INTRODUCTION:
On 6 September 1975 I wrote to Castaneda, telling him I was getting this book together, asking him to define emic, requesting permission to purchase Sorcery [Sorcery: A Description of the World, Castaneda’s doctoral dissertation] from Xerox, inquiring about the topic of his next book, and inviting him to lunch. On 4 November, having received neither an answer or my letter back, I sent a reminder. Today, 2 April 1976, I am still waiting for his reply. [Richard de Mille, Castaneda’ Journey: The Power and the Allegory, Capra Press, Santa Barbara, California (1976), p. 67.]
Though I am quite sure don Juan was invented by Castaneda, I have not hesitated to write about him as though I knew him personally, which of course I do, as anyone does who has learned the Yaquiless Way of Knowledge. A few pages back, for example, I said don Juan would not despise his apprentice’s need for the controlled folly of worldly recognition. While we always risk error when speculating about the motives or hypothetical acts of others, I feel at least as confident in saying what don Juan would not despise as in saying what my editor or publisher would not despise, because I know don Juan better than I know them. Don Juan lives! That is his inventor’s prime achievement on this earth. Though an undistinguished wordsmith, Castaneda is an able, dedicated mythmaker and may well take his place with [George] MacDonald and [Charles] Williams, whose language was an adequate though not elegant vehicle for their allegories, but not with [C. S.] Lewis, who was a literary artist as well as a master of myths. [De Mille, ibid., p. 90.]
I feel that Richard de Mille did the world an inestimable service when he exposed Carlos Castaneda for the liar and cad he actually was, but, at the same time, did the age-old discipline of philosophy a deplorable disservice when he adamantly maintained to have shown, even to his dying breath, that don Juan Matus must have been an entirely fictional character. I believe that Richard de Mille, whose two books (Castaneda’s Journey and The Don Juan Papers) I admire immensely, would have come to a different conclusion with respect to don Juan’s factual existence or nonexistence if Carlos Castaneda had in any small way been complaisant when he received the first letter from de Mille. I am quite sure that Richard became overly vindictive when he was so callously slighted by Carlos, and that his innately astute judgement was clouded over by his thirst for revenge, his ambition to bring down Carlos utterly. Richard de Mille did, while not belittling all the good. It does matter whether or not don Juan Matus was a real person. If for no other reason, at least our sense of justice should force us into re-examining this question with great earnest. If an indigenous Mexican sorcerer (brujo) named Juan really was the primary source for Castaneda’s Teachings of don Juan, then all the credit for one of the greatest—at least, in my opinion—philosophical tracts of all time should certainly go to the source himself, and not, as usually seems to be the case, to Carlos Castaneda, who in his aberration, messed things up almost beyond the point of reclamation.
The evidence which supports the conjecture that don Juan was a real person, and also that he was the primary source for the Teachings of don Juan, is largely circumstantial; so too is the evidence supporting the conjecture that he never existed. All things considered, I should like to maintain that evidence in favour of the first-named conjecture is greater than the evidence in favour of the latter, taking especially into account the twelve photocopied pages from Castaneda’s field diary which have, in almost miraculous circumstances, survived, and are available for inspection and analysis in the Economic Botany Library of Oakes Ames at Harvard University. Discovering all the original pages of his field diary would probably settle this question once and for all; however, since it seems quite likely that Castaneda himself destroyed the field diary in order to escape almost certain condemnation for academic fraud, such an extraordinary and fortuitous discovery is not likely to be made. Likewise, finding credible evidence of the man that Castaneda called Juan Matus in public records or in the local folklore of the Yaqui River Valley in Sonora, Mexico, would also, more or less, settle this question. Unfortunately, no one has reported finding any credible evidence—possibly because no one has searched hard enough. (I believe that if someone were to stubbornly ask around amongst the Yaquis in Sonora, they would eventually find someone who recalls an old brujo named Juan, or at the least remembers visits to the Valle del Yaqui by a Spanish-speaking Yankee anthropologist named Carlos. Time’s a-wasting, however.) Therefore, those of us who, for whatever reason, prefer to think of Juan Matus as a real person and the true source for the Teachings of Don Juan, will, for the time being, have to make do with circumstantial evidence. (Personally, I don’t think that I would be able to follow the teachings of don Juan if I did not believe that he had been a real person.) Some of this circumstantial evidence can be found in the earliest recorded interviews with Carlos Castaneda. (My commentaries are set in italics.)
Excerpts from a tape-recorded group discussion and interview at UCLA in 1968 with Carlos Castaneda and Jane Hellisoe, University of California Press: (I have not been able to discover the exact date on which this Q&A session was held in a lecture hall at the University of California, Los Angeles. The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge was released by the publisher on 27 June 1968; however, the fall semester at UCLA did not begin until early September, 1968. Since a Q&A session would probably not have been held until enough students had had the opportunity to actually read the book, and make staging such an event worth the effort for the publisher’s representative, Jane Hellisoe, we may assume that the session was held in November or December of 1968. It is important to point out that Carlos Castaneda was obviously answering questions entirely ad libitum, which would have made slips of the tongue much more likely than if he had been holding a well-prepared lecture. A nearly full transcript is available from https://www.nagualism.com/1968-carlos-castaneda-interview-electroprint-graphics.html The so-called “missing ten minutes” are available from https://archive.org/details/castanedas-lecture-hosted-by-jane-hellisoe-missing-part )
CARLO CASTANEDA: There’s an interesting idea that occurred to me now, that I would like to test in the field. I have attended recently a peyote meeting. It was a gathering, which I just took water to them. I didn’t participate. I just went there to watch, to observe. [In this instance, Castaneda is mentioning a field trip with don Juan to the state of Chihuahua, which would appear to have actually taken place in June of 1968. The field trip is described in detail in his second book, A Separate Reality, which was first released by the publisher on 7 May 1971. Thus it seems that Castaneda had actually resumed his field work with don Juan at about the time his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, was released.]
[. . .]
CARLOS CASTANEDA: At the moment, like uh, he used to cure years ago, that’s before I met him. Today he is not interested in curing or bewitching. [This is the only time Castaneda intimates that don Juan had not only been a brujo (sorcerer), but also a curandero (healer).]
[. . .]
