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

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