(March 10, 2026 at 9:47 am)Leonardo17 Wrote: BrianSoddingBoru + Thumpalumpagus:
- It’s still a classic among books on spirituality.
Journey to Ixtlan made Castaneda a millionaire when a million dollars was worth seven million dollars. It earned him a special dispensation PhD under the title Sorcery: A Description of the World. In 1973, Castaneda was both a cultural phenomenon acclaimed by John Lennon and Joni Mitchell, and an academic superstar recognised by Mary Douglas. Time introduced him as “the godfather of the New Age” and an “enigma wrapped in mystery wrapped in a tortilla” but still described him as an anthropologist.
Doubts were mounting about the academic status of his work, however. In the five years since Castaneda had first introduced don Juan to the public, nobody had succeeded in tracking him down. Though apparently a Yaqui, don Juan did not participate in Yaqui ceremonies or exist in a Yaqui community. The psychotropic plants which Castaneda describes don Juan administering were not known to be used by the Yaqui, and Castaneda’s account of his method of smoking powderized mushrooms would have had no psychoactive effect, since the alkaloids would be destroyed by combustion.
“Is it possible,” novelist Joyce Carol Oates wondered in a November 1972 letter to the New York Times Book Review, “that these books are non-fiction?” Time sowed further doubts. Whatever the truth of his field work in Mexico, Castaneda had been less than straightforward about the facts of his own biography. The author hadn’t been born in Brazil in 1935 as he claimed, but in Peru ten years earlier, and his father wasn’t a professor of literature, but a jeweller. “We all liked Carlos,” his Lima schoolmate Jose Bracamonte told Time. “He was witty, imaginative, cheerful — a big liar and a real friend.”
Castaneda imperiously rejected this demystifying approach. “To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics,” he told Time, “is like using science to validate sorcery.” Don Juan himself had instructed him to erase his personal history. Was don Juan a Mexican sorcerer version of Ossian, the ancient bard concocted by his ostensible translator? Castaneda denied it. “The idea that I concocted a person like don Juan is inconceivable,” he told writer Sam Keen in November 1972. “The truth is much stranger. I didn’t create anything. I am only a reporter.”
In some sense Castaneda was telling the truth. Seven years after the Time cover, psychologist Richard de Mille’s 1980 book The Don Juan Papers completed the destruction of his reputation, with a 47-page glossary identifying sources of don Juan’s quotations in dozens of authors including C.S. Lewis and Wittgenstein. Castaneda hadn’t created don Juan; he had composed him from the scattered wisdom of the dead. Although in breach of modern views of authorship, this form of syncretic activity is typical from the perspective of religious history: versions of this procedure have defined the composition of sacred books at least since Genesis.
https://thecritic.co.uk/castaneda-the-sorcerer/
"Spirituality" -- for you. My take on the spiritual is clearly very different.
