A hoaxer without his critic is like a bridegroom without his mother-in-law

The Don Juan Papers Further Castaneda Controversies Edited by Richard de Mille

Foreword

To kill an error, Darwin said, is as good a service to science as establishing a new fact or truth, and sometimes it is better. But you have to catch the error before you can kill it. The error we are hunting here is the foolish academic legitimation and irresponsible perennial promulgation of a social-science hoax. The hoax in question is ten years of reported desert field work, first published in three popular volumes, the third of which was accepted as a formal dissertation in anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. The hoaxer is Carlos Castaneda, prolific author of ingenious but suspect anthropological best-sellers. The hunters and catchers of the error give chase in this book, The Don Juan Papers.

In 1975, Richard de Mille, psychologist, academician, writer, and editor, was reading Castaneda's second volume, about "don Juan," the now legendary Mexican Indian teacher of universal wisdom, when he was struck by a stupendous scientifico-literary revelation: Castaneda's sage of the sagebrush was an invented Indian, and those eclectic metaphysical conversations in the desert were scholastic allegories. For the next six years de Mille pursued Castaneda up and down the stacks and across the realms of discourse, until he had produced Castaneda's Journey: The Power and the Allegory and The Don Juan Papers. These books, well-received by scholars and public alike, drill the didactic bones of Uclanthropus Pilt-dunides Castanedae and everywhere strike baloney — though, of course, many of Castaneda's fans, with or without Ph.D., still like to believe that Carlos and don Juan roamed Sonoran sands together, catching wild rabbits with bare hands while discussing Husserl and Wittgenstein.

Going beyond Darwin's maxim, the Don Juan Papers not only nail an academic error but ask how this quite detectable hoax could succeed so long and so well in the halls of higher learning and what that says about the morale and competence of our guardians of scholarly truth and teachers of the next generation.

James A. Clifton
Frankenthal Professor of Anthropology and History University of Wisconsin,
Green Bay Series Editor

Preface

Since the 1981 edition of this book, the positions of the disputants have changed little if at all. Carlos Castaneda has published further best-selling romances about his magico-mystical teacher, the mysterious don Juan, and continues to declare that he is not making anything up. Skeptics and subscribers go on arguing about whether his story is fact or fiction and whether the difference matters. Humanists are increasingly disappointed by his swift, unreturning flight into occultism. Occultists accuse him of muddying ancient wisdom with impudent hogwash. Parapsychologists learn from him how clever Trickster's disguises can be. Ronald Siegel, a psychopharmacologist, finds enough anomalies in Carlos's 22 wondrous drug trips to refute Castaneda's purported ethnobotany. Rodney Needham, a social anthropologist, discovers one more academic author don Juan must have been reading out there in the desert: Eugen Herrigel, who in turn pirated some of his sham zen from the German philosophical aphorisms of G. C. Lichtenberg. Bruce Bebb, a writer in southern California, recalls that in 1957, three years before Carlos met don Juan, Castaneda was already talking about meditating, saying he wanted clarity, and writing about shamans — as well as claiming to have been a barber, a tailor, a knifer of dogs, a thief, a veteran, the husband of a junkie, and a New York jazz trumpeter. Meanwhile, back at the campus, Castaneda's UCLA faculty patrons have not confessed the slightest error, and innocent students across the land are still being led astray by not entirely guiltless teachers who persist in offering Castaneda's pseudo-Yaqui, Euro-Asian wizard as an Amerindian guide to the invisible world.

From the visible world, since 1981, four important figures in this book have vanished. Ralph Beals, who roamed the real Sonoran sands and knew the Yaqui when they were still unencumbered by Wittgensteinian Upanishads, regretted in 1978 that some members of the department of anthropology he had founded had been outwitted or demoralized by a typewriting coyote; in 1985, he died at 83. R. Gordon Wasson, first recorded non-Indian to eat the psilocybic mushroom, identifier of the ancient soma, unveiler of the Eleusinian potion, finished his fifty-year ethnobotanic journey into prehistoric visionary realms; in 1986, he died at 88. Maria Sabina, shaman of Huautla, early model for don Juan, woman who spoke with God and with Benito Juarez, filled the deep sierran night with luminous language taught to her by the tiny "saint children" that had entered her body; in 1985, she died at 91.

