By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Carlos Castaneda created the sacred tradition of a sorcerer who supposedly existed somewhere in Mexico. His success in both hoodwinking the academic world into accepting his work as authentic and at the same time establishing a popular new religion, neo-shamanism, with its own ancient sacred tradition, can best be understood in terms of a particular form of "charismatic authority," involving skillful rhetoric so that he was able to make believable the sorcery apprenticeship he described. In fact Castaneda was skilled at self-mystification. Though born in Peru, he had changed his year of birth, location, family background, and early education. After separating from friends and his wife Margaret in the summer of 1960, Castaneda became elusive, living his own meta­phorical life, constantly constructing a separate reality by deliberately transforming common social meanings into uncommon ones - going to Mexico in the blink of an eye, telling you he is in Mexico as he stands talking to you in Los Angeles ... what makes it metaphorical rather than insane is that Castaneda knows which reality is ordinary and which is nonordinary, though his listener may not. (De Mille, Don Juan Papers, p. 376.)

 

Enter Carlos Castaneda

Castaneda was an art student in Lima, and one month after he made a girl pregnant, he left on 9/23/51 by boat to the USA. The later Castaneda, crosses the border at San Francisco, California, as César Arana, bound for Richmond, CA. He later writes to his father, “I’m going on a very long journey. Don’t be surprised if you learn nothing more about me.”(For this and other details of his early life see Richard De Mille, The Don Juan Papers: Further Castaneda Controversies)

He enrolls in Los Angeles Community College as Carlos Castaneda, and takes courses in journalism, science, literature, and two creative writing classes with Vernon King. (March 5, 1973 Time Magazine, see cover below.)

He tells Margaret Runyan (his future wife) that he was born in Italy on Christmas Day in 1931, the son of a 16-year-old girl attending finishing school in Switzerland and a professor who was on a world tour when he met the girl. He also claimed his mother’s sister came to Italy soon after he was born to bring him to live at the family farm near Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he allegedly attended schools until he was old enough to go to art school in Italy. He also claimed to have entered the U.S. in New York, and to have attended art schools in Montreal and New York. (Runyan, “My Husband Carlos Castaneda,” in February 1975 issue of Fate: True Stories of the Strange and Unknown.)

In 1959, Castaneda enrolled at UCLA, where he signed up for California ethnography with archaeology professor Clement Meighan.

According to his wife, after already having written a term paper on Aldous Huxley, Carlos showed an interest in the phenomenology of his professor. At home however he spoke about sorcery in terms of Talcott Parsons’ idea of glosses. Carlos at the time explained that “a gloss is a total system of perception and language. For instance, this room is a gloss. We have lumped together a series of isolated perceptions-floor, ceiling, window, lights, rugs, etc.-to make a single totality.” (Margaret Runyan Castaneda’s A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda, Millenia Press 1996.)

He also read Andrija Pharich’s The Sacred Mushroom, would talk a lot about Timothy Leary and his moving psychedelics out of the lab and into private apartments or out into the desert or someplace, anyplace, everyplace, seemed quite important to Carlos. (Runyan, article in Fate)

Much of the actual writing of The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge was done at his apartment. After his first peyote experiences back in 1961 his ex wife reported. He presented it to Professor Garfinkel, but Garfinkel didn’t want to read some student’s subjective assessment.

By the time Carlos had quit school however he decided to work through the manuscript in its entirety again, and this time when he finished it, he went up to the third floor of Haines Hall but this time he dropped it on the desk of Professor Meigham who he had occasionally talked with.

Meighan suggested that he go over and talk with somebody at the University of California Press, which was just across the lawn from Haines Hall, in the basement of Powell Library. He also suggested that Carlos not present his manuscript as something for the anthropology series, or any other series for that matter, but as a trade book with general readership. (A Magical Journey)

By September, after many delays, it was obvious that the University of California Press would publish it. Bill Bright told the board members that the book was oke, Meighan agreed.

