Carlos Castaneda (1925 to 1998) was an anthropologist and writer whose books, beginning with The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968), told of his years as apprentice to a sorcerer called don Juan Matus, sold in their millions and drew a whole generation towards shamanism. They are controversial because critics, above all the psychologist Richard de Mille, found so many inconsistencies in them that don Juan is now widely thought to be invented. Castaneda insisted to the end that his teacher was real, and some, including Michael Harner, have valued the books for what they opened up, whatever their origins.
Who was Carlos Castaneda? #
A writer who presented himself as an anthropologist reporting fieldwork. He was born on 25 December 1925 in Cajamarca, Peru, though he told several different stories about his early life, including that he was born in Brazil. He studied anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.1 According to the story he told, he met don Juan in 1960 at a bus station in Nogales, on the border between Mexico and Arizona, whilst looking for an informant on the use of medicinal and hallucinogenic plants, and became his apprentice, at first in Arizona and then in the Sonoran Desert of northern Mexico.2
His account of that apprenticeship, written up first as a university paper and then a thesis, was published by the University of California Press in 1968 as The Teachings of Don Juan. Sequels followed, among them A Separate Reality (1971), Journey to Ixtlan (1972), which UCLA accepted for his doctorate in 1973, and Tales of Power (1974). The books were translated into many languages and made him one of the best-known anthropologists in the world.3 In the 1990s he began teaching a system of movements he called Tensegrity, through a company he set up for the purpose. He died on 27 April 1998.4
Don Juan is presented as a Yaqui, from Sonora in northern Mexico, though one who had travelled widely and whose knowledge Castaneda did not tie to any one culture. The Yaqui were mainly farmers along the Yaqui River, who also hunted, fished and gathered.5
What do the books teach? #
That there is a reality beyond the everyday, ego-bound one, and that a ‘man of knowledge’ can learn to perceive it. In the first books don Juan leads his apprentice into that ‘separate reality’ with the help of power plants such as peyote, datura and mushrooms, and through long, teasing conversations meant to break down his ordinary ways of seeing. In the later books the plants drop away, and don Juan’s knowledge is traced back to the ancient Toltecs of central Mexico. The aim throughout, as Castaneda later put it, is to break the limits of ordinary perception.6
For many readers the books’ images, the spirit moths, the plant ally Mescalito, the sorcerer don Genaro held to the slippery rocks at the top of a waterfall, became part of their own inner lives, and some went looking in the American Southwest for teachers of their own.7
Why are the books controversial? #
Because the evidence suggests don Juan may never have existed. Doubts began early. The mushroom expert R. Gordon Wasson was puzzled that don Juan smoked powdered mushrooms, which do not burn, and later said that when he first read the book he “smelled a hoax”. The anthropologist David Aberle was troubled that the books never gave don Juan a real setting.8
The decisive attack came in 1976, in the psychologist Richard de Mille’s Castaneda’s Journey. De Mille, and later the anthropologist Jay Fikes, listed many inconsistencies, among them no native names for the power plants, animals and insects in the Sonoran Desert that do not live there, and no field notes that anyone could check. De Mille called Castaneda a “Rorschach man”, a figure onto whom readers projected whatever they were looking for, and the books’ changing message, from drugs in the psychedelic 1960s to drug-free practice later, seemed to follow the mood of their readers.9 Some, such as the novelist Joyce Carol Oates, have read them as fiction rather than scholarship.10
On the other side, Castaneda maintained until his death that he had studied with don Juan and done his fieldwork in Arizona and Mexico. Pressed for details, he answered that what don Juan taught could not be explained in terms of cause and effect, or checked by the standards of Western scholarship. When de Mille accused him of borrowing from Michael Harner’s ethnography, Harner defended him, pointing out that shamanic practices are very similar across the world.11 Harner also wrote that the books, “regardless of the questions that have been raised regarding their degree of fictionalization, have performed the valuable service of introducing many Westerners to the adventure and excitement of shamanism and to some of the legitimate principles involved.”12 And for many readers it hardly mattered. As one put it, it did not matter whether it was ethnography or myth they were reading.
How does Therapeutic Shamanism see Castaneda’s books? #
The books themselves are not part of Therapeutic Shamanism’s teaching, but several of its principles bear on them. The first is about drugs. Therapeutic Shamanism does not use psychoactive plants. Dramatic experiences of that kind can wake people up, but their effects tend to wear off once a person is back in ordinary modern life, and a shamanic practice needs to become part of daily life, not something semi-detached from it.13 The steady drum, not the plant, is the way into the journey. See Do you need psychedelics or plant medicines to practise shamanism?
The second is about the Toltecs. Many people think of empires such as the Inca, Aztec and Toltec as shamanic, and in a sense they may have been, but they were also Fallen societies, city-based, deeply unequal, hierarchical and violent, so a teaching traced to them is not necessarily free of Taker thinking.14 Harner noticed something related, that the books do not emphasise healing, though healing is generally among the most important tasks of shamanism, perhaps because don Juan is a warrior or sorcerer type of shaman.15 Therapeutic Shamanism, as its name says, is first of all a healing path.
The third is about authenticity. Therapeutic Shamanism does not judge a practice by whether it comes from an unbroken tradition, but by whether it works.16 Seen that way, the question of whether don Juan lived matters less than whether what the books teach holds up in practice. The books also leave a reader unable to tell which parts, if any, come from real Yaqui or other indigenous teachers. See What is plastic shamanism? and What is neo-shamanism, and how does it differ from traditional shamanism?