Barbara G. Myerhoff, pilgrim in Wirikuta, witness at the waterfall, warrior in the jungle of Academe, turned to the study of her own people, saying: "I will never be a Huichol Indian . . . but I will be a little old Jewish lady." She was wrong about the second part. With scarcely a word of warning, fierce, implacable death overtook her at 49, in the midst of her work, unwilling to go, a mournful loss to all who knew her. On reading Alvaro Estrada's oral autobiography of Maria Sabina and contrasting it with the eclectic audacities of her friend Carlos Castaneda, Myerhoff wrote:

Indigenous traditions deserve accurate and respectful preservation, and these records must be distinguished from imaginative works. ... It is the obligation of the lettered to make written records of the lore of the unlettered simply a record—not a mirror of ourselves or our needs and fantasies.
And what of the fantasist himself? On 4 December 1981, I met him at last, standing at the top of the Up escalator in the Los Angeles Hilton Hotel, where (he said) he was waiting for Michael Harner. Exactly as I had imagined him in manner, he was in form surprisingly small and delicate, no longer the plump young scamp who is pictured on page 16. His elfin eyes were hollow and haunted, as if he had actually seen the other world and somehow wished he hadn't. Me, however, he was apparently delighted to see. He bounced up and down, put his hand on my shoulder, and said in a confidential tone, "We have so much to talk about." I listened for twenty minutes.

He described his strange adventures as though I knew nothing about them, contradicting specific things I had written about him, without mentioning that I had written them. He said he had no imagination at all and could only report what had happened to him. His former teachers no longer believed him, he said. Goldschmidt wouldn't talk to him. A writer he had met in the hotel bar was despondent over bad reviews. A businessman he knew had become a psychiatrist and found that both careers were empty. Fame was an illusion. "Look at Telly Savalas. Who remembers him today?" I tried to let him go. He clung to me. He said, "Ask me anything you want." I asked him about his so-called Toltecs. Toltecs was not their real name, he said; it was "just a denomination, like Democrats." Softly, solemnly he defined our inescapable, paradoxical, seriocomic collaboration: "You know, these people that I'm working with in Mexico have forbidden me—absolutely forbidden me—to read anything that is written about me. So, for that reason, I have not read your books. But I want to say that for me it is an honor—an honor — that anyone writes about me, even if he says that my books are crap." And in that moment I saw that no con has only one side, and a hoaxer without his critic is like a bridegroom without his mother-in-law.

Richard de Mille June 1989

The Shaman of Academe

Carlos Castaneda said he was bom in Brazil in 1935. His immigration record said he was bom in Peru in 1925. He said his father was a professor of literature. Time said his father was a goldsmith. He said he had no interest in mysticism. His former wife said mysticism was all they ever talked about.

In 1973 Castaneda received a Ph.D. in anthropology for interviewing a mystical old Mexican Indian named don Juan Matus on many occasions from 1960 to 1971, and for documenting the interviews at great length in three volumes of field reports, the third of which was accepted as his dissertation at the University of California, Los Angeles. In all of that, there is nothing particularly unusual.

The three volumes of field reports sold millions of copies coast to coast and around the world. That's unusual.
Don Juan, the mystical old Mexican Indian, was an imaginary person.

That's extraordinary.

“Is it possible that these books are non-fiction?" exclaimed Joyce Carol Oates. Novelists Oates and William Kennedy and science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon were quick to recognize Castaneda as a fellow story teller.

Carlos (as I call the young anthropologist in the story told by Castaneda) goes to Arizona to learn how the Indians use peyote but to his utter amazement is chosen by the imperious don Juan, whom he has accidentally met in a Greyhound bus station, to become “a man of knowledge," which means he will after long and arduous training enter “a separate reality" and see the essence of the world as mystics do.

Published during the psychedelic years, The Teachings of Don Juan and A Separate Reality recount 22 wondrous drug trips through which don Juan guides Carlos, but as new-age consciousness gained favor in the media Journey to Ixtlan suddenly discovered a wealth of neglected drugless techniques in some piles of old fieldnotes Carlos had stupidly set aside. Tales of Power and The Second Ring of Power reflected later popular trends toward occultism and feminism.

If the trendy Castaneda could write at least five best sellers in a row, why did he bother with the anthropology hoax? An obvious economic reason is that competition was too steep in the fiction market. Defective Richard de Mille style, weak dramatic structure, poverty of detail, cardboard characters that do not develop (but are suitable for allegory), stereotyped emotions, and absence of ordinary human relationships make his books unsalable except as fact. Readers love a true adventure even if badly told.

A more important, psychological reason is that anyone who would keep up such a difficult and complicated pretense for eight years before getting any material reward is a person who habitually refuses to follow the rules of society and insists on winning the game of life by playing tricks. As with Castaneda, this lifelong pattern often includes personal charm, high intelligence, and some genuine accomplishments along with the con job.

Professors do get conned, admitted Clement Meighan, a member of Castaneda's doctoral committee, "but someone's going to have to prove this."

(...)

A second kind of proof arises from absence of convincing detail and presence of implausible detail. During nine years of collecting plants and hunting animals with don Juan/ Carlos learns not one Indian name for any plant or animal, and precious few Spanish or English names. No specimen of don Juan's hallucinogenic mushroom was brought back for verification, though Gordon Wasson had challenged its identification in 1968. Don Juan's desert is vaguely described, his habitations are all but featureless. Incessantly sauntering across the sands in seasons when (Hans Sebald will tell us) harsh conditions keep prudent persons away, Carlos and don Juan go quite unmolested by pests that normally torment desert hikers. Carlos climbs unclimbable trees and stalks unstalkable animals. With prodigious speed and skill he writes down "everything" don Juan says to him under the most unlikely conditions. No one but Carlos has seen don Juan.

