On a day in the early spring of 1998 I found myself sitting in a hotel room in Hollywood waiting to hear whether or not I would be interviewing Carlos Castaneda. He was the author of The Teachings of Don Juan, published in 1968, a book which recounted his apprenticeship in the deserts of Mexico at the feet of an elderly Indian shaman and his induction through mind-altering substances into ‘the Yaqui way of knowledge’.
In revealing the deeper reality behind the illusion of existence, providing a blueprint for the life of ‘a warrior’ free from the fear of death, Don Juan’s teachings were perfectly attuned to the zeitgeist of the age. Like Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf and Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, The Teachings of Don Juan and its sequels became essential reading for legions of seekers after truth. The books sold in their millions; yet Castaneda himself remained as mysterious as his Yaqui teacher.
A kind of New Age Salinger or Pynchon, Castaneda, following Don Juan’s instruction for ‘a man of knowledge’ to ‘create a fog around yourself’, had given only a handful of interviews in some 30 years, had never appeared on television and had refused to be photographed. I was told I could not record our conversation but only take notes, just as Castaneda himself had done with Don Juan. And then the interview was cancelled. Castaneda, I was informed, was ‘in retreat’ in the Mexican desert. A few weeks later I learned that in fact he was three miles away from where I was sitting, in his Westwood home, on a morphine drip, dying of liver cancer and watching war videos.
‘Let me unequivocally get this out of the way,’ Ru Marshall writes in the prologue to this astonishing book. There was no Don Juan, no trips to the desert, no psychedelic experiences:
They were novels. Phenomenological ghost stories. Or, put another way, it was all a hoax, a trick. A brilliant joke. Or, put slightly more carefully: outside of the reality created by Castaneda’s words, Don Juan didn’t exist.
And what a hoax, what a trick. The legend of Don Juan was a lie which Castaneda perpetrated on the millions who read his books. His fans included Bob Dylan, Octavio Paz and John Lennon, who once described Yoko Ono as ‘my Don Juan. She taught me everything I fucking know.’ Anthropologists endorsed The Teachings of Don Juan, and assessors at UCLA awarded Castaneda a PhD on the basis of his researches – completely bogus as they were.
As Marshall puts it, Castaneda didn’t lie out of convenience or opportunism. He lied because he loved to. Lying was for him an art. He lied about his time as a border spy in Texas; about being a jazz trumpeter in New York; and about the bayonet wound he’d received in North Korea while leading a troop of pre-Castro Cuban soldiers. His favourite film director was Federico Fellini, who was in turn an avid fan and wanted to make a film of The Teachings. When they eventually met, Castaneda told Fellini he had gone with Don Juan to see La Dolce Vita three times. Fellini was smitten. Marshall writes:
Although there may have been moments when Carlos wanted to stop lying, to admit the scale of his problem – to agree it was a problem, not a skill – would have been to admit to an imperfection his ego couldn’t afford. He had to be impeccable. Or he’d be nothing.
The lie began with his name. He was born César Carlos Salvador Arana, not in Brazil, as he claimed, but in Peru, the son of a watchmaker, whom he despised as weak and a failure. As a child he gained a reputation as a brilliant storyteller. His friends called him Fashturo, after the town drunk, famous for his jokes and his colourful stories.
When he was 24 he made a 13-year-old girl pregnant and fled from Peru to America. He changed his name to Carlos Castaneda, took six years off his age (later taking another two years off) and in 1962 enrolled in a graduate programme at UCLA in ‘Problems in Cultural Anthropology’. In 1968 he published his doctoral thesis, based, he claimed, on research conducted with Don Juan in Mexico.
It was hailed as a groundbreaking work. It was certainly a masterful act of deception – the world Castaneda created and passed off as truth being plundered from myriad sources. He stole from Wittgenstein, German phenomenology, Buddhist texts, anthropological papers and horror films – what-ever he took an interest in, or saw a use for. In the words of one anthropologist, he was ‘a magpie’; to another associate he was ‘a vacuum cleaner’.
