“CARLOS CASTANEDA: 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 reconnoitres 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 resocialising 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, Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Psychology Today (December, 1972: pp. 90-102.) Excerpt from the interview.]”
“Here fiction and fact entwine to turn event into allegory. A student of the German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, knowing of Castaneda’s interest in phenomenology, gave him a piece of ebony that once sat on Husserl’s writing desk. Carlos had read and discussed passages of Husserl’s Ideas with don Juan and passed the gift on to him. Don Juan fondled the ebony, as Husserl had done a generation before, and gave it an honoured place in his treasury of power objects that are used for conjuring. And it is wholly appropriate. Husserl sought to escape from the subjectivity and solipsism that was the legacy of Descartes’ definition of man as a rational being enclosed within the certainties of his own mind. Don Juan likewise taught that it is a mistake to get caught in the world of the psyche and neglect the marvels that are all around us. There is no salvation or sanity to be found within the isolated self. If we can discover ways of deconditioning consciousness, of erasing the barriers to perception that are imposed on us by common sense, there is no telling what strange things we may discover.
[Sam Keen, ibid., excerpt from the preface to the interview.]”
The two passages quoted above have been excerpted from the interview of Carlos Castaneda by Sam Keen which was published in the magazine Psychology Today in December of 1972, less than three months before the cover article on Castaneda, Magic and Reality, appeared in TIME Magazine on 5 March 1973, the article that put the anthropologist’s reputation as a legitimate social scientist into serious doubt and effectively forced the man himself into near-total seclusion from the media. It had become painfully evident that the veracity of Carlos Castaneda’s field reports from his work with the indigenous Mexican sorcerer Juan Matus was not to be taken for granted. In present time, more than fifty years after the publication of Sam Keen’s interview, I find myself seriously questioning Castaneda’s claim in the interview that he had read to don Juan from the works of Husserl and Wittgenstein, and that he and don Juan had subsequently discussed how the world views of these two very important philosophers compared with don Juan’s own. It’s not that I doubt that Castaneda continued to visit don Juan in Mexico from time to time, even after he had bowed out of his “apprenticeship” in 1963, having probably fulfilled his fieldwork commitment for a PhD in anthropology. (On the other hand, I do not for a minute believe that he resumed his fieldwork with don Juan in May of 1968 as he claims to have done in his [in my estimation, predominately fictional] second book, A Separate Realty, which was published in 1971.) It is possible that Castaneda was telling Sam Keen the truth about reading to don Juan from the works of Husserl and Wittgenstein, but considering all that we know about Castaneda’s day-to-day personality and deportment, I don’t think that he was; that is to say, I don’t think he was telling the unmitigated truth about the matter. This uncertainty does not, however, mean that a comparison is not relevant, especially in the case of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Don Juan’s world view was astonishingly similar to that of Wittgenstein, and yet they probably never knew of one another’s existence.
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Juan Matus were born two years and an entire ocean—indeed, an entire world—apart. Ludwig was born in Vienna in 1889 into one of the wealthiest families in Europe; Juan was born in Arizona Territory in 1891, the son of a struggling immigrant mineworker who originally hailed from the southern part of the Mexican state of Sonora. Nevertheless, both of these boys, however juxtaposed they may appear to be, were destined to become very influential philosophers: Ludwig in 1922, at the publication of the English-language translation of his treatise Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, under the title Tractatus Logico Philosophicus;and Juan in 1968, at the publication of The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, the first of a series of books by his Peruvian/American protégé and hagiographer, Carlos Castaneda.
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is rightly considered to be one of the most significant achievements in the history of philosophy. It is also considered to be one of the most inaccessible works of philosophy for the interested layperson, mostly, I surmise, because the author of the Tractatus presupposes an in-depth knowledge of prepositional calculus on the part of the reader. Moreover, Wittgenstein preferred to express himself by means of the aphorism, which, in combination with his enigmatic, very complex and not always endearing personality, did not help even the academically trained philosopher to fully understand the message he had wanted to convey. If I have at all understood his message, I believe it is amply conveyed in the preface to his treatise, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus:
THE PREFACE FROM TRACTATUS LOGICO PHILOSOPHICUS
“This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book. Its object would be attained if it afforded pleasure to one who read it with understanding.
The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language. Its whole meaning could be summed up somewhat as follows: What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.
The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather—not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.
How far my efforts agree with those of other philosophers I will not decide. Indeed, what I have written makes no claim to novelty in points of detail; and therefore, I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another.
If this work has a value it consists in two things. First that in it, thoughts are expressed, and this value will be the greater the better the thoughts are expressed. The more the nail has been hit on the head. –Here I am conscious that I have fallen far short of the possible. Simply because my powers are insufficient to cope with the task. –May others come and do it better.
On the other hand, the truth of the thoughts communicated here seems to me unassailable and definitive. I am, therefore, of the opinion that the problems have in essentials been finally solved. And if I am not mistaken in this, then the value of this work secondly consists in the fact that it shows how little has been done when these problems have been solved. [Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge (1922), pp. 27, 29.]”
Once one has read the preface and thoroughly considered the implications this reading may have for reading and understanding the main body of text in the Tractatus, one can skim through the text and highlight every proposition that intuitively, that is to say, without a working knowledge of mathematical logic on the part of the reader, seems to make sense in the context of discovering the limits of language, for example:
“The world is everything that is the case. (1)
The world is the totality of facts, not of things. (1.1)
The world divides into facts. (1.2)
Any one [fact] can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same. (1.21)
The total reality is the world. (2.063)
That which expresses itself in language, we cannot express in language. (4.121)
What can be shown cannot be said. (4.1212)
That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which I understand) means the limits of my world. (5.62)
Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is. (6.44)
For an answer which cannot be expressed, the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered. (6.5)
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course, there is then no question left, and just this is the answer. (6.52)
There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical. (6.522)
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. (6.54)
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (7)
[Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Routledge (1922), selected excerpts.]”
Tales of Power (published 1974) was Carlos Castaneda’s fourth book, a book in which he purported to have recorded a number of sessions with don Juan that took place between 1971 and 1973. During the final session in March of 1973, Juan Matus bids Carlos a fond farewell as Carlos throws himself “into the unknown” from the top of a mountain in central Mexico. Fortunately, Carlos survives the fall of about 200 metres and manages to make his way through uncharted domains back to Los Angeles in time for an early breakfast the following morning at the Ships Coffee Shop on Wiltshire Boulevard. Needless to say, perhaps, I believe that the narrative in this book is fictional—from beginning to end. I’m sorry, but such a great number of inexplicable phenomena cannot possibly have been experienced by a single person within the covers of a book of 287 pages. One must read the book in order not to believe it. (All the following five books by Carlos Castaneda are equally unbelievable and, I believe, equally fictional.)
The question is: Why did Carlos Castaneda continue to write books after he had published the final book in his original teachings of don Juan trilogy, and thereby had even achieved his PhD in Anthropology, which had been his goal from the very beginning? In my opinion, the third book of the trilogy, Journey to Ixtlan, ended in a rather satisfying manner, and I have never felt that there had ever been any point in allowing the adventures of Carlos and don Juan, be they true or not, to continue:
I looked at don Juan. He was gazing at me.
“Only as a warrior can one survive the path of knowledge,” he said. “Because the art of the warrior is to balance the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man.”
I gazed at the two of them, each in turn. Their eyes were clear and peaceful. They had summoned a wave of overwhelming nostalgia, and when they seemed to be on the verge of exploding into passionate tears, they held back the tidal wave. For an instant I think I “saw.” I “saw” the loneliness of man as a gigantic wave which had been frozen in front of me, held back by the invisible wall of a metaphor.
My sadness was so overwhelming that I felt euphoric. I embraced them.
Don Genaro smiled and stood up. Don Juan also stood up and gently put his hand on my shoulder.
“We are going to leave you here,” he said. “Do what you think is proper. The ally will be waiting for you at the edge of that plain.”
He pointed to a dark valley in the distance.
“If you don’t feel that this is your time yet, don’t keep your appointment,” he went on. “Nothing is gained by forcing the issue. If you want to survive you must be crystal clear and deadly sure of yourself.”
Don Juan walked away without looking at me, but don Genaro turned a couple of times and urged me with a wink and a movement of his head to go forward. I looked at them until they disappeared in the distance and then I walked to my car and drove away. I knew that it was not my time, yet.
[Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan, Simon & Schuster (1972), pp. 315.]
His Journey to Ixtlan soon afforded Carlos Castaneda membership in the very exclusive society of writer millionaires. His first three books, The Teachings of Don Juan, A Separate Reality, and Journey to Ixtlan, were, by and large, considered to be three parts of a trilogy, which meant that if someone bought Part One, they would probably also buy Two and Three. As far as maintaining his accustomed lifestyle was concerned, Castaneda was not really obliged to publish any more books. His proceeds from the continuing sales of the three books in his trilogy would have kept him in good comfort for the remainder of his life. (He was 47 years old in 1972.) I strongly suspect that something else besides the accumulation of dollars was inciting him to continue writing about the teachings of don Juan.
