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Carlos Castaneda

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Carlos Castaneda
Carlos Castaneda 1962
Carlos Castaneda 1962
BornCarlos César Salvador Arana Castañeda
(1925-12-25)December 25, 1925
Cajamarca, Perú
DiedApril 27, 1998(1998-04-27) (aged 72)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
OccupationAnthropologist, author
NationalityAmerican
Period20th-century
SubjectShamanism

Carlos Arana Castaneda[1] (December 25, 1925 – April 27, 1998) was a Peruvian-American anthropologist and author.

Starting with The Teachings of Don Juan in 1968, Castaneda wrote a series of books that describe his alleged training in shamanism. The books, narrated in the first person, relate his supposed experiences under the tutelage of a Yaqui "Man of Knowledge" named Don Juan Matus. His 12 books have sold more than 8 million copies in 17 languages. Critics have suggested that they are works of fiction; supporters claim the books are either true or at least valuable works of philosophy and descriptions of practices which enable an increased awareness.

Castaneda withdrew from public view in 1973 to work further on his inner development, living in a large house with three women ("Fellow Travellers of Awareness") who were ready to cut their ties to family and changed their names. He founded Cleargreen, an organization that promoted tensegrity, purportedly a traditional Toltec regimen of spiritually powerful exercises.[2]

Books

Castaneda's first three books — The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge; A Separate Reality; and Journey to Ixtlan — were written while he was an anthropology student at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He wrote these books as his research log describing his apprenticeship with a traditional "Man of Knowledge" identified as don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian from northern Mexico. Castaneda was awarded his bachelor's and doctoral degrees based on the work described in these books.

In 1974 his fourth book, Tales of Power, was published. This book ended with Castaneda leaping from a cliff into an abyss, and signaled the end of his apprenticeship under the tutelage of Matus. Castaneda continued to be popular with the reading public with subsequent publications.

In his books, Castaneda narrates in first person the events leading to and following after his meeting Matus, a Yaqui "Man of Knowledge", in 1960. Castaneda's experiences with Matus inspired the works for which he is known. He also says the sorcerer bequeathed him the position of nagual, or leader of a party of seers. He also used the term "nagual" to signify that part of perception which is in the realm of the unknown yet still reachable by man, implying that, for his party of seers, Don Juan was a connection in some way to that unknown. Castaneda often referred to this unknown realm as nonordinary reality.

The term "nagual" has been used by anthropologists to mean a shaman or sorcerer who is believed capable of shapeshifting into an animal form, or to metaphorically "shift" into another form through magic rituals, shamanism and experiences with psychoactive drugs (e.g., peyote and jimson weed - Datura stramonium).[3]

Biography

Immigration records for Carlos Cesar Arana Castañeda indicate that he was born on 25 December 1925 in Cajamarca, Peru.[4] His first family name, Arana, is the paternal one, inherited from his father's paternal family name, César Arana Burungaray; while the second family name, Castañeda, is the maternal one, inherited from his mother's paternal family name, Susana Castañeda Navoa. His maternal surname appears with the ñ in many Hispanic dictionaries, even though his famous published works display an anglicized version. He moved to the United States in the early 1950s and became a naturalized citizen in 1957. In 1960, he was married to Margaret Runyan in Tijuana, Mexico. They lived together for only six months but, contrary to rumor, were never divorced[citation needed]. On August 12, 1961, Carlton Jeremy Castaneda was born in Hollywood, California. Carlos spoke of CJ as his biological son and is listed on the younger Castaneda's birth certificate as his father.

Carlos Castaneda was educated at UCLA (B.A. 1962; Ph.D. 1973).[5]

Castaneda also married Florinda Donner-Grau in Las Vegas in September 1993. According to his will of April 23, 1998, Castaneda adopted Nuri Alexander.

In all, twelve books by Castaneda were published, two posthumously.

Castaneda was the subject of a cover article in the March 5, 1973 issue of Time.[6] The article described him as "an enigma wrapped in a mystery." When confronted by correspondent Sandra Burton about discrepancies in his personal history, Castaneda responded by saying: "To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics...is like using science to validate sorcery. It robs the world of its magic and makes milestones out of us all". The interviewer wrote that "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 these videos.

Castaneda died on 27 April 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. It was not until nearly two months later, on 19 June 1998, that an obituary entitled "A Hushed Death for Mystic Author Carlos Castaneda" by staff writer J.R. Moehringer appeared in the Los Angeles Times.[7]

Four months after Castaneda's death, C. J. Castaneda, also known as Adrian Vashon, whose birth certificate claims Carlos Castaneda as his father, challenged Castaneda's will in probate court. For many years Castaneda had referred to Vashon as his son. The will was signed two days before Castaneda's death and Vashon challenged its authenticity. The challenge was ultimately unsuccessful.[8]

Companions

After Castaneda stepped away from public view in 1973, he bought a large house in Los Angeles which he shared with three 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.

