The Archivist of His Own Miracles

Jodorowsky spends a page of Chapter 7 explaining why Maria Sabina is not, technically, in his book. He describes her visiting his dreams, healing his ankles from a distance, appearing "always in a way that was very helpful to me" until her death — and then writes: "This is why I have not included Maria Sabina as one of the characters in this book: I cannot exclude the possibility that she is a sort of illusion personal to me." She then appears anyway, quoted, photographed, footnoted, present in every way except the category he has invented to hold her at arm's length. It's a strange little act of bookkeeping, and it tells you more about the book's method than any of its actual mysticism does: Jodorowsky is not trying to convince you these things happened. He is showing you the seams of a man deciding, in real time, what to believe about his own memory.

That distinction matters because it puts him somewhere unexpected in the shelf of twentieth-century consciousness literature. John Lilly, floating in his tank in 1972, wanted his inner states certified as data — the whole architecture of *The Center of the Cyclone* is a bid for scientific standing, a refusal to admit the difference between a vision and a finding. Jodorowsky refuses the opposite way: he keeps the uncertainty visible, keeps "my intuition said yes, my reason said no" sitting right there on the page, unresolved, as if resolution would be a kind of cheating. It is a more honest instrument for exactly the same material — and it is also, not incidentally, a much better story. Ejo Takata telling him to abandon Zen for a woman ("empty mind does not mean empty heart") reads less like doctrine than like a therapist who happens to speak in koans. Whether that's wisdom or good editing is a question the book has no interest in letting you settle.

Where the hindsight gets less kind is in the economy around the mysticism rather than the mysticism itself. Ana Perla organizing disciples into forced meditation vigils while the master sleeps off jet lag; a cat shaved and dressed as a monk as a joke that reads, decades later, like hazing; and after Takata's death, a fax arriving from "Roshi Silencio" asking Jodorowsky for a thousand dollars to build a stupa. Jodorowsky declines and sends a poem instead — a good scene, beautifully staged — but the fax is the more instructive artifact. It's the same request every lineage eventually generates once the person who justified it is gone: pay to formalize the memory of the thing that used to be free. Reading this in 2026, with a decade of retreat centers and "psychomagic" workshops and trademarked healing modalities behind us, the fax isn't a curiosity from Jodorowsky's past. It's the industry's founding document.

What the book withholds, and what makes its 2023 publication date genuinely strange to sit with, is any reckoning with the parts of Jodorowsky's own legend that have not aged as well as Ejo Takata's koans — the claims made in decades of interviews about staging real violence for the camera, claims that circulated for years attached to his name before this memoir was assembled. A book called *The Spiritual Journey of* [himself], written by the subject at the far end of that journey, has total control over which anecdotes get to stand for the whole. Leonora Carrington gets Buñuel's motel room and her handprints in blood; Violeta Parra gets six archangels and a verse in her honor; Jodorowsky gets to choose, at ninety-four, which mysteries about himself remain productively unresolved and which get quietly excluded the way Maria Sabina was excluded — present in substance, absent from the ledger. The book is honest about the unreliability of his memory. It says nothing about the unreliability of his selection.

So the question worth sitting with isn't whether Jodorowsky's mystical claims are true — he's told you upfront that he doesn't fully know either. It's what happens to a spiritual memoir once its author has spent sixty years also being its primary publicist, and whether "I cannot exclude the possibility that she is a sort of illusion personal to me" is a confession or a technique.