The cover article in TIME Magazine, Magic and Reality, was published on 5 March 1973. According to Castaneda, in his posthumously published book The Active Side of Infinity, he returned at about this time to Los Angeles from the mountains of central Mexico, where, on a mountain top, he had said farewell to don Juan and don Genaro, and afterwards had jumped to a projectably certain death in the abyss. Not having died, he inexplicably made a journey of more than three thousand miles in less than ten hours. “Or was it that it had taken ten hours for me to fly, slide, float, or whatever to Los Angeles? To have travelled by conventional means to Los Angeles from the place where I had jumped into the abyss was out of the question, since it would have taken two days just to travel to Mexico City from the place where I had jumped.” (The Active Side of Infinity, p.266.) Upon waking up in his flat in Westwood with an incredible case of jetlag, he decided to get some breakfast at his favourite restaurant, which was situated only a few blocks away from where he lived. “I walked into the restaurant as I had always done. I sat at the counter and a waitress who knew me came to me. ‘You don’t look too good today, dear,’ she said.” (ibid., pp. 265-266.) I am thinking that if she had told him about the TIME Magazine article, his worse-for-wear appearance would have taken a turn for the even worse. In any case, he would have been, and reportedly was, devastated by the article once he had got the opportunity of reading it.
Castaneda was in a unique dilemma. The TIME Magazine article had not specifically alleged that he was guilty of academic fraud, but it had shown beyond a reasonable doubt that he was a compulsive liar when it came to matters of his own personal history, and therefore, perhaps, the accuracy of his field reports might not be beyond reproach:
In some quarters, Castaneda’s works are extravagantly admired as a revival of a mode of cognition that has been largely neglected in the West, buried by materialism and Pascal’s despair, since the Renaissance. Says Mike Murphy, a founder of the Esalen Institute: “The essential lessons Don Juan has to teach are the timeless ones that have been taught by the great sages of India and the spiritual masters of modern times.” Author Alan Watts argues that Castaneda’s books offer an alternative to both the guilt-ridden Judeo-Christian and the blindly mechanistic views of man: “Don Juan’s way regards man as something central and important. By not separating ourselves from nature, we return to a position of dignity.” But such endorsements and parallels do not in any way validate the more worldly claim to importance of Castaneda’s books; to wit, that they are anthropology, a specific and truthful account of an aspect of Mexican Indian culture as shown by the speech and actions of one person, a shaman named Juan Matus. The proof hinges on the credibility of Don Juan as a being and Carlos Castaneda as a witness. Yet there is no corroboration—beyond Castaneda’s writings—that Don Juan did what he is said to have done, and very little that he exists at all.
[Carlos Castaneda: Magic and Reality, TIME Magazine, 5 March 1973.]
“The nerve of those people! Vete a la chingada, pendejos! First, they set me up, and then they can’t understand that what I am really doing is following don Juan’s maxim that a warrior must erase personal history. The teachings of don Juan are really anthropology—in the truest sense of the word—and I have the fucking field notes to prove it.”
He did actually have the field notes; his dilemma was that he could not safely show them to anyone because anyone well-acquainted with his writings about don Juan—his professors at UCLA, for example—would very quickly have noticed that none of the notes pertained to sessions with don Juan in which Carlos is shown how to use hallucinogens other than peyote, that is, sessions which concerned intoxication by means of either devil’s weed (Datura inoxia) or sacred mushrooms (Psilocybe Mexicana). Chapters 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 10 in The Teachings of Don Juan and chapters 7, 8, 11, 12, and 13 in A Separate Reality concern such sessions. Moreover, the last pages of Castaneda’s field notes would have been dated to the beginning of January 1963, whereas, according to his published works, the last notes should have been dated to May of 1971 (i.e., the notes relevant to chapters 18, 19, and 20 in Journey to Ixtlan). Yes, he had worked with an indigenous Mexican sorcerer named don Juan, but he could not prove it except by giving those who doubted him access to his field notes, but this he could not do without exposing himself to the fully justified accusation of academic fraud. He would, of course, have made a typescript of his notes that pertain to the earliest part of his “apprenticeship” (December 1960-January 1963) to offer as proof of don Juan’s existence; and as proof of his actually having carried out fieldwork in Mexico with this don Juan, he might even have included photocopies of his hand-written field notes in the same portfolio. (In reality, Castaneda did send 12 photocopied pages of his field notes to R. Gordon Wasson in 1968. For images of these pages, please see the pdf entitled Searching for the Historical Juan Matus, which is available from this website.) Unfortunately, Journey to Ixtlan had already been published, both as a novel and as a doctoral dissertation, by the time of the TIME Magazine article. There is good reason to assume that the reliability of the data presented in the narrative that is contained in the dissertation would not have survived a comparison to the narrative in the actual field notes. To paraphrase Shakespeare (Hamlet—Act 5, scene 1): As a woodcock to his own springe, Carlos was justly killed by his own treachery. If he had ever really achieved warrior status under the guidance of don Juan, he was, by 1973, a fallen warrior. What could he now do with his life, except steer clear of every request for an interview, but nonetheless continue to write books about the teachings of don Juan? No matter how fanciful he might get, he was hardly going to make matters worse. I suggest that his dilemma slowly drove him into megalomania and malignant narcissism, and I imagine that he did not have that far to go. Towards the end of his life, that is, in the 1990s, it may be that he actually believed what he, in the 1960s and 1970s, consciously knew to be fabrication.
Of all the books that Carlos Castaneda published post-Ixtlan, Tales of Power is the only one that is of more than purely superficial interest to the present-day scholar of the “Teachings of Don Juan” phenomenon. It is true; the narrative in Tales of Power appears to be entirely fictional. Aside from the fact that it is mostly unbelievable, I believe there is good reason to suspect that don Juan had died, or, at the least, had become incommunicative for some reason, before Castaneda published The Teachings of Don Juan in June of 1968; that is to say, Castaneda would not have dared to publish his mostly-fictional first book while Juan Matus was still living and in good health. Nevertheless, many of the conversations between Carlos and don Juan in Tales of Power have the feel of authenticity about them, probably because Castaneda is referencing aspects of the Teachings that he had already published in Journey to Ixtlan. A good point in question concerns the conversations in which don Juan explains to Carlos about the dichotomy of the tonal and the nagual, namely:
This was the first time in our association that he had used those two terms. I was vaguely familiar with them through the anthropological literature on the cultures of central Mexico. I knew that the “tonal” (pronounced, toh-na’hl) was thought to be a kind of guardian spirit, usually an animal, that a child obtained at birth and with which he had intimate ties for the rest of his life. “Nagual” (pronounced, nah-wa’hl) was the name given to the animal into which sorcerers could allegedly transform themselves, or to the sorcerer that elicited such a transformation.
“This is my tonal,” don Juan said, rubbing his hands on his chest.
“Your suit?”
“No. My person.”
He pounded his chest and his thighs and the side of his ribs.
“My tonal is all this.”
He explained that every human being had two sides, two separate entities, two counterparts which became operative at the moment of birth; one was called the “tonal” and the other the “nagual.”
I told him what anthropologists knew about the two concepts. He let me speak without interrupting me.
“Well, whatever you may think you know about them is pure nonsense,” he said. “I base this statement on the fact that whatever I’m telling you about the tonal and the nagual could not possibly have been told to you before. Any idiot would know that you know nothing about them, because in order to be acquainted with them, you would have to be a sorcerer and you aren’t. Or you would’ve had to talk about them with a sorcerer and you haven’t. So, disregard everything you’ve heard before, because it is inapplicable.”
“It was only a comment,” I said.
He raised his brows in a comical gesture. “Your comments are out of order,” he said. “This time I need your undivided attention, since I am going to acquaint you with the tonal and the nagual. Sorcerers have a special and unique interest in that knowledge. I would say that the tonal and the nagual are in the exclusive realm of men of knowledge. In your case, this is the lid that closes everything I have taught you. Thus, I have waited until now to talk about them.
“The tonal is not an animal that guards a person. I would rather say that it is a guardian that could be represented as an animal. But that is not the important point.”
He smiled and winked at me.
“I’m using your own words now,” he said. “The tonal is the social person.”
He laughed, I supposed, at the sight of my bewilderment.
“The tonal is, rightfully so, a protector, a guardian – a guardian that most of the time turns into a guard.”
I fumbled with my notebook. I was trying to pay attention to what he was saying. He laughed and mimicked my nervous movements.
“The tonal is the organizer of the world,” he proceeded. “Perhaps the best way of describing its monumental work is to say that on its shoulders rests the task of setting the chaos of the world in order. It is not farfetched to maintain, as sorcerers do, that everything we know and do as men is the work of the tonal.
“At this moment, for instance, what is engaged in trying to make sense out of our conversation is your tonal; without it there would be only weird sounds and grimaces and you wouldn’t understand a thing of what I’m saying.
“I would say then that the tonal is a guardian that protects something priceless, our very being. Therefore, an inherent quality of the tonal is to be cagey and jealous of its doings. And since its doings are by far the most important part of our lives, it is no wonder that it eventually changes, in every one of us, from a guardian into a guard.”
He stopped and asked me if I had understood. I automatically nodded my head affirmatively and he smiled with an air of incredulity.
