Dualism and The Mirror a research essay about Alejandro Jodorowsky's THe Holy Mountain

This is a paper i wrote for my graduate class. I wanted to publish this because while i was doing the research for this piece, i found there wasn't much written about the amazing film, "The Holy Mountain," and practically no analytical texts at all. I've included the references and the text in full and i hope it can provide some interesting academic insights into and absolutely incredible film.
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The Dualism and The Mirror
Krisztina Lazar

There is something that is at the very core of both philosophical and esoteric traditions that defines humanity’s exploration and navigation of the world that we inhabit. It is a concept that has many interpretations and has had many evolutions and incarnations throughout history, but the basic inquiry still remains the same. Human beings, as a conscious, self-reflective creature, are obsessed with the definition of Self, of what it means to be human, of the identification of the “I” and “not I,” the Other, in other words, and the relationship that is established because of this primordial separation. This interaction between the I and the Other sets up a binary, a comparative contextual dialogue between two opposing forces that cannot exist alone and can only be understood as functionalities of each other. This basic duality, this interaction between opposites, is the fundamental essence of our projected reality, the basic seed of our scientific inquiry and the core of all mythological and spiritual Creation.
In a sense, this duality is how we define ourselves, especially in our Western tradition, where we take it to mean the difference between myself and everything else. However, in many esoteric and spiritual traditions, this duality is the source of Creation and there is an understanding that the two opposing forces are a function of a unified whole, like the opposite sides of coin, separate, but tied inextricably together, where there is an underlying, non-homogenizing unification of this inherent binary system. It is precisely this dialectical discussion between these two viewpoints that Alejandro Jodorowsky employs in his 1973 film, The Holy Mountain. He dissects notions of Self and Other through the discerning lens of Western philosophy as well as through a vast array of overlaying spiritual and hermetic contextualization, creating intersections and reflections of thought between modalities that generally don’t fit together in a friendly discussion. Essentially, Jodorowsky is creating a platform by working with duality to speak about duality.
The very first image we are presented with when the film begins are two Marilyn Manroe-esque women flanked by a black and white patterned wall reminiscent of Islamic geometrical patterning. The pattern is our first clue. The binary in the colors, the reference to Islamic patterning and the sacredness inherent within its geometry, we are visually prepared for what comes next. Our view is expanded and a third character is added, a man, dressed all in black.
Probably one of the most widely recognizable symbols of any esoteric tradition is the yin yang, the embodiment of the collaboration between opposites. The yin is the black, the feminine, the night, and the yang is the white, the masculine and the day. Each half of the yin yang contains a small circle of the opposing color, indicating that within each force there exists elements of its opposite. The women in this opening segment are dressed in white, the color of yang, the masculine energy and the man, the Alchemist, is dressed in black, the color of yin, the feminine principle. Visually, they depict elements of their opposing aspect, displaying a physical yin yang, a marriage of the separate components of dualism.
From the very beginning of the film, the significance of the symbolism, the conscious inclusion and use of color, the pattern of repetition, and most importantly, the all-pervading theme of duality is concretely established as the ground from which the film will evolve. As the audience, we are led into a labyrinthine construction of imagery and philosophy and are asked to create connections between the heavy layers and juxtapositions of symbolisms, allowing much of the details in the density to be absorbed in an unconscious way. There is a strategy of positive exhaustion, to examine a concept from as many different angles as possible, creating connections and conclusions from this diversity and a particular significance through such a symphonic mélange of imagery.(1)
As the film continues, the viewer is rocketed from a interior, ritualistic, sacred space to an arid, unfriendly location where we see a dirty man lying on the ground surrounded by broken bottles of what can be assumed to be liquor. We are confronted with not only the opposing factors of interior/exterior, pure/filthy, constructed space/natural space, sacredness/earthiness, but we meet the Alchemist’s antithesis as well. There are several Tarot cards that are flashed before us, almost too quickly to fully comprehend them. One is the Crocodile, which was the creature the Mayans believed held the world on his back, and the second is the Fool.(2) We learn something about the Thief through this juxtaposition, perhaps something critical about Jodorowsky’s views on Christianity as well as both of these notions crop up throughout the film multiple times, and we are set up for this character’s role in how the story unfolds.
We accompany the Thief on a journey, both physically as well as internally. This is both an aspect of a dual narrative as well as a metaphor of one for the other. Yet we are always the observers, never privy to an actual interiority of the character, almost as if we are implicated as one of the initiates within the film itself, asked to watch and learn from the Thief’s mistakes.
