There were no chain drugstores in Northampton when I was in college.
Strange though this may sound in a day when Walgreen's, CVS, and Rite-Aid seem to have the local pharmacy market neatly divided into three parts, it was true. Oh, there were national retailers downtown - I spent many a happy hour buying craft supplies, toiletries, and other small comforts at Woolworth's - and on nearby Pleasant and King Streets, but the banks were local, most of the retailers were either entirely local or regional chains, and the restaurants were all owned by people who lived, worked, and owned property in and around Northampton. There were three local movie theaters, a host of bookstores, and clothing choices that ranged from the delicate Indian prints found at the Mercantile and Faces of Earth to the solid blazers and sensible shirts peddled by Ann August.
Even the commercial strip on King Street was largely populated by merchants ne'er seen nor of in Western Pennsylvania. There was a Friendly's (so much better than Eat 'n Park, even if the milkshake equivalent was called a "Fribble") for burgers and fries, the august and matronly Hotel Northampton and its staid, take-your-parents-out-to-dinner menu, a Bradlee's for inexpensive clothing and dorm furniture….
To quote the title of an old sitcom, Northampton was most definitely a different world from the place I'd come from. The air was different, with the clean tang that seems to be found only in areas that are within striking distance of both the shore and the mountains, the fall foliage blazed with the glorious reds and oranges of sugar maple, and the cool crisp nights seemed at odds with the warm, sunny days of Indian summer. Even the way people talked was unfamiliar; my freshman roommate, a gentle girl from Rhode Island, called a long sandwich a "grinder" and barely pronounced her terminal r's, while the carbonated beverage I'd been raised to call "pop" was "soda" or sometimes "tonic."
This may be why I spent so much of my free time exploring Northampton that first semester at Smith. The landscape was both familiar enough to feel safe and unfamiliar enough to satisfy my curiosity, and so between classes I'd either hole up in Neilson Library to read the national and international newspapers or head into downtown to browse and window shop. I was more than ready to spread my wings after four years attending the same high school where Mum taught English, and I soon forgot the constant accusations that I'd gotten my grades thanks to her influence.
It was on one of these expeditions that I wandered into a small book and stationery store on King Street. I don't recall the name - it was either locally owned or part of a long-absorbed regional alternative to Hallmark - but it had a good newsstand, and that was enough to attract my attention. I flipped through the weeklies, curled my lip at the women's magazines that urged me to lose weight while cooking delicious treats for my family, and glanced at the general service magazines -
And then I saw what appeared to be a small newspaper, right there next to the usual copies of the New York Times and the Boston Globe.
The front page bore a passing resemblance to the Pittsburgh Press, but the Press would never have printed a headline like "TWO DACRON WOMEN FEARED DEAD; Japan destroyed," or had a Sunday supplement entitled Pomade. And who was this publisher, Rutgers Gullet, who seemed to have an obsession with newsboys, or the MacAdams family of asphalt fame? Surely comics like The Amazing Squirrel-Man and Grommets, Featuring "Good Ol' Weepy Whiner" weren't real, were they? Or the Chinese restaurant that promised delights like twice-fried hamburgers and hot shredded spicy hot spices?
Gentle readers, this was no ordinary newspaper. It was the National Lampoon's Sunday newspaper parody. And I was so amused, and so engrossed (in every sense of the word), that I plunked down my money, stuffed the Dacron Republican-Democrat into my blue nylon backpack, and headed back to campus to begin reading my treasure cover to cover.
There was plenty to like, and laugh at, in this surprisingly deft mockery of a typical Midwestern newspaper: the editorials that all but twisted themselves into Mobius strips to avoid offending anyone; the willful blindness that refused to identify a local criminal as a scion of the powerful MacAdam family even though both the Powder Room Prowler and young Bobby had a penchant for women's shoes; the ridiculous advice columns; the ads for cultural delights like Chinese Truck Ballet and a Linda Ronstadt album entitled Toilet Full of Boyfriends. The usual Lampoon flaws (the superiority that comes only from being a white male who's rich enough or smart enough to attend an Eastern school, preferably after several years at a good Eastern prep school; a heap of bad jokes; a casual attitude toward women that made me wince, and a dismissive attitude toward blacks that verged on appalling) were all there in abundance, but there were enough dead-on hits that I was willing to overlook them.