Shortly before their divorce his wife describes: “During February of 1973, Carlos traveled to New York to talk with his publisher about Tales of Power and invited me to join him there for a few days. But by now he had become quite dictatorial, ordering me all around. When I got back home to Charleston, West Virginia, I filed for divorce. Something that I had meant to do for years. Then Carlos called who said he was confused by the notice of divorce. I complained about his strange attitude and behavior in New York. There was a long silence , finally, he asked me to repeat all that about his attitude in New York. Which I did- Carlos listened and then solemnly confessed that ‘I wasn’t in New York at the Drake Hotel in February,’ he said. ‘I didn’t see you there then.’ I thought for a moment and wondered why he would lie about something like this. Somebody was there, that’s for sure. What kind of bizarre schizophrenia was I dealing with here anyway? And then suddenly, it dawned on me-what a magnificent new level he had slipped on everybody. What a marvelous new twist.”
Serious criticism of Castaneda’s books did not emerge until 1976 when Richard de Mille published Castaneda’s Journey: The Power and the Allegory.

Castaneda, who following the above Time article in 1973, disappeared from the public view–began to organize a secretive group of devoted followers. In 1973, Castaneda purchased a compound on the aptly named Pandora Avenue in Westwood. The women, soon to be known both in his group and in his books as “the witches,” moved in. They eventually came to sport identical short, dyed blond haircuts similar to those later worn by the Heaven’s Gate cult. They also said they’d studied with don Juan. The also were urged to cut off all contact with their past lives, as don Juan had instructed Carlos to do, and as Castaneda had done by cutting off his wife and adopted son.

The witches, along with Castaneda, maintained a tight veil of secrecy. They used numerous aliases and didn’t allow themselves to be photographed. Followers were told constantly changing stories about their backgrounds. Only after Castaneda’s death did the real facts about their lives begin to emerge.

The books’ status as serious anthropology went almost unchallenged for five years. Skepticism increased in 1972 after Joyce Carol Oates, in a letter to the New York Times, expressed bewilderment that a reviewer had accepted Castaneda’s books as nonfiction. The next year, Time published a cover story revealing that Castaneda had lied extensively about his past. Over the next decade, several researchers, most prominently Richard de Mille, son of the legendary director, worked tirelessly to demonstrate that Castaneda’s work was a hoax.

In one example, de Mille first quotes a passage by a mystic, Yogi Ramacharaka: “The Human Aura is seen by the psychic observer as a luminous cloud, egg-shaped, streaked by fine lines like stiff bristles standing out in all directions.” In “A Separate Reality,” a “man looks like a human egg of circulating fibers. And his arms and legs are like luminous bristles bursting out in all directions.” The accumulation of such instances leads de Mille to conclude that “Carlos’s adventures originated not in the Sonoran desert but in the library at UCLA.”

Following the publication of “The Teachings,” thousands of pilgrims descended on Yaqui territory. When they discovered that the Yaqui don’t use peyote, but that the Huichol people do, they headed to the Huichol homeland in Southern Mexico, where, according to Fikes, they caused serious disruption.

In spite of the exhaustive debunking by now, the don Juan books still sell well. The University of California Press, which published Castaneda’s first book, “The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge,” in 1968, steadily sells 7,500 copies a year. BookScan, a Nielsen company that tracks book sales, reports that three of Castaneda’s most popular titles, “A Separate Reality,” “Journey to Ixtlan” and “Tales of Power,” sold a total of 10,000 copies in 2006. None of Castaneda’s titles have ever gone out of print – an impressive achievement for any author.

In the late ‘80s, perhaps because book sales had slowed, or perhaps because he no longer feared media scrutiny, Castaneda sought to expand by developing a movement technique (Tensegrity) he claimed had been passed down by 25 generations of Toltec shamans. Thus during the last decade of his life, a corporation, Cleargreen, was set up to promote Tensegrity; it held workshops attended by thousands. Novelist and director Bruce Wagner, a member of Castaneda’s inner circle, helped produce a series of instructional videos. Cleargreen continues to operate to this day, promoting Tensegrity and Castaneda’s teachings through workshops in Southern California, Europe and Latin America. Simon and Schuster, Castaneda’s main publisher, still classifies his books as nonfiction.

Many have reported that Castaneda wasn’t only mesmerizing, he also had a great sense of humor. And because, he was a ‘control freak,’ as Amy Wallace portraid him in her book “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”followers were often freed from the anxiety of decision-making.

According to estimates, several hundred people were told by Castaneda at his compound, to cut off their families, although there were no more than a dozen each year that did, and most did not stay on.

