The sorcerer's apprentice
MICK BROWN
In the psychedelic '60s, Carlos Castaneda
wandered deep into the Mexican desert and brought
back the chemically enhanced key to mystic paperback
success. But was he a shaman or a sham? Mick
Brown looks for enlightenment.
In February of this year I received a curious and
completely unexpected invitation ... Would I like to
interview Carlos Castaneda? To the uninitiated, the
invitation will mean nothing. But those who came of
age in the '60s counter-culture will recognise that
it was like being invited to peruse the Cretan
Minotaur.
Carlos Castaneda stands alongside Timothy Leary as
one of the great avatars - and one of the great
enigmas - of the psychedelic age. In 1968, Castaneda
published The Teachings of Don Juan, describing his
apprenticeship in the deserts of Mexico to an Indian
shaman, and his induction through mind-altering
substances into "the Yaqui way of
knowledge".
Like Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf and Aldous
Huxley's The Doors of Perception, The
Teachings of Don Juan and its sequels became
essential reading for a legion of seekers after truth
- guidebooks into a fantastic and exotic world beyond
the dull grind of materialism. And long after the
first generation of fans had moved on to more
pragmatic concerns - mortgages, families, tax returns
- the books continued to sell.
Since 1968, the works of Carlos Castaneda have sold
more than eight million copies in 17 languages,
totally unhindered by the fierce debate about whether
don Juan really existed or was simply a figment of
Castaneda's imagination.
No less a mystery was Castaneda himself. "The
art of the hunter," don Juan had taught,
"is to become inaccessible", and it was a
maxim that Castaneda had observed with an almost
religious dedication for 30 years, forsaking public
appearances, refusing almost all interviews, leading
the life of a recluse.
But now, I was told, there had been a mysterious and
dramatic change of heart. After years of
inaccessibility, Castaneda had emerged into the
public eye, bringing with him for the first time what
he claimed was the most important facet of don Juan's
teachings - a system of physical movements known as
"magical passes". He was prepared to lift
the shroud of secrecy and talk to the world.
A date was provisionally set for me to meet him in
Los Angeles. I was told that he would countenance no
photographs, no tape-recording equipment. I would be
allowed only to take notes, as he had taken notes
during his years of tutelage at the feet of don Juan.
"A recording," Castaneda had told the Los
Angeles Times in 1995 in a rare conversation,
"is a way of fixing you in time. The only thing
a sorcerer will not do is be stagnant. The stagnant
world, the stagnant picture, those are the antitheses
of the sorcerer."
Then the date was changed. And changed again.
Castaneda, I was told, was "on retreat" in
the Mexican desert. When - if - he returned, I would
be notified. In late March, I left for California on
other business. But the call never came. There was a
simple reason. At the time that I was in sitting in a
hotel room in Los Angeles, Castaneda was not in
Mexico at all. He was five kilometres away from me in
his Westwood home, dying of liver cancer.
Carlos Castaneda died, at the age of 72, on April 27.
But, peculiarly, it was to be another two months
before the news of his death became public. There was
no announcement, no press report, no funeral or
service of any kind. According to the Culver City
mortuary that handled his remains, his body was
cremated at once, his ashes spirited away to the
Mexican desert.
In death, as in life, Castaneda remained inscrutable.
When, eventually, the news of his death leaked out to
the press, two British newspapers ran obituaries,
alongside photographs of a man who was not Carlos
Castaneda. His friends drew a veil of silence over
the death, refusing to comment. In a statement to the
press, his agents, Toltec Artists, would say only
that, "In the tradition of the shamans of his
lineage, Carlos Castaneda left this world in full
awareness."
Castaneda, this suggested, was a spiritual teacher of
the highest order, who had left behind a body of work
to enrich mankind. In reality, he left behind a more
tangled legacy. Rather than dying "the
immaculate death" of the sorcerer, it is
suggested that the sorcerer's apprentice actually
died a frail, paranoid and angry old man, lashing out
at the world with lawsuits - including one against
his 73-year-old former wife, Margaret - and conjuring
up the spirit of don Juan in a last, desperate
attempt to exploit it for all it was worth.