JANE HELLISOE: Were there other men of knowledge considered to be like don Juan?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Yes, don Juan likes to think that his predilection is talking. He likes to talk. There are other men who have another type of predilection. There is a man who gives lessons in waterfalls. His predilection is balance and movement. And the other one I know dances, and he accomplishes the same thing. [This is quite an important question: Were the “teachings of don Juan” in reality an age-old esoteric tradition/practice among the indigenous peoples of Mexico of which don Juan was just one of the tradition bearers? Castaneda here claims to be personally acquainted with two other “men of knowledge” besides don Juan. According to A Separate Reality, Castaneda first met Elias Sacateca, the Yaqui man of knowledge whose predilection was dancing, very early on during his work with don Juan. On the other hand, Castaneda writes in A Separate Reality that he first became involved with the man of knowledge whose predilection was balance and movement, Genaro Flores, as late as in October of 1968, only a month or so before the Q&A session at UCLA. Of course, it is possible that he was making all this up on the spot, possibly with the help of two characters that he had already created for a projected sequel to The Teachings of Don Juan; but considering the fact that don Elias is only an anecdotal character in A Separate Reality, I think it rather likely that he was real person and possibly even an authentic indigenous man of knowledge. A third “man of knowledge” is mentioned in A Separate Reality (Chapter Two), a certain Vincente Medrano—apparently and somewhat surprisingly a white Mexican, and not an indigenous Mexican or even a Mestizo—who lived in the town of Durango, and whose “predilection” would appear to have been herbology. Like Elias Sacateca, he is an anecdotal character in the book and thus, possibly, he was a real person in real life. My argument is that Castaneda, at the time of the release in 1968 of The Teachings of Don Juan, did not know that the monograph would be at all successful within academia, much less that it would ever achieve international bestseller status as an ordinary trade book. I think that his success took him very much by surprise. Therefore, I doubt that he had even as much as outlined any sequel or sequels to his book by the time of the Q&A session in late 1968, but was actually drawing on his real-life experiences in the field.]
[. . .]
JANE HELLISOE: Does don Juan or any of the other brujos have any difficulty with the Church?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Well, I suppose they do. They couldn’t care less one way or the other. [. . .] You see, don Juan is not trying to fight anybody, therefore nobody [fights] with him. He’s very capable, he’s a hunter. [. . .]
JANE HELLISOE: He hunts animals for food?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Many ways, metaphorically, and in a literally way. He’s a warrior, meaning he’s alert on his toes consistently. He never lets anything beyond by him. There’s a great argument that I have with his grandson. His grandson says my grandfather is feeble-minded. I said you know perhaps you’re wrong. Do you think you could sneak up on him? And the young guy, Fernando, no, my grandfather, you cannot sneak up on the grandfather, he’s a brujo. [Here Castaneda is foreshadowing the narrative in his book Journey to Ixtlan, which was not to be published until 1 October 1972.]
[. . .]
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Don Juan took me to Sonora as a show, so he could convince his grandson that it was very desirable to take peyote. That it would change his life. His grandson is a very handsome chap, terribly handsome. He wants to be a movie star. He wants me to bring him to Hollywood. [. . .] Don Juan has the intention to turn his grandson to the use of peyote. And he failed every time. And he took me one day as a show, and I told them my experiences, there were eight Indians and they’re listening. They said it, peyote causes madness, causes insanity. Don Juan says, “but that’s not true, if that would be so, look at Carlos, he isn’t mad.” They said, maybe he should be. [This visit to don Juan’s grandson is the subject of an entire chapter in A Separate Reality (Chapter Four). In the book, Fernando’s name has been changed to Lucio, and the visit is said to have taken place from 4 September 1968 until 7 September 1968, that is, two or three months prior to the Q&A session.]
[. . .]
CARLOS CASTANEDA: And he told me that one day he was walking, collecting—at the end of the year they collect the mushrooms that wouldn’t be served. He doesn’t use them, but he still collects them ritually. I don’t know what he does with the mixture, but he still does it. And he and another man, a Mazatec Indian, don Genaro, who is also a man of knowledge, they were involved in collecting mushrooms. And the process of collecting mushrooms is a very sacred, profound, amenable ritual. [. . .] [According to Barbara G. Myerhoff, a fellow graduate student of Castaneda in 1966, she told him in August of that year of her recent experiences in the field with her informant, Ramón Medina, a Huichol shaman in Guadalajara, Mexico. Castaneda had exclaimed excitedly that don Ramón had performed shamanic feats that were very similar to those he had seen performed by one of his own informants, don Genaro, a Mazatec sorcerer and man of knowledge, a man he would later claim to have first met very briefly in April of 1968. It seems to me that Castaneda’s “don Genaro” had likely been a real person, although it is very apparent that don Genaro’s purported predilection for acts of acts of balance and movement at waterfalls was audaciously misappropriated by Castaneda from Barbara G. Myerhoff and her informant, don Ramón.]
[. . .]
STUDENT: Are there many young Yaquis who still have a desire to become brujos?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Yeah, there’s one, I’ve just met one, not too long ago, very recently. He made a mask for me, for a friend [. . .] and he [don Juan] sent me to this young guy, up in the sticks, in no man’s land, to look for him and ask him for a vision. And this young guy was very, very funny, very abrupt, strange man. And he told me he would do it. And well, it took him about eight, nine months for him to have a vision and to execute it. And his mask broke four times until he finally finished. And it is truly one of the most astounding pieces of work. It’s in Columbia University. [. . .] [This anecdote is deserving of some research, I think, although I have not had the opportunity to look more seriously into the matter. Castaneda is here describing a man, obviously a Yaqui mask maker, who should not be that difficult to trace—I mean, how many Yaqui mask makers can there have been? Of course, Castaneda could have been making this man up; however, while listening to the actual sound recording, I could clearly sense the emotional enthusiasm with which he described the man and his art. Unfortunately, any attempt at tracing this man would entail an actual trip to the Valle del Yaqui in Sonora, Mexico, in order to make an almost door-to-door inquiry among the locals. In addition, if a Yaqui pascola mask was really donated to the art collection at Columbia University (probably at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library) in the 1960s, there will be a record of acquisition, but truth to tell, I feel too embarrassed to inquire about this to the administrator of collections at Columbia University. Carlos Castaneda’s bad reputation as a liar and a fraud is far greater than his reputation as a good anthropologist, even in academic circles.]
Radio interview from 30 January 1969 with Carlos Castaneda and Theodore Roszak from California State College at Hayward (Pacific Radio Archives): (Unfortunately, the interviewer in this radio broadcast, Theodore Roszak, seems to have been more interested in Castaneda’s purported bouts with hallucinogen fuelled non-ordinary reality than Jane Hellisoe was during the Q&A session at UCLA some months earlier. Theodore Roszak: “Now, the heart of the book, at least as far as my reading was concerned, certainly the most fascinating part of the book, has to do with your experiences with what you term non-ordinary reality, and many of these experiences as you recount them have a great deal of cogency to them; that is, they are experiences that seem to come very close to demonstrating the validity of practices like divination, and then on the other hand you have experiences that, at the time, seemed to have been tremendously vivid experiences of flight and of being transformed into various animal forms, and often you suggest a sense of some ultimate revelation taking place. What sense do you make of these experiences now as you look back on them all? What seems to have been valid about them and how was don Juan, do you feel, seem able to control or predict what these experiences would be?” And so on. In my estimation, Castaneda had one single experience of intoxication by hallucinogenic substance, namely, the peyote session of 7 August 1961 in which he behaved under the influence of peyote intoxication in a manner that convinced don Juan that he was the “chosen man.” I believe all of the other hallucinogenic experiences that he recounts in his first two books were entirely the result of creative writing, and that his reliance on creative writing was the result of his not having enough data for a viable academic thesis. Nevertheless, a few of Castaneda’s answers in this interview are illuminating inasmuch as they give us an idea of such things that may actually have occurred.)