There was also a lot of jealousy/competition. Sometimes initiates were banished for obscure spiritual offenses, such as drinking cappuccino (which Castaneda himself guzzled in great quantities). They’d no longer be invited to the compound. Phone calls wouldn’t be returned. Having been allowed for a time into a secret, magical family, they’d be abruptly cut off.

Castaneda investigated the possibility of incorporating as a religion, as L. Ron Hubbard had done with Scientology. Instead, he chose to develop Tensegrity, as the means through which the new faith would spread. Tensegrity is a movement technique that seems to combine elements of a rigid version of tai chi and modern dance. In all likelihood the inspiration came from two karate devotee inner group members, and from his years of lessons with martial arts instructor Howard Lee. Documents found, show him discussing a project called “Kung Fu Sorcery” with Lee as early as 1988. The more elegant “Tensegrity” was lifted from Buckminster Fuller, for whom it referred to a structural synergy between tension and compression.

In the early ‘90s, to promote Tensegrity, Castaneda set up Cleargreen, which operated out of the offices of “Rugrats” producer and Castaneda agent (and part-time sorcerer) Tracy Kramer, a friend of Wagner’s from Beverly Hills High. Although Castaneda wasn’t a shareholder, according to Geuter, “he determined every detail of the operation.” Jennings and Wallace confirm that Castaneda had complete control of Cleargreen. (Cleargreen did not respond to numerous inquiries from Salon.) The company’s official president was Amalia Marquez (sorceric name Talia Bey), a young businesswoman who, after reading Castaneda’s books, had moved from Puerto Rico to Los Angeles in order to follow him.

At Tensegrity seminars, women dressed in black, the “chacmools,” demonstrated moves for the audience. Castaneda and the witches would speak and answer questions. Seminars cost up to $1,200, and as many as 800 would attend. Participants could buy T-shirts that read “Self Importance Kills – Do Tensegrity.” The movements were meant to promote health as well as help practitioners progress as warriors.

But if Castaneda’s early books drew on the occult, Buddhism, and phenomenology, his later work seemed more indebted to science fiction. But throughout, there was a preoccupation with meeting death like a warrior. In the ‘90s, Castaneda told his followers that, like don Juan, he wouldn’t die – he’d burn from within, turn into a ball of light, and ascend to the heavens.

In the summer of 1997, he was diagnosed with liver cancer. Because sorcerers weren’t supposed to get sick, his illness remained a tightly guarded secret. While the witches desperately pursued traditional and alternative treatments, the workshops continued as if nothing was wrong (although Castaneda often wasn’t there). And while the nagual lay bedridden with a morphine drip, watching war videos, the inner circle burned his papers.

And when in April 1998, the inner circle began packing up the house, the following week, at age 72, Castaneda died. He was cremated at the Culver City mortuary.

The media didn’t learn of Castaneda’s death for two months. When the news became public, Cleargreen members stopped answering their phones and placed a statement, on their Web site: “For don Juan, the warrior was a being ... who embarks, when the time comes, on a definitive journey of awareness, ‘crossing over to total freedom’ ... warriors can keep their awareness, which is ordinarily relinquished, at the moment of dying. At the moment of crossing, the body in its entirety is kindled with knowledge ... Carlos Castaneda left the world the same way that his teacher, don Juan Matus did: with full awareness.”

When asked whether, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Simon and Schuster still regarded Castaneda’s books as nonfiction, Adam Rothenberg, the vice president for corporate communication, replied that Simon and Schuster “will continue to publish Castaneda as we always have.” Tensegrity classes are still held around the world. Workshops were recently conducted in Mexico City and Hanover, Germany. Videos are still available from Cleargreen. According to the terms of Castaneda’s will, book royalties still help support a core group of acolytes. On Simon and Schuster’s Web site, Castaneda is still described as an anthropologist. No mention is made of his fiction.

As seen so far, Castaneda fits into a pattern of gurus and tricksters who work creatively and inventively with the works and teachings of others to persuade us that they have access to an ancient sacred tradition. His success in both hoodwinking the academic world into accepting his work as authentic and at the same time establishing a popular new religion, neo-shamanism, with its own ancient sacred tradition, can best be understood in terms of a particular form of “charismatic authority,” involving skillful rhetoric so that he was able to make believable the sorcery apprenticeship he described. Thus like many others before him, he managed a continuing dialectic between his own creativity and the sources he drew on to create his own sacred tradition.

