Word: castaneda
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Essentially, The Teachings and A Separate Reality were about the strategy by which Don Juan, one of the wiliest and most subtle men ever to live in print, used hallucinogens to reveal his descriptions of reality to Castaneda and so turn him into a man of knowledge himself. As a result, the books were greeted as landmarks by the counterculture. Indeed they are-but they are not "drug literature...
JOURNEY TO IXTLAN by CARLOS CASTANEDA 315 pages. Simon & Schuster...
...year-old anthropologist named Carlos Castaneda was poking about on a field trip in the Southwest, researching his thesis on medicinal plants used by local Indians. In an Arizona border town, while waiting for a bus, he met an old Yaqui Indian from northwest Mexico, Don Juan Matus. Don Juan was an exceptionally powerful "man of knowledge": a brujo, or sorcerer. Over the next ten years, Castaneda became his apprentice, as Don Juan initiated him into increasingly mysterious and alarming states of "non-ordinary reality" through the systematic use of three hallucinogenic plants: peyote, Jimson weed and psilocybe mushrooms. Thus...
Indefatigably, and to the vast amusement of his old mentor, Castaneda scribbled down nearly every transaction and experience he had with Don Juan. The notes have resulted in three books: The Teachings of Don Juan (1968), A Separate Reality (1971), and now Journey to Ixtlan. As anthropological documents, they are already classics; no explorer has worked more lucidly at the very edge than Castaneda, describing a system of power and magic terrifyingly alien to his own culture. It is a world in which men can change into crows. Power objects and spirit allies operate inconsistently. There are iridescent talking coyotes...
Wrong Question. This is naturally not a field accessible to the normal shard-counting anthropologist. "The failures of anthropology," says Castaneda, "come from our unwillingness to look at other cultures in their own terms. So we ask the wrong questions. In our world Don Juan's acts and experiences don't happen. They are impossible. They conflict with the description of reality we've been fed since we were little babies. So Don Juan just seems a crazy old Indian. But in his world, his way of knowledge is superb and absolutely congruous. My task...