One of these was the Republican-Democrat's bestseller list. I don't recall the complete list, but I can tell you that its mix of fantasy fiction, self-help books, alleged history, and thrillers would have been familiar to anyone who glanced at the lists in the Newspaper of Record that originates in that den of iniquity called Manhattan. Highlights included The Dummerillion, one Professor Bonkbrain's riveting account of the quest to save the Sugar Plum Fairy's silver fox ranch, and the self-explanatory World War II exposé The Schnauzers Fly At Midnight: The Story of Hitler's Secret Canine Air Corps.
The humor in these fictional books should be obvious to those of us who lived through the Me Decade - I mean, epic fantasy quests abounded, but the Sugar Plum Fairy? Ditto German war secrets, though I daresay that the Man called Intrepid never once encountered a Nazi Schnauzer heiling and goose stepping its way toward an ultralight. But one title was so close to the original, so near to what it parodied, that it's stuck with me ever since, even during the times when I'd all but forgotten about Dacron, Ohio, sister city to Dacrõn, Pakistan, and home of the nine-eyed carp:
Carlos Castañeda's Book of Party Tricks.
Yes. Really.
Younger readers of these diaries may not be familiar with Carlos Castañeda, or why the idea of this New Age stalwart writing a book of tricks, jokes, games, and other amusements suitable for adults who were sick of playing Charades or Scrabble is so funny. Tonight's diary will attempt to remedy that lack, simultaneously enlightening the ignorant and elevating yet another scribe to the ranks of Writers So Bad They're Good.
Carlos Castañeda entered this plane of existence on Christmas Day, 1925, as Carlos César Salvador Arana Castañeda in Cajamarca, Peru. He grew up in Peru, then moved to the United States in the early 1950s and was naturalized in 1957 using the name he appended to all his published works. He matriculated at UCLA soon after, married one Margaret Runyan, and welcomed his own son, Carlton Jeremy Castaneda, about a year before graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology. Being an industrious sort in those days, he promptly applied to graduate school at the his alma mater, and as the 1960s segued from the optimism of the New Frontier to the debauchery of the Drug Culture, Carlos divided the whole of his earthly existence into three parts: schoolwork, family life with his wife and child, and field work studying the teachings of a Yaqui Indian who went by the name of Don Juan Matus.
And what fascinating field work it was! Don Juan, whom Carlos had met at a bus station on the Mexican border during a quest for medicinal plants, may have looked like an old, somewhat battered Yaqui, but he was much more than he appeared. Carlos soon learned that Don Juan, who lived near Sonora, Mexico, was a teacher and shaman of tremendous spiritual power who quickly deigned to take on the lowly college student as his apprentice. Under his tutelage Carlos, despite his responsibilities in California, was soon spending much of his time in the Mexican desert training to be a "man of knowledge" like Don Juan, with the goal of becoming a spiritual adept.
Carlos' advisers at UCLA were fascinated by this groundbreaking work; shamen weren't common, after all, and ones willing to work with an American (albeit a naturalized one from Peru) were even rarer. This was a priceless opportunity to learn about the spiritual and psychological traditions of a culture that had managed to avoid the taint of modern civilization, and who could possibly say no to that? And if it involved becoming expert in the use of illegal, possibly dangerous, but crucial "ally plants" such as peyote, jimsonweed, and psilocybin mushrooms, well, the advancement of knowledge sometimes demands sacrifice on the part of the researcher.
Besides, it was the Sixties. If Timothy Leary and his buddies could drop acid in the pursuit of wisdom, how much better to find a "natural" source of hallucinogenic enlightenment!
Even better, Carlos, who found his drug trips as unnerving as they were rewarding and broke with Don Juan in 1965 before his training was complete, was a graceful, lucid writer whose accounts of his doings in Sonora so impressed the anthropology faculty at UCLA that he was soon urged to tweak his master's thesis into a format that would appeal to the non-specialist and write a book that would bring this priceless ancient knowledge to the eager if drug-addled public.