A key aspect of the teachings of don Juan, as
recounted by Carlos Castaneda, was the necessity of
the "self" to die. "It is imperative
to leave aside what [don Juan] called 'personal
history'," Castaneda told the Chilean magazine
Uno Mismo in 1997. "To get away from 'me' is
something extremely annoying and difficult. What the
shamans like don Juan seek is a state of fluidity
where the personal 'me' does not count." For
Castaneda, "the personal me" was a subject
of constant fluctuation and revision.
By his own account, Castaneda was born on December
25, 1935, in Sao Paolo, Brazil. His mother died when
he was seven and he was raised by his father, a
professor of literature whom Castaneda supposedly
regarded with a mixture of fondness and contempt - a
shadow of the man he would subsequently meet in don
Juan. He claimed to have been educated in Buenos
Aires and sent to America in 1951. He travelled to
Milan, where he studied sculpture, before returning
to America and enrolling at UCLA to study
anthropology.
In fact, American immigration records indicate that
Castaneda was born not in 1935, but in 1925 - not in
Brazil, but in Cajamarca, Peru.
His father was not a university professor but a
goldsmith. His mother died when he was 24. And while
it was true that he had studied painting and
sculpture, this was not in Milan but at the National
Fine Art school of Peru. Arriving in America in 1951,
he studied creative writing at Los Angeles City
College before enrolling on an anthropology course at
UCLA in 1959.
The following year, he travelled to the
Mexico-Arizona desert, intending to study the
medicinal use of certain plants among local Indians.
At a bus station in the town of Nogales in Arizona,
he would later write, he met the man he called don
Juan. For the psychedelic generation it was the
equivalent of Stanley stumbling into a jungle
clearing and discovering Livingstone, the young John
Lennon bumping into Paul McCartney at a church fete
in Woolton.
According to Castaneda, don Juan Matus was a Yaqui
Indian nagual, or leader of a party of sorcerers -
the last in a line stretching back to the times of
the Toltecs, the pre-Hispanic Indians who inhabited
the central and northern regions of Mexico a thousand
years ago. Under the guidance of the Yaqui sage,
Castaneda was introduced to the psychotropic
substances of peyote, jimson weed and "the
little smoke", a preparation made from psilocybe
mushrooms that had been dried and aged for a year.
Under the influence of these drugs the bemused
anthropologist underwent a series of bizarre
encounters, with columns of singing light, a
bilingual coyote and a 30-metre-tall gnat - "the
guardian of the other world" - manifestations of
the "powers", or impersonal forces, that a
man of knowledge must learn to use.
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of
Knowledge was first published in 1968 as an
anthropological thesis by the University of
California Press.
A year later - repackaged in a psychedelic book
jacket - it was published by a mainstream company. It
became an immediate counter-culture hit, prompting an
exodus of would-be apprentice sorcerers to the
deserts of Mexico in search of don Juan - or at least
good drugs.
A Separate Reality, published in 1971, was
more of the same - a giant gnat circles around
Castaneda, and he sees don Juan's face transformed
into a ball of glowing light - as the old Indian
inducted Castaneda into the so-called second cycle of
apprenticeship. These experiences were not just
psychedelic magical mystery tours. The use of drugs,
Castaneda explained, was don Juan's way of leading
his pupil to "see" the world outside the
cultural and linguistic constraints of Western
rationalism, unencumbered by conditioned
preconceptions or the taint of personal history.
Drugs were not in themselves the destination, he
explained in Journey to Ixtlan, which was published
in 1973; they were merely one route to the
destination, to be discarded once this fundamental
shift in perception had been achieved. Journey to
Ixtlan won Castaneda his PhD from UCLA. It also made
him a millionaire.
By now, doubts about the authenticity of Castaneda's
accounts had begun to multiply. It was one thing for
him to refuse to divulge the identity and whereabouts
of the Yaqui sage (don Juan, he always made clear,
was a pseudonym which he used to protect his
teacher's privacy), but quite another for him to
refuse to let his field notes be examined by other
anthropologists. But whatever the doubts about the
books' provenance, even the most sceptical critics
agreed that they were powerful parables about the
search for personal enlightenment, "remarkable
works of art" as the author Joyce Carol Oates
described them.
In 1976, a teacher of psychology named Richard de
Mille (the son of Cecil B.) published the first
comprehensive critique of the don Juan books,
Castaneda's Journey: The Power and the Allegory,
detailing myriad inconsistencies in the chronology of
Castaneda's accounts and the character of don Juan.
