a tree, with seven steps cut into it and surrounded by cinnamon sticks. In a manner of speaking, the rehue is a vertical altar on which the machi stands. Using it as a base, the machi utters her incantations in a language that comes from the depths of time. Thanks to the shipment of “needs,” we were kindly received. The woman, who was pregnant, wore a simple skirt and sweater vest. Over these humble clothes she wore a long silver necklace and spiked silver bracelets on her wrists. Despite her wrinkled face, she was no more than thirty years old.

The ethnologist had told me that this woman, married very young to a man who was a heavy drinker, had dreamed one night that a white serpent came to her and gave her the power to heal. She woke up distraught, feeling ignorant, too burdened by the weight of her husband and children to deal with the ills of so many people. But her body started to become paralyzed, and she found it more and more difficult to breathe, until she was at the point of dying in atrocious pain. The white serpent came to her in a dream again, and this time she told it that she would agree to be a machi. The snake immediately gave her the power to recognize the healing value of plants and taught her to heal using ancestral rites. She awoke speaking the mysterious language of the machis, and the first thing she did was to cure her husband of his vices and make him her assistant.

She allowed us to attend a healing session in a small, very clean room decorated with fabrics woven in geometric patterns and a photo of her with her husband, their children, and their dogs. She received a sick man covered with a wool blanket who was carried in the arms of his wife and his mother. He was pale, with fever and pain in his stomach and liver, and his legs were so weak that he was unable to walk.

“An envious man, we’ll soon see who, has paid a sorcerer to send you this ill. I will chase it off of you,” the machi said to him as she laid him down on his back on a small rectangular table, with his feet flat on the dirt floor on each side. She struck the
kultrung,
a small drum with cosmic significance, and while hitting it began an incantation to each of the four cardinal points. Then, apparently in a trance, she flogged the air around the sick man with a handful of herbs, as if banishing invisible entities. “Evil spirits, leave this place! Leave this poor man alone!” Then, in a resounding voice she said, “Bring me the white hen!” Her husband, a broad-chested, short-legged man, his face embellished by respectful love, brought her the bird. The healer tied its legs and folded its wings so that it could not flutter or escape. She put the hen on the patient’s chest. “Look well, poor man. The life you see in those eyes is your life. The heart that beats is your heart. Those lungs that breathe are your lungs. Do not blink; do not stop looking at her.” She struck the drum rhythmically, crying with surprising authority, “Get out, bad bile! Get out, devil fever! Get out, stomach pain! Set free this good man, this brave man, this handsome man.” Then, gently, she took the white hen and showed it to the sick man and his family, who trembled in surprise. The hen was dead!

“The evil in your husband, your son, passed into this hen. She died so that you might live. You are healed. Go to the yard, gather dry wood, and burn her.”

Seeing that his illness had passed to the hen, the sick man’s imagination allowed him to believe that he was healthy. His fever and pains vanished. He got up without any help, went smiling out to the garden, gathered dry twigs, skillfully lit a fire, and burned the bird. For my part, I imagined several ways in which the machi could have managed to kill the bird surreptitiously. Perhaps she thrust one of the spikes on her bracelet into its neck, pressed on a nerve center, or, in complicity with her husband, poisoned it beforehand. What did it matter? The point was that she was able to affect the patient’s mind, making him believe that his illness had been removed. Are all diseases a manifestation of the imagination, a kind of organic dream?

Some time later in a course that I taught to doctors and therapists in Sanary, in the south of France, I applied this primitive concept to the removal of evil from the body, coming closer to what I call “psycho-shamanism,” taking a few minutes to cure a woman of a tic that she had had for forty years. Constantly, every two or three seconds, in a broken rhythm, she would shake her head from side to side. I called her up in front of a hundred students and proceeded to interrogate her, using a friendly voice that instantly made me a paternal archetype for her. Applying Pachita’s technique, despite her forty-eight years, I spoke to her like a child. “Tell me, little girl, how old are you?” She fell into a trance and replied in a childlike voice, “Eight years old.”

“Tell me, little one, who are you saying no to all the time with your head?”

“The priest!”

“What did this priest do to you?”

“When I went to confess to prepare for my first communion, he asked me if had sinned mortally. Since I did not know what a mortal sin was, I said no. He insisted, asking me if I had touched myself between my legs. I had done it without knowing it was wrong. It gave me great shame, and I lied with a resounding ‘No.’ He kept on insisting, and I kept denying it. I left there and received the sacred host feeling that I was a liar, in a state of mortal sin, condemned forever.”

“My poor child, you have kept on denying for forty years. You have to understand that this priest was sick, that you did not have to feel guilty: it is normal for children to investigate their bodies and touch themselves; the sex organs are not the seat of evil. I will remove the useless ‘No!’ from your head . . .”

I had the woman write “NO!” on masking tape with a black marker and stuck it to her forehead. I asked her to lie on her back on a table and shook my outstretched hands all around her body as if severing invisible bonds, shouting, “Go away, you stupid priest; leave this innocent child alone! Out! Out!” Then, acting as if it was a great effort, I began to tear the tape with the “NO!” off her forehead. I pretended that it was very difficult. I exclaimed, “It has deep roots! Push! Push it out! Help me, girl!” She began to push, screaming in pain. Finally, I triumphantly pulled off the masking tape. She covered her face with her hands and burst into tears. When she raised her head, she no longer had the tic. I told her to go out to the garden and burn the “NO!” I told her to take some of the ashes, dissolve them in honey, and swallow it. She did. Her head shaking never returned.

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.