By Ru Marshall

Review by Natalie J. Storey

A new biography of Carlos Castaneda chronicles how the hoaxer invented the idea of shamanism for a white American audience and then capitalized on its popularity to create a suicide cult. The stereotypes Castaneda generated are still pervasive in American society, especially in the psychedelic renaissance. But—as biographer Ru Marshall points out—it was all based on a lie. Don Juan, the Yaqui elder Castaneda quoted in his books, never existed and his “knowledge” was cobbled together from European sources.

“(H)e was a particularly American trickster—a trickster of the Americas. A simulacrum, a trickster for a consumer society,” Marshall writes. “For trickster stories serve a social and ritual function. They’re employed in healing rituals. However much they disrupt society, they have a role in it. And, when the tricking is done, the charming perp disappears.”

At its core Marshall’s biography is an exhaustive accounting of how the guru created his hoax, and then how forcefully American culture lapped it up. Castaneda’s books have been translated into 17 languages, sold at least 10 million copies, and continue to sell thousands every year. When the University of California Press published a deluxe fortieth anniversary edition of The Teachings it categorized the book as Religion/Native American Studies/Mysticism even though various scholars and friends of Castaneda have decried the accounts as fake. The books inspired a laundry list of famous artists, including George Lucas (don Juan was perhaps the inspiration for Obi-Wan Kenobi), Joni Mitchell, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Federico Fellini, Octavio Paz, even the philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

American Trickster opens with an eerie scene in 2003 when two hikers find the body of Nury Alexander—one of five women who disappeared after Castaneda’s death—in the Panamint Dunes in Death Valley, CA. Nury was the adopted daughter and sometimes lover of Castaneda who had built her life around sharing his teachings. Castaneda’s cult fell apart in the late 90s after his death at home from liver cancer and the disappearance of the women, whom he had dubbed witches. Five of his closet female companions disappeared shortly after their guru’s death, apparently committing suicide to join their leader, which members of Castaneda’s cult called “making the leap.” The bodies of the other four women have never been found.

American Trickster’s first section delves into Castaneda’s childhood in Peru. Although Castaneda often claimed he was from Brazil and younger than his age, he was born in Cajamarca, a remote city in the northern Andes, in 1925. Marshall tracked down characters from Castaneda’s early life who remembered him as a gregarious liar and a fabulous storyteller. Castaneda came from one of the village’s leading merchant and silversmith families, but his branch was the “poor relations,” according to Marshall.“When he was a boy, all of (Castaneda’s) friends called him by his nickname, Fashturo. Fashturo was the town drunk, famous for his jokes and colorful lies.” 

As a young boy, Castaneda talked of going to America. When he arrived in San Francisco by boat in 1951, he left a wife and child behind in Peru, whose existence he would lie about for the rest of his life, according to the biography.

Marshall makes a convincing case that the author’s family was involved in the brutality of mining in South America, possibly even owning slaves and participating in a massacre of indigenous people. “Did the grandfather of Mr. World-Famous Author own a mine, or a share in a mine? Family members in Cajamarca told me he did. Some said silver, some said gold.” Given that the family belonged to the non-Indigenous aristocratic class, Marshall argues that it’s unlikely Castaneda would have picked up knowledge of indigenous healing or psychedelic practices from his childhood in Peru except as a distant observer.

Friends and associates never saw Castaneda use psychedelics and some of the information about indigenous psychedelic use in his books is inaccurate, American Trickster reiterates. Gordon Wasson, who created a bank of stereotypes of his own when he convinced Maria Sabina to give him psychedelic mushrooms in the 1950s, was the first to log suspicions about the psychedelic use chronicled in The Teachings. Wasson knew a thing or two about psychedelic mushrooms, such as the fact that they aren’t smoked by any tribe as Castaneda recorded. Marshall argues this was probably an error by Castaneda, who was naïve about psychedelics. According to Marshall, the obvious conclusion was: “The drug culture’s new hero had never tried shrooms.” Castaneda’s only documented contact with Yaqui people appears to have been on trips to Mexico when he bought masks from merchants, Marshall writes. Over the years, Yaqui elders have attempted to distance themselves from Castaneda’s books and the ideas within.

Marshall shows how Castaneda tricked multiple prominent UCLA professors during the 1960s in part because “the knowledge” in his books was branded as indigenous. Requesting funding to do a research trip in Mexico, Castaneda’s professors touted the fact that he spoke “several South American languages fluently and can pass as Mexican and/or indigenous,” Marshall writes. In fact, The Teachings likely began as an assignment in the archaeologist Clement Meighan’s “Methods of Field Archaeology” class in the spring of 1960. Meighan promised any student who could find and interview a real “Indian” an automatic A, which Castaneda received. Meighan then helped Castaneda launch his career.

The last third of American Trickster chronicles Castaneda’s descent into debauchery and increasing manipulation of his followers as he created a New Age cult in Pasadena. Marshall shows how the author’s lifestyle program called Tensegrity devolved into a recruitment tool for his ever-expanding harem. Castaneda kept a rotating roster of female followers who changed their names at his insistence, cut ties to their families and friends and waited for their chances to sleep with “The Nagual,” whose semen they believed had magical powers. Marshall relies on the testimony of writer Amy Wallace, one of Castaneda’s long-term sexual partners, to illustrate the salacious dynamics of the cult. According to Wallace, the women believed: “You needed the Nagual’s sperm to become a magical being. It was like drinking a magic elixir.”

Castaneda demanded that members of his inner circle give up their personal histories and attachments, including giving away pets, and he instructed them to lie about the existence of his cult and harem. Castaneda claimed celibacy yet continued to sleep with his female followers. He banned his women from going to hairdressers and insisted on giving them the cult’s signature boyish bowl cuts himself. Sexuality and jealously “permeated the interactions within the group” despite Castaneda’s claims of celibacy, Marshall writes. “Carlos, almost until the very end, was still carefully choreographing sexual interactions among the inner circle.”

American Trickster reveals the colossal ramifications of the cultural paradigm Carlos Castaneda created, which is still alive and well in American culture today, especially in the psychedelic underground, where people continue to pass out The Teachings as a paragon example of indigenous spiritual practices involving psychedelics. The psychedelic renaissance remains preoccupied with the lineages of its teachings, facilitators and substances in ways that mimic The Teachings. But, of course, as Marshall’s new biography tries to assert yet again: don Juan wasn’t real, and the “knowledge” in Castaneda’s books was largely plagiarized from European philosophy and previously published anthropological studies. In the end, Marshall reminds us: “We believe stories that fit narratives to which we already subscribe.” And Carlos Castaneda was an expert at manipulating his readers with these narratives.

“The truth was indeed much stranger: a mestizo author, who insisted on identifying himself as ‘European,’ who’d created an ‘Indian’ character who turns the world of the ‘Western’ character ‘Carlos’ inside out, revealing a supposedly indigenous way of knowledge that was in fact based on German philosophy.”