Between Spaces: Selected Rituals and Essays From the Archives of Templum Nigri Solis - Harris T. 2010

La Catalina/ 1962

/ kjjgfc Preface to the Second Edition

This book tells the story of a rank newcomer to the field of anthropology gradually discovering how a brilliant pretender named Carlos Castaneda had brought off the greatest science hoax since the Piltdown man. Borrowing Castaneda's mysterious tone, the account often imitates his narrative sleight of hand, thereby testing the reader's ability to separate the plausible from the implausible—a test much like the one imposed by Castaneda's books.

Some readers of this book whose view of things was rather more solemn and literal than mine hated the test, but others enjoyed being fooled occasionally by a quasi-Castanedic chronicle. A few fans were positively transported by a gleeful suspicion that the book had been written by Castaneda himself, playing his most convoluted trick. This illusion was strengthened by minor coincidences such as both writers being scholars, of about the same age, having wives named Margaret, living in California, speaking Spanish, and providing [in my casej no personal history and (in Castaneda's) no credible personal history. Delighted as I was with that reaction, I must state for the record that in spite of common interests in social science, religion, metaphysics, magic, ESP, visions, and trickery, Castaneda and I are definitely not the same person. Let me also certify that I am not playing any more tricks on the reader, and point out that w hen I did play them 1 also furnished plenty of clues, mostly in the notes, to what was straight and what was twisted. Of course, not everybody reads notes or picks up clues. To start things off right, I assure all readers past and present that the UCSB library door did break exactly as Chapter Ont? says it did.

During the two years between editions popular critics flatly proclaimed the don loan hooks a hoax—a belated illumination provoked chiefly by the outrageous extremes their generally

dense credulity or timid skepticism had driven Castaneda to in The Second Ring of Power, published in 1977. Like many another hoaxer, Castaneda had worked hard to give himself away, only to be frustrated volume after volume by man's capacity for self-deception and media's enslavement to fads.

The same interval saw the anthropological profession openly acknowledging the hoax at last, and 1 think it would be fair to say Castaneda’s Journey was the main source of this newfound readiness to announce in public what most anthropologists had been saying in private since A Separate. Reality appeared, in 1971,

Luckily for detective-story buffs, general recognition of the hoax did not spell the end of the Castaneda plot but barely the beginning. Writing in Religion (Autumn 1977), Stephen Reno said de Mille's expose had merely changed the question from "Did it happen?"|it being Carlos's strange adventures) to "How could it have happened?" (it now being the academic ratification of Castaneda's fantasies, particularly UCLA's covert acceptance of a rctitled published novel as a dissertation in scientific anthropology).

Thepuzzle persisted, Ralph L. Beals, one of Castaneda's early professors, complained at length in the American Anthropologist |June 1978) about his former student's evasiveness, improbable trips to Sonora, and invisible fieldnotes, but Michael Hamer—from lour of whose published works |Chapter Five proposes¹ Castaneda sequentially adapted some two-dozen ideas for don Juan—indignantly declared he was not familiar with any evidence of that borrowing (New York Times Book Review, 7 May 1978).

Given such persistence, the Castaneda plot remains largely intact. Don Juan still appeals to new-age consciousness as a fountain oi wisdom and a model for personal growth. Likely sources of his lore await detection in obscure corners of the UCLA library. Of the hoaxer's personal history meager details have been restored, while the depths of character from which the hoax arose go mostly unplumbed. Though speculations in Chapter Four ate proving close to the mark, we are still not sure what happened at UCLA, Accumulating information fails to banish the specter of Sonoragate, an appalling scenario in which certain eminent academicians knowingly tolerate or enjoy a hoax, as others carelessly indulge what (to them if not to the general reader) should be a transparent imposture Five years into the plot, when Time began the first skeptical inquiry, the academy closed ranks to cover up what had been

done, thus provoking eventual accusations of fraud and demands for investigation and censure from scholars who were not so amused as L

Such shenanigans (don |uan w^rould dub them) made it possible for a complete novice and utter outsider to write not only this book but an explanatory sequel to be titled The Don luan Papers: Further Castaneda Controversies, a unique opportunity for which I am grateful and because of which—without intending any more irony than is already inherent in the situation — I rightly and gladly call Castaneda my teacher and don Juan my benefactor.

The Piltdown comparison is far from superficial. Though Eoanthropus dawsoni (Dawson's daw n manl clung to the evolutionary tree for 41 years (1912-1953), whereas don Juan walked Sonoran sands no more than eight (1968-1976), the hoaxes are alike in several ways. This is particularly true if we compare them in rhe framework of Ronald Millar's theory (broached in The Piltdown Men, 1972) that the hoaxer was not after all Charles Dawson, a Sussex solicitor and amateur geologist who found certain skeletal fragments in a local gravel pit, but Grafton Elliot Smith, a brilliant man of science given to playing mordant jokes on his colleagues.

In Millar's closely reasoned speculation, Smith championed a theory of prehistoric cultural diffusion which would be well served by any discovery in English soil of a missing link between ape and man, an evolutionary gap now filled by A us tra-lopithecus, Preoccupied by his unfashionable thesis, Smith conceived a trick to draw^r attention to it. Over a period of several years, he deposited fragments of a modern human skull, suitably antiqued, and parts of an orang utan's jaw, stained to match, where the unsuspecting Dawson would be likely to find them. This was no careful forgery meant to stand the test of time but a clever concoction meant to explode in laughter at the expense of Smith's scientific adversaries, Filed to resemble human teeth, the orang-utan's molar surfaces bore tell-tale scratches of artificial abrasion. Much to Smith's dismay [reasons Millar) nobody looked for those signs of fabrication. Since he could not openly question Dawson's discoveries without risking exposure, Smith supplied new evidence of their spuriousness, to no avail. Instead of betraying the fakery, parts of a single skull planted at different sites gave rise to a second Piltdown man, and only untimely death kept the discoverer from being knighted. Despairing of exhibits preposterous enough to disillusion his credulous colleagues, the hoaxer

went to his grave without confessing. Not until 1953, when he had been dead for two decades, did anyone scrutinize the Piltdown relics as a possible forgery.

In light of Millar s theory, let me now list the features these hoaxes have in common:

Each could have been exposed at once by a competent skeptical inquiry—into the shape of Piltdown's teeth, into the existence of Castaneda's voluminous Spanish fieldnotcs, never offered fur examination and now, alas, destroyed by convenient flooding of Castaneda's basement.

Each was the product of a clever prankster who was very knowledgeable about the relevant science.

Each provided superficially plausible support fora particular scientific tendency—Smith's cultural diffusion, the ethnosci-enceand ethnomethodology Castaneda encountered at UCLA.

Each was hailed by some as a giant step in science hut was doubted by others.

Each wasted the time of or made fools of some trusting colleagues.

Each cast suspicion on an innocent party Piltdown on Dawson, don Juan on Theodore Graves. When Don Strachan was reviewing Castaneda's lourney for the Lox ApgeJes Times Book Review (6 Feb 1977], a UCLA anthropology professor, who requested anonymity, told him 'Graves was the prime mover" of Castaneda's doctoral committee. In fact, Graves did not sign the dissertation but had left the country for New Zealand a year before it was signed by five other professors.

Each hoaxer presented ever more extravagant material in an apparent but long unsuccessful attempt to unmask the imposture.

Neither hoaxer confessed. Castaneda, of course, can still do so, but frank confession would be quite out of character for him. His flagrant fourth and outlandish fifth books constitute a sort of implicit confession.

In certain other ways, the hoaxes are dissimilar. Grafton Elliot Smith seems to have had no accomplices, but credence is strained by the optimistic proposal that nor one of Castaneda's faculty sponsors knew what was going on during the five years in which he presented his suspect, unsupported, self-contradictory writings for academic approval.

The scientific cost of Piltdown man was high, of don Juan low. Some forty years Sir Arthur Keith played dupe to Piltdown; a quarter of a century Arthur Smith Woodward hunted additional fragments of him- countless lectures and

articles expounded his evolutionary significance In contrast, few anthropologists subscribed to don Juan, no pits were dug to bud him or monuments erected co him; trifling research funds were diverted by him. The spate of fuanist writings has been literary, philosophical, or occult, seldom scientific.

Piltdown did more harm than good, his only contribution a warning against further frauds. Even within the confines of science don |uan may do more good than harm, for he reveals the condition of anthropology, disclosing a widespread confusion between authenticity and validity—a false inference that don Juan must exist because some of his lore agrees with what Indians say—and manifesting the rift between those anthropologists who (in Colin Turn hull's words] "regard anthropology primarily as a humanity and those who regard it primarily as a science."

In 19551, 5 Weiner convinced the world of Dawson’s apparent duplicity and Piltdown’s undeniable illegitimacy. Four years later, when Weiner's Piltdown Forgery was galvanizing anthropology students much as The Teachings of Don I tian would electrify them ten years thence, Castaneda began his studies at UCLA. Reflecting on his subsequent career dare we entertain the fantastic notion that the Piltdown hoax not only foreshadowed the don Juan hoax but also inspired it? I believe that if we do not entertain such fantastic notions we shall never understand Carlos Castaneda.

In.S’ci.f^nJ Ring of’Power Castaneda soared to his fifth level of incredibility, thus disillusioning a legion of don loan s disci pics. As don Juan's loyal debunker, I am not entirely pleased by this turn of events. Though fewer naive followers survive to accuse me of sacrilege, a small cadre determined to exonerate UCLA have seized upon Castaneda's wild fourth and fifth books not as an implicit confession of hoaxing but as an abandonment of factual reporting "Anyone reading the later books/' snorted one academic legitimize!, "would naturally conclude he was a fraud." My considered judgment is that anyone carefully and skeptically reading theeurJs books would also conclude he was a fraud Castaneda's first book, published by the University of California Press with faculty approval, and his third book, accepted as a dissertation, cannot both be factual accounts, because they contradict each other. Possibly under a spell cast by dun Juan, 1 carelessly omitted a telling example of that contradiction. Let me add it here.

During the first two years of Carlos's storied apprenticeship (narrative 1961-19621 don Juan speaks standard English one

day, in The Teachings, slang the next, in journey to Ixtiau, a remarkable counterpoint which can, of course, be laid to don Juan's professed translator, Castaneda. Haider to explain away than this counterpoint of speech or translation is a corresponding counterpoint of mood.

The Teachings cells a gloomy, somber tale, in which excitement tends toward fear or wonder, seldom toward joy or amusement. When, in narrative-1968, the legendary Carlos takes up the second part of hi* apprenticeship (recounted in the second book, A Separate Reality], he finds "the total mood of don Juan's teaching. .. more relaxed. He laughed and al so made me laugh a great deal. There seemed to he a deliberate attempt to minimize seriousness in general. He clowned during the truly crucial moments of the second cycle."

The text bears out this description, and when we get to Ixtlan. the third book, don Juan is a regular cut-up, a walking koan, a Zen buffoon, notwithstanding that Ixtlan is set back in the early period, of the somber Tetic/rings. So we are asked to believe that "the total mood of don Juan's teaching" changed from day to day during 1961-1962 in perfect concordance with our reading of either the first or the third book. Now I grant don Juan is a versatile fellow, and no doubt prescient, but 1 du not deeply believe he could infallibly assume the proper mood each day to fit the tone of one of two books in which his mood would be contradictorily described seven and eleven years later. Nor can 1 think of any authorly excuse for this contradiction. U don Juan's chronicler could not distinguish smiling from frowning, or brooding silence from roaring laughter, throughout two years, or if he didn't care which way he reported them, why should we credit his report? 1 judge this one systematic flaw, all by itself, unsupported by numerous other contradictions described in Chapter Three, to be fatal to Castaneda's supposed fieldwork and to his nominal dissertation, now standing cheerfully on a shelf in the UCLA library.

Having erred once in dun Juan's favor, 1 also erred once against him. Chapter Three of the first edition argued hilariously but incorrectly that "pulling your leg" could not have been translated from Spanish; the Spanish, Juan Tovar has shown, is tomdndotc el pelo. My conclusion, however, remains unchanged: Except for occasional details, the conversations with don Juan were originally composed in English, by Castaneda alone, In this edition, leg-pulling gives way to an inquiry into the name Mescalito. Chapter Four adds a new view of Goldschmidt's "allegory." Chapter Six restores Barbara

Myerhoff to her rightful place at the waterfall and digs up Michael Hamer's missing reference to Yaquis using Datura,

Further research has traced additional sources for don Juan's wisdom and Carlos's exploits. The fieldwork of just one of Castaneda s fellow UCLA graduate students, for example, offers the following Juamst ideas: the spiritual warrior, the shields of the warrior, the warrior's strange left eye, death threatening from the left, the soul defender's special fighting form, the spirit catcher, the head that turns into a bird, and the name Ixtlan (taken by Castaneda for Mazatec Genaro's home town, though there is no Mazatcc Ixtlan). Such details await publication in The Don [mm Papers, hut one thing must be told here: the origin of 'la Catalina.'

How Chapter Nine scrambles to explain that name! And what an odd name it is: 'the Catherine'—in quotation marks! Though I think my previous guesses still have peripheral merit, 1 now believe I have found the central source of the only significant female figure in Castaneda's first four books.

La Catalina,' you may recall, was a beautiful but fearsome witch, who trapped Carlos's soul and interfered with his hunting for power. A worthy opponent, don |uan called her. To restore her personal history we have* to go back to a rather surprising place, the Saturdd} Evening, Post, where John Kohler's article of 2 November 1963 was the first to name her.

In those early days, I have come to believe, Castaneda was an avid reader of the Post, where in October 1958 he undoubtedly read an article, "Drugs that Shape Men's Minds,'' by one of his favorite writers, Aldous Huxley.

"Stimulators of the mystical faculties" like peyote and LSD, wrote Huxley, "make possible a genuine religious experience" by which "large numbers of men and women (can ] achieve a radical self*transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things," which will constitute a religious revolution.

Castaneda was not the only spiritual revolutionary to take inspiration from Huxley. When professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert |later Baba Ram Dass) got into trouble at Harvard with their psychedelic evangelism, they set up a research and training center for membersuf their "International Federation for Inner Freedom'' in the Mexican fishing village of Zihuatanejo, up the coast from Acapulco. There "It-Ji I" found a shoreline sanctuary in the charming little Hotel Catalina

I sat transfixed all evening before a tree, feeling in it the very tieencss of trees,” said one ch cmico-spi ritual tripper in Kohler's account.

"1 sensed it was a tree by its odor," a drugless Carlos would recall in Idles of Power (200). "Something in me 'knew' that that peculiar odor was the 'essence' of tree."

"Our favorite concepts are standing in rhe way of a floodtide/' Leary and Alpert warned. "The verbal dam is collapsing."

"I saw the loneliness of man as a gigantic wave . .. held back by the invisible wall of a metaphor," Castaneda would write in his druglcss Ixtlan (267).

If-If proposed to liberate its members from their "webs," so that they might soar through the infinite space of consciousness. Carlos's be-mushmomed head would fly among silvery crows; his undrugged eyes would see a range of mountains as a "web of light fibers" \lxtlan 2021.

Though If-If adopted The Tibetan Book of the Dead as a drug-taker's manual, don Tuan would tell Carlos the book w as a "bunch of crap" (Reality 194).

Dashing the hopes of some five-thousand acidophile applicants, the Mexican government, on 13 June 1963, "gave the 20 Americans then staying at the Catalina five days to clear out of the country."

"If anybody can show^r us a better road to happiness," the notorious Leary challenged, "we'll drop our research. But we don't think they will."

A better road was already running through the unknown mind of Carlos Castaneda—don Juan's path with heart — which w^Tould carry future readers away from what Castaneda saw as the haphazard drug-fiendery of the Catalina, toward a disciplined and eventually drugless mysticism. Jn this nil-proclaimed competition for the hearts and minds of self-transceivers, Leary soon came to grief and Castaneda triumphed. The impact of a worthy opponent would elicit a warrior's best efforts, don Juan said; the opponent he thought worthy of Carlos was la Catalina. ’ In the fall of calendar-1962, If-If flourished in Zihuatanejo; in the fall of narrative-1962, Carlos survived six hair-raising encounters with his worthy opponent in Sonora

A startling photograph in Kohler's article shows a formidable young woman in a leopard-skin bathing suit wading into the Mexican surf after taking LSD, her long left hand extended downward toward the water. She is, the caption tells us, "feeling the power of the ocean." That remarkable image, I believe, incubated four years in Castaneda's brain, emerged in 1968 as a black bird, "a fiendish witch" who wanted to finish don Juan off—before Castaneda s mythogcnic power could be felt in the world through the don Juan allegory.

1. THE DAY OF THE COYOTE

In Dr. Wills' full sight, at a distance of about four feet, a saucer . . . hovered for a split second, then with a loud report snapped in two and fell straight down. *

Rumbling sounds were heard and the glass broke in a wall picture of Jesus.

One night in 1973 Margaret Castaneda was in her living room waiting for Carlos to call from Mexico, when a sound "like a gunshot" came from rhe kitchen. Rushing in, she found a crystal dish shattered into a thousand pieces. Neither the dish on top of it nor the one beneath had moved. Next day Carlos did call, explaining that her line had been busy He had placed his cal], he said, just when the dish had shattered.

1 can't vouch for the details of Margaret's story, hut 1 have no reason to question them. Unaccountable breakage is firmly established in serious literature (like the quotations above! though its causes can only be guessed. Often it seems to come and go with angry feelings of some person on the scene. Whether the shattering dish was a sorcerer's greeting from Carlos or a mental stamp of Margaret's foot when the phone refused to ring, such perplexing events do keep bursting into our ordinary reality, if we are willing to notice them.

A story 1 can vouch for is the following. On 6 September 1975 I sent a letter to anthropologist Carlos Castaneda saying I was working on this book, asking for some technical information from his dissertation, and suggesting we get together for lunch.

* see notes beginning on page L⁷⁷

Castaneda had written four best sellers about his 12-year apprenticeship in the Sonoran desert under a Yaqui Indian sorcerer named don Juan Mattis. There his head had turned into a crow and flown away, he had become brother to the coyote, and he had learned to erase his personal history. That erasure was making it difficult for me to write a well rounded book. Knowing his reputation for being elusive, I didn't really expect him to meet me for lunch, but 1 hoped he would answer the letter.

On 1 October, having heard not a word from Castaneda, I visited the library at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to sec a rare book called Mushrooms Rus.sija and History, which I thought might have influenced him Arriving a few minutes before closing time, I could make only a cursory inspection of the work, but what I saw convinced me 1 was on the right track, and 1 said 1 would come back in two days to examine it again.

Two days later I was back, but the book was not to he had. The night before, library assistant Howard Rankins had been startled by a noise "like a rifle shot." Searching the deserted reading room, he found nothing amiss at first, then froze in his tracks as he caught sight of the plate glass door to the rare book room. No longer transparent, the glass was mottled like marble. Stepping closer he saw long cracks radiating from a pinhole about five feet from the floor.

Tn the morning, workmen boarded up the ominous slab to keep glass from falling into the reading room. No possible trajectory for a missile could be found, so the door was deemed co have shattered spontaneously. With a sheet of plywood safely in place nobody could get his hands on the mushroom book for a week or two. Department head Curtis Brown hoped the delay would not inconvenience me too much.

"I'd like to get Rankins's description of what happened/' I said. "I might be able to use: it in my book,"

"Surely/' Brown said. "We can give you his number." "1 don't suppose he noticed a coyote around at the time." "A coyote?" Brown smiled indulgently,

"Or a crow/' 1 said. "A coyote or a crow when the door broke?"

'This is the eighth floor/ Brown said kindly. "We never see any animals up here."

It was a silly question, because a coyote stands only two feet tall, and that pinhole was at eye level for a sorcerer five-foot five. 1 could see the whole pattern of radial cracks through the

window on the opposite side of the rare book room. If Carlos was warning me to keep my nose out of the history he had erased, what should I do? Don Juan, [ knew, would deflect a worthy opponent's magic bullet to a target of his own choosing, In telling this story, I believe 1 have followed his teaching.

Sifting rumors was a major task:

Castaneda was killed in a Mexican bus crash.

Castaneda is alive and well at his grandfather's farm in Brazil.

Castaneda's next book is the biography of an old Yaqui furniture maker.

Castaneda confessed to a Harvard class that his don Juan books were a hoax.

Castaneda is controlling other people's dreams in a UCLA research project.

Castaneda lived for several weeks at the house of a lady in central California. Then he was asked to leave. It seems he wasn't the authentic Castaneda.

Castaneda spent months in 1966 as a psychiatric patient at the UCLA Medical Center. George Olduvai was a UCLA student at the time and he knew all about it. Did George see Castaneda in the hospital? No. Did he talk to the doctors? No—but it was common knowledge.

Benita Zorro knows the man who introduced Carlos to don Juan. Benita lives at no particular address in the Topa Topa Valley. 1 call the man who knows Benita, and he takes my number. She doesn't call back.

Al Egon has a photo of don fuan. I call him in Los Angeles.

"I understood don Joan didn't allow pictures.”

"That's right This picture was taken surreptitiously." "Who took it?"

"I can't discuss that."

"Could 1 publish it in my book?"

"No, no. It can't be shown to anybody."

"Who has seen it besides you?"

"Nobody."

"You must have taken it, then."

"1 can't discuss that."

Al goes on to say I shouldn't even begin to write my book until I have taken at least SOO LSD trips. Hell him I'm fighting a deadline.

Reactions to Castaneda and his works ^see page 24) range from visionary enthusiasm, through angry rejection, to com

plete lack oi interest My own opinions arc just as well balanced but not so extreme. I bring some good news and some bad news, some praise and some blame, some affirmations and some refutations. While I have not joined the Castaneda Idolaters' Club, neither can I claim membership in the League of Outraged Skeptics and I certainly do not belong to the Committee to Scamp Out Sorcery. Far from it. Sorcery lives. Magic is all around us. Swedenborg sees a tire burning 300 miles away. LID. Home floats in and out of hotel windows. A vacuum-physics experiment implodes just as the Subatomic jinx is passing through town on a train. A soldier is wounded and his mother bleeds* Mild-mannered bumpkins turn into murdering satanicbeasts. A sexy dolphin tries co make it with an off-duty restaurant hostess. Lionel Tiger prowls Manhattan shoulder to shoulder with Robin Fox. And crows haunting the Irvine campus are taken for don luan and Carlos Castaneda* This is a deep, multifaceted subject, having both comic and sober sides. Like the dreamer and the dreamed, I expect to he on all sides at once.

To begin with; Carlos Castaneda must not be mistaken tor Margaret Mead. ],R*R. Tolkien, Swami Vivekananda, P.T. Barnum, Plato, or the Great Pretender—though he has something in common with each of them. Castaneda is an original: there is nobody else quite like him And he is controversial, no doubt about it. 1 will not waste any time trying to be neutral about him: but 1 will not be for him or against him either: 1 will he for him and against him simultaneously.

In that contradiction, 1 shall not be alone. Legions betray mixed feelings about Castaneda. Those he has tricked laugh wryly at his slyness. Those he has betrayed forgive him through their tears. Critics boo him for one thing and applaud him fur another. Myriads adore him, but no one simply despises him. His former wife told me with cheery regret: "Carlos is one of those people you can love and hate at the same time." Exactly. One ferocious, bearded fellow; whose name escapes me now, told me a tale of Carlos Coyote, Trickster Teacher.

"I had this kilo of grass/' he said, "and my stupid cat pissed on it. Carlos was there, and 1 asked him what I ought to do. He said to take a sharp knife and carefully cut out just the part the cat had pissed on—and save it. He said to throw the rest away, Well, he got chat peyote-chewing grin on his face, so I knew' he was kidding. Rut then he came around later when I wasseparat-ing the seeds (which I keep! from the stems (which! throw' out|.

Hey!' he said, 'Don't throw the stems away. Don Juan told me they're the best part for stJeing. Hell, everybody knows better than that, but I was really into The Teachings at that time, so I thought, don Juan must know a lot more about grass than the rest of us. 'Okay, J said, 'I'll save them/ 'lust make tea out of them/says Carlos, 'You'll be surprised/Right. But that time he wasn't smiling. So I made tea out of them. 1 didn't .see anything, but I sure got a helluva headache/' Chuckling through clenched teeth, my friend refilled his shot glass, till it ran over on the table. "Carlos is one funny falcon coyote,” he said.

Not being addicted to best sellers, pop mysticism, drug trips, cactus, or Indians, and having too many other things to read already, I had survived well into the spring of 1975 without reading a word of Castaneda. Of course 1 had admired the mesmerizing black crow on the cover of his first (Pocket) book, the flash-faced levitator on his second, the fleet white falcon on his third, and the ten-foot moth on his fourth, but I had resolved not to be seduced by any of those entrancing symbols. Having seen no book reviews, I felt pretty well insulated from Castaneda—whoever he was—but still his far-flung silvery web entangled me. One after another, various weighty academic articles ! was reading kept mentioning him in passing—with respect, with admiration, even with awe—and gradually the feeling grew that I ought to check out his books just to see what was going on there. Perhaps he did know something 1 didn't know but needed to know.

And then there was my niece, a most enthusiastic young woman. She kept harping on Castaneda. "What's the general theme?" 1 asked her "Nobody can describe don Juan to you," she said. ' You have to read the books yourself." One day she dumped all four of them on me. "Start at page one/' she said, "and go straight through. Don't skip around and don't leave anything out/' "I heard you could get the message," 1 said, "just by reading a few pages in Tales of Power." "Forget that!" she yelped. You can't fool around with don Juan. You have to take the whole trip."

For months the books stayed in a pile on the table where she had putthem. Everytime I walked by, that fanatical crow fixed me with his angry eye. "What arc you waiting for?" he cawed. I shuffled him down into the pile, but then Old Clow head kept walking toward me out of the sky—and where was that spout of water coming from, anyway? 1 shuffled them down and got the white falcon. He was okay at first, but then he turned into a

flying fish, which reminded me of the loneliness and seasickness of childhood, so I balanced the hardcover on top of the three pulps and was relieved to see the two dusty chums sitting peacefully back to back in the moth-fanned purple twilight. Eventually I began to wonder what they were talking about.

k is true [as don Juan says—and Michael Polanyi said before him) that once you learn something you have learned it. Never can you go back to where you were before you learned it. For better or worse, it has become □ part of you. One thingl learned from reading Castaneda was that there were two funny little old guys out there in the desert who were a real kick in the head. I wanted to go out there and talk to them—which I could easily have done, since both of them spoke excellent Spanish, a language I can understand tolerably well if people don't speak too fast. 1 hadn't learned any Yaqui yet, of course—hupo hu’upat kateka npaupatia (skunk sitting on a stump making a noise like a skunk)—hut that wasn't necessary. The only obstacle between me and Carlos's playmates was Carlos himself. He wouldn't give out their address.

Another thing I learned was that Castaneda was kicking some very big true ideas around: There is more than one kind of reality. There is magic that is not illusion. The world is what comes out of what can be. The world we know is something we are doing. Part of you is not in this world. Part of you knows what the rest of you doesn't. If you trust your silent seif, your talking self won't have to stay so ignorant. A wise man knows his time to act is short. Say hello to Death: he has some good advice for you. Responsibility gives power. But greater than power—is knowledge.

Wow! I thought. This young UCLA anthropologist is plugged into the right channel. But he has a very noisy receiver. Along with the good stuff, it keeps giving out interference like: On the other hand, greater than knowledge—is sometimes power. A man with a past is weak and helpless. Woman is the scariest thing on earth. Nothing really matters. Nobody can be happy. Nobody can get close to anybody. You can love the world but nor the people in it. Laughing is always better than crying. If your kid is dying, see him as a fog of crystals, and you'll feel a whole lot better. A man of knowledge w alks on the river of life without getting his feet wet. And there is no way to tell one kind of reality from another.

What a mess! The wisdom of the ages folded into an omelet with the neurosis of the century. It didn't help that Carlas was

always badmouthmg him sell as a neurotic. I had to agree with him. Like the psychiatrist who told his patient: Don't worry about having an inferiority complex. You 're inferior.

But he was superior too, 1 mean—how many anthropology graduate students would have the gall to tackle the world outside the world and the man inside the man while leaping into oblivion and bouncing back a celebrity? You have to give Castaneda plenty of credit for effrontery.

And for talent. Joseph Cunrad grew up speaking Polish and became a master oi English prose. Vladimir Nabokov did the same from Russian. Castaneda started out with Spanish [or maybe Portuguese or Italian -weU get to those later) and wrote 1,000 pages of quite readable, mostly entertaining colloquial American narrative and 70 pages of utterly unreadable but logically self-consistent social-science jargon. That's pretty good.

One fervent follower of don Juan told me: "The reason you can't grasp the fact that don Juan really exists is that you can't believe a Yaqui Indian could express himself with clarity and elegance. What you don't realize and what many anthropologists don't realise—that the oral tradition of sorcery cuts across tubal cultures, going back for thousands of years and displaying an eloquence far above the local cultural Level." "Shamans every where/' Gwyneth Cravens wrote, "have been found to have unusually large and poetic vocabularies." 1 admit don Juan often waxes poetic, hut his shamanistic vocabulary also supports discourses that sound like this:

To recapitulate my teachings, little Carlos—I first taught you the routines of the game we were hunting, then I taught you to test your traps against those routines. When you indulged in your self-pity, 1 taught you to assume responsibility for the acts that brought you to the state that elicited that self-pity. By altering your use of those acts or elements, you changed the facade of your tonal. But changing the facade meant only that you assigned a secondary place to a formerly important element. After that I taught you to stop your internal dialog and to account for everything that was accountable.

Other shamans, not so well traveled or educated as don Juan, sound more like this:

I am the mushroom that speaks, it says. I am a mouth awaiting the voice of heaven. lama wind that blows on the mountain, it says, 1 am star, moon, cloud, and dew on the grass I am the one that goes to meet the day, it says. I am rhe one that

holds up the world. I search out sickness, it says. 1 am the one that cures. All things that should be together 1 bring together and all things that should be apart I separate. 1 am the one that speaks in the silence, that shines m the darkness, that talks with those who live in the sky. I am the one that brings truth to the asker, it says.

Castaneda was lucky to find a shaman who could lecture like a university professor and not one of those monotonous mountain poets. We have to score a big plus for his finding such a sophisticated informant —or for inventing one, if it turns out don Juan doesn't really exist.

I began my trek into don Juan's desert with an open mind. Sure, I had heard rumors. Castaneda wrote his field notes in a motel room, and so on. Rut 1 thought: If 1 were a struggling graduate student or an obscure professor, and some guy came along and wrote four best sellers in a row while I was trying to finish my dissertation or get some puny five-page paper published in the American Anthropologist. I might have some snide and unfair things to say about him, too. Let's just read what the man wrote and see if we believe it.

Sociologist Harold Garfinkcl says people try very hard to make sense out of random signals. Often they succeed, but the sense is theirs, it's not in the signals. Castaneda's outpourings are not random, but they are sufficiently and artfully disordered to make the reader work hard pulling the w^Thole thing together into a coherent picture. That's what novelists do, of course. They drop you right into the middle of the fun house and let you try to find your way out. You're not supposed to escape until the last page.

Castaneda goes them one better. He never lets you out Even when you reach page 1000, you still aren't sure what happened when Carlos and Pablito jumped off the edge of the plateau, you still don't know- where don Juan took his degree. Reading the first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, one gets a strong and consistent impression that this is a factual report of what went on in deserts of Arizona and Mexico between June 1960 and September 1965. Every entry is dated, and the dates check out on the perpetual calendar (except for 8 April 1962, which is called Saturday instead of Sunday—a perfectly ordinary error that proves absolutely nothing). My nephew, a suspicious analytical type, told me he had caught Castaneda in logical errors, such as being in two places at the same time without benefit of magic. Hah! I thought. A sitting duck. Forget it.

There are no such errors anywhere in 1,000 pages. Castaneda leaves no fingerprints, no laundry' marks, no cigarette stubs, no roaches, no seeds, no steins, no nothing. His tracks fill with sand before he is over the next dune.

One man 1 talked to had spent a week with Castaneda. "If you could sum up your impression of him in a word," I said, "what would it be?" "Egnimatic," he said. "What do you mean by egnimatic? " I asked. "The story he tells. 1 couldn't get things straightened out." "The chronology?" I said. "That's it," he answered.

Castaneda's time track is like a ball of string. The reader gets utterly confused about w hat-happened-when. We're going to straighten that string out later on till it twangs like a spirit-catcher, but 1 can assure you that we are not going to find any simple concrete contradictions like having lunch in Mexico City and Los Angeles on the same day. Castaneda's contradictions arc on higher levels of abstraction.

When I finished The Teachings. I was still going along with the proposition that Castaneda had met an old Indian in an Arizona bus station who had led him various poisonous plants, had taught him a lot of intricate rituals, and had put him through trials of endurance and tests of sanity not all of which he had passed with high scores. Like most readers, academic or amateur, I wanted to believe what I was reading no matter how strange it might be, and so 1 was glad that the University of California had already put its stamp of approval on Castaneda's report. "It has been assumed," the merchandising voice ol the University Press had intoned in an early ad, "that the West has produced no way of spiritual knowledge comparable to the great systems of the East. The present book is accordingly nothing less than a revelation." Whoever wrote that could not have read Rudolf Otto's Mysticism East and West, but never mind, the point is subsidiary. Castaneda's five-year apprenticeship, the ad went on, and his strangely beautiful narrative would assure his book "a place in the literature of ethnology." To back that claim, The Teachings carried a laudatory foreword by a senior professor of anthropology at UCLA acknowledging our debt to Castaneda for his patience, courage, and perspicacity in seeking out don Juan and reporting the details of the experience. "In this work," the foreword said, Castaneda "demonstrates the essential skill of good ethnography—the capacity to enter into an alien world." Such authoritative credentials could not be lightly dismissed.

The ethnological gourd began to leak, however, when I got into A Separate Reality. I don't know just how it happened. The writing was better, hut the effect was not so good. One reviewer—after finishing the fourth book, I read some thirty reviews—one reviewer said: "The story no longer seems to have the same Quality of objectivity that marked the first book." Quite so. I found myself asking: What kind of Yaqui Indian talks like this? And what exactly was Carlos doing to those unfortunate reptiles back on page—where is it anyway?—it's impossible to find anything in these books—but was that lizard caper a dream or a practical task?

Realizing before long that such ruminations would ruin the adventure lor me, I stopped my internal dialog, stepped heavily on the intrusive foot of doubt, reasserted my will, and pressed forward hopefully into the new reality. Literary license, I told myself, and Carlos's many psychotropic detours would surely account for the vagaries of his tale. Nevertheless, the seed of dissent had fallen on fertile soil, where it would silently grow for another seven-hundred pages, steadily accumulatingpower like a lonely Lophophora.

Vincent Crapanzano, au expert on shamans, wrote a scholarly article about five works of "popular anthropology"— "works which may be admired for their literary quality but which for professional anthropologists are not to be taken too seriously/' Three of the five were by Castaneda. Though the article starts out with cool academic detachment, it winds up complaining that Castaneda has let us down—has in fact let Crapanzano down personally. "He once told me that [Journey to Ixtlan] was to be his last hook on the subject," but now jthe complaint continues) he is compulsively writing more and more books, clowning for the public, playing coyly with his image, showing a lack of courage, a weakness of vision, falling dupe to his own tricks, dallying oddly with the media, and cheapening the quest. There is something inauthentic, something desperate about his act. He has not passed the test of the warrior. He has betrayed the teachings.

Anyone who ever wanted to believe m don Juan [and that includes most of us) can sympathize with Professor Crapan-zano's disillusionment. "The books," he says, "should not be read ... as an accurate description of Castaneda's apprenticeship, however accurate his reportage may be." What an oddly inconsistent statement! Is the reportage accurate or not? Surely that matters, Crapanzano thinks there must be "many"

embellishments added to the tale of the "somewhat" dubious Yaqui sorcerer, but still he does not find the tale wholly incredible or even definitely dubious. One suspects he found it wholly credible in 1968, when the first volume came out, but has been gripped by misgivings in the meantime and is hiding his embarrassment in a fog of ambivalence.

Castaneda's opus, he laments, will suffer the fate of popularized texts. "It will be worked up, exploited, made into a movie, simplified beyond recognition," and resurrected later as a mere social phenomenon by cultural historians. "Meanwhile the text that is Castaneda's will be lost." With a million copies in existence, the text that is Castaneda's will he lost ’ But this Lun ent has a deeper meaning. Something truly has been lost already: the text you and 1 and Crapanzano thought we were holding in our hands when we confidently accepted Castaneda's first innocuous sentence: In the summer of 1960, while T was an anthropology student at the University of California, Los Angeles, I made several trips to the Southwest to collect information on medicinal plants used by Indians of the area."

While the general reader does not have to endure public embarrassment like the duped expert, he does suffer the private wound of betrayal For each of us, public or private, professional or amateur, critical or gullible, the faith elicited by Castaneda's bland beginning was at least partially betrayed somewhere along the way. Whether in book two or book four, whether spontaneously or at the urging of Castaneda's many critics, the realization finally came that, to some extent anyway, we were being had Though 1 have found many ap-preciators, subscribers, followers, and defenders, I have not found anyone who expresses complete and unqualified confidence in Castaneda At the same time, I have found very few who roundly condemn him For most of us, he begins as an ingratiating stranger and ends as a family delinquent, the sort of person you have to make allowances for but can't get rid of. The best thing to do with such a fellow is to try to understand him as well as you can.

My contribution to understanding Castaneda will be a sor-ceredelic trip up the long road from obscurity to fame, winding back and forth between record and rumor, truth and fallacy, lessons and tricks, literature and mythmaking, scholar and shaman, imp and saint, power and helplessness, love and iso la* tion. It will be a rough ride for believers, not because I want it that way but because the road is full of holes. Just the same, it

won't he a tree ride for skeptics or cynics, who will have to hang on to their hats when we sight the same Navy diver on both sides of the road at once or nearly fall into the void out of which everything comes.

Keep an eye peeled for love in the separate reality. You could miss it altogether. "What else can a man have except his life and his death?" asked don Juan. "We are all born for love," Disraeli would have answered. "It is the principle of existence and its only end." Though don Juan told Carlos to be an unflinching warrior, not a whimpering child, he gave his apprentice tender, loving care, teaching him how to walk, putting him down for his nap, washing him when he soiled himself, soothing him with a voice like warm water, calling him "my little friend/' cooking for him, setting food in front of him, urging him to cat. smiling at him like a fond parent, forgiving his foolishness and enjoying his childish ways. When a mothering Matus pushed a howl of soup gently toward him, Carlos couldn t take the warmth and kindness in that gesture. It made him feel "idiotic." Unable to relax and let the old man love him, he had to disrupt his mood by rummaging for his spoon and asking intellectual questions.

At some point, 1 believe, Castaneda forsook human companionship for a separate reality where he could substitute ideas for love. Ideas he juggles like oranges, dropping hardly any. Love he finds too hot to handle. Well, who can handle love? One of Castaneda's favorite writers, San luan de la Cruz, noted the difficulty:

Since thou hast wounded this heart, Wherefore didst thou not heal it?

And wherefore, having robbed me of it, hast thou left it thus

And takest not the prey that thou hast spoiled?

Castaneda labored 49 years to become the complicated, superficially inconsistent, deeply constant man who wrote Tales of Power. 1 have labored one year to unfold him. The contest is clearly uneven. Where I have gone astray others will stay on the path. Where I have hit the nail on the thumb, many whose thumbs are throbbing will stoically deny it Though this study of the man and his works is necessarily analytic, I have not shirked my duty to fill mysterious gaps with bold speculation, My theory of la Catalina/ for example, displays effrontery

bordering on apo cal ypsis. On the other hand, I have taken pains to distinguish fact from inference and to identify [or frankly conceal) my sources. Castaneda did the best he could to show others exactly how he came by his knowledge, Paul Riesman said; I hope he will say the same of me.

To separate the seeds from the stems without throwing anything away, 1 will begin by drawing a line between Carlos and Castaneda.

TESTING THE TONAL

Q: IVfttK dovou think of Carlas Castaneda and the teachings of dun I mud

Don Juan is the most important model lor man since Jesus, It he is imaginary, then Carlos Castaneda is the principal psychological, spiritual, and literary genius of recent generations.

A Castaneda s books accurately report the facts of his experience, which many people cannot accept because of their previous social conditioning. It's their problem, not Iris The world is a much stranger place than most of Us realize, or dare to admit.

A: Don hi an exists pretty much as he is portrayed m the first hook, which was the scientific report that got Castaneda his Ph.D The later books contain more and more allegory and symbolism, <r Castaneda tries to reach a wider and wider audience.

A; Don Juan i$ a mm bi nation of various spiritual teachers Castaneda has met or read about. Many of the details in the books are factual though disguised to protect people's privacy,

A: I don't know whether Castenyada s books are fact or fiction, and 1 couldn't care less. Either way, they're terrific.

A: Castaneda is obviously a science-fiction Off met aflet ion wilier who makes a lot of good points he couldn't have gotten across tn many people it he had admitted he was writing fiction. It's a legitimate teaching maneu ver, brilliantly executed.

A; Castaneda 1$ a vulgar hoaxer and cheapiack cun man. who writes blatant occultist trash and philosophic piffle, which i s gobbled up by the ignorant and gullible but ignored by the informed and discriminating. I have nothing to say about what happened at UCLA.

A: Castaneda 's only sorcery consisted of turning the University of California into an ass.

• A: Carlos who-

  

• 2. CARLOS AND CASTANEDA

In those days Car/us ivtis known as Carlos Aranha. which is sometimes spelled Aran ja, He told me that his uncle, the ruler of the household. Oswaldo Aranha. ran for president of Bradl in 1960.

If Oswaldo Aranha ran for president of Brazil in I960 it was a short campaign because he died on the 27th of January. Having been Minister of Justice, of Finance, and of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador to the United States, and President of the UN General Assembly, Oswaldo was the most famous member of a great Brazilian-Portuguese family and undoubtedly ruled the household, but he was definitely not Carlos Castaneda's uncle or any other relative. His mother was Luisa de Freitas-Valle, while Castaneda's grandmothers came from the families Burungaray and Novoa. They didn't live in Brazil cither. They lived in Peru.

Carlos Cesar Arana Castaneda was bom on Christmas day 1925 in the historic Andean town of Cajamarca, where on 29 August 1533 night tell at noun as Pizarro's soldiers strangled Atau Huallpa. The unlucky 13 th Royal Inca, whose name meant Turkey Fortunate in War, had consented at the last minute to he baptized Juan, in return for which the Spaniards had promised not to burn him at the stake The bargain brought a double benefit, qualifying an Indian soul to enter a European heaven, and saving Atau Huallpa's body from destruction by earthly fire, which would have made him unacceptable after death to his divine father the sun.

Cajamarca is also known for its gold and si Ivor industry. Baby Arana's father was a goldsmith and watchmaker named Cesar Arana Burungaray, while his mother was Susana Castaneda Novoa. A ran a and Castaneda are Spanish names, Burungarayis Basque, Novoa Portuguese. Though Indians and Mestizos make a majority in Peru, none of these names suggest any Indian or mixed heritage.

Young Arana went to high school in Caiamarca, hut in 1948 the family moved to Lima, where some members still live and where the family jewelry store was doing business in 1973. After graduating from the Colegio National de Nuestra Scriora de Guadalupe, he studied at the National Fine Arts School of Peru, lose Bracamonte, a fellow student and now a well known illustrator, remembered him as a resourceful blade who lived mainly off the horses, dice, and cards and harbored "like an obsession"the wish tomovetothe United States. "Weall liked Carlos," Bracamonte told Time's Peruvian reporter Tomas Loayza. "1 le was witty, imaginative, cheerful a big liar and a real friend."

In 1949, when his mother died, Carlos Arana declared he was going to leave home. He entered the United States at San I'rancisco in 1951 Alter a four year gap we find him enrolled as Carlos Castaneda ar Los Angeles City College. Between 1955 and 1959, while following a pre-psychology curriculum, he took two courses in cream u writing and one in journalism.

On 17 December 1955 he met Damon Runyon's very distant cousin Margaret, four years older than he, unattached, and deeply interested in popular metaphysics, Six months later they began to see a lot of each other, attending occasional metaphysical lectures, going to City College together, and spending hours calking about philosophy, mysticism, and spiritualism According to Margaret he took his U.S, citizenship in 1959 as Carlos Castaneda. One day on the spur of the moment they went to Tijuana to get married; the certificate, dated 27 January I960, shows his name as Carlos Aranha Castaneda. At home he did the cooking. Margaret thought his spaghetti was w onderful. Though they stayed together only six months as man and wife, they remained good friends after the separation and saw each other often. Thu marriage was not legally terminated until 17 December 1973. At UCLA Castaneda kept the marriage secret, but sometimes he showed up on campus mysteriously holding a towheaded youngster by the hand. The little boy. mentioned in Chapter 11 of A Separate Reality, is Margaret's child of another marriage.

Castaneda entered UCLA as an undergraduate in 1959 and received a B.A. in anthropology September 1962. He was enrolled on and off as a graduate student until 1971, receiving a PhD. in anthropology March 1973, His scholarly publications are limited to his dissertation and one paper read at an anthropological meeting in 1968,

Students at the Irvine campus of the University of California; empowered to select and hire two percent of the faculty, appointed Castaneda to lecture during the spring quarter of 1972. His graduate seminar, "The Phenomenology of Shamanism," drew over 50 persons, some ol whom were faculty visitors curious to see the young anthropologist who had supposedly gotten inside the head oi an authentic pre-literate mesoamerican witch doctor. His undergraduate class in primitive religions was packed to the rafters and turned away hundreds. Occasionally he lectured at other institutions of learning or sat briefly in other professors' classrooms like a glow ing mushroom stone.

Such engagements were prompted by his growing celebrity as a popular writer. His first book, The Teachings of Don /uan: A Yaguf Wayuf Knowledge, had been published by the University of California Press in 1968, then commercially marketed by Ballantine Books in 1 969. A Separate Reality anti [ovrney to Ixtlan followed from Simon and Schuster in 1971 and 1972. Sales w ere climbing rapidly, and media scribes were bestirring themselves to interview the new star shining so remotely in the documentary sky, hoping to bring him close enough for everybody to get a good look. The first thing they found out was that he didn't like to have his picture taken.

Castaneda stands a stocky five-foot-five, weighing 140to 150 pounds. "From his waist to the top of bis thick curly black hair/' said Margaret, "his body is that of a man six feet tall. His legs , . . are disproportionately short." His hands. Time said, are stubby and calloused. Characteristically he wears unassuming sport shirts or business suits. Sometimes he wears or carries a hat. His hair is cut short. People have said he blends into the woodwork, or resembles a Cuban waiter One of Margaret's snapshots shows a man surprisingly youthful for his 40 years, whose skin is dark but whose features arc quite European—an impression worth mentioning since some people have said Castaneda looks like an Indian. Though his skin has been judged nut-brown, pale, and even gray, nobody has said it was red, copper, or bronze. I suspect Bruce Cook hit

the right formula with his "sallow-swarthy," a paradoxical combination that brings to mind the olive skin of Spaniards, which is what I would call Castaneda: a basquish Peruvian Spaniard.

The foregoing sketch includes the major established and presumptive facts about Carlos Castaneda, It is a short sketch because convincing facts are few. Almost nothing credible is known about his childhood, family relations, early schooling, jobs, friends, women [beyond Margaret], or daily routines. "Neither Margaret nor 1 ever knew where Carlos was living," wrote Margaret's cousin Sue "He came to us_; we did not go to him." Though he wrote Margaret romantic letters, he didn't sign them. That erasure of personal history, identity, and character has been blamed on don Juan, but Margaret said: "Carlos was elusive before he learned this from Don Juan."

If we had only our few facts and nothing more to go on, Castaneda would be mysterious but not confusing. Fortunately forthose who like complex, self-contradictory puzzles we have a never-ending supply of non-facts as well. In order to comb out this informational spaghetti I am going to split our central figure into several parts, to which cohesive sets of data can be assigned. The first split will separate Carlos from Castaneda.

From here on, established and presumptive facts will be assigned to "Castaneda," non-facts to "Carlos." Castaneda will be the writer of books, burn Carlos Arana in Peru. Carlos will be an imaginary person appearing in the books Castaneda has written—and in countless rumors, misconceptions, unsubstantiated reports, errors, and fabrications promulgated by Castaneda or by others. It is not, of course, a revelation to say Castaneda contradicts himself He admits it and the record shows it. My point is not to belabor the obvious but to bring order out of chaos. Naturally 1 have no control over what other people have said about him, so in quotations you will have to decide from the context whether "Carlos" means Castaneda or "Castaneda" means Carlos, if you see what I mean. Also, when I say "Carlos Castaneda" I mean Castaneda not Carlos.

Unlike Castaneda (though according to him I Carlos was bom in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1935 (or as Margaret heard it, 1931— which made her seem only ten years older than he instead of I4|. Grandfather Aran ha had come from Italy | or in one version, Sicily] bringing his Portuguese name with him. Another grandfather (or maybe the same one! wasashort-statured, red-haired, blue-eyed inventor, who married grandmother Margarita,

nearly six feet tall [as Castaneda told Margaret, whom he sometimes called "Margarita"). Father Cesar (Aranha, or as Gordon Wasson was told. Castaneda), who later became a professor of literature, was only I⁷ when Carlos was bom, while mother Sosana (Castaneda, or to Wasson, Aranha I was 15. Tragically, she died when Carlos was only six*

Because of his parents' extreme youth little Carlos was raised from the start by his grandparents on their chicken farm in the Brazilian back country [or as Margaret heard, by an aunt who lived in Peru), where he fought constantly during preschool years with 22 cousins until they finally left him alone, and where he inadvertently broke the collarbone of a first-grader answering to the Spanish name Joaquin.

Having learned both kalian and Portuguese on the farm (languages no one has reported hearing Castaneda speakl, Carlos acquired Spanish land presumably his taste for rhe poetry of Cesar Vallejo, born Peru 1892, died Paris 19381 at the "very proper" Nicolas Avellaneda boarding school in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he stayed until he was 15. By 1951 he had grown so unruly that his uncle, the family patriarch, shipped him out to Los Angeles—California, that is—to live with a foster family. Besides Spanish he must have learned plenty of English at Nicolas Avellaneda, because he enrolled immediately at Hollywood High School, whence he graduated in two years. While there he met his friend Bill, who seven years later would introduce him to don Juan.

After high school Carlos journeyed to Italy, where he studied sculpting in Milan's Academy of Fine Arts, accomplishing little because he lacked 'the sensitivity or openness to be a great artist." Despite this feeling of inadequacy, Margaret mentions beautiful sculptures and contest-winning poems created during the City College period. She and a friend were taken by Castaneda to see an architectural sculpture [of a goddess, the friend told me) which Carlos had done for the front of an office building on Wilshire Boulevard near Vermont Avenue. The building is gone now, and Margaret has no picture of the sculpture.

Sometimes, Margaret says, Castaneda told her things about Carlos that probably weren't true, like his marriage to a gypsy girl, which may have been trumped up to make her jealous, or his U.S. Army wartime service in Spain Margaret wondered just which war that could have been

Castaneda told Margaret about Carlos's sister Lucia, while

down in foggy Lima Castaneda's cousin Lucia, raised with him "like a sister/' was saving his infrequent letters. One of them described a tour in the U.S. Army, from which Carlos was discharged after some trauma—mental or physical, Lucia was not sure. As befits one of the nation's great bureaucracies, the Defense Department can't find Carlos's service record anywhere.

Students at Irvine scribbled a primitive-religions note about Carlos's blond Scandinavian wife (the right sort of mom for a towheaded youngster whose dad is a sallow-swarthy Spaniard married to an anglo-Frcneh brunette!. The furry gent with the micturated kilo heard about Carlos's wife and child languishing in Buenos Aires. Two women in a Sacramento bookstore sighed tor a little Carlos who never had any real home because he was an "army brat," whose father continually dragged the family from one military post to another.

