Was he a real person or an entirely fictional character?
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge was first published by the University of California Press in 1968. The book was, to all appearances, a legitimate work of anthropology, an account of the apprenticeship of a postgraduate student of anthropology, Carlos Castaneda, to an indigenous Mexican sorcerer, Juan Matus. To the surprise of the postgraduate and also his thesis supervisors, the book had sold out three printings by the UC Press by the time the rights were acquired in 1969 by Simon & Schuster, for a second hard-cover edition, and Ballantine Books, for a paperback edition. Carlos Castaneda was awarded his Master’s degree in anthropology, and his monograph, subsequently published as an ordinary trade book, made the New York Times bestseller list in a very short time.
It would appear that Castaneda returned to Mexico in 1968 and resumed his apprenticeship with Juan Matus, almost certainly with the intention of achieving his doctorate in anthropology and, at the same time, writing a sequel to his first book, again in the guise of an academic thesis. A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan was published in 1971, and Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan, which would even serve as Castaneda’s doctoral dissertation under the title Sorcery: A Description of the World, was published the following year. In this manner, Carlos Castaneda had, by 1973, graduated from penniless undergraduate to celebrity millionaire Doctor of Philosophy.
The reaction of literary critics, academics, but also general readers to these three books was overwhelmingly positive. As is usually the case, a number of dissenting views of the books were also expressed. R. Gordon Wasson, ethnobotanist and co-author of Mushrooms, Russia and History, wrote in his review (March 1969) that he had felt something was seriously amiss in Castaneda’s description of the use of entheogens of the genus Psilocybe (the so-called sacred mushrooms) in the teachings of don Juan, but that Castaneda had promptly replied to his queries and, what is more, had sent copies of some of his worked-up pages of field notes in Spanish, which more than anything had proved to Wasson’s satisfaction that Castaneda was actually working with an indigenous Mexican sorcerer named don Juan.
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. Some say the idea that one might gain a sort of “transcendent” knowledge through the ritual use of hallucinogens found much appeal among adherents of the countercultural movement of the 1960s. Carlos Castaneda has been dubbed “the godfather of the New Age movement;” however, it seems to me that he was made godfather without his consent. In his third book, Journey to Ixtlan, he disavowed the use of hallucinogens as a pathway to any kind of knowledge, and certainly his personal habits and his appearance were not by any stretch of the imagination countercultural.
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 an indigenous Mexican sorcerer 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. The sorcerer had not refused outright, but had suggested that the two of them should meet at a later date at the sorcerer’s home in Sonora, Mexico, where they might discuss the matter with more ease. On this later date, don Juan steadfastly refused to even talk about peyote, much less to allow Carlos to take part in a peyote ceremony, until Carlos had managed to get a better grip on his life. According to don Juan, in order to meet Mescalito, the deity he believed is contained in the peyote cactus, Carlos would have to be well on his way to becoming a true warrior, that is, he would have to at least attempt to erase his personal history, relinquish his self-importance, take death as his advisor, and assume responsibility for his actions. It does not take much imagination to understand that don Juan’s admonishments might just as well apply to anyone, no matter what their ultimate goal in life might be.
The romance between Carlos Castaneda and his readers was relatively short-lived. In March of 1973, Time Magazine published an article, Carlos Castaneda: Magic and Reality, which put the veracity of what Castaneda was writing into serious doubt. It was at about this time that Castaneda himself effectively went into hiding, refusing to be approached by anyone on any account—a burnt child dreads the fire, I suppose. In 1976, psychologist Richard de Mille published a book, Castaneda’s Journey: The Power and the Allegory, in which he claimed to show that Castaneda had made everything up. Don Juan was an entirely fictional character. The twelve photocopies of field notes that Castaneda had sent to R. Gordon Wasson in 1968 had been pulled from forgeries. Castaneda was therefore guilty of a very thoroughgoing academic fraud. But despite the fall from grace, from his place of hiding in the Westwood neighbourhood of Los Angeles, California, he continued to publish books about his apprenticeship with don Juan, each new book apparently bound with a longer thread of untruth and utter make-believe than the one before.
In 1991, Carlos Castaneda came out of hiding, and with the help of a small, tightknit group of co-conspirators, he began to organize lecture classes and workshops with the purpose of teaching a self-invented, codified system of body movements, superficially similar to t’ai chi, which he called the “magical passes.” He eventually managed to gather a large following, but after his death in 1998 it became more and more apparent that Castaneda had been afflicted with a severe narcissistic personality disorder, the sort of behaviour pattern that often leaves a considerable amount of human wreckage in its wake. One might say without exaggeration that, as the almost stereotypical leader of a cult following, Carlos Castaneda was a particularly nasty piece of work.
Nowadays, much of what interest there still is in Carlos Castaneda as a writer is mostly centred on discovering the actual sources he used for the muddled patchwork of ideas that he presented in his books. After all, Castaneda was probably not imaginative enough to have fabricated his fantastic stories entirely on his own. In my opinion, however, this avenue of research runs in the wrong direction. What we should be asking ourselves is not so much: From whom did he misappropriate the ideas that underlie all that is so transparently deceitful in all of 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 sorcerer with whom he worked in his capacity as student of anthropology for about two years in the early 1960s. Richard de Mille was mistaken when he claimed that the copies of field notes that Castaneda had sent to R. Gordon Wasson in 1968 had been pulled from outright forgeries. Luckily, these twelve sheets of photocopies have survived. They were safely deposited in the archives of the Botany Library of Oak Ames at Harvard University in 1981. Upon closer scrutiny, and keeping an open mind, you will find nothing in these pages that might indicate that they are anything but the photocopies of twelve pages from an authentic field diary. What we should really be asking ourselves is thus: Just how much did the real don Juan contribute to the almost hopeless conglomeration of strange but sometimes wonderful ideas that is contained in the complete works of Carlos Castaneda? At least, this is what I have been asking myself, and I believe I have found an answer: Don Juan contributed all of the wonderful ideas.
This blog post is an excerpt from my book The Curious Case of Dr. Castaneda’s Twelve Pages of Field Notes (F. Lawrence Fleming), published 5 January 2023. For an annotated transcription of Castaneda’s field notes, please see the appendix to the book mentioned above.