The Interesting Journey Of Carlos Castaneda

Carlos Castaneda was a difficult man to classify. For a great many people he was a wise man, ahead of his time and endowed with an impressive lucidity. For others, a charlatan who speculated on ancestral beliefs and became a millionaire by selling books that said nothing.

His real name was Carlos César Salvador Arana Castañeda and he was born in Cajamarca (Peru) on December 25, 1925. Despite the fact that he claimed to be Brazilian, there are copies of his birth certificate in the Inca country. He was the son of a jeweler and a housewife. He first studied in his hometown and then finished high school in Lima. Later he studied at the School of Fine Arts and when his mother died he traveled to the United States.

In San Francisco he took some courses in creative writing and journalism. He then obtained a degree in Fine Arts from UCLA and later a doctorate in anthropology. The data on his life are diffuse and imprecise, since he himself was in charge of erasing his traces when he began his process of spiritual transformation.

What is known is that when he was nationalized in the United States, he only adopted his maternal surname and that the “ñ” was replaced by an “n”. Since then his official name was Carlos Castaneda.

Aspects of the life of Carlos Castaneda

Carlos Castaneda did not have it at all easy initially in the United States. He had to sell hamburgers on the streets, work as a taxi driver and even as a hairdresser. Since 1960, before graduating as an anthropologist, he apparently came into contact with Don Juan Matus, a shaman from the Yaqui community, in the Sonoran desert in Mexico. This link was maintained until 1973.

Also in 1960, Castaneda married Margaret Runyan, but a few months later he left her for another young woman named Mary Joan Barker. Carlos Castaneda admitted that he had a daughter named Marilyn Castañeda, whom he never recognized. Apparently he did recognize other children even though they were not biological. He did not mention his natural and biological daughter in his multimillionaire will.

Apparently, in his later years Carlos Castaneda had several women who served him as “acolytes.” According to Amy Wallace, daughter of writer Irving Wallace, three of them were part of his inner circle. All of them were his lovers and apparently they agreed to a collective suicide, at the death of Castaneda.

A spiritual transformation

Carlos Castaneda became world famous thanks to the publication of his book The teachings of don Juan, a Yaqui way of knowledge. The first edition of it had a foreword by Octavio Paz. The text includes Castaneda’s conversations with Don Juan Matus, with whom he supposedly began a learning process to become a Nagual Toltec shaman.

According to Castaneda, don Juan was the leader of the last group of witches in a long dynasty. In his books, however, Castaneda combines Yaqui wisdom with Toltec traditions and even with aspects of martial arts. From the anthropological point of view, his work is not verifiable and, therefore, lacks validity.

One of the most striking aspects of his work was the description of altered states of consciousness, induced by hallucinogens. Apparently, don Juan introduces him to the use of peyote, colloquially called “mezcalito”, among others. Castaneda did not present the field diaries of the experience, an aspect that makes many think that don Juan did not even exist. For them, the entire narrative is nothing more than literary fiction.

A story with many gaps

Carlos Castaneda did not allow himself to be recorded or photographed. After having made several publications along the same lines as the first, around 1993 he announced that he would make known the “magic passes”. He created the Cleargreen Foundation to spread his new approach. Thereafter he made several public appearances.

From the beginning, Carlos Castaneda’s work caused a stir. He had followers all over the world, true fans of his work. Among them were John Lennon, Depak Chopra and Federico Fellini. At the same time, his work was viewed with great suspicion in scientific circles. Even the FBI was in his footsteps,  suspecting that he was the leader of a dangerous cult.

In his work there is a great contradiction of dates. There is also data on the Yaqui culture that does not coincide with those collected by scholars on the subject. Despite the strong doubts that Castaneda’s work leaves, he still has thousands of followers all over the planet. Castaneda died in Los Angeles in 1998, a victim of liver cancer. However, there was no internal fire that predicted that it would consume him from the inside out and that would carry him wrapped in a light into another dimension.