Until don Juan tricked him into it, Carlos knew little and cared less about metaphysics, "I'm no mystic," Lila Freilicher was told, "not a searcher of any sort. I'm an anthropologist, and this thing fust happened to me without my looking for it."

"How often did you talk about mysticism andphilosophy?" I asked Margaret.

"That's all w’e ever talked about," she said.

No one has imputed violence to Castaneda, but don Juan told Carlos he was "a violent fellow," and Gwyneth Cravens heard Carlos got so fed up being followed around by a nutty would-be disciple that he hurled him over a park bench. "The only way to deal with a psychotic is to be one yourself," Castaneda explained, Well, what would you expect from the 22-cousin-vanquisher and collarbone smasher of the Brazilian [or Peruvian! backwoods?

Early in 1973 Carloshad "completed a book on the formation of perceptual glosses" which Castaneda has not yet published.

Of course, there are many similarities. Carlos and Castaneda are physically alike. Both enjoy running around in the countryside picking plants. One has a beach house, while the other lives at Malibu And so on.

At the start of this project I invited Castaneda to lunch, but he didn't accept I regret that, because I'm sure I could have learned significant things by sitting in a little Mexican restaurant or on a park bench with the source of all those different versions of Carlos's life. Without adding fuel to the fire by asking if he were related to Carlos E. Castaneda, the authority

on Spanish-colonial administrators, or to Professor Enrique Arana, the Argentine historian, I would have tried to hear the man behind the stories.

At least six professional interviewers have reported what they learned by talking at length—some for days—with Castaneda. Most of what they learned was not true. Bruce Cook was so dismayed by Castaneda's credibility gap that he delayed publishing his interview for more than a year, "I wasn't sure he was completely on the level," Cookrecalled. "I don t believe he is who he says he is." The name Castaneda, Cook observed, is not Italian though Carlos's grandfather came from Italy, nor is it Portuguese though Carlos was born in Brazil. It is Spanish.

Pm surprised more journalists didn't make the same comment early in the game. Suppose a certain Karins Kas-taniebaum, w ho is studying anthropology at the University of China, Fu Kien, publishes a best-seller called The Teachings of Swami Goanananda: 4 ihansi Way of Knowledge, Ihansi being a district of India, right next door so to speak.

"Where were you born, Karlus?" asks reporter Broo Skuk of the Foochow Observer

"Scotland," says Karlus with a mischievous twinkle in his big blue occidental eye, "where my grandfather Magnus Kas-taniebaum immigrated in 1X91 from Marseille, which is how I grcw^r up speaking both Provencal and Gaelic."

"I notice," probes Skuk, "that Swami Goanananda always spoke to you in perfect German. Where did you learn that?"

"I learned perfect German," Karlus explains, "when my Scottish uncle, Ossian McFingal, the ruler of our clan, packed me off to the very proper Ferdinand Maximilian boarding school in Vienna. I learned plenty of Chinese there, too."

It shouldn't take a professor of linguistics at UCFK to find a flaw or two in that story.

and they brought us to rhe Queen of the people who place pots upon the heads of strangers who is a magician having a knowledge of afl things I and she did take us, and lead us by terrible ways, by means of dark magic to where the great pit is, in the mouth of which the old philosopher lay dead, and showed to us the rolling Pillar of Life (hat dies not, whereof the voice is as the voice of thunder; and she did stand in the flames, and come forth unharmed, and yet more beautiful. . . 1 speak of those things, that though they be past belief, yet have 1 known, and lie not.

it scarcely seemed likely that such .1 story could have been invented by anybody it was too original

H Rider Haggard

S/ie. .4 Hi'dorr nf .4J ven hire

The idea that ] concocted a person like don Juan is inconceivable. I didn't create anything I am only a reporter.

Carlos Castaneda to Sam Keen

• 3. FACT OR FICTION

It makes no difference w heiher the books are a record of an actual encounter or Castaneda is the author of a clever fiction.

When Joseph Margolis wrote that, he didn't mean it makes no difference, Ik meant (and said) it would not affect don Tuan's potency as a fountain of philosophy or an instrument of our instruction. And there are other ways in which the factuality or fictiveness of Castaneda's books makes no difference. If we care solely for entertainment or inspiration, if we seek only an allegoric truth behind the fantasy, if we believe every story is true in its own way, then we may not care at all whether Castaneda actually interviewed anybody, or whether the person he interviewed was anything like the don Juan we have come to know I am perfectly content to allow those who don't care about factuality to ignore the question. On the other hand, there are some good reasons for caring.

1 don't think we can gauge the value of Castaneda's work if we have no definite opinion about whether his tale is true or false, in the ordinary sense of those terms. Never mind whether Carlos "really flew." What 1 want to know is, whom did Castaneda meet in the Nogales bus station? Where have the Spanish Held notes been deposited? When can we listen to the tape recording of the conversation that took place in Lucio's house on the night of 4 September 1968?

Let me allay suspicion right now by saying that, however this inquiry comes out, I do believe Castaneda has contributed something of value to society by writing his books* At the least,

he has widely popularized certain metaphysical propositions some people, including me, think art both important and defensible. Many people also credit him with being a scientific anthropologist, an original philosopher, a master teacher, a psychic visionary, a literary genius, or a practical sorcerer. To judge these additional qualifications particularly his status as a scientific anthropologist, we need to know whether his bocks are fact or fiction.

A majority of the professional anthropologists who have rendered public judgments on Castaneda's works have either questioned or denied their factuality. Francis Hsu compared them to Gulliver's Travels Jesus Ochoa thought they contained "a very high percentage of imagination " Marvin Harris doubted the existence oi don Juan. Edmund Leach said The Tktichings was "a work of art rather than of scholarship/' while Weston La Barre called it "pseudo-ethnography/' and ethno-botanist Gordon Wasson "smelled a hoax" on the first reading. Beyond Castaneda's solitary word there has been no evidence whatsoever don Juan existed or any field work was ever carried out. Scientifically, this is not an entirely satisfactory situation.

Even sc>, no ime has presented a systematic proof that Castaneda's work is a hoax—only vague, intuitive dissatisfactions with his text, comments (in isolated, incongruous details, or irrelevant objections like, "People can't turn into crows."It has been said such a proof would be impossible, dun Juan's privacy must he protected, and so on. Joseph Margolis allows the four books seem to have been planned as a tetralogy from the beginning, which would certainly make them fiction, and he is quite sure the first book was dedicated {anonymously) to Pablito and don Genaro, whom the Carlos of the narrative hadn't even met yet, but these speculations are far from being proofs. With apparent relict Daniel Noel declares he has not yet heard "any conclusive argument for the view that the books were an outright hoax," In this chapter 1 shall present the conclusive argument Professor Noel has not yet heard.

What is a hoax? My dictionary says it is a humorous or mischievous deception that imposes on the victim's credulity. Three main elements appear in that definition—deception, humor or mischief, and credulity. As I dwell on those elements, I perceive a logical structure joining them together. Deception is the core. A humorous deception wil I be a benignly playful deception which most people will find amusing when the truth comes out. A mischievous deception will be a some

what harmful deception, which may arise from malice; most people will not find it amusing, but some whose oxen escape ungored will think it a laugh riot at the expense of certain victims they do not love. Whether the deception will be judged playful or malicious will depend partly on the normal level of credulity. A hoax that deceives nearly everybody may be either playful or malicious, hut a hoax that deceives only boobies will seem playful to anybody who is not both a booby and a victim. A second test will be the persistence of the deception. The sooner the hoaxer admits his trick, the fewer will judge it malicious. His admission need not be direct or explicit. He could, for instance, write a series of books making the hoax progressively more preposterous until everybody caught on. Hoaxes must be distinguished from frauds. Frauds are nearly always harmful, hardly ever amusing, hoaxes are often amusing, seldom harmful.

My dictionary defines hoaxing as deceiving by a fiction. In this chapter I shall prove to my satisfaction and perhaps to yours that Castaneda's books, though they may contain a fact here or there, are abundantly and essentially Active and must be classified as fiction li we are going to classify them at all. Once persuaded by this proof, you can decide for yourself whether Castaneda's fiction constitutes a hoax.

Several writers have said it doesn't matter whether Castaneda wrote fact or fiction because all fact is fiction. That would have to be the extreme tion-hoax position. Those of us who think we can tell the difference still have topicka lair test, I would not call Castaneda a fiction writer just because he allowed don Juan, to use a cover name, or condensed several conversations mto one, or translated don Juan's Spanish into bouncy American slang. I wouldn't dismiss his factual reporting if I learned that TcrJcw of'Power alone was fiction. I. certainly wouldn't say the books must be fiction because they describe fantastic visions.

Part of the apparent but t think illusory difficulty of deciding the question springs from Castaneda's terms, "ordinary and nonordinary reality." Anyone who says the books arc not factual risks being told Carlos's adventures were real enough in the nonordinary reality. That may he true, hut it also points a way out of the difficulty. While Castaneda's books treat a nonordinary reality, they depend on the ordinary reality for then acceptance as factual reports. The author implicitly agreed to chat when he offered them as conventional reports of

anthropology field work conducted on particular occasions dated by the ordinary’ calendar. "In the summer of 1960," he wrote, "while I was an anthropology student at the University of California, Los Angeles, I made several trips to the Southwest." He did not say, "Don Juan told me that in the summer of 1960 1 made several trips," or "After smoking the mushroom mixture, 1 found I was a student at the University of California," or "When I crossed my eyes, I saw a white-haired old Indian sitting in the bus station." Castaneda the anthropologist may have had his left foot in the other world, but he had his right foot in this world. My task here is to pry up the sole of his this-world shoe to sec whether there is a banana skin under it. My test of fact or fiction will be whether the ordinary events reported in his books would be possible m this ordinary world. If not, the books must be fiction.

In Chapter One I said we were not going to catch Castaneda in simple concrete errors. Since I wrote that, a friend has pointed out iust such an error, which I relate here to show what we are not going to find any more of.

One day in October 1968, Carlos and don Juan drove deep into Mexico to visit don Genaro. Leaving the car somewhere, they walked for two days to reach Genaro's little shack perched on the side of a mountain. A few days later, Genaro proposed they should go to meet his apprentices Nestor and Pabhto, who liveij nearby. The next sentence is: "Both of them got into my car." A good trick, if the car had been left two days' walk from the shack.

That little slip is certainly incongruous, but it won't take us very far. Maybe Castaneda left something out. Maybe the car got stuck in the mud and a friend delivered it to the shack later. Maybe Genaro had two shacks, one on the mountainside, the other in the village. Who knows? A dozen ambiguities like that wouldn't prove the case. Almost anything can be explained by imagining special circumstances. To argue convincingly that Castaneda was writing fiction, 1 have to show that he deliberately violated the rules of the ordinary reality, that he covered up what he had done, and that he had a good reason for doing it. I have to produce the body, the weapon with his fingerprints on it, and the motive. Let's start with the body.

One night Carlos and don Juan were sitting in don Juan's room chatting in the dark, when don Juan asked Carlos what he used the darkness for when he was in Los Angeles. Carlos admitted he used it for sleeping. Don Juan said the darkness of

the day was the best time to "see." "He stressed the word 'see,'" Castaneda wrote, "with a peculiar inflection. I wanted to know what he meant by that."

"What's it like to see, don Juan?" Carlos asked four days later. Don |uan said he couldn't tell him. Carlos would have to see for himself. "Is it a secret I shouldn't know?" Carlos persisted. No, don Juan reassured him, but he must do it to know it.

In the next book, we find don Juan and Carlos on a hilltop, when don Juan tells Carlos to run over and get some leaves from a certain bush. From where he stands Carlos can see a large green hush growing on the near slope of the next hill. He runs down one hill and up the other, but when he gets to the right spot the bush has disappeared. 1 le returns and reports his mistake. Don |uan says there has been no mistake. lie leads Carlos around to the far slope, out of the direct hne of sight, where they find the bush, the only one of its kind within a mile. The bumbling apprentice doesn't grasp what has happened, of course, but don Juan is delighted and calls it an omen.

Later in the day, Carlos finds a place he will return to in his dreams, a place don Juan will give him as his own nonordinary domain, "not to use but to remember." "This spot," don Juan tells him, "is yours. This morning you saw, and that was the omen. You found this spot by seeing."

How gratifying that Carlos has finally achieved in this second episode the personal experience of seeing about which he could only wonder in the first. What would you say, though, if I told you I have given you these two episodes in the wrong order? Granted, they are in the right order for seeing. They are in the normal order for learning. They arc in sequence as they were published, the first from A Separate Reality, the second from journey to Ixtlan. But according to the author's meticulous chronology, the two men were chatting in the dark on 21 May 1968, while Carlos saw the bush on the wrong side of the hill and found his spot by seeing on 29 January 1962. Carlos first heard about seeing six years after he saw. That is not the way things work in the ordinary world.

Very odd, you say, but perhaps Castaneda got his notes mixed up. Why not? But I have to tell you this is only the victim's left ear. In "Carlos-One and Carlos-Two" 1 have laid the body out for your inspection. If you w ant the details of the autopsy, turn to that appendix. If cold surgery makes you faint, let me summarize my findings here.

All the evidence ever needed to prove a case of big-time fictioneermg can be found in Castaneda s first three books. The secret is to make a chronological list of the events. After that, the case proves itself. Why hasn't it been done before? Book reviewers barely have time to read the books they review. Anthropologists who dismissed Castaneda's "pseudo-ethnography" didn't think any proofs were needed. Novelists saw him as a writer manipulating the market. Philosophers, mystics, or parapsychologists fastened on don 1 man's wisdom, techniques, or powers, ignoring the question of his existence. Perhaps only a chronic puzzle addict would have traced that twisting time-like trail down past the ethnographic event horizon to discover the Einstein-Castaneda bridge from world to world buried under a pile of skillful flashbacks and plausible introductory remarks.

Though most readers thought they were getting a pretty straight story in The Teachings of Don Juan, many felt uneasy with A Separate Reality. Carlos's wonderful adventures were moving right along when suddenly he was seized by overwhelming recollections of 'la Catalina/ the only significant woman walking, hopping, or sailing through the books. As Carlos saw her, 'la Catalina' was an evil sorceress hunt on killing him, or at least on suckingout his soul and leaving him exhausted and impotent. A frightening if fascinating prospect.

While the reader was delighted with 'la Catalina/ he couldn't help wondering just where she had gotten on the bus. In contrast with the author's careful dating of every bag of groceries and evacuation in the chaparral, the lady blackbird flew into the story on no particular day. A long time before the recollection surely, but even the year was hard to figure out. Too hard for anybody hut a puzzle addict. Quite a few readers may have asked themselves why Castaneda found it necessary to treat 'la Catalina' in flashbacks when almost everything else was given in straight narration.

By the time we got toJourney to lx tian, however, we gave up trying to keep track of things. Castaneda had split that book into two parts, with a ten-year gap between them, and had started out by announcing that dull-witted Carlos had missed the whole point of his first two years in the desert, so now we had to go back and start the story over again. Many readers found that surprising, but 1 am sure few saw just how strange it really was.

My analysis shows beyond the shadow of a doubt that four

ney to Ixtlan is logically incompatible with The Teachings of Don Juan and A Separate Reality. 1 don't mean there are some details that don't fit. 1 mean the entire structure, the integral time frame, the action and progression of the third book conflicts with that ot the first two. There is no way to get from the pair to the single, or back. "Carlos-One and Carlos-Two" displays my finding that two different Carloses live in these books. The two are not even proper nagualian doubles. They don't share their experiences. They travel on parallel time tracks. They inhabit alternate e universes. Since the factuality of the story depends on its conforming to the one ordinary universe in which Castaneda said he was logging his field work, the discovery of dual universes brings us willy-nilly to the conclusion not all of these books can be factual reports To put it most plainly: Either The Teachings ot Don Juan or Journey to Ixtlan is categorically a work of fiction. This bare finding will have important implications in Chapter Four, where we ask what the anthropologists at UCLA thought they were doing when they doctored Castaneda on the strength ot field interviews that were either partly or wholly invented by the candidate, though they had all the evidence needed to prove any suspicions they may have felt about the legitimacy of his reports. A worthy puzzle in itself.

In the meantime, this investigation has uncovered the corpse ot factuality slain. The autopsy has shown the victim died of systemic logical contortion, deliberately imposed by the author in his third book (and to a lesser degree in his second] but cleverly covered up with smooth talk and juggled chronology. Sufficient motives for this heinous deed (discussed in the appendix) were the author's presumed eagerness to produce a third book while the market was at its height and his wish to stop drug fiends from perverting don Juan's teachings. Either purpose would have required him to backdate Journey to Ixtlan. the first because he had run out of calendar time in which Carlos's further adventures could take place, the second because he wished to prove don Juan had acted impeccably from the beginning, while only the incompetent apprentice had been goofing.

While the charge of first-degree fictioneering has been amply proved, the case is far from over. The autopsy relied on strange twists in the victim's skeleton but ignored such bizarre features as the victim's eyelids, which were sewn shut, the victim's tongue, w'hich was forked, and the victims lungs, which

were stuffed with smoked mushrooms. To put it another way, I trust I have argued conclusively that some of Castaneda's work is fiction, but J believe all of it is fiction, and I have evidence to support that belief. This further evidence cannot compel us to a conclusion even against our will, as 1 think the previous evidence can, but it should convince almost anyone.

To simplify the argument, 1 am going to make one reasonable assumption, which is that given the conclusion that either The Teachings or Journey to Ixtlan is fiction, it would be ridiculous to assume The Teachings was fiction while Ixtlan was fact. If Castaneda had any facts to report, he would have reported them first. The fiction would have followed in an effort to extend a successful performance. Therefore I take the fictive-ness of Journey to Ixtlan as proved and concentrate now on showing that The Teachings and .4 Separate Reality are also fiction.

The new evidence is of a different kind. Up to now I have used the strongest kind of evidence, comprising internal contradictions, errors of narrative construction, or logical incompatibilities that definitely rule out consistent factuality. Now I turn to a less strong but still persuasive kind of evidence, which falls into two categories. The first involves conflicts between ordinary events in the story and what common sense tells us is possible in the ordinary world. The second displays features of the author's style that contradict his premise that his interviews with don Juan were conducted in the Spanish language.

Before getting into all that, let me lay to rest a ghost that constantly pops up when we wander in this particular graveyard. Somebody is bound to say: "But Castaneda's books do contain a lot of facts'" Of course they do. Yuma, Tucson, Ciudad Obregdn, Tonm, Durango, Oaxaca, Ixtlan, Mexico City, even Los Angeles—those are real places. The Yaquis do live in Arizona and Sonora. Indians do have traditions of shamanism, curing, sorcery, eating peyote, saying unkind things about the Jimson weed, getting high on mushrooms, sending evil birds to make people sick or steal their souls. Philosophers, mystics, and parapsychologists recognize many of don Juan's teachings as eternal truths or empirical facts. But you can find those places on maps and those ideas in books. Castaneda could have found them there, too. The point of this chapter is not whether Castaneda's story contains facts but whether it is a factual story, not whether such things are true or could happen but whether they truly happened to Castaneda. 1

see no more evidence that any of them happened to Castaneda than that they happened to me. Well, they didn't happen to me, and 1 don't think they happened to him either.

A friend of mine asked, "Why are you writing a book about somebody you think is a liar?" That stopped me. Why was 1? Shouldn't I simply dismiss Castaneda as Weston La Barre had dismissed him? My friend supplied the answer. Castaneda wasn't a common con man, he lied to bring us the truth. His stories are packed with truth, though they are not true stories, which he says they are. This is not your familiar literary al-legorist painlessly instructing his readers in philosophy. Nor is it your fearless trustworthy ethnographer returned full of anecdotes from the forests of Ecuador. This is a sham-man bearing gifts, an ambiguous spellbinder dealing simultaneously in contrary commodities—wisdom and deception. That's unusual. It may be important. And it needs straightening out.

Anyone who struggled all the way through The Magic Mountain came down with tuberculosis at some point, and the reader who followed Carlos through his first ten psychotropic experiments was markedly disoriented by 20 December 1964, the day Carlos surrendered for the last time to that untamable horticultural shrew, the Devil's weed, whose leaves and stem cure Indian boils, whose root bestows the strength of twenty, whose seeds divine book thieves and vandals, whose flowers kill, enslave, or madden. Countless college instructors assigning Castaneda's books have exploited that same disorientation to destroy the earthbound complacency of their students, but I cite it here as a reason why no one has publicly questioned the prodigious feat Carlos achieved before he drank the Jimson potion, rubbed the paste on his temples twenty-five times, and quite against don Juan's advice smeared it all over his forehead. The thrill of that perilous mistake and the wonder of the resulting visions combine with the general psychedelic theme to dull the reader's critical faculty, but the episode contains a core of ordinary reality that can be drilled and assayed for factuality.

About six o'clock that Sunday morning Carlos returned to the place where for three years he had been privately cultivating a Jimson weed. Attending closely to instructions written into his field notes eighteen months earlier, he spent most of the day preparing the potion and the paste. Late in the afternoon he wasted an hour and a half, from five to six-thirty,

trying to catch two lizards for his ritual. By the time he caught them, "it was almost dark."

In the failing dusk, directed only by don Juan's transcribed discourse on the subject, he accomplished a delicate task he had neither practiced before nor seen demonstrated. Having put each lizard into a separate bag, he drew one out, apologized for hurting her, then using the fiber of a century plant for t bread and the thorn of a prickly pear as a needle sewed up her mouth, drawing the stitches tight. Taking the other lizard out, he apologized to her also, then sewed up her eyelids, so that deprived of sight she might be more inclined to talk to him about what the muted lizard was seeing.

Letting the muted lizard go, he tied the blinded lizard to his right shoulder with a string, so as not to "lose or injure hen" It was important to keep both lizards alive. If the muted lizard had died, Carlos would have had to give up the Devil's weed for the next two years. (As things turned out, he gave it up forever, so perhaps that lizard did die.} It the blinded lizard had died also, Carlos might have gone mad. At least he would have had a very bad trip.

You who have passed a steel needle and a polished thread in a bright light through a piece of inert but paper-thin leather about as wide as a newborn baby's little fingernail without ripping it will, I am sure, appreciate Carlos's skill in passing a perforated cholla thorn trailing an agave fiber in the darkling twilight through the tiny fragile blinking membranes that shield a living lizard's eyes, without tearing them, never having tried it before, and never having seen anyone else do it. "The sewing of the mouth and eyes," Castaneda wrote, "was the most difficult task." No doubt. One would have to be a sorcerer to do such a trick. But this was no sorcery. It was not even hallucination, since Carlos had been without drugs for fifteen weeks. This was an ordinary exercise like collecting plants on a hillside or grinding seeds in a mortar. Ordinary, but incredible.

For a long time I couldn't figure out why a writer would gratuitously insult the confidence of an already indulgent reader when he could so easily modify the incident to make it more credible. Was he daring us (or his academic committee) to catch him’ Could this be a message scrawled in cold lizard's blood on our mirror—"Stop me before 1 write again!" Why did he let such a frankly impossible ordinary event creep into The Teachings? Where did he get the idea? The answer came at last,

up out of that bottomless well whence so many others will come in later chapters: the library. Though Castaneda has told students and friends alike that he reads very little, don Juan has somehow' acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of anthropology. 1 quote from the Handbook of South American Indians:

"A (Peruvian] sorcerer who wished to bring sickness or death to an enemy might. . . . take a toad, sew up its eyes and mouth with thorns, tie its feet, bury it in a place where the enemy would be likely to sit down. The suffering of the toad w^Tas supposed to pass into the enemy."

The difference being that the Peruvian sorcerer |in the days of the Incas) was doing something anybody could do, sticking pins through the eyes and mouth of a toad that was not supposed to survive anyway. No threading crudely punched wooden needles with rough fibers and pulling stitches through flimsy minuscule moving targets in the dying gloam. Just simple skewering in broad daylight. Our Yaqui bookworm, however, did not notice the slight error of diction in the Handbook, where sew w as used for pm. As he passed the quotation along to his collaborator |a contemporary Peruvian sorcerer) the idea assimilated to a modern culture, where sutures are made by fine steel needles drawing thin slick strands under brilliant lights through tough thick membranes, clamps and drugs immobilizing the patient. A subtle and understandable transformation, but an awkward slip for a supposed reporter of facts. The only one of its kind in the book.

Not that an actual factual reporter couldn't bring home a wonderful tale. Until 1957 most people who had heard of Robert Gordon Wasson thought he was only a Wall Street banker. That year Life magazine revealed his prowess as an ethno-botamc detective, co-discoverer of the hallucinogenic mushroom Psilocybe mexicana (and related fungi) and first among recorded white men to cat such mushrooms during an ancient shamanic ritual practiced in Mexico for thousands of years but carefully hidden from non-lndian eyes after the Spanish invasion. Wasson's adventure crowned a thirty-year quest for the mushrooms of vision.

Emerging from the center of the visual field, the mycogenic images would approach and expand, quickly or slowly as one willed, in colors beautiful and harmonious. At first they depicted graphic motifs, then palaces or mythical beasts. Next the seer's soul flew free, abandoning adobe w'alls, soaring into mid-space to view vast landscapes where camels plodded

across great slopes, mountains rose into the heavens, or pellucid rivers flawed through endless expanses of reeds down to measureless seas, while all was bathed in horizontal light from a pastel sun. Once a beautiful enigmatic woman stood like a breathing statue staring out across the water. Wasson felt no hope of reaching her, for she belonged to a world apart, while he hung poised in space, an incorporeal eye that saw but was not seen.

The psilocybic visions neither blurred nor wavered but were always vivid and sharp. They came to Wasson more real than anything seen before, and he felt he was for the first time seeing plain rather than with normal imperfection, face to face at last with the archetypes themselves, with the very Ideas as Plato had seen them in the Temple of Elcusis. Seized by the power of the mushrooms he was privileged to glimpse that extraordinary world William Blake could visit as he wished, of which he had said: "He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing eye can see, does not imagine at all."

Two years before tasting the acrid mushrooms Wasson asked his bilingual muleteer to explain their Mazatec name, nti¹ shi^tho¹, the dear holy thing that springs forth. The muleteer answered:

£/ honguillo vienepor si mismo. nose sabe de dbnde, como el viento que viene sin saber de dunde nr pursue.

As Wasson translated it:

The little mushroom comes of itself, no one knows whence, like the wind that comes we know not whence or why.

Wasson was deeply impressed by the reverence his Indian friends showed the mushroom [so different from their jocular contempt for the alcohol they freely abused). He understood the honor they did him by sharing a tradition so long kept from Spanish-speaking oppressors and well-meaning missionaries alike. He was touched by a generosity that asked only a few dollars for the transitory and elusive mushrooms, gathered perhaps by a virgin harvester in pre dawn breezes from a mountainside at the time of the new moon. "We did not this for money," he was told.

Twice in the remote mountain village of Huautla de fimenez he ate the mushrooms during night-long ceremonies conducted by the curing-shaman Maria Sabina, a lady without blemish, one who had never dishonored her calling by using her powers for evil. La Seriora (sometimes addressed as Doha

Maria] was acknowledged by her people ase ho⁴to⁴ch;⁴ne⁴, una mujer que sabe. a woman who knows. The first ceremony was held on the night of 29-30 June 1955. in the house of deputy mayor Cayetano, whose brother Genaro also attended along with Wasson's friend photographer Allan Richardson and perhaps ten others of all ages from the immediate families. Though the Senora chanted for hours, the Americans did not learn for several years all that she was saying, for the mushrooms spoke only Mazatcc. They also caused some vomiting, but that was taken in stride. Six weeks later and thousands of miles from the State of Oaxaca. Wasson ate the mushrooms dried in his New York apartment Their potency was undiminished, but he recognized that to know their sacredness one had to eat them surrounded by reverent bemushroomed Indians as the vibrant voice and ubiquitous percussions of an impeccable woman of knowledge filled a darkness made luminous only by a private reality that was at once new and prehistoric.

In the twenty years that followed, as a research fellow of the Harvard University Botanical Museum, Wasson published numerous articles and three notable books on religious uses of visionary plants. From his mushrooms in 1958 came the psychotropic drug psilocybin, which in the early 1960s opened to many experimenters formal or informal a subjective world much like the one Carlos entered when he smoked don Juan's mixture in December 1963. It was only natural, then, for Wasson to review each of Castaneda's books as it came out.

The four reviews furnish the clearest example on record of the ambivalence serious critics have felt about Castaneda. Having been over the same ground himself, Wasson opened The Teachings hoping to find a kindred spirit and fellow scientist. If Castaneda had gratified or disappointed him on both counts, no difficulty would have arisen, but Wasson found himself simultaneously gratified and disappointed, as he saw the kindred spirit straying from the path of science. It was a paradigmatic exercise in weighing error against authenticity, or lies against truth. Almost everybody cares more about truth than about lies, which are perceived as mere bits of manure clinging to mushrooms of knowledge. Against them, any substantial truth will tip the scale. Lies do weigh something, however, and they continue to make trouble. Though human beings are notoriously inconsistent, we prefer to see them constant, wanting them purely good or bad, longing to accept

or reject them without reservation. Our condemned should display no endearing habits, our master's feet should not be made of clay. Looking back on him across the centuries, we forgive Newton for perfecting his data, but we don't care to be conned by an upstart from UCLA. If Castaneda says something we like to hear, we give him the benefit of the doubt, but we keep our eyes peeled.

As Wasson proceeded through The Teachings, several things struck him as not quite right. Castaneda said the ally-bringing mushrooms were "possibly Psilocyhe mexicana.” Don Juan had told Carlos to tear the mushrooms into shreds so that they could pass through the narrow neck of a gourd, in which at the end of a year they would have dried to a fine dust. "All one needs to do is to mash the chunks," don Juan had said Wasson's dried mushrooms, in contrast, had retained their shape for more than six years and could not be mashed into dust. He was sure don luan's mushrooms could not be Psilocybe.

Though Don Juan taught Carlos to collect, sort, dry, grind, and mix many kinds of plants, Carlos never seemed to learn the names of any plants but peyote, limson weed, and mushrooms [Zo.s honguitos). Recalling centuries of botanical work in Mexico, Wasson wondered why Castaneda neglected to name any of the other plants Carlos could spot on sight, and why he offered no reason for the omission. At least he could have brought back some mushroom specimens for verification. Don luan's special formula could still have been kept secret. "Until [Castaneda] submits his plants for identification," Wasson wrote, "the learned world will receive his books with a shrug of skepticism. Zoologists will yawn when they read [in A Sepj-rate Reality about I a puma that, quite unprovoked, 'charges' Don Juan,"

Disconcerted as he was by such botanical and zoological omissions and anomalies, Wasson was bothered more by Castaneda's language. Why, he asked, did we get no flavor of Spanish discourse in The Teachings! Why, in A Separate Reality, did don Juan spout so much American slang, when he had spoken standard English before* Why, in lourney to Ixtlan, did Castaneda give us Spanish we didn't need but fail to tell us what Spanish phrases don Juan used for critical terms I ike ally, not-doing, and stop the world! "Any careful reader," he concluded, would say the original language of the conversations with Don Juan was English."

Castaneda's inexplicably unhispanic translation of Carlos's

Spanish field notes had aroused suspicion from the start. In 1968 Wasson sent a letter expressing misgivings. Castaneda replied "fully and frankly," even sending xerox copies of 12 large ruled pages of worked-up Held notes (not the kind Carlos had scribbled in the heat of the action, but a second generation, prepared in quieter moments). "They were in Spanish and carried questions, which Castaneda put to Don luan, and replies, written in legible handwriting." Their substance appeared in The Teachings "satisfactorily rendered into English," tor 8 and 15 April 1962. when Carlos and don Juan were talking about the four enemies of a man of knowledge. Within a year, Wasson met Castaneda twice and was favorably impressed. "He was obviously an honest and serious young man." Despite those assurances, Wasson's estimate of Castaneda as a factual reporter steadily declined, reaching its nadir in 1973, when he saw Castaneda vacillating between science and romance, "a poor pilgrim lost on his way to his own Ixtlan." The following year Tales of Power resolved the quandary and tipped the scale. Castaneda had abandoned science and was writing frank romance. "For me the best is the latest," Wasson said. The meaning of the tetralogy had at last come clear. The four books were an extended parable, an allegory revealing an a lien, pre-literate world. Though some doubts lingered about where ancient traditions left off and idiosyncratic sciencediction began, Wasson felt Castaneda's artistic truth, whatever its details might prove to be, finally outweighed the fumbling pseudoscience of his first three books. Chapter Seven will take up Castaneda's truth; here we arc still pursuing his pretensions.

Though Carlos itched to snap photos and spin tapes, don Juan wouldn't stand for anything more evidential than notebooks. Luckily Carlos was an outstanding note taker a speedwriter "capable of writing down most of what I don Juanl said in the beginning . . and everything that was said. , . later." "You really write everything?" Don |uan could hardly believe it. Later he complimented Carlos on the sorcery of writing without concentrating. Carlos admitted he paid no attention to the scribbling, which seemed to him a separate activity he had nothing to do with. To be sure, the conversations arc so full and lively that only an automatic writer could have written them down while participating in them. Years of this writing produced volumes of notes, which had to be organized and edited, but Castaneda assured us his editing was only selecting, not rewriting. If, as I believe, no other an

thropologist has used automatic writing to take notes in the field, Carlos's volumes of scribbled notes should without fail be deposited in some scholarly library, not merely to show that the interviews actually occurred, but also to illustrate a remarkable recording technique. If Castaneda could demonstrate the technique in person, that would be even better, methodologically.

Carlos's literal transcription of "everything that was said," and Castaneda's faithful reproduction of intact passages from Carlos's notes tempt us to believe only simple translation stands between us and don Juan's actual speech. How odd then to note as Wasson did that don Juan spoke standard English in The Teachings but slang in the later books. Granted, the don Juan of The Teachings did say, "Accident, my eye!" and repeated Carlos's judgment that a girl named H. was "off her rocker," but those were rare lapses. In /I Separate Reality don luan switched openly to slang—"yeah," "bull!" "big deal!" "piddle around," "clobbered"—and in Ixtlan he called the wind "sneaky," told Carlos he was "truly a pill," and said things li ke "Cut the guff," "Come on, beat your gums," "Some clown brought you to me," "Don't lose your marbles," and "Golly! We're in a fix." Tn Tales of Power don Juan told Carlos a warrior had to "prepare his tonal not to crap out," praised Carlos with a BBCdy "Good show," called him a "greenhorn," but acknowledged that "We all go through the same shenanigans." Don Genaro he dubbed "the real McCoy." Not only did don luan speak standard English in 1965, slang in 1968; but throughout 1961 and 1962 he spoke standard English in The Teachings, slang in Journey to Ixtlan.

How can we explain such foreign and capricious speech in an aging Yaqui recluse? Wasson, a former English instructor and magazine editor, laid the blame on delinquent editors at Simon and Schuster. Having found but a single error in The Teachings | where "all right" was consistently spelled "alright"), he judged the later books to be editorial disasters, where one would meet such clumsy mistakes as: "the reason ... is because," "I. . . recuperated my balance," or "I wanted to adapt [adopt in The Teachings] a fighting position." "What good," Wasson asked, "is an editor who .. . docs not edit?" No good, surely— but I think we have to excuse Simon and Schuster's editors. A little blackbird has told me Castaneda refused to cooperate with editors from the moment he escaped the University of California Press, where his undisciplined, eclectic, anachronistic colloquialisms had been expunged for the sake of

academic dignity and ethnographic plausibility. In other words, don Juan's habitual, authentic, uncensored speech is either American slang or some kind of Spanish that is more appropriately translated into American slang than into standard or hispamcized English, One wonders what kind of Spanish that could be,

Castaneda's favorite adjective is "weird," which he usesnot as Macbeth did to connote destiny or supernatural influence but in the weak sense meaning odd, unusual, or strange. He is free to do so, of course, but he allows his Yaquis to do the same. Don Juan tells Carlos, "If you ever learn to see, 1 suppose you must do it in your own weird way," Don Juan's grandson Lucio |no doubt having picked the word up from his slangy old grandad) says, "If peyote is that weird, I'm glad I've never taken it." Castaneda's weak "weird" has no counterpart in Spanish and cannot be justified as a suitable translation of any word that could enter a Spanish context. Juan Tovar, who translated Castaneda's books into Spanish {or back into Spanish, if you are still a believer), had a hard time with it. He rendered don Juan's "weird" as razisimo, very odd, but he gave up completely on Lucio's "weird," writing a phrase that has no connection with Castaneda's English.

Castaneda wrote that some of don Juan's hunting tactics were "based on what he called 'the quirks of quails.' " Here the author forgets he is supposed to be translating from Spanish and gives us a direct quote from don Tuan in English. If don Tuan had said/os capnchos de los codornices. Castaneda could have told us so, as he told us don Juan saidcantidades decaminos, la yerba del diablo. or su nombre deleche. but don Juan didn't say /os capnchos de los codornices. he said "the quirks of quails."

Wasson was astonished to read that Carlos ' was supposed to look up and see the sorceress ['la Catalina'] in all her 'magnificent evil splendor,' " and that "Don Juan actually used those words." Again the author forgets he is supposed to be translating. Don Juan could have said, en todo su esplendor magnrfico pero mal£volo. but he chose instead to express himself at that critical moment in English, which Castaneda let pass.

My second appendix, "Go to the Blackbird," analyses the Spanish phrases Castaneda sprinkled through The Teachings and finds two quite different reasons for sprinkling them. In 10 of 27 bilingual entries, the author was giving the reader useful information, revealing don Juan's names for unfamiliar plants or sorcerous entities, distinguishing Yaqui Spanish from Mexican Spanish, or explaining Spanish idioms don Juan could have

used. Since the information in those 10 items could have arisen from don Juan's sorcery or speech but would not readily be found in a reference work, I called them Justifiable Entries. The other 17 1 called Unjustifiable Entries, because they told the reader nothing he did not already know from the English and because they could easily be found in an abridged bilingual dictionary. 1 concluded the Unjustifiable Entries had been added at random to strengthen the reader's false impression that the conversations were based on notes in the Spanish language.

The foregoing observations convince me that, except for a handful of names and phrases, the conversations with don Juan never existed, spoken or written, on tape or in notebooks, in any language but English until Juan Tovar translated them into Spanish.

Just a minute, you are saying, what about the 12 pages of Spanish handwriting Castaneda sent to Gordon Wasson? Of course—the 12 pages. How^r silly of me. But they don't change anything. The passages Castaneda picked out to reassure Wasson were completely safe. Though they mimic conversation, they constitute a formal philosophic discourse, a metaphysical catechism quite incapable of betraying any misfit between Spanish and English repartee. A second-year student could translate them in either direction with the greatest of ease. Subject to refutation by long-awaited proofs from Castaneda, it is my solemn conviction that those 12 pages did not exist before Wasson wrote his letter, that they were manufactured for the occasion, and that they are the only pages of Spanish field notes to come out of Carlos's dozen years in the desert. I do admit J shall not be surprised if some fat volume of Spanish scribbling shows up somewhere purporting to haul Carlos's field work back into the ordinary reality. What would surprise me would be a careful examination of such a volume that did not find it to be just another linguistic leg-pul] by those wonderful folks who brought you "Yaqui Shenanigans" and "Quirks of Quails," those incredible cactus conjurors, Carlos McCoy and His Sonora Spoofers.

Having substituted gringo fiction for Spanish fieldnotes on a big scale, Castaneda substituted Spanish for Indian names on a small scale. A major figure in the first two books is Mescalito, a berry-headed, green-warted, cricket-bodied, choral-voiced, cinema-handed supernatural personage, who appears when Carlos has been eating peyote and shows him a sparkling but enigmatic future. True to Indian tradition, don Juan does not

distinguish the peyote cactus from the teacher and protector who comes when one eats it.

"You really arc going to teach me about peyote?" Carlos exclaims.

"I prefer to call him Mescalito," says don Juan. "Do the same."

A month later, one of don luan's Indian friends hands Carlos something called both peyote and mescal, which he must chew. But peyote is not mescal, and Indians know it is not, especially men of knowledge like don luan. Weston La Barre lists plenty of Indian names for peyote—hicun. huatari, kamaba. pejori, beyo, kop, walena, ho. nesac, wokowi, and so on. He does not list mescal. The original mescal was the Nahuatl mexcallj, the agave cactus, from which pre-Columbian Indians fermented beer. The hard-drinking Spaniards distilled the Indian beer into a liquor they called mescal, and prizing alcohol above all other mind-benders, they obtusely applied the same name to two unrelated vision-plants used by the Indians: the fairly poisonous red-bean plant, Sophora secundiflora. and the more benign peyote cactus. In 1896, as Bigwood and Ott record, a German scientist who isolated an alkaloid from peyote perpetuated the Spaniards' misnomer by naming his discovery' "niezcalin."

Since Castaneda admits having read La Bane before Carlos's apprenticeship began, we can be pretty sure he knew peyote was not mescal. Why, then, did Castaneda's archetypal Indian call peyote "dear little mescal," a name provided by Spanish parochialism? For the same reason, 1 believe, that he called Jimson weed/u yerba del diablo and mushrooms honguitos or humito, all Spanish names. If Indian names for such things had popped up in the story, don Juan's exclusively Spanish discourse would have come under question, and author Castaneda might have been held responsible for an extensive Indian vocabulary.

Reviewing The Teachings of Don fuan, Edward Spicer, author of the major ethnographic works on Yaqui Indians, pointed out that the subtitle A Yaqui Way of Knowledge could not be justified, since don Juan did not participate in any Yaqui community and since his use of hallucinogenic plants contradicted what was known of Yaqui culture. "No Yaqui words are mentioned," Spicer commented, "not even in connection with the most distinctive concepts in Don Juan's 'way of knowledge.' "

That does seem odd. Of course, very few readers have any conception of the Yaqui language. Before working on this book,

I certainly didn't. For all J knew, Yaqui could have been a dialect of Spanish Well, it isn't. Yaqui is about as different from Spanish as Kickapoo is from Swedish. It is a language from a different continent, a different race, a different age.

If you happened to be spending the weekend in Yucatan —not the big peninsula that sticks out into the Gulf of Mexico, hut the little Yaqui settlement just west of Guaymas, in Sonora, from where don Juan's Mexican daughter-in-law came over to tend him after he dislocated his ankle on that fateful occasion when the murderous lady blackbird flew all the way to his house and gave him a shove in his moment of weakness—and you complimented one of the local residents on having a handsome house, whereupon he acknowledged that he and his family were living fairly comfortably there, the exchange could go like this:

E.s bonita su casa.

Si senor, Como listed ve. tenemos aqut una casa bastante buena.

But if you were up on your Yaqui, it could go like this;

Tua emuhyoisi bo'ak

Hewi achat, Itepo ala besa hiokut inilen inim ho'ak.

Don Juan grew up talking like that. Despite his "superb command" of Spanish and his Mazatec parleys with don Ge-naro, "he regarded himself as an Indian from Sonora," from Yaqui country that is, where we know his grandson Lucio lived in a typical Yaqui house. Don Juan spoke to Yaquis in their own language and even sang Yaqui songs when the occasion warranted. During "the great Yaqui w ars" seven-year-old Juan had seen his mother murdered by Mexican soldiers. Two years later the central government had exiled the remnants of the family to another part of Mexico |which, though Castaneda calls it "central," was more plausibly the southerly State of Oaxaca, where Juan sold herbs in the market place as a youth). In the 1930s a relenting government allowed the Yaquis to come home, so that when Carlos met him in I960 don Juan had been living for 20 years among or near Yaquis in Sonora and Arizona. If he had any cultural ties at all, he was, as he said he was, a Yaqui. If he spoke a native tongue, it was Yaqui. If he reverted to the language of his childhood w^rhcn he got excited or could not find the right word in Spanish, he used Yaqui words. Nevertheless, Carlos learned not one word of Yaqui during his first five years w ith don loan.

By the ninth year of the association, Carlos had learned tw^ro

Yaqui words: yon. wh ite man, and Torino the name of a Yaqui settlement—which means wood rats, though Castaneda didn't mention that. When don Juan sang to Eligio in Yaqui, Carlos wanted to know what had been said. Don Joan told him, "That was only for Yaqtiis." Carlos was sure he had missed something very important but the rebuff did not spur him to learn the language of his cultural hosts, from whom he was hardly insulated even if he spent must of his time with don Juan. Bajea; Benigno, Esquere, Genaro (no relation to don Genarol, and Victor were Yaquis, Carlos talked with them for hours, as a recorder hidden in his briefcase taped the conversation (eyeing the briefcase, Benigno wondered if Carlos could be a tequila salesmani; there must have been some Yaqui phrases on that tape. Touring Sonora on his own, Carlos inquired about diab-leros, questioning Indians named Choy, dona Luz. and Genaro [again no relation}. He formed a friendship with a local man (possibly a Mexican who gave him a shotgun on short notice to blast the lady blackbird with, Even when he was avoiding don Juan, he visited Sonora, for we know he first met Lucio in 1966. A dozen years frequenting the Land of the Talking Tree, surrounded by the spirit children of Yommuuli, and only yon and Tonm to show for it.

Don Juan warned Carlos to shun the wrong kinds of mushrooms and taught him to pick the right ones from among the wrong ones. Are we to believe don Juan used no Indian names to distinguish those varieties, or to identify other kinds of plants Carlos came to know like the back of his hand-’ Perhaps an uncharacteristically taciturn brujo sketched the plants in Carlos s notebook, or recorded them with □ poiaroid camera. Or perhaps the story is fiction and the author didn't bother to do his homework on Indian names of plants animals, artifacts, parts of the body or social roles. That would explain why don Juan wouldn't help Carlos fill out his kinship charts. The author didn't want the Yaqui words for father [a ch 01), mother or daughter-in-law ihubonn) to come up. It would account for don Juan's never calling a rabbit tnnbu, a squirrel tsku, a ratchfku/. a bird w j/krr, a lizard wi’ikn, a fawn mtilit, a coyote wv'i, meat tekiun water baa'd, cactuses mibm .siitta. ono'e, or aaki, seeds bauchi. hands mamam, head koba, Indians yoemem. woman humut. ramada hekka. hunter 'amureo. or warrior/iassimwd; never saying anything was tuj (good!, uhyoi (beautiful I, or even buitu (a "bunch of crap"|.

Not being an anthropologist 1 didn't miss those exotic Yaqui

words the first time round, though I did hear a false note closer to home. On 5 September 1969, Carlos told don luan he had been reading about people who had clinically died but then revived. "In all the cases I had read," Castaneda wrote, "the persons involved had made statements, upon reviving, that they could not recollect anything at all; that dying was simply a sensation of blacking out." That surprised me, because all the cases 1 had read reported just the opposite. Where could such cases have been published, I wondered. Then it occurred to me that writing up a scries of negative cases would be a rather unlikely exercise in scholarly masochism Perhaps Castaneda and I had read the same cases but he had turned them upside down so that he could throw the best Imus to don Juan.

That would be a writer's trick to build up his main character. In the same vein, several critics have applauded or derided Carlos's invincible doubts and confusion, which for six calendar and 12 narrative years let skeptics side with the overcautious, easily-rattled apprentice, while believers rooted for his resolute teacher, all the while gluing everybody to the books until one view or the other should prevail. It was an effective way to perpetuate suspense, unless the reader knew how people normally react when they meet the supernatural

Though anyone may catch an occasional, ambiguous glimpse of the metaworld—may witness, as don Juan would say, effects of the ntigual or reflections of an indescribable unknown—few of us have met that fitful otherness face to face, in living color and quadraphonic sound. Conventional skepticism blots out nearly any second-hand report of flying saucers {or sorcerers), hurtling bric-a-brac, graceful levitations, demonic possessions, smiling apparitions, soul trysts, perspicuous mountains, or inexplicable foreknowledge, but naive complacency crumbles quickly when someone plunges without warning from the familiar Newtonian world into a universe of alternatives, a realm of what might be, an every w’here-when-what of which the hcrc-now-this is only the most probable of possible realities. The following story, merely the most recent of its kind that I have read, illustrates how typically fragile is the defense of skepticism when the effects of don Juan'snngutr/ are directly witnessed.

While his frantic fellows were trying to rescue him from waters off Key West, a Navy scuba diver trapped for hours below the surface suddenly found himself observing the interior of his New York apartment, where his wife had just come

home from shopping. The phone rang, and the hapless woman heard a Navy official describe her husband's predicament, whereupon she made hasty arrangements to take the first flight to Florida.

Once rescued, the bemused diver declared what he thought his wife had said and done, who had called her, and when. The confirmed accuracy of his report startled and perplexed both him and his associates. Everyone said it was incredible, hut no one could deny it. Despite his emphatic rejection of any spiritualist or idealist world view that would make sense of his discamate travels, the traveler could neither explain them nor dismiss them but could only accept them as a genuine interruption of what he had believed was the only reality. His puzzled but frank, acknowledgement of the anomaly typifies the reaction of most hard-headed skeptics to vivid, first-hand events they judge, correctly or incorrectly, to he impossible under the normal rules. Carlos's dogged refusal to accept his own experience belongs to quite a different Order of behavior.

On 29 December 1961, the day after he saw a solid bridge joining a mountain to a bank of fog, then went to sleep in a cave that vanished by morning, Carlos appeased his conventional realism by indulging the suspicion don luan had slipped him some drugged meat. Since that was only the sixth of 34 non-drug nonordinary events ,listed in appendix Table 21, we may approve or at least defer to Carlos's caution. On 9 April 1962, having been frightfully menaced by entities of the night, Carlos supposed don Juan might have stationed some teaching assistants in the underbrush to make scary noises and cast sudden shadows -but that was only the ninth event. On 22 May 1971, nine years and 26 anomalies later, Carlos w as still dragging his feet on the road to conviction. Having peered through solid rock; gasped at a magic show where he and four Indian apprentices simultaneously saw don luan in five respective guises; beheld 'la Catalina¹ zipping like a shot across one country road, hopping as fast as he could run along another, and sailing silhouetted over his head like a ghastly female kite; heard his own dead mother laughing, calling him, and shuffling her slip pers; seen her clearly standing beside him? observed don Ge naro tumbling unsupported on a waterfall; struggled vainly to start his car after don Juan hexed its sparkplugs? recoiled from a moth as big as a mail; viewed the rumble of a rolling mountain, watched the same leaf fall four times; heard, seen, and felt in his belly the ten-mile leap to the mountaintops —to say no

thing of having his mind read over and over by don Jiiaa— having come through all that, Carlos still claimed to be from Missouri.

"I always think I'm being tricked," he complained. Alter summoning 47 luminous personal blobs, he called don Genaro and was thunderstruck when the elfin benefactor stepped lightly from a golden bubble, stood before him solid as a peyote button, and swore he had just popped over from his house 1200 miles—as the eagle flew away. Instead of welcoming the master with awe and admiration, Carlos sulked in skeptical confusion, suspecting the mighty leaper of lurking in the bushes and sneaking into the room when he wasn't looking. How many supernatural lessons does a hand-picked apprentice need! Enough, apparently, to keep the reader guessing to the very last page.

Tn the twelfth year of his magical studies, Carlos-Skeptic noticed don Juan was always around when he dropped in. "It had never occurred to me until then.¹' Castaneda wrote, "to think anything of it." B inter. Anyone so unreflective, so rationalistic, so defensively skeptical would have dropped the project on the first day right there in the bus station when don Juan fixed the "chosen man" with a "stupendous look" that numbed him so he could not speak or even think coherently. Facing such a challenge to his emotional security, his conventional world view, and his personal independence, Carlos-Skeptic would have beat a hasty retreat to the safety of the campus, where he would have switched his undergraduate major to creative writing, Rescued from waters off Key West, he would have accused his chief petty officer of rigging an underwater movie to dupe him. Carlos-Skeptic cannot share a personality with Carlus-Apprentice any more than Carlos-One can keep a diary w ith Carlos-Two.