And where someone like Ron Hubbard, as we have seen yesterday, used Dianetics to try and convince others that his inventions about Xenu during the 1930’s where ‘serious’, appropriate for his case, Castaneda’s obtained authentication from academics, like for example Michael Harner’s whose position in an “academic foundation” and his reputation as an expert on shamanism made his acceptance of Castaneda invaluable.

For example Harner’s own workshops also validate Castaneda, since they rely on Castaneda’s distinction between “non-ordinary reality” and “ordinary reality” -and offer the experience that many could not obtain through just reading the books. One believer writes:

I became interested in different paths, including the internal martial arts, ecstatic Christianity, Eastern religions and philosophies, and meditation. All the while, I yearned for the kinds of experiences Carlos Castaneda described in his first five books. Then I met Michael Harner, taking the Basic workshop in I98I, and felt that I had found what I had been looking for: a spirituality that offered direct experience, promoted intimacy with the natural world, enabled one to help others, and demanded personal freedom. (www.shamanism.org)

 

Anthropologist And Other Readers Weighting The Pro And Con

It is quite common for followers of Castaneda and the Warrior Path or the Toltec path to see those who classify- Castaneda's work as "fiction" as being hindered by their lack of experience of other realities.

Castaneda's work can only really be appreciated if you can "read between the lines" ... all great works of spiritual import (including the Bible) speak deeply to those who have EXPERIENCED a deeper journey and a deeper calling of Reality than simply the alignment or nonalignment of "factual data." (www.newvision-psychic.com)

Nevil Drury, specialized in the  occult, similarly focuses on the significance of Castaneda's experiences:
Carlos himself is probably the actual visionary and many of the shamanistic perspectives have probably been implanted in the personage of the real, partially real, and unreal being known as don Juan. In this sense it hardly matters to the person interested in consciousness and states of perception whether don Juan is real or not since the fiction, if it is that, is authentic. (Drury, Elements, 87.)

Transpersonal experiences, trance states, altered states of consciousness, and alternative reality are the terminology for the new don Juan debates and have become an empirical foundation for a spiritual worldview; psychology is sacralized and religion psychologized. It may all be in the mind, but what is in the mind is real and can shift our view of the world. (Hanegraaff, New Age, pp. 224-9.)

Authenticity for many true believers (everywhere), is considered a matter of personal interpretation, and since Carlos has clearly experienced non-ordinary reality, what he says must be true even if it is put in a fictional form.

But also debates in anthropology have contributed to the case for the validity and "sacredness" of the books. Some anthropologists could find similarities in their own fieldwork with shamans and had "validating experiences." Marton describes his own validating experience of the Afro-Cuban Orisha path. (Marron, "Experiential Approach," p. 278.)

Peters, Grindal, and Stoller produced ethnographies in the 1980s which contributed to the reflexive, narrative, novelistic tradition of Castaneda. Creativity in anthropology became central to how cultural worlds are represented (Peters, Ecstasy and Healing; Grindal, "Into the Heart"; Stoller, Fusion of Worlds.)- a case well argued by Marcus Clifford. (Clifford, Predicament of Culture; Routes.)

Although many anthropologists recognize the significance of Castaneda in opening up these issues of experimental writing and the predicament of ethnography - that it is always caught up in the invention, not the representation, of cultures (Marton, "Experiential Approach.");- Marcus and Fisher, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, p. 40.) most anthropologists reject Castaneda since he refused to make available ways of evaluating and monitoring his information. (Marcus and Fisher, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, p. 40.)

 He is the religious trickster of anthropology. And certainly encouraged more self-reflective ethnographies which no longer claim to have the "truth" about any society. Professor Stan Wilk has argued that the books complement scientific anthropology, a mythic study of science to complete the scientific study of myth. "The Don Juan books are 'beneficially viewed as a sacred text' which prepares us 'to witness, to accept without really understanding.' " (In de Mille, Don Juan Papers. 39 Marton, "Experiential Approach," pp. 273-97.) Carlos Castaneda's ambiguous legacy to anthropology is fully documented by Yves Marton in “Experiental Approach” pp.273-97.

