El Topo (The Mole) by Jodorowsky

[didgeridoo]

El Topo (The Mole)
http://www.britfilms.tv/images/reviews/El%20Topo.jpg
EL TOPO is my favorite of Jodorowsky's films for its highly personal, interior and symbolist vision. The frist time I saw this film back in the seventies, I was shocked by the violence and couldn't get past seeing the film from my literalist mindset. I walked out of the theatre feleing sick and disgusted.

I told a friend of mine, someone I saw as wider than myself, about my experience. He suggested that I see the film, again, but not take anything literally. He asked me to view every scene as a symbolist ritual representing archetypal forces at work in a larger arrangement of The Journey archetype colliding with The Crucifixion archetype.

The second time I saw EL TOPO (through this symbolist framework), I saw an entirely different film. I saw a masterpiece of cabalistic cinema.

Take the four master gunfighters, for example, that El Topo had to slay. I saw them as symbolic of four brains or intelligences: Physical (the yogi), Emotional (the cage-maker), Intellectual (the rabbit farmer) and Spiritual (the old goofy guy). Killing the first three resulted in spiritual suicide (the old goofy guy killed himself) and the beginnning of his underworld initiation into rebirth.

I am curious to find out if and how others may have viewed EL TOPO from a non-literalist, more symbolic vantage and what they saw as a result of making this perceptual shift.

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[snoopsnuffleopagus]

Cordial Felicitations, Didgeridoo:

Thank You for the synapsis and the Links.

I will view this for sure.

Recall, the Elders suggest 35 years of rigorous study of the Torah and Scripture of Yahweh as a reccomended pre-requisite for the study of Kabbala..

Kind Regards: Snoopsnuffleopagus

[them]

Thank you. I will be looking at those tomorrow, after Saturday Kitchen (http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/tv_and_radio/saturdaykitchen_week.shtml) has finished.

a masterpiece of cabalistic cinema..


There are no less than two dozen variant spellings of kabbalah, the most common of which include kabbalah, kabala, kabalah, qabalah, qabala, cabala, cabbala, kaballah, kabbala, kaballah, and qabbalah. This sort of confusion is frequently seen with Hebrew and Arabic words borrowed into English because there exist several different systems of transliterating the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets into Roman letters. Often a more exact or scholarly transliteration, such as Qur'an, will coexist alongside a spelling that has been heavily Anglicized (Koran). The fact that the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets do not as a rule indicate short vowels or the doubling of consonants compounds the difficulties. Spellings of kabbalah with one or two b's are equally “correct,” insofar as the single b accurately reproduces the spelling of the Hebrew, while the double b represents the fact that it was once pronounced with a double b.

http://www.karinkabalahcenter.com/mod_temp1_03.gif (http://www.karinkabalahcenter.com/)

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