Don Tuan is just as divided as Carlos. One minute he is don Indian, speaking and acting |in Wasson's words) "as members of any pre-literate community have always spoken and acted." The next he becomes the Indian don, lecturing like an Oxford fellow. "What impresses me in Castaneda's writings/' said Colombian anthropologist Gerardo RcichelDolmatoff, "is that his Indians think and express themselves like the Indians I have know n." " i he devil's weed/' don Indian tells Carlas, "has very few friends, and paloverde is the only tree in this area which agrees with her." "Because the smoke is my ally,” don Indian says, "1 don't need to smoke anymore. I can call him anytime, anyplace."

Such pre-I iterate parables (just now personifying the Jimsun weed and identifying the mushroom mixture with the spirit it calls} are the more extraordinary, Wasson comments, since in other respects don Juan is "a man of our times/' confidently commanding literate Spanish while "most genuine shamans in Mexico are locked behind , linguistic barriers" that isolate them from European thought. The Indian don, Castaneda tells us, "was very careful to establish that the world was whatever we perceive." Bishop Berkeley would have Lked to hear that. He "maintained that 'perceiving the world' entails a process of apprehending whatever presents itself to us. This particular 'perceiving' is done with our senses and our will." Such a Yaqui way of knowledge David Hume w’ould gladly have endorsed.

How shall we reconcile the compact animism don Indian teaches his apprentice with the discursive phenomenology in which the Indian don tutors his pupil? Where did the Uto-Aztecan polymath acquire his modem conceptual repertory? Castaneda offers no hint of the intensive curriculum behind this erudition. The years don Juan must have spent in the library of the Univcrsidad Autonoma are no less concealed from us than the reading lists assigned by Castaneda's UCLA professors. Don ]uan admits to reading nothing, while Castaneda acknowledges six sources: the nbi’idU Book oi the Dead, some cases of returners who brought back no news, Weston La Barre on the peyote cult, Talcott Parsons on glosses, Ludwig Wittgenstein's linguistic philosophy, and Edmund Husserl's phenomenology. Hearing of Castaneda's interest, a former student of Husserl's .whom Castaneda neglects to name! gave Carlos a piece of ebony that had emee sat on the philosopher's writing desk. After reading and discussing Husserl's Ideas [published in Englishi with the Indian don. Carlos gave the ebony to don Indian, who fondled it "as Husserl had done a generation before, and gave it an honored place in his treasury of power objects/'

Not content with erasing the Indian don's academic history, Castaneda startles us with greater incongruities, as Tij/es of Power introduces don Parvenu, an urban sophisticate who keeps a wardrobe of natty business suits and boasts he is "a stockholder." The metamorphic Matus quickens and brightens Castaneda's allegory but nullifies his anthropology.

As A Separate Reality opened, we found Carlos and don Juan sitting on a park bench somewhere in the mountains |presumably of Oaxaca) about the middle of Tuesday afternoon, 2 April

J968, when Carlos pulled a copy of The Teachings from his briefcase.

"It's about you, don Juan," he said.

The unschooled sage appraised the proportions of the binding, felt the hard cloth cover with his palms admired the green color of the dust jacket, riffled the pages like a deck of cards, and handed the book back.

"1 want you to keep it," said Carlos.

"1 better not," Don Juan smiled. ' You know what we do with paper in Mexico." Carlos laughed. He thought don Juan's touch of irony was beautiful.

The two men were waiting t0 sec don Genarobefore driving back to Sonora. Genaro's house i7c/7t'> of Power would tell us) was a six or seven-day drive from Los Angeles. This time the car had broken down, adding three days to the trip Carlos could not have left Los Angeles later than 2.5 March.

The University of California Press published The Teachings of Don Juan on 27 font 1968 Carlos had received an advance copy "in April," but the Press did not send advance copies to reviewers until 3 June, though the normal schedule called for sending them three or tour weeks earlier—in May, that is. Perhaps the books were delayed at the bindery. Unhampered by conventional time and sharing Castaneda's pride in the coming publication, the eager Carlos felt compelled ' to tuck a nonordinary copy of The leachings into his briefcase on 25 March, a iu 11 ten weeks before the bindery plodding along the regular time track managed to deliver boxes of ordinary books to the Press. Castaneda's touch of irony is even more beautiful than don Juan's. You know what we do with facts in the separate reality.

Which brings me to a speculation that has been trying to break through ever since I read the following statement by Margaret Castaneda:

"One day m the summer of I960 Carlos told me be had met a man he wanted to study with and it would mean being away for days or weeks at a tune. He knew- that would disturb me so he said maybe we should live in separate apartments."

"Did he mention the man's name?** I asked heron the phone.

"Don Juan," she said.

Having spent most of this chapter arguing that don Juan is imaginary, [ now have to ask myself what it means when Castaneda's then wife says Carlos met don Juan just when Castaneda says he met him. Having shown how far narrative and calendar ar co nt of ph a sc in Castaneda's books, I must now

explain this perfect synchrony. It could mean don luan was as real as you or I, breathing ordinary air, treading silica sands, trapping the doomed taabu under clear Sonoran skies, making tiny stitches in the eyelids of the lvj iku—but 1 think the evidence has overwhelmed that hypothesis. It could mean Margaret Castaneda was trying to build up the myth oi don Juan, but the rest of her article does not support that view. It could and I think it does mean narrative and calendar time were often the same for Castaneda, if fur nu one else. In other words, he was living in the story.

If Carlos gave The Teachings to don Juan the day after April Fool's Day 1968, that was when Castaneda wrote the scene. It Carlos met don Juan in the summer of 1960, that was when Castaneda conceived the idea, or made the first notes, or wrote the first version of the meeting. Though departing from the realities of commerce and family, science and academy, the separate reality was substantially true tn itself Much of the time, author and character lived, thought, and felt as one person.

In the fall of 1963 The Psychedelic Review carried a memorable article by four men who had eaten the mushrooms oi vision in Huautla or had used psilocybin in the United States. Three oi the four had seen eyes or faces glowing as don Juan's would later glow^r. One had tell himself submerged in water as Carlas would be submerged in the irrigation ditch. The same man had lost his body, all but the head, as Cados would do before flying like a crow. Thu skull of a second man had expanded into a huge sphere, on whose inner walls his introspective eyes had skated freely about, observing rapidly changing scenes of the private world, as sorcerers would later observe t he tonal within the bubble of perception. A third man had shot up into a standing position merely by willing it, as Carlos would "think" himself up during his first mushroom experiment which would take place on 26 December 1963 shortly after the article appeared

If Carlos's adventures were so closely linked in time and substance to Castaneda's clandestine reading, how did Carlos happen to meet don Juan in the summer of 1960? By Decern her of 1959," Margaret Castaneda recalled, "Carlas and I had read the Puharich book ! The Sac red Mitshr<Nim\ and somehow it changed us." Castaneda (she continued) "seemed with drawn." He took trips "to Mexico," where he was "digging fur bones." My theory places that particular "Mexico" in the UCLA library, where the rare "bones" Castaneda dug up were

the bona fide fieldwork of Gordon and Valentina Wasson.

Puharich praised the Wassons' epochal Mushrooms Russia and History, a lavish two-volume edition, printed in Italy, priced at $125, limited to 512 copies, published in 1957 while Castaneda was still at Los Angeles City College studying psychology, journalism, and creative writing. Whether or not he had read Wasson's Life article in 1957, we can safely assume Castaneda would not have bothered with Puharich in 1959 if by then he had already held the Wassons' dazzling source-work in his hands. On Margaret's reckoning, he read Puharich during his first quarter as an undergraduate anthropology student at UCLA, where he had only to visit the University Research Library to join that elite group of scholars who knew the full, authentic details of Wasson's discoveries. My theory finds him there, early in 1960, sitting unobtrusively in a corner of the special-collections reading room, perusing Volume Two with unbending intent, taking copious notes J this time in English! on what the ethnomycologists had found in centra] and southern Mexico.

In the summer of 1953, while he was collecting information on the hallucinogenic plants used by the Indians of the area, Gordon Wasson met Don Aurelio, a resident of Huautla de Jimenez who spoke both Mazatec and Spanish. Though Don Aurelio possessed many of the secrets Wasson was searching for, he did not at first reveal himself as a curing-shaman. "For days," Wasson wrote, "we had been talking with a curandero all unawares." "I had known don Juan for a whole year," Castaneda would write, ''before he took me into his confidence."

Like don Juan, Don Aurelio was "one who knows," seeing across time and distance, divining the thoughts and feelings of persons not present. Unlike don Juan he was only 45 years old, and his right eye was blind, whereas don Juan would tell Carlos, "The secret is in the left eye. . . . Usually the left eye of a warnor has a strange appearance/' With the mushrooms, Don Aurelio said, "one secs everything, one sees where God is also." "The smoke. . . . will set you free to sec anything you want to see,"donluan would say. "They carry you there where God is," several Indians told Wasson. "Mescalito takes you to another world," don Juan would say, "Is it heaven . . . where God is?" Carlos would ask.

The mushrooms, Wasson wrote, could be preserved in a dried state for as long as six months. Later he learned they could be kept for years. In my theory, Wasson's incomplete statement deceived don Juan into believing the mushrooms would crum

ble into dust before a year was out. Like Maria Sabina and her guests, Don Aurelio ate the mushrooms in their natural state. No one smoked them in a pipe. Maria Sabina, however, prepared the mushrooms for the ritual by passing them through the smoke of aromatic plants, as a photograph showed her doing. In my theory, the photo of Doha Maria aromatically "smoking'' the mushrooms inspired don Juan to smoke mush-room dust in his pipe and to "sweeten the smoke mixture" with leaves and flowers he and Carlos would gather.

Aristeo, a Zapotec manjak or man of knowledge, told Wasson three or four experiences of the mushrooms were necessary to get over the surprise of the visions. Don Juan would tell Carlos he must smoke the mushroom mixture as many times as he could to learn to handle its power.

Though Wasson thought Mana Sabina was in her fifties, her age was hard to guess. Like don Juan she combined youthful vigor with an aged visage; like his, her face was dark and deeply lined. Like him, she sat on a straw mat, was "seized" hy the power of the plant, and did not want her photograph shown to outsiders. "It w’ould be a betrayal," she said. For his part, Carlos would assure don Juan he had never betrayed his confidence by revealing his true name or whereabouts. In the 1957 Life article, Wasson called Maria Sabina "Eva Mendez," Cayetano "Filemon," Huautla "a remote village," the Mazatecs "Mix-tecos." The real Mixtecos lived farther to the West, toward that "central Mexico" Carlos and don luan would so often visit to see their Mazatcc friend Genaro. Cayetano's brother Genaro was not mentioned in Life.

How does the crow^r fly from Ixtlan to Huautla? Backwards through Castaneda time, 60 miles NNW across Oaxaca, dropping from 6187 feet in the Sierra Madrc del Sur to 5623, forsaking |in those daysl 1075 people for 3314. A short hop in a big country. Shorter in imagination.

My theory holds Carlos's self-effacing friend Bill could introduce him to don Juan in the Nogales bus station in the summer of 1960 because earlier that year in the specialcollections reading room at UCLA Gordon Wasson had introduced Castaneda to Don Aurelio, Maria Sabina, and Aristeo, three curing-shamans some of whose attributes found their way into the character of don Juan. Later chapters wi 11 reenter the library to seek further influences on don Juan's teachings, Carlos's exploits, and Castaneda's fiction, but first we inquire how one cams a Ph.13. in anthropology by reporting interviews with an imaginary brujo.

CARLITOS AND DON JUAN

(Karlosla into Achai Hoan)

A while back they say Ikuu haiki wasuktiam sirnsu-ka'apo'otea) this white guy (youi) drove down to Batacon-sica in his VW bus {'ill yoi-karopo) to learn how the Yaquis fly [Hiakim haisanenne’epo ta'aabaekail. He came all the way from the gnngo University of California \Kalipor-niapo kateka. hwe’u ehkweela betana weyekai) but he didn't know nothing tu aak).

Ha-ha! my boy \heheeli in uu.si), said a funny old man (musa’ala n’oJa] who was living by the irrigation ditch [hakia bewit ho'akan]. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! \heheheheheheheeti!\You sure don't know nothing. Looks like 1 got to be your teacher (’cnchi mah mahtaneeme}.

Well (pos), as everybody finally found out, that comic old man was the famous unknown sorcerer don Juan (yee-sisibome achai hoan], while the not-so-young anthropologist (hafbu kaa hu'ubwa-yo'otu tatta'abwi yoemraatat hu'uneebaeka au mahtame] was Carlitos, the man with no past |karlosla ka'etehoimta).

Wow’ \heppa!\ You should have seen the two of them, charging around on the mountains like a pair of wild horses (knuponau kum-kumti sdkul, leaping from rock to rock [tetdnjmet chep-chepti takaHike a couple of jumping beans (woi karpokaps asaltitans benasi], talking to the plants [mamyammak ’etebo], spying on the birds [wikitchimmet hiiu-sime}, singing sad Mexican songs [hume'e siok maisi yoi-bwikim 'am bwi bwikan], swapping tall stories (eteteho), and yelling at the wind \hekau-bicha chachaaen}. Carlitos learned to hunt |twmu), to set

traps (wite'rm), to enjoy eating rattlesnake (aakame-hissobata ukkule), to plaster leaves on his belly-button |sawd/n sikupo yaaka), to sew up the eyes of a lizard with a cactus thorn fivikuim pusim, choa-wichammea 'am hi ikak), to sit under the ramada (hekka betuku katek), to chew peyote [hikuri a’a chachamte), to smoke the mushroom mixed with special bugs \nanacata biichammak etemmak eelesukimmak untxoweiter buichia), to turn his head into a crow fu'u kobawa 'a'a konitu-tuuk|, to fly through the sky [teekapo ne'e), to see visions in the fog [bahewapo hita bibicha), and to stop the world fdnidtd kiiktetua). During those years |ivuMiktnnnpul, he played with the electric pissing dog {beokte sisi chuu'umake yeewesuk), he took a shot at the pretty lady blackbird (tutu'uli chana-hamutta muhuk), he almost got run over by a giant gnat [kuituund wrteepo’nnedj, he said how are-you tn a Chicano coyote [yoMvo’itrj tebotekl, and he played hide-and-seek with his invisible ally [eusila a 'a 'amareornake).

Sometimes Carlitos got so scared m the night \tukaanu awomtiwak) that he cried \abuanak), he fell down |ko’om wechek], he threw up |abjsdtdkJ, and he crapped in his pants (ahaitauyak), but he never stopped writing, writing, writing (bi/nACof?) about the life of the hunter fuznureoht haisa 'a’a hiapsa'u], the death of the warrior (nussunreotrl balsa 'a 'a naukuka 'it I, the man of knowledge (susuakame), and the path with heart (hoo'o hiapsita). Since he never learned a single word of Yaqui [nuput semi yoemnoki ahikahak], nobody (kabe) could tell him don Juan was just kidding him [abaita’ak] about all that fancy stuff \uhyoi buita). Well Idbwt’l, they say he went back to California and wrote a book in English [hi’osam mkienooka etea) about the old Spanish-spcaker \epanoukareu) who taught him a Yaqui way of knowledge [hiaki akad'emic puton). He made a big pile of cash [tomi), and that's about it (hunum chupe).

• 4. WHAT HAPPENED AT UCLA?

Castaneda as one pro/essor put it, is ’a native genius/ for whom the usual red tape and bureaucratic rigmarole were waived; his truth as a witness is not in question.

Alter wild-coyote chase across Italy, Argentina, and Brazil, where no trace was found of the quadri lingual, multinational Carlos, Time dug up a dusty immigration record for one Carlos Arana C. and read at last the facts of Castaneda's Peruvian origin. Seeing the case so deftly cracked we wondered if any secret could be kept from the global reach, the massed bushbeating, the skillful probing of The Weekly Newsmagazine Indeed it could Hot on the West wood trail Time b Sandra Burton hit a stone wall of silence, whose pleasant ivy mantle was all that saved her a sore nose, as cordial professors chatted amiably with her but told her nothing that could explain Castaneda's unusual academic career. "A native genius/' sighed one. "The type of student a teacher waits tor," marveled another. "Power takes care of you and you don't know how," glossed the Separate Raconteur himself. Burton and her campus informants went round and round the subject, but nary a chink opened in the faculty facade through which an outsider might glimpse the forbidden Dance of the Dreaming Disser-tator, in which for seven long years a tireless story-teller brings fairy tales to the learned elders, offering them as factual reports, until without warning the Men of Knowledge call him Earth Doctor and World Stopper, hoist him to their crumbling shoulders, bear him in stately procession out of the gloomy

Graduate Limbo, through the narrow Gate of Power, onto the limitless tundra of professional anthropology, where they hand him a scroll and bid him goodbye.

Why should this ritual from one isolated coastal village differ so markedly from what competent observers have seen almost everywhere else? Why has no ethnologist contrasted it norma* tively with more familiar rites? Why has no ethnographer tried to penetrate its indigenous meaning? Why. in short, has no scholar criticized what happened at UCLA or asked what the professors thought they were doing when they ratified Castaneda's fantasies?

Perhaps I assume too much. Who among us has seen the official document? June said Castaneda received his Ph.D. "for" Journey to Ixtlan. but Castaneda told his Irvine students /xt/un would have "an academic analysis appended to it tor his dissertation." Perhaps the forma] work he submitted contains both validating exhibits and scholarly apparatus going far beyond his popular writings.

While don loan's privacy had to be protected, the legitimacy of the fieldwork could still have been fairly tested. Suppose Castaneda and his doctoral committee select a panel of disinterested experts, agreeing to take the word of any one of them about the existence and character of don Juan. Castaneda goes over the list with don Juan, whosees each member of tire panel as a luminous mushroom, easily screening out any who cannot be trusted with the identity of a bnijo, tolerated in a two-room shack, or taken on hikes to witness power in the mountains. One referee is chosen, sworn to secrecy, and charged to stay in Sonora long enough to satisfy himself either that the fieldwork happened as Castaneda said it did or that it was a swindle, a sham, a masquerade, a spool, a hoax, or what you will. Though the visitor may lack the power to see magical events, he can certainly tell whether don Indian and the Indian don inhabit the same agile, wiry body .and compose" a single, trans cultural personality.

"There is no way tn escape the doing of our world," don loan told Carlos. "Out there is your hunting ground." Clearly he would not despise the apprentice's need lor the controlled folly of worldly recognition or balk at a modest request for one academic visitation. Perhaps, then, the validating testimony of some neutral observer like Pedro Carrasco or Peter Furst is recorded in the dissertation. And what a fine chapter that historic meeting will someday make in Castaneda's Tales of Folly'.

"These friends of yours/' don luan said, "do they know more about Indians than Indians know’"

"Of course not," 1 protested, "It's just that some members of the committee don't think 1 am telling the truth."

Don Juan looked out across the desert. His eyelids were half-closed. "A warrior doesn't care whether a thing is true or untrue," he reminded me. "If a thing is said to be untrue, he can still act impeccably. He just doesn't believe in what he is doing. Did you tell them that?"

"They read it in the dissertation, don Juan, hut that didn't make them warriors. They're just professors, a bunch of losers like my father."

Don Juan nodded. "If they arc losers," he said softly, "then you're a losers' pimp," He took the list out of my hand and examined it intently, A tremendous apprehension seized me. My thoughts went hack to a day many years before when, knowing nothing about don Tuan, I had insisted on taking pictures of him and recording our conversations on tape. On that occasion don Juan had said that if I wanted to have anything more to do with him I should never mention such foolishness again. Now I was proposing to bring a total stranger to his house. 1 felt like an idiot. I w anted to grab the paper out of his hand and tell him to forget the whole thing, that J would drop anthropology and devote myself to sorcery, that I didn't give a fig for the world of the professors. An intense wave of sadness swept over me, but don Juan began to hum a Mexican tune, and 1 knew he was about to clobber me. 1 sat up straight, my body tense with expection.

"This Professor Furst/' he said, pointing to the name at the top of the list. "What it we take him to a place ot power, and the entities of the night crush him like a bug?"

Though Castaneda was "stubbornly indifferent to any similarities between his experience with Don Juan and Zen or any other discipline," though he affected to be unfamiliar with philosophic sources his Irvine students pointed out, though he routinely denied being a whizz in the stacks, perhaps that was all propaganda for his popular books while his dissertation cited scores of writers like Artaud, Atkinson, Beals, Bennett and Zingg, Harner, Kluckhohn, Kliiver, Langer, Levy-Bruhl, Nunez, Rowe, Russell, Sapir, Swain, Thord-Gray, Weitlaner, Whorf, and of course the Wassons, He might be Carlos-Naif on the platform but Castaneda-Sc ho Jar in Classifications B to GR.

Such speculations did not have to remain hypothetical. Dis

sertation Abstracts International lists nearly every dissertation in the country. There I found SOO words by Castaneda under the promising title, Sorcery. A Description of the World. 'The data that comprises the present work," Castaneda wrote, "was gatheredover a period of tenyears of sporadic fieldwork in northwestern Mexico, under the guidance and tutelage of a Yaqui Indian sorcerer, don Juan Matus, whom 1961 took me as his apprentice. ' Since tourney to Ixtlan covers only 1960-62 and a brief episode in 1971, the abstract implied the dissertation was a more inclusive study. Three times describing it as "an emic account" |a term 1 had not seen before), the abstract suggested the dissertation was a formal, theoretical work. Here at last, I thought, might be the inner secrets of don Juan's sorcery and ample justification of Castaneda's academic recognition. I was eager to examine the document.

Dissertations listed in the Abstracts can ordinarily be purchased directly from Xerox University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, unless the author has prohibited such distribution. Of 30-thousand new works listed in one recent year, fewer than 50 were so restricted. The rare author (1 in6001 who does not want us to order his dissertation typically plans to publish it in a more profitable commercial form, or in an improved edition that will instruct us more effectively. Whatever Castaneda's reasons, he notified us we had to write to him in Westwood if we wanted a copy. Seeing his notice was already two years old, 1 ordered a copy from Ann Arbor anyway. Sorry, answered Xerox's computer, input codes forbid me to bill out dissertation 73-13132. Please contact author for copies.

On 6 September 1975 I wrote to Castaneda, telling him I was getting this book together, asking him to define emic. requesting permission to purchase Sorcery from Xerox, inquiring about the topic of his next book, and inviting him to lunch. On 4 November, having received neither an answer nor my letter back, I sent a reminder. Today, 2 April 1976, I am still waiting for his reply.

While the author may control Xerox distribution, he has nothing to say about the two copies of his dissertation that must be deposited in the library By early October I was holding the mysterious volume in my hands, appraising the proportions of the binding, fueling the hard cloth cover with my palms, admiring the dull red library color, turning the 368 leaves like pages of the Visions of Hernias [which, though they were "not strictly canonical, the Fathers appointed to be read

for direction and confirmation in faith and piety"' only to find that except for its title, five faculty signatures endorsing the fieldwork, a five-line vita, a four-item list of Castaneda's prior publications, the 500-word abstract, and a few minor editorial changes in the text. Sorcery A Description o/ the World was indeed Journey to Ixtkm and nothing more. No appended academic analysis, no reference list, no archival deposits, no referee's testimony, not even a definition of emic. The circulation record indicated no scholar outside of UCLA had borrowed the dissertation

Knowing these facts we can easily deduce some reasons for making Sorcery inaccessible, and rule out others. The tact that Sorcery and ixtlan are virtually identical rules out the perfective motive. The J act that the bookstores were selling Zxt Am at $6.95 eight months before the Abstracts listed Sorcery at $11 rules out the commercial motive. Still unread, however. Sorcery could be thought to contain the so I id scholarship, the supporting evidence, and the theoretical analysis normally expected and often found in scientific works Unexamined, it would strengthen the myth of dun Juan, attesting to his existence by its existence, protecting his privacy by its inaccessibility. finally, if Xerox's computer refused to bill it out. no angry letters would come to the UCLA anthropology depart ment protesting a sour-dollar iip-oii.

One of Castaneda's most favorable reviews and surely his biggest commercial boost came from anthropologist Paul Riesman, who praised his sconce in the strongest language anyone has used Taken together, Riesman said, Castaneda's first three books "form a work which is among the best that the science of anthropology has produced .. [Castaneda] has done the best he could to show others exactly how he came by his knowledge." Believing Castaneda had done the best he could not to show but to hide that information, 1 wrote to Riesman expressing my Views, In due course ,in answer came from 200-miles south of Timbuktu, where Riesman was doing palpable field work. Though lacking the relevant materials, he answered forthrightly as follows:

"I am no longer convinced Castaneda has dune the best he could to show others exactly how he came by his knowledge, for if he had, I do not think so many people would be suspicious of him What he does du is with great artistic skill show' the reader the experiences that led him to feel as real the world of the sorcerers, and if the reader is moved by the books he comes

away from them feeling, at least with some part of his being, that that world is real. This is an important and valid anthropological enterprise, one that very few anthropologists can do well, but [not. of course] the only thing anthropologists should do. If I were writing my review today, I would omit the word science/ because while I feel Castaneda's work can be very useful to anthropology I do not think his goal in writing the books was to be scientific. I don't think I would criticize him for this, though 1 might want to [ distinguish] between art and science in anthropology and [say I what I think their relationship is."

'What harm/ I had asked Kinsman, "has Castaneda done to anthropology?"

"I doubt that he has done any harm/' he answered. "Even if it should be proven that his books are pure fiction/ that would make some anthropologists like me look foolish but I don't see [any harm to] anthropology."

How foolish was Riesman to take Castaneda at his word? How foolish was Edward Spicer, when he wrote that though The Teachings taught us nothing about Yaquis, it "should attain a solid place in the literature of both the hallucinogenic drugs and the field behavior of anthropologists"? That depends on whether scholars generally can trust their colleagues. If scholars usually lie, then nothing can be taken for granted, but if scholars usually tell the truth, then lacking contrary evidence the community of scholars does well to rely on a presumption of good faith. Spicer relied on that presumption, and he was right to do so, though the presumption was in the event mistaken Even Riesman, writingas late as October 1972, but far from the village of the Dream Dance, defensibly relied on it. The burden of his review was that C arlos's progress from arrogance to humility, from ethnoccntrism to empiricism, was a model for ethnographers The point was well made whether don Juan existed or not,

"What," 1 had asked, 'was going through the minds of the committee that gave Castaneda a PhD. for Journey to Ixtlan !"

"1 wasn't aware/' Riesman answered, "that he had gotten a Ph.D. for that book. 1 remember reading in a publication of the American Anthropological Association that Castaneda had written a thesis on the world of the sorcerers, or something like that, but the title was utterly different; 1 didn't realize it was the same book." Erasing academic history seems to work

pretty well.

Responses from UCLA were less frank. When I asked one member of Castaneda's doctoral committee whether be had revised his estimate of how factual the fieldwork was, he replied: "I refer all questions about Carlos Castaneda to Carlos Castaneda The validity of his work is not determined by second-hand information nor taking a vote on it." But the Committee had voted affirmatively on the validity of the information that came to them second-hand from Castaneda, I was only asking if anyone had changed his vote in the meantime.

When 1 pressed a non-commit tee professor to confirm or deny his Statement (told to me by a common friend'¹ that he still did not know whether Castaneda had actually done the fieldwork, he complained about "intellectual blackmail."

When 1 admitted some of my questions were "quite probing," a second committee member said: "Frankly, I cannot even conceive of a purpose io your 'probing questionsTnor do I] see in what serious sense they can be called 'probing.'" One question my informant found neither purposive nor probing ran as follows:

"It has been said that even if Castaneda s fieldwork never really happened, and even if academics and the public were temporarily misled, the deception was justified by the result, which is that Castaneda has provided a valuable catalyst for re-examining ethno methodology, particularly the fieldworker's attitudes toward his indigenous informant. My reaction to such a statement is:"

A second non-commit tee professor let me call him Professor Blythe—reacted to that statement by saying, "1 don't accept that there was any 'deception.'" Two prominent professors from other universities answered at greater length. One said: "The statement [fairly describes Castaneda's influence] but 1 cannot support any deception. If it was all deception, then no result can justify the procedure." The other said; "I don't think there is room in scholarly work for deception of any kind. As matters stand, our fieldwork is not always scientific even with the best of intentions." No professor said deception was justified.

In a letter to Professor Blythe, I remarked that Castaneda's philosophy was a real mess—an opinion I later moderated—but an interesting and important mess. "So far as I can see," he answered, "Carlos doesn't present any philosophy'of his own; he claims to be reporting Don Juan's words, and one wouldn't

expect a Yaqui Indian to present a completely coherent philosophical system."

When Blythe acknowledged he was one of those who had advised the University Press to publish The Teachings and said he still approved the subtitle, 4 Kn/m Way of Knowledge, 1 asked how he could justify the subtitle after Spicer and others had rejected it as misleading. He answered: The general outlines of Yaqui culture are fairly well known from the work of Spicer and others, so that Carlos could take that for granted." But the subtitle didn't take Yaqui culture for granted, it promised to bring new information about it, a promise the text broke and the author repudiated—in The Teachings, in Ixtlan, and in his dissertation abstract, where he wrote: "The conclusion I have arrived at alter years of fieldwork is that sorcery does not have a cultural focus."

Asked to justify the doctoring of Castaneda, Blythe said: "One could argue his degree was awarded in recognition of the impact all his work <through Journey to Ixtlan} had made on anthropology and the reading public. Though the dissertation contained little conventional academic analysis. The leachings of Don Juan had contained such an analysis, for which no academic recognition had been given."' Blythe was referring to "A Structural Analysis," of which Weston La Barre had said: "This tedious attempt to play dutiful Levi Straussian games can have satisfied neither committee nor general reader." Now, we know La Barre could not stomach any of Castaneda's work, w hich he found "woefully inadequate, . . pseudo-profound, sophomoric, and deeply vulgar*... tiresomely dull, posturing. and intellectually, kitsch," but even Castaneda's admirer Ries man deplored "A Structural Analysis," calling it "awful. ... a pathetic demal of the reality of [Carlos's experiences, which] exemplifies the arrogance and fright of most of us Western anthropologists, who carry on as if we know the reality while 'other cultures' merely have approximate 'versions' of that reality." Of course, Riesman wrote that before he realized Castaneda was practicing art, not science. More attuned to literary artistry, novelist Joyce Carol Oates thought she recognized in "A Structural Analysis" a "parody that goes beyond what Vladimir Nabokov did in Pale. Fire (his target being literary criticism I

"It became obvious to me," wrote Castaneda (introducing The Teachings}, "that don Juan's knowledge had to be examined in terms of how he himself understood it; only in

such terms could it be made evident and convincing." Flatly ignoring don Juan's admittedly indispensable point of view, "A Structural Analysis" |Part Two of The Teachings) demonstrated for page after boring page, in soggy paragraphs sagging with deliberately redundant detail, nothing more illuminating than the obvious fact that don Juan's teachings were internally consistent and logically coherent, something every reader felt and no one had questioned, least of all don Juan. One might as well set out to clarify the theory of relativity by diagramming Einstein's sentence structure and reporting that he wrote no ungrammatical sentences. "A Structural Analysis" is an utterly empty exercise, and it was meant to be. As novelist Oates suspected, it is a merciless parody, w’hose sole and entire purpose was to fail pathetically, which it did triumphantly. If Castaneda's professors didn't see that, they were a lot dumber than 1 think they were. In his heart, Professor Blythe knows as well as you and I that "A Structural Analysis" is not a lecture appended to a story, but part of the story, the part that tells what happened when Carlos got back to UCLA and had to deal with his ethnocentric, frightened, hut arrogant professors. As the years went by, the UCLA part of the story mushroomed into a surrealist play, Castaneda and lus professors (including Professor Blythcl acting the roles of Carlos and his professors. Bravo for living theater! But no points for science, or good faith,

Laymen of different stripes have offered various explanations of what happened at UCLA: Professors are pointy-headed poltroons, UCLA is a ass, Anthropology is no science, Science is out and magic is in, or Something is missing. Judging Castaneda's career to have been a rare aberration, I find the last explanation most appealing. But what more can be missing? Based solidly on hunches and leaks, my theory may not stand as long as Ptolemy's, but at least it makes sense and fits all the data; no other I have heard can make that claim.

The minute I saw' Castaneda's unfamiliar word emic, I knew something was up. The closest my portable decoder could get w'asemicturate, which 1 didn't think would help. Three times Castaneda said it: "This is an emic account of sorcery as it is practiced by the American Indians of modern Mexico. . . . The main premises of this thesis, being an emic account, were statements voiced by the sorcerer-teacher. . .. The present emic account, therefore, deals with the 'techniques' by virtue of which a new agreement about the nature of reality is attained wnth its concomitant, a new perceptual reality." In a

500-word abstract, that constitutes nagging repetition, giving the impression the dissertation not only falls into the emic category (whatever it may prove to be) but treats the category itself in theoretical discussion. As we all know- by now, such an impression is false; Sorcery is only txtlan, and the word emic appears nowhere in the text. Nor could I find it in dictionaries of English, Latin, Greek, philosophy, social science, or anthropology. Evidently the author was at pains to signal the holders of some special code book, but who were they? I asked around. Nobody knew. Emic, one grad student recalled, formed a dichotomy with etic. Emmic-eetic I said, eemic-ettic she corrected, okay 1 said eemic-ettic but what do they mean? She couldn't remember—something about two different research strategies. At last a letter came from an impeccable ethnographic warrior I call Professor Volpe, who wrote as follows:

"In the early 1960s, a fad called 'ethnoscience' was born at Harvard, flourished briefly in many parts, then died almost everywhere outside of California. A lot of hot air was expended when the cognitive anthropologists, cultivating the fad of ethnosciencc, accused the rest of us of not getting inside the native's head before interpreting his culture. The terms emic and etic (coined from phonemic and phonetic by linguist Kenneth Pike in the 1950s¹ were used respectively to distinguish ethnography that attempted to adopt the native's conception of reality from ethnography that relied on whatever personal or theoretical conception of reality the ethnographer might have brought with him into the field. At Columbia, Marvin Harris argued against doctrinaire cmicism_; Columbia and Michigan have been consistently pro-etic. Since they were mainly linguists (w’ho are not as a class known for psychological insightj the emic anthropologists proceeded to get inside the native's head by collecting his names for things. After countless boring articles had been published on the native terms for firewood, plants, and roofing materials, Gerald Berrtman started an interdepartmental row by telling a large gathering of emicists at Berkeley they had been practicing 'anemic anthropology.' I don't know' how Castaneda got away with calling Journey to Ixtlan 'an emic account,' since it fails to meet the usual emic criteria of scientific rigor and narrow scope, but he certainly got farther into his native informant's head than most of us do. Of course, if don Juan was already m his head to begin with, he didn't have far to go to share the native reality, did he?"

Hunting up Harris's book in the library 1 found a chapter on

"Ernies and Erics," which took Kenneth Pike to task for treating etics unjustly. To give the gist of Harris's argument, the field worker who starts our with no conceptual framework won't be able to find his way to the village; the one who can find the village takes his world view along with him and applies it when he arrives. "Despite brave talk very few 'emicists'. . trust the native's account of his inner life." Pike's procedure in particular cannot carry the anthropologist to "a valley of inner subjective truth," however much he may long for it.

First the elmckers chastise the cttickers for beating about the native's head; then the ettickcrs retort that the emkkers talk a lot about mdigenoeranial penetration but haven't the foggiest how to do it. It Castaneda wanted to join this argument on the side of the emickcrs, and show them how to live up to their ideals, he did a great job. Over and over Carlos-Etic caricatures the arrogant, ethnocentric lie Id worker trying to wrestle an academic strait jacket onto nature's noble Indian. While Carlos-Em ic crosses his eyes at gullies and hushes,, watches his hands in dreams, luxuriates in the warmth of magic leaves, grinds up plants that have no names, and practices the gait of power, Carlos-Etic plagues don loan with geneology and kinship charts, and is told. "Don't waste your time with that crap"; regrets the Indian's "coarse ways"; condescends to acknowledge his social equality and is called a professors' intellectual pimp; lectures him on the meteorology of wind and is told such opinions are "pure crap", arrives in the land of saguaro and sage wearing a three-piece business suit, fears he will look ridiculous with a knapsack over bis jacket, and is invited to wear his jacket over the knapsack, so as to seem only a hunchback; calls don [inn's chitchat with a magic deer "sort of dumb" and receives the answer: "What did you expect? I'm an Indian." When the allegoric Mazatecs offer food to the eternally homeward-bound Cenaro, Carlos-Etic interrupts the story to ask whether Mazatecs customarily deny having food. Interviewed for Hdrper’s Magazine, Castaneda-Ernie accuses Carlos-Etic of asking: "What could a greasy old Indian teach me, a manof science?" On this view "A Structural Analysis" is Carlos-Etic-Procrustes cutting and fitting don Indian to a very short bed of mere logical coherence, Carlos-Total not only inhabits parallel universes and manifests incompatible personalities but takes both sides in methodological arguments.

As I perused "Ernies and Etics," a feeling of dejd vu en-

Veloped me, Harris quoted Edward Sapu, a giant in the history of linguistic anthropology: "It is impossible to say what an individual is doing unless we have tacitly accepted the essentially arbitrary modes oi interpretation that social tradition is constantly suggesting to us from the very moment of our birth/'

From the very moment of our birth"’ That had an oddly familiar ring Going back through journey it) Ixtlan I found a passage I had underlined on the first reading: ". . . what I held in mind as the world at hand was merely a description of the world; a description that had been pounded into me from the moment I was born." The statement had struck me not (I assume] because I saw that I should later read its counterpart in Sapir's 50-year-old essay but because it marked an extreme position in the environmentalist linguistic theory of child development, conjuring up visions of pedagogical parents leaning over the bassinet from either side, instructing the neonate in how to cognize his mothers face. Ove. Carlitos! Mira la car a de tu Mama. Aqui los o/os. Aqui la narin Aquila boca. . . .

Further reading persuaded me Sapir had rhetorically overshot and did not mean to impose the linguistic model so literally. "We must regretfully admit," he granted, "that the rebel who tampers with the truths of mathematics or physics or chemistry is not really the same kind of rebel as the one who plays ninepins with custom. . . ."(in which statement I assume the hard sciences stand for our non-social environment!. For Sapir, the physical and social realms were not equally affected by language-mediated interpersonal agreement. The Indian don, in contrast, whose epistemology was strongly influenced by the concrete thinking of his alter ego, don Indian, cheerfully applied the same rule of social agreement, in the same degree, to perceptions of mountains or mothers' faces as to conceptions of impeccability or pimpishness.

"We are making this room," he told the befuddled Carlos. "Every one of us knows the doing of rooms. . . . We have all been taught to agree about doing. You don't have any idea of the power that that agreement brings with it.' !n the social world, Sapir had written, 'existence'is determined by consensus. Customs are what people say they are. Castaneda congealed Sapir's fluid customs into adobe walls much as he had materialized Sapir's hyperbole of infant pedagogy. By the flickering light of such abstruse transformations do we detect the sorcerer's silvery' web shining across our path and learn what hoary spinner is helping him entangle us.

When Sapir talked about the social world, he put 'existence' in quotes, thus distinguishing a reality based on convention from a harder reality more broadly based on shared physical and physiological givens not so easily transformable by what people in one culture or another might say about them. Though don Juan usually scorns Sapir's physical-social distinction, he occasionally Acknowledges an ordinary reality beyond a shaman's visionary control. Carlos flies through the sky "as a man who has taken the weed," not as the birds do, and his body remains prostrate "in the bushes." Though a sorcerer may go to the moon, he can't bring home a bag of rocks. Having made his own concession to rocks, Sapir asserted his social version of the separate reality. "Any individual," he said, "has cultural definitions which do not apply to all the members of his group, which even, in specific instances, apply to him alone." A certain Two Crows denied the existence of a custom well vouched for by other Omahas His disagreement with his fellow Indians was not pathological or illusory but only personal and separate. "He had a special krnd of rightness [and] if we think long enough about [it] we shall have to admit that in some sense Two Crows is never wrong/* Don Juan told Carlos the world was whatever we perceive, however we choose to perceive it. For him, perception was an act of the will The separate physical reality was as clear to the Sonoran One Crow a? the separate social reality to the Omaha Two Crows,

So far we have found a methodological cause for Castaneda to take up and have seen Carlos-Emic skillfully promoting it while Carlos-Etic failed as devil's advocate. Paul Ricsman said as much in his review, though he did not guess Carlos-Etic had failed deliberately. Our immediate question, however, is not what Castaneda was doing but what the professors were doing. How did a fabrication like The Teachings, with its Yaquiless Yaqui, its gratuitous Spanish, its anonymous actors, its vague setting, its parodic analysis, and its spurious subtitle, attract faculty sponsors who would urge the University Press to publish it. "When [the book] was originally submitted to us," a Press spokesman declared, "we realized the treatment was unorthodox, but all the eminent anthropologists we consulted recommended publication/' Those eminent consultants must have been rather carefully selected. Stranger still, how did Journey to Ixtlun, easily shown to be logically incompatible with The Teachings, get by as a dissertation after so many critics had said Castaneda was writing fiction?

Did the genius dazzle his less gifted mentors? Did the Dreamer hypnotize the Learned Elders or cast a spell on them? Brilliant, magnetic, thaumaturgic though he is, I cannot believe C astaneda could outfox, mesmerize, or bewitch half-a-dozen tenured doctors of philosophy 13 years running. If he couldn't fool La Barre, Leach_r Harris, Hsu, Ochoa, or Dates, who bore no grave responsibility for critically judging his work, it defies common sense to suppose he could bamboozle five dissertation signers and one or two other faculty members who did bear such responsibility. Confidently rejecting the minor that Castaneda duped his professors, I do suspect he seduced them. Very likely they were not sure and preferred not to ask just whose hats he was pulling his metaphysical tiiahum out of, but they must have known they were dealing with an illusionist rather than a fieldwork er. Why did they wish to foster the illusion?

"What was going through the academic mind?" 1 asked several professors. "After many years on campus," one replied, "I have come to the conclusion there is no academic mind." "I would rather not comment," said another, "since I am a firm believer in departmental autonomy." Well, so am I. Academic freedom is a cornerstone of the inquiring society - but what is academic freedom? Is it a right to carry on without answering to anyone? Certainly not. Academic freedom is a right of scholars to answ er to their colleagues rather than to administrators, politicians, vigilantes, or gadflies like me. a right established to promote the growth of knowledge through the freest exercise of individuaI initiative consistent with standards upheld by the community of scholars, a nght that carries a duty to communicate assumptions, procedures, and reasoning fully and clearly to that community. I would not for a minute challenge the right of Castaneda's committee to doctor him in anthropology for writing a fantasy, provided they said that was what they were doing and invited their colleagues to judge their action. As it turned out, the colleagues rendered uidgment uninvited, and it was far from favorable, though it might have been favorable if the committee had come forth at some point—dare we still hope for that to happen?—with a frank, coherent explanation. "Waiving red tape" for a "native genius" is neither frank nor explanatory; it is artful dodging. If Castaneda's "truth as a witness" was "not in question," why wasn't it? Not, in 1973, because he was above suspicion but obviously because questioning his truth might have elicited some embarrassing

answers. How do learned elders get themselves in such a pickle?

The theory I propose here can he tested against the special information insiders possess. Though I lack that information, I am sure the theory is worth testing, and 1 hope someone will test it. To wit: Certain schismatic culturologists at UCLA, feeling powerless to persuade their theoretical opponents by the tedious process of rational disputation, feeling shunted onto a sidetrack of scholastic history, feeling oppressed by the academic majority, feeling at the same tune the surging rebellion of the 1960s, the boiling upheaval of dissent, greening, and expanding consciousness, suddenly finding themselves challenged by a uniquely talented and picaresque accomplice, could simply not resist the temptation to pull a fast one on their opponents. They sanctified The Teachings, spurious subtitle, parodic analysis, and all, not because they thought it w^Tas ethnography or even a tactual memoir, but because they felt it would be a well-deserved kick in the pants for certain ethnocentric, arrogant, etic mossbacks. On this view, University publication of The Teachings as ethnography was a private ioke on, about, among, and for culturologists. Laymen were not supposed to get in on it.

Thu University Press had bigger ideas. Teachings would appeal to youth, especially in the drug culture. Perhaps the book would persuade acid droppers and speed freaks more discipline was needed on the road to enlightenment, hut disciplinary or not it would sell like penny uppers. Failing to recognize "A Structural Analysis" as part of the story, some directors of the Press wanted to delete it. Castaneda was not about to give up his devil's advocate; the unreadable parody stayed, a spokesman confided, "not at our insistence but the author's." The subtitle, too, was "the work of the author." It was needed to distinguish don Juan from the horny Spanish misogynist, a former editor assured me. What it did was expand the market. A Yaqui Way of Knowledge not only announced new' wisdom from nature's nobleman but introduced a kind of red man no one had ever met—1 mean, who in 1968 knew anything about Yaquis? A tew dusty ethnographers in Arizona. It was a marketing masterstroke.

University Press editions generally run pretty small; The Teachings had an oversized first printing and was advertised as "nothing less than a revelation." The advance copy that hit the N'ew York Tinies Book Review trailed a long fuse. The reviewer

placed his charges well: young anthropologist, Indian sorcerer, peyote and other hallucinogenic plants, power over demons, science confronted by magic, spirituality stunted by rationalism, moving personal experience, turn-on, terror, danger, ecstasy, sinister guru, nervous breakdown. A Ballantine Books executive read the review, called the University Press, and the fuse was lit. April 1969 saw Ballantine's mass edition explode the private prank into a national fad In three years The Teachings sold 300,000 copies, transforming an obscure graduate student into a pop-htt, qua si-scientific, neomystical cult figure, as he pressed on to publish his second, more novelcsque adventure and to talk about his third.

Back at the village the elders realized they had let loose a monster. Though he had done nothing that would ordinarily merit such advancement, the Dreaming Dissertator made no secret of his aspiration to doctorhood. The pranksters had three choices. They could repudiate The Teachings, claiming Castaneda had deceived them, which would make them look like fools. They could boldly admit their prank, which would set off an endless professional wrangle, wherein they would suffer sorely, and which might provoke administrative reprisals. Or they could stonewall, thumbing a collective nose at critics, handing the prodigy his scroll, and closing the village gate behind him. Of three bad choices, the last was least.

It might be thought Castaneda's degree would secure his place in the world of the professors. The opposite is true. It transported him forever. "I can no longer be an integral part of that world," he said to Gwyneth Cravens. Between doctorhood and professorship yawns a chasm wide and deep. Prospective junior professors whose theses are known or suspected to be hoaxes will compete with difficulty against sober, earnest candidates whose work is conventional and whose appointment will invite no ridicule or censure. If the Dreamer made an ass of the University, the University got even by making him invisible, at least within the grove of Academe. The transparent doctor must have cried all the way to the bank; at 16-thousand copies a week, who needs students or committee assignments?

Could no one have held the ethnoscicntific toboggan back from its perilous plunge? "What about committee members who felt misgivings?" I asked a learned elder of a neighboring tribe. "They may have used the Whitehall system," he replied. Whiteballing, I learned, was the opposite of blackballing, where one negative vote excludes a candidate from a private

club. In whiteballing, one positive vote outweighs all negative votes. Whiteballing professors live in a world of mutual backscratching; when you are scratching somebodyS back, you are in no position to step on his toes. If a professor with status or prestige sponsors a dubious candidate, other professors do not voice their objections loud enough to prevent the candidate's advancement. "1 have been quite embarrassed at some of the people who have gotten through this way," my informant said, 'and I would guess one or two members of CastanedaS committee were pretty uncomfortable about what they were doing I understand somebody asked him in his final oral, 'You don't really mean you became a crow do you, Carlos?' 'Oh yes/ he says, '1 was a crow. I flew,"'

Who whiteballed the man who had been a crow? Thus far I have not given actual names. One reason is that my theory of what happened at UCLA is only a theory, while names are facts. Another is that 1 am not sure how to assign individual responsibility for what was done. A third is that the responsible persons have been sufficiently embarrassed by now to satisfy anyone's Calvinistic cravings. If despite all this 1 now mention Professor Harold Garfinkel, UCLA sociologist and signer of Castaneda's dissertation, it is because he has already been identified by lune as Castaneda's thesis supervisor, nominated by DC San Diego psychiatry professor Arnold Mandell as Castaneda's putative sponsor, and described by MIT political scientist Christopher Schaefer as Castaneda's advisor and a member of "a very small group of social scientists who are working in an area called ethno-methodology which is an extension and elaboration of phenomenology/' a description that echoes Professor Volpe's recollections of the "cthnose icntists."

Some years ago, Mandell endured an arduous postdoctoral apprenticeship under Garfinkel, whom he later recognized as his own don Juan-in-the mind, an academic rebel who held that social scientists found no truth in nature, but fabricated all. Mandell suspected that m making Castaneda rewrite an intended thesis three times Garfinkel had imposed his ethnographic nihilism so ruthlessly that the wily graduate student had determined to go him one better, to "outgarfinkcl Garfinkel," to prepare a beautifully wrapped empty package, a bogus thesis, a fake ethnography, which would achieve continuity and a sense of reality, thereby demonstrating the student's capacity to manipulate c thno metho dologic tools, without contradicting the master's teaching that all reality in social

science was manufactured by social scientists. "It has to be the only way to work with this scrambler of tenets/' Mandell wrote.

In suggesting Gartinkel forced Castaneda to tell tall tales, i ! th ink Mandell went a step too far If Carlos met don Juan in the summer of I960, and Margaret Castaneda heard about it shortly thereafter, when Castaneda still had two years to go as an undergraduate, the tales must have begun to grow tall long before any thesis supervisor could have applied any pressure. Seeing the didactic relationship as symbiotic rather than exploitative, I suspect the two men found each other perfect partners, whose respective needs, interests, and talents were mutually sustaining. It may have been a beautiful collaboration.

Having piled nihilism on errticism, as the Navajos piled Pelion on Ossa to escape the flood Coyote heedlessly brought upon the Third World, we have climbed up finally out oi the bog of speculation onto the firm ground of fact again. Walter Goldschmidt, then chairman of the UCLA anthropology department, conspicuously legitimized The Teachings in a laudatory Foreword whose first paragraph had only seven words: "This book is both ethnography and allegory/' Let's take ethnography first.

Employing unmistakably concrete terms, Goldschmidt placed the fieldwork squarely in the ordinary reality. Castane-da's 'Interviews" with don Juan "were initiated" while he was a student of anthropology at UCLA. We are indebted to him for "reporting to us the details of his experiences," through which he was "guided" by don Juan's "subtle manipulations " with "the aid of. ., peyote, datura, and mushrooms," If. writing in 1967, Goldschmidt felt any doubts about whether Castaneda had actually done the fieldwork, he evidently gave Castaneda the benefit of those doubts.

Were the don Juan interviews ethnography? Spicer and others would say no, while Castaneda had already disclaimed any "intention .to determine his precise cultural milieu," but Goldschmidt said yes, What did he mean by that’ Castaneda [he wrotel "demonstrates the essential skill oi the good ethnographer -the capacity to enter into an alien world." Perhaps he meant to limit Castaneda's "ethnography" to his demonstration oi a skill, which others could apply in cultural settings. "Ethnography" stretches to include the bare demonstration of an applicable technique, hut we can still recognize it.

What about "allegory"? In Greek it means "speaking otherwise than one seems to speak/' In English it means "describing a subject under the guise of some other subject." If The Teachings is allegory, the common meaning of that word compels us to suppose the book is not what it seems to be (a report of fieldwork) but something else (an imitation of reporting, a fairy tale about fieldwork). Goldschmidt's first paragraph should then say "This book seems to he ethnography (in a broad sensei, but actually it is an allegoric tale with important implications for ethnography/' That would be both true and plain. As it stands, the paragraph is misleading nonsense. Do eminent professors write misleading nonsense? Hardly ever con fined to seven words.

Further study of Goldschmidt's graceful but ambiguous little essay persuaded me that when he said "allegory" he meant "analogy." Now, of course, an allegory ;.s a kmd of analogy, but to write "allegory" when you mean "analogy" is to be misunderstood by just about everybody. For one terrifying moment I suspected Goldschmidt had been taking spoofing lessons from McCoy and the Cactus Conjurors, but then it occurred to me that social-science intellectuals live on the fringe of the English language indulging the hideous vice of jargon. Perhaps in certain dingy academic corners "allegory" regularly stands in the stead of "analogy/' NugutiJ preserve me from such dens of depravity!

