INTRODUCTION:
Carlos Castaneda, born Carlos César Salvador Arana Castañeda in Cajamarca, Peru, in 1925, was the author of a series of nine books which purport to describe the author’s twelve-year apprenticeship to an indigenous Mexican sorcerer by the name of Juan Matus.
The first two of these books, The Teachings of Don Juan (1968) and A Separate Reality (1971), describe Castaneda’s initiation into the world of sorcery, mainly through the use of three hallucinogenic plants that are native to Mexico: peyote (Lophophora williamsii), devils weed (Datura inoxia/stramonium), and sacred mushrooms (Psilocybe mexicana).
In the third book, Journey to Ixtlan (1972), the author has realised that the use of hallucinogens is not the only, nor the most effective, portal into the world of sorcery. He finds that he must revisit the first two years of his fieldwork with Juan Matus in order to reevaluate those early experiences which were not the result of having ingested one or another hallucinogenic substance.
In the fourth book, Tales of Power (1974), Castaneda describes his experiences in the company of Juan Matus and his companion, Genaro Flores, from the autumn of 1971 until these two sorcerers’ “departure from this world” in June of 1973.
In The Second Ring of Power (1977) and The Eagles Gift (1981), we readers learn that the two departed sorcerers had had a total of nine apprentices besides Castaneda himself. We also learn that Juan Matus had been the leader of a covert group of fifteen sorcerers and witches, whose witchcraft practices allegedly have a history that, unbroken from generation to generation of practitioners, goes back thousands of years in time.
In The Fire from Within (1984)we learn that the apprentices of Juan Matus had received their instruction, not only in their normal state of consciousness, but also in what Castaneda calls a state of “heightened awareness,” an amnesic state of consciousness which he claims Juan Matus induced in his apprentices by striking them with his fist on the right shoulder blade.
In The Power of Silence (1987) and The Art of Dreaming (1993) we learn about the true goal of sorcery: “The definitive journey is the possibility that individual awareness, enhanced to the limit by the individual’s adherence to the shamans’ cognition, could be maintained beyond the point at which the organism is capable of functioning as a cohesive unit, that is to say, beyond death. This transcendental awareness was understood by the shamans of ancient Mexico as the possibility for the awareness of human beings to go beyond everything that is known, and arrive, in this manner, at the level of energy that flows in the universe. Shamans like don Juan Matus defined their quest as the quest of becoming, in the end, an inorganic being, meaning energy aware of itself, acting as a cohesive unit, but without an organism. They called this aspect of their cognition total freedom, a state in which awareness exists, free from the impositions of socialization and syntax.” (Carlos Castaneda, from the author’s foreword to The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, 30th Anniversary Edition, University of California Press, 1998.)
Nowadays (2024), there appears to be a fairly general consensus among those who have read the books by Carlos Castaneda—and among many who have not—a general consensus among academics and laypersons alike, that the first two books are largely or, probably, entirely fictional; and that the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth books are unquestionably fictional. Concerning the possible factuality of the first part of the third book, Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan, the jury is still deliberating. At the present time, a great majority of the jurors seem to be voting for absolute fictionality.
I was first selected for jury duty—or rather, I volunteered for jury duty—in April of 1981. I had recently come home from a sojourn in North America, part of which I had spent in the American state of Arizona and part in the Mexican state of Sonora. Yes, I admit, I was one of those fools who actually went in search of Carlos Castaneda’s elusive Yaqui Indian benefactor, don Juan Matus. I also admit that I found neither hide nor hair of don Juan in either Arizona or Sonora. In my defence, however, I must tell you that now, at long last, I realise that I was searching for evidence of him in the wrong places. I wasn’t that far off, actually only a few kilometres, but as it is said, a miss is as good as a mile. If I should take a flight to Sonora, Mexico, tomorrow, I would know exactly where to look, and with a little perseverance, I would probably find someone in their seventies or eighties who remembers an eccentric old man who used to live in a small wattle and daub house at the very edge of the desert. Be this as it may, I returned to Europe convinced as ever that the narrative in Part One of Carlos Castaneda’s book, Journey to Ixtlan, although in part outrageously embellished, was basically a true story. I thus became a juror with an agenda.
It occurred to me in 1981 that the best way to deliver the teachings of the historical Juan Matus to those who do not believe he ever existed—or, at least, as close as one could get to the true teachings—would be to produce a motion picture based on the narrative in Castaneda’s first three books, but having first mercilessly deleted every session between Carlos and don Juan that appears to be complete fabrication, for there is no doubt whatsoever that Carlos Castaneda had been a social scientist who suffered from severe pseudologia fantastica. The unfortunate anthropologist was probably incapable of reporting the unvarnished truth.
I got as far along in my project as to writing a rough draft for the entire screenplay, but I soon realised that the chances of actually making a movie about don Juan were virtually nil. For one thing, although he had effectually gone into hiding, Carlos Castaneda was still alive in the 1980s, and he was still writing books about his “apprenticeship” with don Juan. He would never approve of a scene script that would show him up for the liar and fraud that he was in real life. For another thing, once you remove from a basically nonfictional narrative as much as possible of any nonfactual artistic embellishment, you will probably end up with a rather boring motion picture.
Therefore, I have decided to shift my tactics. I would now like to produce an audio book instead, and the first step in such a project is, of course, to arrive at a reading text that is as faithful as possible to Castaneda’s own authorship, but omits as many of his outright fabrications as possible. This I hope I have achieved satisfactorily. Carlos Castaneda is dead, and thus he is no longer in a position to disapprove of my new project. Nevertheless, apart from arranging his sessions with don Juan in strict chronological order, and also adding a good deal of much-needed punctuation, I have made very few edits to the texts that I have excerpted from his first three publications. The second step in my project will be to recruit a voice actor, preferably a voice actor who has Spanish as his first language and will be able to emulate Carlos Castaneda’s manner of speaking English.
The chapter titles in the following table of contents that are of my own devising are set in italics. The specific book from which a chapter has been taken is indicated within brackets, viz. The Teachings of Don Juan [TDJ], A Second Reality [SR], and Journey to Ixtlan [JI], followed by the chapter number in the book that has been indicated.)
Chapter One—Reaffirmations from the World Around Us. [JI-1]
Chapter Two—Erasing Personal History. [JI-2]
Chapter Three—Losing Self-Importance. [JI-3]
Chapter Four—Death is an Advisor. [JI-4]
Chapter Five—Assuming Responsibility. [JI-5]
Chapter Six—Becoming a Hunter. [TDJ-1] [JI-6]
Chapter Seven—Being Inaccessible. [JI-7]
Chapter Eight—Disrupting the Routines of Life. [JI-8]
Chapter Nine—The Last Battle on Earth. [JI-9]
Chapter Ten—A Meeting with Mescalito. [TDJ-2]
Chapter Eleven—Becoming Accessible to Power. [JI-10]
Chapter Twelve—The Mood of a Warrior. [JI-11]
Chapter Thirteen—La Catalina. [TDJ-3]
Chapter Fourteen—A Battle of Power. [JI-12]
Chapter Fifteen—A Warrior’s Last Stand. [JI-13]
Chapter Sixteen—The Four Enemies of a Man of Knowledge. [TDJ-3]
Chapter Seventeen—The Blackbird. [SR-14]
Chapter Eighteen—Confrontation with a Sorceress. [SR-14]
Chapter Nineteen—A Worthy Opponent. [JI-17]
Chapter Twenty—Succumbing to Fear. [TDJ-11]
You can download the reading text in Portable Document Format from this website. I would suggest that you read the entire text before continuing on to my commentaries, which follow the introduction in this blogpost. Aside from adding some much-needed punctuation in the reading text, I have made very few edits to the actual wording of the selected texts as originally published by Carlos Castaneda. These edits will be pinpointed and explained in the commentaries for each chapter.