CARLOS CASTANEDA: The way the books present it seems to heighten some dramatic sequences, which is, I’m afraid, not true real life. There are enormous gaps in between in which ordinary things took place, that are not included. I didn’t include in the book because they did not pertain to the system I wanted to portray, so I just simply took them away, you see. And that means that the gaps between those very height states, you know, whatever, says that I remove things that are continuous crescendos, in kind of sequence leading to a very dramatic solution. But in real life it was a very simple matter because it took years in between, months pass in between them, and in the meantime, we did all kinds of things. We even went hunting. He told me how to trap things, set traps, very old, old ways of setting a trap, and how to catch rattlesnakes. He told me how to prepare rattlesnakes, in fact. And so that eases up, you see, the distrust or the fear. [Once again, as in the Q&A session at UCLA, Castaneda is foreshadowing the narrative in the first part of his book Journey to Ixtlan, which was not to be published until 1 October 1972.]
THEODORE ROSZAK: I see. So, there was a chance for you to build up a tremendous amount of confidence in this man.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Yes, we spent a lot of time together. He never told me what he was going to do, anyways. By the time I realized, I was already too deep into to turn back.
[. . .]
THEODORE ROSZAK: I’d like to ask about one particular set of experiences. We don’t have to go into them in detail here. I think we might simply tempt the listeners to look at the book, and read the actual details of the experiences. But, your final experience with don Juan is one of extreme fearfulness. Why do you think he led you into this final situation, at least final in your relationship with him in which, I mean, he very literally just scared the hell out of you. What was the purpose of that. It seemed almost as you record it, it seemed at points almost deliberate cruelty. What do you think he was up to when he did that?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: When he had previous to that last incident, or right before it, he taught me some position that it’s proper of shamans to adopt at moments of great crises, the time of their death, perhaps. It’s a form that they would adopt. And it’s something that they would use, it’s a sort of validation, a signature, or to prove that they have been men. Before they die, they will face their death and do this dancing. And then they will yell at death and die. And I asked don Juan what could be important, you know, since we all have to die, what difference does it make whether we dance or we cry or scream or yell or run, and he felt that the question was very stupid because by having a form a man could validate his existence, he could really reaffirm that he was a man, because essentially that’s all we have. The rest is unimportant. And at the very last moment, you see, the only thing that a man could do was to reassert that he was a man. So, he taught me this form and in the course of the event, this very frightening set of circumstances, or actions, I was forced nearly to exercise this form and use it. It brought a great amount of vigour to me. And the event ended up there, “successfully”. I was successful. And perhaps staying away from death, or something like. The next day, the next night he took me into the bushes, and what I was going to do was, he was going to teach me how to perfect this form, I thought was neat. And in the course of teaching me, I found myself alone. And that’s when the horrendous fear attacked me really. I think what he had in mind was for me to use this form, this position, this posture that he had taught me. And he deliberately scared me, I suppose, in order for me to test that. And that was my failure, of course, because I really succumbed to fear instead of standing and facing my death, as I was supposed to as a, let’s say apprentice of this way of knowledge, I became a thorough European man and I succumbed to fear.
THEODORE ROSZAC: How did things actually end then between you and don Juan?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: They ended that night I think, you know, I suffer a total ego collapse because the fear was just too great for my resources. And it took hours to pull me back. And it seems that we came to an impasse where I never talk ever again about his knowledge. That’s almost 3 years ago, over 3 years ago.
THEODORE ROSZAC: You feel then he had finally led you up to an experience that was beyond your capacity to grapple with?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: I think so. I exhausted my resources and I couldn’t go beyond that and its coherent with the American Indian idea that knowledge is power. See you cannot play around with it. Every new step, you see, is a trial and you have to prove that you’re capable of going beyond that. So that was my end.
THEODORE ROSZAC: Did he ever make it really clear to you what it was about you that lead him to select you for this vigorous process.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Well, he guides his acts by indications, by omens, if he sees something that is extraordinary, some event that he cannot incorporate into his, possibly his categorization scheme, if it doesn’t fit in it, he calls it a portentous event or an extraordinary event and he considers that to be an omen. When I first took that cactus, the peyote, I play with a dog. It was very remarkable experience in which this dog and I understood each other very well. And that was interpreted by don Juan as an omen, that the deity, Mescalito, peyote, had played with me, which was an event that he had never witnessed in his life. Nobody has ever, in his knowledge, nobody has ever played with the deity, he told me. That was extraordinary, and something was pointing me out, and he interpreted it as I was the right person to transmit his knowledge, or part it or whatever. [This is the only time in which Castaneda implies that don Juan had chosen him specifically for the task of relaying to the world at large the “world view of a man of knowledge.”]
THEODORE ROSZAC: Well, now after spending six years in apprenticeship to don Juan, what, may I ask, what difference this great adventure has made to you personally?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Well, it has, certainly has given me a different outlook in life. It’s enlarged my sense of how important today is, I suppose. I think, you know, I have, I’m the product of my socialization, I, like any other person of the western world, I live very much for tomorrow, all my life. I sort of save myself up for a great future, something of that order. And it’s only, it was only, with the, of course, with the terrible impact of don Juan’s teaching that I came to realize how important it is to be here, now. And it renders the idea of entering into states of what I call non-ordinary reality instead of disrupting the states of ordinary reality, they render them very meaningful. I didn’t suffer any disruption or any disillusion of what goes on today. I don’t think it’s a farce. While I’ll say I tended to think that it was a farce before. I thought that I was disillusioned as I was an artist to do some work in art, and I felt, you know, that something was missing with my time, something is wrong. But as I see it, you know, nothing is wrong. Today I can’t conceive what’s wrong anymore. Cause it was vague to begin with, I never thought exactly what was wrong. But I alluded that there was a great area that was better than today. And I think that has been dispelled completely.
THEODORE ROSZAK: I see. Do you have any plans of ever seeking out don Juan again?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: No, I see him as a friend. I see him all the time.
THEODORE ROSZAK: Oh, you still do see him?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Yes, I do. I’m with him, I have been with him lots of times since the last experience that I write in the book. But as far as seeking his teachings, I don’t think I would. I sincerely think that I don’t have the mechanics.
