What’s the deal with Carlos Castaneda and The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge? I always thought he was just a nut job who ate too many mushrooms. But now I hear that the whole thing is fiction. Did Castaneda ever go to Mexico and eat peyote with an old Indian? Are any of his books true? Or is the whole thing completely made up?
Teachings, published in 1968 by the University of California Press, purports to be the first-person account of a UCLA anthropology student who meets an old man named Juan Matus at a bus station on the Mexican border while on a field trip looking for medicinal plants. The student, Carlos Castaneda, strikes up a friendship with the old man, who eventually reveals himself to be a Yaqui Indian sorcerer. Don Juan decides to make Castaneda his apprentice and teach him the ways of a “man of knowledge.” This consists mainly of giving cryptic answers to Castaneda’s naive questions and instructing him in the use of hallucinogenic plants–peyote, jimsonweed, and a mushroom possibly containing psilocybin. One of these plants will become Castaneda’s “ally,” Don Juan says, and help him see the world as it is. (This theme, only hinted at in Teachings, is developed in later books.) Under Don Juan’s tutelage, Castaneda takes several drug trips, which are alternately exhilarating and terrifying. Although he makes progress, he eventually becomes too frightened to continue his training. The story breaks off in 1965.
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Skeptics demanded proof that Don Juan existed. Apart from 12 pages of “field notes,” which apparently were from an early draft of the books, no such proof was forthcoming. Journalists discovered that Castaneda was a habitual teller of tall tales who, among other things, falsified his family background and his place and date of birth. Many early admirers were offended when he turned to the occult in his later work. Before his death from cancer in 1998 he gave $600-a-head seminars on “Tensegrity,” full of New Age nonsense about “600 locations in the luminous egg of man.”