Don Juan, de Mille concluded, was a work of fiction,
but Castaneda "wasn't a common con man, he lied
to bring us the truth ... This is a sham-man bearing
gifts." But de Mille's book vanished without
trace while Castaneda's continued to sell.
An anthropologist named Jay Courtney Fikes provided
yet another twist on the don Juan stories in his
book, Carlos Castaneda, Academic Opportunism and the
Psychedelic Sixties, published in 1993. In this,
Fikes suggested that rather than being one
individual, don Juan was actually an amalgam of two
or possibly three authentic Indian shamans, including
a well-respected Mazatec healer called Maria Sabina,
who had also collaborated with the anthropologist
Gordon Wasson on his study of psychedelic mushrooms
in the '50s.
"I would see Castaneda as an
anthropologist-lite, as it were, or a travel
writer," Fikes now says. "There is a
residue of authenticity there. I think he did make
trips to Mexico and he had some interesting
experiences, and he then fictionalised them and
called them non-fiction.
"I don't think he set out in 1960 to create a
massive hoax. The first book took off, it was a
best-seller: there were very few people who publicly
expressed scepticism at that point, so he just kept
going."
Castaneda's response to the criticisms was always the
same. He was writing about states of mind and
perception outside the normal conventions of
academia, so the normal terms of reference did not
apply. Sorcerers, he said, have only one point of
reference: "infinity". He would continue
repeating the same mantra to the very end. "I
invented nothing."
Castaneda maintained that don Juan "left the
world" in 1973, dying "the immaculate
death" of the warrior. His departure did nothing
to stem the flow of Castaneda books. Throughout the
'70s and '80s, a stream of books appeared expounding
further on don Juan's teachings. Diligent readers
noted that the anthropological references seemed to
grow fewer and that the books increasingly bore the
traces of other influences: the study of
phenomenology; Eastern mysticism; existentialism.
Something weird started happening to don Juan's
voice. One minute he was intoning sonorous desert
utterances, the next joshing in American slang, and
the next assuming the stilted, jargon-heavy
circumlocutions of a professor of philosophy. (In
Castaneda's last book, The Active Side of Infinity,
which is due to be published next year, don Juan is
quoted as saying, "The effect of the force that
is descending on you, which is disintegrating the
foreign installation, is that it pulls sorcerers out
of their syntax" - a mouthful for a professor of
linguistics, let alone a Yaqui Indian.)
Critics talked of "the grim sound of barrels
being scraped" and noted an increasingly
Messianic tone in Castaneda's pronouncements. With
don Juan having "left the world", Castaneda
himself had become the heir to the lineage, the
nagual. No longer a mere disciple, he had become the
prophet and, as befits a prophet, he began to gather
around him a coterie of disciples. Foremost among
these were three women - Carol Tiggs, Florinda
Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar - who, according to
Castaneda, had also been students of don Juan.
"The four disciples of don Juan", as
Castaneda styled them, lived in close, but apparently
celibate, proximity to each other. Castaneda once
said that he eschewed relationships of "a sexual
order", for shamanic reasons. More prosaically,
rumours suggested he was incapacitated by "a
groin injury", said to have been sustained when
he was young.
For years, the group remained largely reclusive,
apparently following don Juan's dictum that the
sorcerer's way was to "touch the world
sparingly". But in 1993, Castaneda suddenly
emerged into the public eye, propagating what he
claimed to be the culmination of the sorcerer's arts
- a system of bodily movements which he called
"magical passes". These movements,
Castaneda claimed, had been taught to initiates over
27 generations in conditions of the utmost secrecy
and passed on by don Juan to Castaneda and his three
other disciples before his death.
Through these "magical passes", Castaneda
claimed, the Toltec sorcerers had attained an
increased level of awareness which allowed them to
perform "indescribable feats of perception"
and experience "unequalled states of physical
prowess and well-being". The "magical
passes" even had a brand name - "Carlos
Castaneda's Tensegrity" (an architectural term
meaning a combination of tension and integrity) - and
an organisation called Cleargreen, set up by
Castaneda to promote seminars and workshops.
Castaneda himself would appear at these seminars,
alongside his three women companions, talking about
his experiences with don Juan, before introducing a
team of demonstrators, dressed in black work-out
uniforms and known as "the chacmools", to
demonstrate the movements.