Despite being Christ like in appearance, the Thief is the most flawed, the most unwilling to give up and let go of his attachments, the most disturbed by his own image and his own Self. Once he enters the city, he is tricked by large rotund men dressed as Roman soldiers and one as the Mother Mary, to drink in excess so that he blacks out. We are given a reenactment of Michelangelo’s Pieta, an embodiment of a captured moment of the union of opposites, shortly after which the Thief wakes up amidst seemingly hundreds of replicas of himself. He is terrified, screaming, and sets about to destroy all but one, which he seemingly cannot get himself to part with at that time.
This is such a loaded segment for many reasons. It speaks directly to questions of Self, of fragmentation of the self, of the primordial separation, the direct confrontation of this duplicity and then the inability to let go of this fantasy. It is the first moment of self-recognition, an identification of the I as opposed to what is around him. It is his moment of human subjectivity where his recognition of himself puts himself in the center of his own thoughts.(3) Up until this point in the film, the Thief was very infant-like, urinating on himself, unable to speak, impulsive. This recognition of his image evolves him into a maturation of consciousness so to speak, the mirror stage that establishes the binary of internal/external, indside/outside, me/reflection of me, me/not me.
Jacques Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage is essentially the moment of the identification of the I, the transformation of a subject when he assumes an image of himself.(4) This moment of realization is in a sense a ripping apart of the self, a fragmentation of some imagined primordial totality, and it is this terror, this realization of the many versions of self that can be created and distributed, a mimicry, a copy, a shadow of whatever original form existed prior that gets translated into the Thief’s screams. In Lacan’s words, “the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination; it is still pregnant with the correspondences that unite the I with the statue in which man projects himself, with the phantoms that dominate him, or with the automaton in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his own making tends to find completion.”(5)
The Thief’s violence towards his replications is a narcissistic crisis, a revolt against his image within the strange ambiguous in-between unconscious space. It is abjection acted out, the moment of death and expulsion into the abominable real.(6) It is the space where meaning collapses and “I give birth to myself amidst the violence of sobs, of vomit.”(7)
The Thief destroys all but one, symbolizing that he is not ready to dissolve his ego and let go of his projections, but also begs the question as to whether or not we are able to give up our perception of ourselves. Can we ever truly assimilate once we’ve separated out the Other? Can we ever become an integrated Whole, or are we ourselves just version of the yin yang, opposites that exist in concert as a part of a unified duality and it is the understanding of this split that eventually reconciles the primordial fracture? It is a split in man’s psyche and it is precisely this duality that inhibits him from knowing himself and therefore remaining a mystery to himself.(8) Consciousness is a precondition to being, but there is an indoctrinated fear of the psyche itself, a mistrust of the unknown depths of the unconscious mind which further instills in us the separation of I and Other, both externally in the world around us and internally within ourselves.(9) This unknowable part, the unattainable aspect of the self is an object of desire that is imagined as separate from the self, essentially an objet petit a, becomes incarnated into these replicas of the Thief as Christ.(10) He accepts his desire as he longingly gazes at his effigy, then proceeds to walk with it through the streets, performing the dialectical connection between his recognition of his desire for the object and his desire for recognition. He is literally carrying his desire, a manifestation of his unconscious of sorts, as he goes, performing Zizek’s assertion that the unconscious is on the outside, all around us in society and in what we do and create, not hidden in unfathomable depths. He quotes the X Files motto, “the truth is out there,” and it is indeed this truth that the Thief, almost despite of himself, stumbles into.(11)
“The unconscious is crazy, is madness. . .but we are living in an ocean of madness in a little ship of logic,” as described by Jodorowsky in his own words.(12) The visual decadence of the film is the ocean of madness and the journey that we accompany the characters on is the ship of logic. The deliberate mash-up of ideas and imagery is the very essence of the grotesque as defined by Robert Storr. To be grotesque, something must be in conflict with something else yet indivisible from it, in other words, an encapsulation of the extremes of duality.(13) Our unconscious works much in the same way, recombining, blending, transmuting an imagined ideal form into untold possibilities. In this way, “the ruin of perfection is the origin of vital hybridities, mutation, and cross-fertilization – the source of hitherto unseen combinations of familiar forms. Thus the breakdown of a previously established order provides the armature for rearranging its components; and from that process the shape of a provisional new order emerges.”(14)
As we follow the Thief on the road to this new order, he climbs into the Alchemist’s tower. This giant phallic tower is an axis mundi, the center of the world, that connects heaven, earth and the underworld. The axis isn’t one specific location, rather a symbolic edifice that can be moved or imagined practically anywhere.(15) It establishes the spatial relationship of higher and lower, heaven-ward and earthbound, up and down, and this is reinforced by the zooming camera away from the Thief as he ascends and the downward zoom toward the eyes of the Prostitute and her chimp.