In contrast to the ambiguous response of anthropologists, millions of readers responded to Castaneda by buying the books (some eight million in seventeen languages). These books reflected their new interest in non rational approaches to reality. Castaneda was articulating what people around him were increasingly feeling, that is, a growing dislike of an overly rational, scientific, materialistic world that had no understanding or feeling for "other realities," such as those to be experienced on hallucinogenic drugs.

The counter-culture in 1968 was ready for an alternative to the dominant scientific view. In the 1950s and '60s California was alive with students experimenting with drugs. Aldous Huxley had taken mescaline in 1953 and in 1954 he described his experiences with hallucinatory drugs in The Doors of Perception. As seen above Castaneda was intrigued by Huxley, who represented for the generation of the 1960s a new freedom to explore other realities, a freedom from the whole Western industrial complex. The success of Castaneda's portrayal of don Juan's ancient sacred tradition makes sense against the background of opposition to modern "Enlightenment" views of reality, raising issues about consciousness, the nature of reality, and the nature of the person. He made famous the notion of "non-ordinary reality." As de Mille says in his first critique of Castaneda, "Castaneda was kicking some very big true ideas around: There is more than one kind of reality. There is magic that is not illusion. The world is that which comes out of what can be ... Responsibility gives power. But greater than power is knowledge." (De Mille, Castaneda’s Journey, p.16.)

The new religion of Toltec Warriors, based on don Juan's Toltec warrior tradition, which Castaneda created around him in the counterculture of the 1970S and '80S, played on the mystery and the fascination of the hippies and beats, and on the anthropological academe for exploring and validating the existence of other realities. He had identified a Western wish to break out of the scientific paradigm and to experience, like Castaneda, the insider's view. He provided them with Tensegrity, dance moves similar to Gurdjieff's, and opened the way for Harner to develop "core shamanism" for the development of neo-shamanism for everyone.

This popularity of neo-shamanism continued and spread with Nevil Drury, Harley SwiftDeer, Archie LameDeer, Lynn Andrews, Jonathan Horwitz and Sun Bear. SwiftDeer, for example, founded the "Deer Tribe Metis Medicine Society Shamanic Lodge of Ceremonial Medicine" in 1986 and claims that he and Carlos Castaneda studied under the same Native American medicine men and took part together in meetings in Mexico. They created a mythical role for Castaneda, claiming that his books used the secret teachings of the "Twisted Hairs Council of Elders," who collected an eclectic body of traditional and powerful knowledge from American Indians from both North and South America. Members say because the planet was in such crisis, Carlos Castaneda was given the knowledge and told to reveal it to the world as a hook to "wake people up to how the world should be."

They claim that SwiftDeer and the Deer tribe are modernday representatives of an ancient lineage of sacred knowledge which has evolved over thousands of years. Their references to an ancient lineage and to Castaneda himself are the strategies for authenticating this new tradition of "personal growth and spiritual awakening." Other leaders of neo-shamanic groups, such as Michael Harner and Victor Sanchez, have similarly created a mythical role for Castaneda in their own creations. So why did so many endow him with such authority? De Mille, why he didn't dismiss Castaneda.

My friend supplied the answer. Castaneda wasn't a common con man, he lied to bring the truth. I;Iis stories are packed with truth, though they are not true stories as ·he says they are. This is a sham'!'man bearing gifts, an ambiguous spellbinder dealing simultaneously in contrary commodities - wisdom and deception. (De Mille, Castaneda’s Journey, p.41.)

We have seen from the range of responses and disagreements that the authenticity was fought over, claimed, and counter-claimed. If what he wrote was purely from his imagination, for many believers and academics it didn't matter. The books contain deep truths. They make shamanism available to a wide audience. They are innovative ethnography. They confront the hegemony of the Western scientific tradition. The planet is in crisis and needs these books to change us. The tradition presented in Castaneda's books is presented, like Theosophy before it, as an ancient tradition. The authority of don Juan is gained from his status as a wise "sorcerer" who has insight and knowledge unavailable to the rest of us. He was invented, imagined, a construct.

 

Achieving Authenticity

The art of the hunter, the sorcerer, according to don Juan, is to become inaccessible. Castaneda used this as his explanation for refusing to be photographed or recorded or to reveal biographical data. In order to become don Juan's apprentice, Castaneda claims, he was told in December 1960 to "erase his personal history": He believed  he said, that it was better not to know anything about a shaman; in this way, instead of encountering a person, one encounters an idea that can be sustained. (Rivas, "Navigating.")