In the early 1990s, Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar published two books purporting to describe their experiences with don Juan and his party. Together with Carol Tiggs, they appeared and sometimes lectured at many of the Tensegrity workshops that began in July 1993, and Donner-Grau and Abelar appeared at book signings and gave occasional lectures and radio interviews as well.

Shortly after Castaneda died, Donner-Grau and Abelar disappeared, along with Patricia Partin. Amalia Marquez (also known as Talia Bey) and Tensegrity instructor Kylie Lundal had their phones disconnected and also disappeared. On 2 August 1998, Carol spoke at a workshop in Ontario. The remains of Partin, also referred to by Castaneda as Nury Alexander and/or Claude, were found in 2003 near where her abandoned car had been discovered a few weeks after Castaneda's death in 1998, on the edge of Death Valley. Her remains were in a condition requiring DNA identification, which was made in 2006.[2]

Because the women 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 her disappearance merited investigation. Their opinion changed in 2006 after the remains of Patricia Partin were identified, and the LAPD finally added Bey to their missing person database.[9]

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, international banker and amateur mycologist R. Gordon Wasson, who had originally praised Castaneda's work, questioned the accuracies of Castaneda's botanical claims.[10]

In 1976, Richard de Mille published Castaneda's Journey: The Power and the Allegory, in which he argues, "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."[11] On these showings de Mille asserts, The Teachings of Don Juan and Journey to Ixtlan (his third book) cannot both be factual reports.[12]

For his part, Castaneda in the introduction to A Separate Reality, his second book, addressed the incomprehensible nature of his experiences as being understood only 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 Rosak, Castaneda admitted that he took some license in his writing about actual events for dramatic effect: "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 height 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 rattlesneaks. He told me how to prepare rattlesneaks, in fact. And so that eases up, you see, the distrust or the fear."

Castaneda's works were presented as real-life accounts, but critics held that they were fictional. At first, and with the backing of academic qualifications and the UCLA anthropological department, Castaneda's work was critically acclaimed. Notable American anthropologists like Edward Spicer (1969) and Edmund Leach (1969)[13] praised Castaneda, alongside more alternative and young anthropologists such as Peter Furst, Barbara Myerhoff and Michael Harner.

The authenticity of Don Juan was accepted for six years, until Richard de Mille and Daniel Noel both published their critical exposés of the Don Juan books in 1976. Most anthropologists had been convinced of Castaneda's authenticity until then — indeed, they had had little reason to question it — but some averred that de Mille's analysis disproved the veracity of Castaneda's work. 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 accuracies of Castaneda's work.[14]

In The Power and the Allegory, De Mille compared The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge with Castaneda's library stack requests at the University of California. The stack requests documented that he was sitting in the library when allegedly his journal said he was squatting in Don Juan's hut. One discovery that de Mille alleges to have made in his examination of the stack requests was that when Castaneda was alleged to have said that he was participating in the traditional peyote ceremony—the least fantastic episode of drug use—he was sitting in the UCLA library and he was reading someone else's description of their experience of the peyote ceremony. Other criticisms of Castaneda's work include the total lack of Yaqui vocabulary or terms for any of his experiences.[15]

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 bestsellerdom. 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.[6]

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.[16]

Donald Wieve cites Castaneda to explain the insider/outsider problem as it relates to mystical experiences, while acknowledging the fictional nature of his work.[17]

Two other authors, Taisha Abelar and Florinda Donner-Grau, wrote books in which they claimed to be from Matus' party of Toltec warriors. Both Abelar and Donner-Grau were endorsed by Castaneda as being legitimate students of Matus, whereas he dismissed all other writers as pretenders. The two women were part of Castaneda's inner circle, which he referred to as "The Brujas," and both assumed different names as part of their dedication to their new beliefs. They were originally both graduate students in anthropology at UCLA.[2]

Felix Wolf, one of Carlos Castaneda's apprentices and translators, wrote The Art of Navigation: Travels with Carlos Castaneda and Beyond. In his book Wolf details how his life had been transformed by his association with Castaneda. While touching on all aspects of the teachings, Wolf highlights what he perceives to be the overriding and essential transmission that came through Castaneda's work: The Art of Navigation.

Amy Wallace wrote Sorcerer's Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda,[18] an account of her personal experiences with Castaneda and his followers.

In Carlos Castaneda e a Fenda entre os Mundos - Vislumbres da Filosofia Ānahuacah no Século XXI Brazilian writer Luis Carlos de Morais analyzes the work of Carlos Castaneda, its cultural implications, and its continuation in other authors.

