Searching for the Historical Juan Matus, A Suggestion on How to Read the Works of Carlos Castaneda, and Facing the Other Way

Description

Don Juan Matus: Real or Fictional?

Was the don Juan Matus, in the books by Carlos Castaneda, a real person? This ebook proposes that he was. It is a compilation of two previously published books that concern the literary works of Carlos Castaneda (1925-1998): Making Sense of the Life and Works of Carlos Castaneda (F. Lawrence Fleming, first published 2018) and The Curious Case of Dr. Castaneda’s Twelve Pages of Field Notes (F. Lawrence Fleming, first published 2023). It is my ambition that the reader who is interested in researching this subject matter will find this edition of the two books in one a convenient solution. This ebook is also available in a hardcover print edition at amazon.com.

However Did an Anthropological Thesis Become a Bestseller?

We may well ask ourselves, now that some fifty years have elapsed since Castaneda was awarded his PhD, what it was about his first three books that garnered so much praise when they were first published. I would like to suggest that it was the story in itself that appealed to so many of us, the story of the undergraduate of anthropology at UCLA who approached don Juan Matus, an indigenous Mexican sorceror, at a bus station in Arizona with the intention of enlisting the old man as an informant for an academic study concerning the ritual use of the hallucinogenic cactus peyote.

Nowadays, much of what interest there still is in Carlos Castaneda as a writer is mostly centered on discovering the actual sources he used for the muddled patchwork of ideas that he presented in his books. In my opinion, this avenue of reserach runs in the wrong direction. What we should be asking ourselves is not: From whom did he misappropriate the ideas that underlie all that is so transparently deceitful in all his books; but rather: From whom did he get the ideas that underlie all that is so remarkably edifying in the first three of his books? I firmly contend that he got the edifying ideas from the indigenous Mexican sorceror with whom he worked in his capacity of student of anthropology for about two years in the early 1960s – don Juan Matus.