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Castaneda's cult

Like so many late sixties/early seventies college students, I had a passing interest in author Carlos Castaneda's books about his experiences learning to be a shaman from the wise Yaqui Don Juan. After reading the first book, I was fascinated but skeptical; Marsha and I read the second book and maybe the third, and we decided that some of the "teachings of Don Juan" were interesting and compelling even if they were actually fictions. I was always curious about Castaneda; who he was, and the real bases for his stories &ndash even if they were fictions, they seemed to draw on real cultural, philosophical, and spiritual traditions of native Americans and others. (I just asked Marsha what she remembered of Castaneda's writing; she says "that you have to look to decide to see." We found this and other bits of wisdom useful and meaningful.) Currently Salon is running a very good, comprehensive article about Castaneda, the eventual compelling evidence that his books were fictions, and the strange life he led until his death in 1998 from liver cancer. After his dealth, five women who lived with him had their phones disconnected and vanished. Most assume they committed suicide.

Jennings believes Castaneda knew they were planning to kill themselves. "He used to talk about suicide all the time, even for minor things," Jennings told me. He added that Partin was once sent to identify abandoned mines in the desert, which could be used as potential suicide sites. (There's an abandoned mine not far from where her remains were found.) "He regularly told us he was our only hope," Jennings said. "We were all supposed to go together, 'make the leap,' whatever that meant." What did Jennings think it meant? "I didn't know fully," he said. "He'd describe it in different ways. So would the witches. It seemed to be what they were living for, something we were being promised."

The promise may have been based on the final scene in "Tales of Power," in which Carlos leaps from a cliff into the nagual. The scene is later retold in varying versions. In his 1984 book, "The Fire From Within," Castaneda wrote: "I didn't die at the bottom of that gorge -- and neither did the other apprentices who had jumped at an earlier time -- because we never reached it; all of us, under the impact of such a tremendous and incomprehensible act as jumping to our deaths, moved our assemblage points and assembled other worlds."

Did Castaneda really believe this? Wallace thinks so. "He became more and more hypnotized by his own reveries," she told me. "I firmly believe Carlos brainwashed himself." Did the witches? Geuter put it this way: "Florinda, Taisha and the Blue Scout knew it was a fantasy structure. But when you have thousands of eyes looking back at you, you begin to believe in the fantasy. These women never had to answer to the real world. Carlos had snatched them when they were very young."

Wallace isn't sure what the women believed. Because open discussion of Castaneda's teachings was forbidden, it was impossible to know what anyone really thought. However, she told me, after living so long with Castaneda, the women may have felt they had no choice. "You've cut off all your ties," she said. "Now you're going to go back after all these decades? Who are you going to go be with? And you feel that you're not one of the common herd anymore. That's why they killed themselves."

jon posted this at 9:12 AM
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