THEODORE ROSZAK: One final question: you make a heroic effort in the book to make sense of don Juan’s world view. Do you have any idea of whether don Juan took any interest or takes any interest in your world, the one you’re calling that of a European man?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Well, no I think he’s versed, don Juan’s very versed in what we, the Europeans, stand for. He’s not handicapped, in that sense, he makes use, he’s a warrior, and he makes use of this; he sets his life as in a strategic game; he makes use of everything that he can; he’s very versed in that. My effort to make sense of his world is, it’s my own way of, let’s say, paying back to him for this grand opportunity. I think if I don’t make the effort to render his world as coherent phenomena, he’ll go by the way he has for hundreds of years, as nonsensical activity, when it is not nonsensical, it’s not fraudulent, it’s a very serious endeavour.
THEODORE ROSZAK: Yes. Well, the outcome of your experiences with don Juan is a really fascinating book and, after reading it myself, I can certainly recommend it to the Pacific audience. It is an adventure in a very different world than we ordinarily live in. I’d like to thank you, Mr. Castaneda, for making this time available to talk about the book and about your adventures. This is Theodore Roszak.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Thank you.
Magazine article and interview from December 1972 with Carlos Castaneda and Sam Keen, consulting editor at Psychology Today: (This magazine article is so good that I have excerpted the entire interview section of the article, and I have declined to add any commentary. I think that Sam Keen manages to convey to the reader a strong impression of the factuality of Castaneda’s working relationship with the Yaqui Indian sorcerer Juan Matus. This is the very same impression I would like to convey. So, enough said!)
SAM KEEN: As I followed don Juan through your three books, I suspected, at times, that he was the creation of Carlos Castaneda. He is almost too good to be true—a wise old Indian whose knowledge of human nature is superior to almost everybody’s.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: The idea that I concocted a person like don Juan is inconceivable. He is hardly the kind of figure my European intellectual tradition would have led me to invent. The truth is much stranger. I wasn’t even prepared to make the changes in my life that my association with don Juan involved.
SAM KEEN: How and where did you meet don Juan and become his apprentice?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: I was finishing my undergraduate study at UCLA and was planning to go to graduate school in anthropology. I was interested in becoming a professor and thought I might begin in the proper way by publishing a short paper on medicinal plants. I couldn’t have cared less about finding a weirdo like don Juan. I was in a bus depot in Arizona with a high-school friend of mine. He pointed out an old Indian man to me and said he knew about peyote and medicinal plants. I put on my best airs and introduced myself to don Juan and said: “I understand you know a great deal about peyote. I am one of the experts on peyote (I had read Weston La Barre’s The Peyote Cult) and it might be worth your while to have lunch and talk with me.” Well, he just looked at me and my bravado melted. I was absolutely tongue-tied and numb. I was usually very aggressive and verbal so it was a momentous affair to be silenced by a look. After that I began to visit him, and about a year later, he told me he had decided to pass on to me the knowledge of sorcery he had learned from his teacher.
SAM KEEN: Then don Juan is not an isolated phenomenon. Is there a community of sorcerers that shares a secret knowledge?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Certainly. I know three sorcerers and seven apprentices and there are many more. If you read the history of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, you will find that the Catholic inquisitors tried to stamp out sorcery because they considered it the work of the devil. It has been around for many hundreds of years. Most of the techniques don Juan taught me are very old.
SAM KEEN: Some of the techniques that sorcerers use are in wide use in other occult groups. Persons often use dreams to find lost articles, and they go on out-of-the-body journeys in their sleep. But when you told how don Juan and his friend don Genero made your car disappear in broad daylight, I could only scratch my head. I know that a hypnotist can create an illusion of the presence or absence of an object. Do you think you were hypnotized?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Perhaps, something like that. But we have to begin by realizing, as don Juan says, that there is much more to the world than we usually acknowledge. Our normal expectations about reality are created by a social consensus. We are taught how to see and understand the world. The trick of socialization is to convince us that the descriptions we agree upon define the limits of the real world. What we call reality is only one way of seeing the world, a way that is supported by a social consensus.
SAM KEEN: Then a sorcerer, like a hypnotist, creates an alternative world by building up different expectations and manipulating cues to produce a social consensus.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Exactly. I have come to understand sorcery in terms of Talcott Parsons’ idea of glosses. A gloss is a total system of perception and language. For instance, this room is a gloss. We have lumped together a series of isolated perceptions—floor, ceiling, window, lights, rugs, etc.—to make a totality. But we had to be taught to put the world together in this way. A child reconnoiters the world with few preconceptions until he is taught to see things in a way that corresponds to the descriptions everybody agrees on. The world is an agreement. The system of glossing seems to be somewhat like walking. We have to learn to walk, but once we learn we are subject to the syntax of language and the mode of perception it contains.
SAM KEEN: So, sorcery, like art, teaches a new system of glossing. When, for instance, van Gogh broke with the artistic tradition and painted The Starry Night he was in effect saying: here is a new way of looking at things. Stars are alive and they whirl around in their energy field.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Partly. But there is a difference. An artist usually just rearranges the old glosses that are proper to his membership. Membership consists of being an expert in the innuendoes of meaning that are contained within a culture. For instance, my primary membership, like most educated Western men, was in the European intellectual world. You can’t break out of one membership without being introduced into another. You can only rearrange the glosses.
SAM KEEN: Was don Juan resocializing you or dissocialising you? Was he teaching you a new system of meanings or only a method of stripping off the old system so that you might see the world as a wondering child?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Don Juan and I disagree about this. I say he was re-glossing me and he says he was de-glossing me. By teaching me sorcery he gave me a new set of glosses, a new language and a new way of seeing the world. Once I read a bit of the linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to don Juan and he laughed and said: “Your friend Wittgenstein tied the noose too tight around his neck so he can’t go anywhere.”
SAM KEEN: Wittgenstein is one of the few philosophers who would have understood don Juan. His notion that there are many different language games—science, politics, poetry, religion, metaphysics, each with its own syntax and rules—would have allowed him to understand sorcery as an alternative system of perception and meaning.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: But don Juan thinks that what he calls seeing is apprehending the world without any interpretation; it is pure wondering perception. Sorcery is a means to this end. To break the certainty that the world is the way you have always been taught you must learn a new description of the world—sorcery—and then hold the old and the new together. Then you will see that neither description is final. At that moment you slip between the descriptions; you stop the world and see. You are left with wonder; the true wonder of seeing the world without interpretation.
SAM KEEN: Do you think it is possible to get beyond interpretation by using psychedelic drugs?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: I don’t think so. That is my quarrel with people like Timothy Leary. I think he was improvising from within the European membership and merely rearranging old glosses. I have never taken LSD, but what I gather from don Juan’s teachings is that psychotropics are used to stop the flow of ordinary interpretations, to enhance the contradictions within the glosses, and to shatter certainty. But the drugs alone do not allow you to stop the world. To do that you need an alternative description of the world. That is why don Juan had to teach me sorcery.