Having broken Goldschmidt's code, let s see what he was talking about 1 believe he meant to say this: Any world we continuously experience is only a cultural construct, a special way of looking at things that is determined by our cultural background. Any such culture-determined world is not the real world but only an orderly and fairly stable representation of the real world. It is an analogue of reality. An analogy to reality. An "allegory" of reality, if you will. (I won't—but never mind.) When we have known only one such analogue, we believe it is the only one there is, but Castaneda and don Juan have helped us to sue there are many such analogic worlds, and by seeing more than one, we can sometimes, it we are lucky just for an instant, catch a fleeting glimpse of the absolutely real world that lies beyond our cultural constructs.

Joseph Chilton Pearce chided Goldschmidt tor imagining that one reu/iy real world stands behind some hnper/ectJy real worlds we (or sorcerers) habitually see (or see). While I quite agree that Goldschmidt fell into a fallacy here | which I discuss

in Chapter Seven) 1 recognize it as don Juan's fallacy and Appropriate for the Foreword. Though 1 think he was fair to don Juan, Goldschmidt's peculiar choice of words and failure to define the words he chose booby-trapped both him and the reading public. In two shakes of the Coyote's tall tale, the anthropological establishment in the august person of Edmund Leach dumped a heavy load of skeptical criticism on the Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Re-read today, after more and wilder versions of the story have appeared, after the ethnography has been called not skill but hoax, after rhe allegory has been labelled not phenomenal analogy but blatant fiction, Goldschmidt's first paragraph—"This book is both ethnography and allegory"— seems to say that anthropological reports based on fieldwork are not to be preferred to or even distinguished from those conceived in dreams—a message the writer can hardly have meant to convey.

Noting with relief that Goldschmidt five years later refrained from signing Castaneda's best-selling dissertation, 1 am inclined to count him, like don Juan's mother, a casualty in Castaneda's allegoric Yaqui Wars. Another and more obviously innocent victim was the Library of Congress, now approaching its second decade classifying the don Juan books as Yaqui history rather than fiction. Don Indian must have "roared, kicked, cried, coughed and choked with laughter" when the Indian dun told him the cataloging data in Tales of Power gives no birthdate for Castaneda, who surely had one, but gives a birthdate for don Juan, who surely had none.

Why has no anthropologist complained in public about what happened at UCLA? I can see several reasons. Like other professionals, the anthropologists prefer to do their laundry in private. Again, should Castaneda enter the furious competition for junior faculty appointments, his anomalous career would handicap him severely. Third, since anthropologists generally do not recognize his books as ethnography, and since the main ethnographic claim was confined to one subtitle [the marketing misnomer, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge] which the author thrice repudiated, it doesn't strictly matter to anthropologists whether the books are fact or fiction. Fourth, Active or not, the don Juan books uniquely illustrate an ideal of fieldwork many anthropologists want to teach. Last but not least, Castaneda's books have swelled the rolls of undergraduate anthropology at a time when the academic market is failing, and prudent instructors prefer incorrect their students'

enthusiastic misconceptions diplomatically, without biting the Coyote that feeds anthropologists.

Condemned for violating a rule [don Genaro told us) a warrior admits he has run out of ordinary time, thanks those who have taken care of him and helped him on his way, says goodbye to his friends atop the barren mesa, and walks away from them down the slope toward the woods to the west, as they raise their weapons and keep him in their sights. If he loses his head and starts to run, or if he cries out in his anguish, he will be cut down by an unknown sharpshooter, but if he walks slowly and steadily, eyes straight ahead, never stumbling or turning to look back, never questioning his condemnation or challenging his expulsion, his former associates recognizing his dignity, admiring his bravery, and appreciating his loyalty to the code, will hold their fire so that he can reach the woods alive. His only chance to escape execution lies in impeccable conduct. Once in the western woods he must remain there, waiting without hope of forgiveness or reward, alone but not lonely, completing certain unspecified, power-storing tasks. Someday perhaps he will be allowed to return and rejoin his comrades on the high ground.

Recently Walter Goldschmidt explained his characterization of The Teachings as an "allegory." '1 meant (hat the book has a moral," he said This explanation makes some sense, ar last nt his calling the hook both ethnography and allegory"—though the statement is still misleading, since the book is not rthnogtaphv in any case. Ethnography is both cultural and factual, while don Juan's lore arises from no identified culture, certainty not from Yaqui culture and the old man himself is by all reasonable tests not factual but imaginary Bv finding a moral in The Teachings. Goldschmidt rendered the book an allegory, just as one might take the sinking of the titanic to be an allegory of man's fate or of God’s mysterious ways to man This would be a reader's allegory. implying neither that the Titanic was an imaginary ship nor that reports of the sinking were written to convey a moral Reports written to convey a moral would likely depart from accuracy, since intentional allegorizing conflicts with factual reporting in both purpose and technique By using the bare term "allcgoiv " which connotes writer's intent more strongly than reader’s interpretation, Goldschmidt unwittingly but correctly told his readers The Teachings was a writer's allegory—which, when closely examined, is seen to offer a tract on methodology and metaphysics under the guise of a field report, thereby disqualifying itself as tactual reporting. An inadvertently correct 'allegory" contradicts a mislead ing "ethnography." making nonsense of "both ethnography and allegory."- RdeM 19^8

TwMWwwVwfrfmwtVfimw

The Disagiki is an evil mythical bird, so small it is not visible to the eye. It is owned by sorcerers, men of ill repute, wizards, or witches. Only the owner nr a shaman has the power to sec a Disugi-ki. [’he Tarahumara believe such a bird can be sent by its master to any house to make someone sick. To do this, the bird is supposed to land on the food, take a bite, leave its excrement on the food, and return to its owner. If a shaman can catch one of these birds and throw it on the tire, the owner will become very sick. A shaman who can "see" the bird can drive it away by throwing powdered chile pepper into the air, as the bird does not like chile, which symbolizes tire. Further, the owner of a bird may sometimes be spotted, as he never touches chile.

When a person suffers from nose-bleedingand bilious dizziness, one of these birds has been at work The man's soul has been stolen or eaten up while he was sleeping with his mouth open. To bring the soul back, the shaman boils four pieces of oak bark, three silver pesos, and three or four iron nails tn a pot. A mouthful or two oi this medicine will restore the soul. .Another cure is to cat some chile and place some food outside the house for the bird,

— I. Thord-Gtay

Tarahumara Dictionary

• 5. A MAN OF NOVELS

A warrior treats the world OS an endless mystery. . . , stupendous, awesome . . . unfathomable. , , The art of a warrior is to balance rhe terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man.

The quality which had enchanted me m his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrify mg and ecstatic reality in which we al! live.

fhe writer whose imagination enchanted Clive Staples Lewis was not Carlos Castaneda but the 19th-century allegorist whose dialogue between man and raven I quote at the end of Chapter Nine. As 1 trace the geneology and kinship charts, I find George MacDonald's Phantasies and Lilith to be direct literary ancestors of the don Juan books. MacDonald, Charles Williams, or C.S. Lewis would doubtless have been repelled by Castaneda's impersonal and loveless miguol but would instantly have felt at home among the actors in his tale—the naive, persistent seeker, the well-meaning common folk blind to supernatural signs, the good and evil wizards and witches, the familiar spirits, and the benevolent talking animals. Those three great religious fantasists would have rejoiced in Carlos's longing for illumination and his tireless search for transcendental reality. They would, in Christian charity, have hailed him as a lost sheep bleating tu be rescued from ancient and modern heresies and from self-imposed spiritual exile.

In 1956, during Castaneda's studies of creative writing ar Los Angeles City College, Lewis published his last and most mysterious novel, a complex, obscure fantasy which like the don Juan books can be read as often as one likes without failing to yield new meaning, 7"r// We J/tiir Ferres is the bitter polemical memoir of Orual, Queen of Glome, ruler of a dismal land where people worship the goddess Ungit. a powerful black stone without head or hands or face, a divine lump like a Peruvian hiidcti. Defiant at the end of her long and harrowing life, Orual dates to accuse Ungit and her son the mountain god of hateful injustice, writing she says in Greek so that when the next rare traveler from the Greeklands loses his way and wanders into Glome he will read her accusation and carry it back with him to where men speak openly oi the gods and do not fear to judge their acts.

Sadly searching the mountains (she writes) for her younger sister Psyche, abandoned as a sacrificial bride for the mountain god, expecting to rind only her bones, picked and bleached, Orual meets instead a laughing, smooth-limbed woman, with radiant face and eyes like stars. As.the sisters sit together on the ground eating berries and drinking water from a spring, Psyche recallshow the temple girls al the bidding of her father gave her a drug to prepare her for the sacrifice, how she quickly entered a dream in which she was carried on a litter up into the mountains, where a bird-headed man bound her standing to a tree and left her alone, where she suffered thirst in the glaring sun and ached to lie down, where beasts gathered round her and a lynx sniffed at her feet, after which a shapeless change from within summoned a rainstorm, and win J that roared but softly all round her, seeming to lift her. but when she saw the wind he was a god, and she felt ashamed of being only a mortal before him, who took her m his beautiful arms which burned but gave no pain and pulled her painlessly up out of the iron girdle in which the priest had bound her and carried her into the air far above the ground and whirled her away

"You must have been dreaming," Orual exclaims.

And iiit was a dream/' counters Psyche, 'how do you think I came here? More likely everything that happened to mu before this was a drcam.

Though Psyche saw the wind god only for an instant, as one sees in a lightning flash, she knew and trusted him from that moment forward and felt no tear of sailing with him through the sky. Presently he set her down in front of a great house like

none before conceived, told her it was her own, and hade her enter as his bride, There unseen women welcomed her with wind-like voices, ted her and bathed her and put her to hud, where in the night her husband came to be with her.

Onia I interrupts, saying she can bear no more, for if the story is true she has been mistaken about reality all her life and must begin anew. She begs Psyche to show her the wonderful palace. Psyche rises and invites her to go in, urging her not to be afraid at anything she may see or hear. Orual asks if it is far.

"Far to where?” says Psyche.

"To the palace, to this god's house.”

"What do you mean’" Psyche begins to tremble.

¹ I mean/' Orual is gripped by her own tin comprehending fear, "where is the palace? How far do we have to go to reach it?"

Psyche cries out sharply, stares white-faced into her sister's eyes, says. "But (his is it, OrualJ It is here! You are standing on the stairs of the great gale.”

Then do the desperate women confront each other across the widening gulf that separates their two realities, Orual commanding Psyche to stop, to admit they are alone in a desolate mount am valley, Psyche turning to show Orual the shining palace walls, pleading with her to touch them to beat her head against them if need be, Orual accusing Psyche of pretending, of making herself believe, but knowing she herself is lying to hold back the horror of that dread place, where even priests dare not go, so high in the mountains, so near to the gods, where a hundred things she cannot see may surround her, where the palace of the wind god may be standing before her. seen by Psyche but unseen by Orual. And with the horror of that thought jshe writes) "came inconsolable grief. For the wiilld had broken in pieces and Psyche and I were not m the same piece.’'

"We spun through the air with such speed and force that I couldn't see," said don Gvnaro. "Spinning with your ally,” don loan told Carlos, "will change your idea of the world. . . . and when that changes, the world itself changes.” After my encounter with the ally/' Gemini said, "nothing was real any more."

Recognizing Castaneda's first two books as fiction, Joyce Carol Oates compared his story-telling unfavorably with that nt Jorge Luis Borges and doubted (for the moment) she would read a third. Time, in contrast, found don Juan's world "as

thoroughly articulated as... Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County." Ridiculous! retorted novelist William Kennedy; when he gets down to concrete details, Castaneda is as clumsy as a brick mason touchingup the gold leaf on the Taj Mahal; his fluid but gawky dialogue can be tolerated only if you don't think it is supposed to he realistic; his descriptions of ordinary activities are thin and repetitious; wading through his silly prose you grow to like him not for his literary skill but for his intense commitment and mountainous labor. Well, people have very different reactions to things. Thomas Wolfe's novels were called both the greatest American prose ever written and bombastic apocalyptic delirium. According to Time s Robert Hughes Carlos's meeting with don Juan was "one or the most fortunate literary encounters since Boswell was introduced to Dr. Johnson/' while according to William Kennedy many of Castaneda's passages would get him kicked out of any decent creative-writing class.

"If we define 1 nerature as an art whose medium is words, then certainly [he: has no place in its first rank—perhaps not even in its second (Occasionally his wisdom burns away] the baser element* in his style, . . , but he does not main Min this level for long. 1 he texture of his writing as a whole is undistinguished, at times fumbling.” 1 would call that a fair appraisal of Castaneda's writing, except for the fact that it was not written about him but about one of his fillcgorist forebears, George MacDonald, by another, C.5. Lewis. Badly as MacDonald often wrote. Lew is judged him a master of mythmaking, and myths, he said, have a life of their own, independent of their makers and of the words their makers use. Unless I am quite mistaken, don Juan will outlive not only his maker but the many critics who have rightly said his maker was not worth noticing as a literary stylist

When the enthusiastic Joseph Pearce called Castaneda "the principal psychological, spiritual, and literary genius of recent generations,” he said something triply absurd, but his absurdity carried a sound implication: don Juan the myth has come to stay. Pearce devoted many pages to comparing don Juan, an actual person, with Jesus, another actual person. Various earnest psychotherapists have hailed don Juan, an actual person, as a source of improved therapeutic concepts and techniques. Parodists have offered us burlesque brums, thereby acknowl

edging don Juan as a mythic figure who challenges the powers of parodists to destroy him in the trial by guffaw. It is clear to me that all such assaults must fail no matter how funny they may be; don Juan is too big for burlesque, too strong for caricature; he brushes off parodists like hundred-micron gnats.

Though 1 am quite sure don Juan was invented by Castaneda, I have not hesitated to write about him as though I knew him personally, which of course I do, as anyone does who has learned the Yaquiless Way of Knowledge. A few pages back, for example, I said don Juan would not despise his apprentice's need for the controlled folly of worldly recognition. While we always risk error when speculating about the motives or hypothetical acts of others, I feel at least as confident in saying what don Juan would not despise as in saying what my editor or publisher would not despise, because I know don Juan better than I know them.

Don Juan lives! That is his inventor's prune achievement on this earth. Though an undistinguished wordsmith, Castaneda is an able, dedicated mythmaker and may well take his place with MacDonald and Williams, whose language was an adequate though not elegant vehicle for their allegories, but not with Lewis, who was a literary artist as well as a master of myths.

Beyond the looming of don Juan, when does Castaneda rise above mediocrity? Notably, as several critics have remarked, in his fable of Gcnaro's perpetual journey to Ixtlan, a retelling of the universal folktale we might call "Sorcerers Can't Go Home" but the Japanese called "Urashima Taro," Washington Irving called Rip Van Winkle, and C.S. Lewis called Till We Have Faces. Almost any literary version is better than Castaneda's, yet he does evoke the poignancy we look for in that age-old story of the impetuous seeker or unlucky wanderer irredeemably touched by the gods, of the sorcerer or innocent suddenly privileged to look on hidden wonders but ever after deprived of the joys men find in ordinary' affairs.

Other high points in Castaneda's writing include some of his comic episodes and many of his dignified or vulgar aphorisms: The twilight is the crack between the worlds, There are no survivors on this earth, Death is our eternal companion, To die alone is not to die in loneliness, We arc the prisoners of power, Crap on the roof with your ass on the ground (perhaps a mesoamerican or Hispano-Peruvian version of the old-world Leap to the roof), Attacking a lion with your farts, When Ge-

naro shits the mountains tremble. These epigrammatic fungi are savored all the better if we brush off the occasional bits of stylistic manure that cling to them: A masterful caricature, A mountain of glass shreds, Don luan placed each rock about a foot apart in two crevices, He sprung to his feet.

Understandably piqued, Kennedy called Castaneda a literary grand larcenist for peddling fantasies as facts in a market where fiction was hard to sell, then credited him with "the skills of a superb but flawed novelist" for artfully novelizing a series of philosophy lectures. Like Agatha Christie planting clues, Castaneda sows the seeds of our belief early in the season and waits patiently for them to bloom. Not many readers remember Carlos's first meeting with don Genaro, the unnamed Mazatec Indian who showed up three hours alter don Juan threatened to use the nonordinary copy of The Teachings as ordinary toilet paper. That crucial off-stage meeting, in which don Juan recognized Genaro as Carlos's spiritual benefactor, was not mentioned again for 73 pages, was not explained for 755.

Unlike Agatha Christie, Castaneda does not hesitate to mislead us unfairly, as when he deftly palmed the dates on winch 'la Catalina' scared the buifu out of him. He mystifies us with doctrinal contradictions, purportedly don Juan's tricks to trap a reluctant pupil, but often obviously the result of the author's continuing education. As Elsa First remarked, his understanding grows from book to book [which growth helped us to confuse calendar with narrative time when the backdated Ixtlan came along).

Accomplished story-tellers pepper their tales with names and attributes. Castaneda's moonshine is watered down with anonymous and featureless plants, animals, places, and persons. Good old Nogales Bill tor instance knew don Juan before Carlos did, but that didn't get him a last name or an occupation. (Outside the text but still inside the story he and Carlos went to Hollywood High together, or as further facts came out to Cajamarca High.) Carlos picked up some amusing mannerisms from a certain German Sinologist who lacked both name and institutional affiliation. [Outside the text he took some wild celery to be analyzed by a famous but nameless UCLA botanist. An unidentified student of Husserl's gave him the philosopher's very own paperweight.) "Oh, I am a bullshitter!" Castaneda "cackled" to Sandra Burton, "Oh, how 1 love to throw' the bull around!" Those impulsive, careless conversational effluents seep often untreated into the bullslinger's

prose. ''With astounding speed and skill" but with no specific materials or opera nuns, don Juan assembles a trap having no particular structure and catches three rodents described only as "chubby*¹ and "squirrel-like." He sings an idiotic Mexican sung so comically that Carlos hast) laugh, hut not a line of it can he recalled He suggests ' a series of hilarious rhetorical exclamations'' which remain forever buried in Carlos's Spanish Held notes. Castaneda strokes us with a broad brush hut his paint is thin.

The prisoner of power stands convicted also of felonious self-plagiarism, as in The Gait of Power ' a chapter of Jxtlan that closely parallels in mood and action Section 16 of A Sepzr-rertf? Reality, Carlos in both episodes menaced by things that go bump in the night, fleeing through the chaparral, cowering in terror, or galvanized by unseen popguns as directionless as Maria Sabina's midnight percussions in Cayetano's house. Castaneda's volume budging cliff-hangers belong in soap opera. Alter ten years of gruelling study, May 1971 saw Carlos's car re appearing from under a hat, Carlos conversing with a glowing coyote, and the world sustained by internal dialogue finally collapsing. "On that occasion,'¹ Castaneda wrote, iny apprenticeship came to an end." it was a thrilling climax, "a bona fide termination," a last exit by Carlos-Apprentice promising a quick, entrance by the long-awaited Carlos-Sorcerer. Three months later, in the next book., Carlas-Apprentice was back, sitting once more at the master's feet, learning hi\ lessons in the same i Jd way. One typical Saturday morning in the Apollo Theater on Hollywood Boulevard I saw with my own two eyes a run-away covered wagon plunge over a chit carrying the heroine of our weekly serial to certain doom. Seven days (less 30 minutes^ later that wme wagon swerved at the Last second to save the lady and the story but left an audience of prcpubescent rubes feeling shamefully abused. Tn those days hardly anybody had heard of a separate reality.

Castaneda s narrative skill appears when we realize the events in don Juan's desert are nobody's bedrock experiences but parables, metaphors, theoretical models, concretized conceptions, solidified abstractions. Ta/es of Power is a play based on Wittgenstein's theory, a pretty sloppy play which needs cutting and rehearsal but better than no play at all. To those who didn't know Wittgenstein had a theory it's a revelation, and Carlos or don Juan is a world teacher. If Castaneda is not the Shakespeare of metaphysics, at least he is the Neil Simon.

Outstanding for a lecturer it not for a fantasy writer, his imagination caters to a pedestrian market. Seldom dots he drop his dusty cloak of pedantry to carry us on wondrous wings beyond the boundary of what we can conceive. Characteristically he borrows conventional images—glowing varmints floating bubbles, falling leaves, personal auras, translucent mountains -or flatly says the experience is ineffable.

It was something, something, something ... like nothing I can tell," stutters Genaro(ellipsisin the original). "It is hard to see on the other side of the boundary/'says don Juan. "Neither you nor I will ever know what really took place at those times." Saying thetonxr? and the ntigual are both inexplicable, don loan stands on solid metaphysical ground- -if that docs not sound like thin ice- hut he isonly postulating a transcendent quality, not making us feel it. His miguaj taps us lightly and lets go oi us quickly^ rarely docs it grip us If Castaneda had the power to wrench us across the ultimate boundary and hold us there, not letting us return to the world we think we understand hut losing us on the other side—in a world that is by definition only an amazing counterfeit projected by the writer from this side onto a faceless void—he might rise into the company of another imperfect wordsmith, the fabulous David Lindsay, a mythopoeic paragon w ho rushed into the pseudo-nagual too fast and too far for his contemporaries tn follow -and died forgotten Determined not to be forgotten before he was remembered, Castaneda obeyed the schoolteacher's rule and met his pupils where they were. Seeking ancient wisdom oi doors to other worlds, they were not likely to have much background in science, philosophy, or literature. Un instructed native wit might be their only educational resource. The low state of popular learning, the durability of native wit. and the ubiquity of metaphysical hunger have brought commercial success if not critical acclaim to the Malibu mythmaker.

As we have seen in previous chapters, one oi Castaneda's prime talents is an ability to find, select, transform, marshall, and present other people's ideas without letting the sources show I have uncovered so many of these sources by now that I am beginning to wonder if anything at all can be correctly attributed to Castaneda. What a terrific subject for n UCLA doctoral dissertation! Before Saying goodbye to the man of novels, let's look at a few more instructive examples, all of which are possible Castaneda sources, some of which seem to me quite certain.

In his creative-writing days, Castaneda greatly admired Aldous Huxley, a literary pioneer in hallucinogens and mysticism. Huxley's good southern-California friend and fellow literary mystic Gerald Heard wrote a fantasy about a man transported by music, dance, and the very structure of a cathedral into a nonordinary state m which he "saw the whole choir—not outlined in light rather the shafting, arcading, capitals, spandrels, the springers, ribs, vaulting, bosses . . . transparent and, like an immense phosphorescent billow, glowing with an inherent flush that shone through the translucent mass." There is luminous structure for you, as well as palpable detail. Having thus "seen" the cathedral, Sylvester Shelbournu "felt the awful Spasm of a creature suddenly made to sustain the pressure of two universes, its frail twofold nature the sole link between two primal energies. . . . Temporal and Eternal, for a moment I knew both, and for an instant sustained the anguish of belonging to neither." Shortly afterwards the seer is found dead. "One becomes a man of knowledge for a very brief instant," don Juan said, "but that moment ... is enough."

The human aura, wrote William Walker Atkinson, is shaped like an ugg. "To the psychic vision it appears to be 'streaked' by numerous fine lines extending like stiff bristles from the body outward. In normal health and vitality these 'bristles' stand out stiffly, while in casus of impaired vitality or poor health they droop like the soft hair on an animal, and in some cases present the appearance of a ruffled coat of hair, the several 'hairs' standing out in all directions... "Fibers, like white cobwebs," don Juan said, "Very fine threads that circulate from the head to the navel. Thus a man looks like an egg of circulating fibers. And his arms and legs are like luminous bristles, bursting out in all directions." After taking peyote, Heinrich KI liver wrote, one may see the cobweb figure, "coloured threads running together in a revolving center, the whole similar to a cobweb."

Though Atkinson's popular occult books were published by the dozen in Chicago, he used the pseudonym "Yogi Ramacharaka." When Castaneda's students at Irvine pointed out the parallel between don Juan's luminous egg and "Ramacharaka's" oval aura, Castaneda "made the intriguing speculation that American Indian sorcery might have originated in Asia He reasoned that since it is generally accepted that the Indians came from Asia across the Bering Strait when it was still a land bridge, it might very well be that they brought

their religious views along with them"—all the way from Siberia's great frozen Lake Mishighan. 1 like an apprentice who thinks on his feet.

Directed by Jon Juan, Carlos called 47 persons who appeared as luminous blobs. Each had a characteristic shape and color, some yellowish, some whitish. Don Genaio came in a golden bubble. A golden aura, "Ramacharaka" told us* betokens great intellectual attainment. "Dr. B. named different persons," Heinrich KI over wrote. "Soon, thereafter, they appeared to stand in perceived space." Before Kluver's own peyote-buttoned eyes, a drawing of a head changed into a mushroom, a man in greenish velvet jumped into a deep chasm [as a naked Carlos's perception would leap into the abyss], and a strange animal turned into a piece of wood in horizontal position [as Carlos's supine monstrous bird-beaked mammal would turn into a burnt branchi.

Human beings, speculated Joseph Bogen, may have two distinct minds, a propositional, speaking mind typically latcralizcd in the left brain, and in the right brain an appositional mind w hose functions we can barely guess. In don Juan's terms, the left brain would speak about the tonul, the right brain w ould intuit the nagual. Why, then, does death stand on the left? Because the nerves that carry sensations cross over to the opposite side oi the brain before reaching the perceptual areas. For the same anatomical reason, well know^rn to former City College psychology students but not to stone-age wizards, the naguallian Genaio whispered into Carlos's left ear, the tonallran don Juan into his right.

Even the bemushroomed cthnobotanist felt his mind split, "the rational side continuing to reason and to observe the sensations that the other side is enjoying," but the grandest revelation Wasson wrote tor don Juan [quoted here on page 145) describes one dazzling moment when great gates towered before him at the edge oi the comprehensible world, ready to open and admit him into the presence of the ultimate, whence he might not have returned, for he sensed a willingness to he extinguished in the divine radiance waiting beyond. "There is a crack between the two worlds," don Juan told Carlos. "It opens and closes like a door. . . . like a monumental door, a crack that goes up and down." Sorcerers, like botanists, could approach that door only after their limbs had shaken and they had vomited several times. "Journeying into the unknown is very much like dying," don Juan said. "Once you have entered the unknown . . . you must decide whether or not to return."

"Who will relinquish this willingly?" asked the psilocybin user whose skull expanded into a bubble of perception. His co-author having eaten Maria Sabina's mushrooms, soared i nto the sky like Carlos, became a child like apprentice Nestor, and conversed with Mazatecsin English as Mescalito would let Carlos hear Arizona Indians talking Italian.

"Who arc you really?" asked Carlos after several months.

"For you 1 am loan Matus," came the opaque reply.

Where did magus Matus get his name? Thu two great heroes of Yaqui history were Juan Bandera and Juan "Rolling Stone" Maldonado. A third, lesser hero detained former president Alvaro Obregon at a Sonoran whistle stop for a friendly chat about Yaqui real estate, only to find himself in a shoot-out when the army came to rescue Obregon from what they thought was capture. That unsuccessful diplomat was General Luis Matus. The year was 1926. Coolidge was in the Casa Blanca, Carlos Arana C. was a baby in Peru, and (in a separate reality) don Juan was a 35-year-old herb seller in Oaxaca, where he was living under an unassumed name.

Yaquis, we now realize, do not speak to Mescalito, but some of their eastward neighbors (made famous in literary circles by Anais Nin'smad friend Antonin Artaud । both fear and venerate him. Digging him with a stick because he hates to have his roots broken when some fool pulls him up, the Tarahumaras call him hikuri, or "seize-wh tiling." Though a joyful hikuri protects impeccable Indians, an angry hikuri may throw peccable Indians off a cliff or drive them crazy. Only hikur? among the magic plants is strong enough to cure the wretch who has touched the Jimsun weed without a shaman's supervision.

The Tarahumaran shaman who wants to see an invisible sorcerer eats ball cactus (bukd-nori) to clear bis sight. He knows the personal character of every ki nd of wind. The people of the whirlwind, who are horn in river whirlpools, look like’ pigs. Their close relatives, the spirits of the waterholes, look like rattlesnakes. Crow is wise, but he eats up the corn. And don't forget that a tfadgi-Ai can fly to your house any time to steal your soul. Better sleep with your mouth shut.

In the roar of an Air Force jet, in the crash of a falling rock, in the perking of his coffeepot, dun Juan heard the world agreeing with him. In crows' flights, changes of wind, sunbeams, and set-up dreams he found omens of success ur danger. Ixtlan abounds with these supernatural signs. While it was being written, the biography of a less famous Yaqui was published.

Rosalio Moises (who lived until his tall candle burned down in heaven) was perpetually preoccupied by signs of good and bad luck, "Few events and happenings were left un interpreted. . . . when snakes, frogs, and other animals climb trees, a bad flood is coming; buzzards circling a house calling a name means that that individual will die; black baby chicks are bad luck; a black baby chick that tries to crow like a rooster is double bad luck ... if one casts one's shadow upon a wall at sunrise and the shadow has no head, death will follow."

Rosalie's most important omens ''were visions and dreams that foretold the future. . . . On many occasions he w ent to bed with the intention of having a dream that would give him information about a particular subject." Often he dreamed that he was Hying. "As he got oldei he flew lower. When the flying dream first came to him, he saw tall buildings, big cities, and other things distant in time and space such as he had never seen at that time." In Ixtlan don Juan taught Carlos he could discover secrets or go to distant places by controlling his dreams. In Talcs of Power a dreaming Carlos walked along a deserted street in an unknow n foreign city.

MichaelI. Harner, known for his studies of visionary plants, spent some of his childhood in South America, where he returned in 1956 to visit the Iivaro Indians, a tribe of headhunters inhabiting forests of Ecuador and Peru, about 300 condor miles from Castaneda's home town. Hamer gives a vivid account of the Jivaro way of life before the encroachment of industrial civilization.

The traditional livaro viewed his neighbor with suspicion and hostility One man in four was a sorcerer. Most deaths, illnesses, and accidental injuries were blamed on witchcraft and could be prevented or cured only by undoing spells. Without strong supernatural protection a man might be murdered any day of the week not only by strangers but by persons well known to him Parties of Jivaros raided adjacent tribes partly for booty but mainly to take heads, whose soul power could be used to increase the yield of a vegetable plot or make animals more prolific.

The vision-soul, a specially powerful and protective kind of soul, could be found discarnatc, playing like a breeze in the spray of a very high waterfall. Boys or men accompanied by their fathers or older men would journey to the sacred waterfall, where they would camp four or five days drinking tobacco water or the much stronger Datura water and waiting for

visions. A lucky pilgrim would wake one night in what seemed to him a raging storm just in time to see something strange emerging from the forest. The vision, lasting less than a minute, might show him a pair of giant jaguars fighting, a huge human head floating toward him, or a ball of fire. A coward might flee in terror, but a brave man or boy would run forward and touch the vision, whereupon it would explode like dynamite, or silently vanish.

Telling no one about his success, the visionary would return to his home and sleep on the river bank, where in the night an old Jivaro man would come to him claiming to be his ancestor. The ancestor's soul would enter the sleeper's chest, filling him with confidence and forcefulness, endowing him with sharper wits and a more honorable character. To retain this vision-soul, he had to say nothing about it, but those around him would soon know what had happened because of the changes in his conduct.

It was a rare woman that could get a vision-soul, but some men got many and accumulated their power. Jivaro feuding was so intense that a boy would nut be expected to survive puberty without at least one vision-soul to protect him. A sorcerer who wanted to kill a man by witchcraft would try to steal his last vision-soul. Family and friends would know it had been stolen if the victim fell ill or began to speak without his usual forcefulness.

When Carlos complained of constant anxiety, don Juan diagnosed the condition as "loss of soul." Whoever had trapped the soul, he said, must intend to kill Carlos or make him very sick. Like the stealing of souls, most of Harner's other Jivaro observations were first published in 1962 and 1963, Those two early publications share some two dozen sorcering ideas with Castaneda's books. To wit:

Young men are conducted by older men to a very high waterfall to seek visions that bring power. Datura [in Ecuador, D. arborea} in Sonora D. inoxia, or Jimson weed! brings not only visions but a surge of strength and confidence. Fatal danger lurks behind every bush, but magical power wards it off if the details of getting power are kept secret. Men can accumulate power and can give or sell it to others. Visionary plants bring spirit helpers, which may form a shield to protect the shaman. (Carlos's shield was psychological, formed by dwelling on heartening thoughts.! Stones, seeds, or insects can be collected, filled with power, and hurled at enemies to kill them. Shamans

disdain non-magical herbal remedies. They rub their apprentices' bodies. An apprentice is likely to become the same kind of sorcerer his teacher was, curer or bewitcher, seeker of knowledge or diablero. On special occasions, men tell their visions to each other, the Jivaro before a raid, five apprentices after don Juan's magic show. Fearsome creatures come in visions—fighting jaguars, towering gnats, slavering coyotes, and colossal smothering felines. One's spirit helper may be a moth or a giant butterfly. The soul or perception of one person may enter the chest of another, as Carlos entered don Juan's chest. At death one's soul or personal life diffuses as a fog. A man attempts to kill a magical bird that has come to harm someone living in a house temporarily under his protection. And, as we have already seen, a shaman or sorceress may steal the soul of an intended victim, who can only guess why his strength is failing and who his assailant is.

A 1968 article by Harner contained the further idea that one's normal waking life is a lie. "Doings are lies," said don Juan in Ixtlan. Harner's 1972 book furnished three fresh bits of lore that were duplicated m Ixtlan though not in Castaneda's earlier books. Magic quartz crystals are especially deadly weapons. A father teaches his son by showing him a corpse and letting him shoot or touch it. A naughty boy's world should be temporarily replaced by something out the ordinary; the Jivaro father gives his son Datura to bring him visions; the American father, on don Juan's advice, would hire a bogeyman to frighten the little fellow out of his ordinary wits.

A thorough scholar keeps track of his sources, reading new contributions as they appear. Castaneda would have needed the manuscript of Harner's 1972 book some months before its publication, but that should have been no problem. According to Harner, the two specialists in visionary plants had been friends for at least nine years.

One day without warning young Joe Pearce slipped into a trance in which he knew nothing could hurt him. As dormitory fellows watched in amazement, he held glowing cigarettes steady against his palms, cheeks, and eyelids. He felt no pain, and he got no blisters. Years later, when his wife contracted cancer, he resisted the malignancy in a spontaneous, intuitive campaign of mental healing. Her symptoms disappeared for more than a year. From such experiences he acquired his mission, to search for better ways of creating reality.

Joseph Pearce cares more for truth than for the manner of its

expression. He prizes the gift above the wrapping. He does not glance down at the giver's feet to see if they are clay. Taking The Teachings to be a factual account he hailed Carlos as a brave pioneer and "plainly loved" don Juan, but he found some flaws in the old man's Way and during two subsequent years of writing did his best to repair them.

Since The Crack in the Cosmic Egg was largely about don Juan, Castaneda could hardly have overlooked it. What would his reaction be, I wondered. Would he bask in Pearce's praise? Would he resent an attempt to improve the wisdom of don Juan? Would he simply shrug his shoulders? 1 don't consider myself naive, but I wasn't ready for the answer.

□escribing the Australian aborigine's Dream Time [a clairvoyant standing trance) Pearce wrote: "He knows when his own totem food animal is in the vicinity, though a hill intervenes. At the closest point of interception, he breaks his stance land] intercepts his game." From where Carlos stood, Castaneda would write, he could see a large green bush, though a hill intervened. Walking around the crown of the hill, he came upon it.

The aborigine disdained houses, clothing, and other artifacts that interfered with Dream Time. The world where such things were valued was a world of "unreal men." "They were people," Genaro would say, "but they were no longer real."

A psychic young man guided by a spontaneous creative process became totally unpredictable. A hunter, don Juan would tell Carlos, "is not at all like the animals he is after, fixed by heavy routines ... he is free, fluid, unpredictable."

To find the crack in the cosmos, Pearce wrote, one must surrender as if a child to a father-figure who assures the return of one's surrendered life. Genaro made Nestor a child again, Pablito would say. The benefactor opens the bubble of perception from the outside, don Juan would tell Carlos, allowing the one who has come under his protection to see his own totality.

The split between conscious and unconscious thinking, Pearce wrote, is necessary to achieve objectivity, but we must "develop a balance between the modes of thinking," and an "opening to the total process of mind." "What matters to a warrior," don Juan would say, "is arriving at the totality of oneself." The teacher arranges the apprentice's tonal (his reasoned view of the world | on one side of the bubble of percep tion, so that the nagual (his unaccountable will) can create nonordmary worlds on the other. Once the benefactor has

opened the bubble, a warrior lives with the two sides in balance.

Pearce represented our actual and potential realities by the metaphor of a clearing in a forest. Don Juan would represent them as an island in a sea. “Thu tonal is an island," he would explain, running his hand over the table top. “The nagual is there," he would say with a sweep of his arm. “There, surrounding the island."

It is a mistake, Pearce said, to think the forest exists as the clearing exists. The trues we fell at the edge “need not always have been. Indeed, there may be no trees at all in the depths of that dark. Rather . . the trees may grow according to the kind of light our reason throws/' from the clearing into the darkness we mistake for a forest. “The tonal," don Juan would say, "is a creator that doesn't create (but it does make up] the rules by which it apprehends the world. So, in a manner of speaking, it creates the world."

“Our notions of what is real direct our perceptual apparatus [ini a reality-shaping procedure/' said Pearce. “We are an open possibility." "How far one can go on the path of knowledge and power/' don Juan would say, “is an issue which is open."

Pearce mentioned Susanne Langer's belief that we live in a world of verbal reality, where nature as we perceive it is a “language-made affair . . . prone to collapse into chaos if ideation fails." Carlos would grasp a Chicano coyote's thought because he had stopped his internal dialogue and let his ordinary world “collapse."

Far from resenting Pearce's extensions of don Juan's Way, Castaneda gave them a deft pseudo-Yaqui twist and folded them gently into his third and fourth books.

“Don't stare at the car. Stop the world!" shouted don Juan one narrative day in May 1971. One calendar night in October 1962 a creech of critics crowded into Broadway's Shubert Theatre to see Anthony Newley's cockney Mr. Littlechap escape poverty, marry the boss's daughter, and rise to empty glory as M.P., peer of the realm, and member of the Snobs club. Buying success with conformity Littlechap like Carlos had trapped himself in a sterile, boring world. As Carlos indulged in self-pity, so Littlechap loudly complained. Reported Time: “Littlechap periodically shouts 'Stop the World!" Said Saturday Review: " A number of comeuppances . . . cause him to shout, Stop the World!' But he always swallows the rest of the sentence [as if] rejecting drastic commitment." Don Juan we

know welcomed drastic commitment, and his creator had long since abandoned family, home, and native land to seek fame, fortune, and life's deeper meaning, but Carlos needed nine more years before he could believe himself when he said: Stop the World—I Want to Get Off.

"I dream my books," Castaneda told Gwyneth Cravens. "In the afternoon I go through the notebooks with all my field notes in them and translate them into English. Then I sleep in the early evening and dream what I want to write. When I wake up, I can work all night. Everything has arranged itself smoothly in my head, and I don't need to rewrite My regular writing is actually very dry and labored."

"The dream world is becoming my specialty," Anais Nin had written in her diary 39 years before. "Most dreamwriting is false and intellectually composed . . . the real dream has an authenticity and can be recognized. The intellectually composed or fabricated dream does not arouse the dream sensation in others. . . . There is no dialogue in the dream, and very few words. The words are condensed like the phrases of poems. The language must be a kind of non-language. The dream happens without language, beyond language."

"It is Nin more than any other writer I can think of who has over the years insisted on the continuity of dream and reality, as Don Juan does, and whose theories about fiction as controlled dreaming provide such a precise counterpart to don Juan's ideas about learning to control one's dreams."

Ronald Sukenick's "precise counterpart" seems pretty imprecise to me. Nin and Castaneda are obviously talking about radically different uses of dreams, one authentically dreamlike, the other featuring an ordinary nap between ordinary preparation and composition. Whatever pointers Castaneda picked up during his few visits to Nin's house in the 1960s, dreamwriting did not grow out of them. Sukenick may be the wrong man to contrast these dreamings, since he decries our culture's "false separation . . . of imagination from reality" and apparently believes Castaneda's conventional descriptions and expository dialogue actually rolled out of evening dreams about translated Spanish field notes into a midnight typewriter, like Clifford Irving's Howard Hughes hoax rolling out of the tape-reader into the high-speed printer after-hours at the computer center. Maybe Carlos dreams his books, but a bag of fresh-roasted wild hikuri nuts says Castaneda writes like everybody else. If the first draft never gets re-written (which I

doubt], it's not because Castaneda is Samuel Taylor Coleridge but because he is editorially self-indulgent.

Margaret Castaneda's cousin Wanda Sue Parrott knew the napwriter well, before he met don Juan. "In those days/' she wrote, "my impression was that he was an author m search of a publisher. " Like Oates and Kennedy, Parrott recognized Castaneda as a fellow writer.

Clement Benedict |I call him here] worked on the manuscript of The Teachings. "I had already seen auras," Benedict told me "The Teachings freed me to accept them. Carlos has used some of my experiences in his hooks."

"Writing to get my Ph.D. was . . . my sorcery," Castaneda told Sandra Burton.

"Your notebook is the only sorcery you have," don Juan said to Carlos. "You started on the path of knowledge writing, and you will finish the same way."

I'll go along with di on that. More than anything else, Castaneda is a writer—one who cares little for style but much for content, a story-teller who tricks us into learning, a fantasist on a pedagogical mission, a mythmaker who has made himself a myth. In the next chapter we take up the myth of Carlos Coyote, Trickster Teacher.

Coyoie over the whole western half of North America, is the most important figure of myth . . . trickster and dupe by turns . . , aiding, willy-nilly, the First People tu the discovery of their final and appropriate shapes. He is ... a great transformer . . . and in parts, at least, of California, his deeds are represented as almost invariably beneficent in their outcomes; he is a true, if often unintentional, culture hero.

—Hartley Burr Alexander Nortfi American VlythoZogy

Every generation occupies itself with interpreting Trickster anew. No generation understands him fully but no generation can do without him.

—Paul Radin The TYickster

• 6. TRICKSTER TEACHER

Coyotes are not reliable. They tire tricksters, . . 1 would never trust a coyote. But you are different and you may even become a coyofe sorcerer

And so he became and remained everything to every man. . , ,

One day as Trickster was wandering aimlessly around the oval island of the world, he came upon a lodge. Inside two raccoon women were tending their children. When Trickster tossed some ripe plums through the hole at the top, the women came out.

"Where did you pick these, Older Broth er’" they asked him.

Trickster described a place a good way off where the ripening of plums was reddening the sky_r but the women said they could not leave their disobedient children, so Trickster offered to take care of them.

"You are very kind to us," said the women, setting off to find the plums.

T he minute they were out of sight Trickster killed the children. singed the hair off them, and boiled them in a pot.

"Now is the tune I will eat some fat," he said.

When his belly was full he cut one child's head off, stuck it on a stick, and sot the stick at the door of the lodge as though a naughty child were peeping out Then he went on his way well pleased with himself.

Having found no plums where Trickster had said they would,

the angry women were returning to the lodge when they spied a disobedient child peeping mischievously out at the door.

"What kind of iokeis this?" said the child's mother, slapping the naughty tact. The head flew through the air and rolled over and over on the ground.

"Oh my children!" shrieked the women, "lie has killed them! h must have been Trickster!"

As often as Trickster duped others, he fell dupe. Once he ate many laxative bulbs to show they could not affect him against his with Soon he was up in a tree climbing higher and higher to escape his own excrement. When it reached the top of the tret, he fell in.

Another time Trickster caught sight of someone in a black shirt pointing at him across a lake.

"What arc you pointing at, Younger Brother?" he called, but the person said nothing. After calling three times without getting an answer, Trickster put on his own black shirt and stood there still as a stick pointing his finger at the offensive stranger. Some hours later Trickster tried to talk the challenger out of the contest, even offering to kill a Hue animal lor him to cat, hut the fellow ignored his remarks. Finally Trickster gave up in disgust and resumed his stroll along the edge of the lake. Glancing back once more at his stubborn opponent, he was astonished to see a burnt tree stump from which a branch was protruding,

"It is because of things like this," he said, "that people call me foolish/'

Indeed, Trickster was not only foolish but divided against himself. While h is right arm was busy skinning a buffalo, his left arm took hold of it.

"Let go," said the right arm, "or I will cut you with my knife."

The left arm would not stop interfering, and soon the two arms were in a vicious tight. When it ended, the left arm was bleeding badly.

"Why have I done this?" cried Trickster when he saw what had happened. "Why do 1 make myself suffer this way?"

Seeing his predicament, the birds began to make fun of him, calling his name again and again, but Trickster pretended not to know what they were saying.

in spite of such pranks and foolishness, Trickster sometimes did good things for the people and brought them useful knowledge. One day he heard a noise like many people having a party.

Drawing closer he found an elk's skull filled with flies. The thus were making the party noise by rushing in and out. Envying their good time, Trickster asked how he could join them.

"Enter as we do, through the neck," they said.

When Tricks ter picked the skull up and jammed it down over his head, the flies all tied through various holes, leaving him alone again. Wearing his great bone face and wide branching antlers, he walked slowly up river till he met some people. Before they could recover from their astonish menu he said to them:

'Bless you, good people. 1 am an Elk Spirit. This river is my home. Strike oil the top of my head with your ax, and you w ill find good medicine." The people obeyed, but when they split the skull open they round Trickster grinning at them.

"See how you have spoiled my fine headdress!" he jibed.

¹ It is Trickster!" they said in dismay, but he told them:

"Now that you have helped mu, I will give you the pieces of this skull. Use them tor any purpose you wish, and you will he successful,"

Then the people made bone instruments and used them to cure sickness.

Another time he made the mistake of probing a hollow log with his penis and got only a short stump of it hack out of the hole. Smashingthe log, he found Chipmunk chewing his penis to bits. After flattening Chipmunk, he distributed the useless pieces around the world as potatoes, turnips artichokes, rice, beans, and water Lillies for the people to use.

As he got older Trickster thought less about playing tricks and more about helping people. Toward the end he walked the length of the Mississippi River preparing it lor Indian habitation, removing obstacles, shoving the water spirits'ho les below the surface so that boats would not fall into them, and eating any creatures that might molest the people. Finding a most inconvenient waterfall, he commanded it to be gone. When the waterfall refused to move he shoved it unto the land, out nt the people's way. Journeying westward be became Coyote, and there he stole fire from the Fire People and left it among the trees where men could find it.

Returning to the fork of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, Trickster prepared his last meal on earth before ascending into the heavens. Thu big rock where he sat down to eat it still bears the imprint of his buttocks and testicles.

Though Trickster walks in every land, his North American

Indian guises are the most archaic. Here he is Coyote, there he is Old Man, elsewhere he is Raven, Hare, or Spider, but essentially he has no fixed form, coming to men as a formless presence foreshadowing their possible futures. In the Winnebago Trickster cycle, which we have been sampling, he hauls his intestines and prc-Chipmunk penis wrapped around his body, not yet having discovered proper places in himself for his constant hunger, his unruly gut reactions, and his irrepressible sexual urges.

Once Trickster saw a chief's daughter and her young friends swimming at the other side of a lake. Unwinding his penis, he spoke as follows:

' Younger Brother, you arc now going after the chief's daughter. Pass her friends by, but see that you lodge in her squarely/'

When the women saw Trickster's penis gliding toward them, they rushed to get out of the water, but the chief's daughter was last and could not get away. Coming to her aid, the others tried to pull the penis out. hut it was stuck fast and would nut budge. The strongest men in the village were sent for bur did no better. Finally the wise woman arrived. Recognizing the intruder right away, she took out her awl, straddled the penis, and chanted, ’ Pull it out Trickster! Pull it out if it is you!"—meanwhile jabbing away with the awl Suddenly the penis jerked tree, throwing the old woman a great distance, while everyone could hear Trickster howling and laughing on the far shore.

Having no form of his own Trickster is all things to all men- giver, taker, creator, destroyer, duper, duped, liar, and bringer of truth. Willing nothing consciously he brings everything about. Lacking morals he elicits moral standards from men who contemplate his insupportable acts. Easy going he does harm. Careless he does good. Whether annoying, frightening, or admirable, his acts are permeated with laughter, his own and other people's.

Symbolically we may take Trickster for man struggling to master himself, man trying to cope with a world be did not ask to enter and cannot control, man pulling himself together, man doing great things as much by accident as on purpose, man pretending he knows what he is doing, man in the making, man changing from one character to another with little stability or selfhood. Psychologically we may recognize him as the unconscious source of human acts, unpredictably creative, absurd, or destructive. Educationally we may take him to be a teacher of man's imagination, one who violates all rules of man or nature,

who makes wafer run uphill, who irreverently stamps his warbundle into the ground, who offers fairy talcs to the learned elders as factual reports, ' See here/' says Trickster, "this world is not fully or finally formed. I can make my part of it any way I want to. So can you. There arc many realities, and we need not agree on this particular one.' Socially we may recognize him as a big liar and a Honor din ary friend.

Though one of the first to suspect Castaneda as Trickster for the Seventies, Vincent Crapanzano did not develop the theme beyond saying Castaneda might be falling dupe to his own tricks. A cursory study of the myth persuades me Oswaldo's false nephew is Trickster's true incarnation—so many traits do they share.

Trickster is metamorphic, appearing in countless guises. Castaneda comes on as Carlos-Ethnographer, Carlos-One, Carlos-Two, Carlos-Apprentice Carlos-Skeptic, Carl os-Emic, Carlos-Etic don Indian, the Indian don, Pablito, Nestor, Nogales Bill, don Genaro, the Dreaming Dissert a tor, Earth Doctor, World Stopper, Castaneda-Anthropologist, Carlos* Psychic, Car los-Sorc er er, Carlos-Philosopher, Carlos-Nad, Castaneda-Scholar, and Trickster Teacher -to mention a few. Trickster is ageless, a boyish or childish Old Man. Castaneda is notably youthful for his years and enjoys a movable birthdate.

Both talk to, kill, eat, and may become, animals. Roth have fragmented selves. Trickster's penis swims off to molest the chief's daughter, while Carlos's double visits Castaneda's publisher or pops down to Mexico for the afternoon. Trickster confronts his shadowy antagonist across a lake, Carlos worries about wrestling with his ally, a projection of his naguallian self. Trickster s left hand fights with his right, Carlos’s subselves stumble all over each other.

Both are shaped by public opinion. Indians make Trickster a fool by calling him one. Carlos and Castaneda erase personal history so that other people's expectations will not form their characters or direct their acts.

Trickster wanders the world alone, partying with flies, dancing with the wind Carlos spends 13 years in the company of imaginary companions. Both marry but do not remain at home.

Trickster is a spirit of disorder, an enemy of boundaries. Castaneda disrupts academic protocol and rubs out the line between real and unreal. Trickster was a bad boy. Carlos baffled the school principal with his pranks. The early Trickster made a mess of things. The early Apprentice bemoaned the fruitless-ness of his life and the inadequacy of his character.

Trickster is not guided by conventional morality. Don Juan taught Carlos the tolly of truth. Trickster symbolizes rebellion. Carlos is "a horse that doesn't hke to be saddled/' a son who rejects his father s conventional world. Castaneda rose to fame by breaking rules of scholarship.

Trickster has little control over his impulses. Castaneda cannot resist making up stories during interviews even if they will trip him up later. Trickster is always hungry for food, Carlos for love. Trickster, like don Juan's warrior, takes what he wants but expects to be used by others when it is their turn.

Trickster wreaks havoc wherever he goes, destroying lives and making the innocent suffer. Castaneda has been a painful embarrassment to colleagues, some of whom suffer so sorely they cannot speak about it. All the same Trickster does not go on the warpath and no one has called Castaneda violent.

