Christopher Reed in Los Angeles
The self-proclaimed shaman and best- selling author Carlos Castaneda, who pioneered the New Age movement with stories about a Mexican sorcerer called Don Juan, has died as mysteriously as he lived.
His demise in the fashionable Los Angeles district of Brentwood was disclosed by the Los Angeles Times, almost two months after it apparently happened on April 27. He was believed to be 72, but his death certificate contained various falsehoods and he himself switched his year and place of birth.
Nobody near to him, including his lawyer, made an announcement and almost no one is talking – an attitude that again raises the question: was Castaneda a shaman or a sham?
He came to fame in 1968 when, as an anthropology graduate student at the University of California, he wrote a master’s thesis about a journey he made in Arizona and Mexico. After studying the effects of medicinal and psychedelic plants, he said he met – in a Greyhound bus station – a mysterious Yaqui Indian named Juan Matus, who used powerful hallucinogens to initiate novices into a mystical world.
The thesis became a best-seller, The Teaching of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Nine more books followed and they were translated into 17 languages. But Castaneda’s canon is not regarded seriously by academic anthropologists, and suspicions have always remained that Don Juan never existed.
Over the years, Castaneda experimented with psychedelic plants such as peyote, jimson weed and dried mushrooms, which gave him perceptive dreams as well as some “bad trips”.
He wrote of roaming the Sonora desert with Don Juan and seeing giant insects. He became a crow, grew a beak and learned to fly, and after experiencing “states of non-ordinary reality” arrived at a higher consciousness that gave him great wisdom.
Back in Los Angeles the mystic’s lawyer, Deborah Drooz, said that as Castaneda had disliked publicity and being photographed or recorded: “I did not take it upon myself to issue a press release.” Michael Korda, the British author who edited Castaneda’s books, said: “I have made it a lifetime practice never to discuss Castaneda with anyone in the newspaper business.” Castaneda’s literary agent, Tracy Kramer, would only say: “In the tradition of the shamans of his lineage, [he] left this world in full awareness.”
The shaman of Westwood left a will, but among other errors his death certificate said he had never been married. This came as a surprise to Margaret Runyan Castaneda, aged 76, his lawful wife from 1960 to 1973. She was upset to hear of his death from the Los Angeles Times and said: “I wasn’t notified, I had no idea.”
In a 1997 memoir that Castaneda tried to ban, she wrote that “much of the Castaneda mystery is based on the fact that even his closest friends aren’t sure who he is”. The well-known author Joyce Carol Oates wondered in 1972: “Is it possible these books are non-fiction? They are beautifully constructed. The dialogue is faultless. The character of Don Juan is unforgettable. There is a novelistic momentum.”
Dr Michael Shermer publishes Skeptic magazine and is a debunker of mystical matters. He said Castaneda’s work was “not entirely” fictional because he did research Mexican-Indian religious beliefs and probably met shamans. But Don Juan was probably an amalgam. “He tweaked it all a little bit here and there and it became a money-making scheme.”
Orin Tyson, a representative for the American Atheists society, was blunter. “I’m not surprised his people are guarding Castaneda, because if you looked too closely there’s nothing there,” he said.
But many still revere Castaneda as the father of a quasi-religious New Age. Time magazine wrote in the 1970s: “To tens of thousands of readers the first meeting of Castaneda with Juan Matus is a better-known literary event than the encounter of Dante and Beatrice beside the Arno.”
In today’s material world, of course, neither event is recognised by very many people.