SAM KEEN: There is an ordinary reality that we Western people are certain is ‘the’ only world, and then there is the separate reality of the sorcerer. What are the essential differences between them?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: In European membership the world is built largely from what the eyes report to the mind. In sorcery the total body is used as a percipient. As Europeans we see a world out there and talk to ourselves about it. We are here and the world is there. Our eyes feed our reason and we have no direct knowledge of things. According to sorcery this burden on the eyes in unnecessary. We know with the total body.
SAM KEEN: Western man begins with the assumption that subject and object are separated. We’re isolated from the world and have to cross some gap to get to it. For don Juan and the tradition of sorcery, the body is already in the world. We are united with the world, not alienated from it.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: That’s right. Sorcery has a different theory of embodiment. The problem in sorcery is to tune and trim your body to make it a good receptor. Europeans deal with their bodies as if they were objects. We fill them with alcohol, bad food, and anxiety. When something goes wrong, we think germs have invaded the body from outside and so we import some medicine to cure it. The disease is not a part of us. Don Juan doesn’t believe that. For him disease is a disharmony between a man and his world. The body is an awareness and it must be treated impeccably.
SAM KEEN: This sounds similar to Norman O. Brown’s idea that children, schizophrenics, and those with the divine madness of the Dionysian consciousness are aware of things and of other persons as extensions of their bodies. Don Juan suggests something of the kind when he says the man of knowledge has fibres of light that connect his solar plexus to the world.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: My conversation with the coyote is a good illustration of the different theories of embodiment. When he came up to me, I said: “Hi, little coyote. How are you doing?” And he answered back: “I am doing fine. How about you?” Now, I didn’t hear the words in the normal way. But my body knew the coyote was saying something and I translated it into dialogue. As an intellectual my relationship to dialogue is so profound that my body automatically translated into words the feeling that the animal was communicating with me. We always see the unknown in terms of the known.
SAM KEEN: When you are in that magical mode of consciousness in which coyotes speak and everything is fitting and luminous it seems as if the whole world is alive and that human beings are in a communion that includes animals and plants. If we drop our arrogant assumptions that we are the only comprehending and communicating form of life we might find all kinds of things talking to us. John Lilly talked to dolphins. Perhaps we would feel less alienated if we could believe we were not the only intelligent life.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: We might be able to talk to any animal. For don Juan and the other sorcerers there wasn’t anything unusual about my conversation with the coyote. As a matter of fact, they said I should have gotten a more reliable animal for a friend. Coyotes are tricksters and are not to be trusted.
SAM KEEN: What animals make better friends?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Snakes make stupendous friends.
SAM KEEN: I once had a conversation with a snake. One night I dreamt there was a snake in the attic of a house where I lived when I was a child. I took a stick and tried to kill it. In the morning, I told the dream to a friend and she reminded me that it was not good to kill snakes, even if they were in the attic in a dream. She suggested that the next time a snake appeared in a dream I should feed it or do something to befriend it. About an hour later I was driving my motor scooter on a little-used road and there it was waiting for me—a four-foot snake, stretched out sunning itself. I drove alongside it and it didn’t move. After we had looked at each
other for a while I decided I should make some gesture to let him know I repented for killing his brother in my dream. I reached over and touched his tail. He coiled up and indicated that I had rushed our intimacy. So, I backed off and just looked. After about five minutes he went off into the bushes.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: You didn’t pick it up?
SAM KEEN: No.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: It was a very good friend. A man can learn to call snakes. but you have to be in very good shape, calm, collected—in a friendly mood, with no doubts or pending affairs.
SAM KEEN: My snake taught me that I had always had paranoid feelings about nature. I considered animals and snakes dangerous. After my meeting I could never kill another snake and it began to be more plausible to me that we might be in some kind of living nexus. Our ecosystem might well include communication between different forms of life.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Don Juan has a very interesting theory about this. Plants, like animals, always affect you. He says that if you don’t apologize to plants for picking them you are likely to get sick or have an accident.
SAM KEEN: The American Indians had similar beliefs about animals they killed. If you don’t thank the animal for giving up his life so you may live, his spirit may cause you trouble.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: We have a commonality with all life. Something is altered every time we deliberately injure plant life or animal life. We take life in order to live but we must be willing to give up our lives without resentment when it is our time. We are so important and take ourselves so seriously that we forget that the world is a great mystery that will teach us if we listen.
SAM KEEN: Perhaps psychotropic drugs momentarily wipe out the isolated ego and allow a mystical fusion with nature. Most cultures that have retained a sense of communion between man and nature also have made ceremonial use of psychedelic drugs. Were you using peyote when you talked with the coyote?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: No. Nothing at all.
SAM KEEN: Was this experience more intense than similar experiences you had when don Juan gave you psychotropic plants?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Much more intense. Every time I took psychotropic plants, I knew I had taken something and I could always question the validity of my experience. But when the coyote talked to me, I had no defences. I couldn’t explain it away. I had really stopped the world and, for a short time, got completely outside my European system of glossing.
SAM KEEN: Do you think don Juan lives in this state of awareness most of the time?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Yes. He lives in magical time and occasionally comes into ordinary time. I live in ordinary time and occasionally dip into magical time.
SAM KEEN: Anyone who travels so far from the beaten paths of consensus must be very lonely.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: I think so. Don Juan lives in an awesome world and he has left routine people far behind. Once when I was with don Juan and his friend don Genaro, I saw the loneliness they shared and their sadness at leaving behind the trappings and points of reference of ordinary society. I think don Juan turns his loneliness into art. He contains and controls his power, the wonder and the loneliness, and turns them into art. His art is the metaphorical way in which he lives. This is why his teachings have
such a dramatic flavour and unity. He deliberately constructs his life and his manner of teaching.
SAM KEEN: For instance, when don Juan took you out into the hills to hunt animals, was he consciously staging an allegory?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Yes. He had no interest in hunting for sport or to get meat. In the 10 years I have known him don Juan has killed only four animals to my knowledge, and these only at times when he saw that their death was a gift to him in the same way his death would one day be a gift to something. Once we caught a rabbit in a trap we had set and don Juan thought I should kill it because its time was up. I was desperate because I had the sensation that I was the rabbit. I tried to free him but couldn’t open the trap. So I stomped on the trap and accidentally broke the rabbit’s neck. Don Juan had been trying to teach me that I must assume responsibility for being in this marvellous world. He leaned over and whispered in my ear: “I told you this rabbit had no more time to roam in this beautiful desert.” He consciously set up the metaphor to teach me about the ways of a warrior. The warrior is a man who hunts and accumulates personal power. To do this he must develop patience and will and move deliberately through the world. Don Juan used the dramatic situation of actual hunting to teach me because he was addressing himself to my body.
SAM KEEN: In your most recent book, Journey to Ixtlan, you reverse the impression given in your first books that the use of psychotropic plants was the main method don Juan intended to use in teaching you about sorcery. How do you now understand the place of psychotropics in his teachings?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Don Juan used psychotropic plants only in the middle period of my apprenticeship because I was so stupid, sophisticated and cocky. I held on to my description of the world as if it were the only truth. Psychotropics created a gap in my system of glosses. They destroyed my dogmatic certainty. But I paid a tremendous price. When the glue that held my world together was dissolved, my body was weakened and it took months to recuperate. I was anxious and functioned at a very low level.
