Word: juan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...arduous. It entailed the destruction, by Don Juan, of the young anthropologist's interpretation of the world; of what can, and cannot, be called "real." The Teachings describes the first steps in this process. They involved natural drugs. One was Lophophora williamsii, the peyote cactus, which, Don Juan promised, revealed an entity named Mescalito, a powerful teacher who "shows you the proper way of life." Another was Jimson weed, which Don Juan spoke of as an implacable female presence. The third was humito, "the little smoke"?a preparation of dust from Psilocybe mushrooms that had been dried and aged...
...California 13-year-olds getting blissed-out by the latest child guru off a chartered jet from Bombay. The acupuncturist now shares the limelight with Marcus Welby, M.D., and his needles are seen to work?nobody knows why. However, with Castaneda's increasing fame have come increasing doubts. Don Juan has no other verifiable witness, and Juan Matus is nearly as common a name among the Yaqui Indians as John Smith farther north. Is Castaneda real? If so, did he invent Don Juan? Is Castaneda just putting on the straight world...
...giving, and peddled the result to Penthouse magazine. This so infuriated Castaneda that he is reluctant to accept any major lecture engagements in the future. At present he lives "as inaccessibly as possible" in Los Angeles, refreshing his batteries from time to time at what he and Don Juan refer to as a "power spot" atop a mountain north of nearby Malibu: a ring of boulders overlooking the Pacific. So far he has fended off the barrage of film offers. "I don't want to see Anthony Quinn as Don Juan," he says with asperity...
Anyone who tries to probe into Castaneda's life finds himself in a maze of contradictions. But to Castaneda's admirers, that scarcely matters. "Look at it this way," says one. "Either Carlos is telling the documentary truth about himself and Don Juan, in which case he is a great anthropologist. Or else it is an imaginative truth, and he is a great novelist. Heads or tails, Carlos wins...
...enigma wrapped in mystery wrapped in a tortilla, the work is beautifully lucid. Castaneda's story unfolds with a narrative power unmatched in other anthropological studies. Its terrain?studded with organ-pipe cacti, from the glittering lava massifs of the Mexican desert to the ramshackle interior of Don Juan's shack?becomes perfectly real. In detail, it is as thoroughly articulated a world as, say, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. In all the books, but especially in Journey to Ixtlan, Castaneda makes the reader experience the pressure of mysterious winds and the shiver of leaves at twilight, the hunter's peculiar...