“A guardian is broad-minded and understanding,” he explained. “A guard, on the other hand, is a vigilante, narrow-minded and most of the time despotic. I say, then, that the tonal in all of us has been made into a petty and despotic guard when it should be a broad-minded guardian.”
I definitely was not following the trend of his explanation. I heard and wrote down every word and yet I seemed to be stuck with some internal dialogue of my own.
“It is very hard for me to follow your point,” I said.
“If you didn’t get hooked on talking to yourself you would have no quarrels,” he said cuttingly.
His remark threw me into a long explanatory statement. I finally caught myself and apologized for my insistence on defending myself.
He smiled and made a gesture that seemed to indicate that my attitude had not really annoyed him.
“The tonal is everything we are,” he proceeded. “Name it! Anything we have a word for is the tonal. And since the tonal is its own doings, then everything, obviously, has to fall under its domain.”
I reminded him that he had said that the tonal is the social person, a term which I myself had used with him to mean a human being as the end result of socialization processes. I pointed out that if the tonal is that product, it could not be everything, as he had said, because the world around us is not the product of socialization.
Don Juan reminded me that my argument had no basis for him, and that, long before, he had already made the point that there is no world at large but only a description of the world which we have learned to visualize and take for granted.
“The tonal is everything we know,” he said. “I think this in itself is enough reason for the tonal to be such an overpowering affair.”
He paused for a moment. He seemed to be definitely waiting for comments or questions, but I had none. Yet I felt obligated to voice a question and struggled to formulate an appropriate one. I failed. I felt that the admonitions with which he had opened our conversation had perhaps served as a deterrent to any inquiry on my part. I felt strangely numb. I could not concentrate and order my thoughts. In fact, I felt and knew, without the shadow of a doubt, that I was incapable of thinking and yet I knew this without thinking, if that were at all possible.
I looked at don Juan. He was staring at the middle part of my body. He lifted his eyes and my clarity of mind returned instantly.
“The tonal is everything we know,” he repeated slowly. “And that includes not only us, as persons, but everything in our world. It can be said that the tonal is everything that meets the eye.
“We begin to groom it at the moment of birth. The moment we take the first gasp of air we also breathe in power for the tonal. So, it is proper to say that the tonal of a human being is intimately tied to his birth.
“You must remember this point. It is of great importance in understanding all this. The tonal begins at birth and ends at death.”
I wanted to recapitulate all the points that he had made. I went as far as opening my mouth to ask him to repeat the salient points of our conversation, but to my amazement I could not vocalize my words. I was experiencing a most curious incapacity; my words were heavy and I had no control over that sensation.
I looked at don Juan to signal him that I could not talk. He was again staring at the area around my stomach.
He lifted his eyes and asked me how I felt. Words poured out of me as if I had been unplugged. I told him that I had been having the peculiar sensation of not being able to talk or think and yet my thoughts had been crystal clear.
“Your thoughts have been crystal clear?” he asked.
I realized then that the clarity had not pertained to my thoughts, but to my perception of the world.
“Are you doing something to me, don Juan?” I asked.
“I am trying to convince you that your comments are not necessary,” he said and laughed.
“You mean you don’t want me to ask questions?”
“No, no. Ask anything you want, but don’t let your attention waver.”
I had to admit that I had been distracted by the immensity of the topic.
“I still cannot understand, don Juan, what you mean by the statement that the tonal is everything,” I said after a moment’s pause.
“The tonal is what makes the world.”
“Is the tonal the creator of the world?”
Don Juan scratched his temples.
“The tonal makes the world only in a manner of speaking. It cannot create or change anything, and yet it makes the world because its function is to judge, and assess, and witness. I say that the tonal makes the world because it witnesses and assesses it according to tonal rules. In a very strange manner, the tonal is a creator that doesn’t create a thing. In other words, the tonal makes up the rules by which it apprehends the world. So, in a manner of speaking, it creates the world.”
He hummed a popular tune, beating the rhythm with his fingers on the side of his chair. His eyes were shining; they seemed to sparkle. He chuckled, shaking his head.
“You’re not following me,” he said, smiling.
“I am. I have no problems,” I said, but I did not sound very convincing.
“The tonal is an island,” he explained. “The best way of describing it is to say that the tonal is this.”
He ran his hand over the table top.
“We can say that the tonal is like the top of this table. An island. And on this island. we have everything. This island is, in fact, the world.
“There is a personal tonal for every one of us, and there is a collective one for all of us at any given time, which we can call the tonal of the times.”
He pointed to the rows of tables in the restaurant.
“Look! Every table has the same configuration. Certain items are present on all of them. They are, however, individually different from each other; some tables are more crowded than others; they have different food on them, different plates, different atmosphere, yet we have to admit that all the tables in this restaurant are very alike. The same thing happens with the tonal. We can say that the tonal of the times is what makes us alike, in the same way it makes all the tables in this restaurant alike. Each table separately, nevertheless, is an individual case, just like the personal tonal of each of us. But the important factor to keep in mind is that everything we know about ourselves and about our world is on the island of the tonal. See what I mean?”
“If the tonal is everything we know about ourselves and our world, what, then, is the nagual?”
“The nagual is the part of us which we do not deal with at all.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The nagual is the part of us for which there is no description – no words, no names, no feelings, no knowledge.”
“That’s a contradiction, don Juan. In my opinion if it can’t be felt or described or named, it cannot exist.”
“It’s a contradiction only in your opinion. I warned you before, don’t knock yourself out trying to understand this.”
“Would you say that the nagual is the mind?”
“No. The mind is an item on the table. The mind is part of the tonal. Let’s say that the mind is the chili sauce.”
He took a bottle of sauce and placed it in front of me.
“Is the nagual the soul?”
“No. The soul is also on the table. Let’s say that the soul is the ashtray.”
“Is it the thoughts of men?”
“No. Thoughts are also on the table. Thoughts are like the silverware.” He picked up a fork and placed it next to the chili sauce and the ashtray.
“Is it a state of grace? Heaven?”
“Not that either. That, whatever it might be, is also part of the tonal. It is, let’s say, the napkin.”
I went on giving possible ways of describing what he was alluding to: pure intellect, psyche, energy, vital force, immortality, life principle. For each thing I named he found an item on the table to serve as a counterpart and shoved it in front of me, until he had all the objects on the table stashed in one pile.
Don Juan seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. He giggled and rubbed his hands every time I named another possibility.
“Is the nagual the Supreme Being, the Almighty, God?” I asked.
“No. God is also on the table. Let’s say that God is the tablecloth.”
He made a joking gesture of pulling the tablecloth in order to stack it up with the rest of the items he had put in front of me.
“But, are you saying that God does not exist?”
“No. I didn’t say that. All I said was that the nagual is not God, because God is an item of our personal tonal and of the tonal of the times. The tonal is, as I’ve already said, everything we think the world is composed of, including God, of course. God has no more importance other than being a part of the tonal of our time.”
“In my understanding, don Juan, God is everything. Aren’t we talking about the same thing?”
“No. God is only everything you can think of, therefore, properly speaking, he is only another item on the island. God cannot be witnessed at will; he can only be talked about. The nagual, on the other hand, is at the service of the warrior. It can be witnessed, but it cannot be talked about.”
“If the nagual is not any of the things I have mentioned,” I said, “perhaps you can tell me about its location. Where is it?”
Don Juan made a sweeping gesture and pointed to the area beyond the boundaries of the table. He swept his hand, as if with the back of it he were cleaning an imaginary surface that went beyond the edges of the table.
“The nagual is there,” he said. “There, surrounding the island. The nagual is there, where power hovers.
“We sense, from the moment we are born, that there are two parts to us. At the time of birth, and for a while after, we are all nagual. We sense, then, that in order to function we need a counterpart to what we have. The tonal is missing and that gives us, from the very beginning, a feeling of incompleteness. Then the tonal starts to develop and it becomes utterly important to our functioning, so important that it opaques the shine of the nagual, it overwhelms it. From the moment we become all tonal we do nothing else but to increment that old feeling of incompleteness which accompanies us from the moment of our birth, and which tells us constantly that there is another part to give us completeness.
“From the moment we become all tonal we begin making pairs. We sense our two sides, but we always represent them with items of the tonal. We say that the two parts of us are the soul and the body. Or mind and matter. Or good and evil. God and Satan. We never realize, however, that we are merely pairing things on the island, very much like pairing coffee and tea, or bread and tortillas, or chili and mustard. I tell you; we are weird animals. We get carried away, and in our madness, we believe ourselves to be making perfect sense.”
Don Juan stood up and addressed me as if he were an orator. He pointed his index finger at me and made his head shiver.
“Man doesn’t move between good and evil,” he said in a hilariously rhetorical tone, grabbing the salt and pepper shakers in both hands. “His true movement is between negativeness and positiveness.”
He dropped the salt and pepper and clutched a knife and fork.
“You’re wrong! There is no movement,” he continued as if he were answering himself. “Man is only mind!”