Even the most credulous students of his writings were
puzzled. In all of the don Juan books there had been
no mention of Tensegrity or "magical
passes". If these movements were so important,
why had Castaneda never mentioned them before? And
why was he breaking the habit of a lifetime by
appearing in public to talk about them?
Castaneda's explanation was typically mind-boggling.
It was true that don Juan had always maintained that
the "magical passes" should be kept secret,
but an extraordinary event had dictated they should
now be made public. While following don Juan's
techniques in mastering "the art of
dreaming", Carol Tiggs had "disappeared
into a dream" in a hotel room in Mexico City
sometime in the '70s. She had vanished, Castaneda
said, in order to act as a beacon from the other
side, guiding initiates through "the dark sea of
awareness". In 1985, however, Tiggs made a
surprising reappearance in a California bookshop
where Castaneda was giving a talk. Her reappearance
had convinced Castaneda that the "message of
freedom" enshrined in the "magical
passes" should now be passed on to the world.
More puzzling still was the fact that there is no
tradition of such bodily movements among pre-Hispanic
Indians and that Castaneda's "magical
passes" bore a suspiciously close resemblance to
such Asiatic disciplines as kung fu and Tai Chi.
In fact, it seemed that for inspiration Castaneda had
travelled no further than the Los Angeles suburb of
Santa Monica, to the classes of a kung fu teacher and
"energy master" named Howard Lee. Lee
confirms that Castaneda studied with him between 1974
and 1989.
There were allegations that Castaneda paid a
substantial sum of money "and the phallus of a
puma" in order to deter Lee from taking legal
action. Lee denies this ("A what of a
puma?") and says he has never seen the
"magical passes" in action. "Some
people have said they're similar to what I teach, but
I don't know. I've never seen them and I'm not
interested."
Whatever their origins, the courses in Tensegrity
proved extremely profitable. Workshops and seminars,
costing from $US200 to $1,000, attracted hundreds of
participants, stimulating a brisk business in
Tensegrity T-shirts ("The magic is in the
movement") and videos, on sale for $29.95.
In its marketing, promises of well-being and
promotion of Castaneda as the guru, sceptics could
see in Tensegrity the seeds of a New Age religion.
"Castaneda had built himself up as a prophet
through the don Juan books," says Jay Fikes.
"The bible, so to speak, was written; but there
was no ritual, so it was necessary to invent
one."
Whether Castaneda's books were wholly true, partly
true or fiction, even his sternest critics
acknowledged that their success opened the door to a
tradition of authentic Indian shamanic teachings
which had hitherto been unavailable.
In the years following the publication of the don
Juan books, a number of teachers emerged in America,
claiming to be in the same Toltec tradition as don
Juan, even to have been taught personally by him or
his contemporaries.
Among the most prominent of these teachers is Merilyn
Tunneshende - "The Nagual Woman" who says
she met the man Castaneda had called don Juan on a
railway station in Yuma, Arizona, near the border
with Mexico, in 1978, five years after Castaneda
claimed he had "left the world". According
to Tunneshende, don Juan was a Yuma, not a Yaqui
Indian. She says she studied with him from 1978 until
his death in 1991. At don Juan's instigation, she met
Castaneda in Los Angeles in 1979, remaining in
intermittent contact.
Tunneshende became the most vocal critic of
Castaneda's Tensegrity, writing a series of articles
in the American magazine Magical Blend - a forum for
such matters - alleging that Castaneda had been
expelled from the sorcerer's circle in 1980.
"Carlos was a very insecure man in a lot of
ways," Tunneshende now says. "With
Tensegrity, he never felt as though he could reveal
at any point that this was something he'd developed
himself. It was as if he needed the name of don Juan
to lend whatever he was doing some authority."
Castaneda, according to one observer, had begun to
behave "like the Toltec pope". In 1995 he
filed suit against another Toltec teacher - and an
old friend - Victor Sanchez, claiming that the jacket
of Sanchez's book, The Teachings of Don Carlos,
infringed Castaneda's copyright. And in 1997 he
launched a lawsuit against his ex-wife, Margaret
Runyon Castaneda, over the publication of her book, A
Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda.
In his determination to obliterate any traces of
personal biography, Castaneda had never made any
reference to a wife. According to Margaret, however,
she and Castaneda were married in Tijuana in 1960,
and while they lived together for only six months,
their divorce did not become absolute until 1973.