Carlos might not have had the intestinal fortitude to become a Yaqui man of knowledge, but he was no fool. Between 1965, when he fled the desert after a particularly bad trip, and 1967, he wrote up his experiences as The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, added a segment on structural analysis for the disbelieving and the academic, and shipped his manuscript off to the publisher. One of his teachers at UCLA, Walter Goldschmidt, wrote a laudatory forward, giving the book an aura of academic respectability lacking in works such as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and other counter-cultural classics.
To say that The Teachings of Don Juan touched a nerve is putting it mildly. Published in 1968, it soared to the top of the non-fiction bestseller lists as readers hungry for spiritual truths, authentic information about the traditions of a culture that had long been ignored and oppressed, and eager to learn about what Uncle Duke would later call "our friend, the playful peyote button," bought copy after copy. Critics praised it for its vivid descriptions of the Southwest, anthropologists praised Carlos for his daring apprenticeship, and at least one expert in hallucinogenic mushrooms praised its accurate accounts of the side effects of doing lots and lots o'shrooms, at least at first. And if he'd shaved a full decade off his age, presumably became a birthdate in 1935 would turn his story from "middle aged family man abandons wife and kid to trot around the desert doing drugs while an old man mutters incomprehensible koans" to "youthful seeker follows a teacher on a psychedelic vision quest," well, what was the harm in that? It the teachings of Don Juan that mattered, not the minutiae of his amanuensis's life.
Carlos, who freely admitted that he had taken some license in the section of book devoted to his life with Don Juan to shape his field notes into a coherent and appealing narrative, continued his studies, both at UCLA and, surprisingly enough, with Don Juan. He worked this new field work up into another bestseller, A Separate Reality, and in 1973 was duly awarded his doctorate in anthropology for a dissertation that was published in popular form as Journey to Ixtlan. A Time cover story from March of 1973 described his books as
"[making] the reader experience the pressure of mysterious winds and the shiver of leaves at twilight, the hunter's peculiar alertness to sound and smell, the rock-bottom scrubbiness of Indian life, the raw fragrance of tequila and the vile, fibrous taste of peyote, the dust in the car, and the loft of a crow's flight. It is a superbly concrete setting, dense with animistic meaning. This is just as well, in view of the utter weirdness of the events that happen in it"
The author himself was described almost as if he himself were a mystical object, with Time's interviewer actually calling him "an enigma wrapped in a mystery." This impression was heightened when Carlos, confronted by Time correspondent Sandra Burton about certain inconsistencies in his biography (like, say, his age), replied with a suitably opaque statement that, "To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics...is like using science to validate sorcery. It robs the world of its magic and makes milestones out of us all."
Then, like any good adept who had found his quest for meaning outweighed mundane life, Carlos disappeared, only the periodic appearance of further books such as 1974's Tales of Power (an account of his final days with Don Juan and another Yaqui shaman, Don Genero, including a dramatic and almost certainly fictional leap off a cliff to symbolize his own ascendance as a man of power), several more accounts of his meetings with fellow Don Juan apprentices, a guide to dream interpretation the Yaqui Way, and at least two books on non-Yaqui shamen. None sold quite as well as his first three books, but all became staples of the burgeoning New Age movement, but eventually some 28 million copies were sold in 17 separate languages. And despite the dearth of anything approaching the Lampoon's suggested book of party games, it's all but certain that Carlos' oeuvre figured in more than one party at college campuses, New Age retreats, and alternative religious celebrations during the Me Decade. And if Carlos himself re-emerged in the early 1990s with a purportedly new wisdom called "Tensegrity" that was allegedly passed down from twenty-five generations of non-Yaqui teachers, surely only the cynical would claim that this was solely because of declining book sales, not because he'd discovered something fresh and exciting to share with the world.
All of this would be a fairly standard New Age narrative about a spiritual teacher, his star pupil, and the books and career that resulted; in many ways it's similar to the story I told a while back about the many-named guru known as Da Free Bubble Yum Ramalamadingledongledangle Love Ananda Blah-de-da auf Ulm. There is one crucial difference, though, that lifts Carlos Castaneda from the ranks of just another former household name to Author So Bad He's Good, right alongside T. Lobsang Rampa, whose entirely fictional life as a lama was lovingly chronicled by his cat:
He made almost everything up.