He took the bottle of sauce and held it up. Then he put it down. “As you can see,” he said softly, “we can easily replace chili sauce for mind and end up saying, ‘Man is only chili sauce!’ Doing that won’t make us more demented than we already are.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t asked the right question,” I said. “Maybe we could arrive at a better understanding if I asked what one can specifically find in that area beyond the island?”
“There is no way of answering that. If I would say, Nothing, I would only make the nagual part of the tonal. All I can say is that there, beyond the island, one finds the nagual.”
“But, when you call it the nagual, aren’t you also placing it on the island?”
“No. I named it only because I wanted to make you aware of it.”
“All right! But becoming aware of it is the step that has turned the nagual into a new item of my tonal.”
“I’m afraid you do not understand. I have named the tonal and the nagual as a true pair. That is all I have done.”
He reminded me that once, while trying to explain to him my insistence on meaning, I had discussed the idea that children might not be capable of comprehending the difference between “father” and “mother” until they were quite developed in terms of handling meaning, and that they would perhaps believe that it might be that “father” wears pants and “mother” skirts, or other differences dealing with hairstyle, or size of body, or items of clothing.
“We certainly do the same thing with the two parts of us,” he said. “We sense that there is another side to us. But when we try to pin down that other side the tonal gets hold of the baton, and as a director it is quite petty and jealous. It dazzles us with its cunningness and forces us to obliterate the slightest inkling of the other part of the true pair, the nagual.”
As we left the restaurant, I told don Juan that he had been correct in warning me about the difficulty of the topic, and that my intellectual prowess was inadequate to grasp his concepts and explanations. I suggested that perhaps if I should go to my hotel and read my notes, my comprehension of the subject might improve. He tried to put me at ease; he said that I was worrying about words. While he was speaking, I experienced a shiver, and for an instant I sensed that there was indeed another area within me.
I mentioned to don Juan that I was having some inexplicable feelings. My statement apparently aroused his curiosity. I told him that I had had the same feelings before, and that they seemed to be momentary lapses, interruptions in my flow of awareness. They always manifested themselves as a jolt in my body followed by the sensation that I was suspended in something.
We headed for downtown, walking leisurely. Don Juan asked me to relate all the details of my lapses, I had a hard time describing them, beyond the point of calling them moments of forgetfulness, or absent-mindedness, or not watching what I was doing.
He patiently rebuffed me. He pointed out that I was a demanding person, had an excellent memory, and was very careful in my actions. It had occurred to me at first that those peculiar lapses were associated with stopping the internal dialogue, but I also had had them when I had talked to myself extensively. They seemed to stem from an area independent of everything I knew.
Don Juan patted me on the back. He smiled with apparent delight.
“You’re finally beginning to make real connections,” he said.
[Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power, Simon & Schuster (1974), pp. 119-129.]
“Does the nagual have consciousness? Is it aware of things?”
“Of course. It is aware of everything. That’s why I’m interested in your account. What you call lapses and feelings is the nagual. In order to talk about it we must borrow from the island of the tonal, therefore it is much more convenient not to explain it, but to simply recount its effects.” [ibid. p. 130.]
“On certain occasions or under certain special circumstances, something in the tonal itself becomes aware that there is more to us. It is like a voice that comes from the depths, the voice of the nagual. You see, the totality of ourselves is a natural condition which the tonal cannot obliterate altogether, and there are moments, especially in the life of a warrior, when the totality becomes apparent. At those moments, one can surmise and assess what we really are.
“I was concerned with those jolts you have had because that is the way the nagual surfaces. At these moments the tonal becomes aware of the totality of oneself. It is always a jolt because that awareness disrupts the lull. I call that awareness the totality of the being that is going to die. The idea is that at the moment of death the other member of the true pair, the Nagual, becomes fully operative and the awareness and memories and perceptions stored in our calves and thighs, in our back and shoulders, and neck, begin to expand and disintegrate. Like the beads of an endless broken necklace, they fall asunder without the binding force of life.
“The totality of ourselves is a very tacky affair. We need only a very small portion of it to fulfil the most complex tasks of life. Yet when we die, we die with the totality of ourselves. A sorcerer asks the question: If we are going to die with the totality of ourselves, why not, then, live with that totality?” [ibid. pp. 131-132.]
“The nagual is not experience or intuition or consciousness. Those terms and everything else you may care to say are only items on the island of the tonal. The nagual, on the other hand, is only effect. The tonal begins at birth and ends at death, but the nagual never ends. The nagual has no limit . . .” [ibid. p. 140.]
“We can talk about the nagual to your heart’s content, as long as you don’t try to explain it. If you remember correctly, I said that the nagual is only for witnessing. So, we can talk about what we witnessed and about how we witnessed it. You want to take on the explanation of how it is all possible, though, and that is an abomination . . .” [ibid. p. 191.]
“An immortal being has all the time in the world for doubts and bewilderment and fears. A warrior, on the other hand, cannot cling to the meanings made under the tonal’s order because he knows for a fact that the totality of himself has but a little time on this earth.” [ibid. p. 196.]
“Personal power decides who can and who cannot profit by a revelation; my experiences with my fellow men have proven to me that very, very few of them would be willing to listen; an and of those few who listen even fewer would be willing to act on what they have listened to; and of those who are willing to act even fewer have enough personal power to profit by their acts . . .” [ibid. p. 231.]
“The first act of a teacher is to introduce the idea that the world we think we see is only a view, a description of the world. Every effort of a teacher is geared to prove this point to his apprentice. But accepting it seems to be one of the hardest things one can do; we are complacently caught in our particular view of the world, which compels us to feel and act as if we knew everything about the world. A teacher, from the very first act he performs, aims at stopping that view. Sorcerers call it stopping the internal dialogue, and they are convinced that it is the single most important technique that an apprentice can learn.
“In order to stop the view of the world which one has held since the cradle, it is not enough to just wish or make a resolution. One needs a practical task; that practical task is called the right way of walking. It seems harmless and nonsensical. As everything else which has power in itself or by itself, the right way of walking does not attract attention. You understood it and regarded it, at least for several years, as a curious way of behaving. It didn’t dawn on you until very recently that that was the most effective way to stop your internal dialogue.
“Walking in that specific manner saturates the tonal. It floods it. You see, the attention of the tonal has to be placed on its creations. In fact, it is that attention that creates the world in the first place; so, the tonal must be attentive to the elements of its world in order to maintain it, and must, above all, uphold the view of the world as internal dialogue.”
He said that the right way of walking was a subterfuge. The warrior, first by curling his fingers, drew attention to the arms; and then by looking, without focusing the eyes, at any point directly in front of him on the arc that started at the tip of his feet and ended above the horizon, he literally flooded his tonal with information. The tonal, without its one-to-one relation with the elements of its description, was incapable of talking to itself, and thus one became silent.
Don Juan explained that the position of the fingers did not matter at all, that the only consideration was to draw attention to the arms by clasping the fingers in various unaccustomed ways, and that the important thing was the manner in which the eyes, by being kept unfocused, detected an enormous number of features of the world without being clear about them. He added that the eyes in that state were capable of picking out details which were too fleeting for normal vision. [ibid. pp. 236-237.]
“The nagual is the unspeakable. All the possible feelings and beings and selves float in it like barges, peaceful, unaltered, forever. Then the glue of life binds some of them together. [. . .] When the glue of life binds those feeling together a being is created, a being that loses the sense of its true nature and becomes blinded by the glare and clamour of the area where beings hover, the tonal. The tonal is where all the unified organization exists. A being pops into the tonal once the force of life has bound all the needed feelings together. I said to you once that the tonal begins at birth and ends at death; I said that because I know that as soon as the force of life leaves the body all those single awarenesses disintegrate and go back to where they came from, the nagual. [. . .] There is no way to refer to the unknown; one can only witness it.” [ibid. pp. 272-273.]
“The last piece of the sorcerers’ explanation says that reason is merely reflecting an outside order, and that reason knows nothing about that order; it cannot explain it, in the same way it cannot explain the nagual. Reason can only witness the effects of the tonal, but never ever could it understand it, or unravel it. The very fact that we are thinking and talking points out an order that we follow without ever knowing how we do that, or what that order is.” [ibid. p. 277.]
I should, perhaps, put the exchanges between don Juan and Carlos, which I have quoted above, into their proper context. I have taken almost all of these excerpts from two chapters of Castaneda’s fourth book, Tales of Power; namely, from the chapter entitled The Island of the Tonal and from the chapter entitled The Strategy of a Sorcerer.
In the first of these two chapters, Carlos is in Mexico City. He has stopped in the city to spend a few days before continuing on to the state of Oaxaca to visit don Juan. To his surprise, he runs into don Juan at the Mercado Lagunilla, seemingly by chance. Don Juan is dressed in a finely tailored, pin-striped suit, which is a shocking sight for Carlos, who has never before seen him dressed in anything but threadbare khakis, sandals, and a straw hat. Afterwards, the two are sitting on a park bench in the Alameda Central talking between themselves, and, according to don Juan, waiting for an omen that will indicate that Carlos has enough personal power to deal with “the sorcerer’s explanation.” Towards evening, the omen does occur—in the personage of a dying pauper: “That man is dying where he has always lived, in the streets. Three policemen are his guards of honour. And as he fades away his eyes will catch a last glimpse of the lights in the stores across the street—the cars, the trees, the throngs of people milling around—and his ears will be flooded for the last time with the sounds of traffic and the voices of men and women as they walk by. So you see, without an awareness of the presence of our death there is no power, no mystery.” The next day, Carlos and don Juan meet up again in the Alameda at about noon. Carlos assumes that they will sit down together on the bench, and that don Juan is about to take him into full confidence regarding the elusive, nebulous “sorcerers’ explanation.” Instead, don Juan suggests that they go have lunch in a restaurant across the street, which is where we find them as don Juan begins his elucidation of the sorcerers’ explanation in a venue that affords him all the props he needs.