SAM KEEN: Does don Juan regularly use psychotropic drugs to stop the world?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: No. He can now stop it at will. He told me that for me to try to see without the aid of psychotropic plants would be useless. But if I behaved like a warrior and assumed responsibility, I would not need them; they would only weaken my body.
SAM KEEN: This must come as quite a shock to many of your admirers. You are something of a patron saint to the psychedelic revolution.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: I do have a following and they have some strange ideas about me. I was walking to a lecture I was giving at California State, Long Beach the other day and a guy who knew me pointed me out to a girl and said: “Hey, that is Castaneda.” She didn’t believe him because she had the idea that I must be very mystical. A friend has collected some of the stories that circulate about me. The consensus is that I have mystical feet.
SAM KEEN: Mystical feet?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Yes, that I walk barefooted like Jesus and have no callouses. I am supposed to be stoned most of the time. I have also committed suicide and died in several different places. A college class of mine almost freaked out when I began to talk about phenomenology and membership and to explore perception and socialization. They wanted to be told to relax, turn on, and blow their minds. But to me understanding is important.
SAM KEEN: Rumours flourish in an information vacuum. We know something about don Juan but too little about Castaneda.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: That is a deliberate part of the life of a warrior. To weasel in and out of different worlds, you have to remain inconspicuous. The more you are known and identified, the more your freedom is curtailed. When people have definite ideas about who you are and how you will act, then you can’t move. One of the earliest things don Juan taught me was that I must erase my personal history. If little by little you create a fog around yourself then you will not be taken for granted and you will have more room for change. That is the reason I avoid tape recordings when I lecture, and photographs.
SAM KEEN: Maybe we can be personal without being historical. You now minimize the importance of the psychedelic experience connected with your apprenticeship. And you don’t seem to go around doing the kind of tricks you describe as the sorcerer’s stock-in-trade. What are the elements of don Juan’s teachings that are important for you? Have you been changed by them?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: For me the ideas of being a warrior and a man of knowledge, with the eventual hope of being able to stop the world and see, have been the most applicable. They have given me peace and confidence in my ability to control my life. At the time I met don Juan I had very little personal power. My life had been very erratic. I had come a long way from my birthplace in Brazil. Outwardly I was aggressive and cocky, but within I was indecisive and unsure of myself. I was always making excuses for myself. Don Juan once accused me of being a professional child because I was so full of self-pity. I felt like a leaf in the wind. Like most intellectuals, my back was against the wall. I had no place to go. I couldn’t see any way of life that really excited me. I thought all I could do was make a mature adjustment to a life of boredom or find ever more complex forms of entertainment such as the use of psychedelics and pot and sexual adventures. All of this was
exaggerated by my habit of introspection. I was always looking within and talking to myself. The inner dialogue seldom stopped. Don Juan turned my eyes outward and taught me to accumulate personal power. I don’t think there is any other way to live if one wants to be exuberant.
SAM KEEN: He seems to have hooked you with the old philosopher’s trick of holding death before your eyes. I was struck with how classical don Juan’s approach was. I heard echoes of Plato’s idea that a philosopher must study death before he can gain any access to the real world and of Martin Heidegger’s definition of man as being-toward-death.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Yes, but don Juan’s approach has a strange twist because it comes from the tradition in sorcery that death is physical presence that can be felt and seen. One of the glosses in sorcery is: death stands to your left. Death is an impartial judge who will speak truth to you and give you accurate advice. After all, death is in no hurry. He will get you tomorrow or the next week or in 50 years. It makes no difference to him. The moment you remember you must eventually die you are cut down to the right size. I think I haven’t made this idea vivid enough. The gloss—death to your left—isn’t an intellectual matter in sorcery; it is perception. When your body is properly tuned to the world and you turn your eyes to your left, you can witness an extraordinary event, the shadowlike presence of death.
SAM KEEN: In the existential tradition, discussions of responsibility usually follow discussion of death.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Then don Juan is a good existentialist. When there is no way of knowing whether I have one more minute of life. I must live as if this is my last moment. Each act is the warrior’s last battle. So everything must be done impeccably. Nothing can be left pending. This idea has been very freeing for me. I am here talking to you and I may never return to Los Angeles. But that wouldn’t matter because I took care of everything before I came.
SAM KEEN: This world of death and decisiveness is a long way from psychedelic utopias in which the vision of endless time destroys the tragic quality of choice.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: When death stands to your left you must create your world by a series of decisions. There are no large or small decisions, only decisions that must be made now. And there is no time for doubts or remorse. If I spend my time regretting what I did yesterday I avoid the decisions I need to make today.
SAM KEEN: How did don Juan teach you to be decisive?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: He spoke to my body with his acts. My old way was to leave everything pending and never to decide anything. To me decisions were ugly. It seemed unfair for a sensitive man to have to decide. One day don Juan asked me: “Do you think you and I are equals?” I was a university student and an intellectual and he was an old Indian but I condescended and said: “Of course we are equals.” He said: “I don’t think we are. I am a hunter and a warrior and you are a pimp. I am ready to sum up my life at any moment. Your feeble world of indecision and sadness is not equal to mine.” Well, I was very insulted and would have left but we were in the middle of the wilderness. So I sat down and got trapped in my own ego involvement. I was going to wait until he decided to go home. After many hours I saw that don Juan would stay there forever if he had to. Why not? For a man with no pending business that is his power. I finally realized that this man was not like my father who would make 20 New Year’s resolutions and cancel them all out. Don Juan’s decisions were irrevocable as far as he was concerned. They could be cancelled out only by other decisions. So I went over and touched him and he got up and we went home. The impact of that act was tremendous. It convinced me that the way of the warrior is an exuberant and powerful way to live.
SAM KEEN: It isn’t the content of decision that is important so much as the act of being decisive.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: That is what don Juan means by having a gesture. A gesture is a deliberate act which is undertaken for the power that comes from making a decision. For instance, if a warrior found a snake that was numb and cold, he might struggle to invent a way to take the snake to a warm place without being bitten. The warrior would make the gesture just for the hell of it. But he would perform it perfectly.
SAM KEEN: There seem to be many parallels between existential philosophy and don Juan’s teachings. What you have said about decision and gesture suggests that don Juan, like Nietzsche or Sartre, believes that will rather than reason is the most fundamental faculty of man.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: I think that is right. Let me speak for myself. What I want to do, and maybe I can accomplish it, is to take the control away from my reason. My mind has been in control all of my life and it would kill me rather than relinquish control. At one point in my apprenticeship, I became profoundly depressed. I was overwhelmed with terror and gloom and thoughts about suicide. Then don Juan warned me this was one of reason’s tricks to retain control. He said my reason was making my body feel that there was no meaning in life. Once my mind waged this last battle and lost, reason began to assume its proper place as a tool of the body.