Never malicious, Trickster, Carlos, and Castaneda are good natured, entertaining fellows whose tricks are only jokes, bladders filled with irony hurled from heights of glee. You know what we do with facts in the separate reality. When Trickster returns to the village, the people build him a long lodge right next to the chief's, and the young men spend hours in his company. "We all liked Carlos," said lose. When the young mtn go courting, Trickster goes along with them just for the fun of it.

Both temporarily switch sex roles. Trickster transexualizus himself with elk's-Iiver vulva and elk's-kidney breasts into "a very pretty woman indeed," so he can marry’ a big-meal-ticket chief's son and bear him three boys, the first illegitimately sired by Fox, Jaybird, and Nit. Margaret's Carlos did the cooking (in 1960, when cooking was women's work).

Both play tricks on men and women. Trickster slipped Mink a laxative that made him soil the chief's daughter during an illicit conjunction, then ran all round the camp shouting Mink's disgrace. Funny Falcon Coyote persuaded a furry friend to steep his stems and get a superheadache. Castaneda w arned Margaret's cousin Sue not to open the door of his archeology closet next to her guest bed. "Eci you do," he said, "the bones, they weel get up and walk around all night."

Both pretend ignorance of what they know- and people know they know’. Trickster has no idea what the birds are saying about him. Carlos-Naif has never heard of Yogi Ramacharaka.

Both arc notably preoccupied with fecal matters. Trickster is forever putting his foot in it, while Carlos has to take his clothes off so as not to ruin them during nagualli an leaps. Little Genaro's evacuations make the mountains tremble. Trickster blasts trees, rocks, and hills to smithereens by firing borrowed skunk charges out of his anus and vainly hopes to kill deer the same way. Don Juan warns Carlos not to attack the lion with his farts.

When circumstances beyond his control reduce the incremental cost to zero. Trickster gives of himself for the good of others. After Chipmunk chewed his root to bits, Trickster founded agriculture. Cut oft by his own character from intimate exchanges with his fellow men, Castaneda turned inexpressible yearning into philosophy, as don Juan turned loneliness into art, to be packaged in books and distributed among the people. Toward the end of his life Trickster acknowledged his mission to help the people. Castaneda rejected a life of fruitless self-indulgence in Peru to become mankind's teacher.

Both hold what is eating them inside. Trickster subdued Hawk by closing his rectum tightly around Hawk's head hut then had to endure Hawk's fitful gnawing and flapping. Carlos's trite, superficial whirrings are mere cosmetics for Castaneda's unspoken suffering. Rebuffed again and again. Trickster finally gets what he wants. Castaneda, Time said, had to rewrite his thesis three times.

A man in one of Ray Bradbury's stories wore a Rorschach shut in which passers-by saw their inner worlds animated, Castaneda is a whole Rorschach man, writing Rorschach books. In him and m them people find what they are looking for. Occultists find a practical sorcerer. Theodore Roszak found an improver on Timothy Leary. Paul Riesman momentarily found a scientific anthropologist. Joseph Margolis found an original philosopher or a master teacher. Elmer and Alyce Green found an open-minded observer. Joseph Pearce found a literary genius. Bruce Cook found a new James Macpherson |whose don Juan was Ossian}, Charles Tart found an al tered-states-of-consciousness technician. Gordon Globus found an outstanding hypnotic subject. Weston La Barre found a mercenary charlatan. Nancy Wood found another ruthless exploiter of Lo, the poor Indian. Marvin Harris found a counter-revolutionist. Richard Gott found an infuriate: of Ronald Reagan. Janies Sire found a breaker of the First Commandment. Hal Lindsey found a worshipper of demons. Patricia Garfield

found a chronicler of dream technique, while professional helpers have found in don Juan [an actual person) a model for counselors or a successor to Frederick Peris,

Some who have known Castaneda face to face cherish in him a valued colleague, a spiritual leader, or an appealing rebel, for whom they feel warm regard, deep loyalty, or fierce partisanship. Others believe they have faced an impenetrable, discomforting con man, whom they dismiss with a shrug, a sneer, or a shudder. Seeing so many different reactions to Castaneda, I can only join the Winnebago birds in saying:

"Look, look! There is Trickster! There he is walking about!"

In the summer of 1966 Ramon Medina showed Barbara Myerhoff and Peter Furst what it meant to have balance. Knowing his anthropologist friends lacked the power to see the narrow bridge a Huichol shaman must walk to cross the great chasm separating the ordinary world from the otherworld beyond, the i:tir(indero determined to give them a concrete demonstration of physical balance in this world standing for spiritual balance in that world.

Ramon led his party to a spectacular waterfall, from whose edge the water dropped hundreds of feet to the valley below. As his Huichol companions sat in a semicircle to watch, Ramon took his sandals off, gestured to the "world directions, then leapt—or flew—from one rock to another with arms stretched wide, often landing but a few inches from the slippery edge. Now he vanished behind a boulder, now he stood motionless on the brink of destruction, but never did he or his Huichol observers show the slightest concern that he might fall, though the visitors from California were terrified.

On narrative 17 October 1968 don Genaro led his party to the bottom of a roaring waterfall, where don luan, Carlos, Nestor, and Pabhto sat down in a straight line to watch. Genaro took his sandals off, then climbed the hazardous 150 feet, several times seeming to lose his footing and hang in the air by his fingertips. Reaching the top, he leapt out upon the edge of the fall, where he seemed to be standing on the water. There he perched for a long time, occasionally leaning out into space with no visible support, but mostly standing unaccountably still, resisting the rushing current. Though his performance struck terror to Carlos's heart, the watching Indians evinced no concern for his safety. At the end Genaro turned a lateral somersault to vanish behind a boulder.

In the spring of 1970, having been Associate Director of the

UCLA Latin American Center since 1967, Peter Furst organized a series of lectures on the ritual use of hallucinogens, during which he and Carlos Castaneda presented their respective accounts of shamans manifesting agility or magic atop lofty Mexican waterfalls. Though Castaneda's version had the observers sitting in a straight line at the bottom rather than a semicircle at the top, though it added levitation and Bolivian somersaulting, and though the rocks Ramon landed on were easier to make out than Genaro's (possibly because of the observers'different location], Furst recognized Castaneda's account as "strikingly similar” to his own. Tn Flesh of the Gods he reproduced it as a footnote, with no further comment

Other specialists in hallucinogens and shamanism have saluted Castaneda's contribution to their science. Janet Siskind acknowledged the fieldworker's need to relearn his worldview under the shaman s guidance as Carlos had done. An expert on psychedelic healing told me Castaneda had published certain facts of shamanism before anyone else knew oi them. When I asked tor an example, none came forth.

Gullibility aside, what would blind such scholars to Castaneda’s fictioncering? A powerful reason would be that they admire his literary illustration of getting inside the native’s head. A second, and I think crucial, reason would be that he broke the psychedelic-fieldworker barrier with a bigger bang than any predecessor. Before Castaneda, prudent candidates did not declare to their dissertation committees that they planned to eat peyote or drink Banisteriopsis as a preparation for scientific observation. When Douglas Sharon set off in the summer of 1970 to eat the San Pedro cactus under a curan-dero's guidance SO miles from Castaneda's birthplace, he was inspired by two pioneers James Slotkin who had gained full membership some 15 years before in the peyote-eating Native American Church, and Carlos Castaneda, a UCLA graduate student whose catalytic first book was just at the height of its academic popularity. Without Castaneda's literary intervention, such a project might have been guided into safer channels by a cautious graduate-school committee.

"When I first undertook research among the Jivaro in 1956-57," confessed Michael Harner, "I did not fully appreciate the psychological impact of the Bnnrstenop.sis drink upon the native view of reality, but in 1961 I had occasion to drink the hallucinogen (and to find] myself, though wide awake, in a world literally beyond my wildest drcams (where] I met bird

headed people, as well as dragon-like creatures who explained that they were the true gods of this world. ... I realized that anthropologists, including myself, had profoundly underestimated the importance of the drug in affecting native ideology."

That statement was published in 1968. What did Harner's 1962 article and 1963 dissertation have to say about anthropologists drinking Banisteriopsis in 1961’ Not a word. Harner waited seven years to tel I the academic world about his conversation with the true gods. On a parallel track in a separate reality, Carlos began his psychotropic experiments in 1961 and Castaneda told the world about them in 1968.

It is easy to see how legitimate fieldworkers would feel grateful to Castaneda for making frankness saferand funds for the research of their choice easier to get. Some have expressed their gratitude by citing Castaneda in the scholarly literature as though he were just another scholar. Others have gone further to build the myth of Carlos-Ethnographer.

"Some years ago," wrote Harner, "1 ran across a reference to the use of a Datura ointment by the Yaqui Indians of northern Mexico, reportedly rubbed on the stomach 'to see visions,' I called this to the attention oi my colleague and friend Carlos Castaneda, who was studying under a Yaqui shaman, and asked him to find out if the Yaqui used the ointment for flying and to determine its effects."

Observing the narrative chronology, Harner's request must have come before 4 July 1963, when Carlos did fly with the aid of Datura (limson weed; and the supervision of the Yaquiless Yaqui. Harner quoted Castaneda's subsequent description of the Hight, saying it furnished impressive evidence for the impact of Datura. While there was already some evidence that Datura would make people fly, Harner's request constitutes our only evidence, however circumstantial, of legitimacy in Castaneda's enterprise. Unfortunately for Carlos-Ethnographer, the evidence is suspect.

If Hamer queried Castaneda in or before 1963, why did an eager, repetitious questioner like Carlos-Apprentice not once link Datura to Yaquis, Datum to flying, or Yaquis to flying before he flew, though don Juan himself had dropped a few hints about flying? My guess is neither Carlos nor Castaneda had heard the Datura query because it didn't exist until Harner mythopoetically "remembered" it around 1968 or later.

Harner's article lists 37 references to the literature but not one reference to Yaquis using Datura for any purpose what

soever. Why not? I would guess, because the lost reference did not exist before Harner needed it to flesh out his account of a request supposedly made some years earlier. "1 know of no information or reference concerning Yaquis using datura," writes Edward Spicer On such stuff arc drcams and Tricksters made.

When a coyote sees the shadow of a roosting chicken by moonlight he pounces on the shadow and brings down the bird, When a Coyote-Ethnographer sees the shadow of a sorcering Crow by the light of his silvery mind he pounces on it and brings down the Temple of Learning. Out of the rubble w ill rise a new construction of the relation between art and science in anthropology. Amid the groans of dying illusion we hear a Yaquity-Iberian laugh. Through the dust of collapsing confidence we spy an impish stocky man wearing a naughty wolfish head, and we know at once it is he, Trickster-Academe, the Rogue who Teaches. Well pleased with himself, Coyote Ph D. is going on his way now, leaving us to pick up the pieces,

Under the world where Earthmaker lives there is another world just like it and of this world he, Trickster, is in charge.

I thought my hint that Michael Harner had invented the Yaqui-Duturu reference to build up the myth of Carlos-Ethnographer might provoke some clarification, but Hamer has buoyantly rebuffed every request from friend or stranger to reconsider Castaneda. David Christie, a Canadian anthropology student, hounded Harner by phone and letter for the bust part of a year, and at one point Hamer promised to send him the missing reference if he could find it. Now a timely note from Hans Peter Duerr, University of Zurich, turns up w'hat could well be a reference Harner read and then lost track of: Jose Perez de Barradas, Plantas Mdgicas Americanos, Institute Sahagun (Madrid) 1957: 239, 310-312. Apparently depending on V. A. Rcko's unreliable La Flora Diabdlica de Mexico. Perez asserts—erroneously by most accounts—that the Yaqui Indians use both peyote and Datura. I translate the pertinent passage: "The must curious thing is that the women make a salve, mixing various greases with seeds of Datura les tramonio, or thorn apple] and belladonna and rub themselves w^Tith it, fust like European witches in the middle ages, on chest and bully" (312). This plausible identification of the missing reference puts the matter in a new light, suggesting Harner was convinced of Castaneda's legitimacy all along and did ask him to query don Juan about Datura.—RdeM 1978,

But what* if man had eyes to see beauty itself, the true beauty, whole, pure, and unalloyed? Beholding that beauty with the eye of the mind, he would conceive not images of beauty but realities,

—Diotima to Socrates Symposium of Plato

H AAH0Q1 TH

We who live in hollows of the earth imagine that we dw ell on the surface above as if a creature at the bottom of these a were to fancy itself living on the surface ot the water. But it any man could take wings and Hy upward, he would—like a fish putting its head out of the water and seeing this world—see a world above this world, where common stones are transparent gems, where unknown colors shine, where gods really walk in the sacred groves and speak to men in the temples. And it man's nature could hear such a seeing he would acknowledge thiit there, dot here, is the true earth.

—Socrates to Simmias

Phaedo of Plato

• 7. THE TEACHINGS OF DON JUAN

The world is. . . . also u.s you picture it. but that's not all there is to the or Id.

Don Juan teaches what is how to know what is, andhuw to live so as to know what is—ontology, epistemology, ethics. Other writers have traced bits of his eclectic wisdom back to well known sources and no doubt more will do the same but I want only to point out the chief signs along don Juan's Way and say how I read them. My readings will hardly meet with universal approval bur they may foment some worthwhile discussion

Carlos met don Juan at the beginning of the road to know!* edge and walked with him to the chasm that separates what is from what might be. Because this is an essay, not a story, you and I can walk from the chasm back to the beginning, which will make the signs easier to read.

The central proposition in the teachings of don Juan is the distinction between tonal and nagual- Aztec words George Foster defined authoritatively in 1944. The new meanings Castaneda gave them have little or nothing to do with their Aztec meanings. Don Juan's nugud I is the metaphysical void of potentiality out of which all actualities come. Though it is empty of actuality, it is filled with potentiality. What does potentiality look like? Nobody knows. Nobody Can know. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall he, the nagual is indescribable, unspeakable, “Of what cannot be said," Carlos

no doubt read to don Juan out of the Tract a tux, "thereof one must be silent" Not only silent but blind and deaf. The njgudf is void as well as unspeakable. There is nothing in it though all things come out of it,

Toiik, the most interesting metaphysical question is: Where did all this come from? Or: Why is there something and not nothing? Don Juan's naguuf idea is a way of asking that question. It is a gratifying way because it sounds a lot like an answer, hut when you say the world comes out of an unspeakable void filled with potentiality you have not exactly told anybody how to get to the men's room. An answer like that is an ultimate question in disguise. When Castaneda made that question live in the minds of a million readers he earned our consideration as a Culture Hero despite all his tricks.

The t until is what happens when themiguj/gives birth. The ronoZ is what exists, More properly, it is people's perception or imagination of things. The idea of the nagual is part of the tonal, but the nagual itself is not part of the tonaA Everybody has a tonaf but the naguaJ has everybody. When something ceases ti) exist- like an ocean wave, a life, or a lanal—it returns to its potential state in the nagual, perhaps to emerge again. Everyth mg un don loan's dinner table—thoughtful spoon, graceful napkin divine tablecloth—was to mi lit an because it existed, n was there, and don Juan and Carlos were looking at it. Surrounding the table was a naguailian formlessness out of which tablecloths, napkins, and spoons might come to rest on the table (the waiter who brought them was not part of the metaphor). Though it is more familiar, don Juan said, the tonal is just as mysterious as themrguaf from which it comes. Potentiality and actuality are coordinately inexplicable.

Out tnniri experience (the only experience we have) can be divided into several kinds of reality, the most obvious being ordinary reality, or ordinary experience. This book. Castaneda s books, Castaneda himself, and Carlos understood as a character in a book arc part of today's ordinary reality, but when don Juan appears in your dreams or talks to you after you have gone 72 hours without sleep, he is not part of the ordinary reality.

The ordinary reality is not the same thing as the physical world, hut ii contains our ordinary view of the physical world, whether that view is correct or incorrect. Some years ago the ordinary reality contained a flat world; today it usually contains a spherical world.

Ordinary reality tends to be fairly stable. One thing that keeps it stable is social convention, the sort of thing Edward Sapir was talking about, When most people admire the emperor's new clothes, few sec him naked. A more powerful stabilizing factor is the physical system in which our sensing bodies are immersed. Under a four-billion-year-old physico-biological contract we structurally and instinctually "agree" to distinguish night from day, air from water, heat from cold, and peyote from chicken salad, Though the ordinary reality is not more real than an LSD trip, it is more constant, accessible, and communicable than LSD trips are In this life it is the boss reality. Don Juan generally admits its bossness, but he likes to keep Carlos guessing about it. Where was my body when 1 flew, queries Carlos. In the bushes, says don [tian. What 11 1 chained myself to a heavy rock before flying? Then you would have to fly holding the rock. Carlos is plenty confused, and no wonder, because don loan is playing with a crooked cue. Myself is not my body body stays in the bushes while self goes flying. The kmd of rock I can chain my self to can be taken along on the flight, Semantic sleight of hand. Later don Juan talks a little straighter. Can a sorcerer go to the moon? Yes, but he can't bring back a bag ot rocks. Did my body leap tn to the gorge? No. it Was your perception. (The incorrigible magus Matus can't leave it at that. He has to fuzz up the "No." Perhaps Carlos's "reason" will "admit all of him jumped." Castaneda-Cliffhanger forev er keeping his occult options open for the next book. Potboiler perenn is. Trickster sempervjrens.)

A second kind of reality is the sorcerer's reality, which Carlos enjoyed during his 22 drug experiments and 34 non drug nonordinary events. Others might call it psychedelic reality or altered states of consciousness, but Carlos's guide kept talking about surcermg, so we have to acknowledge that special emphasis. More important than the emphasis on sorccring is the separateness of rhe reality. It is not much like the ordinary reality, often containing such things as giant gnats, slavering coyotes, transparent mountains, little guys running up and down trees defying gravity. It is unstable. And it is only partially or fitfully communicable to other people Peyoteros may share the same visions, merely believe they share them, or know- their visions are different. [Anthropologists usually attribute shared visions to shared expectations about visions but some now contemplate the possibility ESP is a factor.) Visionaries have a hard time telling n on-visionaries what they

have experienced. Their experience is ineffable, unspeakable. Such inciiability may be nothing more than lack of common experience and vocabulary. If enough people had the same visions, and if some visionaries were verbally competent, there might be no more inclfability of visionary experience. As things stand, certain explorers visit otherworlds and come back to say they defy description, or that it takes another visionary to understand the description. People say the same thing about the Grand Canyon: If you haven't been there, you don't know how deep it is. Even CBS has not sent crews into otherworlds with camera, tape, and tendentious list of questions to put to giant gnats.

Though few of us are sorcerers, mystics, or conscious psychics, all of us have separate realities We all dream, we all imagine, we all misperceive things. The excursions (or self* uttursions) ol sorcerers, mystics, and psychics arc not more separate than our dreams, only less usual. They arc not less real than waking experience. Reality is a subjective quality. It something feels real, it is real. That doesn't mean you can eat it, Copulate with it, or cash it at the bank. Those operations require participation in the boss reality, which is massively coordinated with the physical system we seem to he immersed in. It is therefore a good idea to be able to tel I the ordinary, boss reality from other, nun ordinary realities. People who get them mixed up come to grief. Don luan makes that clear on occasion but like the good Trickster he is, he mixes the realities up whenever he wants to—like substituting self for body when Carlos isn't paying attention, like saying the Little Smoke took Carlos's body away, that for a w hile he did not have an ordinary body, that don Juan didn't know where his body had gone, and so on. Undoubtedly one could find a point of view from which those statements would be true, but neither Carlos nor the reader is warned that don Juan is not at that moment sitting in the boss chair, speaking from the ordinary point of view. Perhaps don Juan is doing the right thing to shake up the reader's complacency by keeping him off balance this way, but he plants a seed of nondiscrimination that must grow into a devil's weed of confusion for some readers. Trickster is not the kind of teacher vulnerable people should seek out.

Most of the time dun Juan puts boss and nonbass in their proper places. A warrior can tell things apart; he can tell "what is real and what is not" I don Juan slipping here into the com’ mor parlance, equating cedi with boss. not with nonboss), "A

Structural Analysis" says a sorcerer shifts hack and forth between realities at will, distinguishing them by their different uses. It he doesn't distinguish them (don luan would surely add! he will soon be a dead sorcerer. The luminous coyote, don luan insisted, "was not talking the way you and I talk," Genaro didn't remove Carlos's car from the boss reality _? he merely forced Carlos to look at the sorcerer's reality, where no car was. The separate reality is definitely separate, and it should be kept that way.

Unhappily for neatness and complacency, even sane, grown up people can't separate the realities categorically. rhe field of parapsychology [psychical research, paraphysics, implicit communication, or whatever it may be called next year recognizes apparent invasions df the boss reality by what ought to be imaginary events. Non-lrndulent mind reading, knowledge of objects or events not present to anyone's senses, non moscular mental control over physical forces, validly foreseeing events that cannot be inferred—such anomalies look very much like dr cams come true or the impossible made actual. Though Carlos looks into the past co discover a book thief, sees a bush through a hill, finds his notebook by nut-doing, and vjfrits Sunday's Laguni I la market on Wednesday, Castaneda docs not direct the reader explicitly or by implication to the serious literature treating such transordinary feats, Specialists and in formed readers know magical events abound, puny ones in laboratories, monstrous ones tn convents, annoying ones in kitchens and warehouses. Fraud, insanity, and credulity aside, the impossible docs stick up nut of the probable like a sore thaum defying us to understand it—and we don't understand it. Some of it is demonic, some oi it is angelic, and some of it is merely puzzling, but we don't need a Yaquiless Yaqui or a Coyote Ph D. to tell us about it. A lot of solid citizens have plenty to say on the subject, and their truth is stranger than Castaneda's fiction. When I asked philosopher-parapsychologist Bob Brier whether Castaneda had dune any harm by linking psi manifestations to a suspected hoax, he said he didn't know anyone who thought so, but I can't help wondering how many prospective readers of serious psi literalurc may have been shunted off in another direction by Trickster-Psychic.

A third kind of reality is true reality, the sort of ideal reality Plato had in mind after consuming fly agaric in the Temple of Eleusis. The true reality is a world above this world, where

common stones are transparent gems, where unknown colors shine, where gods really walk in the sacred groves, and so on Castaneda and don Juan don't endorse the true reality, but sometimes a fleeting wish to trade this evil world for a better one speaks out in ways not consistent with the gospel according to doii Juan Though he knows the true reality is just a gold plated private world no truer than a sorcerer's reality, don Juan flirts with a perfectable tonal when he says seeing will show things the way they really arc, or that only by pitting two views against each other can one weasel between them to arrive at the real world. or that Carlos's power-plant trips were true excursions into the nagtial—as though the nagual were some transcendental Disneyland rather than a void filled with potentialities. A more donnic Juan might have said the nagtwf had produced new visions in Carlos's ronn/, the only place for them,

Carlos's path to knowledge begins with the sorcerer's reality and ends at the source of realities. It begins with shamanic ritual and concrete imagery and ends with European metaphysical abstractions. Though Joseph Margolis thought Castaneda had planned the tetralogy, I believe this progression reflects continuous learning as much as initial planning. The author would hardly have planned so many inconsistencies and contradictions. Much of don Juan's tedious, occasionally sophistical academic recapitulation in Tiflis of Power serves to disguise Castaneda s intellectual growth as tortuous didactics devised by the devious master.

So tar we have been talking about don Juan's theory of what is. Now we come to his method of knowing what is. One of his major cpistemologic tools is the bubble of perception, a quasi-spherical private world encompassing the ton#/. Within the bubble, the teacher helps the apprentice divide the tondf into two sectors. Everything he is used to perceiving and understanding, the ordinary objects and events of daily life, the memories, the concepts, the familiar fantasies, the habitual roles and routines are to be herded into one sector, on the right side, leaving the other side empty. To prevent crowding or resurgence the apprentice should nink as much of his mental content as possible.

The empty side of his mind will now be dedicated to the 1 his does nor mean it will be thendgued, which cannot be memnlized. but that it will offer little or no resistance to new manifestations of the nagual, The apprentice will not

have to sit around wondering what the new manifestations will be, because the benefactor, acting as agent and personification of the nagual, will catalyze one or more startling nagual-lian irruptions into the bubble. In the process he will open the bubble from the outside, maybe even sticking his head in to say hello These wondrous events will leave the apprentice a changed man. Thenceforth he will live with the conservative and innovative sides of his fonn] in balance, alert for signals from the unknown.

Twice don Tuan draws a diagram showing Carlos the eight points of his totality. My figure reproduces don Juan's topography (the exact arrangement didn't matter he said}. On the right we have the tonal han tonal, containing everything ordinarily associated with mental life and social communication. On the left we have the nagua Ilian tonal. a mental receptacle yearning to be filled. The yearning is shown by the overlap of will into the left sector. Don Juan's wi/J signifies not stubbornness or even conscious intent but unconscious, intuitive desire. The tonal, ' he said, "doesn't know that decisions are in the realm of rhe nagual,"

Often don I nan equates will and rum-reflective awareness with body. Carlos's body learns, knows, decides, accumulates power, practices not-doing, or detects the presence of the ally. The usage strikes me as rather odd, since it vaguely and incongruously suggests identity of mind and brain, Perhaps Castaneda chose the term as a way of separating ideas, which he handles constantly and expertly, from feelings, which he handles seldom and awkwardly. Between his exaggerated emotive cliches--chills, suffocation, paralysis, spasms, whining, shrieking and don Juan's curt dismissals of: Carlos's "indulging," we get very little emotion naturally expressed or plausibly interpreted. Let the unmanageable feelings stay in the body, where they will not disrupt the smooth flow of ideas.

Don Juan's discourse on the totality of the self is not as clear as his diagram, a difference that may betray the Man of Novels getting ready for a fifth, clarifying book, or Castaneda-Learner not quite having mastered the concepts he is working with. I suspect it is the latter. In spite of some fuzziness, however, the bubble of perception is a vivid metaphor persuading the reader to open his mind to what may be, whatever it may be.

Often don Juan tells Carlos to stop his internal dialogue, so that the ordinary world will stop and another reality can present itself. This formula combines yoga and linguistics.

Meditators cultivate inner silence as a step toward illumination. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests "that all one's life one has been tricked, all unaware, by the structure of language into a certain way of perceiving reality, with the implication that awareness of this trickery will enable one to see the world with fresh insight," Susanne Langer said the experiential world would collapse if language failed. Don Juan puts more emphasis on this technique than I think it deserves, since meditative inner silence is only the first of many steps, and since the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis unduly stresses the influence of language on perception.

Don Juan's seeing is of several kinds. Ideally it illuminates the world, showing the hidden power that maintains it, showing people as luminous eggs, but often don Juan sees through people as character readers do or secs remote events as psychics see them. "I believe you," he says. "I've smoked you." "How did you know about the white falcon?" Carlos asks. "I saw it," says don Juan. Some seeing mimics the ordinary reality, like seeing the bridge to the other world. Other seeing mixes the senses, as when Carlos saw the sound of Genaro's great boulder.

A nagging ambiguity in don Juan's teaching is the uncertain relation between knowledge and power. Weston La Barre fudges the accumulation of supernatural power to be the core of New World shamanism, as it came across the Siberian land bridge in Paleolithic times. Whether found in lightning-struck wood, in strangers' severed heads, or in visionary plants, power controlled such things as weather and animal fertility, making man's environment more friendly. Don Juan urges Carlos to accumulate power as a means to knowledge, but he never quite subordinates the instrument (power) to the goal [knowledge), never fully persuades us a man of knowledge despises shamanic manipulations of the environment and cares only for the essential nagualhan character of all worlds.

Power doesn't matter any more, he says. Who cares about frightening Indians these days? It's better to smoke the mushroom and see than to get power from the devil's weed and kill men. A sorcerer is a sad fellow who uses power that doesn't really belong to him for unworthy ends. My benefactor was a man of great power but not a man of knowledge. He didn't know his own totality until he died, Power is the strongest enemy a man of knowledge has.

On the other hand don Juan "conveyed the impression that

other parts of his teaching were incidental to the acquisition of power," Mcscalito, he said, teaches us how to live, the Little Smoke brings power to see and know, the devil's weed gives sorcering power. Coming with feelings of buoyancy or anger, power makes a sorcerer invincible—a master of his fellows or a terror to his enemies. Even warriors have the great fortune to he prisoners of power, awaiting unknown fulfillments of its promise. With all this loose talk don Juan never cleanses his teaching of the taint of sorcery. Cynics can still suspect Carlos or Castaneda if not Genaro or Jon fuan of taking perverse pleasure in performing unworthy tricks.

James Boyd shows connections between Buddhism and don Juan's not-doing or stopping the world. lie finds the warrior's controlled folly similar to a Buddhist's de tach menu Sun Wilk recognizes controlled folly from the teachings of Lao Tzu.

Twilight may be the crack between the ordinary and non ordinary worlds because it is a time of uncertain perception, when imagination plays a greater part in what we see A warrior's climactic leap into the unknown, whence he may return to live differently, could symbolize the mystical experience of oneness and the changed hie many believe will follow it. The gait of power—charging down steep banks on moonless nights amid gullies, boulders, and spmey cactuses—could be a practical test of bat-like clairvoyance or of bone fragility, but I interpret it more confidently as a writer's fantasy of abandoning himself to racing, plunging creative dreams.

Before don luan's power-hunting and know ledge-seeking techniques can be practiced the apprentice must begin to live ii ke a warrior. A warrior never goes to war but he faces up to his impending death. Knowing his time on earth is short, he lives impeccably to maximize his accomplishments. Feeling him always nearby, glimpsing him occasionally an arm's length to the left, a warrior frequently consults death, his only wise advisor.

To become a man of knowledge if only for an instant, a warrior knows he must conquer four enemies. Fear can make him run away horn knowledge. Clarity can make him believe he is already a man of knowledge when he is not. Power can seduce him into unworthy preoccupations. Old age can weaken his resolve, so that he will not stand ready for the test.

A warrior chooses a path with heart, which is any way of living that brings him peace and gives him pleasure while leading him to knowledge. On that path he does not suffer the

anxieties that plague nun-wanriots. His passions arc focused and do not stray to distracting objects. He journeys eagerly from wonder to wonder, detached from Ordinary concerns. 1 hough he may mingle with mtn or even women, he knows their activities arc folly* Their great goals and gripping crises he finds no more important than their idle pleasures and trivial routines. If he joins or imitates them, his only obligation is to control his folly so as to preserve his impeccability.

A warrior erases personal history He does not tell his name, his origin, or his previous occupation. Sometimes he forgets those things himself. Having no idea what to expect of him, other people cannot pm him down with their thoughts.

Since he cares nothing for the follies of his fcllotvs, a warrior does not submit to the tests they constantly make to determine what is happening and who can be trusted. Valuing truth no more than untruth, he acts on truth believing in what he is doing, on untruth disbelieving. Either way, he acts impeccably—which is to say he acts without awkwardness or miscalculation.

"What is a truthful life?" asks Carlos.

"A life lived with deliberateness," says don Juan, "a good, strong lite." To thine own self be true, Pol on ins might have added. Thou nccdst not then he true to other men.

A warrior assumes responsibility for the consequences of his acts, making "his decisions so carefully that nothing that may happen as a result of them can surprise him, much less drain hi% power." Steadfastly unsurprised and unaffected, he loses Li.mtrul neither of his life nor of his emotions. You will not find him indulging in remorse or self-pity. Having jettisoned his past, he is not beset by feelings arising from earlier times. No flickering strangers with familiar faces confront him unless he is ready for them, no ambassadors come uncalled from unknown regions of his mind He never meets his double face to face, for that would kill him. His life has its own spontaneous order, but nobody can predict hi> movements. He does not wait around to be clobbered, and no one catches up with him. He is never idle and never in a hurry

A warrior, then, has some notable virtues. I go along with him on contemplating death, watching out for the four enemies, and taking responsibility for consequences, but I cannot believe a warrior is never surprised, and my heart does not choose such a solitary path However wise cold death may be, one likes to have some advisor more congenial. A warrior

who could not steer his own course if anyone expected anything of him must have been remarkably docile A warrior who banishes the man or child he used to be is asking to meet himself coming back from exile just when he is least ready to face himself. A warrior who shares neither his past nor his feelings nor any ordinary standard or commitment may be fit to hunt power or pursue knowledge but he is in no condition to live with people. Isolation is don Juan's Haw, said Joseph Pearce. Not so, answered Genaro, three books later.

A warrior's hit- cannot possibly be lonely or lack feeling, Gena to told Carlos, because it is dedicated to his beloved. Who is a warrior's beloved? Genaro began to roll or glide along the ground like an eel in water or an infant wriggling joyfully on its mother's belly. Little Genaro loves the world don luan explained. He swims on it to express the only love that can release his great sadness, to adore the one beloved that can turn his loneliness to solitude This enormous earth, this lovely being alive to its last recesses gives a warrior shelter, accepts his love, understands Ins feelings, soothes his distress, cures his pain, and teaches him to be true. Only if he loves the earth with unbending passion and receives its wondrous gifts as a sign that it cares for him can a warrior be complete.

Castaneda filled 1000 pages before he told us about love in the separate reality. Like most of us, a warrior loves the biosphere. Unlike most of us, he loves only the biosphere. Thar is his choice, and his secret.

When Pizano obtained possession of Cuzco, he found a country well advanced in (he arts of civilization] institutions under which the people lived m tranquillity and personal safety the mountains and the uplands whitened with flocks, the valleys teeming with the fruits of a scien tific husbandry; the graneries and warehouses filled to overflowing; the whole land rejoicing in ns abundance; and the character of the nation softened under the influence of the mildest and most innocent form of superstition, well prepared for the reception of a higher and a Christian civilization. But, far from introducing this, Pizano delivered Up the . ।mquered races to his brutal sol di ery । the sacred doisters were abandoned to their lust; the towns and villages were given up to pillage; the wretched natives were parcelled out like slaves, to toil for their conquerors in the mines; rhe flocks were scattered and wantonly destroyed; the gran erics were dissipated; the beautiful contrivances tor the mure perfect culture of the soil w ere suffered to fall into decay; the paradise was converted into a desert Instead of profiting by the ancient forms of civilization Pizarro preferred to efface every vestige of them from the land, and on their ruin to erect the institutions of his own country Yet these institutions did little for rht poor Indian, held tn iron bondage It was little co him that the shores of the Pacific were studded with rising communities and cities, the marts of a flourishing commerce. He had no share in the goodly heritage. He was an alien in the land of his fathers.

William Hick ling Prescott The Conquest of Peru

• 8. THE POWER AND THE ALLEGORY

Ttosr your personalpower. That's all one bus m this whole mysterious world.

At the time 1 met don fuan I had very little personal power. ■ ■ - my back was against the wail.

When Carlos Arana wa> a little boy 13-thousand people lived in Cai am area hut the railroad didn't go there. From the end of the line one had to ride three days on a mule- An unpaved mad that eventually came winding through the mountains from the rest of the world washed out regularly during the six-month rainy season. The obscure youth who would later win fame in the United States as Carlos Castaneda spent most of his Peruvian life in those Andean sticks, walled in by formidable peaks, rusticated at 9000 feet, cut off from coastal commerce much of the time, and perpetually out of touch with Lima 300 miles away, where the big decisions were made and where those who counted lived. It was not a promising start on the road to the cover of Time.

Some 500 years earlier people in that skyward valley had owed their allegiance to the C hi mu kings, who reigned in the great coastal city of I'hanchan. The Cai am area Indians raised crops, pastured animals, and spoke a language of their own, until a royal Inca came north to conquer them anew. His name Yupaiiqui meant that he counted for something, as those he conquered did not.

Conquest brought the sierra dwellers a new capital city, Cuzco, a new language, Quechua, and a new status as “worthless people Since they would thenceforth do the work of the empire, their worthlessness was not economic but hereditary, consisting in their failure to have descended from the sun. Though the Incas may have numbered no more than 20-thousand at any time, their brief empire was one of the great power trips of the world. By sheer will and novel mythmaking they constituted themselves supermen of the Andes. Learning to fight better than any other tribe and to hold their gains with ostentatious arrogance and bureaucratic cunning, they conquered millions of their fellows and organized Peru as a wheel of wealth and power whose hub was not only a capital city but a resplendent shrine

The mythopoeic Incas superimposed recently discovered heavenly gods on ancient Peruvian shamanism. Conquered sorcerers read the future in the veins of inflated llama lungs under the scrutiny of Inca priests. Those who divined wrongly were killed or mutilated. No word for priest was needed, since every Inca w as a priest of Inti, the sun. As archpriest, the Royal Inca brought together and personified priesthood and caste, church and state, divine and political power

At first the Incas were impeccable warriors, vigilant against attack, never caught without a plan, eager for battle swift in pursuit. A most popular name for an Inca man was Hawk. The word for fighting meant also to enjoy playing games with the enemy. As their conquests succeeded, the Incas became ritualists of power.

The region around Cuzco was laid out as a model of the empire. Serfs from every nation lived at distances from the shrine theoretically corresponding to the remoteness erf their homelands from the capital. No one could leave bis assigned hamlet, where native custom was kept and native garb was worn. Weaving cloth in an unaccustomed pattern or wearing the headgear of another nation was discouraged by fatal blows from stone hammers. Within the city, adulterous harem girls and their lovers would be' hanged naked by the hair until frost and birds had dealt with them sufficiently Their relatives would be hunted down and dispatched. Lesser offenders might have heavy stones dropped on their backs from a height of three feet. Noble criminals were cast into a famous pit of poisonous snakes. Captured enemy captains were routinely deprived of their skins, which were stuffed with grass to serve as man

drums, objects ol merry contempt in victory parades. Toasts would he drunk from their skulls.

That good Christian gentleman William Hick ling Prescott was right about the land rejoicing in its abundance. Inca engineers knew how to build roads and channel water. Effective military administrators made sure the transport and water systems did not tall into disrepair. The tranquility and personal safety Prescott praised were generally available to both Incas and worthless people who did exactly as they were told, but Prescott's "mildest and most innocent form of superstition" needs further examining.

Peru is a land empower spots -of mountains, stones, streams, and winds charged with supernatural power. These ubiquitous, multiform/mica required propitiation in their own right and, under (he Inca regime, as intermediaries to the gods on high. When a sickly Inca lord wished to beg for better health, he might choose his most beautiful daughter to intercede for him, since only the purest and most pleasing messenger was fit to address the gods The Royal Inca, needing many divine favors, needed also many messengers, some on short notice. Good administration meant keeping such messengers always in readiness. Down die long mountain roads that carried tributes of gold, grain, cloth, and leather came also the most beautiful children of the empire, dutifully though presumably not always gladly Surrendered by their parents to serve as the emperor's spokes!ings. These boys and girls, five to twelve years old, were kept in huts near the sacred llama corrals, where priests came to inspect them three times a year for soundness and purity of body. Speaking many different languages, the children no doubt had little to say to each ocher about their predicament. Now and then certain of them would be chosen and taken away for messenger duty.

On the ceremonial day a reverent party gathered round some massive outcropping, the visible form or delegate of a god such as the creator Viracocha. While the party blew solemn kisses to the huacti, the emperor descended from his litter and approached the stone to pray. Up the trail came the messenger children, dressed for the first time m elegant clothing, adorned with gold and silver bangles. Having been plied below with many cups of sacred beer, they were staggering drunk and had to be led by the hand. At the proper moment each was led around the rock by a strangler-priest and deftly strangled, to the crowd's approving murmurs. Still undefiled by sickness or car

nal passion, each small body tumbled into its sacrificial grave, along with gold and silver figurines to further please the god. Then trembling workmen used their sacred digging sticks to cover all. At the coronation of Huascar, whose name meant hummingbird, 200 children carried royal greetings to the gods. Not all were strangled. Some were decapitated, while others had their hearts torn out and their blood smeared across the face of thehufled. By such mild and innocent superstition was the character of the nation softened, preparing it for the higher, Christian civilization that Pizarro did not promptly bring.

The conquistadors were brutal men seeking wealth and fame among heathens. The capable,persuasive, illiterate Pizarro had started his career as a swineherd. Some say he was nursed by a sow. Wehav e rightly been told the cruel Spaniards bet rayed and murdered Atauhuallpa, but few have read how At auhua lipa's captains prepared to celebrate his coronation. Hanging trussed on poles in Cuzco's Recreation Square, Afcauhuallpa's haltbrother, the deposed emperor Huascar, saw a hundred women of his harem who were or might be pregnant torn open and his progeny removed. The bodies were spitted on heavy posts set along the road whereon the victor would approach the city, the unborn children pinned into the mother's folded arms. Women with born children were treated the same way, and hundreds of additional posts were set tor loyal half-brothers, servants, and friends. Atauhuailpa never saw those triumphal decorations because the Spaniards had already captured him in bloody battle at Cajamarca.

Pizarro 3 men were few hut hard. They had the great luck to land on the Peruvian shore at the very' moment when the Inca regime corrupted by royal sacrilege, torn by fratricidal strife was spontaneously disintegrating. In the turmoil many Incas took the Spaniards tube the legendary army of Viracocha, who would stop time, overturn the world, and institute a new creation. Unable co choose between sullied rival emperors and legendary renewers, the warriors were caught without a plan. Hating them in turn, many of the worthless people sided with the hairy invaders. Had the Spaniards landed 50 years earlier, they would surely have been struck down with stone hammers and paraded as man-drums through the streets of Cuzco. As things stood, they proved just enough bolder, harder, cruel er, and more determined to prevail against the faltering supermen. Thirty years after the landing the Inca caste and nation was no more The most sacred statue of Inti had been rooted out of its

mountain hiding place and inched down to pay the debts of the Spanish king, The Indians were starving in the rains of their economy, dying from European diseases, slaving for masters who took their women but gave them no viaducts in return.

Facing a vast crowd assembled to see him executed for rebellion, the last legitimate Inca heir is said to have told his followers the oracles of Inti had been a royal lie and trick The truth, he said, was in the law of Christ, to which he had just been converted and under which he was ready to die. Thus in cities and towns did supernatural power pass from Inti to Jesus, secular power from Royal Inca to royal Philip, while deep in the mountains the Indians turned for solace to their hihicas, as they do today.

The Peruvian colony was so loyal to Spain that its fight for independence was led by outsiders. As a nation it continued divided, Europeans and Mestizos dominating the coast and lower sierra, Indians populating the high plateaus Those who counted ran the nation's business, politics, and military affairs from Lima. Great families owned the land, while peasants tilled the soil and tended the animals. Between these major classes an industrial-merchant-professional class was making its influence felt about the time Carlos Arana came on the scene- The I it de we know about his family suggests they were establishing themselves as merchants during his youth- Growing wealth and rising status would have been prime family concerns. Castaneda's false portrait of his father as an academic snob who wouldn't talk to anybody that hadn't read Plato combines a fantasy of descent from intellectuals with rejection of rural conservatism and middle class conformity. Though Carlos's father became a mediocre professor, Carlos was raised on a farm in the backwoods.

In a land that reeked of power, ancient and modern, sacred and secular, young Arana had little Of his own. The hum tain of supernatural power for a person of his class would have been the Church, and the Castaneda we know today might have made an outstanding monseigneur had not young Arana rejected everything Catholic save the untypical San Juan de la Cruz, who died imprisoned and accused ot heresy. As for don |uan de Sonora, Tom Torquemada would gladly have incinerated him for teachings that transformed God Almighty into a tablecloth and went downhill from there. Carlos, don Juan jibes, hasn't been to confession in all the years they have been numing around together and has lost his last medallion. In a

horrendous scene of mountain witchcraft, superhuman Juan and Genaro boom out demonic laughter at a terrifled comical Trinity of Carlos the Father, Pablito the Son, and Nestor the Holy Ghost, Standing cold sober in Mexico City's main square, Carlos notices lhe cathedral more slanted than before. He ventures a lew feet inside, when a "cynical thought" crosses his mind. The reader, risking his own salvation not Carlos's. is to imagine the cathedral toppling over or crashing down. Juan and Genaro can indulge in blatant heresy, but Carlos and Castaneda can only hint subtly at the collapse of the One Holy Church. Could this be the fearful resentment of the apostate? The chapter is titled. '1 laving to Relieve." A few minutes after escaping rhe falling stonework, Carlos is tapped on the shoulder in the marketplace, A shiver shakes his body from head to toe.

"My God, don Juan!" he exclaims "What are you doing here?"

"What arc you doing here?" echoes Juan divine.

Apostate Arana belonged to no powerful secular class. His family were nut aristocrats or landholders, and he felt no inclination toward the military a possible road to power in Peru. Though Margaret's Carlos "was always talking about starting a revolution" to help the underdogs of Latin America, Jose's Carlos busied himself taking money from less adept gamblers and displayed no revolutionary ardor or activism on behalf of oppressed Indians. Repelled by industry and commerce, scorning the managerial or professional career that might have brought him modest influence, he was alive to poetry and sculpture. Like the Indian, he lived outside the economic and political life of his country. Like the Indian, he was not content but longed for power of another order.

Castaneda recalled Carlos's childhood as an eternity of helplessness, a desert of loneliness, a jungle of fear a trial oi pain. Summers without the busyness of school were hot and suffocating. Boredom occasionally erupted into anger. Carlos was a violent fellow, don Juan would say, capable of frothing at the mouth, hut we may imagine Carlitos dared not show his temper in father Arana'S house any more than in the house of his Heavenly Father. Kicking or hurling stones in a remote corner of the garden, he would feel ashamed if an adult noticed his display of feeling.

At school he couldn't help picking on pesty little Joaquin and eventually broke his collarbone. Feelings of guilt were so

strong that Carlos swore "not ever to win again." We don t have to take the incident at face value to find in it the paradigm of anger turned inward. Castaneda has been described as a passive, gentle person but also as an annoying jokester. Deprived of its original family targets, his submerged anger bursts out in little pranks easily forgiven, or in subtle insults seldom recognized by friendly or adoring victims.

Before he met don Juan, Carlos could almost always get his way by wheedling, arguing, whining, complaining, or showing false anger. Oddly, don luan admitted having used the same tactics when he was still a member of society. "It's funny the way you sometimes remind me of myself," he said.

"What injures the spirit," he told Carlos, "is having someone always on your hack, beating you, telling you what to do and what not to do." Eight-year-old Carlos evened the score by playing real or imaginary tricks on the principal. Teenage Carlos chose the typical tactic of humoring people, saying yes and meaning no. Graduate student Castaneda humored his professors by reporting imaginary field work.

Devious dealing has its costs. "I confessed," wrote Castaneda "that I had never respected or liked anybody, not even myself, and that I had always felt I was inherently evil."

"True," said don luan, "you don't like yourself at all." He then distracted Carlos from the history of his self-condemnation, the sources of his misery, and the roots of his rebellion by saying social conduct was folly unworthy’ of a warrior's regret. The truth that Carlos was ugly and rotten could be dispelled by realizing all truths were lies, all perceptions illusions. Such comforting sophistry, such intellectual shields against the cruel barbs of self-reproach were presumably not available in the parish of Caiamarca. Besides devious dealing, what sins made one feel rotten and ugly there? Oppressing Indians, Defacing schoolbooks, Maiming first-graders,, Cursi ng parents under one's breath. Ducking mass, Performing unauthorized hedonic exercises? Embraces are permissible only between men and women, Genaro said, or between a man and his hurro. Don Juan gave Carlos a piercing look.

"What are you doing in your pocket?" he asked frowning. "Are you playing with your whanger?" Pretty familiar for the second interview, hut fathers don't always stand on ceremony. Carlos said he was writing notes in his pocket, Father Matus laughed heartily, but maybe father Arana didn't swallow excuses like that. In any case, as don luan said, Carlos's father had

him all figured out, knew his habits and his character Carlos felt pinned down by the old man's opinion of him, which no power on earth could change* One solution was to put thousands of miles between himself and chat opinion. Another was to alter and then abandon his father's name. A third was to banish an imaginary lather to a life of futility in Brazil, as "a literary man who has never written a thing." A fourth was to deplete the paternal power by making the father only seven years older than the son. A fifth was to Find an Indian foster father. A sixth was to be the father himself. An exorcist does well to employ a variety of spells.

The Brazilian fathcrling's efforts to become a writer were "a farce of indecision," Castaneda told Sandra Burton, but added: "1 am my father. Before I met don Juan I would spend years sharpening my pencils and then get a headache every time 1 sac down to write. The blocked paternal author portrays the filial Man of Novels struggling in quicksands of inherent evil. Writers who don't Like themselves tear up their manuscripts in advance.

"There is no longer a war within you/' don luan said. How was it fought or settled? Who won or who surrendered? The evidence does not support the idea that Castaneda ever found anyone to open his heart to. Many wished to be his friend and would have listened gladly towhatever he needed to tell, hut he couldn't reveal anything important about himself except in his books, allegorically. Margaret knew him lor years and never really knew him. If he wouldn't tell her, whom would he tell? Don Juan?

Suffering is only a thought, said Doctor Matus. A warrior doesnot indulge in self pity. Look directly at the funny things but through the sad things. Laughing feels a lot better than crying. If someone you love dies, don't look at her body in the coffin, sec her life expanding into a fog of crystals. That way you will not hear the cry inside you.

Though earnest psychotherapists have hailed don Juan as a contributor to their art, he never permits his client to welcome or express painful emotion—a crucial error that is to be expected when therapist and client are the same person, shrinking from the same anguish, fleeing the same distress. In his years of roaming, Carlos had grown callous to pain and sadness. Occasionally they caught him off guard, but most of the time he played the buoyant clown turn mg sadness into jokes, or the wise man turning loneliness into philosophy.

Carlitos is really cool.

He's got a bit of a poet, a nut, and a fool,

Genaro's doggerel must have been more elegant in the original Spanish, but he's on to something. Carlos thought he might be "a bit crazy" wanting to spend his time with don Juan, who called him m turn "a very strange plugged up fool" because he couldn't see. More plugged up than seeing is feeling. Carlos can't open his gap and let his passion flow into another person. He can't commit himself to anything hut the separate reality, first in his tnind_r then on paper, rarely in an interview or on the podium Telling stones excites him but only displays his power to fill tip the social world with cobwebs. He does not embrace people, causes, or even his burro. Socially he is really cool.

Carlos did not know where to go or what to do. He was chronically bored. Most of his lies were told to stir up a little excitement. Often he sank into a depression, which rubbed him of his buoyancy or wisdom and incapacitated him for dealing with people. "I can like my fellow men only when 1 am at the peak of my vigor and not depressed." Castaneda told Sam Keen "Atone point in my apprenticeship I became profoundly depressed. I was overwhelmed with terror and gloom and thougilts of suicide."

We don't have to credit the apprenticeship or the terror to take note of the depression, gloom, and thoughts of suicide. Helpless, desolate self condemnation may he the worst thing anyone can feel. Terror could be an improvement. Imaginary terror could be positively delightful. Living a fantasy of mysterious danger, the perfect companion always by one's side— there is a cure lor boredom and depression. If no one else can be trusted, it may be the only cure. Nut everyone can do it The apprenticeship starts early.

Mama, 1 saw a falcon sitting in the fig tree.

Show mt.

It's gone now. It was all white.

Margarita, I met a man I want to study with.

Who is he?

His name is don Juan.

The fantasies of childhood usually give way to the conventions of adulthood, but not always. When they act as shields to cover naked feelings and keep out the world that stirs up those feelings, taking them off is an agony too severe to be borne in solitude 1 lowevcT lonely, the separate reality can be secure and comforting. Like don fuan, Carlos quit his apprenticeship be

cause it was too hard. Like don luan, he came back to it because there was "no other way to live/'

The labor in Castaneda's academic put-on was obviously so much greater than in legitimate research that Time could not believe the don Juan books were a hoax. Where was the motive for a superior student with a good record to choose such a hard, slow, dangerous, unpromising path to professional membership? 1 can see two motives. Castaneda wanted to test his personal power—to solidify his private world, to harden his shields against inner pain and outer pressure, to realize his career as a writer, to impose his separate reality on the world outside and see it taken for the boss reality. He couldn't do those things as a novelist His writing skill was not great enough to impress fiction editors, but what was more important, he would have conceded that he was making a myth. That concession would have destroyed must of his power. Students do not run around the British Isles searching for hobbits.

