ringmaster photos on Flickr

97 years ago he came walking out of the desert with a deck of cards in one hand and a reel of film in the other, boots full of stardust and pockets lined with holy fools. That’s the man we celebrate today, Alejandro Jodorowsky, an Aquarius, the alchemist of celluloid, the ringmaster of the inward circus. If you asked him where he was from, he might say Chile, or Mexico, or Everywhere or Nowhere, depends on which wind was blowing through his beard that day.

Jodorowsky don’t just shuffle tarot cards, he listens to them breathe. Seventy-eight little mirrors, each one catching the crack in your voice. The Fool stepping off the cliff like he’s got wings stitched under his coat. Death smiling like a door left open. He says the cards ain’t about fortune; they’re about permission. Permission to wake up inside your own myth. He reads the table like it’s a stage, lays out archetypes like harmonicas, and every spread is a song about who you might become if you stopped lying to yourself.

Then there’s the movies—oh Lord, the movies. Dusty highways turning into pilgrimages, gunslingers baptized in golden blood, crippled saints crawling toward invisible suns. He paints with violence and tenderness at the same time, like he’s trying to carve halos out of bone. The camera don’t just look, it confesses. Every frame feels like a dream somebody dared to remember in daylight. He ain’t telling stories so much as he’s cracking open symbols and letting them bleed.

Back in the mid-’70s, when prophets still hitchhiked and cinema hadn’t learned to behave, Alejandro Jodorowsky set his sights on Dune like it was a holy mountain buried under spice. He didn’t want to film the book no, no, no, he wanted to rape it lovingly, he said, to crack it open and let a new god crawl out. He gathered a congregation instead of a crew. He called up Moebius to storyboard the cosmos line by line, thousands of drawings like illuminated scripture. He brought in H. R. Giger to dream up biomechanical nightmares for House Harkonnen, cathedrals made of bone and oil. Chris Fosspainted starships in colors loud enough to wake the universe. For music, he split the sky in two: Pink Floyd for the noble House Atreides, and Magma for the dark side of the moon. He wanted the soundtrack to feel like prophecy plugged into an amplifier.

And the casting? That was pure desert fever. His own son trained like a monk-warrior for years to become Paul. Salvador Dalí was promised the role of Emperor, for a king’s ransom per minute of screen time, seated on a golden toilet throne. Orson Welles was lured with promises of gourmet meals. Mick Jagger circled the project like a glittering comet.

But the studios looked at this 10-, maybe 12-hour cosmic opera and saw madness instead of money. They wanted a manageable epic; he was offering a psychedelic messiah. The film never got made. The sandstorm swallowed it whole.

And yet—here’s the twist in the tarot deck—that unmade movie became a seed. The massive storyboard book passed through Hollywood like contraband scripture. Its visions bled into other galaxies: echoes can be found drifting through Alien, Blade Runner, and the long corridors of cinematic science fiction. Years later, another pilgrim, David Lynch, would take his own swing at Arrakis with Dune—a different dream, darker and stranger in its own way. And decades after that, yet another vision would rise from the sands.

But Jodorowsky’s Dune remains the phantom limb of cinema. A film that exists only in drawings, in ambition, in the wild testimony of those who almost touched it. Like a tarot card that was never turned over—still humming with possibility. Sometimes the movie you don’t make becomes the loudest one of all.

And when the crowd’s gone home and the projector cools, he talks about psicomagia like it’s a medicine show for the soul. Says your wounds are poems written by your ancestors, and you got to answer them with an act so strange it shakes the dust off your family tree. Bury a photograph. Marry the moon. Masturbate in front of a man dressed as your father. Not therapy in a white coat, but ritual in the street. A theater where you’re both actor and audience, and the script is written in invisible ink only your heart can read.

He believes imagination ain’t escapism, it’s a blade. Cut through fear, cut through shame. He’ll tell you the world is sick with literal thinking, starving for metaphor. So he builds a ladder out of surreal dreams and says, “Climb.” He hands you a card, points a camera at your shadow, whispers that madness might just be unpolished wisdom.

Some folks call him mystic, some call him madman. But maybe he’s just a troubadour of the unconscious, strumming the strings of the unseen. He walks between circus tent and cathedral, between tarot spread and silver screen, leaving footprints shaped like question marks.

ink, watercolor on paper

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Genís Matabosch - Ringmaster by Festival Internacional del Circ Elefant d'Or