The greatest science hoax since the Piltdown man

 

CASTANEDA’S JOURNEY The Power and the Allegory

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 him- self, 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 case) 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 when I did play them I 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 One says it did.

During the two years between editions popular critics flatly proclaimed the don Juan books a hoax—a belated illumination provoked chiefly by the outrageous extremes their generally vii 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 I 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’ strange adventures) to “How could it have happened?” (it now being the academic ratifica- tion of Castaneda’s fantasies, particularly UCLA’s covert acceptance of a retitled published novel as a dissertation in scientific anthropology).

The puzzle persisted. Ralph L. Beals, one of Castaneda’s early professors, complained at length in the American An- thropologist (June 1978) about his former student’s evasive- ness, improbable trips to Sonora, and invisible fieldnotes, but Michael Harner—from four of whose published works (Chap- ter Five proposes) 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 of 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 are 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 in- quiry, the academy closed ranks to cover up what had been viii done, thus provoking eventual accusations of fraud and demands for investigation and censure from scholars who were not so amused as I.

Such shenanigans (don Juan would 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 Juan 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 dawn man) clung to the evo- lutionary 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 the 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 be- tween ape and man, an evolutionary gap now filled by Austra- lopithecus. Preoccupied by his unfashionable thesis, Smith conceived a trick to draw 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 (rea- sons 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 skep- tical inquiry—into the shape of Piltdown’s teeth, into the existence of Castaneda’s voluminous Spanish fieldnotes, never offered for 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 for a particular scientific tendency—Smith’s cultural diffusion, the ethnosci- ence and ethnomethodology Castaneda encountered at UCLA.
Each was hailed by some as a giant step in science but 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 Journey for the Los Angeles Tinies 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 im- posture.

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 not 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 find him or monuments erected to him; trifling research funds were diverted by him. The spate of Juanist 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 Juan 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 Turnbull’s words) “regard anthropology primarily as a humanity and those who regard it primarily as a science”.

In 1955 J. S. Weiner convinced the world of Dawson’s appar- ent duplicity and Piltdown’s undeniable illegitimacy. Four years later, when Weiner’s Piltdown Forgery was galvanizing anthropology students much as The Teachings of Don Juan 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 Second Ring of Power Castaneda soared to his fifth level of incredibility, thus disillusioning a legion of don Juan’s disciples. 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 legitimizer, “would naturally conclude he was a fraud”. My considered judgment is that anyone carefully and skeptically reading the early 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 don Juan, I carelessly omitted a telling example of that contradiction. Let me add it here.

During the first two years of Carlos’ storied apprenticeship (narrative 1961–1962) don Juan speaks standard English one day, in The Teachings, slang the next, in Journey to Ixtlan, a remarkable counterpoint which can, of course, be laid to don Juan’s professed translator, Castaneda. Harder to explain away than this counterpoint of speech or translation is a corresponding counterpoint of mood.

The Teachings tells a gloomy, somber tale, in which excite- ment tends toward fear or wonder, seldom toward joy or amusement. When, in narrative-1968, the legendary Carlos takes up the second part of his apprenticeship (recounted in the second book, A Separate Reality), he finds “the total mood of don Juan’s teaching . . . more relaxed. He laughed and also made me laugh a great deal. There seemed to be 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 Teachings. 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 I do 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 I think of any authorly excuse for this contradiction. If 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? I judge this one systematic flaw, all by itself, unsupported by numerous other contradictions de- scribed 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 don Juan’s favor, I also erred once against him. Chapter Three of the first edition argued hilari- ously but incorrectly that “pulling your leg” could not have been translated from Spanish; the Spanish, Juan Tovar has shown, is tomándote el pelo. My conclusion, however, re- mains 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 Harner’s missing reference to Yaquis using Datura.

Further research has traced additional sources for don Juan’s wisdom and Carlos’ exploits. The fieldwork of just one of Castaneda’s fellow UCLA graduate students, for example, offers the following Juanist 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 Mazatec Ixtlan). Such details await publication in The Don Juan Papers, but 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, I 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’ soul and interfered with his hunt- ing for power. A worthy opponent, don Juan called her. To restore her personal history we have to go back to a rather surprising place, the Saturday Evening Post, where John Ko- hler’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 Har- vard with their psychedelic evangelism, they set up a research and training center for members of their “International Federation for Inner Freedom” in the Mexican fishing village of Zihuatanejo, up the coast from Acapulco. There “If-If “ found a shoreline sanctuary in the charming little Hotel Catalina.

“I sat transfixed all evening before a tree, feeling in it the very treeness of trees”, said one chemico-spiritual tripper in Ko- hler’s account.

“I sensed it was a tree by its odor”, a drugless Carlos would recall in Tales of Power (200). “Something in me ‘knew’ that that peculiar odor was the ‘essence’ of tree”.

“Our favorite concepts are standing in the way of a flood- tide”, 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 drugless Ixtlan (267).

If-If proposed to liberate its members from their “webs”, so that they might soar through the infinite space of conscious- ness. Carlos’ be-mushroomed head would fly among silvery crows; his undrugged eyes would see a range of mountains as a “web of light fibers” (Ixtlan 202).

Though If-If adopted The Tibetan Book of the Dead as a drug-taker’s manual, don Juan would tell Carlos the book was a “bunch of crap” (Reality 194).

Dashing the hopes of some five-thousand acidophile appli- cants, 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 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 would carry future readers away from what Castaneda saw as the haphazard drug-fiendery of the Catalina, toward a disciplined and eventually drugless mysticism. In this un- proclaimed competition for the hearts and minds of self- transcenders, 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, “feel- ing 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 mythogenic power could be felt in the world through the don Juan allegory.

Richard de Mille