DRUGS 30
2-1c The interviewer wrote:
Castaneda makes the reader experience the pressure of mysterious winds and the shiver of
leaves at twilight, the hunter’s peculiar alertness to sound and smell, the rock-bottom scrubbiness
of Indian life, the raw fragrance of tequila and the vile, fibrous taste of peyote, the dust in the car,
and the loft of a crow’s flight. It is a superbly concrete setting, dense with animistic meaning.
This is just as well, in view of the utter weirdness of the events that happen in it.
Following that interview, Castaneda retired from public view.
In the 1990s, Castaneda once again began appearing in public to promote Tensegrity, a group of
movements that he claimed had been passed down by 25 generations of Toltec shamans.
On 16 June 1995, articles of incorporation executed by George Short were filed to create
Cleargreen Incorporated. The Cleargreen statement of purpose says in part:
Cleargreen is a corporation that has a twofold purpose. First, it sponsors and organizes seminars
and workshops on Carlos Castaneda’s Tensegrity, and second, it is a publishing house.
Cleargreen published three videos of Tensegrity movements while Castaneda was alive.
Castaneda himself did not appear in the videos.
2-1d Death
Castaneda died on April 27, 1998 in Los Angeles due to complications from hepatocellular
cancer. There was no public service; Castaneda was cremated and the ashes were sent to
Mexico. His death was unknown to the outside world until nearly two months later, on 19 June
1998, when an obituary entitled “A Hushed Death for Mystic Author Carlos Castaneda” by staff
writer J. R. Moehringer appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
Four months after Castaneda’s death, C. J. Castaneda, also known as Adrian Vashon, whose
birth certificate shows Carlos Castaneda as his father, challenged Castaneda’s will in probate
court. Carlos’ death certificate states metabolic encephalopathy for 72 hours prior to his death,
yet the will was supposedly signed 48 hours before Castaneda’s death in c C.J. challenged its
authenticity. The challenge was ultimately unsuccessful.
2-1e Castaneda’s companions
After Castaneda stepped away from public view in 1973, he bought a large house in Los Angeles
which he shared with some of his female companions. The women broke off relationships with
friends and family when they joined Castaneda’s group. They also refused to be photographed
and took new names: Regina Thal became Florinda Donner-Grau, Maryann Simko became
Taisha Abelar and Kathleen Pohlman became Carol Tiggs. Another disciple, Patricia Partin,
was renamed Blue Scout by Castaneda.
Shortly after Castaneda died in April 1998, his companions Donner-Grau, Abelar and Patricia
Partin disappeared. Amalia Marquez (also known as Talia Bey) and Tensegrity instructor Kylie
Lundahl had their phones disconnected and also disappeared. Weeks later, Partin’s red Ford
Escort was found abandoned in Death Valley.
Because the women in question had cut all ties with family and friends, it was some time before
people noticed they were missing. There has been no official investigation into the
disappearances of Donner-Grau, Simko and Lundahl. Luis Marquez, the brother of Talia Bey,
went to police in 1999 over his sister’s disappearance, but was unable to convince them that
it merited investigation.
In 2006, Partin’s sun-bleached skeleton was discovered by a pair of hikers in Death Valley’s
Panamint Dunes area and was identified by DNA testing. The investigating authorities ruled
Partin’s death as undetermined.
On August 2, 1998, Carol Tiggs spoke at a workshop in Ontario, Canada. Since that time,
she also has disappeared.
2-1f Reception
Despite the widespread popularity of his works, some critics questioned the validity of
Castaneda’s books as early as 1969. In a series of articles, R. Gordon Wasson, who had
made psychoactive mushrooms famous, and had originally praised Castaneda’s work,
questioned the accuracies of Castaneda’s botanical claims.
In 1976, author and Scientologist Richard de Mille published Castaneda’s Journey: The Power
and the Allegory, in which he argued, “Logical or chronological errors in the narrative constitute
the best evidence that Castaneda’s books are works of fiction. If no one has discovered these
errors before, the reason must be that no one has listed the events of the first three books in
sequence. Once that has been done, the errors are unmistakable.” On these showings de
Mille asserts, The Teachings of Don Juan and Journey to Ixtlan (his third book) cannot both be
factual reports.
For his part, Castaneda in the introduction to A Separate Reality, his second book, addressed
the incomprehensible nature of his experiences as only being able to be understood in the
context of the alien system of perception from which they arose, suggesting that his books are
by their very nature contradictory and incomprehensible (as to time and place especially) to
academic and critical inquiry.