Once in the tower, he attempts to fight the Alchemist and is quickly subdued. The Alchemist taps on his chakra points and the Written Woman cuts the tumor on the back of his neck, removing a squid-like entity that seemingly could be the source of his abjection. Once removed, he has seemingly gone through another maturation of consciousness as he is now able to speak. Language is encapsulated within the essence of being human.(16) In whatever form, the powers of articulation render a command over consciousness, one that raises a being from guttural utterings to the possibility of higher thought, in other words, from crawling with the worms to soaring with the intellectuals. Only when he is able to speak can he express what it is he wants and however unaware he is as to what he just got himself into, he is ready to begin the process of purification, of maturation, of becoming himself and reaching his potential.
The Thief’s excrement is purified by an alchemical process that uses his own sweat, his essence, to make the transmutation, driving home the idea that we ourselves are responsible for our own purifications and it is within ourselves that we can turn even our most metaphorically abject excretions into the purest form. The pelican that waddles around in the room during the procedure is a symbol for the philosopher’s stone. It dissolves itself, rather, it dies, to allow the transmutation of the Great Work to happen, the changing of lead into gold.(17)
During the transmutation process, we see the Thief go from exhaustion to elation, to a sublime moment of jouissance expression that milks from him what is needed to purify his excrement. Yet, once he is presented the gold, his objet petit a, and shown his image in the mirror, he is once again terrified and breaks his own image with the object of his desire. It is through jouissance, the pleasure principle, the objet petit a, the unattainable object of desire, is created, and it is with this object that his own reflected image, the Other, is shattered. He is shown the “cipher of his mortal destiny,” seeing himself as himself, and he couldn’t handle it. Where the effigies were closer to the imagined Other, his actual reflection was far more immediate, a glimpse at the “ecstatic limit of Thou art that,” where duality is realized and incorporated into being and the projection of the Real becomes and immediate Now.(18)
After the 7 initiates are gathered, the Thief and the Written Woman make 9 and are taken into the wilderness as students on the journey to spiritual purification. They perform rituals, mediations, vision quests, and afterwards are asked to count how many of them they see. Each counts 9, but profess that someone is missing. There is a clay basin with water in it in front of them and they each look in and see their own reflections. There they see the one that is missing; they see themselves, their own image, they are the one missing. This constant repetition of the reflection of Self is in a progression towards the Hindu proverb of Thou art that which Lacan spoke of. Beginning as a complete external realization, each identification of the Self subsequently is a closer understanding of that Other as a projection of I.
Proclaiming that this reflected Other has drowned, they walk in funerary procession to bury the deceased. The Alchemist pours the water into a grave and then they perform a ritualistic dying themselves. He asks them to let go of their bodies, their loved ones, everything and to fully experience death. Then he instructs them to feel their renewed sense of being, of completeness all onto themselves. He says, “you will be born again. You will be real. You will be your own father, your own mother, your own child, your own perfection.” Through this ritualistic death and rebirth, they are now a group, not a homogeneous entity, but a whole made up of many parts, a mandala of sorts, an actualization of the fundamental notions of dualism within the construct of the principles embodied in the yin yang.
Despite this initial unification of the group, the Thief somehow does not fully belong. Each initiate is given a staff that has the symbol of his or her planet on the top. The Thief’s staff has the crescent moon, the only one that is not a planet, setting him apart from the rest. As the moon, he orbits the Earth, which is held by the Alchemist, his antithesis. They are set as opposites from the beginning, the Alchemist as highly hermetically intellectual, the Thief as very corporeal and carnal. The Alchemist is a mystic and the Thief is portrayed as very human. As the moon, he symbolically represents his own opposite as the moon is feminine, is the yin, is the night, is the mystery, is nature.
Once they’ve reached the mountain where the 9 wise ones sit, their relationship is brought to climax as the Alchemist instructs the Thief to cut off his head. There is a tradition amongst ancient tribes where the leader is sacrificed in order for the people to progress onwards onto sacred grounds. In essence, the Alchemist asks the Thief to sever their connection, to make the sacrifice, as shown by the sacrificial lamb that gets beheaded in his place, and to have the courage to exist independently on his own. He says to him, “now you can begin to learn,” and tells him to unite with the Prostitute and to “forget the summits; reach eternity through love. . .teach your family and your people; change the world.” This reads as a comment of the essence of the actual teachings of Christ, not Chrisitanity as it was developed by Paul into the religion we know today, but the very visceral connection to the sublime that Christ taught; salvation through love.
