Carlos Castaneda
Something went horribly wrong with the discipline of anthropology during the counter-culture revolution of the 1960s - a deviation that has not altogether healed even today - and no one epitomises what went wrong so much as Mr. Carlos Castaneda. After graduating in anthropology from UCLA in the late 1950s the mysterious Senor Castaneda, a Peruvian, embarked upon a remarkably successful writing career beginning with a bestselling book entitled The Teachings of Don Juan. This purported to be an account of his arduous but illuminating apprenticeship under a Yaqui shaman who taught him the esoteric and mystical traditions of the indigenous masters of the Americas. He is supposed to have been initiated in various shamanic techniques by this Don Juan and taught a raft of mystical philosophies through the agency of spiritual journeys which revealed hitherto secret methods of a natural spirituality which had been repressed and obscured by the coming of the white man. The Teachings of Don Juan, and many subsequent books, offered readers these lost teachings in accessible paperback form - a complete guide to the shamanic lore of the native Americans along with detailed information on the use of hallucinogenic botanicals. The idea of shamanic spirituality captured a niche market in the counter-culture of the era. Castaneda's books were republished by Penguin and became standard New Age literature. In all, he wrote fifteen books which have been translated into over seventeen languages selling more than 8 million copies worldwide. They continue to have readers - and Don Juan still has his believers - but more importantly they have shaped New Age and popular perceptions that there is a body of shamanic lore preserved among indigenous Americans that can be reconstructed to offer an alternative nature-based and eco-friendly spirituality.
Unfortunately, it was all a fiction. We can say with absolute confidence that there was no such person as Don Juan, that Castaneda was never initiated into anything of the sort, and that the teachings he dressed up as the profound secrets of Native Americans were, in fact, rehashed variations on half-baked anthropological theories mixed together with bits of pop existentialism. At the time, though, it all seemed convincing, and Castaneda - who went underground in 1973, largely to avoid scrutiny - was able to establish himself as a counter-culture guru with a dedicated and cultish following. In particular, he surrounded himself with a cohort of impressionable young women who, predictably enough, he inducted as student/lovers and companions on hallucinatory magical 'pathworkings'. It was a deeply closed and secretive world, with the reclusive Castaneda requiring his students to cut all ties with their families and friends and to erase their previous identities. He package his teachings - or rather those of "Don Juan" - as "Tensegrity", a neo-shamanic New Age system of attainment that included, amongst other things, syncretic elements of native sorcery, witchcraft, voodoo and ideas and methods lifted from karate and Tai Chi. Famous through his books and a carefully cultivated mystique, he offered Tensegrity workshops in Los Angeles all the way through to the late 1990s. He had once been immortalised on the cover of Time magazine, exposure that made him one of the most celebrated and sought-after gurus of the latter 20th C.
Carlos Castaneda - the first of the fake Indians - died of liver cancer on April 27 1998 at the age of 73. His death was not announced publicly by his followers until that June. It was also revealed, however, that five of his closest followers - five women - had gone missing two or three days after his death, and their whereabouts were unknown. These women were:
*Patricia Partin, alias "Nury Alexander"
*Amalia Marquez, alias "Amalia Marin"
*Taisha Abelar, alias "Maryanne Simko"
*Florinda Donner-Grau, alias "Regine Margarita Thal"
*Kylie Lundahl
These were all students of anthropology, most of whom had met Senor Castaneda at UCLA. They had become devotees of his teachings and practitioners of his methods. Some claimed to have met and studied under Don Juan himself and Florinda Donner wrote her own account of shamanic experiences with the Yanomami Indians of the Amazon basin in a book entitled Shabono: A Visit to a Remote and Magical World in the South American Rain Forest, a work subsequently debunked and exposed as another fraudulent work of anthropological fiction in 1983.
But what had become of these young women? It seems that their telephone accounts were disconnected several days after Castaneda's death and thereafter they disappeared from the face of the earth. To this day only Patricia Partin has been accounted for. Her car was found in Death Valley in May 1998. Then, in 2003, bleached human bones were found further into the desert near to where the car had been found and these were finally identified as being her remains in 2006. But no trace has been found of any of the other women. Their families have continued to search for them but without the slightest success. We have no idea what happened to them and whether any or all of them are alive or dead like Patricia Partin. The most common supposition is that at the death of Castaneda they engaged in some manner of cult suicide, separately or together, but there are many other theories. One is that they fled to the desert to engage in some form of shamanic communication with the liberated spirit of the dead Master and they died in a spiritual misadventure. Another theory is that - since they were well-trained in the art of erasing and changing identities and disappearing into reclusive anonymity, a hallmark of Castaneda's teaching - they may still be alive but living under new names. That is, at Castaneda's death, they went to ground. Senor Castaneda was himself deeply camera shy. There are very few photographs of him. There are even fewer of these missing women. They had been taught the art of disappearing. Alternatively, they turned into their totem animals and flew, crawled or slithered away.
This mystery is compounded by the fact that the police have been reluctant to investigate the disappearances. The authorities have generally taken the view that the women were not subject to foul play and orchestrated their own disappearance as do thousands of missing persons every year. Until some trace of them is found there is not much for the police to go on. Even more so, the police are especially reluctant to investigate such "cult" cases - more often than not it turns out that the missing person simply does not want to be found, least of all by their family. In any case, these women have been missing for seventeen years now. It seems likely that, by design or circumstance, they will never be found. They represent the dark underside of the "teachings of Don Juan." Not only was Carlos Castaneda a manipulative charlatan, but he created a deluded sub-culture of hippie anthropology intent on a regressive sorcery fuelled by toxic cactus juice and the systematic confusion of the primitive with the primordial. Much of this sub-culture has become a feature of New Age-ism and remains current today. It is an integral part of the spurious spirituality of post-colonial decadence. Neo-shamanism workshops have never been so popular or paid so well. Castaneda created that market. The case of the four missing women reminds us what it is really about.
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Yours,
Harper McAlpine Black
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