My chapter-by-chapter commentaries are an attempt to indicate which elements of the narrative that I believe concern factual events that Castaneda would have recorded in his field diary, and which elements I believe are the result of very creative, after-the-fact writing on his part. I do not insist upon my personal evaluations. I could very well be mistaken in some, or even many, of the details. What I do insist upon is the bare-boned factuality of Castaneda’s narrative in the first part of his book Journey to Ixtlan, the part he called “Stopping the World.” I would hereby like to assure you that Carlos Castaneda, an undergraduate student at UCLA, did actually meet an old Indian named Juan Matus, an expert on the entheogenic uses of the hallucinogen peyote, at a bus depot in Arizona. Carlos did actually conduct a number of field trips to the Valle del Yaqui in the Mexican state of Sonora for the purpose of working with don Juan, his native informant. I contend that these field trips were documented in reasonably accurate field notes, field notes which would subsequently serve as the basis for the (quasi-) doctoral dissertation Sorcery: A Description of the World, initially published as the novel entitled Journey to Ixtlan. Yes, I am certain that Carlos Castaneda was an academic fraud of monumental stature, but despite his unsavoury, yet well-deserved, present-day reputation, he did, nonetheless, manage to document the world view of one of the most important philosophers in the long history of the discipline, a philosopher who otherwise would probably have vanished from the world without leaving so much as a trace. Therefore, at long last, let us forgive him. I believe that dealing with his very special predicament, while an entire world was watching him attentively, eventually drove him around the bend into madness. This was a steep price to pay for any posthumously awarded honour for having served mankind, however ineptly that service was rendered.
A SUGGESTION ON HOW TO READ THE WORKS OF CARLOS CASTANEDA
CHAPTER-BY-CHAPTER COMMENTARIES BY THE EDITOR:
Chapter One—Reaffirmations From the World Around Us:
We were in the waiting room of a bus depot in Arizona.
Carlos, the undergraduate UCLA student, meeting don Juan, the Mexican Indian sorcerer, in the waiting room of a (Greyhound) bus depot in some Arizona border town is an integral plot point in Carlos Castaneda’s narrative(s). The question is: Which border town? I surmise that Castaneda did not name this town in his earlier books because he felt obliged to keep secret any information that might help to disclose to curious readers exactly where in Arizona don Juan lived.
In 1960, there were only two Arizona towns, on or closely adjacent to the Mexican border, which had a Greyhound bus depot, that is to say, a proper bus station with a ticket office and a waiting room: Nogales and Yuma. In his final book, The Active Side of Infinity, published posthumously in 1998, Castaneda asserts for the first time in any of his publications that the bus station in question had been the station in Nogales, Arizona. I would like to suggest, however, that Castaneda is, in this book, still trying to keep his readers in the dark concerning the part of Arizona in which don Juan had lived when he was in the United States.
I have myself stepped off a Greyhound bus in Nogales. I remember the station as more or less “a hole in the wall,” more of bus stop than a bus station, and not at all like the “bus depot” that Castaneda describes in his earlier books. In addition, the Greyhound bus station in Nogales was, and, as far as I know, still is, an end station. If don Juan had boarded a bus in Nogales, it would have been the bus that was bound for Tucson, Arizona, the same bus that Carlos was waiting for. Greyhound Lines did not have any cross-border services, and in order to catch a southbound bus, one had to cross the border on foot into the city of Heroica Nogales on the Mexican side and take a bus from there.
The city of Yuma, on the other hand, had a proper Greyhound bus depot in 1960, complete with restroom facilities, ticket office, waiting room, vending machines, and so on. Yuma is not right on the Mexican border, but don Juan could have taken a Yuma County transit bus from outside this station to the town of San Luis, Arizona, crossed the border on foot, and continued on into Sonora, Mexico, from the city of San Luis on the Mexican side. Carlos himself would have made his way back to Los Angeles by way of San Diego on a Greyhound bus.
Identifying the bus depot where Carlos first met don Juan helps us, of course, to ring in the general area in Arizona where don Juan lived when he was not at his home in the Valle del Yaqui (Yaqui River Valley) in the southern part of the Mexican state of Sonora. It is quite likely that he stayed with relatives on the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation when he was in Yuma.
A friend of mine had just put us in contact and left the room, and we had introduced ourselves to each other.
Another important plot point in Castaneda’s books is this friend of his, who “had just put us in contact and left the room.” This man, whose name was apparently Bill—although “Bill” may also have been a pseudonym chosen by Castaneda in order to keep “Bill’s” true identity secret—is an interesting character inasmuch as his character changes a great deal from Castaneda’s first book, in which Bill is a bumbling, opinionated companion who is assisting Carlos with his field work despite the fact that he does not speak Spanish; to Castaneda’s final book, The Active Side of Infinity,in which Bill is a seasoned and very capable anthropologist who, we must assume, speaks fluent Spanish. In the chapter of my reading text that we are presently investigating, extracted from Castaneda’s third book, Journey to Ixtlan, Carlos’ friend appears to be a Yuma local whom Carlos has engaged as a knowledgeable informant because of the man’s familiarity with the goings-on of Indians in Yuma County and, in particular, because of his purported who’s-who knowledge of the Native American peyote cult. Personally, I find this “Bill,” a longtime resident of the city and county of Yuma, Arizona, the more believable. In the narrative, we definitely need an insider who knows Yuma County inside and out, someone who can introduce Carlos, an absolute outsider, to don Juan. I think that this particular Bill, whatever his real name may have been, was the man.
It was at that moment that he lifted his head and looked me squarely in the eyes. It was a formidable look. Yet it was not menacing or awesome in any way. It was a look that went through me. I became tongue-tied at once and could not continue with the harangues about myself.
A third plot point in his books that Castaneda never lets the reader forget is the “stupendous” look he was given by don Juan as he was finishing up a long harangue about himself. I think don Juan was simply signalling wordlessly, but very effectively, to Carlos that he was seeing through all the bullshit Carlos was handing him. Few people have been given the divine right to cut another person down to size in this abrupt and usually devastating manner. If you have ever been knocked off your high horse by someone like don Juan, you will understand why Carlos became thoroughly obsessed with that “stupendous” look and decided to make the long and trepidatious trip to the Yaqui River Valley in Sonora, Mexico, in order to search for don Juan.
When I felt I was ready, I went back to Arizona. I found his house after making long and taxing inquiries among the local Indians.
Castaneda wrote in the introduction to his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, that he had served “the apprenticeship” first in Arizona, and then in Sonora, “because don Juan moved to Mexico during the course of his training.” We now know that this is not true. In various interviews, and also in the second chapter of his last book, The Active Side of Infinity, Castaneda clearly stated that he travelled to the southern part of the Mexican state of Sonora in December of 1960 with the purpose of discovering where don Juan lived, meeting with him, and, if everything went as he hoped it would, enlisting don Juan as his informant. In certain of these interviews, he intimated that, after making long and taxing inquiries among the local Indians, he had finally found don Juan’s house on the outskirts of the Yaqui village of Pueblo Vícam. This is not true either, but at least Castaneda was not leading his interviewers that far astray. Don Juan’s house must actually have been situated at the edge of the desert on the outskirts of Estación Oros, a small settlement on the Southern Pacific Railway line, some 14 kilometres to the northeast of Pueblo Vícam. (I have not yet [2024] had the opportunity of visiting this settlement in order to look for the house, or to question anyone who might remember it, if it is no longer standing or if it has been put to some use other than as a home.) All this business of misdirection was a fully understandable effort to conceal don Juan’s actual place of residence. Castaneda had, after all, promised don Juan not to reveal to anyone his whereabouts or any other information that might help others to identify him and track him down. Interestingly, Castaneda makes a slipup in Chapter Fourteen of his second book, A Separate Reality, when he several times mentions the ramada on don Juan’s house in connection with a session that took place on 23 November 1961. (By ramada, Castaneda was referring to the open-sided but roofed porch that is typical for traditional Yaqui dwellings in the Yaqui River Valley in Sonora, Mexico.) The likelihood that don Juan would have had a ramada, both on the house in which Castaneda claimed he lived in Arizona, and on the house in Sonora to which he supposedly moved at a later stage in Carlos’ “apprenticeship,” is not very great. Therefore, we may assume that don Juan probably did not have a house of his own in Arizona.