Second, he was apparently seeking social passage from childhood to adulthood, symbolic passage from human to superhuman status. His ceremonial egress through the Westwood Gate of Power stood for the shaman's perilous walk across the bridge to the otherworld or the paradoxical visionary passage through the eye of the needle or the strait gate. Transition from the degradation ot candidacy to the glory of doctor-hood would make Castaneda "a sorcerer for sure." "You are like an infant that can't get out of the crib,” don Juan would say. Climbing out of the crib at last, Castaneda would leave behind the stains of childhood. There is a place of power (he told John Wallace a year before receiving his degree J w here you can go to get rid of the undesirable things that attach themselves to a sorcerer. As you squeeze between two sheer cliff walls, the evil things arc rubbed off and remain forever in the place of power. Like any other shamanistic candidate, Castaneda prepared himself by arcane rituals, which included creating illusions of transcendence and where necessary playing sorcerer's tricks.

British neurologist Sir Henry Head (1861-19401 was famous for studies of brain function. I suppose for every brain specialist named Head there may be another named Foote, and so no correlation between name and occupation or name and trait, but in case names do affect lives, you will want to know the translation of Castaneda's true family name. History tells us Diego de Arana helped Columbus discover America. Jesuit Antonio Arana wrote Latin biographies, Cesareo Arana

politicked in San Salvador, and Vicente Arana translated Tennyson. None was accused of trickery, so far as I know, except maybe Ccsareo, bur tirana (Latin trrrmed, spiderweb) means: trap, snare, fib, lie, deceit, fraud, swindle, or trick. In his native land, Garlitos Arana was Charlie Trick,

"It was believed," wrote a sixteenth-century historian, "that he who had no nagual could never be rich." A young man possessing the latent power to transform the nagual from a jaguar witch into a formless void containing everything was wasting his time in a conservative pre industrial country run by land barons and political soldiers. Vallejo had gone to Paris to die, Arana would go to the United States and begin to live. Fortune smiling upon him. he might pave the path of heart with blocks of gold and become a stockholder like the future dun Juan, In the United States, Castaneda did what Arana had done in Peru. He made up fantastic stories. The market was much better in the United States, and so were the stories.

Carlos met don Juan as a UCLA undergraduate, when his back was against the wall. A doctoral aspirant in a big university feels excruciatingly powerless. He has tn propitiate an Olympian crew by ingesting the Augean contents of the library. He knows he can't do it, but he thinks they mean him to. The most important thing he learns while acquiring membership is that the Olympians hrn cn't done it either, they just talk as if they had. Though he pretended to have seen only six sources, Castaneda mastered more literature than most. Retrieving his thrice-conquered Cajamarca Indians from the mental file, he transformed them into Yaquis and Mazatecs, mixed a new bruin from old ingredients, and synthesized the integrated mesoameric an-European wise man. He never cracked a smile that wasn't in the script.

Success was largely due to his personal presence. Campusmate Sam Bunsen described him as follows:

''[ had expected an intellectual or a magician but he looked like a farm worker. 1 thought a sorcerer would be fierce but he was mild and gentle. Though he knew so much, when students asked questions, he suggested answers very humbly. I bumped into him on campus a couple of times and we talked about sorcery. He was friendly but not what you call outgoing. He listened respect fulls to anything I said, but I felt he either already knew what I was going to say or he wasn't interested in my ideas Maybe he is limited to a master-disciple relationship. He was always serious. I never heard him make any jokes,

Sometimes I would see him walking across the campus, not looking at anybody. He seemed alone in the crowd, the kind of person who would prefer co avoid people?'

' How did you feel after you had been with him?" 1 asked

Excited, Sam said, "filled with a sense of wonder. Not so much by him as by what he had to say. 1 knew it was authentic."

"He certainly does not resemble the inert undergraduate sophist he claims he once was," wrote Gwyneth Cravens several years after Sam had known Castaneda. "He is alert, inquisitive, convivial."

Sandra Burton found him a ceaseless self •mocking, mesmerizing talker Men and women who have known him more privately have seen him playful and even boisterous.

Castaneda's public conduct grew more assertive and ironic as he gained confidence, but like magus Matus he consistently wielded a baton of mystery, evoking wonder from his listeners. The power of his hidden agenda was always felt. Leaders of secret causes fascinate then followers in the same way. They do not tell the whole plan, but everyone knows where the plan will come from when the moment of truth is at hand. Castaneda had nut only a plan but a separate world.

Most people are painfull) aw arc of the evils of this world and of their powerlessness to correct them, but they drcam of having unlimited power or of finding a better world. When a well recommended, sober looking fellow stands up barefaced in front of them and says he has come hack from another world where he has been accumulating personal power from nature and supernature, the dream bursts open inside of them. "There was a curious air of suspended disbelief in the seminar room," John Wallace wrote. "The students wonted to believe these .. . incredible accounts . hut they seemed embarrassed in their believing. There was a lot of tense laughter." The ambassador from another world who can elicit tense laughter from a respectful audience commands power in this world.

Wallace told a remarkable story of Castaneda Puppetmaster manipulating casual triends and colleagues. Castaneda suggested he come to Wallace's campus office, whence they would goto lunch Wallace waited through the appointed time, but Castaneda didn’t show up. Wallace went to Castaneda's office. The door was locked and nobody answered his pounding. Castaneda's teaching assistant said he had gone to Mexico on the spur of the moment. He needed a couple of fast answers

from don Juan. Anyway, she said, don't worry about it. He never shows up when he says he is going to. About one o'clock Ronald Sukenick arrived for his lunch date with Castaneda. Thu two stood ups went to lunch together. On the way hack Wallace met Castaneda in the elevator. "I thought you were in Mexico/' he said. "I waited in my office from eleven till one with the door open," said Castaneda, Wallace stared at him aghast. "But we must talk, John/' Castaneda continued. "We have so much to talk about. '

The best way to meet Castaneda was by accident, Sukeruck wrote, like the time they noticed each other in a Los Angeles coffee shop altera lecture by Anais Mm Not only was it a poor place for conversation but Castaneda looked Sukenick straight in the eye and said:"I'm in Mexico. 1 go back and forth very fast. Why don't you get in touch next time you're in Los Angeles. We should talk."

A high-pressure executive I once knew used to get nd of people Ke didn't want to talk to by making them promise to look him up lor a talk, k sa wizard technique. On one occasion when she knew where he was living, Margaret had a phone installed in Carlos'sapartment so she could call him. He never picked up the receiver. The next time she visited him she found the phone wrapped in towels in the closet.

When Sukenick read A Separate Heulkv the possibility that don Juan was a Yaqui Ossian occurred to him right away, but after he had met the author four times [the last time in the coffee shop) he no longer believed Castaneda could write a sustained work of fiction—his mind was just too literal. The don Juan story must therefore be true

Bruce Cook doubted Castaneda had written the books by himself. His English was so laden with social-sc fence jargon and his syntax was so pedantic that Cook could not sec him spinning abstirbing tales. Some experienced novelist must have taken the field notes in hand. Cook suggested Clifford Irving,

Playing various roles in life as well as in books. Castaneda adapted to the needs of tune and place. His performance as colorkss pedant qualified him as a sober, trustworthy student at the University. More important, if he had little or no imagination, he could hardly have invented don Juan.

His power over his reader proceeds from allegory. Describing one thing under the guise of another, philosophy as anthropology, separate as boss reality, daydreams as facts, he appeals to

the reader's hunger for myth, magic ancient wisdom, noble savages, true reality, self* improvement, other wen Ids, or imaginary playmates. The allegory protects him and teaches us. For him it is the only way to live. For us it is the only way to know him. He speaks to us tn the only way he can,

"Thus we see him. " wrote Claude Levi-Strauss of the Zuhi apprentice accused of witchcraft, "with a mixture of cunning and good faith, progressively construct the impersonation which is thrust upon him . . . drawing on his knowledge and his memories, improvising somewhat hut above all living his role. . . At the end of his adventure, what remains of h is earlier hoaxes? To what extent has the hero become the dupe of his Own impersonation? What is more, has he not truly become a sorcerer? We are told that. ... At times his face became radiant with satisfaction at his power over his listeners."

Michael Hamer describes the livaro shaman curing the patient by sucking a magical dart out of his body. The dart merges withan object the shaman is already holding in his mouth, and the combination of essence and object is shown to the patient as proof of the cure. Though Levi-Strauss would say the shaman is practicing fakury | in which he may believe}, Harner says the shaman is not lying because the object serves as a visible sign that the invisible magic dart has been removed. Without such a sign, the patient might not believe, and the cure might fail,

An important (though not the sole) criterion for choosing between these subtly different views is the fact that the patient gets well. Who is to say that his recovery is an illusion? More to the point, who is to say that his recovery has not been effected by magic rather than mere belief? If it comes down to that, what is mere belief? Sometimes belief or intention makes things happen in the ordinary world without psychosomatic or other mechanical mediation. Thu separate reality merges with the boss reality.

Castaneda's literary magic can he viewed in the same way. The words that come out of his mouth or typewriter arc charged with an essence that makes things happen in both separate and boss realities. Some of t hese things may be beneficial. He is not lying, we can say, because rhe meaning we gut from his allegory is more important than his secret preparations. As the shaman's patient recovers, so we grasp a new meaning of reality and recognize the existence of alternative realities. He is not lying because he is careless of being

found out, making his tales progressively more preposterous, leaving clues that betray their synthetic eclecticism. Finally he is not lying because the story is more real to him than the paper on which it is printed. Don Juan's irony cuts both ways.

Joseph Pearce chided Hugh Schonfield tor supposing Jesus took a drug to simulate death. Jesus-Trick st er cannot be lesus-Bunefactor Pearce protested. No good fruit from a bad tree No feet of clay. I am not sure about that. Any allegory is a bit of a trick. Mustard or Jimson seed can tall on good ground. Castaneda has sorely tested our capacity to tell one kind of reality from another, and many readers have tailed the test, but those of us who do not believe don Juan walks Sonoran sands still feel he somehow lives. Whatever disrespect J may have shown the old metamorph in these pages, I have paid him the compliment of meeting him frequently on his own turf, and if he walks through the door tomorrow we can have it around the room and see what comes out.

When eventually recognized as other-saying, Castaneda's allegory still retains its power. Our commitment to his reality charges it with life. Sorcery turns out to have a social context after all.

On both nights RGW stood up tor a long time in Cayetano's room, ,it the foot of the stairway, holding on to the rail transfixed in ecstasy by the visions that he was seeing in the darkness with his open eyes. For the first time that word 'ecstasy' took on a subjective meaning for him. Ecstasy was not someone eisc's state of mind. It was no lunger a trite superlative cheapened by overuse. It signified something different and superior in kind, about which RGW could now testify as a competent witness. There came one moment when it sec me J as though the visions themselves were about to be transcended and dark gates reaching upward beyond sight were about topart, and we were to find ourselves in the presence ■ d the Ultimate. We seemed to be flying at the dark gates as a swallow at a dazzling lighthouse, and the gates were to part and admit us. but they did not open, and with a thud we tell back gaspmg We felt disappointed, but also frightened and half relieved, that we had not entered into the presence । i the Ineffable, whence, it seemed tons at the time, we might not have returned, fur we had sensed that a willing extinction in the divine radiance had been awaiting us.

—R. Gordon Wasson & Valentina I⁵- Wasson Mushrooms Russia History

• 9. JOURNEY TO CAXAMALCA

lest flesh and blood quicken with natural love, which is ever alive among kinsfolk. . . . Hold them all as strangers to thee. . . . Think not of them at all, . . flee from them in so far as thou humanly canst. ... for in no other way canst thou free thyself from the imperfections and evils which the soul obtains from creatures.

WtJ tire all alone. Carlitos That's our condition.

Yet thev keep trying to go home fully aware that they can’t. It’s very tragic; their control over their loneliness u superb.

On 24 June 1542 at Fontiveros near Avila in old Castile was bom to Gonzalo and Catalina de Yepus their third son, whom they named Juan. Gonzalo died soon after, leaving the beautiful Catalina in poverty, to raise the boy without a father. From infancy she taught the future saint to look to the Blessed Virgin for so lace and salvation. At 12 he boarded at the poor-school. At 15, feeling no inclination toward carpentry, tailoring, woodcarving, or painting, he found employment nursing the sick when not pursuing his studies. At 21 he went to learn theology at Salamanca, where he voluntarily practiced extreme austerities and mortifications, sleeping in a bare coffin-like trough, scourging his body till the blood ran, wearing rough sackcloth over the sores. Seeking only solitary contemplation, Juan humbly asked to continue as a lay brother, but he had proved such an able scholar that he was made a priest at 25, and a year later Teresa de Jesus [Saint Teresa of Avila) appointed

him the first member of the first monastery of barefoot Carme-lite friars. 1 here he took the name Juan de la Cruz [John of the Cross). The monastery was a dilapidated shack which young Padre Juan adorned with many skulls and crosses, one of which bore a paper Christ. Walking barefoot through rural snows he gained a great reputation among the good people whom he inspired with the love of Cud.

Love was the core of Juan's teaching—not love of man for woman, of mother for child, or of neighbor for neighbor, but of the soul for Cod. The soul, he wrote, was the bride of God. Describing that mystical marriage he dismayed many who believed holiness and passionate pleasure made strange bedfellows. Judge for yourself from these typical verses:

Upon my flowery breast

Kept wholly tor himself alone,

There he stayed sleeping and 1 caressed him.. . .

There he gave me his breast.

There he taught me a science most delectable, And 1 gave myself to him reserving nothing.

There J promised to be his bride.

When the mystical union failed to occur fora long time, Juan wrote of the s< nil's desolation:

Where hast thou gone hiding. Beloved, and left me moaning? Thou didst flee like the hart, Having wounded me.

Such language required volumes of Juan's clarifying commentaries to make it orthodox.

Juan urged the religious person to withdraw his emotional treasure from human and other earthly commitments and to store it in God. Sister Catalina de la Cruz, a candid, simple soul who cooked for the convent, asked why the frogs jumped into the pond and swain to the bottom whenever she came near. Juan said they found their security there. That is what you must do, he said. Flee from creatures and plunge into the depth and center—which is God -and hide yourself in him. The depth and center was to be found within oneself. The center of the soul was God.

Juan compared the contemplative soul to the solitary bird—not a fancied creature but an actual species, thepd/aro solitariO or solitary thrush Known also as thepd/nro loco or crazy bird, it is described as eight inches long, dark brown

spotted with white, an eater of insects and grapes, nesting in ruined buildings, preferring solitude, having a sweet, agreeable song. Juan's Spanish will help us understand Castaneda's use of this simile:

Las candid ones del pdjaro sol it ar io son cinco:

la primera, que se va a lo mas alto-, la segunda, qve no suf re compa nia.

antique sea de su naturaleza;

la tercera, que pone el pica al aire_;

la cuarta. que no tiene de ter mina do color:

la quinta, que canta suavemente.

Castaneda translated these lines as a frontispiece for Tales of Power, attributing them to "San Juan de la Cruz," who many non-Catliolic readers no doubt thought was another modem poet like Cesar Vallejo or Juan Ramon Jimenez. My translation leans on that of Peers:

The characteristics of the solitary bird are five: first, it soars as high as it is able;

second, it can endure no companionship

even of its own kind;

third, it puts its beak into the air,-fourth, it has no definite color; fifth, it sings softly.

Juan explains these lines as follows: The contemplative soul must rise above transitory things, paying no more attention to them than if they did not exist. She (the soul, the bride of God J must be so fond of solitude and silence that she will not tolerate (Peers says, cannot endure) the company of any other creature. She must put her beak into the air of the 1 loly Spirit—that is, she must seek God's inspiration to make herself more worthy of his company. She must not have a definite color— that is, she must not be intent on anything except what is the will of God. She must sing softly [or sweetly) in contemplation and love of her divine Husband.

Castaneda's translation departs from the above in three significant ways, which set limits on his imitation of the mystic saint. One of these departures is a definite error of translation, hut since I am confident he knew how to translate no sufre company correctly, I take the apparent error to be an intentional change of meaning. Let me start with the least impressive departure.

Castaneda changed "the" solitary bird to "a" solitary bird,

thus replacing Juan's simile with his own metaphor. Juan says: The contemplative soul is like the solitary thrush. Castaneda says: I am a solitary bird, The metaphor is more personal, more centered on Castaneda, less subject to the authority and guidance of a dead saint—whom Castaneda deftly transmuted |for the general reader, at least' from Doctor of the Universal Church in Mystical Theology Writing Didactic Prose to Unknown Poet Seeking Himself. To adapt the saint's lines to his own purposes, Castaneda had to ignore the interpretation that follows immediately in the saint's text.

Castaneda rendered "puts its beak into the air" as "aims its beak to the skies," disregarding the saint's explicit, unambiguous intent, which was the submission of the soul to her divine Husband by seeking to breathe and be transformed by his purifying air. Castaneda seeks no inspiration from any guide, male or female, not under his control. Rather he rises by bis own power i that is, by power accumulated from an impersonal source and temporarily at his disposal' to the highest point of self-development (whose height, uncalibrated by dogma, he will judge himself). As elsewhere, he rejects the Judeo-Christian separate God. preferring an Eastern or idiosyncratic absolute within, a That thou art. (The soul found her Husband within, but doctrine required the saint to think and speak of him as separate.'

Inserting the word for, Castaneda produced a new proposition: "It docsnot suffer for company." Where Juan says the soul does not tolerate or cannot endure the company of any creature, Castaneda says the accumulator of personal power does not miss having company, not even of persons like himself. In this line [though not elsewhere) Castaneda's solitude, unlike the saint's, costs him nothing. He whistles in the graveyard of friendship lost and love departed. (Altering the meaning, he also falls into ambiguity, since most idiomatically his line means: He has plenty of company, even of persons like himself. That could not be true from anyone's point of view.)

Castaneda adapts San Juan's dualistic mysticism to the monistic Way of don Juan. The solitary bird, who is Castaneda himself, soars alone to the highest achievement on wings of personal power, feeling no need for companionship. By having no reliable public characteristics, and by not raising his voice or being abrasive, he escapes the demands and controls of his fellows.

Some of San Juan's propositions fit into don Juan's teachings

without change. Both teachers deprecate specific visions, which can mislead or distract the seeker, prescribing formless union instead, San luan the oblivious union of the soul with her Husband, don Juan the sorcerer's metaphoric leap into the void. Don Juan prescribes a clean tonal, where ordinary thoughts have been thinned out and swept to one side. San Juan says:

When thou thinkest on anything,

Thou ceasest to cast thyself upon the all.

Carlos was touched in some undefined part of himself by the luminous coyote, after which indescribable warmth and well being exploded within him. The Beloved inflicted a most subtle touch upon the bride, inflaming her heart with love:

Oh, living flame of love

That tenderly woundest my soul in its deepest center. Oh, sweet burn! Oh, delectable wound!

Oh, soft hand! Oh, delicate touch!

The soft, silky, furry paw of a giant rabbit seemed to touch Carlos's neck, nearly maddening him. The Beloved wounded the bride's neck, causing her senses to be suspended. Touched by the coyote, Carlos soon had no thoughts or feelings^ he was floating free. The oblivious soul reclined her face on the Be* loved.

In his euphoria, Carlos discovered a simple secret that encompassed everything but could not be put inti; words or even thoughts an ineffable truth. Juan de la Cruz entered a place he did not recognize and heard great things so secret they could not be told, l ie was filled with understanding that drove out understanding. The more he knew about the all, the less he knew about particulars. The closer he came to God, the less of him remained. That closeness he felt as an act of God's compassion. Carlos could not put his illumination into words or thoughts, but his body—which is to say, his feelings—gave it substance and quality to be remembered.

Divest thyself of what is human in order to seek God, San Juan said. "After you become a sorcerer, you're no longer human." said Castaneda, but as if reluctant to pay the whole cost of sorcery, he added: "There's a stupendous sorcerer in central Mexico who's supposed to have remained a human being. I'm going to talk to him tomorrow,"

Love to be unknown both by thyself and others, San Juan said. "Nobody knows who 1 am or what I do," said dun Juan, 'not even I Both were sometimes seen to have luminous

faces. On the other hand, San Juan said we should be ready to lose and see others win, while don Juan said Carlos was not bound by his promise never to win again. The saint lost himself in service to others; the sorcerer sought power to rise above human tolly. The saint took refuge from his desires in the mountains, saying, "1 have less to confess when I am among these rocks than when I am among men." The sorcerer loved the rocks and mountains tor themselves and trod his path among them joyfully.

A bird caught in the lime, said San Juan, must free itself and make itself clean. Likewise, he who is mired in desire must free himself, and purity himself from that which has clung to him. The undesirable, evil things that can attach themselves to a warrior are rubbed off. Castaneda said, when he squeezes through the narrow exit. To travel the road of perfection, said San Juan the soul must enter by the strait gate, stripping herself of sensual things.

As before, we see the man of novels reworking someone cIse's ideas, undeniably in the lines about the solitary bird, plausibly in the other examples. More to the point here, Castaneda tells us as directly as he says anything significant about himself that he and San loan are birdsofa feather, which in this case do not flock together but fly in separate realities. Sharing the solitary condition with the saint as with Genaro, Carlos is alone but, he says_r not lonely. As San Juan has the divine Beloved to comfort him, Genaro and Carlos have the beloved World As the saint must purify himself by renouncing desires, the sorcerers must scrape off clinging entities, which may well be desires unacknowledged. Unlike the saint, the sorcerers count on their personal power, refusing to submit to any master except death, and to him only at the last minute. Unlike the saint, they have no obvious bonds with human beings.

Despite his determination to cast off human ties. Juan de la Cruz was deeply attached to certain women. The bride m him yearned for the divine Husband, hut the man yearned for mother, sister, and daughter. Not for wife apparently. A young woman who hoped to seduce him was turned aside with kind, unruffled words.

While his patroness Teresa lived he often denied himself the easy delight of visiting her. After she died, he carried her pic ture constantly. To free the bride within for contemplation of a greater love, he destroyed Teresa's letters, saved for years.

At the first monastery, his mother had come to cook for him. Later he was offered an appointment that would have kept

them together but refused it. partly to mortify his desire for the natural love that is ever alive among kinsfolk. "I do not understand saints who do not love their own family/' commented Saint Theresu oi Lisieux, a holy flower child who had enough love for all. However much Juan de la Cruz loved and needed his mother, the bride within him loved and needed the divine Husband more. Loving a particular person. he felt, was stealing love from God. That rocky path with heart led him steadily away from his fellow creatures, hut now and then he allowed himself to look back for a moment at human love forsaken.

A year after his mother died he wrote a touching letter to a dear friend: "Sister Catalina de Jesus, wherever she may be." Though I don't know where you are (it said) I want to write these lines. Far away, alone in exile, vomited out by that whale (prison) into this foreign port | Andalucia, a region he detestedl, I have not been found worthy to see you again. As darkness prepares us for light, this trial is a gift from God. but how many things I should like to say to you. Not knowing whether this letter will reach you, 1 do nut say them.

Five years after that lonely, stifled cry, Juan's friend was prioress at Beas, while he was spending a week with the nuns at Caravans. One snowy morning he startled them by declaring he was urgently needed at Beas, where he must go even if rhe storm worsened. When they begged him to stay the full week, he said: "If 1 stay you will sec that they will come for me That day a messenger came from Beas, saying Catalina de Jesiis was dead.

Don Juan de Sonora had his own professional colleague Catalina, with whom he too had supernatural communication. Unlike Catalina de |usiis, she was a fearsome witch, but like Catalina de Yepes she was both impeccable and beautiful. Did the witch get her name from the saint s mother or from his dear friend? Only Castaneda could tell us, but there are other possibilities.

The year 307 saw the lecherous Roman emperor Maxentius carrying off countless virtuous wives and daughters of Alexandria for his own amusement until rebuked in the name of Christ by a noble virgin whose name was Purity—Catherine in Creek Helpless, we are told, against her brilliant theology, the emperor summoned 50 philosophers to dispute her. Though only IK, she convinced them all, whereupon Maxentius burned them at the stake Without a word to his wife Faustina, he offered beautiful Catherine a throne beside his and a place in his bed. She refused. Whipped and thrown into prison, she

made converts of 200 imperial guardsmen—and of Faustina, win) dropped in to size up the competition, Maxenrius sunt the new members of the C hutch to greet their Maker and ordered a great wheel set with knives for Catherine's final punishment. As the dread machine began to do its dire work, it flew into pieces, scattering blades through the crowd and wounding many an unbaptized gawker. Undaunted, the emperor cut off his worthy opponent's head, but was as surprised as anyone to see milk rather than blood flowing from her severed veins. A band of angels carried Catherine's body to Mount Sinai, but her learned head was taken to Rome, Today she is recognized as patroness of schools, philosophers, and students of philosophy.

The wheel that failed to slice up Saint Catherine oi Alexandria returns in the names of various magical symbols and practical objects. Among the latter, the spinning firework is called a Catherine wheel, hi Spanish, the mam wheel of a watch has the same name, rueda catalina, or simply la catalina. Dwelling un that. I see a writer's (not a sorcerer's} vision of little Carlos standing at his father's elbow staring mesmerized into the shining movement of a gold watch his father is repairing.

"This is la catalina," tai her Arana says, touching the slow mam wheel with his slender forceps Though Garlitos hears the name, his gaze has already been sucked into the whirlpool of rhe balance wheel, spinning and shimmering like a tiny ballerina. He reaches toward it, but his father warns him it is too delicate and precious to be touched by little boys or nonwatchmakers.

One evening he sues another gulden spinner, skating along the ground or clinging to a tree trunk, A flaming whirl, a sputtering hiss, an acrid smell—then suddenly it is gone again into the shadows. Creeping up to see what happened, he finds the lovely vision's body dead but still warm* A voice behind him asks, "Is there another catalina?"

Women, too, are mesmerizing beauties, fiery winders in their full skirts, sometimes too delicate and precious to be touched by little boys or non-watchmakers. At climactic moments they may go all to pieces and puncture graceless bystanders. Beloved women can he feared, especially "a woman so big that she reached up to the sky and eclipsed the sun," an angry giantess who picked a house up with one hand.

Of course other catalina¹- were available. The Chi mu kings ruled a valley the Spaniards renamed Santa Catalina. The sue-

ond puppet Royal Inca married his sister Dona Catalina, Spanish engineers call a gooseneck gin a Catalina. A gossiping woman who makes trouble and stirs things up is dubbed la Catalina. Wherever the Sonoran Circe got her name, she is the prime model of woman Castaneda gives us. We have to take her seriously not only as a wicked witch of the West but as a vessel, charged with his feelings toward the women in his life.

La Catalina' is young, beautiful, cold, dangerous, stocky, strong, splendid, and evil, a bad mama if ever there was one. You dare not turn your back on her. When you want to get away from her, she follows you around. When you want to get close, to press your face into her clothing, she lumps away like a big, black flea. In dreams she soars above you like a silent bird of prey. When you flee a noisy party w here everybody thinks you are a misfit, she hops out of the shadow s and chases you all the way home. When you hope for a word of condolence, she howls at you like a wild animal. Her direct stare paralyzes your limbs with fearful cravings. Her icy smile invites and forbids you at the same time The scarier she is, the more you want her.

Older, more experienced, somewhat cynical men tell you how to deal with her, how to conduct an affair with a witch. You must take your blunt, split-end instrument in your hand, your ugly, bristly, revolting boar's foreleg, and ram it right into the middle of where she lives, no matter how^K sick it makes you feel. Give her one hell of a time, but don't say a word to her while you are doing it. Leave your calling card in her belly, something she can't get rid of though no one else can see it. She won't bother us men after that. Whatever you do, don't fail to pierce her, or she will cut you dead from then on. and she may even tell her male relatives you tried to take liberties with her. When you meet her again, be sure not to move from your spot. Don't give an inch in your feelings about her. for if you do she w ill take your soul and keep it, and you will waste away and be no good any more as a sorcerer or a man.

Pablito's oldest sister had a look so mean it killed lice. Stronger than he, she pulled a handful of his hair out like chicken feathers. Pabiito lived in fear of his beastly sister until don luan took pity on him and magically transformed her into a saint. Don Juan's satanic benefactor had only to set eyes on a woman to see her wane away. Don luan magically caressed a hungry puma's tits from a distance of several feet until she relaxed and let him escape. In the separate reality, sorcerers dominate females by raping them symbolically or casting

spells on them* I low docs a sorcerographer deal with women m the ordinary reality?

Though Castaneda told the Irvine students he had never heard of a woman apprentice- Maybe it's because sorcerers are chauvinistic male pigs'"—he was charming, graceful, and attentive to the women around him noted John Wallace. He told funny stories in New York about Carlos's failures with women, Eric Todhunter remembered. He showed up with a bunch of girlie magazines in his hand, Roy Buzza "seemed to recall.' He could've got laid easy at the party, Warren Farley rued, he just wasn't trying.

A sorcerer needs a cubic centimeter of luck in his dealings with women, Castaneda said at Irvine. He doesnot deliberately seek women out hut waits lor them to come to him the women he needs to protect him. Margaret Runyan sent him "anopen invitation. Six months later, he sought her protection. In her mid-thirties like 'la Catalina/ she was no fiery witch but a decorous lady. Though he sometiirjies called her "Margarita," most of the time he called her "Miss Runyan/' even alter they were married. No house-upsetting giantess, she sat easily on his shoulder as he carried her playfully about. Like him she preferred ideas to feelings. "I did not tall m love with Carlos/' she wrote. "1 simply loved him completely and spiritually from our first meeting—35 I Jo today." A year after the divorce—14 years after the separation she said 'We arc married spiritually and always will be." "He has a girl friend/' Time reported, "but not even his friends know her last name." For 13 years her last name was Castaneda.

"You don't like the heat/ said don luan at sunset, "you like the glow/' Careful not to cross the scorch I mu, Castaneda gets close enough to women to see the light of curiosity in their eyes or feel the glow of their friendly, often helpful interest. He likes to talk to w omen, even strangers, about himself, hut presently grows restless, begins to tease, and then withdraws Thu two Sacramento bookwomen heard complaints about Carlos's parents, disparagement of his students, and at last a solemn confession that his one remaining ambition was to travel the whole world in the footprints of Margaret Mead,

"Why are you laughing?" Booklady asked me.

"It's ridiculous," 1 said.

"He was insulting us!" she bristled.

One night in April 1962 Sue Parrott dreamed she found an abandoned baby on the stool next to her in a restaurant. Open

ing the blanket, she was horrified to see a man's head on the tiny body and a familiar face leering at her. Now Z'v^goE you/ his expression said. Her sympathy tor the helpless infant gave way to revulsion at the adult's trick.

jVo. Carlos, she said, you 72 not pul I this on me! Unwilling to mother or protect a grown sorcerer, she laid the bundle down and walked away. She was not the first.

Raised from the start by his Brazilian grandparents, Carlos hist his 15-ycar-old mother before knowing her. When he was only six she died or ।in another version) left home. Peruvian Susana died in Lima when her son was 24. Refusing to attend the funeral, he locked himself in his room, where he stayed three Jays without eating. Coming out, he announced he was leaving home. Twenty years later he still carried the "horrendous burden" of her love.

Daring to speculate on this skimpy and suspect evidence, we sec a man whose strongest bond in life was with his mother— not a bond of joy and contentment but one of worry and longing. From the start (he felt) she let others take care of him, and when he was only six (it seemed) her love for him went elsewhere* Until the age of 24 he waited near her, not knowing he was waiting, to feel her love come back to him. At her death he returned 18 years into the past to comfort the motherless six-year-old Carlos. Man and hoy they fasted three days together, mourning the love that was somehow unbearable or had been lost and not regained. Then they left home forever.

In his adopted country the twice-abandoned son dreamed of finding the enveloping, protecting love he could not remember but had always wanted. "You have looked for her everywhere," don Juan told Carlos. Margaret was more like her than anyone else, but no living woman could satisfy a formless craving born in childhood and buried alive at 24. Though ratified, the demands of marriage proved too heavy to bear, and after six months he turned away to a companion who knew just what he was ready to give and never asked for more.

Don Juan su w Carloshad lost a very dear blond woman, who had left him because he made himself too available to her, because he hung around day after day until they both got bored, because everyone knew about the two of them. Righting this topsy-turvy romance we get a more plausible version. The husband left his very important brunette woman because he could not he as open as she wanted, could not enjoy her company very long without getting bored, could not share friends or

colleagues with her, could not endure her attempts to get more or him.

She was a fine person, don Juan said. You should speak no ill of her. She was weak, Carlois retorted. What xvas her weakness? No doubt like everyone she needed to be the baby part of the t ime, buthe wasn't ready kir that. You cling out of desperation, don |uan said, exhausting both yourself and your partner. A hunter deals intimately with his world, yet is inaccessible to that world That's a contradiction, Carlos objected. Don Juan explained the inaccessible intimacy.

A hunter does not squeeze his world or his beloved out of shape, He taps lightly, stays as long as he needs to, then swiftly moves away leaving hardly a mark. What kind of love taps lightly, stays as long as it needs to, and moves away swiftly leaving hardly a mark’ Love in a separate reality, Love for Mother Earth, love for .in unpopulated biosphere. Tn the world of men and women love penetrates, inflames, absorbs. Water to seed, spark to tinder, mercury to gold it stays not as long as it needs to but as long as it can, moving away not swiftly but with grateful sloth, from a beloved not unmarked but wounded, pierced like the lover, sundered and rearranged. Such catalytic love a warrior does not seek and could not tolerate. Love suffered by the child does not delight the man. Nevertheless, a warrior needs women—four at a time.

As the Mother of God visited Juan de la Cruz in prison, showing him a remote window through which he would escape, teaching him to loosen the hinges of his door, cushioning perilous falls and leaps, guiding him with glorious light and voice, and lifting him over an unscalable wall, so when they are needed four benevolent women are blown to a sorcerer like four winds--not to join their lives to his, not to touch or hold him close, not to exchange pleasures with him, hut to stand with him for a little while against the assaults of the ally, the specter that returns Irom exile or conics from an unknown part of him to test his defenses, Either he wrestles the ally to the ground and takes its power, or the ally whirls him up and away from the prison of this world into worlds beyond The sorcerer who hopes to come back to the ordinary world is foolish indeed to confront the ally without his amazon retinue, but he cannot actively seek them. They must come to him voluntarily, subtly drawn by his aching need and charismatic power. More charming than Carlos and less disconcerting, young Pablito had already attracted three volunteers and if he could get a fourth would not have to face the ally by himself.

The four and one journey together to a nameless Sonoran plain, where the ladies man their positions at the cardinal points. To the north, facing the sorcerer, stands the shield and protector To the south, behind him, stands the warm wind, the joker, she who relieves the sometimes oppressive solemnity of the north wind woman. To the west stands the introspective spirit catcher, to the cast the weapon, the foremost authority, the wind of illumination. One by one these noble altruists are "flattened" or otherwise knocked out of the fight, leaving the ally presumably weakened for the final wrestling match with the one who counts.

The characters of the women and the details of the struggle had not been all worked out when the Irvine students heard this parable in 1972, but one thing was clear: the selfless women a sorcerer expends against psychic or occult forces neither desert him in his hour of need nor ask any reward beyond the privilege of serving him. Though a rumor spread at Irvine that his teaching assistant had found him a volunteer coed, Castaneda admitted not a single wind had bloxvn his way and said he expected to stand on that fateful plain alone. Lacking his shock troop he would most likely be no match for the ally. As it had spun don Juan and Genaro, the ally would spin Carlos out of this world forever, permanently exhausting his human feelings and setting his feet on a road that would lead him perpetually homeward but never bring him home.

Though Thomas Wolfe said you can t go home again, he proved you can bring home with you. Most people carry enough along to satisfy them, remembering what they like and forgetting the rest. Proust and Anais Nin remembered practically everything. Of course the past wc carry with us is our own particular version of what happened, the one we care about Thomas Wolfe grew up in Ashville, North Carolina but wrote about Eugene Ciant of Altamont, Old Catawba; that was his version of home. Carlos Arana grew up in Caiamarca. Like other sorcerers, he keeps trying to go home, fully aware that he Can't. Since anyone can go to Cajamarca when the road isn't washed out, I take it his destination is really Caxamalca—an archaic spelling sounding much the same, signifying Castaneda's private version of home. Why does he want to go there when he could bring it with him?

Sorcerers blame their homesickness on the ally. Spinning into other worlds, they say, redefines everything, dims the old memories, dessicates the past, dulls the familiar scenes mak

ing them unreal. New people seem no more real than the old. To get their special knowledge, sorcerers say, they willingly pay this tragic price.

I am not ready to swallow the sorcerer's explanation whole. Some visionaries keep memories bright and ties unbroken. Lame Deer reminisced with great feeling. Maria Sabina and Ramon Medina were not homeless in either past or present. Though the Senoia was a far out lady whose conversation seemed to ret er to worlds apart, she sang to her son, was assisted in ceremonies by her daughter, and enjoyed the company of her neighbors. Though Ramon had learned his shamanic destiny as a little boy from Our Father Sun who spoke to him in dreams, he had a loving wife and was the leader of his people These shamans bridged two worlds and two conditions, human and superhuman. As superhuman beings they visited the spun world. As human beings they took pleasure in the ordinary relations Castaneda said sorcerers would find no longer real. They were not solitary birds who could endure no company, not even of their own kind.

Castaneda compared himself by implication to Saint Jolmoi the Cross, but we don't have to believe the two arrived at the solitary condition in the same way. Juan Ycpcs was called to Serve the Virgin early in his life; we have no evidence young Carlos heard from Inti or Saint Catherine. Padre Juan would rap sharply on the w all of the cloister as he walked along, to keep himself from ecstasy: he was reluctant to say the mass, fearing the Beloved might speak to him and interrupt the proceedings. Carlos's yearning for the absolute seems wholly intellectual, not a cause of his separation Irom mankind but an excuse and compensation for it. San Juan's renunciation of human love cost him dearly. When he allowed himself to turn to a friend, he told her how he really felt, and he signed his name. Castaneda did not reveal himself or his name to his most intimate companion.

I suspect those sorcerers and quasi-sorcerers who keep trying to go home are like other nostalgic people. Their Ixtlan or Caxamalca does not satisfy now because it never did. They can't enjoy it and they can't get rid of it. They want to improve it but they don't know how Sometimes they drcam of going back and starting over—adoring her more intensely who sang the lullabye about a lost apple, running faster to keep up with a grown man in a hurry, accepting a first-grader's awkward hero worship, weeping openly at unexpected approval, speakingout

the words of love a father couldn't hear unspoken, saying a sorrowful goodbye at the harbor instead of talking only about good times and cracking desperate jokes.

A sorcerer abandons those he has loved, don Juan told Carlos. Never can he go back to them. Was there no way, Carlos pleaded, to retrieve them? Couldn't he rescue them and bring them along? No, he couldn't, don Juan said firmly. Even fellow sorcerers had to say goodbye.

At the northwest corner of ancient Cuzco just beyond the House of Inti rises a great round channeled rock called the Sliding Place because the playful used to slide down in the grooves. As we stand gazing up at it, do we not spy our playful benefactor waving to attract our scattered tourist attention? Now he begins co slide, gets stuck in midcourse, plummets down, holds his behind, pretends the rock has pinched him— the sort of trick one might expect from a 70-year-old-by-now sorcerer who 'looked like a small child with shiny mischievous eyes," laughed uncontrollably shaking his body and kicking his legs "like a child," rolled on the ground, lay on his stomach, began to swim on the floor, pretended to fly his hat like a kite, imitated driving a car. In the hack scat while Carlos was driving Gerancho giggled with Juancho.

" Are we getting closer?" Juancho whined.

"We're about to get there," muttered Papa Carlos,

It imaginary playmates surrounded Garlitos Arana, some of whom were rescued and brought to a new land, Gunaroand don Juan may not be the most important members of the troupe. As Joseph Margolis hints, Pabtito and Nestor may go back a lot farther. Pablito is the sunny side of Carlos, small-boned hut wiry and strung like Gcnaro, nearly thirty but acting like a teenager, flashing a winning hut devilish smile. Nestor is the shadow side, taller, heavier, and much older, so gloomy and withdrawn he would have died. Pablito said, if Gcnaro had not turned him younger. Eternal childhood may be the secret of a sorcerer's survival.

Whoever the unseen companions are. 1 count them Castaneda's true and only intimate friends. To them he revealshimself , on them he depends for consolation. Yet sometimes he regrets thei r insubstantiality and longs for love whose arms he can feel around him When don Juan sent him out into the wilderness alone, Carlos felt suddenly abandoned, as if the only point of reference, the sole origin of the separate reality had always been Carlos himself, "as if don Juan had never really been

there, as if when Carlos looked for him “he became what he really was a fleeting image that vanished over a hill."

Don |nan has no real compassion for me," Castaneda said. He can only approximate true human feelings." Perhaps not a harsh judgement of an imaginary being who has been spun by his ally, and yet somewhat unfair. Until the rest of us heard about him, don Juan spent every waking minute entertaining Castaneda. Many of their best conversations went unreported to the outside world because Carlos couldn't take notes while driving. We arc told, for example, that he brought don Juan within 50 miles of Los Angeles.

"I'm not going in there'.'¹ don Juan said. "Too many evil spirits." Carlos had to turn the car around and take him back to Yuma—but what did Castaneda do? Drove straight on to Malibu, in my opinion. During Tucson's Earth Week Carlos attended an ecology lecture, where the speaker punctuated his condemnations of pollution with puffs on a cigarette. A dignified old man in the seat next to Carlos leaned over and whispered: "I cannot imagine that he is concerned with other people's bodies when he doesn't like his own," I'll give you one guess who that old man was.

Castaneda travels the ordinary reality alone, but he travels the separate reality with his comrades by his side. Their love may not be truly human, but it is better than no love at all. Like the loneliness of a child whose playmates are imagined, a warrior's loneliness is real but not complete.

Tales of Power put an end t” both apprenticeship and story—that was Castaneda's solemn promise. The apprentice no longer needed don Joan as master, the man of novels was done with him as character. Declaring they would become again what they had always been, dust on the road, the dons left Carlos and Castaneda more alone than they had been for 13 years.

New public companions are needed now for the separate reality, but the Sonora Spoolers will be a hard act to follow. What will happen to Carlos next? Various possibilities loom: Carlos's double captured by a worthy opponent and held for psychic ransom. Carlos influencing the dreams of UCLA volunteers, one of whom turns out to be a witch. Carlos-Sorcerer, arrived at last, instructing his own apprentice in the mountains of Malibu, or on Wilshire Boulevard in a building ornamented by a sculptured goddess. Carlos retracing the footsteps of Margaret Mead. Carlos in primal therapy. Castaneda writing his

autobiography, telling it like it was—names, dates, places, facts, history restored.

Come to think of it, that last would be a winner. Could he do it? 1 don't think so, but 1 wouldn't sell him short. He is bold and determined, a man of surprises. What is left to do that could top what he has done? Only to deal with a new reality, the ordinary reality, where rocks do come back from the moon, where the most common event is an ultimate mystery, where a man like Carlos Castaneda can live in the flesh as well as in books. Don Juan said the best work in Carlos's lite would be done towards the end of the day.

In the midst of the sad goodbyes, Genaro slipped in a joker as usual. "We will now be like dust on the road," he echoed don Juan, then added: "Perhaps it will get in your eyes again, someday." What did he mean by that?

One day in winter (the story will gol Carlos Castaneda was driving down a pretty smooth stretch of the road to Caxamalca, when he saw a familiar figure trudging along. Screeching to a stop, he jumped out of the bus.

"Genaro!" he shouted. "I thought you would be dust on the road!"

Genaro sauntered up to him with a big grin. His step was as springy as ever.

"This part of the road is oiled," he said, unslinginghis carrying net. "How far you going?"

"Caxamalca."

"Good!" Genaro climbed into the bus. "I'll go with you." Carlos was elated. He took his seat and they got rolling.

"Glad to sec you again, Carlitos." Genaro patted him on the head. The gesture filled Carlos with an overwhelming sadness.

"Why do you want to go to Caxamalca?" he asked.

"I don't." Genaro took out a knife and began to pare his toenails. "I'm still on my way to Ixtlan. You know that."

"This road won't take you to Ixtlan. I have the map right here."

"Let's see it." Genaro snatched the map out of his hand.

"I thought you couldn't read Spanish," Carlos objected.

"When you're in love with the world, all maps are Mazatec," Genaro retorted. Humming a Huautecan tune, he traced the tortuous route with his knife. "Just what I thought," he said. "There's a dead end further on, a permanent washout. This road won't take you to Caxamalca."

"It won't take you to Ixtlan either," Carlos reminded him.

■'I know that." Genaro sighed. "So we may as well travel together."

"I just wish ..." Carlos choked up and couldn't continue.

"You wish old Juancho was riding with us, don't you?"

"Yes/ croaked Carlos. He peered down the sunbaked road, fighting hack the tears.

"You know; your friend Al Egon sent him a copy of Wes of Folly."

' Sent who a copy?" Carlos nearly drove off the road.

"Take it easy! Don Juan, of course."

Carlos was thunderstruck. "Don [uan is alive?" He stared at Genaro with open mouth.

"As alive as 1 am!" Genaro chuckled.

"That's wonderful!" Carlos was bursting with excitement, "What did he think of the book?"

"He said the cover looked great but the pages weren't very soft."

Carlos's face flushed. "He said that again'"

Genaro laughed. "I'm just kidding. You can ask him yourself when we catch up with him."

"What do you mean?" Carlos was confused.

"He's on his way home too, you know, but he started earlier."

"Don Juan wasn't born in Caxamalca."

"Neither was 1, but here I am!"

Carlos shook his head. "I don't understand," he said.

Genaro pounded him on the knee. "By golly, Carlitos! You haven't changed a bit. You're just as dumb as you were in 1968!"

"Please explain it to me!" Carlos begged.

"Okay. It doesn't matter where don Juan was born. He can't get back there anyway."

"But why would he travel the road to Caxamalca? lust tell me that."

Genaro laughed till the highway rippled. "I can't believe what an idiot you are!" he wheezed, "What makes you think there's another road? What would we need another road for?"

"To go different places!" Carlos was getting annoyed.

"Sure, to go different places. But this road doesn't."

"Doesn't what'" Carlos was exasperated. He thought Genaro must be losing his marbles.

"Doesn't go places. This road doesn't go to Ixtlan, doesn't go to Caxamalca, doesn't go to every place somebody wants to go. This is the road sorcerers go home on, and sorcerers can't go home, so it doesn't."

Carlos began to smile. "That's how can all travel together!"

"You got it, my boy!'' Genaro ruffled his friend's coyote-grey hair "That's called the sorcerer's compensation/'

"1 never heard of it before/' Carlos admitted.

"You didn't need it till now/' Genaro said softly.

'^rWhat made y_ou think me a bird?" he asked.

You looked a raven, and ] saw you dig worms out of the ground with your beak/’

"And then?"

"Toss them into the air "

"And then’"

' They grew butterflies and flew away."

"Did you ever see a raven do that? I told you I was a sexton."

Does a sexton toss worms into the air and turn them into butterflies?"

"Yes."

"I never saw one do it."

"You saw me do it."

"I see a pigeon!" 1 said.

"Of course you see a pigeon, " said the raven, "tor there is the pigeon. 1 see a prayer on its way."

"How can a pigeon be a prayer?"Irejoined. I do understand how it should be a hl symbol fur a prayer-- but a live pigeon to come out of a heart!"

"It must puzzle you."

"A prayer is a thought/' 1 pursued, "a thing spiritual/'

"Very true. But if you understood any world besides your own, you would understand your own much better. When a heart is really alive, it can think live things. All live things were thoughts to begin with." He pointed his beak downward.

"That is a pr ay cr-f lower/' he sard.

I looked and saw a little flower of gracious, trusting form, its color as of a new world that was yet the old, like an anemone of pale rose hue, having a golden heart.

"I never saw such a flower before," 1 said.

"No prayer-flower is quite like any other/*

"How do you know it is a prayer-flower’"

"By the expression of it."

"Could you teach me to know a prayer-flower when 1 see it?"

"And if I could, what better would you be? Why know the name of a thing, when rhe thing itself you do not know? Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? Indeed, the business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself fur one, and so begin to be wise/'

—George MacDonald

Lilith

CARLOS-ONE AND CARLOS-TWO

Logical or chronological errors in the narrative constitute the best evidence that Castaneda's books are works of fiction. If no one has discovered these errors before, the reason must be that no one has listed rhe events of the first three books in sequence. Once that has been done, the errors are unmistakable.

Though I call them errors,, I do nut mean they arc inadvertent slips of the typewriter On the contrary, they are massive, systematic, and apparently deliberate transpositions needed when the author changed his thematic emphasis and invented additional incidents that had to be back-dated to find accommodation in ordinary time and to show that don Juan had been on the right track all along while only his thick-headed apprentice had been wandering Our impression that the author knew- very well what he was doing comes from seeing how boldly his rationale for the change contradicts the events it purports to explain ana how smoothly his anachronistic flashbacks are folded into an otherwise straightforward story line to hide logical conflicts from any reader who docs not undertake the tedious chore of plotting the sequence of events. Needless to say, very few readers will have done that.

In his second book, Castaneda began toshift his emphasis subtly from drug experiments to non drug experiences. Table I lists Carlos's 22 drug experiments in sequence. The first column in the table identifies the three classes of experiments —eating peyote |P), drinking infusions or applying paste of the Iimson weed ill, and smoking the mushroom mixture | Ml. Each experiment is numbered w ithin its class, so that we find peyote experiment-- numbered 1-6, fimsun weed 14, mushroom 1-12 The three books are identified as The Teachings of Don fuan (J)“ .4 Separate Reality |R|, and Journey to Ixtlan (I|. The page numbers come from the Pocket Book paperback editions. Each experiment is dated according to the text. Minor conflicts with Castaneda's dates arise from his dual dating system, which mixes dates of events with dates of writing up field notes and from verbal refinements in the text, as when the author says something like: "Two days later I smoked the mushroom mixture again."

The 22 drug experiments occupy a narrative period of eight years. Carlos's learning progresses in an orderly fashion from one experiment to the next, with just enough false starts and wasted effort tn imitate the imperfections of ordinary life. No inconsistencies are evident. In contrast, the non-drug expe nences are logically disordered.

Table 2 lists 34 non-drug nonordinary events occurring I rom January 1961, when Carlos had known don Juan |d)J only six months and had not yet entered the formal apprenticeship, to October 1970, when don Genaro i,dG| leapt ten miles to the mountain tups. During those ten years other non drug nonordinary events may have occurred, depending on tbe reader's ludgment of what is a nonordinary event and what is a mere illusion or mistake, but the 34 listed events are the most vivid and least mistakable ones from that period ^Part TUo of /fiurnev to Ixtlan is excluded, because it treats events occurring in May 1971, too late to have a bearing on this argument.!

Numerous metaphysicians have told us that in the nonordinary reality, in thefitjgud/, or in some absolute realm time can stand perfectly still, can bring past and future into an eternal present, or can run in any direction. One theory of subatomic particles holds that matter going forward in time equals antimatter going backward. I would certainly not dismiss these propositions.

TABLE L

Sequence of Drug Experiments

In fact 1 am devoted to them. All the same, when we try to determine whether a book is a novel or a factual report, we do not probe its subatomic structure or visit the writer in our dreams We examine the text, judging it by common-sense rules of time and tide, clock and calendar. Marked anachronisms or logical conflicts in Castaneda's work must argue that his text is an imaginative fabrication rather than a factual report

Applying the ordinary rules to Castaneda's narrative does nut, oi course, prevent us from sharing don Juan's sense of magical time, as when we saw the same leaf fall tour times. It merely directs our attention ior the moment to the normal temporal context of those magical events. And that context is not negotiable, Castaneda uniformly maintains that the timeline ol his story is the familiar progress of events tn the practical world, where people go to work, sign up for classes in anthropology, and meet or fail to meet their publisher's deadlines. In these three books lie makes much of the exact dates on which things happen, and his conventional chronology helps us to accept his unearthly adventures. Having enjoyed this narrative benefit, Castaneda must now pay the cost by following the rules he has imposed Wherever his ordinary acts Violate the rules of conventional time, his story turns into fiction before our eyes

Carlos's 22 drug experiments are confined tn the first two books. Introducing the third book, Castaneda begs the reader's pardon for having erroneously

assumed that drug states were the only avenue to dan Juanas knowledge The mistake, he says was forecd upon him by the fact that Carlos's drugged perce-ptiatis had been "so bizarre and impressive." Though don Juan had actually tried to give Carlos the core of the teachings in the first two years through non-drvg techniques, and though Carlos had doggedly written those nan-drug lessons into his Held notes along with the drug lessons, he- had neither found them so unusual nor been so impressed by them that Castaneda could not systematically eliminate them while writing The fijucli-ings.

