Nada Se Opone A La Noche Review

He recounts a psychomagic ceremony he performed for himself. He took a photograph of his mother and buried it in a coffin filled with excrement. Then he dug it up. This is not hatred; this is the nigredo perfected. He takes the shit of his lineage—the abuse, the lies, the poverty, the saltpeter dust—and he declares it to be the prima materia.

Alejandro Jodorowsky is often mistaken for a mere surrealist. The image of The Holy Mountain or El Topo —with their alchemical vomiting, limbless pyramids, and ritualistic violence—suggests a creator dedicated to chaos. But beneath the patina of the psychedelic lies a rigorous mystic. Nowhere is this tension more palpable than in his novel Nada Se Opone A La Noche . This is not a memoir. It is an autopsy of a family line, written with the scalpel of a psycho-magus. Nada Se Opone A La Noche

He introduces the concept of the “Phantom of the Family.” This is the un-lived life of the ancestors. The grandfather who wanted to be an artist but became a merchant creates a phantom that haunts the grandson. The grandmother who wanted to escape her marriage creates a phantom of claustrophobia. Jodorowsky’s artistic excess—his films, his comics, his performances—is not a choice. It is an obligation to live the lives his ancestors refused to live. How does one end a book called Nothing Opposes the Night ? One does not find a sunrise. Jodorowsky concludes not with redemption, but with transmutation . He recounts a psychomagic ceremony he performed for himself

Nada Se Opone A La Noche is therefore a grimoire of healing. It rejects the therapeutic cliché of “closure.” There is no closure in Jodorowsky’s universe. There is only transparency . By making the secret visible, the secret loses its venom. Critics have accused Jodorowsky of narcissism and fabulism. Does he have the right to invent his mother’s psychosis? Is it ethical to turn his father’s misery into a Tarot card? These are valid questions. Jodorowsky’s response is essentially shamanic: The cure is more important than the record. This is not hatred; this is the nigredo perfected

Nothing opposes the night. And in that surrender, Jodorowsky finds, paradoxically, the only freedom that matters: the freedom to write one’s own name on the darkness.