Walking back to his home and then driving into town made me feel better, but I was not quite relaxed. I somehow felt threatened, although I could not pinpoint the reason.
The town that Castaneda is referring to here is almost certainly the Mexican railway settlement of Estación Vícam, also known as Vícam Switch, which is situated on Federal Highway 15, and also on the parallel-running Southern Pacific Railway line, about six kilometres north of Pueblo Vícam, which is the original Yaqui settlement called Vícam. In addition, Estación Vícam was the only town in the vicinity of don Juan’s house that had a proper restaurant—which probably had a coffee percolator—in 1960.
I was taken aback. His laughter was a bit too loud, but I was genuinely amused by it all.
Apparently, it is beginning to dawn on Carlos that he has had the extraordinarily good fortune of meeting a very extraordinary person. The same appreciation of personal good fortune would later (after 1972 and the publication of Castaneda’s third book) overwhelm millions of readers as they made their way through the first part of Journey to Ixtlan.
My first real session with my “informant” ended then. He said good-bye at the door of the restaurant. I told him I had to visit some friends and that I would like to see him again at the end of the following week.
This is a good example of the manner in which Castaneda embellished the essentially nonfictional narrative in his field diary with non-facts in order to further the story he actually wanted to tell. If don Juan had really been living in Arizona when Carlos first went to see him, it would not be far-fetched to assume that Carlos really had friends in Arizona that he had to visit during the week that followed this initial session with his newfound “informant.” In truth, however, don Juan was living in the Valle del Yaqui in the southern part of the Mexican state of Sonora when Carlos first visited him. We may therefore assume that he was visiting this area in Mexico for the first time. It is hardly likely that he had already managed to make friends there. I suggest that he stayed in some kind of accommodation, in either Ciudad Obregón or Guaymas, when he was working with don Juan. (Judging from his “field reports,” it seems evident that he very seldom spent the night in don Juan’s house.)
Chapter Two: Erasing Personal History
I said that I was painfully aware that my family and my friends believed I was unreliable, when in reality I had never told a lie in my life.
In this instance, Carlos is either consciously lying to don Juan, and thus lying for the first time in his life, or he is subconsciously deluding himself. We know for a fact, however, that Carlos Castaneda was a pathological liar long before he ever met don Juan. It would be superfluous here to make a list of all the ridiculous and pointless lies that he told to his family, his friends, and to a multitude of his readers during his 72-year lifespan. Pathological lying is usually considered a typical manifestation of the narcissistic personality disorder. In the strange case of Dr. Carlos Castaneda and Mr. Hyde, it definitely was. We can only rue the fact that Dr. Castaneda was incapable of following the teachings of don Juan. He might have found a cure.
Chapter Three: Losing Self-Importance
We walked for hours. He did not collect or show me any plants. He did, however, teach me an “appropriate form of walking”. He said that I had to curl my fingers gently as I walked so that I would keep my attention on the trail and the surroundings.
We walked for another hour and then started on our way back to his house. At a certain time, I dropped behind, and he had to wait for me. He checked my fingers to see if I had curled them. I had not. He told me imperatively that whenever I walked with him, I had to observe and copy his mannerisms or not come along at all.
I curled my fingers and strangely enough I was able to keep his tremendous pace without any effort. In fact, at times I felt that my hands were pulling me forward.
I find it significant that don Juan taught Carlos the “appropriate form of walking” (la forma correcta de andar) as early in their association as during the second of their many excursions in the Sonoran Desert. Achieving the ability to deliberately induce a trance state of consciousness in oneself was the very cornerstone of the teachings of don Juan; however, Carlos Castaneda does not seem to have understood this until some years after he had concluded his fieldwork with don Juan in early 1963. The concept is not mentioned in his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan; and it is only briefly expounded upon in his second book, A Separate Reality, during a conversation with don Juan that he purports had occurred on the 28th of September, 1969:
“For years I have truly tried to live in accordance with your teachings,” Carlos said. “Obviously, I have not done well. How can I do better now?”
“You think and talk too much. You must stop talking to yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
“You talk to yourself too much. You’re not unique at that. Every one of us does that. We carry on an internal talk. Think about it. Whenever you are alone, what do you do?”
“I talk to myself.”
“What do you talk to yourself about?”
“I don’t know; anything, I suppose.”
“I’ll tell you what we talk to ourselves about. We talk about our world. In fact, we maintain our world with our internal talk.”
“How do we do that?”
“Whenever we finish talking to ourselves, the world is always as it should be. We renew it; we kindle it with life; we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus, we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die. A warrior is aware of this and strives to stop his talking. This is the last point you have to know if you want to live like a warrior.”
I firmly believe that Castaneda’s book A Separate Reality is almost entirely fictional. Nonetheless, he would seem to have used, in this book, snippets from conversations that had been recorded in his field diary during the two years of his historical association with don Juan as a student of anthropology. (There are however, clear indications that he continued to visit don Juan after 1963, but with the excuse of being an old friend visiting his once-upon-a-time mentor, and not in the guise of an anthropologist doing fieldwork.) Keeping this in mind, I suggest that the passage quoted above was excerpted from the field notes that Castaneda made during the last three months of his work with don Juan: November 1962, December 1962, and January 1963, but perhaps even earlier.
In his fourth book, Tales of Power, which like the second book is mostly a work of fiction, Castaneda returns to his experiences with “stopping the internal dialogue:”
At the beginning of our association, don Juan had delineated a procedure: walking for long stretches without focusing the eyes on anything. His recommendation had been to not look at anything directly, but by slightly crossing the eyes, to keep a peripheral view of everything that presented itself to the eyes. He had insisted, although I had not understood at the time, that if one kept one’s unfocused eyes at a point just above the horizon, it was possible to notice, at once, everything in almost the total 180-degree range in front of one’s eyes. He had assured me that that exercise was the only way of shutting off the internal dialogue. [Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power (1974), p.8.]
Now, the question is, of course, did don Juan compel Carlos to walk in the “appropriate manner” on all their excursions into the desert? I have little doubt that he did.
I felt elated. I was quite happy walking inanely with the strange old Indian. I began to talk and asked repeatedly if he would show me some peyote plants. He looked at me, but did not say a word.
This passage is rather odd; if it has indeed been excerpted from the field diary. If Carlos had prepared himself for six months by reading up on the uses of peyote among Native Americans, he would have known that the peyote cactus, while native to the Chihuahuan Desert, does not occur naturally in the Sonoran Desert. The request to be shown peyote plants growing in the Yaqui River Valley certainly did not warrant any reaction from don Juan except, perhaps, a roll of the eyes.
Chapter Four: Death is an Advisor
“Would you teach me someday about peyote?” I asked.
