AMERICAN TRICKSTER: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda, by Ru Marshall
Does anyone under 50 know who Carlos Castaneda was? Around 1970, this anthropologist’s books of psychedelic adventures in Mexico with an Indigenous sorcerer named Don Juan turned him into one of the world’s most widely read writers. Today, he’s a little-remembered artifact. So why a serious biography by the writer and artist Ru Marshall?
Castaneda had a wide-ranging cultural influence. And he was a dark, fascinating character, a Peruvian transplant to California who rebranded himself in the 1980s as a wizard, distilling his respectable mass popularity into a small, lucrative cult. In Marshall’s hands, “American Trickster” is smart, thoughtful — and all too timely.
“Let me unequivocally get this out of the way,” Marshall stipulates early on. “It was all a hoax, a trick.” The books were fiction, Don Juan an invention. And with them Castaneda godfathered a facts-don’t-matter alternate-reality paradigm shift still transforming our culture.
Castaneda was 42 and on hiatus from a Ph.D. program in 1968 when “The Teachings of Don Juan” was published. In a foreword, his mentor, the chair of the anthropology department at U.C.L.A, praised his protégé for leading readers into “an entirely different order of reality.”
In a key scene, Castaneda smokes peyote in Mexico and apparently turns into a crow. Carlos, Marshall writes, relinquishes “his Western worldview and its limiting rationalism.” The book was rapturously reviewed as brilliant and groundbreaking, and found its way into millions of dorm rooms and backpacks.
Two more books were quickly written. “One can’t exaggerate the significance of what Castaneda has done,” an editor at The New York Times Book Review wrote of the second. For the third, “Journey to Ixtlan,” the same editor allegedly commissioned a review from a specialist in Native religions, but killed it (too negative) and published a young anthropologist’s rave instead. It was on the nonfiction best-seller list for six months.
Castaneda had hit the pocket of the zeitgeist wave, what Marshall calls “a mass desire to stick it to the Man.” Castaneda’s luck was also boosted by the popularity of Latin American magical realism and the factually-casual New Journalism.
Marshall writes that Castaneda, raised in a well-to-do family, was a two-faced fabulist who grew into a seductive con man. He hung with hipster intellectuals, soaking up Nietzsche and Sartre, whose ideas he mixed with local ghost stories — and voilà, the teachings of Don Juan. “He lied because he loved to,” Marshall writes. “Lying was for him an art” for this “wonderful, fantastic, fabulous liar.”
In the 1950s he arrived in California, the global headquarters of the fantasy-industrial complex. Castaneda studied anthropology, a field at the leading edge of a new don’t-judge cultural relativism seeping through the academy.
Unlike his contemporary Timothy Leary, whose fame derived from getting fired from Harvard, Castaneda depended on his university’s imprimatur. In fact, he didn’t really do drugs, hated rock ‘n’ roll, dressed conservatively. He loathed his later books’ psychedelic covers, which he deemed “completely inappropriate for a work of serious anthropology.”
In 1972, Joyce Carol Oates publicly questioned Castaneda’s credibility. “I realize that everyone accepts them as anthropological studies,” she wrote, but she doubted that “these books are nonfiction.”
Like other countercultural literary heroes, Castaneda was a nonpublic figure, reinforcing his aura of mystery and gravitas. But in 1973, he made a large exception, agreeing to an interview for a Time magazine cover story — one that concluded Castaneda was a fantasist and Don Juan very probably imaginary. “I have to change my whole format,” he told the interviewer. “Now I am going to be a sorcerer.”
Soon he was persona non grata in academia and getting negative reviews. His new books stopped selling. The discourse moved on.
But thousands of devotees paid handsomely to attend his workshops, which quickly turned cultlike. Castaneda called his closest acolytes, mostly women, “winds,” “witches,” “sorcerers,” “Blue Scouts,” “Orange Scouts,” “cyclic beings.” They legally changed their names to be more “sorceric.” Only he could cut female adherents’ hair, and he told them “his semen’s magic properties” would “transmit shamanic knowledge.” In order to become a true sorcerer, he told two followers, he “had to plunge a dagger into a newborn infant’s heart” and eat it. “I have sold my soul to the Devil,” he explained.
One leading male disciple was, improbably, the satirist Bruce Wagner. In 1998, when he learned Castaneda had died, Wagner phoned a fellow follower and joked, “Is it black Nike time yet?” — a reference to the recent mass suicide at the unrelated Heaven’s Gate cult in Southern California. In fact, after Castaneda’s death, five women from the group went missing and never resurfaced.
Marshall himself was a teenage Castaneda fan, and spent 20 years researching and writing “American Trickster.” It’s definitive, exhaustive — sometimes to a fault. We learn the names and pseudonyms of dozens of minor figures in Castaneda’s life, inconsequential dates, endless details of banal encounters; we go down too many digressive, speculative historical and philosophical rabbit holes.
Still, with an American president’s adherents so cultlike (and even pro-psychedelics!), “American Trickster” is illuminating and relevant: We can all use insight into sociopathic selfishness and the pursuit of power for its own sake.
Great American charlatans tend to be extravagant fabricators who believe some or much of their own creation. “I don’t blame anyone for not believing my history,” Mormonism’s creator Joseph Smith said. “If I had not experienced what I have, I would not have believed it myself.”
In the 1990s, Castaneda “laughingly” told followers that psychologists would consider his insistence he saw dead sorcerers’ ghosts a delusion, paranoid schizophrenia — because shrinks are “the ghosts’ puppets.”
Did the people around Castaneda buy his fantasies? His wife “believed him and didn’t,” writes Marshall. “Did Carlos believe he’d sold his soul? Or was he trying to “terrify” an acolyte, “or both?” With tricksters you never know for sure.
AMERICAN TRICKSTER: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda | By Ru Marshall | OR Books | 672 pp. | $29.95
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