Since it has recently come to light that Castaneda met serious early resistance from skeptics in the UCLA faculty, we must believe any supporting evidence he had at his disposal — Indian vocabulary, plant specimens, photographs of places, tape recordings he says were made, or Carlos's "voluminous field notes"—would have been promptly pre¬ sented to counter that resistance. No such presentation occurred, which leads to the reasonable inference that no such evidence existed and that the fieldwork that would have furnished it did not exist either, except in Castaneda's highly developed imagination.

A third kind of proof is found in don Juan's teachings, which sample American Indian folklore, oriental mysticism, and European philosophy.

Indignantly dismissing such a proof, don Juan's followers declare that enlightened minds think alike in all times and places, but there is more to the proof than similar ideas; there are similar words. When don Juan opens his mouth, the words of particular writers come out. An example will show what I mean. Though I have condensed lines and added italics, I have not changed any words:

The Human Aura is seen by the psychic observer as a luminous cloud, egg-shaped, streaked by fine lines like stiff bristles standing out in all directions.

A man looks like an egg of circulating fibers. And his arms and legs are like luminous bristles bursting out in all directions.

Of these two passages, the first comes from a book published in 1903, the second from A Separate Reality, a direct quote from don Juan. What I find piquant about this seventy-year echo is the contention that don Juan spoke only Spanish to Carlos. Somehow, in the course of translating don Juan's Spanish, Castaneda managed to resurrect the English phrases of Yogi Ramacharaka, a pseudonymous American hack writer of fake mysticism whose works are still available in occult bookstores.

Could such correspondence be accidental? Despite the close matching of words and ideas, one would have to allow the possibility if this were the only example, but it is not. Of the two following passages, the first is condensed from the Psychedelic Review, the second from The Teachings of Don Juan. Again I have added italics but no words:

My eyes were closed, and a large black pool started to open up in front of them. I was able to see a red spot. I was aware of a most unusual odor, and of different parts of my body getting extremely warm, which felt extremely good.
What was very outstanding was the pungent odor of the water.

It smelled like cockroaches. I got very warm, and blood rushed to my ears. I saw a red spot in front of my eyes. 'What would have happened if I had not seen red?' 'You would have seen black.' 'What happens to those who see red?' 'An effect of pleasure.'

This goes beyond accidental correspondence. These two passages, each of which is drawn from less than a page of original text, have in common at least five specific word combinations as well as seven ideas: drug hallucination, seeing black, seeing red, unusual odor, parts of the body, getting very warm, and pleasure.

How many stylistic echoes would be needed to prove that don Juan's teachings and Carlos's adventures originated not in the Sonoran desert but in the library at UCLA? The Alleglossary, at the back of this volume, lists some 200 exhibits many of which clearly demonstrate and all of which suggest literary influence of earlier publications on Castaneda's supposed field reports. The list convinces me, but it may never convince another contributor to this volume, who said the don Juan books are "beneficially viewed as a sacred text," which prepares us "to witness, to accept without really understanding." Could that be the voice of Baba Ram Dass addressing the Clearlight Conference? No, it is Professor Stan Wilk writing in the leading official journal of the American Anthropological Association. Do most anthropologists feel that way about Castaneda?

No again. Such views are held by a small but devout minority, who see Castaneda as an emissary to an ideal world of anthropological discovery now returned to teach his colleagues perfect fieldwork. In that other world, which so far only Carlos has been privileged to visit, the fieldworker completely shares /the worldview of his informant, unobstructed by language barriers, culture conflict, grant limitations, de¬ partmental demands, fashions in theory, or modernist conceptions of reality. This monumental achievement required many years and would have been impossible without the tutelage of don Juan, a unique and persistent teacher, now departed, but some comfort can nevertheless be derived from certain knowledge that one indomitable pioneer has scaled the heights. Though Carlos's admirerers could not accompany him into those Elysian fields, they can at least still lose themselves in reports of the fieldwork written by Castaneda.

Thousands of years before there were any priests or holy books or churches, human dealings with transcendental agencies were conducted by spiritual technicians who traveled between this and other worlds, convoying the dead to safety, retrieving souls lost by the living, finding cures for the sick, and bringing back power to control the elements and knowledge of hidden realms. To make those perilous passages easier they often ate, smoked, or rubbed their bodies with visionary plants that helped them fly into the sky. Anthropologists call such special men (and sometimes women) shamans, which is what they were called by the Tungus tribe of Siberia. Shaman means "one who knows." In his singular way, Carlos Castaneda is the shaman of the academy, the special person who goes to another world to bring back indispensable knowledge only he can obtain.

Richard de Mille