He did not answer and, as he had done before, simply looked at me as if I were crazy.
I had mentioned the topic to him, in casual conversation, various times already, and every time he frowned and shook his head. It was not an affirmative or a negative gesture; it was rather a gesture of despair and disbelief.
Here we are reminded of the fact that Carlos had first approached don Juan with the purpose of obtaining information specifically about the ritual use of peyote among Native Americans. He would continue to pester don Juan with this request until the day don Juan decided to put Carlos to the test in order to determine whether or not he was a suitable candidate for experiencing the peyote ritual first-hand; he discovered that Carlos was indeed a suitable candidate, despite his not being an Indian, and he eventually initiated Carlos into a personal knowledge of peyote intoxication during a nighttime ritual that took place on the 4th of August 1961, seven months—and at least four separate field trips—after Carlos first turned up at don Juan’s house in the Valle del Yaqui in December of 1960. (It is interesting to note that Castaneda’s initial attempt at submitting a thesis concerning his fieldwork in Sonora would appear to have occurred in 1965, two years after his fieldwork had been concluded. This thesis, Castaneda himself asserted, had specifically delineated the use of peyote within the context of the teachings of don Juan, and not, or so we may assume, the use of any other types of hallucinogens. The thesis was rejected by his professor, Harold Garfinkle, with the admonishment that it would have to be entirely reconceived. This appears to be the point in time when Castaneda’s academic pursuits began to seriously go amiss. He decided that he would have to include, in his thesis, data which concerned sessions with his informant that had never taken place. In this manner, Castaneda finally managed to write a much-revised version of his thesis that would not only be accepted by his professors at UCLA as fulfilling the requirements for a Master’s degree in Anthropology, but would also, to his surprise, be accepted for publication by the University of California Press under the title “The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge.”)
I have seen the look in the eyes of falcons. I used to hunt them when I was a boy, and, in the opinion of my grandfather, I was good. He had a Leghorn chicken farm, and falcons were a menace to his business. Shooting them was not only functional but also “right”. I had forgotten until that moment that the fierceness of their eyes had haunted me for years, but it was so far in my past that I thought I had lost the memory of it.
He personally organized and carried out a meticulous vigil, and after days of steady watching we finally saw a big white bird flying away with a young Leghorn chicken in its claws. The bird was fast and apparently knew its route. It swooped down from behind some trees, grabbed the chicken and flew away through an opening between two branches. It happened so fast that my grandfather had hardly seen it, but I did, and I knew that it was indeed a falcon. My grandfather said that if that was the case it had to be an albino.
I had sat down to rest and fell asleep under a tall eucalyptus tree. The sudden cry of a falcon woke me up. I opened my eyes without making any other movement and I saw a whitish bird perched in the highest branches of the eucalyptus tree. It was the albino falcon. The chase was over. It was going to be a difficult shot; I was lying on my back and the bird had its back turned to me. There was a sudden gust of wind and I used it to muffle the noise of lifting my .22 long rifle to take aim.
I think that the story of the white falcon that Carlos relates for don Juan in this chapter is probably true, at least in its essentials. In interviews, Castaneda adamantly claimed that he had been born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1935, and that he had been raised by his maternal grandparents on a chicken farm in the Brazilian outback. But judging from public records, we know that this cannot be true. Carlos Castaneda was born in Cajamarca, Peru, in 1925. This circumstance does not, however, necessarily mean that his story of the white falcon is not true, but may instead imply that the grandfather’s chicken farm had been located in Peru instead of Brazil. Carlos Castaneda’s maternal grandfather, whose name, incidentally, was Carlos Castañeda, was from the Sorochuco district of the province of Calendín, about 50 kilometres north-east of the city of Cajamarca; thus, it is very likely, provided the story is basically true, that the Castañeda chicken farm was located somewhere in this district, probably close to the town of Sorochuco. In addition, we may assume that young Carlos did actually stay with his grandparents during the years he attended primary school, that is, between the ages of six and twelve. Castaneda’s first cousin, Lucía Rosa Chávez Castañeda, who was a close neighbour of the Arana family in Lima, Peru, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, explained to the investigative reporter from Time Magazine, who was in Peru in 1973, researching Carlos Castaneda’s real family history, that she and Carlos were raised together, practically as if they had been siblings. Considering the fact that Lucía’s mother, Rosario, Susana Castañeda Novoa’s older sister, lived in Sorochuco in the 1930s, I think we may assume that Carlos was telling don Juan a reasonably true story.
The white falcon, undoubtedly a peregrine, must have been an unusually large individual for its species, for it was able to “fly away with a young Leghorn chicken in its claws.” It would probably not have been an albino falcon, but, much more likely, a leucistic falcon. Such a bird can have plumage that is almost as white as that of the much rarer albino, but it will nevertheless have normally coloured eyes, bill, legs, and feet. Seeing a leucistic bird in flight from a greater distance, however, might give anyone but a highly skilled ornithologist with a good pair of binoculars the impression that it must be an albino.
It also appears to me that Carlos, in the telling of this story, is remembering certain things from his childhood in a manner that seems to verify the story. (In order to actually verify the story, one would have to travel to the town of Sorochuco and look for local records concerning the purported Castañeda farm and also concerning Carlos Arana’s primary school attendance—which, frankly, would be too much of an undertaking for a researcher living in Europe.)
Carlos remembers that the falcon was perched among the highest branches of a eucalyptus tree when he finally had the chance of actually shooting it, but for some strange reason had refrained from doing so. Eucalyptus trees, which are not native to South America, were first planted in and around the Cajamarca region of Peru at about the turn of the twentieth century. Some of those fast-growing trees would have reached a fairly impressive height by the 1930s.
Carlos also remembers that he was armed with a .22 calibre rifle at the time, which would have been a typical firearm for an eight-year-old boy living on a farm. If he had said to don Juan that he had taken aim with a shotgun, a much more effective firearm with which to hunt birds, and especially falcons, I would have been more inclined to doubt the veracity of his story. I doubt that Carlos’ grandfather would ever have let him hunt with a shotgun; at least, I would not have.
He said that my death was there staring at me and if I turned when he signalled me, I might be capable of seeing it. He signalled me with his eyes. I turned and I thought I saw a flickering movement over the boulder. A chill ran through my body, the muscles of my abdomen contracted involuntarily, and I experienced a jolt, a spasm. After a moment I regained my composure, and I explained away the sensation of seeing the flickering shadow as an optical illusion caused by turning my head so abruptly.
I suspect that Carlos Castaneda was an extremely suggestible person, the sort of subject that a stage hypnotist can only dream of—Imagine; just a snap of the fingers and the subject is in deep trance. I also suspect that Juan Matus was a conjuror and a mentalist par excellence. He was, after all, a bonafide Indian sorcerer. He would have had little difficulty in exploiting Carlos’ suggestibility for the purpose of getting a specific point across, and he appears to have gotten his point across in this manner, time and time again. Unfortunately, Castaneda, more often than not, embellished his experiences of altered consciousness after-the-fact; possibly in his reworked field notes, but most definitely in his published works. Concerning the occasion described immediately above, however, Castaneda is probably keeping to the unvarnished truth. He would have had little reason to embellish an experience that so perfectly fits into the narrative, exactly as it was experienced.
Chapter Five: Assuming Responsibility
I told him the story of my father, who used to give me endless lectures about the wonders of a healthy mind in a healthy body, and how young men should temper their bodies with hardships and with feats of athletic competition. He was a young man; when I was eight years old, he was only twenty-seven. During the summertime, as a rule, he would come from the city, where he taught school, to spend at least a month with me at my grandparents’ farm, where I lived. It was a hellish month for me. I told don Juan one instance of my father’s behaviour that I thought would apply to the situation at hand.
