The Teachings of Don Juan

In the Fall of 1995 I was gifted this book. The cover was the one pictured. It came to me in October, a month that has come to rule my life in so many ways. There, or then, in my first Fall as a freshman, I drank in the adventures of Carlos, an ethnology student at UCLA, and his (mis)adventures with psychoactive drugs under the tutelage of the teacher/sorcerer/shaman Don Juan.

The central conceit was simple: a graduate student from UCLA in chinos who is curious about peyote shows up in the desert at a bus station. He meets a Yaqui “Indian” called Don Juan whom he interrogates about peyote (which or, rather “whom” Don Juan calls “Mescalito,” lovingly). In pursuit of answers, Castaneda dips a toe into the world of Don Juan’s shamanic reality. And, like any good ghost story, having dabbled with the awesome primal power of the supernatural unknown, he runs away, afraid.

And here I was in 2024, with my nose bandaged up and a steady run of blood coming out of my surgically opened nose. I took Byron out into the cold for a walk and I saw the same edition of this book in the little library around the corner. Knowing I would be spending a lot of time in the coming days in bed, I borrowed it, so that I could re-experience Don Juan’s shamanic world.

Amazingly, it still holds up. In part, I think it succeeds because we small apes never really quite feel at peace in this vast universe where so many much-bigger things wheel around us at all times, indifferently.

Mammals evolved as prey and even now, even as man stands as the peak apex predator, we haven’t let our adaptive default mammalian anxiety go. We’re nervous, shifty, suspicious and ready for flight or betrayal; we wheedle and prevaricate in the face of being held to account. Other niche apex predators are calm, even ridiculously relaxed because they’ve accepted the Game of Thrones condition that their apex role requires. It is a world that is lethal, absolute, and unforgiving. Most of the time the penalty for error is death, but there are few moments with anxiety.

We have not evolved to have that cool.

To whatever degree our species resisted being another warm-blooded snack, it did so by means of knowledge. Therefore knowledge that quells anxiety is revered in us. That knowledge is called “magic” or “insight” or “revelation,” and the human who possesses it is called prophet, sorcerer, or shaman.

And that is the tantalizing promise of The Teachings of Don Juan. The rather-dull character Carlos is shown a world of power, of the animal, of the final where the only chit for play is death. But what Don Juan promises Carlos, and the reader, is the gaining of true insight. Tantalizing, no?

But the book doesn’t exist in a vacuum anymore. In those years since my first read:

• Castaneda appears to have died in 1998 without some sort of shamanic transcendence
• Several of his followers appear to have disappeared outright and/or their remains have been found in the desert
• There’s the question of whether Castaneda ran a cult in a tony mansion in LA where the power and charm of Carlos-the-character wove a cult of personality around Carlos-the-man
• There’s been a lack of duplication of his ethnological research and hints of plagiarized content

These are all serious charges that verge upon the monstrous.

Material:

• https://www.seanmunger.com/blog/disappeared-the-women-of-tensegrity-missing-since-1998
• https://www.grunge.com/719962/the-untold-truth-of-carlos-castaneda/
• https://ultraculture.org/blog/2012/11/13/carlos-castaneda/
• https://www.salon.com/2007/04/12/castaneda/

In short, there’s evidence to suggest Castaneda was not an enlightened shaman, but was rather a lucky yarn-teller who spun notoriety and man’s need for that indifferent world to make sense, into a cult – a huckster.¹

But let’s just imagine that the story ends at this book (it doesn’t, there are some half-dozen in the series) and let’s put aside, with a very large stamp of DEEPLY PROBLEMATIC the context of Castaneda’s life.

At it’s heart, Don Juan is a simple bildungsroman with American southwestern trappings. The young initiate (Carlos) thinks he wants one knowledge, but Fate has assigned to him a teacher who is a trickster. Through interactions with the teacher-as-trickster Don Juan, Carlos learns to see a separate, shamanic reality (dimly). He learns to understand the cacti, birds, and spirits of the Southwest as participants in an ancient system of knowledge which produces sorcerers like Don Juan. Building from their first discussions about Mescalito, Carlos is introduced to peyote button consumption in a properly shamanic and reverential fashion. In his reverie, Carlos is then shown deep truths in the midst of cavorting with the powerful spirit in the drug. Later he’s introduced to Jimson weed and its essence of power and domination. Lastly (always in threes, that’s the form, no?), he’s introduced to some sort of mushroom (some psilocybin relative) that gives him another view of the hidden reality hidden amid our own.

In the dénouement, Don Juan offers Carlos further lessons in shamanic reality from which there will be no return. Don Juan offers to tell more, but only if Carlos can be committed to the scary and awesome world of sorcerers. Carlos runs away. Carlos returns home and writes up the document we’re reading and finishes graduate school.

It ends like a ghost story, finding the hook hand of the hook-hand-murderer on the door handle; the call is coming from inside the house. And despite being such an formulaic tale, it still bites our sense of curiosity hard and refuses to let go. It still engages, amuses, and inspires. On top of that, it’s dressed as a PhD thesis extraction, something like a found object like the videos of The Blair Witch Project, the found diary entries that drive modern video games like Horizon, or books like House of Leaves.

Castaneda’s tale still fills the reader with wonder and the wearying sense of “Gee, Carlos, how can you be so dim all the time?” In every way Carlos is thicker’n a 2x4, his interlocutor, the shaman and trickster Don Juan is nimble, spry, and clever. Don Juan’s replies are elliptical, captivating, beguiling, and quite often have more than a hint of “Gee, Carlos, how can you be so dim all the time?” We are merry and eager readers of a gripping yarn in a supernatural realm. It’s New Age Marvel.

And it’s still a ton of fun as a book. In the 90’s, I wound up reading the full series, eventually seeing Don Juan transcend death, seeing Carlos call a band of sorcerers unto him, learning (with Carlos) about the nature of reality and life and death that sorcerers inherited from ancient Mesoamerican forebears.

But eventually, toward the end of my read of the series, I started to feel the call of cult coming from the books: “Join Carlos and be a three-pronged sorcerer by sending in 100 box tops and $5.00 shipping and handling.” It made the world make too much sense. It assigned the reader too much power. It couldn’t be true. Like all religious books it promised would-be initiates an explanation of that cold indifferent universe; it promised to quell mammalian anxiety. It started to feel like pure fiction with a cash grab, like most religion. And the data seem to confirm this.

Properly understood as fiction, though, and without the menace of the Castaneda cult project around it, it, like most religious stories, is a fabulous, entertaining, beuiling, and by turns beautiful work of imagination about an experience in the murky zone where our reality abuts another. It’s a story of adventures in a liminal, porous, realm that we feel beckon at twilight when our normal reality goes to bed, and a more powerful, deeper, and more ancient reality overruns the world and reigns once more until the sun rises again.

Footnotes

1. To see so many of the MAGA-aligned follow the same formula was humbling as I lived through 2016 and 2020. There was evidence to suggest Trump was not an enlightened warrior for Christ and babies, but rather a lucky yarn-teller who spun notoriety and man’s need for an indifferent world to make sense, into a cult. He, yet again, a huckster.
   
   In both cults, the heroes move through our seeming reality battling powers beyond our perception: demons (like trans children), witches (like Hillary Clinton), and shadowy movers of reality (the Deep State).