Bibliography

Main article: Carlos Castaneda bibliography
  • The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, 1968. ISBN 0-520-21757-8. (Summer 1960 to October 1965.)
  • A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan, 1971. ISBN 0-671-73249-8. (April 1968 to October 1970.)
  • Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan, 1972. ISBN 0-671-73246-3. (Summer 1960 to May 1971.)
  • Tales of Power, 1974. ISBN 0-671-73252-8. (Autumn 1971 to the 'Final Meeting' with don Juan Matus in 1973.)
  • The Second Ring of Power, 1977. ISBN 0-671-73247-1. (Meeting his fellow apprentices after the 'Final Meeting'.)
  • The Eagle's Gift, 1981. ISBN 0-671-73251-X. (Continuing with his fellow apprentices; and then alone with La Gorda.)
  • The Fire From Within, 1984. ISBN 0-671-73250-1. (Don Juan's 'Second Attention' teachings through to the 'Final Meeting' in 1973.)
  • The Power of Silence: Further Lessons of Don Juan, 1987. ISBN 0-671-73248-X. (The 'Abstract Cores' of don Juan's lessons.)
  • The Art of Dreaming, 1993. ISBN 0-06-092554-X. (Review of don Juan's lessons in dreaming.)
  • Magical Passes: The Practical Wisdom of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico, 1998. ISBN 0-06-017584-2. (Body movements for breaking the barriers of normal perception.)
  • The Wheel of Time: Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts About Life, Death and the Universe, 1998. ISBN 0-9664116-0-9. (Selected quotations from the first eight books.)
  • The Active Side of Infinity, 1999. ISBN 0-06-019220-8. (Memorable events of his life.)

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Corey Donovan. "Prelude to don Juan: Castaneda's Early Years". Retrieved 2010-05-04.
  2. ^ a b c Robert Marshall (April 12, 2007). "The dark legacy of Carlos Castaneda". Salon.com. Retrieved October 13, 2010.
  3. ^ Castaneda, C: The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, pp. 88-120, Washington Square Press Publication, 1968 paperback ISBN 0-671-60041-9
  4. ^ The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, Volume 5: 1997-1999. Charles Scribner's Sons, 2002.
  5. ^ De Mille (1976)
  6. ^ a b Burton, Sandra; et al. (March 5, 1973). "Don Juan and the Sorcerer's Apprentice". Time. 101 (10). Retrieved December 23, 2011. {{cite journal}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help)
  7. ^ Castaneda Obituary All Things Considered, June 19, 1998
  8. ^ "Mystery Man's Death Can't End the Mystery; Fighting Over Carlos Castaneda's Legacy" by Peter Applebome, NY Times, August 19, 1998, retrieved September 3, 2008
  9. ^ The Charley Project
  10. ^ Wasson, R. Gordon. 1969. (Bk. Rev.). Economic Botany vol. 23(2):197. A review of Carlos Castaneda's "The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge.", Wasson, R. Gordon. 1972a. (Bk. Rev.). Economic Botany vol. 26(1):98-99. A review of Carlos Castaneda's "A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan."; Wasson, R. Gordon. 1973a. (Bk. Rev.). Economic Botany vol. 27(1):151-152. A review of Carlos Castaneda's "Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan."; Wasson, R. Gordon. . 1974. (Bk. Rev.). Economic Botany vol. 28(3):245-246. A review of Carlos Castaneda's "Tales of Power".; Wasson, R. Gordon. . 1977a. (Mag., Bk. Rev). Head vol. 2(4):52-53, 88-94. November.
  11. ^ De Mille (1976), p. 166
  12. ^ De Mille (1976), pp. 170-171
  13. ^ Leach, Edmund (1969-06-05). "High School". The New York Review of Books. New York. ISSN 0028-7504. Retrieved 2010-10-13.
  14. ^ Kelley, Jane Holden (1978). Yaqui Women: Contemporary Life Histories. University of Nebraska Press. pp. 24–25. ISBN 978-0-8032-0912-1.
  15. ^ Harris, Marvin (2001). Cultural materialism: the struggle for a science of culture. Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press. p. 322.
  16. ^ David Silverman. Reading Castaneda: A Prologue to the Social Sciences. ISBN 978-0-7100-8146-9
  17. ^ Donald Wieve. "Does Understanding Religion Require Religious Understanding?" In Russel T. McCutcheon (ed.), The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion. New York: Bath Press, 1999. p. 263.
  18. ^ Amy Wallace (2007). Sorcerer's Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda. North Atlantic Books. ISBN 978-1-58394-206-2.

References

  • De Mille, Richard (1976). Castaneda's Journey: The Power and the Allegory. Capra Press. ISBN 978-0-88496-067-6.

Further reading

  • Morais Junior, Luis Carlos de. Carlos Castaneda e a Fresta entre os Mundos: Vislumbres da Filosofia Ānahuacah no Século XXI (Carlos Castaneda and the Crack Between the Worlds: Glimpses of Ānahuacah Philosophy in Century XXI). Rio de Janeiro: Litteris Editora, 2012.
  • Sanchez, Victor. The Teachings of Don Carlos: Practical Applications of the Works of Carlos Castaneda. Bear & Company, 1995. ISBN 1-879181-23-1
  • Williams, Donald. Border Crossings: A Psychological Perspective on Carlos Castaneda's Path of Knowledge Inner City Books, 1981.
  • Collier, Richard "The River That God Forgot" (Background on Julio Cesar Arana, despotic rubber baron, Carlos Castaneda's paternal grandfather) E.P. Dutton & Co., N.Y., 1968. Library of Congress CATALOG CARD NUMBER:68-12451

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