Here again, we catch Castaneda telling lies; but again, his lies do not necessarily imply that the story itself is entirely fabricated. When Carlos was eight years old, his real father, César Arana Burungaray, would have been forty-one years old. Moreover, César Arana was not a teacher—and certainly not a professor of literature, as Castaneda was in the habit of claiming—but a watchmaker, with his own shop in the city of Cajamarca. Allow me to speculate concerning what the personal relationships and general living conditions in the Arana family of Cajamarca may have been, that is, if the stories about them that Carlos told to don Juan were at least basically true. As Castaneda himself tells the story (Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality, Simon & Schuster [1971] p. 147.): “I became so agitated by the memory don Juan had invoked in me, that my power to remember took me back to a time when I was eight years old. My mother had left [and not died, as Castaneda would claim in interviews] two years before and I had spent the most hellish years of my life circulating among my mother’s sisters [Flora María, María Victoria, Rosario (Lucía Rosa’s mother), and Juana (the absentee Susana’s twin sister) according to parochial records in Peru], who served as dutiful mother surrogates and took care of me a couple of months at a time. Each of my aunts had a large family, and no matter how careful and protective the aunts were towards me, I had twenty-two cousins to contend with. Their cruelty was sometimes truly bizarre. I felt that I was surrounded by enemies, and in the excruciating years that followed I waged a desperate and sordid war.” Provided that Carlos Castaneda is here giving us an accurate description of his childhood, and what we actually know concerning his childhood gives us good reason to believe that he is, I think that such an extremely disrupted and traumatic childhood might do much to explain his complex and very contradictory personality.
Chapter Six: Becoming a Hunter
“Would you teach me about peyote, don Juan?”
“Why would you like to undertake such learning?”
“I really would like to know about it. Is not just to want to know a good reason?”
“No! You must search in your heart and find out why a young man like you wants to undertake such a task of learning.”
Most of the text in the entry for 23 June 1961 has been excerpted from the first chapter of Castaneda’s first book, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, which is also dated 23 June 1961. The entire entry for 24 June 1961 has been excerpted from Journey to Ixtlan, Chapter Six.
After an interval the darkness around me changed. When I focused on the point directly in front of me, the whole peripheral area of my field of vision became brilliantly coloured with a homogeneous greenish yellow. The effect was startling. I kept my eyes fixed on the point in front of me and began to crawl sideways on my stomach, one foot at a time.
Suddenly, at a point near the middle of the floor, I became aware of another change in hue. At a place to my right, still in the periphery of my field of vision, the greenish yellow became intensely purple. I concentrated my attention on it. The purple faded into a pale but still brilliant colour, which remained steady for the time I kept my attention on it.
What Carlos is probably experiencing here is the phenomenon known as prisoner’s cinema, that is, the occurrence of hallucinations in the individual who has been deprived of external sensory stimuli for a longer period of time, for example, the hallucinations experienced by a person held prisoner in a dark room, by a person confined in a floatation tank, or by a person who is entering a trance state of consciousness, however it has been induced. While trying to solve the riddle posed by don Juan, Carlos has, during this session, been rolling around on the porch for hours in nearly complete darkness—and at the very edge of a trance state.
“You really are going to teach me about peyote?”
“I prefer to call him Mescalito. Do the same.”
“When are you going to start?”
“It is not so simple as that. You must be ready first.”
By solving the riddle to don Juan’s satisfaction, Carlos has here finally been promised that he will learn about peyote, but not, of course, until he has begun to come to terms with his behavioural shortcomings. He has yet to learn that he must become inaccessible; he must disrupt the routines of his life; and he must understand that whatever he may be striving for at the moment could very well be his last battle on earth. Otherwise, Mescalito, the deity don Juan believed is contained in the peyote cactus, will probably squash him like a bug.
We walked for perhaps an hour while I tried not to focus my sight on anything. Then don Juan asked me to start separating the images perceived by each of my eyes. After another hour or so I got a terrible headache and had to stop.
Here, don Juan is continuing to teach Carlos the manner in which he might stop his internal dialogue.
We spent the rest of the day walking in every direction while he gave me an unbelievably detailed explanation about rattlesnakes: the way they nest, the way they move around, their seasonal habits, their quirks of behaviour. Then he proceeded to corroborate each of the points he had made, and finally he caught and killed a large snake; he cut off its head, cleaned its viscera, skinned it, and roasted the meat.
This is an experience about which Castaneda would fondly reminisce with interviewers, even before the publication of Journey to Ixtlan, the book in which the rattlesnake episode first appeared. Apparently, Carlos thought that the roasted meat tasted delicious, and he would have eaten it eagerly had he only not known that it was snake meat. For my part, although I do not suffer from ophidiophobia, I am still not sure that snake meat is all that delicious without some salt and a couple of twists of the pepper mill.
“I am a hunter,” he said, as if he were reading my thoughts. “I leave very little to chance. Perhaps I should explain to you that I learned to be a hunter. I have not always lived the way I do now. At one point in my life, I had to change. Now, I’m pointing the direction to you. I’m guiding you. I know what I’m talking about; someone taught me all this. I didn’t figure it out for myself.
This is the earliest indication in Part One of Journey to Ixtlan that don Juan had himself had a teacher, and consequently, that the teachings of don Juan might actually have been the traditional teachings of Mexican Indian sorcerers in general.
We remained silent. I felt embarrassed and could not think of anything appropriate to say. I waited for him to break the silence. Hours went by. Don Juan became motionless by degrees, until his body had acquired a strange, almost frightening rigidity; his silhouette became difficult to make out as it got dark, and finally, when it was pitch black around us, he seemed to have merged into the blackness of the stones. His state of motionlessness was so total it was as if he did not exist any longer.
Don Juan’s ability to remain motionless for hours (How many hours?) makes a great impression on Carlos. Don Juan is obviously trying to get his point across: that his world of precise acts and feelings and decisions was infinitely more effective than the blundering idiocy Carlos called “his life.” Certainly, an old hand at stopping his internal dialogue, don Juan would not have been inconvenienced by the need to remain absolutely motionless for hours in order to prove his point.
Chapter Seven: Being Inaccessible
Again, as he had done every day for nearly a week, don Juan held me spellbound with his knowledge of specific details about the behaviour of game. He first explained and then corroborated a number of hunting tactics based on what he called “the quirks of quails.” I became so utterly involved in his explanations that a whole day went by and I had not noticed the passage of time. I even forgot to eat lunch. Don Juan made joking remarks that it was quite unusual for me to miss a meal.
By the end of the day, he had caught five quail in a most ingenious trap, which he had taught me to assemble and set up.
Here the ethnologically inclined reader must rue the absence of any description of how the trap was constructed and how the quail (undoubtedly Callipepla gambelii) were lured into it. I mean, five quail in the same trap! I’ve heard it said, however, that quails are not the cleverest of birds.
The wind was cold. Suddenly he stood up and told me that we had to climb to the hilltop and stand up on an area clear of shrubs.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I’m your friend and I’ll see that nothing bad happens to you.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, alarmed.
Don Juan had the most insidious facility to shift me from sheer enjoyment to sheer fright.
“The world is very strange at this time of the day,” he said. “That’s what I mean. No matter what you see, don’t be afraid.”
Don Juan is putting Carlos into the perfect state of mind for hallucinatory experiences. It is getting dark, and Carlos is getting increasingly apprehensive. I like this episode in which don Juan shows Carlos that the world is indeed a mysterious place; however, I think we should take Castaneda’s published recollection of the event with a good pinch of salt.