The image that is sustained is that of the warrior with a different way of being in the world, living by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting. In other words, a man of knowledge has no honor, no dignity, no family, no name, no country, but only life to be lived, and under these circumstances his only tie to his fellow men is his controlled folly. (Castaneda, Separate Reality, p. 98.)

The rhetoric is skillful. According to Barbara Meyerhoff, when Castaneda met the shaman Ramon, "being around the two of them was like entering a separate reality. They really saw and believed and dwelt in another realm." (De Mille, Don Juan Papers, p. 344).

Castaneda persuaded people through the rhetoric, allegory, and performances in the books. "As Carlos uses traps and bare hands to catch rabbits, Castaneda uses stories and gestures to catch people." (Ibid., p. 380.) Persuasion lies behind the ubiquitous conversations between Carlos and don Juan. Readers are charmed and drawn in by these conversations, identifying with Castaneda and yet feeling superior at his irritating inability to escape his Western logic. The skill of his rhetoric lay in describing another reality, denying the validity of our own ordinary reality and conveying this through the alleg0ry of ethnographic fieldwork and his struggle to understand another worldview. The academic validation of his ethnography as factual is fundamental to the creation of this allegory. Fantasy is not just fantasy. It is also ethnography going further than anthropologists had yet dared to tread. Castaneda created a vision suggesting that Yaqui sorcerers know the right way to live; he showed readers what they could be. Rhetoric persuaded thousands that they could voice protest, oppose the conventional view, follow the "path," and practice magic. They could learn to "see" the ultimate nature of things by adopting "allies" and learning the art of dreaming, the art of stalking, the importance of celibacy, "controlled folly," and "being impeccable." He made philosophical, mystical ideas accessible; he made himself the authority on don Juan, and embodied don Juan.

But, as Bharati said, There is nothing in Castaneda's mysticism mat you cannot find, sometimes in the same words, in Hindu and Buddhist tantrism or in the official Patanjali yoga, which is perfectly exoteric and comprehensible to westerners. (Ibid., p. 148.) Stir together bits of H.P. Blavatsky, gobs of Gurdjieff, sops of Ouspensky, snatches of Govinda, yards of Amerindian folklore, and a series of programmatic LSD trips, and you have the don Carlos idiom. (Ibid., p. 148.

Michael Carrithers emphasizes the extent to which humans are not just culture-bearing but culture-creating and culture-changing beings. "Attending to the rhetorical dimension of life requires attending to the rhetorical will, the work on social situations that the persuading agent intends."53 The appeal of Castaneda's rhetoric can be seen in the light of this. Anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff claimed: "The form he teaches in is essential. It's as important as the content. His allegory. His mirroring. He gives us in a concrete form things we had abstractly conceptualized but didn't know how to articulate or use. He does that beautifully. That's where he's a gifted teacher." (Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures.) Myerhoff appreciated Castaneda as being more than a manipulative deceiver, seeing him as embodying don Juan, and possibly through don Juan as expressing a sub-personality of his own.
She argued that people were not stupid in accepting his work but that many were ready to believe, since "His allegories, the stories he tells, seem to validate everybody." (In de Mille, Don Juan Papers, p. 340).

Castaneda fits into a pattern of gurus and tricksters who work creatively and inventively with the works and teachings of others to persuade us that they have access to an ancient sacred tradition. And that sacred tradition attracted followers. Central to this is skillful rhetoric - the ability to capture the imagination of audiences as well as offer them spiritual insights and codes of behavior. If we define religion, as a system of stories (and, after all, myths are the backbone for many indigenous systems of thought, which change and develop over time with each new storyteller), Castaneda was the storyteller who was able to retell the old stories to capture imaginations. The stories had been told before but never with such persuasive force, never with such an aura of mystique.
Moreover, they voiced a nostalgia for a different reality, responding to a discontent with Western culture. "For a generation of people hungry for a different way of life, the message was clear. Native Americans possessed a vast wisdom, a spirituality lost to US." (Hammer, Claiming Knowledge, p. 136.) As are myths, it does not matter whether don Juan really existed, because the function of the books was to encourage a fundamental reconsideration of what reality is.

 

References

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