In a 1968 radio interview with Theodore Roszak, Castaneda, while confirming that his mystical
experiences were absolutely true to life, did explain that he took some chronological license in
his writing about actual events: “The way the books present it seems to heighten some dramatic
sequences, which is, I’m afraid, not true to real life. There are enormous gaps in between in
which ordinary things took place, that are not included. I didn’t include in the book because they
did not pertain to the system I wanted to portray, so I just simply took them away, you see.
And that means that the gaps between those very heightened states, you know, whatever, says
that I remove things that are continuous crescendos, in kind of sequence leading to a very
dramatic solution. But in real life it was a very simple matter because it took years between,
months pass in between them, and in the meantime we did all kinds of things. We even went
hunting. He (Don Juan) told me how to trap things, set traps, very old, old ways of setting a trap,
and how to catch rattlesnakes. He told me how to prepare rattlesnakes, in fact. And so that
eases up, you see, the distrust or the fear.”
At first, and with the backing of academic qualifications and the UCLA anthropological
department, Castaneda’s work was critically acclaimed. Notable anthropologists like Edward
Spicer (1969) and Edmund Leach (1969) praised Castaneda, alongside more alternative and
young anthropologists.
The authenticity of Don Juan was accepted for six years, until Richard de Mille and Daniel Noel
both published their critiques of the Don Juan books in 1976. Later anthropologists specializing
in Yaqui Indian culture (William Curry Holden, Jane Holden Kelley and Edward H. Spicer), who
originally supported Castaneda’s account as true, questioned the accuracy of Castaneda’s work.
Other criticisms of Castaneda’s work include the total lack of Yaqui vocabulary or terms for any
of his experiences, and his refusal to defend himself against the accusation that he received his
PhD from UCLA through deception. Stephen C. Thomas notes that in her book With Good Heart:
Yaqui Beliefs and Ceremonies in Pascua Village, Muriel Thayer Painter gives examples of
Yaqui vocabulary associated with spirituality: “morea,” an equivalent to the Spanish brujo;
“saurino,” used to describe persons with the gift of divination; and “seataka,” or spiritual power,
a word which is “fundamental to Yaqui thought and life.” Thomas further states:
It is hard to believe that Castaneda’s benefactor, a self-professed Yaqui, would fail to employ
these native expressions throughout the apprenticeship. In omitting such intrinsically relevant
terms from his ethnography, Castaneda critically undermines his portrait of Don Juan as a bona
fide Yaqui sorcerer.
Dr. Clement Meighan, Stephen C. Thomas, and others point out that the books largely, and for
the most part, do not describe Yaqui culture at all with its emphasis on Catholic upbringing and
conflict with the Federal State of Mexico, but rather focus on the international movements and
life of Don Juan who was described in the books as traveling and having many connections,
and abodes, in the Southwestern United States (Arizona), Northern Mexico, and Oaxaca.
Don Juan was described in the books as a shaman steeped in a mostly lost Toltec philosophy
and decidedly anti-Catholic. Dr. Clement Meighan, one of Castaneda’s professors at UCLA,
and an acknowledged expert on Indian culture in the U.S., Mexico, and other areas in North
America, up to his death, never doubted that Castaneda’s work was based upon authentic
contact with and observations of Indians. Later, Don Miguel Ruiz also verified the existence of
Indian “Brujos” in Mexico with native teachings much like Don Juan’s.
A March 5, 1973 Time article by Sandra Burton, looking at both sides of the controversy, stated:
... the more worldly claim to importance of Castaneda’s books: to wit, that they are anthropology,
a specific and truthful account of an aspect of Mexican Indian culture as shown by the speech and
actions of one person, a shaman named Juan Matus. That proof hinges on the credibility of
Don Juan as a being and Carlos Castaneda as a witness. Yet there is no corroboration beyond
Castaneda’s writings that Don Juan did what he is said to have done, and very little that he exists
at all.
A strong case can be made that the Don Juan books are of a different order of truthfulness from
Castaneda’s pre-Don Juan past. Where, for example, was the motive for an elaborate scholarly
put-on? The Teachings were submitted to a university press, an unlikely prospect for best-sellerdom.
Besides, getting an anthropology degree from U.C.L.A. is not so difficult that a candidate would
employ so vast a confabulation just to avoid research. A little fudging perhaps, but not a whole
system in the manner of The Teachings, written by an unknown student with, at the outset, no hope
of commercial success.
David Silverman sees value in the work even while considering it fictional. In Reading Castaneda
he describes the apparent deception as a critique of anthropology field work in general – a field
that relies heavily on personal experience, and necessarily views other cultures through a lens.
According to Silverman, not only the descriptions of peyote trips but also the fictional nature of the
work are meant to place doubt on other works of anthropology.
Donald Wieve cites Castaneda to explain the insider/outsider problem as it relates to mystical
experiences, while acknowledging the fictional nature of his work.
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