The guru who loved to lie: The wild celebrity and dark secrets of author Carlos Castaneda

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

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

“He didn’t prevarication retired of convenience oregon opportunism,” Marshall writes. “He lied due to the fact that helium loved to. Lying was, for him, an art, and helium did it exceptionally well.” This is simply a 1970s story, but anybody successful the contiguous tin relate.

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

Author Ru Marshall

(Allen Frame)

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

That the ’70s American psyche, brutalized by Watergate and Vietnam, recovered solace successful Castaneda’s sophistry isn’t surprising. More shocking is that the world constitution tolerated it too: UCLA awarded him a PhD successful anthropology with “Ixtlan” serving arsenic his dissertation. Castaneda, Marshall writes, made an extremity tally astir the department’s Yaqui expert, with the different committee members overly impressed by his au courant melange of fieldwork and gauzy ruminations, contempt the information that his timelines and grasp of mycology didn’t marque sense. “If we halt telling ourselves that the satellite is so-and-so, the satellite volition halt 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 mode into the orbits of erstwhile Gov. Jerry Brown, Federico Fellini and Oliver Stone astatine assorted points), to the years earlier his decease of liver crab successful 1998. By that constituent he’d focused his attraction connected Tensegrity, a modified martial arts signifier demonstrated astatine pricey workshops, and gathered a big of followers, mostly women, who helium played against each different and psychologically abused successful assorted ways.

But who did this feline deliberation helium was? How did helium travel to invent specified a unusual spiritual system, and make the nervus to merchantability it some to mainstream publishers and the world establishment? Why did helium support a container of knives nether his bed? “Carlos acted successful the portion wherever the trickery of the cult person and that of the literate hoaxer (and the anthropological hoaxer) overlap,” Marshall writes. But each the biographical item brings america nary person to what made him specified a palmy triple menace of eyewash.

Perhaps a publication that couched Castaneda’s communicative much profoundly successful the discourse of the ’70s counterculture and the quality of cults past and contiguous would marque his communicative clearer. But possibly not — his communicative is inevitably thing to wonderment at, grounds of humans’ capableness to rotation a yarn that flatters our egos and impulse to recognize our spiritual selves, and to bargain into what’s spun.

Maybe it’s unsurprising that 1 of the archetypal radical to publically dependable the alarm astir Castaneda was a novelist. In 1972, Joyce Carol Oates wrote a missive to the 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’ world truthful unusual to maine that I cannot judge it, and indispensable effort to crushed my mode retired of believing,” she wrote. “But I don’t deliberation so… I’d beryllium precise funny 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.”