He stared at me fixedly for a long moment and then began to hum a tune. I straightened my back and sat attentively. I knew that when don Juan hummed a Mexican tune, he was about to clobber me.
“Hey,” he said, smiling, and peered at me. “Whatever happened to your blonde friend? That girl that you used to really like.”
There was, actually, a very important blonde girl in Carlos Castaneda’s life. Her name was Gudrun Eduards (1935-2022), a Swedish girl who studied painting and sculpture at Los Angeles City College between 1952 and 1955. In 1955, she was injured in an automobile accident and decided to move back to Europe, where she applied, and was accepted, to the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, Italy. She and Carlos were still corresponding as late as 1973. Nineteen of Carlos’ letters have been preserved. I have not had an opportunity to examine these documents; thus, I cannot say what sort of relationship, amorous or otherwise, Carlos and Gudrun may have had in those early years of the 1950s. He was, in any case, ten years older than she. It was, perhaps, at this time he began to lie about his age, claiming to have been born in 1935.
Chapter Eight: Disrupting the Routines of Life
We spent all morning watching some rodents that looked like fat squirrels; don Juan called them water rats. He pointed out that they were very fast in getting out of danger, but after they had outrun any predator, they had the terrible habit of stopping, or even climbing a rock, to stand on their hind legs to look around and groom themselves.
These rodents that looked like fat squirrels must have been Mexican ground squirrels (Spermophilus mexicanus). Why does not Castaneda call them “ground squirrels?” Don Juan calls them water rats, which makes a good amount of sense because ground squirrel burrows in the desert would naturally be concentrated near and around sources of water.
Chapter Nine: The Last Battle on Earth
He dared me to name an issue, an item in my life that had engaged all my thoughts. I said art. I had always wanted to be an artist, and for years I had tried my hand at that. I still had the painful memory of my failure.
“You have never taken the responsibility for being in this unfathomable world,” he said in an indicting tone. “Therefore, you were never an artist, and perhaps you’ll never be a hunter.”
Castaneda is surely referring to the two years he spent at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Lima, Peru, and probably also to his first years in Los Angeles, California, during which time he had been obliged to take various menial forms of employment in order to keep himself afloat, but had continued to sculpt and paint nevertheless. He would later claim that he had even taken a course in sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, but that he had not had “the sensitivity or the openness to be a great artist.” As you may suspect, it was not Carlos Castaneda who travelled to Italy to study art; it was Gudrun Eduards, his girlfriend, who did. Apparently, she had “the sensitivity and the openness” that Carlos lacked. She became a great artist.
I was still pondering upon the unusual skill that would be needed in order to move with such speed when he told me in a dry tone of command to stalk a rabbit, catch it, kill it, skin it, and roast the meat before the twilight.
He looked up at the sky and said that I might have enough time.
I automatically started off, proceeding the way I had done scores of times. Don Juan walked beside me and followed my movements with a scrutinizing look. I was very calm and moved carefully, and I had no trouble at all in catching a male rabbit.
Carlos has not yet paid enough visits to don Juan to have hunted rabbits scores of times. “Scores of times” must undoubtedly be a hyperbole. I believe, however, that this particular rabbit hunt did actually take place, more or less as Castaneda describes it in the present chapter, although I must admit that the manner in which the rabbit dies bothers me somewhat. Not that I am feeling all that sorry for the rabbit—I have myself hunted rabbits—but rather that the rabbit’s demise fits a little too well into the story that Castaneda is telling. I think that the climax of the story is an embellishment made for the sake of literary momentum. In the real world, don Juan would have wrung the rabbit’s neck when he found that Carlos was incapable of doing it. The rabbit’s time of roaming in that beautiful desert would have come to an end, just the same. That the rabbit would have died from fright, when Carlos tried to set it free, is just too unlikely to be believed. Unfortunately, the embellishment of factual events for the sake of artistic expression was one of Castaneda’s literary mannerisms.
Chapter Ten: A Meeting with Mescalito
I arrived at don Juan’s house at about seven o’clock on Friday night. Five other Indians were sitting with him on the porch of his house. I greeted him and sat waiting for them to say something. After a formal silence one of the men got up, walked over to me, and said, “Buenas noches.” I stood up and answered, “Buenas noches.” Then all the other men got up and came to me, and we all mumbled “Buenas noches” and shook hands either by barely touching one another’s finger-tips or by holding the hand for an instant and then dropping it quite abruptly.
We all sat down again. They seemed to be rather shy—at a loss for words, although they all spoke Spanish.
It must have been about half past seven when suddenly they all got up and walked towards the back of the house. Nobody had said a word for a long time. Don Juan signalled me to follow, and we all got inside an old pickup truck parked there. I sat in the back with don Juan and two younger men. There were no cushions or benches, and the metal floor was painfully hard, especially when we left the highway and got onto a dirt road. Don Juan whispered that we were going to the house of one of his friends who had seven mescalitos for me.
The text in this chapter has been excerpted entirely from Chapter Two of Castaneda’s first book, The Teachings of Don Juan. Castaneda wanted his readers to believe that this peyote session was held in the house of one of don Juan’s friends in Arizona. I am in favour of actually believing this, even though I am well aware of the fact that don Juan himself lived at this time in Sonora, Mexico, and not in Arizona. Don Juan and Carlos must have travelled all the way from southern Sonora to Yuma, Arizona, almost ten hours by car, in order to attend the session, which don Juan had certainly prearranged with his friend John and the other peyotists in Arizona.
When I first came out to the porch, I had noticed that it was all dark except for the distant glare of the city lights.
This is as good a sign as any that the mitote was held in the vicinity of Yuma, Arizona. Yuma does actually glow in the desert at night. I’ve seen it.
Yet he [Mescalito or peyote] either takes people or rejects them, regardless of whether they are Indians or not. That I know. I have seen numbers of them. I also know that he frolics, he makes some people laugh, but never have I seen him play with anyone.
The only way don Juan would have seen numbers of people being either accepted or rejected by Mescalito would be if he had officiated as “road man” for innumerable overnight peyote rituals along both sides of the border between Mexico and the United States.
Chapter Eleven: Becoming Accessible to Power
I walked in front of don Juan. A new jolt moved the animal’s body and I could see its head. I turned to don Juan, horrified. Judging by its body the animal was obviously a mammal, yet it had a beak, like a bird.
I stared at it in complete and absolute horror. My mind refused to believe it. I was dumbfounded. I could not even articulate a word. Never in my whole existence had I witnessed anything of that nature. Something inconceivable was there in front of my very eyes. I wanted don Juan to explain that incredible animal, but I could only mumble to him. He was staring at me. I glanced at him and glanced at the animal, and then something in me arranged the world, and I knew at once what the animal was. I walked over to it and picked it up. It was a large branch of a bush. It had been burnt, and possibly the wind had blown some burnt debris which got caught in the dry branch and thus gave the appearance of a large bulging round animal. The colour of the burnt debris made it look light brown in contrast with the green vegetation.
Castaneda’s description of his experience with the incredible animal that was dying is probably a result of factual reporting with after-the-fact embellishment.
Chapter Twelve: The Mood of a Warrior
I drove up to don Juan’s house, and before I even had a chance to greet him, he stuck his head through the window of my car, smiled at me, and said, “We must drive quite a distance to a place of power and it’s almost noon.”
He opened the door of my car, sat down next to me in the front seat, and directed me to drive south for about seventy miles; we then turned east on to a dirt road and followed it until we had reached the slopes of the mountains. I parked my car off the road in a depression don Juan picked because it was deep enough to hide the car from view. From there we went directly to the top of the low hills, crossing a vast flat desolate area.
