Those born after about 1980 might not understand the Carlos Castaneda phenomenon, and it’s fairly called a phenomenon, in the same way as those who lived and remember it.
When he died in 1998, The New York Times remembered him this way:
Carlos Castaneda, whose best-selling explorations of mystical and pharmacological frontiers helped to define the psychological landscape of the 1960’s, died two months ago just as privately and secretly as he had lived, associates revealed this week. Befitting a man who made an esthetic out of mystery, even his age is uncertain, but he was believed to be 72.
He died of liver cancer on April 27 at his home in Los Angeles, said Deborah Drooz, an entertainment lawyer, friend of Mr. Castaneda and executor of his estate. She said he had suffered from the illness for at least 10 months. After his death, his body was cremated and the remains were sent to Mexico, she added.
In books like ”The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge,” Mr. Castaneda spun extraordinarily rich, hallucinogenic evocations of ancient paths to knowledge based on what he described as an extended apprenticeship with a Yaqui Indian shaman named Don Juan Matus. His 10 books, etched in layer upon layer of psychological nuance and intrigue, became international best sellers translated into 17 languages and were credited with helping to usher in the New Age sensibility and reviving interest in Indian and Southwestern cultures.
Over the years, scholars and critics have debated whether Don Juan existed and whether the books were anthropology or fantasy, fact or fiction, distinctions which no doubt amused Mr. Castaneda.
Rather than respond, he lived in almost total anonymity, refusing to make public appearances, be photographed or tape-recorded. He continued to write up to his death and wanted his death to remain as private as his life, Ms. Drooz said. The Los Angeles Times reported his death yesterday after it was revealed by an Atlanta man who said he was Mr. Castaneda’s son. He said he heard about the death when he learned of probate proceedings.
……
But C. J. Castaneda, 36, who owns a coffee shop in suburban Atlanta, and his mother, Mr. Castaneda’s former wife, Margaret Runyan Castaneda, both say they are skeptical… and question why Mr. Castaneda’s death certificate said he was never married and why news of his death was kept from them.
Mrs. Castaneda, who said they were married from 1960 to 1973, said Mr. Castaneda was not her son’s biological father but he had the boy’s birth certificate changed legally to say that he was the boy’s father. Ms. Drooz said Carlos Castaneda was estranged from C. J. Castaneda, and the younger man was not his son.
……
If confusion follows in the wake of Mr. Castaneda’s death, it would be consistent with the story of his life.
Mr. Castaneda had said that he was born on Dec. 25, 1931, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and that Castaneda was an adopted surname. Immigration records indicate that he was born on Dec. 25, 1925, in Cajamarca, Peru, and Castaneda was his given name.
He came to the United States in 1951, according to the immigration records, and was an obscure graduate student in anthropology when he sent off a manuscript in 1967 to the University of California Press in Los Angeles. The book was released as ”The Teachings of Don Juan” in 1968.
After its paperback rights were resold, it became an international best seller. In the book, in encounters at once fanciful and intellectually and psychologically challenging, Don Juan instructs his disciple about becoming a ”man of knowledge’’…
…(His) books made Mr. Castaneda an international celebrity, and he was featured on the cover of Time. But many of his later books received cooler reviews. In The New York Times Book Review in 1988, Margot Adler described ”The Power of Silence: Further Lessons of Don Juan” as ”an unnecessarily cloudy pathway to the world of dreams and altered states.’’
NY Times, Peter Applebome, June 20, 1998
Regardless of whether Castaneda, and Don Juan’s wisdom, strike you as part of the psycho-babble and spiritual-babble of the 1960’s and 70’s in Western culture, or helped you profoundly in grounding yourself in a spiritual meaning, central, mysterious questions emerged from the Castaneda saga.
He was awarded a doctorate in anthropology from a serious institution for his “fieldwork,” supposedly, with the Yaqui natives of Sonora, and specifically with one Don Juan Matus. Years later, a consensus emerged that, at the very least, his fieldwork might have been embroidered, if not fabricated.
But not before his anthropology department basked, for years, in the popularity of having supported ground-breaking work in cultural anthropology, work that supposedly revealed, not even a thousand miles from Los Angeles as the crow flies, a rich repository of spiritual belief and tradition.
But was it fresh scholarship, or the work of a talented, fresh novelist?
Not to put too fine a point on it, the high priests of anthropology at UCLA may have gotten their academic fields confused. They awarded a doctorate to a gifted novelist, not a social scientist.
Fans of Castaneda so often ask, what does it matter? He helped me, and millions drink at the spring of a deeper spirituality, that’s what matters. Who cares what some stuffy old professors say about someone’s research methods–that’s the kind of bullshit that Don Juan taught us to rise above, anyway.
We appreciate where devotees might be coming from.
Nonetheless, we think that truth-in-advertising issues are more than a species of mystery, they’re a factor in life. If we respect those who’ve been enriched by Don Juan’s non-Western, non-linear thinking, we also ask respect for fact and honest reporting. Arguably, those are high spiritual values in their own right.
And his career was clouded almost from the beginning by the debate over whether Don Juan even existed or whether Castaneda was, as one critic put it, ”one of the great intellectual hoaxers” of all time.
Mr. Castaneda insisted that Don Juan was real. But others have said that, real or not, the books stand on their own both as windows onto the spiritual currents of the 60’s and as part of a long tradition of vivid intellectual and spiritual quests.
”The most important question we can ask is not, ‘Can Juan Matus be located in 1977 in Sonora, Mexico?’ ” wrote Sam Keen in Psychology Today. ”It is rather: ”What does Don Juan tell us about ourselves, about the millions in this country and abroad, who have read his words in 11 languages?’ As an archetypical hero, Don Juan may reveal to us something about the contours of the collective unconscious and the longings of our time.’’
NY Times, Peter Applebome, June 20, 1998
Do you agree with the venerable writer Keen (someone from a generation much earlier than the “flower children”) about what “the important question” is?
Do you agree about the core of the mystery?
