Artist, filmmaker, novelist, playwright, actor, tarotist, mime artist, psychotherapist. A man who treats creativity as a sacred act.
The work
Jodorowsky's films — El Topo, The Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre — are not entertainment in any conventional sense. They are rituals. They are designed to disrupt. To shock the viewer out of the sedated, predictable relationship with image and story that most cinema enforces.
He has said that a true work of art should transform the person who encounters it. Not entertain them — transform them. That is a different and far more demanding standard.
“I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs. The movies must make the miracle.”
Psychomagic
Beyond film, Jodorowsky developed the practice of Psychomagic — using symbolic, poetic actions to resolve psychological trauma. He would prescribe acts: wear your father's clothes, bury a photograph, walk barefoot through a city. Not as metaphor. As literal acts with literal effect on the psyche.
The premise is that the unconscious thinks in symbols and images, not words and logic — so to reach it, you must speak in its own language.
The Tarot
His work on the Tarot de Marsella — the Way of Tarot — treats the cards not as fortune-telling instruments but as a map of all possible human psychological states. Every card is a mirror. Every reading a portrait of the questioner's current location in the landscape of being.
He collaborated with artist Moebius on an unfinished film adaptation of Dune that never reached production — yet influenced nearly every major science fiction film that came after it.
Watch
The interview at the link below is an excellent entry point. Jodorowsky at his most direct, discussing creation, healing, and the sacred obligation of the artist.