Before I me has read Journey to Ixtlan, this rationale sound* quite reason jhie. Afterwards, the reflective reader may notice a contradiction. Despite the rationale, some of the non-drug experiences have been strange indeed, and Carlos has certainly been impressed by them. But while the Carlos of Jx!km finds these lessons intensely moving and w holly relevant tn dun Juan s teaching, the Carlos of The Teachings apparently did not 14 Real

ity, the transition volume, describes 15 such incidents without calling attention tn their non-dmg character.) It seems we are dealing here with two different Carloses, who lived through 1961 and 1962 in the same places with the same teacher hut felt jnd understood it all quite differently.

L.arlus Twu, oi/A(/din, the Carlos We met second, saw a falcon in don Juan's features (F.vcnrlJ, saw a bridge and slept m a cave that did nut exist in the Ordinary world IE-61, spieda bush on one side of a hill whose ordinary location was on the other iE-⁷'i bad a fleeting vision of a vast world in rhe surface of a rock i.E-1 21. saw a range of nunmums as a web of light fibers (E-131, and attended a magical de mon strati tin where don Jujji appeared simultaneously to five apprentices m five different guises iE-141 Reacting to these extraordinary events, Carlos-Two felt his heart had slopped, stared dumbfounded, was nearly paralyzed by the shock of seeing his surroundings, went through a moment of unparalleled confusion, refused to believe what he was witnessing.. grappled forany kind id an explanation, felt a chill run up his spine, felt a hand grabbing his stomach, and screamed involuntarily, Carlos-Unc, in contrast, found these events so commonplace that Castaneda felt no need even to allude to them in The Jr'zirhmgs.

The Teachings seldom mentioned nonurdinary seeing, only once without linking it to drugs. Txt Jun mentioned it at least a dozen times, identifying it as an important aspect of dun Juan's non-drug teaching. Carlos Two was formally introduced tnseeing on 18 December 1961, when dnn loin said: "Look without blinking until you .see." Carlos-One first encountered it on 2 April 1968, when dun Juan said: "The little smoke will help you to see men as fibers of light.^,r "Fibers of light?" The phrase came unfamiliar tn Carlos-Onc's car, though Carlos-TVohad seen a range of mountains as fibers of light in 1962 iiftei dull Junn Jia J instructed him at siime length in that particular kind of seeing.

On 8 November 1968 don Juan said co Carlos-One "There is something in you that resembles seeing hut isn't." On 29 January 1962 dun Juan had to!d C.irlos-lwn "This morning you saw," Though these discrepancies are sugar coated by Carlos-TWo’s frequent protestations that he does not understand what dun loan is telling him, don Juan insists that telling and understanding arc not the point, seeing is the point In seeing, Carlos-TVro is seven years ahead of Carlos-One. The uncoated pill has a sharp taste of contradiction,

Manifestly, these books are describing parallel universes, one inhabited by Carlos-Two, the other by Carlos-One. The conventional rules, by which

TABLE 2

Sequence of Non-Dmg Nonordinary Events

'Page 1-215 places Events 16-18 in October or November of 1962

’ 'Events 19-21, dated in Journey tn Ixtlan, were left undated in Sorc ery A Descnptron of the World.

Castaneda bound himself when he dated Carlos's field notes, tell us these two universes cannot both be our daily world, where graduate students do tangible field work and become doctors of anthropology',

Compelling as this evidence is, a more startling anachronism remains to be described In October 1965 (E-22| Carlos-One went through an ordeal so unexpected and disturbing that he sadly withdrew from his apprenticeship and avoided don |uan for more than two years. The ordeal was a night-long confrontation with a powerful enemy who had assumed don Juan's bodily form though not his accustomed gait or speech. It disturbed Carlos deeply because for the first time he entered a vivid and extended state of nonordinary reality that did nut result from using a drug. This unique event confirmed his growing suspicion chat the nonordinary reality could, without drugs, break through his comfortable daily certainties and flood his sober consciousness. Rather than be overwhelmed by that other world, he tied in terror back to Los Angeles, where Castaneda wrote a book featuring the special event not only as the climax of its story but as the crowning exhibit in an academic analysis of "special consensus."

The reader of The T^achin^ found this development disappointing but plausible. In contrast, the reader of Table 2 discovers that the "special" event was not so special after all, since it was preceded by 21 earlier non-drug nonordinary events, m many of which even stranger visions or more menacing confrontations had invaded Carlos-Two's sober consciousness. Reacting to these earlier events, Carlos-Two had been terrified, angered, saddened, horrified, dumbfounded, deprived of speech, suffocated, bom up by exquisite warmth and supreme well being, or gripped by abdominal pains He could hardly have forgotten about them, but if he had, his field notes would have reminded Castaneda.

Curiously, when Carlos-One- begged don Juan to explain what had happened during the "special" event, "the conversation began wtth speculations about the identity of a female person" |italics in the original I who had snatched Carlos's soul and borrowed don Juan's form. The lady was not named, and the reader was left to wonder whether the galvanizing imper-sonntress was in tact a certain fiendish witch" called la Catalina,¹ who had been mentioned briefly on 23 November 1961, four years earlier. At that time don Juan had said he was harboring certain plans for finishing her off, about which he would tell Carlos One "someday." Pour Carlos One had to wait ten years to learn about those plans in Tales of Power, but Table 2 reveals that Carlos-Two, traveling on a parallel time track carried out those plans with moderate success in die fall uf 1962. wlien he met the magic lady six times in a row (E-16-211, once as a marauding but indistinct blackbird, nnccas a sailing silhouette and tour times face to face "in all her magnificent evil splendor'¹ as a beautiful but terrifying young woman Reacting to those encounters, he felt his ears bursting, his throat choking, his hands frozen, his body chilled, and his arms and legs rigid The hair on his body literally stood on end. Hu shrieked and fell down tu the ground. He was paralyzed. I le began to run. z\nd he lost his power of speech.

Here we are asked to believe that a flesh-and-blood anthropologist who enjoyed this tumultuous supernatural affair with a glorious witch in I 962 did m>t recall her name in 1965, did not make the connection between the last meeting and the previous six when sorting through his field notes in the safety of his apartment, did not put it all together when naming her in his first book bur found the memory "as vivid as if it had just happened" on 22 May

196H, j few pages into his second book Even it we could credit this uncharacteristic amnesia, we would still have to account for don Juan's e^ual failure to name la Catalina in 196s The puzzle is easily solved hy switching from the factual to the Hctive model The abrupt, unsatisfying ending of The Teach

is not a symptom of ethnographic battle fatigue, for our campaigner has already survived six such battles with colors flying. It is only a serialises preparation for the next episode, a cliffhanger that makes us hungry for another book Tune in to my next nonordinary volume and hear 'la Catalina' say: t)ye muchacho¹. If you theenk thees blackbirding, boar-dodging, carstalking, sky sailing, road-hopping, doorway-standingstuif ees bad, just wait three years till 1 ccmpenonatc don Juan."

On these showings, one thing is certain. The Teachings of Don Juan and lourney to Ixtlan cannot both be factual reports One of them at least is fiction.

At this point one may well ask why Castaneda did not save himself a lot of trouble by telling his story in a straight line right from the beginning. Why did he start off with drug experiments if he or don Juan thought that was the wrong way to go' Having made the false start, why couldn't he change his course gradually, as he was doing in ,A Separate Reality. without going back to Day One?

J don't know what Castaneda's explanation will be when he writes his confessions, but my theory runs like this. Many people who have known Castaneda describe him as consistently opposed to the use of drugs, and his four books taken together support that judgement. The 1960s, however, were not the right time tor a nun-drug visionary book. The market belonged to Timothy Leary. If Castaneda wanned to teach young people a better way, or even if he just wanted tosell them a lot of books, hehadtomect them where they were, which was dropping aetd in strawberry fields. As soon as he got a firm grip on his readers, or the market veered away from drugs, he could alter his course. By 1970, when the market was looking better for nun-drug books, Castaneda realized he had unwittingly torpedoed his message by allowing many of his readers to believe nobody could get high enough to enter the other world without a powerful boost from the psychotropic rockets. To rescue the teachings, he had to go back over the old ground, illustrating in convincing detail don Juan's distaste for drugs and his capacity to teach any but the most inept apprentice how to see without them- To accomplish that rescue, Ixtlan had to be backdated,

Or did it? Carlos "had the feeling don luan was capable of arguing his way out of anything " Why not let him argue his way out of the mess Castaneda had gotten him into? He could blame everything on Carlos's stupidity or stuhbomess, and ixtlan could follow 4 Sepurore Reality in narrative time as well as calendar time That way, the contradictions would have been avoided, and this analysis could never have been written. But that option was closed, because the author had run out of calendar time

In the flush of first success, Castaneda had been grinding out magical events faster than the earth was turning, and his readers [and presumably his agent and his publisher) were already how ling for more A Separate Reality had earned us all the way to October 1970, narrative time. Ixtlan would be published just two years later, calendar time. Th.it left a two year credibility gap in which somebody had to experience 17 of the events listed in Table 2 |as well as the events of May 1971, not 1 is ted I, and Castaneda had to write a book

about diem, saving out at least six months and more likely a year for the publisher 's manufacturingand premarketing lb make matters worse, during the first of those two years Castaneda was actively enrolled as a student at UCLA, presumably doing visible things on campus. In thy spring of the second year he was lecturing regularly at UC Irvine. Even for a sorcerer that's a pretty tough schedule Anybody who did not believe a fksfi-and-blood anthropologist could pop back and forth between UCLA and Mexico in the blink oi a lizard's eyelid would nut buy it.

[A systems analyst may warn me this argument is going to founder when 1 get toTa/cs of Power. which was not backdated.That won't happen, because /ii/es of Power does not pretend to be the log oi an apprentice slowly accumulating extended lessons requiring many long absences from Los Angeles. It is a climactic revelation, told in great detail but occupying only a tew days spent with the masters And there are no dates To justify it, the author had to disappear from public view seldom briefly, and never on any particular day. Even if the book had been factual, he would have had a year or more towrite it. By that time, school was out anyway. Theauthor was sure of his Ph.15 He could drop the narrative devices that had imitated factual reporting and write an unashamed romance.I

Summing up my theory, the vicissitudes of the literary market, the pressures of success and commercialism, the author's productivity, and the passage of ordinary time I which don Juan told us was relentless! combined to trap Castaneda, compelling him to leave in his books some w^rell hidden bur ultimately discoverable clues that would someday betray what he had been up to 1 don't suppose he worried much about leaving them. A warrior docs not watt around to be clobbered I hough he so w that 1 would hud lus clues in 197Sand publish them in 1976, healsosjit that he would be flying much too high by that time tn be brought to earth again by mere twelve-gauge conclusive proofs of fiction cering.

GO TO THE BLACKBIRD AND WRITE

THE WORD FOR CHANATE

Scanning the first six sections (hut not the rest) of The Teaching uf Don Ivan, I picked out every phrase char was given in both of Castaneda's languages. Table 3 shows these bilingual entries classified into four categories Spanish-to English (italics on the leftl, English-to-Spamsh (italics on the rightL Justifiable (above), and Unjustifiable (below L

1 call an item justifiable when the two parts of it supply different information the reader needs The ten items in the upper part of the table can be justified without difficulty. The Spanish, of course, gives us the nng of don Juan's speech but what counts here is that the items also name particular unfamiliar plants, introduce sorcerer's terms, distinguish Yaqui Spanish from Mexican Spanish, or employ Spanish idioms and plays on words that must he translated or explained. These items resemble the bilingual entries in ethnographic works, where the original language keeps breaking through to inform us mmc fully or to provide us with a more efficient vocabulary for describing the culture,

TABLE 3

Bilingual Entries in T/ie Teachings of Don I tian ?*g** ^Tc,it Translation or Explanation lustifiable Entries

14 bnifo, diuhlero

23 ma is pinto

44 mamd; tu ihtngada madre

49 escogido

52 la yerba del dtablo

53 humiro

56 su rt ombre de leche

80 All Soul's Day

89 cielo

106 canttdade* dr < aminos

sorcerer, black sorcerer red streaked com kernels

I substitution explained)

(sorcerer's term) chosen man

(Datura 1 devil's weed

(mushroom mixture) little smoke (idiom) her temporary name

I Yaqui! unrrurjs |For Mexican di/unros) (ambiguity) heaven, sky lidioml a million paths

Ltaiu<ti/idMe Entries

29 spot

38 This is to be chewed Chew it, chew it.

49 There are some secrets 1 know,

58 the only thine that grabs or hooks onto it

59 portions

60 the night air

63 plant shoot

66 to frighten the Indians

67 blackbird

70 the bond has been established

71 the little mushrooms

79 mound

89 He shows things and tells what is what

91 honguttos

121 crevices made by running water

124 fat from the intestines

129 a man who has taken the devil's weed flies as such.'As birds do-' No, he flics as a man who has taken ihc weed.

xrtio

esro sc masca

Musca. mused

Tertgo secretos (1 have secrets!

Io tinrco que prende

pa rtes

el sereno

brute

para asustar alus indfos

channte

la amistad esta hecha

honguitos

pilon

enzena las co.sas y te dice Io

,pn> son |tells you what they arc! mushrooms

ziiniiriis

sebu Jc tripa

el enyerbadu vuela usHAsl cornu lus /Miarosb'No, dsi como I os enyerbados.

"Page numbers from Pocket Book paperback edition, 1974.

I call an entry unm mi liable when either part of it can be derived from the other simply by opening .in j bridged dictionary and looking up the common meaning- The 17 items in the lower part of the table fit this definition. Every one is in easy exercise from first-semester Spanish Having encountered a few of the items from the top of the table, any reader who understands Spanish will pause when he sees an item from the bottom of the table to ask, Why has this been cianslatcd mtn Spanish' He feels a complete, unnecessary redundancy het ween the two halves of the item. These i terns do not resemble bilingual entries in ethnographic studies. It we try to explain their presence, wt see right away how they serve illustratively to strengthen our belief that the original language was Spanish, particularly if we do not know Spanish and dq not feel any redundancy

Novelists, of course, sometimes make us feel we are reading one language when we are actually reading another. The woman of Pablo" hispanlcizes " Pablo's wife.'¹' ^JI took them to my 1 ips and their taste jumped in my mouth" Washoes our English But novelists do not randomly parenthesize translations into supposed languages of origin any more than ethnographers render native terms in sprung English. To each his own technique. Castaneda stands oddly between the two.

His compromise may he understood if we consider the alternatives. Hemingway or Sanchez can write sprung English successfully because English is their language and they led its seams for Castaneda English is a foreign language. Though he handies it well much of rhe Mme. occasionally he writes quaint things like ' 1 did nut give a fig," or slips out (if the idiom into "Clarity has loomed upon you" or "That statement had clinched me." The added burden ut distorting the idiom on purpose may have seemed ton great. Moreover, many readers don't like sprung English Lastly, those who spring it are known to be novelists, while Castaneda said he was writing a factual report.

The ethnographic technique, on the other hand, would here have required him to generate 1 ⁷ additional justifiable entries—not so easy if the indigenous informant 15 in one's head. Worse yet, a flesh-and-blood don Juan would have used some Yaqui words Granted, most Yaquis speak Spanish, but they also speak Yaqui. and don |uan was living in home territory A writer intending to give the flavor of an actual encounter could hardly have resisted the exotic Yaqui words even if don Juan habitual Iv used only half a dozen of them. They would have erupted into the text. But if don Juan was imaginary, such eruptions would have 10 be counterfeited. A maneuver both laborious and risky. Easier and safer to stick to the compromise technique and the intermediate language.

In the table, the nearly perfect correlation between language-order and iustifiability suggests that die justifiable items entered, the text in one way, the unjustifiable in another, Ont can easily see the justifiable items arising naturally in the course of composition, die umustih ahi e items being inserted later to add artistic verisimilitude, perhaps at rhe urging of a canny editor.

For appendix “The ( hkken or the Htuivo " including Table 4, see the first edition, pages 1 TA-1 76

NOTES

Each note is identified by page number and key word or phrase, as in the example: 55 false skepticism Some notes refer to passages occupying consecutive pages, though only the first page number is given.

The four don Juan books (References: Castaneda-a, -c, -d₍ -f) are coded in the notes as: J, R, I, P, signify! ng The Teachings of Don fiJAN. A Separate REALITY, fourney to IXTLAN, and Tales of POWER. Pages are cited (from the editions specified in the References) as follows: Jll; R12, 22, 44_f Iviii, 154_; P44-45, 101-2.

Other works are generally cited by putting all or part of the citation in parentheses, as follows: |Castaneda-b, 1001 (M. Castaneda; Parrott; Time, 43|j Wasson |-i)_; MacDonald 121 Oh [Peers, 11*271. A work not listed in the References will be fully identified in the citation, as follows: (Frederick B Pike, The Modern History of Peru. Praeger, 1967).

Works by more than one author are cited by the name of the first author only. For letters that distinguish works of one author ( a, -b, -c, *d, etc.) see References introduction.

Don Tuan and don Genaro will often be abbreviated di and dG.

Additional notes are on page 196.

11 In Dr. Wills'. Nandor Fodor reporting on the Thornton Heath poltergeist in the fournal of the American Society for Psychical Research 1938(May|, 32(5), 152-160; quote from page 154.

11 Rumbling William Roll [1351 reporting on the Olive Hill Demon.

• 11 Margaret (M Castaneda). Castaneda's former wife.

• 12 four best sellers ,Castaneda-a -c, - J, -f), hereafter coded as J, R, 1, I¹.

• 12 Mushrooms .Wassimj).

• 14 D, D. Home A famous levitatur |Roll, 3)

• 14 Tiger & Fox. Prominent social scientists.

• 16 Polanyi. (1231 Irreversible discovery F22K

• 16 hupa [Kurath, 43|. "On a stump" should be "in a mesquite tree."

• 17 shamans' vocabulary [Cravens b' For the sound of shamans, see Wasson (-ih Henry Munn, The mushrooms of language (Hamer-e, 86-122), Furst (■a)_; Myerhoff (179-IN8|; Johannes Wilbert, Toba cco and shamanistic ecstasy among the Warao Indians of Venezuela | Furst-h, 55-33).

• 18 Garfinkel. Mandell (67|.

• 19 merchandising voice. American Anthropologist, 1968||une), 7(J| 1|, back cover.

• 20 reviewer. (Ash).

• 20 Lophophora Peyote plant

22 eke una man have. R96. Mothering Matus 1I37_; R8K-89, 24 ⁷. 125, |K2, lfi4; 1’212, 254.

22 San liuin de la Cruz. Peers -[11-2^1.

24 Test inn the Tt®al. These tunc synthetic answers fairly represent the range uf reaction I found tn reading and talking to people

25 In ihti^e days M. Castaneda {741 For Castaneda's biography, I have depended mainly mi ,M Castaneda; Parrott; and Time]. Though some of Tirni'\ inferences .no naive or illogical my limited checking with Peruvian and domestic sources generally confirms Pimp's tacts Time did swallow Castaneda's non-existent M.A., misspell his grandmother Novoa's name and get a couple of his textual complications wrong, hut most seriously Time repealed unfounded allegations against writer John Wallace and failed to publicly correct its mistake. One of flme’s misstatements could have been avoided simply by examining Wallace's article.

25 Oswalds Aranha Current Riogropby, 1942|.Marl, 1-3; 1960.

• 25 Atau I luallpa. Later spelled Alutihiiiillpa. iltatl, success in war,/?uri/7pu, turkey; the former spelling 4 NihuiiJ/pij means chicken an J is to be avoided [Brundage, VI. W H. Prescott, Gomjuest of I’erti; W. W. Johnson & others, The Andean Republics. Time Inc., 1965J.

26 names. Though Arana iahRAHnal is not a very common name, it is almost as common in Peru as Castaneda, the Lima telephone' book had 191 Aranas 243 Castanedas; in contrast, Mexico City had 141 Aranas, 680 Castanedas Arana cannot be transliterated into rhe Portuguese Aranha [ahRAHNyal 'Uncle" Oswalds had blue spiders embroidered on his shirts, pajamas, and underwear because drtmfw [Spanish, urirriu I means spider Spanish-speakers generally shun rhe nami- Spider, the Madrid telephone book listed only two Aranas. Portuguese-spiakers don't seem to mind the name Spider, though slang meanings of rrnm/m are tumble foot, nitwit, and sap. Castaneda [CahstalniYEHthah hard rh as in tire! means chestnut grove. Castaneda [without the rJ J means nothing in Spanish and, like Arana, was not listed in the telephone books cd Mexico City, Lima or Santiago, Chile- Some people have surprising difficulty with the name Castaneda, [ have several times seen it repeatedly spelled Castenedaor Castenada and have often heard it pronounced CasrenYAlIda, Vine Deloria (see Note: tJO mesoamerican-Europcan wise manl wins the Castaneda-misspelling prize with: Castenada, Casta nada, and (in the index| Castencda. bur never Castaneda.

• 26 heritage. Mestizos, however, may have completely Spanish names.

• 26 Margaret. |M Castaneda) Margaret Runyan told me her great grandfather was the brother of Damon Runyon's father; she did not comment <m the difference in spelling. Margaret will tell her story in a hook co-authored by Wayne Slater which, she said, will reveal that Carlos was actually burn m Italy. Tentative title Solitary Bird

• 27 UCLA career. Undergraduate: Sep 1959 tn June 1961, Jan tn fitly 1962. HA anthropology 7 Sep 1962 Graduate Sep 1962 to Dec 1964. Jan to March 1969, Tan 1970 to Dec 1971. PhD anthropology 24 March 1973, No master's degree. Source Stanley Chin, Registrar.

27 Irvine appointment. (Rucgcr|,

2k Spaniard. Castaneda has not claimed tn be an Indian df was baffled by Mescalito's ready acceptance of Carlos, because Carlos was "not an Indian " ।I9O|. Castaneda told Cravens i ■ j, 971 that he could not live "like an Indian’' and that he was "the first European" tn fid I. iw the path of Indian sorcery.

28 presumptive facts A presumptive fact is a datum giving reasonable

grounds for belief I hough I cannot guarantee other people's observations cited here I expect most readers to find my exposition reasonable and generally credible. 1 hope Castaneda and the other actors in these events will correct any errors, providing evidence as persuasive as mine. It is my intention to be fair both to them and to the reader.

2K jobs. Margaret s reports that Carlos worked as cab driver, delivery boy, and women s wear accountant seem to depend entirely on Castaneda's unsupported. vacillating word (M. Castaneda, 75; Parrott, SOI Let me add a rumor of mv own Carlos (RS7) "used to talk at great length" with a rich lawyer who had struggled ten years against the New Deal (the National Industrial Recovery Act was first broached 17 May 1933), then exiled himself for 25 years ,1943 to 1968 at the earliest I, returning at last to live in a home for the aged, He was 84 when Carlos met him. The most likely place tor long, repeated conversations with sue ha person would he the residents'quarters or grounds of the home for the aged Carlos could have known the old man only between 1968, before which the old man was in exile, and 1970, when the story of the encounter had been written for A .Separate Reality, published May 1971. Was Castaneda working as a nurse or an attendant in a retirement home betw een 1968 and 1970? As a youth, his apparent model, San Rian de la Cruz ,P7 . ’ spent all his leisure in nursing the patients in the hospital with the utmost zeal, patience, and gentleness" [S. Rartng-Gould, Lives of the Saints 1.

• 28 cousin Sue Wanda Sue Parrott.

• 29 as Gordon Wasson was told- See Note: 47 fully and frankly.

29 Carlos'S childhood. R45, 136-141 249. (Cook; Cravens, Keen; /imr.

29 Cesar Vallejo Fl 16.

• 30 glosses. fCravens-a, 971.

30 similarities, picking plants [Wallace, 1421. beach house; Hme i.36,45' allowed Castaneda a Malibu beach house, a Volkswagen minibus, a Master Charge card, and an apartment in Westwood.

• 30 Carlos E. Castaneda. (The corrrgidor in Spanish colonial administration. Hispanic American Historical Review, 1929,9, 446-4701.

• 31 Enrique Arana. (Qu/en e.s Quidn cn la Argentina. 195>, 46

• 31 interviewers. (Cook, Cravens; Hughes. Keen; Time, Wallace)

• 31 Kastamebaum German chestnut tree.

• 31 Goanananda. Pronounced Go-ON-an-ON-da

31 Ossian McFmgal Scottish poet lames Macpherson |l⁷36-96’ pretended to have translated his own English works, including FingaL from Gaelic originals by the legendary poet Ossian

31 Ferdinand Maximilian Austrian emperor of Mexico, 1864-67.

• 32 only a reporter Keen (92|,

• 33 Margolis. (2311.

33 Nogales My best guess at the location of the bus station.

33 tape recording. R58-59.

34 anthropologists H>u, Ochoa Titne. 38) [Leach; l a Barre-C; Harns-c, 25 U,

34 Wasson (-fl.

34 Noel. |67|.

36 got into my car. R93, 99. I’abiito lives nearby I 195.

37 seeing before he saw. R25, 36_; 1134, 149.

41 happened to Castaneda. "These thmg|s) Castaneda writes about ctiuW

have happened. I just don't think they did " (Klepsl.

• 41 A friend of mine Metaphysician I. W. Nicholas.

• 42 lizards JI SA-4 Don Juan showed Carlos two small lizards he had prepared | III 2), hut he did nut demonstrate the stitching technique or tell how to punch a wide hole in a narrow cactus spine to allow a thick, rough fiber to passthrough if lizards had died J158-9.

• 43 Handbook {Rowe, 3141.

43 Wasson |-a_r -b -c, -), V, Was so nt The Blake and muleteer quotes may be found in|-c|. Superscripts—s/u^hrP indicate voice tones; Mazatec is such a tonal language that the Huautecans talk to each otheracross canyons simply bv whistling Budd Schulbcrg i he night we ate magic mushrooms Esquire. 1961 (Dec 5^1^.3371, 129-30,'312-61.

45 psilocybin experimenters. 'The employment of psilocybian fungi at one lime completely restricted to Mexico for magteo religious purposes, has mushroomed m tlie twentieth century to become a worldwide traitscultural phenomenon ' | Pollock, 80),

• 45 gratified and disappointed Edward Spicer felt a corresponding disappointment when comparing^ Separate Reality with The Teachings (letter 1⁷ Nov I975|: I can only sigh and wish that a sensitive young man had continued his efforts to understand the reality which he was beginning to get in touch with at first,"

• 46 Newton. | Westfall I,

• 46 mash the chunks. |h|

• 46 puma charges. R1S2; i Wasson-it

• 46 original language English. |Wasson-f).

• 47 fully and frankly., Wisson-f, -g). Wasson writes (letter 23 April 1976' that Castaneda satd his father's name was Castaneda, his mother's name Aran ha. that his paternal grandfather had been Sicilian, and that he had been horn in Brazil and schooled in Buenos Aires.

• 47 automatic writing. 11 8, R215 P22, Ivin. 125.

• 48 slang. 167, H7_; 162, 97, 160, 97, 91 219, 172; P174, l⁷0, 187, .31, 43.

• 48 editorial errors. RH4_; Pl Hl, 25H; 1178.

• 49 weird. R215, 6⁷ (Tovar-b, 248. ⁷9i

49 quirks. 159. Tovar |-c, 94' rendered quails as perdices, which means partridges, and which loses C astaneda's English alliteration.

49 evil splendor R2O2

• 49 Timr.hr. Vfais en garde. Your point. Hut watch out.

• 50 pulling your leg. PI02, 84. See Added Notes on page 196.

• 51 formal discourse. The European formality of the 15 April passage may have commended it also to a prominent anthropologist who reproduced it as an example of Indian wisdom in his college textbook. under the heading, "A Yaqui Man of Knowledge" (Goldschmidt, 187-1901

• 52 dl's daughter-in-law 167

• 52 es bomtij str casii. (Kurath, 401

52 Yaqui dl 118, R5, 30, 58, 71, 146. Wasson-c said d] spoke the Yuma language, Wasson-f said dfs mother was a Yuma Indian; La Barre (-b, 271) evidently picked this up from Wasson. Failing to find the Yuma datum anywhere in Castaneda, I queried Wasson, who answered |letter 23 April 1976) that Castaneda had written him |6 Sep 19681dj was burn in Arizona toa Yuma mother, spoke Yaqui, Yuma, and Mazatec, but Spanish better than any other language, and also [Castaneda believed I understood English perfectly .

• 53 Yaqui words, yon R60; forim R65; only for Yaquis R71.

53 three Genaros. Genaro-1 was "a very old man " m Sonora (JI 7); Genaro-2, dG, "a Mazatec Indian" [R201 "in his early sixties" (R93I; Gcnaro-3, "a tall, husky, middle-aged' Yaqui |R61|. R G Wasson writes (letter 15 Nov 1975):

The name Genaro' is common tn every Mesoamerican Indian community that 1 know not common like luan and Jose but common enough not to arouse comment. It is the same as Jenaro, the same as Yanario? it is 'January. 11 the name is common, a factual reporter might meet three Genaros in eight years, but d he did he should take more trouble not to confuse his reader with them than Castaneda took. Having borrowed the name from someone eIse's book, an undeclared novelist might in his preoccupation have used it several times inadvertently, while a craftier crypt o-fteti oncer could have repeated it to mimic natural coincidences a frank fiction writer would shun to preserve clarity. Narratively, "don Genaro" was an assumed name, R92.

53 shotgun friend. R204.

53 met Lucio 1966. R58.

53 Talking Tree. (Giddings).

53 names of plants. J81- R94.

53 kinship charts 110-11

53 Yaqui vocabulary. (Johnson, Kurath,- Beals), bunch ofcrap. R194.

54 returners from death R195-6.

54 Navy diver, Grosso (65-66) cites this non evidential story to illustrate the non-skeptical reaction of a typical person whose belief system [like Carlos "si had not prepared him for any paranormal experience.

55 false skepticism, drugged meat 1135. teaching assistants 1178. In Table 2, Events 6, 9, 7, 14, 17, 10, 19, 24 25, 27, 29. 31, 33, 34.

56 being tricked. P28. 43-44.

56 never occurred to me. P56.

56 stupendous look. 12.

5<i don Indian. tWasson-h; t|; J58, 132

56 Reichel -Dolmatoff [Wasson-hl.

57 whatever we perceive R14^

57 six sources. R193, 195, [Keen, 92,95). Nans pec ideally, Castaneda wrote (12-3' "1 became acquainted with every work available |onl the peyote cult of the Indians of the plains."

57 ebony, [Keen, 92|. The treasury of power objects described to Sam Keen is not consistent with an earlier statement about di (J21 "he himself had no respect for power objects frequently used as aids by lesser brujus.

57 don Parvenu. P161-2.

58 publication of the TertcTimgs R7 19-20_; P11. (University of California Press, Berkeley, letter 9 Feb 1976).

59 narrative and calendar time the same A passage about the bubble oi perception, published late in 1974, contains the following sentence (P267| "'[ understood then that it w<>uld have been of no consequence if he had told me everything fourteen years before." Fourteen years before what? Carlos met don Juan in I960 Add [4 years and you get 1974. Callus's bubble of perception must have opened iust when Castaneda was writing about it, early in 1974 or late in 197 3.

59 Psycht'di'/ic Review. (Swam RI57; 1’256: R118; J16.5_; P246-9_i 11 36.

60 Wisson-Castancda parallels. (Wasson i, 245-310—particularly: 251$, 261, 295, 304). a whole year 114, left eye P231, free to sec 182, where God is 189. sweeten the smoke JHO, as many times as he could J141

61 smoking mushrooms. "In Popayan Im the Colombian Andes! it was

learned t lust some people occasionally smoke dried mushrooms, usually after ci;ihor,iti preparation with other agents rhe idea to utilize them in such a manner may well have tome from Castaneda's 'humito,¹ the smi ike resulting from combustion of magic mushroom dust pins special buLinii sweetening agents m ,i ritual pipe ¹ Humite has never been encountered by cEhnobcitanists, mycologists, or other investigators of niualistic mushroom use in Mexico it he center from which mushroom use has recently spread through the Western Hemisphere] Furthermore, with Castaneda’s very own admission I I2J5I that the mushroom dust did nor burn but was ingested, it seems humito¹ was really a symbol or literary device to intrigue the reader. Dried samples of the mushrooms so employed at Pop.iyan appeared to be .lijoyhor.',,- LtjhimiiK It is said to take a larger quantity lor effect and the duration ui action is considered very much shorter than by the oral route , 1 later gave the smoking method a trial but received only a headache"] Pollock, 7'1 Good thing d| didn't say, "Stick ’cm in your ear."

6 1 Maria Sabina’s lace Photographs of Mana Sabina may he seen m Wasson j l>. i j I and at the beginning of th is ch a pc er, the but taken 24 May 196(1 at HuaucLi de lirmner by Frederick A. Usher

62 Carlitos and Don Juan Hi is apocryphal Yaqui folktale follows English models in [Giddingsl and Yaqui models in Johnson The Yaqui vocabulary' was mostly picked out of {fohnsrni Kur.ith Reais' nr constructed from Yaqui routs. Vocabulary and syntax are reasonably correct I ani grateful to |tihn M 1 iedri ck. nt the* bum ini i Institute id Linguistics, for Ins generous and helpful mivne । letters 1(1 Mar, h Apr I9⁷61; he Is not responsible for errors and boobi traps that remain. The latter include the lol lowing non-Yaqui interpolations 11 krjrpo.Gjp.- .j'.jJfit^ro. * c>/rpocu/u .isu/htum Latin lor the moth whose wiggling larva makes the lumping bean rump, 21 unrsoweifter und so wc.rli'T. German for etcetera V jAj.l.¹ ernje nrjr tn = academic or emir put-on The story was conceived as a startling though brief immersion in the Yaqui language, to show that Yaqui is completely alien to the English- or Spanish speaker and to make the point that ill could karn this much Yaqm in about two weeks., ail accomplished linguist like Castaneda should have learned more than two words in nine years

64 native genius. {Time, 3k'

64 type of student ifinir. 441 power takes care id you [7 imr H

65 Cite of Power Compare (Eliade 4X2-6), the Strait gate the shaman's paradoxical passage to the utherworfd

• 65 academic analysis appended. (Rueger, 7 P.

65 nn way to escape 1214.

65 /ti'i’.s u-¹ Folly true or untrue 1191, pimp 15'. Jobber me 167. crush him like a bug 1177.

• 66 stubbornly indifferent iSukemck. 118| affected to be unfamiliar [R Stafford, seminar student teleph one 5 Sep 1975)

• 67 abstract. A jarring note m the abstract was Castaneda's statement: 'I was not permitted to tape-record <ir photograph any event that tuok place during that time" --that is, 1961 to 1971. lVh.it happened I wondered, to the tape recording | R5b-$9! made on 4 Sep 196b' Did don luan confiscate it?

• 67 Xenix statistics (Helen Greenway, University Microfilms Vice President, telephone 13 Nov 1975, letter 9 I,in 19761

• 67 Visions of Hermus. (The Apocrypha/ Afew TkritrrtMnt London: Frunted for William Hone Ludgate Hill. 1820 L’p. 194-2OW).

• 68 dissertation Viru Su hmitti ng hrs dissertation before Tim c's expose was

published, t jstancda said he was boni in Sat) Paulo. Brazil, 25 December 1935 He recorded his 1962 B.A from UC1 A and listed stints as teaching assistant at UCLA in 1963-64 and lecturer at UC Irvine in 1972. Pubfrui-tjons. Only I, (Castaneda-bl R, and I Edrmnu/chungi s One tiny but provocative discrepancy between l\tian and Sorcery affords a fascinating vignette of Coyote's dealings with the defenseless academy. Though all other narrative dates from /.xt/jn arc reproduced in Sorcery two have been deleted. Dissertation pages 292 and3(10 omit the dates|11 Js 12 Dec rm her 19621 that tell us just when la Catalina sailed hopped and stood in the doorway [see: "Carlos-One and Carlos Two," Table 2. Events. 19-21_; Event 21 is dated by textual inference onlyl. Removing these crucial dates Castaneda markedly reduced the risk that a skeptic, if there was one on his committee, might notice and be troubled by the stark logical conflict between C.irios-Onc's first meeting with 'la Catalina' 'Event 22 published with faculty approval in 196fi| and Carlos-TUo's narratively prior meetings with the same sinister lady (Events 18-211 described in the dissertation Having read a nearly draft of the dissertation without the telltale dates, a skeptic would hardly look for those dates in his autographed personal copy oi Lvthm received later m the year. Deleting the dates also lightened the responsibility of permissive or credulous committee members, who presumably were not at all troubled by Castaneda s fiction but might eventually be called to account for having either condoned nor accepted ir as tact Lit Liijulmn n i ord In the two years this copy had hern on the shelf live faculty members (or graduate students) and four undergraduates had borrowed it estimating an equal number for the second copy, we have 18 persons inspecting the dissertation at UC1 A, The only other transaction wa> a loan to the public library at Gettysburg PA, which implies th at no scholar at anv other university had seen Sorcen. Prospective borrowers outside of California need to temind the UCLA librarian that <■-r.-CTL ।call number: LD 791.9 A6 C2⁷5| is not available on mic rofilm.

68 Ixtlan on sale. Simon and Schuster published J, iumcr to Gt/on on 23 October 1972. and Castaneda iorrcctly listed it in his dissertation as a prior publication. His Ph. I > w\is granted as or 23 March 1973, the day after the end oi the 2nd quarter, which ran from 2 January to 22 Match, Even if Sorcery was officially approved by the committee on the first day ot th.it quarter, Castaneda could not have wiittcn his restrictive instructions tn University Microfilms until ten weeks after /xt/uji went on sale, which rules -nil lhe commercial and perfective motives University Microfilms received the document from UCLA in February 1973 Though it is a 1973 dissertation, it beats a 1972 copyright notice, carried forward as the law requires from Simon and Schuster's 1972 first edition

• 68 Riesman An apparently psychic typesetter for the \'ew Vork Times Book Kcvicw subtitled /.be Ttrjc/jipg' ',4 Tin-jir? A.jvo.' KnmvJedge (Letter to Ricsman 14 Aug 1975; reply 1 Dec 1975, from Diibo, Upper Volta

71 Yaqui subtitle rejected, jSpicer-dj Kelley in Moises, xxxiv; La Battc-c, Leach, Madsen, 80).

71 "A Structural Analysis." J189-256. Compare | Levy-Strauss)

71 parody |Oates-b, 101

71 became obvious. J20.

73 emic. Well known tor years to anthropology students the term has not spread much outside of anthropology.

7J Berremaii Spoke on 8 May 1965 [Berrcinanl

74 emic-ctic. (Harris-a 133 150, especially 138-141; Harris-b, 568-604}. Castaneda pe, Abstract) said he had gained membership" as a sorcerer by becoming ''intimately familiar" with dl's alien "perceptual reality. ’ The c laim answers the wish to get inside the native's head, a wish Harris [-a, 141) called futile. Like any other scientist, the social scientist must build an explicit theory by which to interpret established classes of <observations. I he more general the theiiry. the more widely it can be applied, hut the greater the risk of arbitrary interpretation At one extreme, the scientist imposes a quite inappropriate theory on alien behavior, wallowing in complacent ignorance of what certain acts mean to the actors themselves. My favorite non scientific example finds some Spanish explorers meeting a Southwest tribe who call themselves A'ti'mrn, 'the people. ' "How do you call yourselves?" the Spaniards ask. "Pmiatc," reply the A'₍i'torn, thereby acquiring the name " Pima, "by which we call them today In the language of theA’u'tarn pimatc means, "I do not understand I the question!" IRussell, 19). At the other extreme, the traveler insists on knowing the native reality solely as the natives know it. thereby acquiring quasi nativehood and abandoning science No one seriously proposes the practice of either extreme Fheories are built hy alternating between observations that already fit the theory and unexpected or outlandish observations that do not fir and may cause the theory to change or grow. Whatever his intentions or illusions, the scientist nr traveler cannot fully adopt bis informants' point of view, Either he relies on an explicit theory established in his own culture, or he relies ■ perhaps without realizing it| on his personal conceptual system his unique lite experience, his implicit cultural background, his internal thesaurus. Neither explicit theory nor personal thesaurus is likely to match the conceptual system or world view of the people he is observing or lointng The best he can du is achieve a synthesis of his view and theirs that will be fair to both If he is a Rasquish-Peruvian-Spanish intellectual, he is not going to become a Yaqui or even a Yaqui less Indian no matter how hard he tries but he might learn that when a Yaqui says, "The world wishes to end, he is not predicting rhe collapse of a subjective world Susanne Langer says is held up hy language (Pearce a, 51 |fiS| hut watching an eclipse of the sun which he will cure without fail by throwing live coals at the sky Beals, i⁷' For a balanced application m the cimc-cuc dichotomy in a study or modem mysticism see (Hhaxatil

74 Carhis-Fmic. cross eyes 149, hands 19H, leaves 1161. plants 180, gait 1169 74 Carlos-Etic kinship fl 0-11, coarse ways 138 pimp 157, wind 165. suit 189, dumb PR, food 1263, greasy (Cravens-a 911 Pmlessor Volpe comments "Plant names, gene o logics and kinship terms are the stock in trade of ethnoscienlists. Castaneda may here be urging broader humanistic concerns on fellow emicists,"

74 Ettc-Procrustes. Volpe: "Structuralism is often considered a form ot vrnic analysis, so Castaneda may again be trying to humanize emicism. To get your ethnosckiuc straight from the horse's mouth sec: Stephen A. Tyler. Cognitiii 4nthropu/ogi iHRW, 19691 especially the introduction. 1 would say the one good book to come out of ethnosciencc is: Brent Berlin tk Paul Kay, fJ<isnCo/u/ Tfewi.f (LI. Calif.. 19691,"

75 from the very moment of our birth. Sapir: iM.mdcIbaum 546), Castaneda ' from the moment I was bom," Ivm. from the time we an horn," 1254, "from tile moment of our birth," P247

75 Ove. Ciu/;trw, Hey, little Carlos' Look at your mama's face Here the

eyes. Here the nose. Here the mouth.

?5 rebel and reality Sapir (Mandelbauml: rebel 572, existence 572, individ-^ual ^4 Tw oCrows 569, 572. d| makrngthis room 1211-212, not as birds) 129, rocks I 2 t)_r whatever we perceive R147 Incidentally, 1 would not argue chat spatial perception is not at all learned, but that convention affects the learn' ingot space less than the learning of an alphabet. While weare on the subject, another of Sapir's ideas set off a Sonoran echo in my head "Perhaps," wrote Sapir [Mandelbaum, 549|, "there is a far-reaching moral in the fact that even a child may speak the most difficult language with idiomatic ease but that it takes an unusually analytical type of mind to define the mere elements of that subtle linguistic mechanism which is bur a plaything of the child's unconscious " The very tact that we arc thinking and talking.” the Indian don told Carlos |P27O|, "points out an order that we follow without ever knowing how we do that, or what the order is."

76 Press spokesman. |los Angeles office, letters 14 & IS Aug 1975).

• ⁷8 ethnography. To publish The Teaching* as ethnography (or ethnology! was to present it to scholars as a scientific work based on factual, cultural field observations. In fact. >t was neither scientific, factual, nor cultural. If the UCLA pundits meant to redefine ethnography, they should have done so explicitly, in the book and in the advertising. Volpt comments: "Since ethnoscientists don't care much about culture, the spurious Yaqui subtitle probably wouldn't bother them as much as it would a genuine ethnographer like Spicer. On the other hand, ethnoscientists care a lot about language, so a Yaqui informant who spoke not one word of Yaqui in the hearing of the fieidwoxker should have given them pause." Levi-Strauss |2| distinguishes ethnography, the grass roots description of how people in one group live together, from ethnology; the comparative use of data from ethnographic Studies of two or more groups. Both concepts imply culture, fact, and scien tific treatment.

• 78 review' of The Teachings. | Young].

• 79 closing the village gate-1 am not saying Castaneda can't walk around on campuses, lecture at the invitation of students, visit other teachers'classes, participate in research projects, or engage in various other peripheral activities, only that he will presumably not be appointed tn a 'ladder" position in any faculty of social science In iny theory, though physically present or visible, he is academically absent 01 invisible.

• 80 Garfinkel ;firne,44, Mandel 11. Schaefer spoke 26 Oct 1971 (Noel, 1821. Professor Garfinkel did not accept an invitation (letter 5 Nov 197.5' to contribute to this discussion, confirming, correcting, or refuting my theory as he wished.

• 81 disclaimed cultural milieu. 118.

82 nonsense I wrote to Professor Goldschmidt [14 Oct 1975] that since I took ethnography and allegory to he mutually exclusive categories, roughly equivalent to fact and fiction. 1 wondered if his first paragraph could mean: This book is part ethnography andprrrt allegory. (Which would still have been misleading but no longer nonsense.’ He declared himself bemused [21 Ian 1976( at a scholar w ho could not see that something could be ethnography and allegory at the same time 1 protested [23 fan 19761 that ethnography might well treat allegoric material or be interpreted allegorically by poets, but allegory could hardly constitute or replace ethnography. He declined to say more.

• 82 analogy. My reading of "allegory" as "analogic world view" is based on

185

the fact that Goldschmidt's discussion of cultural constructs and 'worlds other than our own" comes right before his conclusory statement: Hence the allegory as well as the ethnography." An alternative reading would skip hack to the previous paragraph, which laments the inadequacy of our language to render the sorcerer's world, Castaneda could then be describingt/mt world under the guise of this world, which come closer to the common meaning oi allegory ’ Perhaps Goldschmidt confounded these two meanings |one conventional, the other idiosyncratic or i.irgnnic’ but the order and terms of his argument fit my reading best, For my own conception ot mental content as analogs, see |de Mille).

82 Pearce, (-a, 1381.

82 fallacy. Dun Itian said seeing shows you things "tor what they really are," R37, 149, Oddly, The Terichrngs barely hints at this Platonic reality In his Foreword, Goldschmidt anticipated—peihaps even inspired— Castaneda¹-, Liter Platonism [see Note 121 inn? reality!

83 roared 1’50

83 swelled the rolls. According to Volpe's impression.

83 condemned, P277-282.

85 Dwdg’i ki Condensed from (Thord-Gray. 555).

86 A warrior. R220, 181, 267.

86 The quality, C. 5, Lewis in (MacDonald, 12). For discussion of Lewis and Williams, see [Hillegas).

86 talking animals, Lewis Carmi! buffs should compare dJ's meeting with the magical deer [I76-7H) and Alice's conversation with the Fawn |Through the ! otiking G/us.s, Chapter 31. For the deer's sweet whistle, sec |Fiirst-a, 551.

88 dG spins with ally. 1260, 266, 264.

88 Oates. (c).

89 C, S. Lewis In (MacDonald, 8)

89 Pearce, (-b, 233).

89 psychotherapists. jHendlin; Pulvino),

89 parodists. "Tilt Teachings ut Don 13.' is the best parody frequently funny (Barthtime), 'The Teachings of Joe Pye' brightens only tor an instant, when Mvscalito becomes Muscat eh [Tomkins¹ "Don Long Juan" thrice saves the Furry Freak Brothers from disaster and show s them pre Aztec ruins beneath Mexico City (Shelton). A mt-xiphile lesbian claims in passing to have done "gynecography feel work under a gorgeous Yakkity Indian witch, dona Juana " "I uanna," confesses Calhsta iMcAllister, 421.

90 Ixtl.in fable. 1257-266. Urashim.i [Sckl, 111'114

90 aphorisms twilight P286, JUS survivors PI94 death 133 die alone P2H1. prisoners P280. crap R66. lion R191 mountains R98

91 stylistic manure, masterful R98, 103, glass shreds R47. each rock ^: 197, sprung 195.

91 dG clue. R19-20, 93, 1’187, 245

9] anonymous entries, friend Btll) l-4_; RI II,⁷ 18, 27, (Keen, 92; Time 431 sinologist 1’278. botanist (Wallace, 142). Husserl student (Keen, 92). rodents 1115. folk song 121 exclamations 1182

92 a bona tide termination Ivii.

92 Wittgenstein. (Margolis

93 ineffable. dG 1259. d| 1185; P30.

93 inexplicable tonal th nagual. P269 271. dj actually said "indescribable

hut that was i. asumeda * error, rhe (Oiia/ is both description and describable. d| describes it fur pages, draws a diagram of it ,1’98), and makes a model erf it on a table top |P 125-9]

94 admired Huxley. Wayne Slater telephone, 5 Dei 19751.

94 Heard. ,196. 200}. brief instant J8J, 87,

94 luminous egg i Atkinson, 58}. R23. |Kliiver, 37}

94 published by the dozen, Atkinson's hookPcrtojja/ ftm । r was published in 1922 by the Personal Power Company, of Detroit,

94 ova lama at Irv i ne. |R uegc t 76} Oi course, many other parallels between Siberian and American Indian shamanism demur depend on William Walker Atkinson, sec: il..i Bane a}.

95 luminous blobs 139-42 dG P43, gulden aura (Atkinson, 651.

95 Kltfvei , il, 2 ^?. 2 < By an inspiring coincidence I found myself working with Paul Radin's personal copy or Kluwr's MescJz. autographed: "Dem Peyotekultforschcr Paul Radin sugccignet! Heinrich Kluver, Chicago. April 1929," which sec ms to say that the book is an appropriate gift for peyote-cult researcher Paul Radin.

95 left ,itk1 right minds. (Bogenl. People in many societies associate the left side of the body with mythical and supernatural forces, including death iKatz: Myrrh off, 88 P183-4, 191, 2(X1

95 cthiiobfitatusi, |\V.i>s(in-;i, 1 Ct9’ great gates (Was*(in-| 295); thougji the "paradoxical passage ' between worlds is nearly universal in shamanism (Eliadc 482-6 Ftu^t b 161 6|, the similarity of dj's and Wasson's language and imagery suggests direct influence Cr^ck J185 like dying P266; compare Blake on "little death iPearce ,i 1 ⁷2' decide whether to return P276.

96 psilocybin users. Swain. 237 226. 227 2251 sum 1126, 168-9 child P224 Italian JI4U,

96 Juan Matus. 137. Bandera & Maldonado (Spiter-b, 27-51); Yaqui Rolling Stone is TefitN.u ■ Luis Matus |Spicer c, 83 Moises, xix) hi the narrative both "Juan Matus" and Genaro" were assumed names, R92.

96 firkuri Tarahumara. Thord-Gray

9o omens, jet 16, tuck 122 percolator 18, crow 12Q, wind 161, sunbeams f 14 i.

155, drcams 192 Moises. xxxi-kxvihI. dreaming 192. 113_rJ5O_;Pl9.