That's right, gentle readers: despite his early work being produced while allegedly under the supervision of a dissertation committee, little to none of it accords with the reality of Carlos Castaneda's life, the actual religious or cultural traditions of the Yaqui Indians, or the landscape of the Sonoran Desert.
This should not have been a surprise to anyone; in addition to Carlos shaving a full decade off his age, one of the incidents recounted in his books involved Don Juan turning into a crow, and not in a "this is your spirit guide" sort of way. There was also the end of Carlos' apprenticeship, which involved a Wile E. Coyotesque leap off a cliff to symbolize his new status as a man of knowledge yet resulted in no broken bones, lacerated internal organs, or large puffs of dust while a jeering bird stuck out its tongue loss of blood. Worst of all, an amateur mycologist, or expert on mushrooms, pointed out that hallucinogenic mushrooms simply did not grow anywhere near where Don Juan and Carlos supposedly found them.
As bad as the above seems, there was more. Oh, so much more.
Although there were rumblings about these supposedly factual books being closer to novels than serious scholarship as early as 1972, when novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote a letter to the New York Times wondering how anyone could possibly think these books were anything but fiction, the anthropological community and the general public had no reason to doubt Carlos' account of his work with Don Juan and Don Genero. The Time article in 1973 raised yet more doubts, but the real deluge didn't come until 1976, when not one but two separate books appeared debunking his accounts of his work with Don Juan. One, Richard de Mille's Castaneda's Journey: The Power and the Allegory, pointed out that if one went through Carlos' first three books and put all the incidents into chronological order, at least two seemingly took place at the same time. Worse, anthropologists who'd done actual, genuine field work among the Yaqui pointed out that Don Juan's teachings bore little resemblance to actual Yaqui religious, spiritual, or cultural traditions.
Oops.
There were other problems, both with the books and with Carlos' life story:
- Carlos described long tromps through the burning desert in the midday sun with minimal water, yet never once did either Don Juan (who as a native should have known better) or Carlos overheat, fall down, have convulsions, or exhibit anything approaching the symptoms of a sunstroke.
- The dialogue is so carefully quoted, and so realistic, that one would either have to be carrying a tape recorder or a memory specialist on the level with Archie Goodwin, yet Carlos stated clearly that Don Juan did not permit him to carry any sort of recording device during his lessons.
- Don Juan himself, who evolved from stern mystical teacher to something of a jokester over the course of the series, showed a startling knowledge of colloquial English phrases despite allegedly speaking only Spanish.
- Despite this alleged isolation and monolingual background, Don Juan supposedly also enjoyed cordial relations with other spiritual teachers throughout the Americas, which he revealed to Carlos just about the time that Carlos checked out books on the home areas of these other teachers from the UCLA library.
- There are no words in the Yaqui language describing anything remotely similar to the spiritual concepts allegedly taught by Don Juan or Don Genaro.
- Far from being uneducated when he matriculated at UCLA, he'd already studied fine arts in his native Peru.
- A paper early in his academic career that described a dialogue with a Native American was almost certainly pure fiction.
- Don Juan's utterings bore a strong resemblance to the words of other spiritual teachers ranging from Hindu gurus to CS Lewis.
- At least some of the UCLA faculty knew that Carlos was being less than truthful, but said nothing because his writings squared with their own beliefs about the malleability and subjectivity of psychology and reality itself.
- His alleged son, CJ, was actually his wife's child by another man, which led to an extremely nasty inheritance fight about Carlos' death in the late 1990's.
- He never bothered to divorce Margaret Runyan, which didn't exactly help when he married another woman many years later.
- He attempted to suppress Margaret's memoir, A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda, when it was published, almost certainly because she claimed that he'd come up with the idea of spiritual teachings being made up by an alleged leader's disciples during a drunken bull session several years before he allegedly met Don Juan.
- The supposedly Toltec traditions behind Tensegrity were (surprise, surprise!) about as accurate and factual as his accounts of Yaqui traditions, Don Juan's ability to become a bird, Don Genero's habit of teleporting, and his descriptions of the non-existent mushrooms of the Sonoran Desert.
