The Holy Mountain

A Sacred Hallucination That Unveils the Truth Behind the Grand Deception of the Modern World

In an era dominated by ideological wars, identity confusion, and viral hatred, “The Holy Mountain” by Alejandro Jodorowsky emerges today as a prophetic work—a film that cries out for rediscovery.

It is not merely a psychedelic visual trip, but a fierce and lucid parable about humanity corrupted by power, dogma, consumerism, and the loss of self.

Beneath its philosophical surface, however, lies a creeping horror: the terror of dehumanization, the grotesque manipulation of flesh and mind, the quiet scream of souls hollowed out by belief systems.

The film opens with an unmistakable image: a modern Christ—filthy, violated, cloned, stripped of spiritual meaning and reduced to a reproducible icon, a commodity.

This central and unsettling figure becomes a metaphor for innocent civilians sacrificed by dictatorships and religions, martyrs crushed under the weight of a God-Father-Master, indistinguishable from the worldly powers that manipulate and dominate.

The cloning of Christ reveals the collective suffering of a humanity that is used, consumed, deified, and then destroyed—a metaphysical form of body horror where the sacred becomes profane, flesh becomes copy, and individuality is erased.

There can be no redemption without awareness, Jodorowsky tells us—and blind faith is merely another mass drug, one that disfigures rather than heals.

To fully grasp the impact of this work, one must recall the period in which it was born.

“The Holy Mountain” was released in 1973, at the heart of a time marked by revolutionary fervour, post-’68 disillusionment, and a growing interest in alternative spiritualities. It was the age of psychedelic culture, of Eastern mysticism flooding into the West, of underground movements and radical experimentation in cinema.

For those unfamiliar with the director, Alejandro Jodorowsky is a Chilean-Mexican artist with a background in theatre and surrealism, who pushes his alchemical, esoteric, and anti-capitalist vision to its limits in “The Holy Mountain,” transforming cinematic language into an initiatory and symbolic practice that is both deeply personal and universally resonant.

It is a film of its time, but also radically ahead of it, a mythopoetic machine that defies linear narrative and rational logic.

But make no mistake: this is also a horror film, disguised as spiritual theatre. The horror is not in the shadows, but in the open—institutional horror, spiritual violation, psychological mutilation.

The film is rooted in religious and pagan iconography, in the objectification of the female body, and in the use of female sexuality as a marketing tool—like the coffin buildings or the orgasm machine—all woven with cultural symbolism from across the globe.

It may well be the most ‘globalised’ film ever made—one that celebrates diversity, gender fluidity, and trans inclusivity (It’s hard not to think of David Bowie - the androgynous prophet of the era - whose presence haunts the film’s aesthetic and spirit), exposing its systematic manipulation.

Every culture, every belief, every identity is devoured by the machinery of power, which exploits their imagery to build invisible cages.

Crusaders, much like today’s wars “in the name of peace,” become puppets of a higher order that experiments with drugs to turn men into beasts and soldiers into automatons—as captured in one of the film’s most emblematic lines.

A perverse factory of obedience, cloaked in ceremony.

Jodorowsky strips bare the horror beneath the festive façade: carnivalesque atmospheres, pastel colours, dreamlike and theatrical sets provide the backdrop to scenes of mutilation, abuse, and brainwashing.

A man’s face is eaten by birds; a religious ceremony becomes a grotesque burlesque of sexuality and sadism; a giant toad army reenacts colonial slaughter.

Children play with weapons, cheer for “white heroes,” while non-Western races are painted as the enemy.

It is a searing, uncomfortable reflection on the pedagogy of racism: What have we been taught to desire? Whom have we been taught to fear?

A corrupted childhood is the most powerful tool to create obedient adults, incapable of critical thought.

Toys, symbols of innocence, here become instruments of mental programming—sinister relics of a system that smiles while it wounds.

In this hallucinatory, post-gender world, man and woman no longer exist as opposing identities, but dissolve into a fluid vision that—with eerie clarity—anticipates our present.

But there is no liberation here without terror.

Jodorowsky was working in the 1970s, but his gaze was already fixed on a future where sexuality, the body, and freedom of expression would be reshaped by consumer culture.

He uses symbolic and literal castration to portray how modern systems dismantle traditional notions of masculinity—not to free individuals, but to provoke confusion, frustration, and deeper control.

The human form is defiled, reshaped, broken open—not as spectacle, but as symbolic punishment. A world that disarms the individual at the root, in childhood, to render them easily controlled.

“Shit that turns to gold is still shit.”

One of the film’s most iconic lines. A perfect aphorism for describing both spiritual and material capitalism: you may ennoble the surface, but the substance remains corrupt.

Even sanctity is for sale, and the path toward the “Holy Mountain” is just another illusion—another trap. And that trap is laced with cruelty: enlightenment becomes exploitation, and the pursuit of truth leads us straight into the machinery of manipulation.

In the end, the film self-destructs, denies itself. Jodorowsky breaks the fourth wall, looks us in the eye, and reminds us it was all fiction. But not for that reason untrue.

Quite the opposite: it is fiction that has shown us reality. And he asks, with urgency: Are you ready to wake up?

“The Holy Mountain” is not an easy film. It is a sharp blade cutting into the flesh of a sleeping humanity. A disturbing, sacrilegious, aesthetically sublime and spiritually shattering work.

A journey through sex, power, death and rebirth that reveals—like no other film—the great lie we call truth. And as it peels back the layers of civilization, what’s left is not transcendence, but a scream—echoing through the void we dared to call enlightenment.

In a world hurtling towards self-annihilation, perhaps Jodorowsky was simply telling us that the future…had already passed. And we never even noticed.