98 loss ofsoul Ideas of visiou quest guardian spirit st ml-loss, sou I-capture, and personally acquired impersonal power are held m many societies iHarner a, 268

98 Ha met-Castaneda para Ik Is |Hamer-a,-b c, d_; respectively published 1962, 1963, ] 96S, 1972; respectively abbreviated in the rest of this note only as: A. IT C, DI. waterfall A260 1499. Datura A26I. 271. 121,64 161 danger B113_; R184, 193, 214, 2 54. secrecy A261, p.5, 78. 150. accumulate power A262; J86; 191. 122, 159. give or sell it Hl04: II64_: see also (Bennett, 256) spirit helpers and shields PH 2; R216^B, ’25, power objects collected BIOS, J2I-22, IOS. 123. hurled B106 J22, 2.5, 178; P61, see also (Kiuckhohn, 341, disdain BI03_; J66. rub D104; R166- follows teacher B104; J65-66; R98, 214. tell visions A261_f 1209. creatures A261. Bl09, RIP, 1'2>9 muthBiQ6_f R231, 235_; P24, 97, 2111 the livaro bmtcrily sang to the visionary with its wings |C281 as Carlos's ally-nuith sputtered its song |P211 chu>i A261. 1138. i >g A267; R90 bird B107, 113, R2O4-7. steal soul A262; J177. guess aasadanr A263; [177. lies C28j 1200. quartz D154_; 1204-6; J2J mentioned crystals but not quart; and not particularly powerful shamanic use uf rock crystals is well known fEliadcj Furst .i 4X90), but the wording and timing here suggest direct injluencc. corpse D113; Ixn. out of the ordinary D90, 134; Ixi, fur

bogeyman, compare: (Matthew W. Stirling, Indians of the Americas. National Geographic Society, 1955, p, 451 "Both the Iroquois and the Algon-quians believe in a masked cannibal called 'Long Nose,' who kidnaps children Youngsters are never disciplined by corporal punishment. Fear that Long Nose will carry them off in his huge pack basket usually insures their good behavior."

99 Pearce, (-a, 2-3, 5-6, 1321.

100 shrug. "What must Carlos Castaneda think of the immense popularity of his works?" asks Mexican poet Octavio Paz. "Probably he shrugs his shoulders" iTovara, 101

100 Pearce-Castaneda parallels. .Pearce-a, abbreviated in this note only as: Al hill intervenes AI27, 1144-5. unreal men A130T, 1264, in contrast, the previous volume called Vicente's d/hes "not people’' R38-39 unpredictable A157_; 17.S find crack as child A173; P224, 247, 19⁷ balance Al 54, 184, 185, PI3, 248, clearing in forest A15-1 7, ISO; 1’125-127 our notions A 13, 159. 1’243. collapse A51, 168; 1136, 253.

101 extensions of dJ's Way Though Pearce's eight ideas were available in some form before The Crack in the Cosmic Lyy was published, their absence from Castaneda's pre-C’nn A hooks and presence in his post Crack books suggests Crack influenced Castaneda Langer's language supported world was present before as "collapse of certainty" |1252l. maintaining the world with internal talk (R218I, and 'undoing' the world by stopping the internal talk|R2l9|. but die formula "collapse the world" had not appeared Castaneda's friend Barbara Mycrhoff had presumably shared her interest in I anger with him before 1968 (Myerhoft, 241

101 Littlechap. 1244 [Time. l962(Oct 12' 80(151, 67 Henry Hewes, Saturday Review. 1962(Oct 201,45(421, 37. Life. l962|Nov 30|, 53(221 117|.

101 stop the world Wasson(-h, 245| noted a striking similarity between don Juan's Stop the world" and Mana Sabina's "Woman who stops the world am I.'' Since the latter was not published anywhere until 1975 .Wasson H the coincidence promised the first bit of evidence that Castaneda had actually met an authentic shaman. The evidential balloon was punctured when translators agreed (Eunice Pike, letter 9 Dec 1975 Florence Cowan, telephone 14 Ian I976J that "Woman who supports the world am I" would be a better translation of the Mazatce, Chum*' sehiquC te' ma". The idea of support finds no place in Stop the world which Castaneda lenders also as Collapse the world (1136, 253|. 'Whenever the dialogue stops the world collapses," don Juan says (P40' Historian Alfredo Lopez Austin writes from Mexico(6 Jan 1976| that although the term One who knows |c j conocedorl is much used in mesoamerican shamanic texts he has not found a single epithet referring to the shaman in his capacity to Stop the world i.detetier cl mundoL

102 dream writing (Cravens a, 97 Nin a, 312, 266, 312 Sukcnick, 110-1' "It was Nin who helped Castaneda publish'The Teachings of Don Juan when he was having publisher troubles " (Sukcnick. HOI; according to Rupert Pole |Nin's husband, telephone k Jan 19761 Nin provided some New York publishing contacts for Castaneda before the University published The Teachings. het friendly gesture had no evident practical consequences Pole recalled that Castaneda met Nin fiu the first time when poet Deena Metzger brought him and Barbara Myerhoif to Nin's house. Sec Added Notes on page 196

102 radically different uses The definition of a dream is ideas and images in the mind not under the command of reason" (Nin-b. 5J, As d| dreamed to

divine undreamhkc facts and accumulate practical power, Castaneda purportedly dreamed to get his undreamlikc rational dialogue and discursive narrative. Often borrowed from other writers, the ideas and images filling Carlos's dreams, visions, and drug trips continued to be tightly commanded by Castaneda s wide-awake reason See Added Notes on page 196

102 false separation. (Sukcnitk, H4>, About the need to separate imagination from reality, Kung-Fu say: Man with both legs in one pant tall down. 10) writer. (Parrott, 80, Firm.'. 4*1 p|56, 275. A good standard against which to judge the don luan books lor authentic mystery, depth of feeling, and literary expression is Hamel Long's faithful though brief and interpretive retelling of Cabeza de Vaca's eight year walk from Florida to Mexico in the 16th Century. For the original sec (Nuricz). For Long's retelling, try library or bookstore for any of seven out-of-print editions, under any of three titles: The Power Within Us (Duell, Sloan and I’earce 1944', Interlinear to Cufiezu de Vaca (Frontier Press, 1969—a beautiful edition!; or Marvellous Adventure o> Cabeza de Vaca (Ballantine, 1973—which includes Wj/rnche. another wondrous tale though without* its Epilogue!. Like Castaneda, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca assumed his mother's name w ithout explaining why.

104 Alexander, i,2271 Radin (1681.

105 coyote not reliable, di 1254-5. everything to every man Radin, 169|.

105 Trickster For trickster myths I depend chiefly on (Radin' slightly on (Alexander! and (Joseph Campbell, The ALis/cs of God, Viking, 1959, pp 275-7), (Blackburn! tells many fine tales of xirxjis coyote trickster and culture hero of California's Chumash Indians.

109 Trickster parallels pranks R141 inadequacy 1109, 200. horse R97. warrior used 1214. hones walk (Parrott, 8 11 take off clothes P254. loneliness mtn art (Keen, 96) rewrite thesis (Trme 44|.

Ill Rorschach man. occultists (Globus Greens (Doug Boyd, Rolling Thun der. Dell 1976, p. 272: hypnotic subject (Globus though Globus adduces appropriate evidence for hypnotism, rhe hypothesis fails to account tor Castaneda’s systematic fictioneering, if dj had actually lived fictionecring would have been neither necessary to Castaneda nor plausible as part of d J's plan of instruction Nancy Wood (Letter, Time. 1973(Mar 26|, 101(13), 8). Harns |-c, 243 258). Gott (New Statesman. I9?2jan 14), 83(2130|, ’1-2' lames W Sire [Eternity, l975 Novi, 26(11' 40-41) Hal Lindsey [Then•'* a New World Coming. Vision House, 1973, pp. 146-7], professional helpers (Hendhni Pulvinoi For further Christian comment, sec Joseph Grange (Commonweal 1971|Sep 171, 94(201 482-31, Mark Imhoff (Fuller Graduate School of Psychology, Pasadena) Castaneda Christianity and psychology on the nature of man Christian Association for Psychological Studies, 1976, paper)} Martin E. Marty [Christian Century, 1973|Mar 211, 90(12), .351); David Nelson (Inside, 1974| Jul-Augl. 5(41, 22-281

112 Ramon and dG at waterfall. Furst b. 152-31 R99-104 Bolivian somersaulting (Furst b, 1321. "Carlos Castaneda and I often talked about shamans and sorcerers, and his deep understanding of these matters contributed greatly to my own thinking," wrote his fellow graduate student Barbara Myerhoff (241, whose mother had wisely caught her a rather unusual idea that dreams were real and who had been present that day m 1966 when Ramon balanced on the waterfall Myerhoff s photo of Ramon s birdhke stance (451 show's the shadow of a semicircular cloud like the one Castaneda describes (R99| Myerhoff s field notes from 1966 contained other likely models for persons and events in Castaneda s books a Pablo was younger than a Carlos 1120); an old man named Francisco was quite as impish as dG (119-120, 146-7, 168), Ramon, likedG, knew of ten levels of knowledge (101,

R99), and Huichol shamans were materially poor but spiritually rich [98-9, 2631, as the urchins Carlos felt sorry for were just as well off as he because any one of them could become a man of knowledge |R2()-22| Myerhoff's dissertation on the Huichol peyote hunt was accepted at UCLA in 1968 |/)issrnatiori Abstrjcfs International. 1969, 30|021, B-4751.

111 Siskind In (Harner-e, 28-9}.

IB Sharon In |Furst-b, 116).

Ill When I first undertook. fHarner-c, 2R-29; reproduced tn -e, 16-171.

114 Yaquis fly with Datum |H.imcr e, 140). Carlos did fly J126-7, d| hints about flying with Datura J66, 106, with peyote J IOS.

US Spicer. (Letter 17 Nov 19751.

115 coyote sees shadow. (Russell, 251'

115 under the world, i Radin''.

115 Trickster. The original version of the Spanish Don Juan myth was Tirso de Molina's play, LI Burladw de Sci j/Zu. The Trickster of Seville |D. G Winter, The Don /tian Legend by Ono Rank. Princeton U,, 19751,

116 Plato. After Jowett, condensed from Symposium 211, Phaedo 109-111 I’heGreek words, he alethas, ye, mean truly the earth" or ' the true earth." 117 The world is, di 1165,

H⁷ other writers trace wisdom ,Boyd; Keen. La Baire-a, Margolis; Rueger_; Wilk), Added References (Gill; Silverman]

11⁷ nagual and tomJ. P121, 125, 131, 157, 243, 248, 265-6, 270-1.

118 TfdCtiJtiis (Ludwig Wittgenstein, ThJctatiM Logrco-Phr/o.sophicus|. Compare |Margolis. 236-238).

118 Why is there something and not nothing* Leibuic.

118 returns to its potential state Compare (Margolis 234'

118 the only experience we have. C astaneda's distinction between ro/iiU¹ and miguuJ is not consistent In one place, thcriiigtni/ is an unknown void [P2711, in .mother it is a world that can he visited, perceived, or witnessed |P173'_r in yer another ii is personified, dj being called rhe nagual" |P2l61. In this chapter 1 adopt the first use intensifying it to make the ntigmiJ not only unspeakable or unknown hut unknowable. The nagual can then be hypothesized as an unknowable source of events witnessed in the specially prepared, naguallian sector of thel tonal All events are ultimately inexplicable; some may also he proximately ineffable, or unspeakable In science, the unexplained is often held to be proximately explicable but never ultimately explicable. Would-be sorcerers who despise science as the enemy of mysteries have science confused with scientism, which holds all things to be ultimately explicable, For every explanation science gives, it generates a new mystery. Asd]told us. there is no shortage of mysteries There never will be.

119 alternative realities. flyingT127-13O, losing body [139-142 others would not see him as a crow JI75, separate reality grows familiar 1234. shift at will from on i' reality to another 1235, the otherworld RIIS. it was not a gnat when it hit you R120. the guardian will take you away R131. whatever we perceive, m any manner we choose R147. they become nothing and yet they arc still there R160. if you have no feeling toward it, the guardian will become nothing Rl⁷0. for the first time 1 did not believe in the final reality RI89. dreaming also takes place 192-3 warrior can tell one reality from another, Carlos can't 199, it is also as you picture it. hut that's not all there is 1165. making this room, agreement 12 11-2 world is not the same for a beetle 1249. coyote was not talking the way you and I talk 1253. dG did not take car away but forced Carlos to see world of sorcerers 1255. reality depends on agreement

with others P28—which contradicts R 14⁷ above and the general idea of a separate reality, hut perhaps d| was only exaggeratingCarlos-Skeptic's social conformity, rock is ruck because we attend to it as such P234, perception went up and down cliff P267 no rocks from the moon P27O.

120 no more inefiabihty Compare l Bharat i 60} "the mystic may simply be a clumsy speaker or writer."

121 Carlos s psi powers 1116. 1144, Ixl 1’162 dl also acknowledges haunt-ings and poltergeists R233.

121 serious psi literature. (Rhine; Roll Pumps yc/mfogy Review; hmrnal of the American Sticiefvfor P- ychfcii' Pt'searcA_; luurna! <>i Purup.svcho/ogvlfor example.

121 true reality a plane above the ground [H6. sec things for what they really are ItF 149 secmg is sneaking between the worlds 1264 neither you nor 1 will ever know what really took place r.ld. neither of us is correct P34. essence of tree P200 weasel between views to arrive at the real world; true excursions into the nugutii P240. d| purports i!’24()'i to clarity an earlier statement (!254| about sneaking between worlds to arrive at see; ng and knowing:¹ I meant that one can arrive at the totality of oneself only when one fully understands that the world is merely a view regardless of whether that view belongs to an ordinary man or tn a sou r " This nnn-l’latonic formula is surely an improvement, but ten lines later ut tails back into Platonism with his "true excursions into the " In an earlier Note [82 fallacy! 1 said Goldschmidt had anticipated Castaneda's Platonism Perhaps Castaneda grasped the true reality firmly for the first nmc while reading Goldschmidt's Foreword to The Tedc/.'ing'i, then glimpsed ns tallacu”iisncs-s while reading Pearce's 1971 finding । a, 118) that Goldschmidt w.js m error- -the author, in each case, instructed by his critic i.compan pages s2 .1 I (Xi- j. above].

122 sophistical. Castaneda iP29'savs C,i’I i..'/<■. lie to understand vci'/ng as intuitive grasp, instant understanding or i'enctratiun of motives. This is blatant revisionism. Over and ctyi.-i i.’.nlos had known seeing aS visualization—oflights forces, structure- “nd events

122 bubble of perception P246 -¹

121 diagram. P98, 270 n u .7 doesn't know'P241

123 will. R84, 146-9, 19⁷ s. P13 L isi. ,. J., । k _Lcn ! HOI: "The body has a will of its own. Or rather, the will is the \> ice ol tin hiidv

123 body, learns, knows, feels friendd j Hsu -i .rices not doing 1188 receives instruction 1194 detect- ' ■ ■ 'grvri *■ crisis 1212 makes

decisions 124T know- the incM.il ii !'  • n i in •>.. 1256. is the

non-intellectual part of the mind 1'4 V i-xudis u I in’m navel 11⁷8.

123 feelings avoided by shitting tr n I" king o . ;.-r Rs 1-4, 90-91. by disrupting mood R89. are only sell tut v 1 II ruv ■ .d i< -•> w ,i- su intense that I began [—-to weep, to cry. to sob? No ^: to think TA"

124 Sapir-Whorf. [ B. Carroll in Win > 2’ .

124 Langer I continue to cite I'e.ru- a 'I !6S| instead of rhe original .Added Reference: Langer, 148 |sil wl u.h i’t..r<. correctly quoted but incorrectly cited—-because I suspcvt ' in ,'i’t - ml uence was thus indirect. 124 I've smoked you. J28 falcon 132

124 power |La Barre, u power inter i >kn<w ge 166 55, 161,69. R199> J87; R239-40; 186, power equal or superior to knowledge |21 24, si 1122-4 157; J86: P193, 280. Pearce (“b, 1'61 comments on the longtng tor power "ME-God (you land/'

126 twilight. P286. Among the hila- vision umv was the first glimmering

of dawn when the eye could not distinguish between a ghost and a solid person ' Brundage. 1941

126 warrior, as to war 1 il deathjl72-3; R47,49, 150. 196, 197j 133-36,40,81, 88, 153-6 1’283. Thi'Ugh a warrior consults death, he does not play chess or badminton with him as we have seen in Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal or its parody The Dove.

126 lour enemies |K2-87;R]98.

126 path with heart JU. 160, IR5; R217-8;, 225; 1266, On a parallel path with heart, Coyott sang in Earthmakn 'My world where one travels by the valR ■■,-i Jgi my world of many 1 ciggy mountains; my world where one goes zigzagging hither and thither, range after range, 1 sing of the country 1 shall travel in In such a world shall I Wander" |Alexander, 118-91. Carl Oglesby I Noel 184] recognized the voluntarism in ill's path with heart

117 fully R77. 79, 82. 85, Hft, 150-1, 153,. 168, 170, 119; 1197, 200, 214 Compare Wittgenstein 'all pro positions are of equal value" । Margolis 239|, 117 erasing personal history. J150; 111-17. Brazil R178. unspecified hie goal R221 ill assured C arlos ] 1'236' that erasing personal history would not make him sh tty or evasive, because he would wit feet himself mote impoitant than a beetle, would take responsibility for his acts, and Would consult his death about decisions. 1 do m>t how those provisions would keep him from being shifty md evasive, Compart note. 122 sophistical

127 truth. J105; R28, 115, 191

127 warrior, takes responsibility 139-42, HO, cannot he surprised 1’155. in control R181 neither remorse R34. nor self-pity U1U-1 familiar stranger R189. 251 orderly life 192 unpredictable 175. clobbered R182. never idle or in a hum- R 191.

127 double d| says j P.521 "'rhe sorcerer that finds himself face to face with himself isa dead sorcerer," Otto Rank says: "The double who catches sightof himself must die within a year" 150); "the double-projection . . was among the most popuLaj motifs in Romantic literature" (9); Goethe survived a precogrtitive vision nt meeting himielt Guy de Maupassant tpuk dictatiun ii i 'ir i;-. double, who sat opposite him al his writing desk ,39' Levy-Bruhl |2U3| mentions "bi presence" in primitive societies, the same living individual being observed in two different places at the same moment

128 isolation d|'s flaw' Pearce-a, 172' Castaneda's myth oi don Tuan denies human reciprocity and community and denies the isolated self wrote Peter Marin |T!it new narcissism. Harper's 1975|Octl, 25J( I 5U5I. 45-50, 55-56 ' I k- who 11iV'. s, sees ^,J said C S Lewis MacDonald, 7).

128 warnnrS beloved. P283-6. choice |predilection) and secret P283.

119 Prescott. |1A H, Prescott. History of the Conquest of Peru Modern I ibrary. no date p, 1095, First published 1847|.

I 30 Ilust i. out personal power, d|: 1167 hack .against the wall, Castaneda to Sam Keen ,981.

130 C,ii.nii.iTca Feu Peruvian background, I depend mainly on .Brundage . slightly on |Frederick H Pike The Modern History o/ Peru, Prneger. 1967? ]. II. Steward, editor, Handbook of South American Indiana volume 2, The Andean Cfvf/izritfons, Smithsonian Institution, 1946, W. W. lohnson & others, Th. Indent) Republic^. Time Inc., 1965;

134 fake portrait t'i father [Cravens-a, 94. Coiikt R5; 14U-43.

1 34 Catholic religion. God as tablecloth PL27. confession 12(16-⁷ medallion 1259 TnnitY P21f* cathedral Pl05.

135 |osl. J i 'itc

115 childhood, helpless, lonely, and afraid R136-7, 1109-10; 1’87. summers R4s violent fellow 129. anger and embarrassment R2.V-8, Joaquin R 14 I 116 Carlas like dj. 12, 56, 157.

136 rebel. Ixii_; R14IJI79.

136 self-candem nation 1183, 200. man and hurro P218. whanger I"' father s opinion 112. no longer a war P156,

137 restricted feelings, suffering only a thought R142. laughing l<84 don't look at body R91. callous 1109, poet P2S2. a bit crazy 127, plugged up R104 13H boredom, where to go 1’285 empty days P242-3 tics for excitement 116 depression, suicide (Keen, 102, 1001

138 no other way to live R125

139 ntc of passage. |Ehade, 482-6). infant P87. Wallace 11421

140 nn ndgLirjA not rich Antonio de Herrera y Fordcsillas (Foster, 90

140 Vallejo. 1’116*7,

140 mcsoamcncan-Eurnpcan wise man. Indian spokesman Vine Deloria, author of Custer Died lor Your Sins found dj rather unlndtan " A substantial number of young people took up the Carlos (Castenada books as it they were the final word "n Indian religion, lyctj Few Indians recognised anything having to do with Indian religion in the books Where were the sacred mountains, the healing ceremonies the tales of creation and hi st urn al migrations? . It was only with Castana da's /uurnei' to /vflur? that the hooks began to take on a discernable Indian shape ' iVinc Deloria It, Cod is Hed, Grosser N Dunlap, 1973, pp. 52-.5.3. 307, 3681.

141 Burton (Time).

142 meet by accident Hoy Buzza met Castaneda both in an elevator anti in a coffee shop, a dual encounter Castaneda called an omen Adam Smith (Tow ers nt Mind, Random House. 1975) met Castaneda or htsdouble in a stairwell at Simon and Schuster's. Smith perpetuates the story about Mexican stu dents scouring Sonora for signs of dl, but academician Roberto Pirinco R. wntes from Mexico 119 Aug 1975|: 'Neither I nor any id my colleagues have heard of a single Mexican student engaging in such a venture. Our students can easily go to Huautla for the mushrooms or find a local Guru if they want to. Research indicates peyote is practically unknown in big cities of Mexico, the only ones with college populations |sce studies from: Centro Mexicano de Estudios cn Farmacodcpcndcncia, Insurgcntes Sur 199 I -B, ' I’no, Mexico 20, D El.”

142 telephone in closet ,Wayne Slater, telephone, 5 Dec 197si,

143 Levi-Strauss. |174) To be fascinated by another kind of illusionist who lives tn feel his power over his listeners, see a study of swindlers, off-shore bankers, advance-fee racketeers, Tennessee land mongers, corporate shell gamers, phonv mutual funders, bogus insurers, and Bankers of S.irk. Kwitny). 143 shaman not lying (Harncr-c, 32-33). shaman taking (Levi Strauss 1781 The shaman pretends, says La Barre |-a, 2671, but not with .my intent to deceive

144 Jesus. (Pearce-a, 182),

145 Wasson |-j, 295), reproduced by permission of R. Gordon Wasson.

146 Lest flesh and blood St [ohnof the Cross {Peers, III 221 Wt are a 11 alone dG P281, Yet they keep trying, Castaneda (Cravcns-a 9⁷'

146 Juan Yepes. For the background of St John oi the Cross, I depend on [Peers; Bruno, Bar ing-Gould, fives of the Saulla, But lei, Lii't’s of the .Sum H ■ and others to be cited

147 Upon my flowery breast (Peers, MOI. There he gave me (Peers, 11-28). Where hast thou gone, translated from (Bruno, 173).

147 frogs. (Cnsogono de |csus, The Life of St fohn of the Cross, Harper & Bros, 1958, p. 134|. center of the soul is God (Peers, 111-251-

148 Las condiciones. (Cnsogono de Jesus and others, Wda y Obras de San luan de la Cruz, Madrid: Bibiioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1964, p 9671. 148 translation of Peers. (II1-253-4)

149 dj and San Juan, deprecate specific visions J118, 190, 112j (Peers, I-149-58), Rap P287, When thou thinkest (Peers, I-63I. Carlos touched 1252-3. Oh, living flame (Peers, III 18). most subtle touch (Peers, 11-97). furry paw R244 ’ Sometimes you just feel a furry hand, soft as a kitten, on your shoulder and neck” (Fire, 194). bride's neck [Peers, I-10|. secret things (Peers, 11-448-50) Divest thyself, love to be unknown, ready tolose, service to others (Peers, III-255) no longer human |Cravcns-a, 97) nobody knows wholam 114. luminous faces R157 (Peers, 111-3721. not bound by promise R141. less to confess IButler, Lives). bird in lime (Peers, III-243|. strait gate Peers, I 87, 383).

151 women of San Juan, seducer (Butler, Lives). Teresa |Bruno, 2321 refused appointment (Bnino, 171-21. Therese (Bnino, 228). letter to Catalina (Peers, 111-264-5; Bruno, 230). death of Catalina (Peers, IH-373 4, Cnsogono de Jesus. 1958, pp 167-81.

152 Catherine of Alexandria (Baring-Gould, Lives, Butler, Lives).

153 angry giantess. P2O3.

154 la Catalina.'See Table 2, Events 16-22. felt her clothes on my face R210. mixed feelings about her P2412.

154 more experienced men. dj tells Carlos to dominate la Catalina' by piercing her R2Q7-8 Is it only by chance don Juan shares his name with the Spanish seducer? De Rougemont (101-7) tells us the mythic Don Juan cannot live with a woman but must dominate women by violating and rejecting them. Ever pursuing an ideal of perfect woman, he need never commit himself to a real woman. His love is eternally distant. Enjoying intellectual as well as carnal rape, he gains power by deceiving, believing truth cannot endure and contradictions do not matter. Castaneda's violation of academic standards and Carlos’s hostile intercourse with a witch have the flavor if not the form of the Spanish myth.

154 don't move from your spot. 1187.

154 sorcerers dominate females. P216_; 1122; R153.

155 Todhuntcr, Buzza, Farley Pseudonyms

155 luck with women (Wallace. 86).

155 don't like the heat. 1155.

155 Sacramento. The bookwomen identified their customer (the date was recalled as some time in 1973| when he bought a copy of The Teachings. autographed it, asked them to mail it for him, and admitted he was Carlos Castaneda. Booklady's recollections of his appearance and mannerisms are consistent with other accounts. In response to their interest in him, he returned later, went into a back room, and talked to them about himself for an hour or so.

156 death of Susana. [Time. 44). horrendous burden R56.

156 let others take care of him. R140.

156 looked for her everywhere. 168. blondbruncttc, hunter's love 167-70.

156 could not share. "As a couple we did not form social friendships. I had my own friends and Carlos had his" (M. Castaneda, 75). Margaret told me

(letter 22 Oct 19 5| Castaneda had never said anything to her about Michael Harner, Jivaro Indians, or Mushrooms Russia and History,

157 her attempts to get more of him. "I was so jealous of him! I would follow him to see if he were going out with other women” (M. Castaneda, 77|. Of course, she couldn't see don Juan

157 Juan de la Cruz escapes. (Bruno, 179-184; Peers, I-xxvn).

157 parable of the four wind women. (Wallace, 140-1) 1 suspect this vivid, self-contained allegory was intended to be an episode in Tales al Power, possibly the climax, until Wallace's article prematurely disclosed it in December 1972.

15⁷ ally, wrestle ally to ground R234, 1206 spun by ally into other worlds 1259-268.

158 not a single wind. Though Carlos got no women at all and Pablito got three he had to leave behind when he went to face his ally, wily old dl had a good thing going inArizona with "a lovely young social worker." On one occasion, dl hid Carlos under the mat when the mothering lady came calling. There Carlos spied on the two of them as a child spies on its parents, until his tittering gave him away. "Sorcerers have a lot of fun together," John Wallace commented wryly [ 1401.

159 Lame Deer. (Fire’

159 Mana Sabina (Wasson-a, -c, -j|.

159 Ramon. (Mycrhoff, 33-34, 145-6).

159 bridged two worlds. |Ehade, 4861 Traditional shamans seem to add superhumamty to their humanity, while Castaneda's sorcerers must lose their humanity to achieve superhumamty.

159 San Juan reluctant to say mass. (Peers, 111-372).

159 most intimate companion. Margaret.

159 starting over, hillabyc 1137, man in a hurry 125. first-grader R14 I approval P191. words of love unspoken 1147, talking about good times P27.3. desperate jokes P282.

160 rescue them. 1265.

• 160 imaginary playmates, suchona. the sliding place (Brundage, 22-41, dG slides down rock P211-2. mischievous eyes P55. kicking legs etc. 1231 kite 1244. imitates driving 1237 names: Juancho, Gerancho PI85. in the back scat 1245 Margolis (232). Pablito and Nestor P195 6, 224 dja fleeting image R237. no real compassion (Wallace, 141). Los Angeles (Wallace, 85) Tucson (Keen, 1021. dust on the road P100, 287.

• 161 solemn promise. "This is the last thing I will ever write about don luan' [Time, 45).

• 162 end of the day 1155.

• 163 haven't changed a bit. R23, 263; 147.

• 164 compensation. Compare dG about dj: "This is the only one who is real. The world is real only when 1 am with this one” 1265.

• 165 Lilith Condensed from MacDonald (210. 206-71.

168 Ixtlan mentions seeing in 1961-2.139, 104, 119, 125, 1.34 136, 149, 156, 183, 188, 194, 202

171 d| argue his way out of anything 154.

174 Sanchez. (Thomas Sanchez, Rabbit Boss. Knopf, 1973, p. 247).

174 | did not give a fig. P283. clarity has loomed upon you R115. that statement had clinched me R193.

175 smoothly translated. |Wasson-h, 246).

ADDED NOTES

See also ADDED REFERENCES on page 201

13 controlling dreams Knppncr (300-2| describes a UCLA dream study whose reported results do suggest a psi effect, but the actual agent could as well have been anthropologist investigator Douglass Price*Williams as intended agent Castaneda

lli not an Indian Also J49

61 Mazatec Genaro An Indian pumping I’emcx at Ixtlan de Juarez told me tin 10 October 1976 there was indeed a local Don Gcnaro, of many but uncounted years and no visible occupation. "Does he speak Mazatcc?" I asked breathlessly "Nobody here speaks Muza tec," the young man replied. Noris Mazatcc spoken in Ixtlan del Rio or Ixtlan de los Hervorcs. Villa , I955| or Writlaner 11969| could have suggested a better home town for dG Cerro Rabon, magic mountain of the Mazatecs, rises at Jalapa, for example. Mazatccs live in Chilchotla, Soyaltepec, and Ixcatlan. Come to think of it, maybe dG told Carlos—who wrote it down wrong—about his journey to Ixcatlan.

102 Nin's help Nin believed her interest in The Teachings had warned UCLA into publishing it (Hinz, 227) which sounds to me like a flattering illusion fostered by Trickster

102 different uses Question, March 19?T Are you interested in the Carlos Castenada method of exploring the unconscious?" Nin: "No, it's not my method to use drugs" (Hinz, 134|.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Cover drawing by Frederick A. Usher, vi 'La Catalina,' hotel in 1962, woman redrawn ifhl by Linda Trujillo vii Guatemalan mushroom stone, 32 Ayesha She-who-must-be-obeyed. 33 Mana Sabina. 62 Yaqui dance mask. 64 Smiling face, Mexico. 86 Huatitccan fabric design. 86 Peyote 104 Huave fabric design. 105 Mimbres Coyote Trickster, New Mexico. 116 The true earth—literally truly Itr/eiho.s¹ the earth |/ie ge|- 177 Tonal welcoming nuguirf 125 Eight points on rhe fibers of a luminous being 129 Peruvian Spaniards uncovering an Indian woman Huaman Poma 130 Chimu mask 145 Mushrooms of vision, Psiluvybe mcxicana Heim. 146 Mochica messenger, Peru. IM Ihma basket design.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Proprietary permissions and other explicit contributions are acknowledged in particular notes or text above. Here I wish to thank those whose help, though often crucial, remains invisible: A.J.O. Anderson, Michael J. Buckley S I,, lose Luis Byr, Margaret de Millc, Ned Divelbiss, David Dolan, Donald Dozer, Marie Ensign, Tomas Loayza, J. Raul Martinez, Mary Moon, Ioanna and Robert Morris, Zoltan Pazmany, Silvio Spigno, Rhea White, and others who remain anonymous. In the second edition, special thanks to Marcello Truzzi and William Madsen for mentioning the Piltdown parallel and Co David Christie for pointing out the Catalina connection on page 232 of La Barre's Peyote Cult.

PRODUCTION CREDITS

To Camera-ready Composition for typesetting; Santa Barbara Photo Engraving tor camera work, R R Donnelly tk Sons, Crawfordsville, Indiana, for printing and binding; Rood Associates for covers and jackets.

REFERENCES

With few exceptions, these references have been specifically cited in the text or notes. Additional references, not listed, will he found in the notes.

Where alternative editions are listed, cited pages arc from the edition marked with an asterisk Works beyond the first listed lor one author are identified by letter |b, c, d, etc. I Fur such authors, the letter d mayor may not be used to cite the first work When nu letter appears, the first work is intended. For example: Cravens ^_ Cravens-a, Pearce - Pearce a.

Castaneda's four don loan books |Castaneda-a, -c, -d, -f| are respectively coded in the notes as: J, R, 1, P—standing for Juan, Reality, Ixtlan, Power.

Alexander, Hartley Burr. The Mythology n/ 41/ Races, volume 10, X'.aih American

Marshall Jones, 1916, Macmillan, 1944. Cooper Square. 1964.*

Artaud, Antonin. The Peyote Dance Fanar, Straus &. Giroux, 1976.

Ash,Lee. [Review of .4 Separate Reality.] Library Rimini/, 197)(May II 9m9l, 1610-1.

Atkinson, William Walker Pseudonym Yogi Ramacharaka) Diartren Lcs.sonun Yogi

Philosophy and Oriental Occultism. Chicago: Yogi Publication Society, 1909

Barthclme, Donald. Th। teachings of Don B. A Yankee way of knowledge York Times c.'.nt 19⁷3|Feb 111, 14-1 ?, 66-67. Reproduced in D. Barthel me. Gui/tv P/easurei Dell, 1974 Pp. 53-62

Beals, Ralph L. The CnntemporaM <"u/ii.Te uf the Cdhita Indians Smithsonian Institution, 1945.

Bennett, Wendell C. tS Robert M. Zingg The Tarahumara. U. Chicago, 1935.

Berrrinan, Gerald I). Anemic and emetic analyses in social anthropology, American

Anthmpoi agist. 1966,68(2, pt II, 146-354.

Bharati, Agchananda. The Light or the Center Context and Pretext of M idem .Wysti-crim Sta Barbara Ross-Erikson I9⁷6

Blackburn, Thomas C. December > Child- 1 13oiA < ¹ ChumaJi i >m! Vim, Un"- U

California. 1975

Bogcn, Joseph E, The other side ut the brain 11: An appositional mind ■■ dleiin >_>r _;> Los Angefes .VEitro/oxicaJ Societies, ]969(Julyi. 34(31, 135-162 Reproduced in Robert E. Omstcin, editor. The -Vjtcn of Hinn >n Cm* j.".-.!.'.■>■■ Viking, 1974.■ Pp 111-125.

Boyd, lames W. lhe teachings of don Juan from a Buddhist perspective. Christum C'enturv 1973|Mat 28), 90(1 fl .360-363.

Brundage, Burt Cartwright. Lords u/ Cujco .4 History and Description of the fnca People m Their Final Days. U Oklahoma, 1967,

Brunn de Jesus-Marie. S t fohn n/ the Cross Sfieed 8* Ward, 1932.

Castaneda, Carlos. The Teachtnysof Don/uan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. U. California, 1968 Ballantine 1969 Pocket Books, 19⁷4’ — code I

h The didactic uses of hallucinogenic plants: An examination of a system of

teaching Paper, 67th Annual Meeting frf the American Anthropological Association, 1968, Abstracts. 21-22 (reference copied from La Bane al

c -----. A .Separate Rcahty Further Conveisarmns with Don /uan Simon &

Schuster, 1971 Packet Bonks, 1974*—code R.

J--Journey to Ixtlan. The Lessons of Don fuan Simon <S Schuster. 1972.

Pocket Books, 1974-—code T.

e ------ Sorcery A Description or the World [DOcioral dissertation, University of

California Los Angeles, |973). Dissertation AbHracts Intrrrunionat. 1973, 33(12 Part I. lunl, 5625B (University Microfilm# No. 73-13,132—'For copies contact

author .11 408 Westwood Plaza, P.O. Box 101. Los Angeles, California 90024")

I ----- To/es of Power Simon A Schuster, 1974—code P

Castaneda, Margaret Runyan, as told to Wanda Sue Parrott My husband Carlos Castaneda Fate 1975(Febl, 28|2’299|.70-78

Cook, Bruce. Is Carlos Castaneda tor real? National Obscn er, 197 4 {Feb 24!, 12|M|, 33. Crapanzano, Vincent. Popular anthropology Partisan Review. 19’3, 40(3), 471-482, Cravens, Gwyneth. Talking to power and spinning w ith the ally Ht/h-z\ Magazine, 19 73| Feb), 246(1473], 91 94, 97,

b ------. The arc. of Might. Harpers Magazine 1974(Sepl, 249(1492), 4.3

de Millc. Richard. The perfect mirror is invisible 2vgon 1976|Marl 11111

de Rougemont, Denis. Lore /'.•< /.ord on the .Myth.' o’ I <nv Pantheon, 1963

Dobkin de Rios, Marlene. Vision.rrv Vine /Ay. hedeln Healing tn the Perm tan Amazon San Francisco Chandler 1972. Dover, 1975.

Lliadr, Mircea. Shumazirsnr. Archaic Techniques >r £■ st.isy Princeton U , 1964

Fite. John Lame Deer a Richard Erdoes. Lame Deer. Seeker of V'oom Simon ts. Schuster, 1972.

First, Elsa. Don luan is to Carlos C.utancda as Carlos Castaneda is to u- New Tork Times Book Review, 1974|Oct 27), 15. 38, 40

Foster, George ,M. Nagualism in Mexico and Guatemala Actu Americana !944{Jan |un),2(l ds 2', 85-103

Freilictier, Lila. The Carlos Castaneda trilogy ,v ; , U,,. - 1971,.Nov 20. 202(211, 50-51.

Furst, Peter T. Huichol conceptions of the soul Folklore .Amencus. I967|[une|, 27(21, 39-106.

b ---, editor. Flesh of the Gods The Ritual L'se of,'tiogens. Pracger. 1972

Garfield, Patricia, Ph.D. Cn utri'i- Dreaming Simon & Schuster 1974.

Giddings, Ruth Warner, collector iiiaiu .Mvth.' ana'Legend? I Ati/.ona, 1959.

Globus, Gordon G. Will the real dun juan' please stand up /hr Academy. 1975 Dec , 19(41, 11-14

Goldschmidt, Walter. Fxp/r 'mg t/v Ways Mankind 2nd edition Holt. Rinehart 6. Winstun, 1971,

Grosso, Michael. Plato and nut-ot-thc-body experiences. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research I9?5(lan5, 69] I), 61 -74

Hamer. .Michael I. Jivaro souls Amcncan Anthrupuj -grst. 1962| Apr', 64(2), 258 272.

h ------ Machetes, shotguns and society: An inquiry into the social impact ul

technological change among the Jivaro Indians Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1963' Djssertcir.i m Ab.tfruct.s, 196.3-64 24, 3497 (University Microfilms No. 64-2060'

c ------ The sound <4 rushing water. Natural History, 1968|Jun-JulJ, 28-3,3, 60-61.

d ------. The livaru. People of the Sacred Waterfails Natural History Press. 3

November 1972 Doubleday Anchor, 1973.'

e - editor Hallucinogens and Shamanism Oxford. 1973.

Harris, Marvin. The Nature of Cultural Things Random House, 1964.

b ------. The Rise of anthropological Theory Crowell, 1968.

c - — -. Coirs. Pigs, Wars o' WitchiThe Riddles at Culture Random House, 1974

Heard, ILL. | pseudonym ot Gerald 1 Icard). Drome non In his The Cheat Foe and Other Werrd Tales Vanguard Press. 1944 Pp, 156-204

Hcndlin, Steven leffrcv. Toward j Converging Philosophy: Don luan Matus and the Gestalt Therapy of Frederick Peris (Master's thesis. United States International University 1973).Masters Abstracts, 1973 ?/|3, Sep' 313. [University Microfilms No M-45991

llillcgas, Mark R.,editm. s/uidini so* on.rgiminon Mic Fanfasit s of C .S. Lrivfv I R R Tblkten. and Charles Williams So. Illinois U , 1969.

Hughes, Robert. The sorcerer's apprentice Time. 1972|Nov 61,/WIN), 10|

Johnson, Jean B. Li Idioma Kjqui. Mexico Institute) National de Anttopologia e I listeria, 1962

Katz, Solomon H, Toward a new science of humanity, Zvgon !975(Marl, 10(11, 12-31

^uPF^renllt:e- Psychology Today l972lDec), 6|7|, 90-92, 95-96,98,

Kennedy, William. Fiction or tact, ,V_t w 69 pi,b'.c |v’4|Nuv 16| 7/(20 1123 2H-3O

Klcps, Art. (Letter) \'eu York Times Book H< \;<'u 197.^Feb 4) 24-25

Kluckhohn. < Ivde. .V,n ,L. Witchcraft Boston Beacon Tress, 1944

Kluvcr, Heinrich. Ah i> :i The Ho me Plant .ttd It's Psvch’-iogiLal Effects London Kegan Paul Trench, Tfubner, 1928 ’ Reissued as .\h.'v<.jJ un.l Mcthunisms of Hallucination. U Chicago. 1966.

Ku rath, William cs Edward H Spicer 4 Hr;, t introduction t< Y.i.pu, 4 .Vdfrve Lan-guageof Sorroru (University of Arizona Social Science Bulletin No. 151 U Arizona, 1947,

Kwitny, L F/it-f.urnLnn Pen Corispn.k y Knoju |9?1

La Barre, Weston. Ha Hueinogens and the shaman n. origins ut religion tn Furst-b 1261-278), 1972

b The Peyote Ciult. 4th edition Schcckcn, 1975. Cite* comments, not cited

here, by H, Gregory, V Howes, R lelhnek, 6. C Simmons

c ---- Stinging criticism (torn the author oi The /'.vote Cult In Nod (40-421,

1976.

Leach. Edmund. High school, A'cw Fork k, ■. ...... “_f Books, 1969||unc 5 ! > |? 13

Levy-Bruhl, Lucien. The Sou] -t the Primitive Pracget, 1966

Levy-Strauss, Claude. Srru iiiral Anthroy •/<gi Basic Books, 1963

Lewis, C.S. Till Ke Hove I ace Harcourt Brace & World 1956. Lerdmans 1964

Lindsay, David, 4 V luge to 4rrh/rus Macmillan 1963 Ballantine. 196k

Mi Allistcr, Callisia. .' or,v/Li. StaBarbara Capra Press I9⁷5

MacDonald, George. Phantasies and Lilith. Ecrdmans. 1964 * Lntruducrion by C S Lewis first published 1946. Z dith first published 189s.

Madsen, William 6 Claudia Madsen The siinerer's apprentice XdtunJ History 19’l||uncl,SO|6l 4 ?6 'K-HO.

MandelbaumDavid G, ri!ir beke ted K’/ir "..sr /■/.-. t r-1 ^lsapt r m Language Culture and Personality U California, 1949

Mandell, Arnold I. L>on loan in the mind Human Behavior, 19'^r5;Jan , J, 1.61-69,

Margolis, Joseph. Don Juan as philosopher In Noel |228 2421. 1976,

Moises, Rosal io, Jane Holden Kellrv s. William Curry Holden. The Tall C.mdle The Personal Chronicle ot a Yuqui Indian U. Nebraska, 1971.

Myerliofi, Barbara GJ'cvutc Hunt T.'n • S.ji red I- mtnei oi t’u flue- il Indians Cornell

U ,1974

Nin. Anais, lhe Diarv of Anais Xin 1931 1934 Swat low x HBW 1966

b ------. The Novel of the Future Mac mil Un, 196*

Nod, Daniel C., editor s>- .ng Cds.n.ned i Re-tenons u> the hum’ Writings of

Carlos Castaneda. Putnam's Sons, 1976 Includes articles cited here: Abridged— Boyd; First; Ricsman_; Time. IJnabridgesi—Leach: Keen; Oatcs-a.b, Spiccr-d.

N’une/ Cabcza de Vaca, Alvar. Belatrun o' Alvar \'ih-.a Cabczc de lucu Translated front the Spanish by Buckingham Smith University Microfilms, 1966 Translation first published in 1871

Oates, loyce Carol. Anthropology or hction-' I Letter] Nriv Y'orl Times Rock Ri c a 1972|Nov 26.41

b Don Juan's last laugh Psvchulogy Today. 1974|Scpl, 8|4 10, 12, 130.

c ------ Letter to Daniel C Noel Ln Noel |69', 1976

Parrott, Wanda Sue. 1 il iolmi'l l C.riancda. J .. J^LJ ’ Icb' _ ;2 299\ ^T’'S|

Pearce, Joseph Chilton. - ■' ■ oi f.'n ■ ■.inn f. Lilian, L97] Pmkn Bonks 1973 *

b Exploring the Crack m the Cosmic 1 yg. Julian, L 974. Pocket Bo<iks 1975.*

Peers, L. Allison, translator and editor The Complete Worksof suinr h ihn "f the Crois volumes l-ltl. Newman, 1949 * First published 1933-34

Polanyi, Michael. Persmi.tl Kn ledo- Harper 6 Row 1964, Torch honk

Pollock. Steven Hayden. The psilocybin mushroom pandemic I- mtnal, c I'- < hi J, he

Drugs l975(Jan-.Marl, 7|II. 73 84

1’uharich, Andrija. The red Mushmom Doubleday, 1959 1974.

Pulvini), Charles I. tx lames I. Lee Counseling according tn don Juan Counsefjngand Values. 197^1 Febl. /9|2I. 125-130

Radin, Paul. Tire Tru Aster 4 Study in American Indian Mythology. Philosophical Library, 1956,

Hank, Otto. The Double l.J North Carolina, 1971,

Rhine, Louisa F. Po IS Tt? The Storyuf ESFund PK. Harper dk. Row. 1975, 1976.

Rresman, Paul. The collaboration or two men and a plant New VrirA Times Book Review. 1971(Oct 22), 7, 10-12.

Roll, William G. The Pij'tcrgi ist. New American Library, 1972, 197.1.■

Ruvtak, Theodore. A sorcerer's apprentice Niif/on. l969|Feb 10,2G8|6|, 184-6.

Rowe, John Howland. Inca culture at the t ime of the Spanish conquest. In J H Steward, editor, Handbook of South American Indians, volume 2, The Andean Civilization'' Smithsonian Institution, 1946. Pp. 183-330.

Riteger, Russ. Tripping the heavy fantastic. Human Re/umor. 197J^Marl .-'ill, 7.1 76.

Russell, Frank. The Pima Indians In Bureau of Ameriudn £thruj/og,v 2t>th \nnual Report. 1904-1905 Pp 4-389 * 47 plates

Srki, R.. eilitot foJAfu/i’< of fap an. U Chicago. 1963

Slid ton. Gilbert .S. Dave Sheridan. The Nil voyage of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, A Mexican odyssey. In their Bi of her Can TciU Spare ⁷5f fur t,^!re Fabtdvus Auro Freak Brother^ (Freak Brother-. # I). San Francisco RipOtf Press Bos 14158, San Francisco CA 94||4|, 1975. 24 unnumbered pages

Spicer, tdward H. Ptfscuu. A i.r^tn Village in Arr/uriJ U. Chicago, 1 • J4U

b i'l'tam. a Yaqui village in Sonera. Ameniiin V,"' rop >r l9>4|Aug

56(4, pt 2. Memoir 77),

c - - -. Cycler of Conquest. U. Arizona. 1962

d--(Review of The Teachings of Dan fuan\ American Anthropologist.

|969(Aprl, 71(2), 320-322.

Sukenick, Ronald. Upward and Ju.inward. The possible drcam. In Noel 1110-120'. 1976.’ First published in Village. Voice, )973(Jan 25)

Swain, I red erick & others Four psilocybin experiences. Psichede/ic Review, 1963(Fall|, 1(2), 219 243.

Tart, Charles T. Did 1 really fly? —Some methodological notes on the investigation or altered states uf consciousness and psi phenomena In Roberto Cavanna, editor. F-d Favorable States or Con.rcftm.mMX. New York Parapsychology Foundation ,29 West 57th Street, New York, NY 100191. 1970. Pp. 3-10.

Thord-Gray, 1. Tarahumara -English, F.nghsh Tarahumara Ou r. n.,-. toJ 'rtfriuhre tion to TbrnJiimiard Grtimnwr U. Miami, 1955

Time. Don |uan and lire sorcerer's apprentice irnie 1973[Mar>l 101. LU¹ 36-38,43-45 , Prepared by Robert Hughes Sandra Burton. Tomas A. Loayza. and others. I

Tomkins, Calvin. The teachings of foe Fye (Field notes tor Carlos Castaneda s next epiphany I New Yorker. 1973|Feb 3|, 4S{50), 37-3ft.

Tovar, loan, translator. Sc Carlos Castaneda LdS Fnomun/.o de Don Triurj lirtu Forma Vjifuj de Coinxim.'iinm Mexico Fimdri de Cultura Lconcmnca 1974 Prulugo de Octavio Paz La mirada anterior, pp 9-23,

b -----. Una Realidad Apart?: Miiec as Conversacitmes con Don Tuan. Mexico:

Fondo de Cultura Econbmica, 1974,

c Viuje a Ixtlan Lay IfCciOncs de Dun /tun Mexico: Fondo de Cultura

Ecandmica, 1975

Wallace, |ohrt. The sorcerer's apprentice: Conversations with Carlos Castaneda I’enthome. 1972(Dcc|, 4(4), B3 86, 139-142

Wasson, R, Gurdon, Seeking the nugic mu-dimonis. Ime. l957| May 131,42|19l, 100-120.

b ----- The divine mushroom Primitive religion and hallucinatory agents. Pro

ceediti^' . ' the Amencjn Philosophical Societv, 1958|June| 702(3). 221-223

c ---- The hallucinogenic fungi of Mexico. Harvard University Botanical

Museum Leatkis. 1961(Feb 17). 19(7), 137-162

^d ----- Soma: Divine Mushroom of /mmorrahti Harcourt, Brace A World, I96H

Hareourt Brace lovanovich 19?|, 1972

^e ■ । Review ot The feachinxs of Don/tranj Economic Hotanv. 1969| Apr-Jun), 23(2), 197.

f I Ke view of ,4 Separate Reality] Economic Botany, I972(jan-Mar), 26|11,

K ------• [Review of fournev to Ixtlan] Economic Botany, 1973|Jan-Marl, 2’1 II,

151152

h--[Review of Tales of Power] Economic Botany. I974(|ub5cpl. 28(3), 245-

246,

¹ ----- George & Florence Cowan, 8t Willard Rhodes. .Maria Sabina and Her

Mazatec Mushroom Velada Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974

I ----- 8* Valentina P. Wasson. Mushrooms Russia and History. volumes 1 tk 2.

Pantheon, 1957

Wasson, Valentina P. I ate the sacred mushrooms. This Week, 19S7(May 19), 1,8 10, .36.

Westfall, Richard S. Newton and the fudge factor. Sciatica, 1973|Fcb 23|, 179|4O75|,

751-758.

Whorf, Beniamin Lee, Language Thought, and Reality MlT'Wilcy, 1956

Wilk., Stan. [Review oi A Separate Rt'.difs'j American .4nth¹-•: ■ "■■■ I9⁷2i Aug'.

7414|. 92! 922.

Young,Dudley.The magic ot peyote New York Timrs Rook Rci rro, I968(8cp291 3(J

ADDED REFERENCES

Gill, Jerry H. The world of don Juan Some reflections Soundings. I974[W|, 57(4), .387-402. Cited here at 117n

Hinz, Evelyn I., editor -A Woman Speak* The Lectures. Seminars and interviews of Anais Nin Swallow, 1975. Pp. 134, 227,

Krippncr, Stanley & Alberto Villoldo The. Realms of Healing Celestial Arts, 19’6- Pp-300-.302.

Langer, Susanne K. The growing center ot knowledge. In het Philosophical Sketch*’> Johns Hopkins, 1962, pp I4.3H ' Fust published in, Lynn White, editor, Frontiers of Knowledge Harper, 1956, pp 257-286

Silverman, David. Reading Castaneda London Routledge A Regan Paul, 1975. A textbook ot sociological epistemology Cited here at 117n

Tovar, d------ Relates de Poder, Mexico Fondo de Cultura Lconemica 1976-

Villa Rojas, Alfonso, Los Mazatecos v etl Problema Indigena de la Cttenc i del Papciloapan Mexico: Institute National Indigenista, 1955

Weitlaner, Roherto J. & Walter A. Hoppe The Mazatec. tn, Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol ⁷ U Texas, 1969 Pp 516-22.