Carlos Castañeda

Carlos Castañeda, born Carlos César Salvador Arana on December 25, 1925, in Cajamarca, Peru, was a Peruvian-American writer trained as an anthropologist. He moved to the United States in 1951 and became a naturalized citizen on June 21, 1957. At the University of California, Los Angeles, he studied anthropology and later received both his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees. He died on April 27, 1998, after a public career that made him one of the most widely read and disputed spiritual writers of the late twentieth century.

Castaneda is best known for the series of books he began publishing in 1968 about alleged training in shamanism under a Yaqui “Man of Knowledge” named Don Juan Matus. His first books, including The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge and A Separate Reality, were written while he was a UCLA anthropology student and were presented as ethnographic accounts. The Teachings of Don Juan gained attention far beyond academic anthropology after moving from the University of California Press to Simon and Schuster in 1968. In 1974, Tales of Power continued the story of his apprenticeship with Matus.

When the books first appeared, many readers accepted them as factual. Over time, however, the character of Don Juan and the training Castaneda described came to be generally considered fabricated, with little relation to actual Yaqui cultural practices. Scholars had doubted the books from the beginning, and Richard de Mille’s 1976 book Castaneda’s Journey presented evidence that damaged Castaneda’s standing among anthropologists. Even so, the books remained important to many readers and became a significant influence on neoshamanism and the New Age movement.

Castaneda’s own life was hard to separate from the themes of concealment and self-invention that surrounded his work. Though he claimed noble origins, a diplomat uncle, an Argentine boarding school, and art training in Milan, records and later accounts point instead to a poor background as the son of a watch repairman and goldsmith. As a child, he spent time working on a family member’s chicken farm in Brazil, and he did attend an art school in Lima. In a 1973 Time cover story, he resisted efforts to pin down his biography, saying that asking him to verify his life by giving statistics was like using science to validate sorcery.

In his later books, Castaneda wrote more openly in religious terms. He described Don Juan as recognizing him as the new nagual, a leader of a party of seers, and he often referred to “non-ordinary reality.” By the mid to late 1970s, he had withdrawn from public view. He returned in the 1990s to promote Tensegrity, described in promotional materials as a modernized version of “magical passes,” and in 1995 helped create Cleargreen Incorporated with Carol Tiggs, Florinda Donner-Grau, and Taisha Abelar to sponsor workshops, classes, and publications.

At the time of his death, Castaneda’s books had sold more than eight million copies and had appeared in 17 languages. His story also carries a dark close: he cultivated a following of young female devotees whom he called “witches” or “chacmools,” and after his death five of his closest female followers went missing. One, Patricia Partin, was later identified from remains found in Death Valley; the fate of the other four remains unknown. His line, “We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same,” still speaks to readers because it is direct, demanding, and uneasy, much like the body of work that made him famous.