Viaje a Ixtlan : las lecciones de don Juan Book

Forty years on, what are we to think of Carlos Castaneda? The Don Juan series, of which Journey to Ixtlan is the central volume, were initially acclaimed as a breakthrough in anthropological field research. Castaneda, as the researcher, placed himself at the center of his book, writing it from the point of view of his own reactions rather than laying out an ethnography. Journey to Ixtlan became his UCLA doctoral dissertation, and was the most noted book of the series because in it Carlos turns away from psychedelic plants and follows Don Juan as his apprentice. He plays the role of the naive, sometimes dense and blundering student, which makes the book seem artless and laces it with subtle humor. By the end, the apprentice begins to get an idea of what don Juan means by power, and how one can become a warrior in the Yaqui sense. The book takes an almost hypnotic hold on the reader, just as don Juan does on Carlos. Carlos cannot break away from don Juan, no matter how irrational, even crazy, he seems, and neither can we. As the book progresses, we become changed in much the way Carlos does. It's almost impossible not to be infused with his sense of awe and wonder at what don Juan is teaching him, and the sorcerer he is changing into. Journey to Ixtlan feels so real, and we get so involved with Carlos' struggle to learn a separate reality, that we become in some sense believers in his alternative universe. We become part of it. The don Juan books were runaway best sellers in the 70's. They were new wave, new age anthropology, and an often dry academic discipline was given new life by this careful, almost childlike transcription of field notes.

The only problem with all this is that the books turned out to be fraudulent. Don Juan was either made up by Castaneda, or he was based on a real person whom Castaneda used as a springboard for fictional tales. Either way, this was not anthropology. It was the fictional journey of a sorcerer's apprentice. As Castaneda wrote more books, they became more fantastic, until even his most ardent supporters had to agree he'd left the world of anthropology for some sort of science fiction or fantasy. In his later years, Carlos Castaneda became the leader of his own cult, something of a Jim Jones figure, a man who apparently induced several women to kill themselves just after Carlos himself died.

So Castaneda and don Juan were discredited, and the man who had sold a total of something like 28 million books faded away. He is not much read any more, though all his books remain in print. Yet he is scorned by the very academics who once lionized him as revitalizing their profession.

It's hard to set all this aside while reading Journey to Ixtlan. Yet the book's faux naif style succeeds in making it just as real as it was before Castaneda's trickery was discovered. In a sense, Castaneda is a throwback to the 18'th century, when there was a convention of presenting fiction as though it were factual travel writing; think of Swift and Defoe. Castaneda's constant interaction with don Juan, along with his fretting about how this could not be real, has the effect of making it seem real even when one knows it is not. It is as real as the greatest fiction, and it doesn't lose its hold on the reader even when you know he made most of it up by piecing together all kinds of occult texts in the UCLA library. But it differs from most occult masterpieces in that Castaneda allows the reader to feel the process of initiation, and the doubts and anxieties it generates, in a moment by moment way. You feel you don't need to attach yourself to a guru, because Carlos does it for you. Whatever genre Journey to Ixtlan fits into, or if it fits into none at all, it's a life changing read. Now that all the controversy is over and the people who pursue that sort of thing have gone on to other interests, it's possible to sit back and read the don Juan books purely for the enjoyment of their ideas, their unexpected lyricism, their emotional wallop. Taken just as it is, Journey to Ixtlan is a read of many rewards.