The Guru Who Loved To Lie: The Wild Celebrity And Dark Secrets Of Author Carlos Castaneda

The 1970s were heavy pinch New Age belief fads and movements, from nan benign (crystals) to nan unspeakably toxic and cultic (Jonestown). Somewhere successful nan mediate of that woo-woo spectrum lies nan activity of Carlos Castaneda. A UCLA anthropology grad student turned self-appointed guru, Castaneda became a counterculture icon pinch nan publication of his first book, “The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge,” successful 1968, purporting to find enlightenment via psychedelic mushrooms, peyote and nan cryptic musings of Don Juan, an Indigenous tone guide.

That book, and nan watercourse of his that followed, seduced millions of readers, plentifulness of them nary uncertainty hoping that pinch nan due dosage they, for illustration Castaneda, mightiness besides toggle shape into a crow and soar crossed nan purple skies of nan dusty Southwest. That Castaneda’s books were mostly flimflam isn’t successful dispute. But Ru Marshall’s hefty biography, “American Trickster,” reveals nan extent of his deception — and, conscionable arsenic potently, really easy group tin beryllium taken successful by it.

“He didn’t dishonesty retired of convenience aliases opportunism,” Marshall writes. “He lied because he loved to. Lying was, for him, an art, and he did it exceptionally well.” This is simply a 1970s story, but anybody successful nan coming tin relate.

Born successful Peru (not Brazil, arsenic he often claimed) successful 1925 (not a decade later, arsenic he often claimed), Castaneda demonstrated nary peculiar intelligence promise. But successful nan mid-1950s, first astatine L.A. City College and later astatine UCLA, he developed an affection for writing, accuracy and history. While pursuing a postgraduate grade successful anthropology successful nan ’60s, he grew enchanted pinch Buddhism, Theosophy, existentialism and Native American spirituality — each cardinal elements of nan spiritualist goulash he would yet navigator up for his books. His timing was impeccable: From Timothy Leary’s LSD experiments to transcendental meditation, non-Christian belief and narcotics fueled nan zeitgeist. And Castaneda’s manuscript of “The Teachings” said effervescently astir both.

Author Ru Marshall

(Allen Frame)

It hardly seemed to matter that nan book besides demonstrated his ignorance of both: He had small knowing of psychoactive narcotics (you don’t fume shrooms, dude), and location was thing meaningfully Yaqui astir Don Juan. Still, nan book — and their follow-ups “A Separate Reality” and “Journey to Ixtlan” — were monolithic bestsellers. Castaneda made it to nan cover of Time magazine. His activity provided George Lucas pinch much than a small inspiration for his master-and-student abstraction opera, “Star Wars.” And he became a target for parodists, nan surest motion of fame. Donald Barthelme satirized him successful his communicative “The Teachings of Don B.: A Yankee Way of Knowledge.”

That nan ’70s American psyche, brutalized by Watergate and Vietnam, recovered solace successful Castaneda’s sophistry isn’t surprising. More shocking is that nan world constitution tolerated it too: UCLA awarded him a PhD successful anthropology pinch “Ixtlan” serving arsenic his dissertation. Castaneda, Marshall writes, made an extremity tally astir nan department’s Yaqui expert, pinch nan different committee members overly impressed by his au courant melange of fieldwork and gauzy ruminations, contempt nan truth that his timelines and grasp of mycology didn’t make sense. “If we extremity telling ourselves that nan world is so-and-so, nan world will extremity being so-and-so,” Don Juan mused. Perversely, Castaneda’s occurrence proved him right.

“American Trickster,” astatine much than 600 pages, is astatine erstwhile much accusation astir Castaneda than immoderate scholar needs, and not astir enough. Marshall (who successful 2006 published a novel, “A Separate Reality,” inspired by Castaneda), has gone to crushed connected each constituent of his subject’s life, from his upbringing successful Peru to his personage (he’d find his measurement into nan orbits of erstwhile Gov. Jerry Brown, Federico Fellini and Oliver Stone astatine various points), to nan years earlier his decease of liver crab successful 1998. By that constituent he’d focused his attraction connected Tensegrity, a modified martial arts believe demonstrated astatine pricey workshops, and gathered a big of followers, mostly women, who he played against each different and psychologically abused successful various ways.

But who did this feline deliberation he was? How did he travel to invent specified a unusual belief system, and create nan nervus to waste it some to mainstream publishers and nan world establishment? Why did he support a container of knives nether his bed? “Carlos acted successful nan area wherever nan trickery of nan cult leader and that of nan literate hoaxer (and nan anthropological hoaxer) overlap,” Marshall writes. But each nan biographical item brings america nary person to what made him specified a successful triple threat of eyewash.

Perhaps a book that couched Castaneda’s communicative much profoundly successful nan discourse of nan ’70s counterculture and nan quality of cults past and coming would make his communicative clearer. But possibly not — his communicative is inevitably thing to wonderment at, grounds of humans’ capacity to rotation a yarn that flatters our egos and impulse to understand our belief selves, and to bargain into what’s spun.

Maybe it’s unsurprising that 1 of nan first group to publically sound nan siren astir Castaneda was a novelist. In 1972, Joyce Carol Oates wrote a missive to nan New York Times Book Review questioning a credulous reappraisal of Castaneda’s books. (The New York Times had spiked a much skeptical one, Marshall reports.) “It is rather imaginable that Don Juan represents a ‘non-ordinary’ reality truthful unusual to maine that I cannot judge it, and must effort to logic my measurement retired of believing,” she wrote. “But I don’t deliberation so… I’d beryllium very willing successful whether different readers stock my bewilderment.” No uncertainty others did. But what if bewilderment was precisely what they were seeking?

Athitakis is simply a writer successful Phoenix and writer of “The New Midwest.”