In the chapter entitled The Strategy of a Sorcerer, Carlos is in the high Sierra Madre de Oaxaca together with don Juan. Other members of this sorcery get-together are don Juan’s sorcerer companion, Genaro Flores, and don Genaro’s two apprentices, Pablito and Nestor. We have the feeling that we are nearing the end—certainly the end of this particular book, if not the conclusion to the teachings of don Juan. Carlos and don Juan have hiked to a specific spot in the mountains that don Juan indicates is don Gernaro’s “place of predilection.” “He said that the occasion required that right there on my benefactor’s place of predilection he recapitulate for me every step that he had taken in his struggle to help me clean and reorder my island of the tonal. His recapitulation was meticulous and took him about five hours. In a brilliant and clear manner, he gave me a succinct account of everything he had done to me since the day we met.” (Castaneda, Tales of Power, p.233.)
I do not believe that these conversations between don Juan and Carlos, which concern the tonal and the nagual, ever took place, not during his original fieldwork with don Juan, December 1960 to January 1963, and certainly not in 1973; nor do I believe that Carlos had ever read to don Juan from the works of either Husserl or Wittgenstein as he claimed to Sam Keen that he had. The story about the “piece of ebony” from Husserl’s desk that ended up as an additional item in don Juan’s collection of prized power objects is, I contend, just a fairy tale. But despite the fact that I do not personally believe that Juan Matus was the actual source for the “dichotomy of the tonal and the nagual,” I nonetheless feel that it is one of the most attractive ideas in the history of philosophy, on parr with anything either Husserl or Wittgenstein has to offer. To paraphrase Wittgenstein: “These propositions are elucidatory in this way: one who understands them finally recognizes them as senseless when one has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (You must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after you have climbed up on it.) You must surmount these propositions; then you will see the world rightly.” (Tractatus Logico Philosophicus: 6.54.) (I promise to forgive you if you never read or reread any of the books by Carlos Castaneda—provided that you promise me to scroll back in this blogpost and reread the excerpts from Tales of Power that I have just supplied you with. You will thank me once you have surmounted these propositions.)
Be all the immediately foregoing as it may, a question that arises in my mind is whether or not Carlos Castaneda is due all the credit for the ideas that are propounded in his books? In other words, did he write his books all on his own, as he always insisted, or were all, or at least most, of his books the result of a collaborative effort between him and some person or persons uncredited? I entertain the notion that, with the possible exception of his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, he did not write his books entirely on his own. Please peruse the following:
The scientific rationale of Western man is that physical death is experienced only once and that those who have experienced it cannot return to describe what it was like. Yet in most cultures, including Western nations, men do speak of death and the hereafter with considerable knowledge and in great detail, and this is not limited to religious specialists such as shamans and priests. Under the premises of the Western man rationale, then, these persons literally “do not know what they are talking about.”
This paper will take the position that in order to understand the meaning that death and the hereafter has for particular people, one must examine what it is to “know” something, and what ways people have of talking about and acting on a particular subject, in this case, death and the hereafter. The perspective taken will be (following Wittgenstein) that grammar tells us what kind of object anything is (Wittgenstein, 1958), and that the meaning of words is their use or their role in what Wittgenstein calls ‘language-games,” that is, the language and the actions into which language is woven. Any concern with some reality behind the language-games is nonsense, for language-games put a limit on what we can know, experience, believe in, imagine, feel, etc.
The language-game that will be described is members’ knowledgeability of death and the hereafter, that is to say, that prior to the time of physical death a person already “knows” about death and about the after-death state, can talk about it, and acts in particular ways based upon this “knowledge.”
When persons speak of death and the after-death state, for them it seems as if they were talking of real feelings and experiences. It is one of the characteristics of language to make persons think that they are talking about “real” feelings or experiences that exist in some kind of ontological sense, when in fact, they are actually talking about the ways their language enables them to talk about things.
The perspective this paper takes is that persons “know” what they are talking about when speaking of death and the state after death in the sense that they have procedures for gaining this knowledge and are able to describe or give accounts of what they believe death and the after-death state to be like. “Knowing” does not imply knowing the “real” state of affairs, but it refers to talking and acting in particular ways. The meaning death and the after-death state have for persons does not refer to any real feelings or experiences at death, but to the language-games involved.
[Annamarie Simko, Death and the Hereafter: The Structuring of Immaterial Reality, Journal of Death and Dying (July 1970), p. 121. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2190/MJF8-W2Y3-C9PM-AMYF]
The paragraphs quoted above have been excerpted from a master’s thesis that was submitted in 1970 at UCLA and, afterwards, submitted for publication in an academic journal. What is interesting in connection with the works of Carlos Castaneda is not only the subject matter in this thesis, but also the name of the graduate student who submitted the thesis: Annamarie Simko. This young woman had, however, first enrolled at the UCLA Department of Anthropology in 1964 under the name Maryann Simko. The legal name printed on her driver’s license was Annamarie Carter, which was also the name under which she submitted her doctoral dissertation, Karate: An Ethnography of Meaning, in 1975. Another publication from 1975, Variability in Beliefs About Curing Among Huichol Curers and non-Curers, is in the name of Annmarie Simko Carter. For anyone acquainted with the controversies that developed in the 1990s concerning Carlos Castaneda and his cult following, this same woman will be known by the name of Taisha Abelar, one of the two long-time companions of Castaneda, popularly called the “Witches of Westwood,” and one of the five women who mysteriously vanished without a trace immediately following the death of Castaneda in 1998. Under this nom de plume—or perhaps nom de guerre would be a better expression—she wrote two books in the 1990s, one that was published, The Sorcerer’s Crossing: A Woman’s Journey (1992), and one that was not, Stalking With the Double. (A typescript of Stalking With the Double was, however, reputedly circulated among the attendees of the Cleargreen Inc. Woman’s Workshop in March of 1996, but was apparently never returned to the author. Eventually (in 2022), this typescript became available to the public as a PDF file at https://archive.org/details/taisha-abelar-stalking-with-the-double/page/9/mode/2up .) I believe that both of these books are basically fictional, but there are, nevertheless, snippets of information in them, mostly about Taisha Abelar/Annamarie Carter herself, which can be corroborated by real-life events.
Taisha Abelar was born as Annamarie Carter on 8 June 1947 in Vienna, Austria. Her father was an American soldier who had served in Europe during World War II, but who had married an Austrian citizen and had chosen to remain in Europe after the war. Taisha has revealed, in her two books, some details which concern her childhood and upbringing, but many of these seem contradictory and, let’s face it, even rather far-fetched. I have attempted to uncover at least some of her early personal history by searching through public records, but without obtaining any credible results. The key dates with respect to her college education, on the other hand, along with her legal name and date of birth, are available on the Vita page of her doctoral dissertation. (https://www.proquest.com/openview/c625d2b423cf63077a0145fc2c0ba06c/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y).
Annamarie Carter received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology in 1967 at UCLA; her Master of Arts degree at UCLA in 1970; and her PhD, also at UCLA, in 1975. During this busy period in her life between the years 1967 and 1974, she also trained herself extensively in the martial arts, apparently with her PhD in mind from the very first day of her training. However, the most significant event to occur in her entire life was undoubtedly her initial meeting with Carlos Castaneda. In her unpublished manuscript, Stalking with the Double, Taisha Abelar describes this in detail. (While the manuscript in itself is basically fictional, some of the narrative would seem to be historically accurate; that is, there are details that could and that can be corroborated. The initial meeting with Carlos and the subsequent trip with him to Sonora are such details.)
Annamarie first met Carlos Castaneda at the very end of the spring semester 1966. She had just attended a lecture on anthropological methodology that was held by Associate Professor John Thayer Hitchcock (1917-2001), his final lecture at UCLA before he effected a transfer as full professor to the University of Wisconsin. Checking in at Professor Hitchcock’s office on the second floor of Haines Hall in order to get some clarification on several points that had been raised during the lecture, Annamarie first approached Rex Jones (b. 1939, PhD 1973), the teaching assistant whose desk was closest to the office entrance, but following a brief exchange with him, she was handed over to a second teaching assistant whose desk was further inside the office. “You’re asking questions that belong to the domain of philosophy,” Rex Jones said. “If you want to know about the meaning of life, you’re in the wrong department. Although my friend Carlos might be able to answer some of your questions. He’s an apprentice to a Mexican shaman.” After some introductory chit-chat, Carlos Castaneda said to Annamarie: “If you really want to know about the meaning of life, you should meet this Yaqui Indian I’m working with. He knows a great deal about life and its meaning. In fact, he is one of the wisest people I’ve ever met. Perhaps we can go to Mexico some time, and I’ll introduce you to him.” Carlos was taken aback when Annamarie audaciously suggested: “All right. How about next weekend? I’ll be through with my exams by then.” Carlos tried to back out of his proposition that they should travel together by saying that it had probably not been such a good idea, after all, because the Indian probably didn’t want to meet a gringa anthropology student; but Annamarie stood her ground. In the end, he took her phone number and promised to call her whenever a trip to Mexico was imminent. Annamarie, having very well intuited the teaching assistant’s original gambit, left the office without any higher expectation of getting a phone call from Carlos Castaneda.