In formulating Don Juan’s vision of the world, he stole in particular from the American sociologist Harold Garfinkel, who devised ethnomethodology – the sociological study of how people use ordinary, everyday methods and common-sense reasoning to construct, maintain and make sense of the social order. Improbably, Garfinkel fell for the hoax and became one of Castaneda’s foremost champions.
‘His best writing employs not just appropriation but dramatisation and assemblage,’ Marshall writes. ‘Anyone can steal; few can steal with Castaneda’s skill and aplomb, and fewer still can then brilliantly combine their thefts.’ When people doubted whether Don Juan was real, Castaneda would say that if he was capable of inventing a character like that he’d be the greatest novelist in the world. Robert Hughes, reviewing Journey to Ixtalan in Time in the series, wrote that Castaneda’s meeting with Don Juan ‘seems one of the most fortunate literary encounters since Boswell was introduced to Johnson’.
Castaneda maintained that Don Juan ‘left the world’ in 1973, dying ‘the immaculate death of the warrior’. But his departure did nothing to stem the flow of the books, which expounded further on Don Juan’s teachings. In 1976, a psychology professor, Richard de Mille (son of Cecil B), detailed myriad inconsistencies in Castaneda’s accounts and the character of Don Juan, but concluded that Castaneda ‘wasn’t a common con-man’ but had lied ‘to bring us the truth… a sham-man bearing gifts’. But while de Mille’s book vanished without trace, Castaneda’s stories continued to sell. They were compelling not only because they were marvellous but because his readers wanted to believe them. Don Juan, after all, had solved the great mystery of life – and death.
Castaneda didn’t lie out of convenience or opportunism. He lied because he loved it.
As Marshall puts it, in the books, just as Don Juan continually forces Carlos to question all his socially provided certainties, leaving him vulnerable to a new kind of authority – Don Juan’s – so too is the reader implicitly invited to question their certainties, leaving them also vulnerable to a new authority – Castaneda’s. No longer a mere disciple, he became the prophet. From a cult following, he was building a cult. And just as Don Juan had remained all-knowing yet ultimately unknowable, so too did Castaneda:
Carlos allowed his friends, lovers, teachers and followers to see in him just what they needed. Very few were aware of his accompanying (and ultimately encompassing) project: the strange, highly controlled world he was busy creating around himself. This project, though inseparable from his writing, would eventually become for Castaneda as important as the books themselves.
He gathered his closest disciples around him, most of them women, whom he called the ‘witches’. Employing the familiar techniques of cult control, he separated them from their families and gave them new names, and in so doing took ownership of them. Marshall suggests that he was adept at planting false memories to suit the stories he crafted for him. He told them his semen contained magical powers, and orchestrated sexual interactions between them.
In the 1990s he began teaching Tensegrity, a system of body movements that he described as ‘magical passes’ and that he claimed had been passed down by 25 generations of Toltec shamans. In fact, he had been taking lessons from a kung fu master in Santa Monica named Howard Lee. He established a corporation, Cleargreen, to market the techniques, and hundreds of people flocked to workshops conducted by Castaneda and his closest acolytes. There was a brisk business in Tensegrity T-shirts (‘The magic is in the movement’.) Tensegrity promised something that Jane Fonda’s workout and other popular aerobics regimes of the day could not. Practised with sufficient rigour, according to Castaneda, one could not merely postpone death but maybe, just maybe, evade it altogether.
His behaviour grew increasingly bizarre. He told followers that if they were depressed they should eat ants, and – significantly – that they should get rid of their pets. He was withering away. Like everything about him, Castaneda’s death when it came was spun by his followers as a mystery. He had not die; he had simply ‘left’, following Don Juan’s instructions, magicking his passage to infinity.
His closest disciples followed him. Within 24 hours, five of the ‘witches’ vanished. Their disappearance has never been explained, but in 2003 the skeleton of one of them, Patricia Lee Partin, also known as Nury Alexander, Claude and the Blue Scout, and Castaneda’s adopted daughter, was found by two hikers in the California desert. It took three years for her remains to be identified.
American Trickster is an extraordinary amalgam of investigation, reportage, psychology, sociology and cultural studies: a monumental study of deception and self-delusion that does full justice to the bizarre and befuddling life of its subject. As Marshall puts it, the books and his life are ‘all real and unreal’.
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