The rest of the initiates climb to the table of the wise ones only to find that they are all dummies, except for one to their surprise, who is the Alchemist. He then explains the “great secret.” He continues,
Is this the end of our adventure? Nothing has an end. We came in search of the secret of immortality, to be like gods. And here we are, mortals, more human than ever. If we have not obtained immortality, at least we have obtained reality. We began in a fairytale, and now we came to life. But is this life reality? No. It is a film. Zoom back camera. We are images, dreams, photographs. We must not stay here. Prisoners. We shall break the illusion. This is Maya. Goodbye to the holy mountain. Real life awaits us.

It is important to dissect this last moment of the film. It is where the reflection and the I collapse into a self realized Now. The film, as knowledge of itself as a film, sets up a paradox, like two mirrors reflecting infinitum into each other, and places itself as the filter between the Real and Unreal. Identifying itself as fantasy, it becomes the screen between desire and drive and tells the story that allows the subject to misperceive the void around which drives orbits their desire.(19) This fantasy, in a psychoanalytic sense, is the primordial form of narrative and self-sustained construction by the Self of the imagined Real.(20) “We are images, dreams, photographs,” is both a comment on the image we see before us on the screen, as well as alluding to that which we see around us all the time. Everything we see is an image, both in a very physiological perceptive sense, as well as a psychological projection. The fear and distrust of images is a tradition in Western thought and ever since Plato, we’ve been warned against the seduction of reflections and shadows.(21) “We must not stay here, prisoners,” is a call for us to walk off camera ourselves, to stand up and realize that what is before us is a shadow and walk out of the cave that holds us there. We must break the illusion, shatter the mirror, recognize the veil of Maya that shrouds our ability to truly see.
“Goodbye to the Holy Mountain. Real life awaits us.” We can study, meditate, journey, learn, and abide by all of the teachings that are out there, from esoteric philosophies, to spiritual experiences, to analytic philosophies of the Western mind and build our own Holy Mountain atop which we may sit. Yet, sitting on top of a mountain looking down on the world, immortal in our knowledge, isn’t going to get us anywhere. It is important to have the knowledge, understanding and experience, but it is the application into real life, into our very humanness, where it becomes integrated and for lack of a better way of saying it, real.
To return again to the notion of, “the truth is out there,” and that the unconscious spills out into the world around us as an ocean of madness. We, on our tiny ship of logic navigate this ocean in an attempt to understand ourselves as I, as the Other, and through our primordial separation of ourselves, we can gaze into our own eyes in our mirrored reflection and perceive the void in all of its beauty and terror. Dualism, self conflict, our simultaneous horror and wonder at the unexpected, is the binary experience that we call our humanity.(22) But we don’t have to let this difference alienate us into ourselves. Perhaps it is the journey, the knowledge and understanding gained along the way, that will help us recognize the duality inherent in our perception of existence, the difference between I/ Other, yin/yang, inside/outside, and transmute the terror of the abject into the wonder of the unknown.
Is this the end of our adventure? Nothing has an end. We came in search of the secret of immortality, to be like gods. And here we are, mortals, more human than ever. If we have not obtained immortality, at least we have obtained reality.

References.
1. Storr, Robert, Disparities and Deformities: Our Grotesque, (SITE Santa Fe; 2004). 11.
2. Matthews, Boris, The Herder Dictionary of Symbols, (Chiron Publications; 1986). 49.
3. Heidegger, Martin, “Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics,” Basic Writings, (Harper Collins Publishers; 1993). 297.
4. Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits, (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1977). 2.
5. ibid. 2-3.
6. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, (Columbia University Press; 1982). 4-14.
7. ibid. 2.
8. Jung, C. G., The Undiscovered Self, (SIGNET; 2006). 46.
9. ibid. 49-50.
10. Zizek, Slavoj, The Plague of Fantasies, (Verso; 2008). 9.
11. ibid. 1-8.
12. Jodorowsky, Alejandro, Interview by Daniel Pinchbeck. A Conversation with Jodorowsky, Part One, Reality Sandwich. Web. 30 November, 2010.
13. Storr, Robert, Disparities and Deformities: Our Grotesque, (SITE Santa Fe; 2004). 16.
14. ibid. 14.
15. Matthews, Boris, The Herder Dictionary of Symbols, (Chiron Publications; 1986). 218.
16. Heidegger, Martin, “Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics,” Basic Writings, (Harper Collins Publishers; 1993). 397-398.
17. Matthews, Boris, The Herder Dictionary of Symbols, (Chiron Publications; 1986). 148.
18. Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits, (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1977). 7.
19. Zizek, Slavoj, The Plague of Fantasies, (Verso; 2008). 43.
20. ibid. 11.
21. Shaviro, Steven, The Cinematic Body, (University of Minnesota Press; 1993). 14.
22. Storr, Robert, Disparities and Deformities: Our Grotesque, (SITE Santa Fe; 2004). 29.