Although a few anthropologists have claimed to find evidence of Mexican brujos, or male sorcerers, that bear certain similarities to the Yaqui Way as described by Carlos Castaneda, the academic community has all but unanimously come to regard his work as worthless. At the same time, some critics, while admitting that Castaneda was about as truthful as Clifford Irving, still express admiration for his spiritual teachings and claim to find eternal truths about life, the soul, and the universe in his work.
At worst, he might be considered yet another New Age guru whose work enjoyed a brief vogue and is now sinking into well deserved obscurity.
Such might well be true…except that unlike similar religious/spiritual figures like T. Lopsang Rampa, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Da Bazooka Joe Duble-Bubble, etc., Carlos Castaneda's final teachings may well have led to human tragedy. For it seems that Carlos, after his farewell interview with Time, started a cult, and that several prominent members ended up not leading their own cults, or becoming deprogrammers, or simply going on to the next phase of their life in peace, ended up leaving this reality under what might be politely called "suspicious circumstances."
It all began in 1973, when Carlos was granted his doctorate, spoke to Time, and promptly stopped interacting with anyone but his publishers and agent. Three female companions, all of whom took new names, joined him in his new home in Los Angeles. Florinda Donner-Grau (born Regina Thal), Taisha Abelar (born Maryann Simko), and Carol Tiggs (born Kathleen Pohlman) spent the next twenty years living and working with Carlos on what became Tensegrity. None would agree to be photographed or have anything to do with their families or former friends, and along with a handful of other female disciples who became known as Las Brujas (the Witches), they became the major figures in his life for the rest of his life.
This changed in the early 1990s, when Donner-Grau and Abelar published two books describing their life with Carlos. All three women began lecturing at Tensegrity workshops, with Donner-Grau and Abelar also making public appearances at book signings, going on the radio, and lecturing on Tensegrity. Carlos himself, despite claims that he was so spiritually evolved that he would never die, was ill with liver cancer, a fact that somehow was never made public until he finally joined Don Juan and Don Genero on another plane of reality in 1998.
Soon afterwards, Donner-Grau and Abelar disappeared.
So did Nury Alexander (born Patricia Partin), Talia Bey (born Amalia Marquez), and Tensegrity instructor Kylie Lundahl. Lundahl and Bey had both had their phones disconnected before dropping out of sight, suggesting that their abandoned their lives voluntarily, but neither has surfaced under either their birth or their spiritual names. And though the last of Carlos' most devoted brujas, Carol Tiggs, spoke at a workshop in August of 1998, she, too, vanished soon after.
Now…this is not necessarily suspicious in and of itself. Unlike such teachers as Marshall Applewhite of the Heaven's Gate cult or the Rev. Jim Jones of the People's Temple, Carlos Castaneda never encouraged his followers to commit suicide. But so many disappearances, in such a short period of time, is what might be politely called "hinky." And though Luis Marquez, brother of Talia Bey, eventually realized that his sister was gone and notified the authorities in 1999, Las Brujas had so thoroughly cut ties with their families that he was virtually alone in sounding an alarm for several years.
Then what was left of Nury Alexander was found in her abandoned car on the edge of Death Valley in 2003, in such a state of decomposition/mummification that she was identified only through DNA analysis. There was no suicide note or other indication of what had happened, and the question of whether she committed suicide, attempted to recreate Carlos Castaneda's vision quest without adequate preparation, or was murdered is still unknown.
As for Carlos Castaneda's literary legacy, his books are still in print, and still treasured for their spiritual wisdom. He himself is still identified as an anthropologist on his publisher's web site, while his later work with Tensegrity and Las Brujas has remained known only to a few.
To date, there has been no sign of Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar, Talia Bey, Kylie Lundahl, or Carol Tiggs. The only word from those still associated with Tensegrity or its corporate parent, Cleargreen, is that all of these women are “traveling.”
Make of that what you will.
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And so, my friends - do you have an old copy of Carlos Castaneda's works in your basement? An old National Lampoon? Are you from Dacron, Ohio? Would you admit it if you were? It's Saturday night, and you know what that means....
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