Carlos Castaneda called a week later and told Annamarie that he was driving to the Yaqui settlements in the southern part of the Mexican state of Sonora with the purpose of sourcing some Yaqui Pascola masks and ankle rattles for the Fowler Museum at UCLA. Did she want to tag along?
I believe Taisha Abelar when she writes that she first met Carlos Castaneda as early as in May of 1966, and she may possibly be telling the truth about a trip in that year to the Valle del Yaqui together with him. I made the same journey fifteen years later, and from my standpoint, her description of the experience rings true. On the other hand, I very much doubt that she actually met Carlos’ native informant, Juan Matus, but it is quite possible that Carlos showed her where don Juan lived or where he had lived—at least, her description of the road they took to get there appears to be accurate:
Benny had wanted to stay for the dancing and fireworks, but Carlos said he needed to make another stop to collect some masks and perhaps a set of cocoon rattles for the museum. We left Benny in the company of some of his friends, and drove back to Vícam Station, but before reaching the town, Carlos suddenly veered off the main highway onto an obscure road as if he knew exactly where he was going. After several miles of a bumpy ride, he parked the car on a well packed area of ground near an adobe house almost completely hidden by shrubs. As we got out, he said casually, that we were not there to look at masks, but that it was don Juan’s house and he had wanted to see if he was home. Carlos called out announcing our presence, but no one came to the door. I waited in the car while Carlos walked down the road to see if he could catch don Juan returning from the store.
[Taisha Abelar, Stalking with the Double, Archive.org, pp. 161-162.]
(Since construction of the dual carriageway between Guaymas and Ciudad Obregón was completed, this particular dirt road into the desert can no longer be accessed from Federal Highway 15. However, you can turn south off the Pótam Road when you get to the irrigation canal, about 100 metres west of the highway, and then follow the canal until you come to a bridge that crosses over it, about halfway between Estación Oroz and Estación Vícam. The road over the bridge goes under the overpasses on Highway 15 and also under the railway overpass, and then continues parallel to the railroad tracks and approaches Estación Oroz from the south. I imagine that don Juan told Carlos to use this poorly maintained road when he came to visit in order to prevent the wagging of tongues in the village.)
How soon after the end of spring semester in 1966 did Annamarie Carter move in with Carlos Castaneda? Due to a lack of evidence, I’m afraid we’ll have to speculate. We know that they were living in the same house—and apparently sharing a bedroom—in July of 1969 because Carlos’ ex-wife, Margaret, came to visit at that time, and Margaret later reminisced in the book that she published in 1996:
C.J. [Carlton Jeremy Castaneda, seven years old at the time] stayed that week at Carlos’ house, a tan stucco home not far from the university. It had a flat roof with two arches out front and a fence on the right, the usual Spanish motif. Inside, there was a large living room with an adjoining dining room and kitchen, and two mattresses on the floor in the bedroom with blankets draped over the top. All the way down the hall and to the right was Carlos’ den, a sparse room with a wooden desk and a typewriter against one wall and a door outside to the backyard directly across the room. There was no telephone. When he or Nanny [Annamarie Carter], a UCLA co-ed who stayed with him, wanted to make a call, they had to go to the public phone booth on the corner. [. . .] During the week C.J. spent at Carlos’, the two of them spent a couple of days at UCLA and a few days hiking in the hills north of L.A. At night, they’d pick up Nanny at a dojo where she was taking karate and return to the house to talk and play Old Maid. Nanny read poetry to C.J. in bed each night, always Casey at the Bat, which was his favourite. Afterwards, he’d lie there in the dark of the bedroom listening to Carlos in the den typing into the early morning hours, typing with a painful slowness on his new book [A Separate Reality].
[Margaret Runjan Castaneda, A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda, iUniverse.com, Inc. (2001), pp. 156-157.]
According to the UCLA Student Directory 1966/67, Annamarie, under the name Maryann Simko, was in 1966 living in the city of Covina, which is about a 40-minute train ride from the UCLA campus. She was also beginning her training in karate under a Shotokan master, Hidetaka Nishiyama, at the dojo on Olympic Boulevard in Downtown Los Angeles. Carlos, on the other hand, was living in rented accommodations in Westwood, only a few blocks from the university campus, but he was probably having difficulties getting together enough money to pay the rent each month. (There were, however, rumours going around campus that he was being helped financially by his former girlfriend, Mary Joan Barker, who worked in the library at UCLA.) It seems almost inevitable to me that Annamarie would have moved into his house as soon as it could be arranged. (During the spring semester of 1970, Annamarie would meet an intriguing first-year anthropology student at UCLA, Regine Thal, who had begun her karate training at Master Nishiyama’s dojo on Olympic Boulevard, and the two quickly became fast friends. Annamarie subsequently introduced Regine to her, by then, famous housemate/boyfriend, Carlos Castaneda. Regine does not appear to have moved into Carlos’ house in Westwood at this time. Perhaps he didn’t have room for her. Besides, Regine was still married in 1970, and was probably living with her then-husband, Edward Steiner (divorced 1972), in Manhattan Beach, California, which is about a 45-minute bus ride from the UCLA campus. However, in 1973, following the disastrous TIME Magazine interview, Carlos purchased a four-unit property on nearby Pandora Avenue which was spacious enough to accommodate Annamarie, Regine, Mary Joan, and Carlos himself, all of whom effectively went into a sort of urban seclusion for the next twenty years. In 1992 and 1993, Carlos, Taisha/Annamarie, and Florinda/Regine began to make public appearances at bookshops and other venues in the Los Angeles area for the purpose of promoting their most recently published books [The Art of Dreaming by Carlos Castaneda, Being in Dreaming by Florinda Donner, and The Sorcerer’s Crossing by Taisha Abelar]. In 1995, Carlos Castaneda created Cleargreen Inc. for the expressed purpose of promoting Tensegrity, which allegedly is a set of martial art practices that had first been devised by the “ancient sorcerers of Mexico.” As far as I can see, Carlos, Taisha, and Florinda had utilised their long years of self-exile from society to slowly drive one another into madness. Their life together ended in 1998 when Carlos died of cancer, and Taisha and Florinda would appear to have committed suicide, although their remains have not been discovered. In order to get a grasp on the sheer lunacy that was inherent in the Tensegrity cult of the 1990s, I would recommend that you read Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Amy Wallace. I believe Amy is telling it as it was, and what it was is not a very good promotion for the teachings of the historical Juan Matus.)
At this point in my blogpost, I would like to return to the question of whether or not Carlos Castaneda wrote his books entirely on his own. Personally, I think what we have here are the makings of a real-life literary conspiracy. I don’t think Carlos was smart enough, nor literate enough in either Spanish or English, to be able to churn out books, whether fictional or nonfictional, at the rate in which he actually did, but I do think he was street-smart enough to rely heavily on collaborators (i.e. Taisha Abelar/Annamarie Carter and Florinda Donner/Regine Thal), but afterwards to take all the credit for himself. And Taisha and Florinda were savvy enough to go along with the arrangement. After 1973, and for 25 years, Carlos was the famous one, and the primary bread winner (to the tune of millions of dollars) for the four households at the corner of Pandora and Eastbourne Avenues.
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Carlos Castaneda’s first book, was almost certainly written by him alone. By the time he had met Annamarie Carter, he had more or less completed a rough draft for the book. By the summer of 1967, he had a finished manuscript, several copies of which were making the rounds among the professors and the graduate students at UCLA. Those who read the manuscript were almost unanimously enthusiastic, even rapturous. The few who frowned at the idea of having this book published were those who smelled a rat—what if this was just a very cleverly perpetrated hoax? The reputation of the university was at stake. The manuscript had been submitted to the University of California Press for publication as a work of scholarship.
Because of this fear of a hoax, it would take another year before the book was released to the general reading public. Fortunately for the board of regents at the University of California, readers were almost unanimously enthusiastic, even rapturous. Carlos also sighed with relief. After two years of torturous uncertainty about the future of his book-in-progress, he could finally feel assured that he would not only be able to pay his share of the rent and other household expenses, but even Annamarie’s share as well.
