Search - List of Books by Carlos Castaneda

The use of the term "the Witches" to relate to the three women Castaneda was eventually to claim had also been apprentices of don Juan seems to date to the early nineties, when books by two of these women purporting to describe their experiences with don Juan and his party were published. These three women are Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar and Carol Tiggs. All three of them appeared and sometimes lectured at many of the Tensegrity workshops that began in July 1993, and Florinda and Taisha appeared at book signings and gave occasional lectures or radio interviews as well.

In October 1965 Carlos-One went through an ordeal so unexpected and disturbing that he sadly withdrew from his apprenticeship and avoided don Juan for more than two years. The ordeal was a night-long confrontation with a powerful enemy who had assumed don Juan's bodily form though not his accustomed gait or speech....

Curiously, when Carlos-One begged don Juan to explain what had happened during the "special" event, 'the conversation began with speculations about the identity of a female person' (Castaneda's emphasis) who had snatched Carlos's soul and borrowed don Juan's form. The lady was not named, and the reader was left to wonder whether the galvanizing impersonatress was in fact a certain 'fiendish witch' called "la Catalina," who had been mentioned briefly on November 23, 1961, four years earlier. At that time don Juan had said he was harboring certain plans for finishing her off, about which he would tell Carlos-One 'someday.' Poor Carlos-One had to wait ten years to learn about those plans in Tales of Power, but Table 2 reveals that Carlos-Two, traveling a parallel time track, carried out those plans with moderate success in the fall of 1962, when he met the magic lady six times in a row, once as a marauding but indistinct blackbird, once as a sailing silhouette, and four times face to face "in all her magnificent evil splendor" as a beautiful but terrifying young woman. Reacting to those encounters, he felt his ears bursting, his throat choking, his hands frozen, his body chilled, and his arms and legs rigid. The hair on his body literally stood on end. He shrieked and fell down to the ground. He was paralyzed. He began to run. And he lost his power of speech.

Here we are asked to believe that a flesh-and-blood anthropologist who enjoyed this tumultuous supernatural affair with a glorious witch in 1962 did not recall her name in 1965, did not make the connection between the last meeting and the previous six when sorting through his field notes in the safety of his apartment, did not put it all together when naming her in his first book, but found the memory "as vivid as if it had just happened" on May 22, 1968, a few pages into his second book. Even if we could credit this uncharacteristic amnesia, we would still have to account for don Juan's equal failure to name 'la Catalina' in 1965. The puzzle is easily solved by switching from the factual to the fictive model. The abrupt, unsatisfying ending to The Teachings is not a symptom of ethnographic battle fatigue, for our campaigner has already survived six such battles with colors flying. It is only a serialist's preparation for the next episode, a cliffhanger that makes us hungry for another book.

At first, and with the backing of academic qualifications and the UCLA anthropological department, Castaneda’s work was critically acclaimed. Notable old-school American anthropologists like Edward Spicer (1969) and Edmund Leach (1969) praised Castaneda, alongside more alternative and young anthropologists such as Peter Furst, Barbara Myerhoff and Michael Harner. The authenticity of don Juan was accepted for six years, until Richard de Mille and Daniel Noel both published their critical exposés of the don Juan books in 1976 (De Mille produced a further edited volume in 1980, in which he withdrew some previously published criticism about Castaneda's knowledge of flora indigenous to the Sonoran desert. In short, de Mille had asserted that mushrooms did not grow in that desert, which was completely wrong, and he edited out this criticism in the 1980 volume). Most anthropologists had been convinced of Castaneda’s authenticity until then — indeed, they had had little reason to question it — but many averred that De Mille’s meticulous analysis disproved the veracity of Castaneda’s work. This is open to debate.

Beneath the veneer of anthropological fact stood huge discrepancies in the data: the books ‘contradict one another in details of time, location, sequence, and description of events’ (Schultz in Clifton 1989:45). There are possible published sources for almost everything Carlos wrote (see especially Beals 1978), and at least one encounter is ethnographic plagiarism: Ramon Medina, a Huichol shaman-informant to Myerhoff (1974), displayed superhuman acrobatic feats at a waterfall and, according to Myerhoff, in the presence of Castaneda (Fikes 1993). Then, in A Separate Reality, don Juan’s friend don Genaro makes a similar leap over a waterfall with the aid of supernatural power. In addition to these inconsistencies, various authors suggest aspects of the Sonoran desert Carlos describes are environmentally implausible,(mushrooms in the desert) and, the ‘Yaqui shamanism’ he divulges is not Yaqui at all but a synthesis of shamanisms from elsewhere (e.g. Beals 1978). Castaneda himself said that at first in the 1960s he presumed that it was a Yaqui belief system because Don Juan had told him that he had been born a Yaqui.. but some years later, Don Juan explained that it was a Toltec belief system, and Castaneda duly wrote this.

• "Winds of Nagual" - A piece for Wind Ensemble by composer Michael Colgrass
• Sorcerer - A concept album of ambient music by Michael Stearns and Ron Sunsinger inspired by the late Castaneda
• The Power of Intention, Wayne Dyer, A contemporary work by Mr Dyer referencing and building on Castaneda's work with Intent.

• Two other authors, Taisha Abelar (born Maryann Simko) and Florinda Donner-Grau (born Regine Thal), wrote books in which they claimed to be from don Juan Matus' party of Toltec warriors. Both Abelar and Donner-Grau were endorsed by Castaneda as being legitimate students of don Juan Matus, whereas he dismissed all other writers as pretenders. The two women were part of Castaneda's inner circle, which he referred to as "The Brujas", and both assumed different names as part of their dedication to their new beliefs. They were originally both graduate students in anthropology at UCLA.
• Felix Wolf, one of Carlos Castaneda’s apprentices and translators, wrote The Art of Navigation: Travels with Carlos Castaneda and Beyond. In his book Wolf details how his life had been transformed by his association with Castaneda. While touching on all aspects of the teachings, Wolf highlights what he perceives to be the overriding and essential transmission that came through Castaneda’s work: The Art of Navigation.
• Donald Barthelme parodied Castaneda's books in his The Teachings of Don B.: A Yankee Way of Knowledge, in which he substitutes "brujo" with "brillo."
• Anthropologist Victor Sanchez claims to have received similar teachings from the Wirrarika people in Mexico. Although he says he has met Castaneda, and that Castaneda's books were an inspiration for him, he emphasizes that Castaneda did not endorse his work.
• Martin J. Goodman claimed to have spent 2 days with a "reconstituted" Carlos, or Carlos' double, after the death of Carlos in his book I Was Carlos Castaneda.
• Miguel Ángel Ruiz is known for bestselling book The Four Agreements.
• Armando Torres wrote Encounters with the Nagual: Conversations with Carlos Castaneda five years after Castanda's death claiming he had been told to do so by Castaneda himself. In it he describes the Rule of Three-Pronged Nagual. Castaneda say in 1995 he has not other Students than the Chacmooles, then Armando Torres look as a merchandise product, and some links relations between the publisher and a newage cult focused in Toltecs called "Templo Tolteca".
• Amy Wallace wrote an account of her personal experiences with Castaneda and his followers