SAM KEEN: “The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of,” and so does the rest of the body.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: That is the point. The body has a will of its own. Or rather, the will is the voice of the body. That is why don Juan consistently put his teachings in dramatic form. My intellect could easily dismiss his world of sorcery as nonsense. But my body was attracted to his world and his way of life. And once the body took over, a new and healthier reign was established.
SAM KEEN: Don Juan’s techniques for dealing with dreams engaged me became they suggest the possibility of voluntary control of dream images. It is as though he proposes to establish a permanent, stable observatory within inner space. Tell me about don Juan’s dream training.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: The trick in dreaming is to sustain dream images long enough to look at them carefully. To gain this kind of control you need to pick one thing in advance and learn to find it in your dreams. Don Juan suggested that I use my hands as a steady point and go back and forth between them and the images. After some months I learned to find my hands and to stop the dream. I became so fascinated with the technique that I could hardly wait to go to sleep.
SAM KEEN: Is stopping the images in dreams anything like stopping the world?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: It is similar. But there are differences. Once you are capable of finding your hands at will, you realize that it is only a technique. What you are after is control. A man of knowledge must accumulate personal power. But that is not enough to stop the world. Some abandon also is necessary. You must silence the chatter that is going on inside your mind and surrender yourself to the outside world.
SAM KEEN: Of the many techniques that don Juan taught you for stopping the world, which do you still practice?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: My major discipline now is to disrupt my routines. I was always a very routinary person. I ate and slept on schedule. In 1965 I began to change my habits. I wrote in the quiet hours of the night and slept and ate when I felt the need. Now I have dismantled so many of my habitual ways of acting that before long I may become unpredictable and surprising even to myself.
SAM KEEN: Your discipline reminds me of the Zen story of two disciples bragging about miraculous powers. One disciple claimed the founder of the sect to which he belonged could stand on one side of a river and write the name of Buddha on a piece of paper held by his assistant on the opposite shore. The second disciple replied that such a miracle was unimpressive. “My miracle,” he said, “is that when I feel hungry, I eat; and when I feel thirsty, I drink.”
CARLOS CASTANEDA: It has been this element of engagement in the world that has kept me following the path which don Juan showed me. There is no need to transcend the world. Everything we need to know is right in front of us, if we pay attention. If you enter a state of non-ordinary reality, as you do when you use psychotropic plants, it is only to draw back from it what you need in order to see the miraculous character of ordinary reality. For me the way to live—the path with heart—is not introspection or mystical transcendence but presence in the world. This world is the
warrior’s hunting ground.
SAM KEEN: The world you and don Juan have pictured is full of magical coyotes, enchanted crows and a beautiful sorceress. It’s easy to see how it could engage you. But what about the world of the modern urban person? Where is the magic there? If we could all live in the mountains, we might keep wonder alive. But how is it possible when we are half a zoom from the freeway?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: I once asked don Juan the same question. We were sitting in a cafe in Yuma and I suggested that I might be able to stop the world and to see, if I could come and live in the wilderness with him. He looked out the window at the passing cars and said: “That, out there, is your world.” I live in Los Angeles now and I find I can use that world to accommodate my needs. It is a challenge to live with no set routines in a routinary world. But it can be done.
SAM KEEN: The noise level and the constant pressure of the masses of people seem to destroy the silence and solitude that would be essential for stopping the world.
CARLOS CASTANEDA: Not at all. In fact, the noise can be used. You can use the buzzing of the freeway to teach yourself to listen to the outside world. When we stop the world, the world we stop is the one we usually maintain by our continual inner dialogue. Once you can stop the internal babble you stop maintaining your old world. The descriptions collapse. That is when personality change begins. When you concentrate on sounds you realize it is difficult for the brain to categories all the sounds, and in a short while you stop trying. This is unlike visual perception which keeps us forming categories and thinking. It is so restful when you can turn off the talking, categorizing, and judging.
SAM KEEN: The internal world changes but what about the external one? We can revolutionize individual consciousness but still not touch the social structures that create our alienation. Is there any place for social or political reform in your thinking?
CARLOS CASTANEDA: I came from Latin America where intellectuals were always talking about political and social revolution and where a lot of bombs were thrown. But revolution hasn’t changed much. It takes little daring to bomb a building, but in order to give up cigarettes or to stop being anxious or to stop internal chattering, you have to remake yourself. This is where real reform begins. Don Juan and I were in Tucson not long ago when they were having Earth Week. Some man was lecturing on ecology and the evils of war in Vietnam. All the while he was smoking. Don Juan said, “I cannot imagine that he is concerned with other people’s bodies when he doesn’t like his own.” Our first concern should be with ourselves. I can like my fellow men only when I am at my peak of vigor and am not depressed. To be in this condition I must keep my body trimmed. Any revolution must begin here in this body. I can alter my culture but only from within a body that is impeccably tuned-in to this weird world. For me, the real accomplishment is the art of being a warrior, which, as don Juan says, is the only way to balance the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man.
[Sam Keen, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Psychology Today, December 1972, pp. 92, 95, 96, 98, 101, 102.]
Magazine article and interview from 5 March 1973 with Carlos Castaneda and Sandra Burton, correspondent for Time Magazine: (Richard de Mille wrote in his book Castaneda’s Journey [1976] that “not being addicted to best sellers, pop mysticism, drug trips, cactus, or Indians, and having too many other things to read already, I had survived well into the spring of 1975 without reading a word of Castaneda. [. . .] One after another, various weighty academic articles I was reading kept mentioning him in passing—with respect, with admiration, even with awe—and gradually the feeling grew that I ought to check out his books just to see what was going on there. Perhaps he did know something I didn’t know but needed to know. [. . .] When I had finished The Teachings, I was still going along with the proposition that Castaneda had met an old Indian in an Arizona bus station who had fed him various poisonous plants, had taught him a lot of intricate rituals, and had put him through trials of endurance and tests of sanity not all of which he had passed with high scores. Like most readers, academic or amateur, I wanted to believe what I was reading no matter how strange it might be, and so glad I was that the University of California had already put its stamp of approval on Castaneda’s report.” What Richard de Mille does not tell the reader is whether or not he had read the Time Magazine article about Carlos Castaneda before he began to actually read the books; he simply makes it apparent that he has read the article, and that he considers it a strong argument against Castaneda’s reliability and overall integrity as a social scientist. This is quite an important question to ask because the answer “yes he did” would do much to explain De Mille’s attitude of unyielding hostility towards Carlos Castaneda. For my part, I read the Time Magazine article some weeks after I had first read the earliest four books by Castaneda; thus, I can say with impunity that I had read them with a reasonably open mind. For Carlos Castaneda’s part, he certainly realised as he shook hands with, and said goodbye to, Sandra Burton that he had made a fateful mistake in consenting to Time Magazine’s request for an interview. The editors of Time Magazine had done their homework very well. They had sent a colleague to Latin America to find the factual answers to the questions concerning personal history that Sandra Burton intended to ask Castaneda at the interview. (After all, this was to be a cover story.) Once the interview had been published, the entire world would know that Carlos Castaneda was a compulsive liar, and was not to be trusted. Castaneda went underground with immediate effect, not to resurface until twenty years later.)