Annamarie would also have breathed a sigh of relief when it became certain that Carlos’ book would be a success, perhaps even a resounding success. In 1969, her PhD in anthropology was still at least four years away, and getting a full education at UCLA was not easy to afford, even with financial help from family and friends. From then on, however, she could rely on Carlos to keep her afloat in academia, provided she maintain their good relationship, working- and otherwise. What did she know or intuit concerning Carlos’ so-called “apprenticeship” to Juan Matus? I am assuming that Carlos at some point showed to her the pages of his field diary—certainly to her, if to no other. Annamarie did not have a working knowledge of Spanish, but Carlos would have explained to her what was going on in the notes as they went through them together, and he would probably have translated selected entries verbatim, if he felt that they were especially important, or if he had actually used them while writing The Teachings of Don Juan. Even without that trip to Sonora in the beginning of their relationship, Annamarie would have understood that there really had been a Yaqui Indian sorcerer named Juan, with whom Carlos had worked in the early 1960s—while she was still in high school. She would also have understood that Carlos’ book, viewed as a work of scholarship, was indeed a hoax. There was no mention in the notes of either Datura inoxia (hierba del diablo) or Psilocybe mexicana (teotlnanácatl). I think that Annamarie, who in the early years of their relationship seems to have had more personal integrity than Carlos, would have been appalled by this blatant act of academic fraud. However, once Carlos had explained how he had been forced into this subterfuge by Professor Harold Garfinkel’s insistence on a rewrite of his original Master’s thesis, she would have relented, having considered the dice to have already been thrown.
By the summer of 1969, Carlos was hard at work on a sequel to The Teachings of Don Juan, to which he had apparently given the working title A Separate Reality. We may assume that Carlos intended this book as his doctoral dissertation. According to Professor José Cuéllar, who was a fellow graduate student at UCLA in 1971: “He submitted A Separate Reality as a dissertation and that was refused. [. . .] So basically, what he did was disband his dissertation committee.” (Boulder Magazine, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, April/May 1978, p. 22.) The narrative in this dissertation-in-progress would have begun with Carlos handing over a copy of his new book to don Juan (and being told by don Juan that Carlos had better keep his book because “You know what we do with paper in Mexico;” and would presumably have ended with Carlos deciding not to keep his appointment with the fearsome “ally” because he felt that it was not his time—yet.
Having advanced to candidacy in UCLA’s Master’s program, Annamarie was busy writing her Master’s thesis during the summer of 1969. The aim of her research was to show that “in anthropology, where the elements of different cultures are apt to appear strange to the investigator, it is imperative that these elements are examined in the contexts in which they are found. The meaning of an item is intrinsically bound to the contexts in which it is used. Only after having examined how people speak of things, how words are used, what activities are involved, that is, what the meaning of an item is, should one proceed to generalize or incorporate elements of other cultures under some general behavioural scientific theory.” (Annamarie Simko, Death and the Hereafter: The Structuring of Immaterial Reality.)
The question is: Who was really influencing whom in this relationship? It’s easy to assume that Carlos was the master and Annamarie the fawning disciple, but I don’t think this was the case. For one thing, Annamarie was one up on Carlos; his lauded Teachings of Don Juan had, by and large, been a work of fiction, and she knew this to be a fact. His work-in-progress, A Separate Reality, was also a work of fiction. She was living in the same household as he was. She knew he was not taking trips to Mexico to see don Juan. Carlos’ renewed apprenticeship to don Juan was taking place entirely at the old Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter on his desk in the den. For another thing, I suspect that Annamarie was smarter and academically much quicker in the uptake than Carlos; and undoubtedly, she was more proficient at writing English in an acceptable scholarly fashion. I’m sure she was fully competent to edit or even rewrite whatever Carlos might manage to punch out on his typewriter.
When A Separate Reality was published as a trade book in 1971 (release date 1 May 1971) instead of as an academic dissertation, the various reviewers of the book were almost united in the opinion that the writing was markedly better than in the previous book, and that the somewhat altered characterization of Don Juan made him seem more like a flesh-and-blood Mexican Indian sorcerer and therefore much more relatable for the reader, which I think is a sign that Carlos Castaneda had not written this novel-based-on-an-unpublished-doctoral-dissertation entirely on his own; he had simply taken credit for it as if he had. Personally, I felt that his separate reality had been truncated, like a dog with a docked tail. “Don Juan looked at me and there was such sadness in his eyes that I began to weep. Tears fell freely. For the first time in my life, I felt the encumbering weight of my reason. An indescribable anguish overtook me. I wailed involuntarily and embraced him. He gave me a quick blow with his knuckles on the top of my head. I felt it like a ripple down my spine. It had a sobering effect. ‘You indulge too much,’ he said softly.” This seems to me more like the end of a chapter than the end of a story. One feels that there should be more to come. To be truthful, I knew before I initially read the book that the narrative in A Separate Reality would be cut short. I had had the good fortune to read Journey to Ixtlan before the two earlier books.
Journey to Ixtlan begins thus: “On Saturday, May 22, 1971, I went to Sonora, Mexico, to see don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian sorcerer, with whom I had been associated since 1961.” Castaneda goes on to write that for ten years past he had always assumed that the states of altered consciousness he had experienced while under the influence of hallucinogens were “the only avenue to communicating and learning what don Juan was attempting to teach him.” This assumption, however, had been erroneous. Further along in the introduction to Journey to Ixtlan, Castaneda writes: “in reviewing the totality of my field notes I became aware that don Juan had given me the bulk of the new description [of the world] at the very beginning of our association in what he called ‘techniques for stopping the world.’ I had discarded those parts of my field notes in my earlier works because they did not pertain to the use of psychotropic plants. I have now rightfully reinstated them in the total scope of don Juan’s teachings and they comprise the first seventeen chapters of this work. The last three chapters are the field notes covering the events that culminated in my ‘stopping the world.’”
I simply do not believe that it took Carlos ten years to understand the importance of those early lessons under the tutelage of don Juan. I imagine that Carlos could be as slow-witted in real life as he made don Juan’s apprentice seem to be in his books—just not that slow-witted. He knew without a doubt that providence had given him a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when he met and talked with don Juan in that bus depot in Arizona. Here was something infinitely more important than learning how and why Amerindians get high on peyote. Almost by sheer luck, he had suddenly found himself in Sonora, Mexico, talking to a wise old Indian, not about medicinal plants, but about the warrior’s way of life. He found himself doing what he knew would be important and utterly unique fieldwork before he had even achieved his Bachelor’s degree. If he could just keep don Juan interested in working with him, in teaching him how to become a warrior; Why . . . his PhD was as good as in the bag.
As things turned out, Carlos’ PhD would not actually be in the bag until January 1973, almost thirteen years after his first meeting with don Juan. What I think happened is this: Carlos was at a loss when his manuscript for A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan was rejected as a doctoral dissertation by his dissertation committee. Following much reconsideration and, I would like to suggest, at the prompting of his housemate/girlfriend, Annamarie Carter, he decided to chop the ending off his rejected dissertation manuscript before publishing it as a trade book, and save the admirable ending for a manuscript that might finally be accepted as a doctoral dissertation. “Only as a warrior can one survive the path of knowledge because the art of a warrior is to balance the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man.” I am taking it for granted that Carlos would have on some fairly early occasion made a typescript of his field diary/field notes. What he needed to do during the rest of the year 1971 and during the following year 1972 was to compose a narrative based on this typescript and then make an interpretive phenomenological analysis of the resulting narrative.
Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan was released on 23 October 1972. The book was an immediate and resounding success. In January 1973, Carlos successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, Sorcery: A Description of the World (essentially a typewritten, double-spaced version of Journey to Ixtlan), and thereby earned his PhD.
In conclusion, I would once again like to contend that the Don Juan we came to know from Carlos Castaneda’s tetralogy, i.e., The Teachings of Don Juan, A Separate Reality, Journey to Ixtlan, and Tales of Power, was a character based on a flesh-and-blood Mexican Indian sorcerer (brujo mexicano indígena) with whom Castaneda worked in his capacity as ethnographic observer during a number of field trips to Mexico in the early 1960s. However, the world view we came to experience through these books by Carlos Castaneda is an oftentimes brilliant hodgepodge of the warrior’s philosophy expounded by Juan Matus during the original field interviews and the subsequent interpretive phenomenological analysis and embellishment of this philosophy by Drs Castaneda and Carter. An excellent example of this hodgepodge is the “dichotomy of the tonal and the nagual” from Dr Castaneda’s book Tales of Power. I first became acquainted with this unique philosophical concept in 1974 when I read Tales of Power, which was in that year fresh off the printing press. At the time, I was studying, among other things, the philosophical works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and to be truthful, I was not making much sense of them. Castaneda’s concept of the tonal and the nagual as the only true dichotomy came as a godsend. So that is what Wittgenstein meant when he wrote: (Tractatus Logico Philosophicus 6.4312) “The temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say, its eternal survival after death, is not only in no way guaranteed, but this assumption in the first place will not do for us what we always tried to make it do. Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive forever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.”
The philosophical value of don Juan’s explanation of the tonal and the nagual in the book Tales of Power is not lessened by the fact that the book is entirely fictional. If these two words from the Nahuatl language were used in this particular manner for the very first time in Carlos Castaneda’s Tales of Power, this does not mean they were not used well. “The tonal is everything we know, and that includes not only us, as persons, but everything in our world. The nagual is the part of us which we do not deal with at all. The nagual is the part of us for which there is no description—no words, no names, no feelings, no knowledge. It can be witnessed, but it cannot be talked about. The tonal begins at birth and ends at death, but the nagual never ends. The nagual has no limit . . .” Or to paraphrase Wittgenstein: What can be said at all, can be said clearly; of that which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.