“Usually, I wouldn’t come here at all,” he said. “But the crow pointed out this direction. There must be something special about it.”
“Do we really have to be here, don Juan?”
“We do. Otherwise, I would avoid this place.” I had become extremely nervous. He told me to listen attentively to what he had to say.
“The only thing one can do in this place is hunt lions,” he said. “So, I’m going to teach you how to do that.
“There is a special way of constructing a trap for water rats that live around water holes. They serve as bait. The sides of the cage are made to collapse and very sharp spikes are put along the sides. The spikes are hidden when the trap is up, and they do not affect anything unless something falls on the cage, in which case the sides collapse and the spikes pierce whatever hits the trap.”
In this chapter, Carlos and don Juan are in a fairly pristine wilderness area, south of the Río Mayo, and about fifty kilometres east of the city of Navojoa. If don Juan’s intention had been to hunt mountain lions, this would have been an ideal area in which to do so. Don Juan has, however, guided Carlos to this specific area in order to show him some natural formations at the base of a tall bluff that the Indians consider sacred. The bluff itself is situated close to the river, about an hour’s hike below the dam on the river. The lion hunting excursion seems to have been something of an improvisation on don Juan’s part. Oddly enough, I find Castaneda’s recounting of his experience quite believable, although some embellishment of the account that was recorded in his field diary may have been perpetrated at a later time, for example, when he was preparing the manuscript for his novel/doctoral dissertation, more than ten years after the fact. The caged ground squirrels would certainly have emitted their typically high-pitched and very audible alarm signal; and if a mountain lion had been in the vicinity, it would have been lured towards the trap. In addition, Carlos would probably have felt amply encouraged to scramble in total darkness to the top of the bluff when the lion let out its scream.
Chapter Thirteen: La Catalina
I didn’t see don Juan sitting on his porch as I drove up. I thought it was strange. I called to him out loud, and his daughter-in-law came out of the house.
“He’s inside,” she said.
I found he had dislocated his ankle several weeks before. He had made his own cast by soaking strips of cloth in a mush made with cactus and powdered bone. The strips, wound tightly around his ankle, had dried into a light, streamlined cast. It had the hardness of plaster, but not the bulkiness.
“How did it happen?” I asked.
His daughter-in-law, a Mexican woman from Yucatan, who was tending him, answered me.
“It was an accident! He fell and nearly broke his foot!”
Don Juan laughed and waited until the woman had left the house before answering.
“Accident, my eye! I have an enemy nearby. A woman. La Catalina! She pushed me during a moment of weakness, and I fell.”
The text for this chapter has been excerpted from Chapter Three in Castaneda’s first book, The Teachings of Don Juan. This is the earliest mention of the sorceress “la Catalina” in the works of Carlos Castaneda. Not only is she a very important character for the narrative, she even appears—at least, appears to me—to have been a real person. Judging from what Castaneda wrote about her, I would say she was a fairly young indigenous woman, born in about 1930 and probably of pure Yaqui descent.
Chapter Fourteen: A Battle of Power
We started on a journey very early in the morning. We drove south and then east to the mountains. Don Juan had brought gourds with food and water. We ate in my car before we started walking.
Don Juan and Carlos are in the high Sierra de Álamos, probably close to the boundary between the states of Sonora and Chihuahua, certainly a majestic setting for any “battle of power,” especially if a thunderstorm should occur. I do not doubt that Carlos experienced a thunderstorm in those high mountains. Indeed, don Juan was very wise in seeking shelter from the storm in a shallow cave. Lightning is especially dangerous at higher altitudes. The hallucinations that Carlos tells don Juan he experienced during the height of the storm are, perhaps, less easy for the reader to accept as a matter of fact. Had don Juan laced Carlos’ “power food” with some hallucinogen, or did Castaneda, when he wrote the manuscript for his novel/dissertation, describe hallucinations that he had not actually experienced?
Chapter Fifteen: A Warrior’s Last Stand
Around ten a.m. don Juan walked into his house. He had left at the crack of dawn. I greeted him. He chuckled and in a clowning mood he shook hands with me and greeted me ceremoniously.
“We’re going to go on a little trip,” he said. “You’re going to drive us to a very special place in search of power.”
He unfolded two carrying nets and placed two gourds filled with food in each of them, tied them with a thin rope, and handed me a net.
We leisurely drove north some four hundred miles, and then we left the Pan American highway and took a gravel road towards the west. My car seemed to have been the only car on the road for hours. As we kept on driving, I noticed that I could not see through my windshield. I strained desperately to look at the surroundings, but it was too dark and my windshield was overlaid with crushed insects and dust.
In this chapter, don Juan and Carlos are in a wilderness area, a short distance to the east of the Pinacate volcanic field in northernmost Sonora. (I have myself travelled along the dirt roads in this area of Mexico.) Don Juan certainly knows how to choose his settings! What Castaneda calls the “Pan American Highway” is, in reality, Mexican Federal Highway 15, which begins in Heroica Nogales and terminates in Mexico City. After driving north on Highway 15 for about eight hours, Carlos made a left turn just south of Nogales onto one of the rugged dirt roads that crisscross the Sonoran Desert between Highway 15 and the Gulf of California. Concerning the narrative itself, I find little reason to doubt that Carlos found “his hilltop” in much the manner in which Castaneda claims he did.
Chapter Sixteen: The Four Enemies of a Man of Knowledge
“A man of knowledge is one who has followed truthfully the hardships of learning,” he said. “A man who has, without rushing or without faltering, gone as far as he can in unravelling the secrets of power and knowledge.”
“Can anyone be a man of knowledge?”
“No, not anyone.”
“Then what must a man do to become a man of knowledge?”
“He must challenge and defeat his four natural enemies.”
“Will he be a man of knowledge after defeating these four enemies?”
“Yes. A man can call himself a man of knowledge only if he is capable of defeating all four of them.”
The entire text for this chapter has been excerpted from Chapter Three and Chapter Four of Castaneda’s first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, namely, the entries for 8 April 1962, 12 April 1962, 14 April 1962, and 15 April 1962. The first and last of these entries coincide very well with the Spanish-language entries for the same dates in the twelve surviving pages from what we may assume was the original field diary. In his novel/dissertation, Journey to Ixtlan, Castaneda gives the reader an account of these two dates which entirely contradicts the account given in the field diary. On his journey to Ixtlan, Carlos finds himself in the Sierra del Bacatete on the 8th of April, hunting power under the guidance of don Juan. On this excursion, he learns how to use “the gait of power” to escape from an “entity of the night” that is pursuing him in the dead of darkest night. From Wednesday, 11 April 1962 until Sunday, 15 April 1962, he and don Juan are wandering in the Sonoran Desert, east of the Pinacate Volcanic Field, where Carlos had discovered his “place of predilection” on a similar excursion three months earlier. My question is: How could such a blatant anomaly make it all the way through the editorial process and into the published book? It seems clear to me that the account for these days that Castaneda gives the reader in his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, is reasonably accurate, while the account given in Journey to Ixtlan/Sorcery, a Description of the World is utter fabrication.
Don Juan leaned against the post of the ramada and fixed his gaze on the Sierra del Bacatete in the distance. A strange melancholy took hold of me, and I said, just to have something to say: “One cannot escape the ravages of old age.”
I have excerpted the final paragraphs of this chapter from the surviving pages of Castaneda’s field diary.
