However, although this massage is effective at calming, it does not heal the essential wound. In the depths, the patient guards his suffering like a treasure. I thought to myself, “It isn’t fair to abandon someone who can’t receive. As a society, we are all responsible for their ills. Not only the tree is sick, but the entire forest. This string of diseases, this reproduction of harm from generation to generation, has to stop someday. There must be a way to make those without eyes see, to make those without ears hear, to communicate love to those whose hearts are closed.”
Just at the moment when I was in need of some valuable new information, dancing reality put a book into my hands by psychotherapist Catherine Lemaire titled Membres fantómes (Phantom Limbs, published in 1998), with a preface by Gérald Rancurel, a professor of neurology at the hospital of Salpêtrière. The subject of this book is one of the most fascinating mysteries of clinical neurology: the “phantom limb,” a phenomenon whereby the patient continues to perceive the presence of a limb that has been lost. However imaginary it may seem, the phantom limb is very real, practically flesh, insofar as it can be felt and described. Even if it does not exist, it can cause pain. Even an amputated limb imposes itself on the consciousness, continuously or intermittently, for many years in some cases. The subject feels his or her leg or arm as if it were actually there. The eyes see through the phantom, but in the dark it is there again, sometimes larger than ever. Touching it is impossible. The missing part is there, perceived but invisible and untouchable. Not only legs and arms produce phantoms, but also the breasts, nose, penis, tongue, jaw, and anus. Jean-Martin Charcot observed a patient who felt not only the phantom of his hand but also the wedding ring on his finger. Some people who were born without certain limbs, and therefore have no sensory experience of them, also develop phantoms. How? I found the answer in another phenomenon observed by neurologists: some people, when they relax their muscles and lie still with their eyes closed, sometimes feel an immaterial limb in a position different from that of the physical limb. Phantom limbs can exist without amputation!
It appeared to me that the scientists spoke mostly of phantom parts of the body, such as limbs, and never of a whole phantom body. I allowed myself to consider that we might have a whole phantom body: an immaterial body veiled by the flesh that exists before any amputation takes place and that has sensations. The experimenters had also encountered blind patients who saw phantom sights and deaf patients who heard phantom sounds.
Some amputees feel excruciating pain in their absent limbs. The neurologists, thinking that the perceived but intangible body parts were not real, could not alleviate these pains, even though they performed operations, desensitizing the cutaneous areas over the stump and also on the torso, where they believed the topological sensations creating the phantom limb originated. I wondered, “What if we were to accept the phantom limb as real and soothe its pain by operating on it? If the limb can feel the presence of a ring or a watch, could it not feel the touch of a scalpel?” I understood the aspect that was missing from my initiatory massages: we do not perceive the body as it is; we are only aware of a material representation of it that is adulterated by the views of others. We do not feel everything we feel, we do not see everything we see, and we do not hear everything we hear; there are tastes and odors that are captured by the tongue and sense of smell but not by the consciousness. With the initiatory massage, I had dedicated myself to cleansing the tangible body without acting on the phantom body. I concluded that Pachita and other witches, when they operated, did not do so on the material body, but acted on the intangible phantom body. Except that with their tricks, they added visible elements such as blood, entrails, and so on, so that the patients would believe that they were operating on their “real” bodies.
I decided to eliminate everything that was intended to deceive the primitive, superstitious spirit and to proceed to operate in all honesty without any kind of gimmick. In the same way that a state of mind changes the body’s attitude, a bodily attitude modifies the state of mind. Moreover, just as what happens to the material body affects the phantom body, what is done to the phantom body affects the material body. Based on this belief, I imagined a psychoshamanic ritual. The shaman acts in his medium, using his surroundings, plants, and animals as elements of power. But the psychoshaman, not imitating that which he is not and which belongs to a different culture, uses the elements provided by his environment, namely the city. A mobile phone, a vacuum cleaner, a car, or supermarket products are as magical as a snake, a fan of feathers, or a mushroom. The psychoshaman does not wear exotic clothes, necklaces, or other ornaments. A typical suit, preferably black for neutrality, will suffice. He does not operate in the shadows, lit by a single candle. He appropriates the words of the poet Arthur Cravan: “mystery in broad daylight.” And, since the act is metaphorical, he does not wield any knife; if it is necessary to symbolize one, a wooden ruler suffices. He never operates in his own name, an attitude consistent with psychoanalysis. Lacan told his students, “You can be Lacanians, I must be a Freudian.” Pachita operated in the name of Cuauhtémoc, Carlos Said in the name of Doña Paz. Every shaman is inhabited by mythical allies, and a psychoshaman can choose his allies from his own familiar urban mythology: He can operate in the name of a famous singer, a film star, a boxing champion, a prominent politician, a dead relative, or a children’s character such as Pinocchio, Popeye, or Mandrake the Magician. He can choose to be assisted by a person of his religion such as Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, the Pope, Stalin, Gandhi, Moses, Allah, and so forth. To create a magical setting, it is enough for the psychoshaman to simply pass his palm over the floor drawing an invisible circle and then, indicating the four cardinal points, the nadir, and the zenith with precise gestures, to say, “There is the north, there is the south, there is the east, there is the west, there is the upper world, there is the lower world, we are in the middle. All paths arrive here, and all paths depart from here.”
After having the patient stand barefoot in the middle of this imaginary circle, he proceeds to fortify it. Witches rub the body with an egg or two, sometimes three, because eggs are considered to be seeds that contain great power. The psychoshaman, bending his thumb inward and enclosing it with the other four fingers, makes a fist symbolizing the seed, a hand position that can be observed in the human fetus. He rubs the patient with this fist, giving him or her energy. Then the patient lies down, prone or supine, on a table, on a cot, or on the floor. Some patients can be operated on while sitting or standing. With an open hand held rigid, wielded like a knife, the psychoshaman slices the air around the patient, cutting away hostile influences.
(To prepare our spirits for the intensity of the operations, my son Cristóbal — who worked with me on many occasions — decided that we should recite in our minds, “There is no being here and now, because here is all space, now is all time, and being is all consciousness. Being, space, and time are the same thing.”)