Postscript (30/08/2024):
Shortly after posting the weblog that you have been reading (above), I became aware of the long-awaited publication (26/08/2024) of a chronology for Taisha Abelar at the recently resurrected “Sustained Action” website: https://sustainedaction.org/taisha-abelar-chronology-of-a-true-believer/
Richard Jennings, a lawyer who became a student of Carlos Castaneda in 1995—and thereby even a member of Castaneda’s cult following—first established the website (linked above) in 1999 for the purpose of publishing “the real facts about Castaneda’s biography and those of the women he claimed had also been students of his supposed teacher, Don Juan Matus.” Several chronologies for members of the cult were published at this time. Curiously and disappointingly absent among the chronologies was one for Taisha Abelar. It has become clear that Richard Jennings had actually done the research for a chronology. He had managed to get in touch with members of the family she had so callously abandoned when she moved in with Carlos Castaneda; however, these family members had requested that he should not publish the details concerning Taisha’s true personal history that they had revealed, and he had consented to this. It is well worth your time to follow the link I have provided above. My visit to this site has given me a more nuanced understanding of the sort of person Taisha Abelar really was. However, for the purpose of correcting all unintentional misinformation that I am guilty of providing in my blogpost, allow me to summarize the most important verifiable details of Taisha Abelar’s personal history.
Taisha was born in Weidenberg, Germany on 25 August 1945 as Maryann Martha Simko. (Thus, the personal information on the vita page of her doctoral dissertation is false information.) Her father was a Hungarian surgeon who worked for the United States Army in occupied Germany, specializing in the treatment of cancer. (This information comes from Taisha’s brother, who, following in his father’s footsteps, became a radiation oncologist, retired since 2021.) Taisha/Maryann’s family, her parents and her four siblings, emigrated to the United States in 1952 and settled in Covina, California. She attended high school at Northview High School in Covina, and in September 1963, she enrolled at the University of California Los Angeles with a major in Anthropology. It would appear that she may have met and moved in with Carlos Castaneda as early as in 1965. (She herself has claimed that she first met Carlos when she was 19 years old, which would mean that this meeting and the subsequent (purported) trip to Sonora, Mexico would have occurred in May and June of 1965.
According to The Teachings of Don Juan, a little over a month earlier Carlos had begun to experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder supposedly related to his repeated ingestion of psychotropic mushrooms. This would probably have been noticeable in his day-to-day behavior. Joining him on an impromptu trip to Mexico would hardly have been advisable under such circumstances.) Taisha filed for a change of name in 1973 from Maryann Martha Simko to Annamarie Carter. In 1991, she once again filed for a change of name, this time from Annamarie Carter to Taisha Abelar.
During my visit to the Sustained Action website, in addition to obtaining trustworthy information concerning the personal history of Taisha Abelar and a nuanced understanding of what the psychologist Carl Jung would have called “a very complex personality” from someone who had actually known her, I was even made aware of the 1993 KVMR radio interview with Taisha Abelar by Hanes Ealy via a link posted on this website. Further research elsewhere led me to another KVMR interview that same year with Florinda Donner Grau. Both of these interviews were first uploaded to SoundCloud in 2020. Links to these interviews follow.
Taisha Abelar: https://soundcloud.com/technomagical-intent/kvmr-radio-1993-taisha-abelar
Florinda Donner Grau: https://soundcloud.com/technomagical-intent/kvmr-radio-1993-florinda
While I listened to these sound files, my suspicions seemed very much warranted; that is to say, all of the books supposedly authored by Carlos Castaneda alone, with the possible exception of the first book, The Teachings of Don Juan (1968), may actually have been products of a literary collaboration, certainly a conspiracy of sorts. Carlos Castaneda would undoubtedly have been the figurehead of this alleged conspiracy. After all, it was he who had met and worked with the Mexican Indian sorcerer Juan Matus. Taisha Abelar was the somewhat humourless intellectual who possessed both the academic and the literary prowess that Castaneda sorely lacked. (His lack of academic prowess is perhaps best exemplified by the structural analysis that is Part Two of The Teachings of Don Juan, an analysis which may suitably be described as abysmally awful.) Florinda Donner Grau was the imaginative and flamboyant one of the three conspirators, the only one of “don Juan’s apprentices” with any true panache. (Florinda’s remarkable talent as a storyteller is, I think, most evident in her often-overlooked book The Witch’s Dream: A Healer’s Way of Knowledge (1985). Like Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, this book must be mostly, possibly entirely, fictional. Nevertheless, the storytelling is so good that I found myself, while reading the book in 1985, fervently wishing that the stories had actually been true. I believe that the influence of Florinda’s storytelling talent on the books “by Carlos Castaneda” would have been considerable. I have no doubt that Florinda knew how to tell a good story; I don’t think that Carlos did.)
If there was a conspiracy of the kind I am suggesting, what purpose, if any, was it meant to serve? (I think it is important to point out that the only definite proof that there was a covert literary collaboration involved in the writing of the books by Carlos Castaneda would be a confession of guilt by one or more of the conspirators, a confession that is not likely forthcoming. One of the three is certified dead and cremated; the two women have been missing for the past 26 years, and are presumed dead.) The most obvious objective for a conspiracy would have been to retrieve the real (historical) teachings of Juan Matus from the utter mess that Carlos Castaneda had made of his fieldwork with the 1968 publication of his monograph The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, but without owning up to academic fraud. This objective that was actually achieved at the publication of Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan in 1972. I am suggesting that without the active collaboration of Maryann Simko/Taisha Abelar and Regine Thal/Florinda Donner Grau, Carlos Castaneda would probably have published a single book, The Teachings of Don Juan, and his readers—and his academic supervisors, of course—would have been led to believe that the only path to the sorcerer’s special knowledge of the world would be to achieve altered states of consciousness by the use of various hallucinogenic substances. This was not the case at all, which is amply evidenced by Castaneda’s field reports, both the twelve pages of notes that have survived and are held by the Botany Library of Oakes Ames at Harvard University and the hundreds of other pages of the field diary that are lost, but were fortunately preserved before it was too late in Part One of Journey to Ixtlan, probably at the insistence and with the assistance of Taisha Abelar and Florinda Donner.
Following the publication of Journey to Ixtlan, however, this original purpose became an anomaly in its own right. Since I discovered the recently published chronology for Taisha Abelar and have even had the opportunity to listen to the 1993 KVMR radio interviews with Taisha and Florinda, I have taken a few hours to reread and study both Taisha’s Master’s thesis and her doctoral dissertation. It has thereby become apparent to me that Taisha was working on a phenomenological analysis of the teachings of don Juan at least as early as in September of 1969, a little more than a year after the initial publication of The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. When Carlos flaunts his understanding of phenomenological theory during the interview with Sam Keen (see the excerpt at the beginning of this blogpost), I suggest that it was Taisha/Maryann who was really speaking. And that student of Husserl who had presented Carlos with an object made of ebony that reputedly had once been kept on the writing desk of the famous philosopher? I suggest that this student had been Taisha, although it’s impossible to determine the true provenance of whatever sort of object this may have been. (It is possible, however, that Taisha’s father, the surgeon Gyorgy Simko, made the elderly Edmund Husserl’s acquaintance at the University of Freiburg in the 1930s. But I still don’t believe that this object, if it did indeed exist, would have ended up in the possession of Juan Matus.) Furthermore, I suggest that Taisha—probably in league with Florinda—encouraged Carlos to turn his early field notes (December 1960-December 1962) into a narrative for the main body of text in his novel/dissertation Journey to Ixtlan/Sorcery: A Description of the World. I strongly sense her influence in the introduction to Ixtlan and even more so in the scholarly preface to his dissertation. And what about the dichotomy of the tonal and the nagual in the book Tales of Power? What about the “sorcerer’s explanation” in the same book?
I believe that anyone who has been intellectually and emotionally overwhelmed by reading Carlos Castaneda’s book Journey to Ixtlan owes a great deal to both Taisha and Florinda, who, in my estimation, were the unsung heroines in the story of how the teachings of the historical Juan Matus were finally gifted to prosperity. Sadly, these two women paid a high price for the dubious privilege of constantly living and working for nearly three decades with a perfectly venomous man such as Carlos Castaneda. I am reasonably sure that if either or both of the women had come under the care of a psychiatrist for any reason during the 1990s, their precarious state of behavioural health would have been diagnosed as severe delusional disorder—a diagnosis that would have been made without much ado. When Carlos Castaneda died of liver cancer in 1998, and not, as anticipated, of burning with the fire from within and joining the ranks of the practically-immortal inorganic beings, Taisha and Florinda, both in their early fifties, could have dusted themselves off and changed their lives for the better. What a fascinating true story they had to tell! Instead, they seem to have chosen to follow Carlos into the void. Now we’ll never know for sure what happened. But insanity is like that, I’m afraid. It dictates; it doesn’t present one with options.