Chapters Seventeen and Eighteen: The Blackbird
and Confrontation with a Sorceress
Don Juan had not mentioned anything about the sorceress la Catalina since the incident with her in November 1961. I thought he had either forgotten or resolved the whole affair. One day, however, I found him in a very agitated mood, and in a manner that was completely incongruous with his natural calmness, he told me that the “blackbird” had stood in front of him the night before, almost touching him, and that he had not even awakened. The woman’s artfulness was so great that he had not felt her presence at all. He said his good fortune was to wake up in the nick of time to stage a horrendous fight for his life. Don Juan’s tone of voice was moving, almost pathetic. I felt an overwhelming surge of compassion and concern.
The text for Chapter Seventeen and Chapter Eighteen has been excerpted from Chapter 14 of Castaneda’s second book, A Separate Reality. Interestingly, the text passage in the published book ends in the following manner: “There was something about the way the woman [la Catalina] moved away from me that was truly maddening. I had witnessed it myself: she had jumped the width of the highway in the flick of an eyelash. I had no way of getting out of that certainty. From that moment on I focused all my attention on that incident and little by little I accumulated proof that she was actually following me. The final outcome was that I had to withdraw from the apprenticeship under the pressure of my irrational fear.” In The Teachings of Don Juan, the sorceress (diablera), who in the final chapter of the book unsuccessfully attempts to impersonate don Juan, is not identified by name. This is probably because Castaneda had wanted his readers to think that he had discontinued his “apprenticeship” due to the adverse effects the hallucinogens he had taken were having on his mental health, and that his experience with the sorceress was merely a precipitating factor. This purported “last session” with don Juan is dated 30 September 1965, which is almost two years after his initial, horrendous confrontation with the sorceress called “la Catalina.” I don’t believe that la Catalina was such an inept sorceress that she would need two years to fulfil her task of scaring Carlos back to Los Angeles. I surmise that Castaneda needed this literary stay of execution in order to make room for his purported experiences while under the influence of the hallucinogenic mushroom Psilocybe Mexicana. (The session in which Carlos initially “smoked” the hallucinogenic mushroom mixture—the first of many sessions that I do not believe ever occurred—is dated 31 December 1963, and the last session, in which Carlos turns into a crow and flies away, is dated 18 March 1965.)
Chapter Nineteen: A Worthy Opponent
Over a month before, I had had a horrendous confrontation with a sorceress called “la Catalina”. I had faced her at the risk of my life because don Juan had convinced me that she was after his life and that he was incapable of fending off her onslaughts. After I had come in contact with her, don Juan disclosed to me that she had never really been of any danger to him, and that the whole affair had been a trick, not in the sense of a malicious prank, but in the sense of a trap to ensnare me.
The text for this chapter has been excerpted entirely from Chapter 17 of Journey to Ixtlan. I think it is a good narrative, although it is probably embellished with some quite awesome experiences that were never actually experienced. I would like to suggest, however, that the fiesta was held in Pueblo Vícam, where there would have been a Mexican shopkeeper in 1962, if I am not entirely mistaken. (According to Rosalio Moisés, who lived in Pueblo Vícam 1938-1939, there was a Mexican store in that town, owned by two brothers, Eusebio and Domingo Aleman Encinas. See: The Tall Candle, a book by Rosalio Moisés, Jane Holden Kelly, and William Curry Holden.)
He signalled me to follow him to my car and we drove to the small Mexican town nearby. I did not ask him what we were going to do. He made me park my car by a restaurant and then we walked around the bus depot and the general store.
We got in my car, and don Juan directed me to the main highway and then to a wide unpaved road. I drove in the centre of it; heavy trucks and tractors had carved deep trenches and my car was too low to go on either the left or the right side of the road. We went slowly amid a thick cloud of dust. The course gravel which was used to level the road had lumped with the dirt during the rains, and chunks of dry mud rocks bounced against the metal underside of my car, making loud explosive sounds.
Don Juan told me to slow down as we were coming to a small bridge.
There were four Indians sitting there, and they waved at us. I was not sure whether or not I knew them. We passed the bridge, and the road curved gently.
“That’s the woman’s house,” don Juan whispered to me as he pointed with his eyes to a white house with a high bamboo fence all around it.
He told me to make a U-turn and stop in the middle of the road and wait to see if the woman became suspicious enough to show her face.
We stayed there perhaps ten minutes. I thought it is was an interminable time. Don Juan did not say a word. He sat motionless, looking at the house.
“There she is,” he said, and his body gave a sudden jump.
I saw the dark foreboding silhouette of a woman standing inside the house, looking through the open door. The room was dark and that only accentuated the darkness of the woman’s silhouette.
About half an hour later, when we had turned onto the paved highway, don Juan spoke to me.
“What do you say?” he asked. “Did you recognise the shape?”
If we assume that the narrative in the chapter A Worthy Opponent is basically true, then it would seem most likely that Castaneda is here describing the most direct route from don Juan’s house to la Catalina’s house. There was only one paved road in the Valle del Yaqui in 1962: Federal Highway 15. We know from the twelve pages of field notes, which Castaneda sent to Gordon Wasson in 1968, that the Sierra del Bacatete were clearly visible from the front side of don Juan’s house, and therefore we can conclude that don Juan lived in one of the station settlements along the Southern Pacific Railway line, which in the Valle del Yaqui are Estación Oros and Estación Vícam. Estación Vícam is clearly “the small Mexican town nearby” to where don Juan lived, and thus we must conclude that don Juan’s house was situated in Estación Oros.
After driving for about 30 kilometres along Highway 15 in the direction of Ciudad Obregón, Carlos makes a right turn off the highway onto a very poorly maintained secondary road, a road that had been laid uncommonly wide to accommodate the transport of agricultural machinery and harvested produce to and from the extensive wheat fields north of the river. (Nowadays, this secondary road, numbered 105 on the map, is paved and well maintained. It has, however, remained a remarkably wide road for the area.)
Carlos and don Juan continue on towards the Yaqui town of Bácum until they reach a small bridge on the outskirts of this town. (This bridge, which we may assume spanned an old irrigation ditch, is no longer extant. The road does, however, curve gently towards the west at this point, and therefore we may assume that La Catalina lived along this stretch of the road, on the western outskirts of Bácum. Her house could still be standing, and not really that difficult to identify, thanks to Castaneda’s description. In addition, there should still be some people in the town who remember her, maybe not as a witch, but perhaps as a strange old lady who kept mostly to herself.)
Chapter Twenty: Succumbing to Fear
I went to see don Juan. Brief, shallow states of non-ordinary reality had been persisting in spite of my deliberate attempts to end them. I felt that my condition was getting worse, for the duration of such states was increasing. I became sharply aware of the nsoise of airplanes. The sound of their motors going overhead would unavoidably catch my attention and keep it, to the point where I felt I was following the plane as if I were inside it, or flying with it. This sensation was very annoying. My inability to shake it off produced a deep anxiety in me.
Chapter Twenty has been excerpted from Chapter 11 of Castaneda’s first book, The Teachings of Don Juan. I have made a few small, but, in my estimation, necessary edits to Castaneda’s original wording of the text by letting don Juan refer to the diablera by name, la Catalina. Neither Carlos nor don Juan has any doubts about who she must have been, even though her disguise was almost perfect. This final confrontation with la Catalina marks the end of Carlos’ “apprenticeship” with Juan Matus. I imagine that both don Juan and la Catalina felt much relieved once they realised that Carlos’ fieldwork was over. Castaneda claimed that he continued to visit don Juan as a friend until 21 May 1968, at which time he resumed the apprenticeship. This was, I believe, a lie; and so also was everything else he claimed to have experienced in the company of don Juan from May of 1968 until March of 1973, when Juan Matus purportedly “burned with the fire from within” and vanished from the face of the earth.