In spending many hours with Castaneda over a matter of weeks, TIME Correspondent Sandra Burton found him attractive, helpful and convincing – up to a point – but very firm about warning that in talking about his pre-don Juan life he would change names and places and dates without, however, altering the emotional truth of his life.
“I have not lied or contrived,” he told her.
“To contrive would be to pull back and not say anything or give the assurances that everybody seeks.”
As the talks continued, Castaneda offered several versions of his life, which kept changing as Burton presented him with the fact that much of his information did not check out, emotionally or otherwise. By his own account, Castaneda was not his original name. He was born, he said, to a “well-known” but anonymous family in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Christmas Day, 1935. His father, who later became a professor of literature, was then 17, and his mother 15. Because his parents were so immature, little Carlos was packed off to be raised by his maternal grandparents on a chicken farm in the back country of Brazil. When Carlos was six, his story runs, his parents took their only child back and lavished guilty affection on him.
“It was a hellish year,” he says flatly, “because I was living with two children.”
But a year later his mother died. The doctors’ diagnosis was pneumonia, but Castaneda’s is accidie, a condition of numbed inertia, which he believes is the cultural disease of the West. He offered a touching memory:
“She was morose, very beautiful and dissatisfied, an ornament. My despair was that I wanted to make her something else, but how could she listen to me? I was only six.”
Now Carlos was left with his father, a shadowy figure whom he mentions in the books with a mixture of fondness and pity shaded with contempt. His father’s weakness of will is the obverse to the “impeccability” of his adopted father, Don Juan. Castaneda describes his father’s efforts to become a writer as a farce of indecision. But, he adds, “I am my father. Before I met Don Juan, I would spend years sharpening my pencils, and then getting a headache every time I sat down to write. Don Juan taught me that’s stupid. If you want to do something, do it impeccably, that’s all that matters.”
Carlos was put in a “very proper” Buenos Aires boarding school, Nicolas Avellaneda. He says he stayed there till he was 15, acquiring the Spanish (he already spoke Italian and Portuguese) in which he would later interview Don Juan. But he became so unmanageable that an uncle, the family patriarch, had him placed with a foster family in Los Angeles. In 1951 he moved to the U.S. and enrolled at Hollywood High. Graduating about two years later, he tried a course in sculpture at Milan’s Academy of Fine Arts, but “I did not have the sensitivity or the openness to be a great artist.” Depressed, in crisis, he headed back to Los Angeles and started a course in social psychology at U.C.L.A, shifting later to an anthropology course. Says he: “I really threw my life out the window. I said to myself: If it’s going to work, it must be new.” In 1959 he formally changed his name to Castaneda.
Thus, Castaneda’s own biography. It creates an elegant consistency—the spirited young man moving from his academic background in an exhausted, provincial European culture toward revitalization by the shaman; the gesture of abandoning the past to disentangle himself from crippling memories. Unfortunately, it is largely untrue. For between 1955 and 1959, Carlos Castaneda was enrolled, under that name, as a pre-psychology major at Los Angeles City College. His liberal arts studies included, in his first two years, two courses in creative writing and one in journalism. Vernon King, his creative writing professor at L.A.C.C., still has a copy of The Teachings inscribed “To a great teacher, Vernon King, from one of his students, Carlos Castaneda. ” Moreover, immigration records show that a Carlos Cesar Arana Castaneda did indeed enter the U.S., at San Francisco, when the author says he did: in 1951. This Castaneda too was 5 ft. 5 in., weighed 140 lbs. and came from Latin America. But he was Peruvian, born on Christmas Day, 1925, in the ancient Inca town of Cajamarca, which makes him 48, not 38, this year. His father was not an academic, but a goldsmith and watchmaker named Cesar Arana Burungaray. His mother, Susana Castaneda Navoa, died not when Carlos was six, but when he was 24. Her son spent three years in the local high school in Cajamarca and then moved with his family to Lima in 1948, where he graduated from the Colegio Nacional de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe and then studied painting and sculpture, not in Milan, but at the National Fine Arts School of Peru. One of his fellow students there Jose Bracamonte, remembers his pal Carlos as a resourceful blade who lived mainly off gambling (cards, horses, dice), and harbored “like an obsession” the wish to move to the U.S. “We all liked Carlos,” recalls Bracamonte. “He was witty, imaginative, cheerful – a big liar and a real friend.” Castaneda apparently wrote home sporadically, at least until 1969, the year after Don Juan came out. His Cousin Lucy Chavez, who was raised with him “like a sister,” still keeps his letters. They indicate that he served in the U.S. Army, and left it after suffering a slight wound or “nervous shock” Lucy is not sure which. (The Defense Department, however, has no record of Carlos Arana Castaneda’s service.) When TIME confronted Castaneda with such details as the time and transposition of his mother’s death, Castaneda was opaque.
“One’s feelings about one’s mother,” he declared, “are not dependent on biology or on time. Kinship as a system has nothing to do with feelings.”
Cousin Lucy recalls that when Carlos’ mother did die, he was overwhelmed. He refused to attend the funeral, locked himself in his room for three days without eating. And when he came out announced he was leaving home. Yet Carlos’ basic explanation of his lying generally is both perfect and totally unresponsive.
“To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics,” he says, “is like using science to validate sorcery. It robs the world of its magic and makes milestones out of us all.”
In short, Castaneda lays claim to an absolute control over his identity. Well and good. But where does a writer’s license, the “artistic self-representation” Castaneda lays claim to, end? How far does it permeate his story of Don Juan? As the books’ sales mount, the resistance multiplies. Three parodies of Castaneda have appeared in New York magazines and papers lately indicating that the critics seem to be preparing to skewer Don Juan as a kind of anthropological Ossian, the legendary third century Gaelic poet whose works James Macpherson foisted upon 18th century British readers. Castaneda fans should not panic, however. A strong case can be made that the Don Juan books are of a different order of truthfulness from Castaneda’s pre-don Juan past. Where, for example, was the motive for an elaborate scholarly put on? The Teachings was submitted to a university press, an unlikely prospect for bestsellerdom. Besides, getting an anthropology degree from U.C.L.A. is not so difficult that a candidate would employ so vast a confabulation just to avoid research. A little fudging, perhaps, but not a whole system in the manner of The Teachings, written by an unknown student with, at the outset, no hope of commercial success.