Furthermore, she claims, Castaneda insisted that she
sign documents with the California Department of
Public Health making him the legal father of her son,
Carlton Jeremy, or CJ, by another relationship.
The book is a gossipy and affectionate account of her
life with a man she describes as "looking like a
Cuban bellhop". (Only 165 cm, Castaneda favoured
neat haircuts and three-button suits.) It casts an
interesting light on the possible origins of the don
Juan books. Long before encountering don Juan, she
suggests, Castaneda had read extensively on the use
of psychotropic drugs among Indians, eastern
mysticism and the literature of Aldous Huxley. She
recounts a dinner with friends in 1959 - a year
before Castaneda's supposed meeting with don Juan -
when the conversation turned to how the great
religious scriptures were never written by the
teachers but by their disciples. "It seemed to
make a big impression on him," Margaret
Castaneda writes.
Which is not to say that don Juan did not exist.
Margaret confirms that her husband made frequent
field trips to Mexico in the time he was supposedly
apprenticed to the Yaqui sage. But by and large,
Castaneda seems to have been as much a mystery to his
wife as he was to everyone else.
For Castaneda, there was a tragic irony in his
emergence into the public spotlight. For by 1996, at
the time when he was promoting courses promising
"unequalled states of physical prowess and
well-being", his own health was said to be in a
state of steady decline. His lawyer, Deborah Drooz,
maintains that the author was ill for "some 10
to 12 months" before his death in April 1998.
Other sources close to Castaneda, however, claim that
he was aware that he had cancer at least two years
before he died.
Shortly before his death, his agent delivered to his
publisher the manuscript of his last book, The Active
Side of Infinity. Read in the light of his death, the
book has a distinctly valedictory air. Reappraising
his encounters with don Juan, Castaneda reiterates
that "the total goal" of shamanic knowledge
is preparation for facing the "definitive
journey - the journey that every human being has to
take at the end of his life" to the region that
shamans called "the active side of
infinity". "We are beings on our way to
dying," [don Juan] said. "We are not
immortal, but we behave as if we were. This is the
flaw that brings us down as individuals and will
bring us down as a species someday."
There are any number of theories about exactly why it
took two months to announce Castaneda's own death.
Cynics point to the unfortunate coincidence of his
death with the publication of Magical Passes: it is
hardly an advertisement for a book promoting a system
fostering "health, vitality, youth and a general
sense of well-being" for its author to die of
liver cancer. However, Deborah Drooz says there was
never any intention that his death should be made
public at all. "Dr Castaneda spent his lifetime
avoiding press attention and keeping the details of
his personal life extremely private. He wanted to be
known only through his work."
Had it not been for the matter of Castaneda's will,
it is possible that his death would have gone
unremarked for years. The news leaked out when
Margaret Runyon Castaneda's son, CJ, who now goes by
the name of Adrian Vashon, received a court letter
indicating he was mentioned in Castaneda's will.
According to Drooz, Castaneda asserted "time and
time again" that Vashon was not his son. Drooz
says that Vashon is not named as a beneficiary. He is
now contesting the will and it is likely to be some
months before the matter is resolved. Castaneda's
estate is believed to be worth some $20 million.
Castenada's organisation, Cleargreen, would make no
comment when I contacted them to talk about the
author's life and death. It made its first, and to
date only, statement about the death on June 22, in a
notice posted on its Web site. This stated that he
had "left the world" in the same way as don
Juan, "with full awareness". "The
cognition of our everyday life," the statement
went on, "does not provide for a description of
a phenomenon such as this. So in keeping with the
terms of legalities and record keeping that the world
of everyday life requires, Carlos Castaneda was
declared to have died."
It is a statement ripe with ambiguity, leaving open
the tantalising suggestion, for those inclined to
believe it, that in his final moments Castaneda had
somehow achieved the nagual's ultimate accomplishment
of a sort of spontaneous combustion, burning in
"the fire from within".
So Carlos Castaneda is dead, but then again, perhaps
he's not. Soon after his death the Internet was
buzzing with accounts from people whom he has
supposedly visited in their dreams. It will not be
long before psychics in South Carolina and Virginia
begin "channelling" communications with
Castaneda from the other side; or, perhaps, before
another young anthropology student walks out of the
Mexican desert, bringing with him the teachings of a
sage who looks like a Cuban bellhop: a sham-man's way
of knowledge.