The world Wallace paints isn't one of brave warriors beyond human pettiness striving for the prize of infinite life in infinite dimensions. I reviewed that book, Sorceror's Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda, in the Washington Post. Wallace wrote her own memoirs of her Castaneda years, far softer on the old fraud than he deserved. In that circle of witches was Amy Wallace, heroine of my youth for her role in the Book of Lists series, which taught me half of what I knew in my pre-teen years. Salon's story is a very lengthy, but very entertaining, account of his checkered career and obvious lies, and the mysterious fate of the gaggle of 'witches' who served him in his dying days in the late 1990s. Leroy, James Frey), and filmic celebrations of stylish lit hoaxes of decades gone by ( The Hoax, about Clifford Irving's daring 'Howard Hughes bio' scam, a hoot and a half with a best-of-career performance from Richard Gere as Irving), Salon reminds us of the saga of megabestselling 'anthropologist' Carlos Castaneda.Ĭastaneda began a series of bestsellers in 1968 that helped make the sixties and seventies so simultaneously groovy and absurd, about how secret Indian knowledge allowed him to turn himself into crows and travel through alternate dimensions, thanks to Yaqui wise man 'Don Juan.' The Don himself conveniently transported himself to another dimension and out of the reach of any other anthropologists or journalists who wanted to check up on Carlos' tales.Īlthough Simon and Schuster to this day sells tens of thousands of his books a year as nonfiction, all scholars who have looked into Castaneda's claims are certain he was a big seller of pure fantasy bullshit in the form of tomes such as Tales of Power and The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge.

The yaqui way of knowledge