J. R. Moehringer (obituary date 19 June 1998)

SOURCE: "A Hushed Death for Mystic Author Carlos Castaneda," in Los Angeles Times, June 19, 1998, p. A1.

[In the following obituary, Moehringer emphasizes the deceptive and enigmatic aspects of Castaneda's life.]

Carlos Castaneda, the self-proclaimed "sorcerer" and best-selling author whose tales of drug-induced mental adventures with a Yaqui Indian shaman named Don Juan once fascinated the world, apparently died two months ago in the same way that he lived: quietly, secretly, mysteriously.

He was believed to be 72.

Castaneda died April 27 at his home in Westwood, according to entertainment lawyer Deborah Drooz, a friend of Castaneda and the executor of his estate. The cause of death was liver cancer.

Though he had millions of followers around the world, and though his 10 books continue to sell in 17 different languages, and though he once appeared on the cover of Time magazine as a leader of America's spiritual renaissance, he died without public notice, without the briefest mention in a newspaper or on TV.

As befitting his mystical image, he seemingly vanished into thin air.

"He didn't like attention," Drooz said. "He always made sure people did not take his picture or record his voice. He didn't like the spotlight. Knowing that, I didn't take it upon myself to issue a press release."

No funeral was held; no public service of any kind took place. The author was cremated at once and his ashes were spirited away to Mexico, according to the Culver City mortuary that handled his remains.

He leaves behind a will, due to be probated in Los Angeles next month, and a death certificate fraught with dubious information. The few people who may benefit from his rich copyrights were told of the death, Drooz said, but none chose to alert the media. The doctor who attended him in his final days, Angelica Duenas, would not discuss her secretive patient.

Even those who counted Castaneda a good friend were unaware of his death and wouldn't comment when told, choosing to honor his disdain for publicity, no matter what realm of reality he now inhabits.

"I've made it a lifetime practice never to discuss Carlos Castaneda with anyone in the newspaper business," said author Michael Korda, who was once Castaneda's editor at Simon & Schuster Inc.

Castaneda's literary agent in Los Angeles, Tracy Kramer, would not return phone calls about the Thomas Pynchonesque author's death but issued this statement: "In the tradition of the shamans of his lineage, Carlos Castaneda left this world in full awareness."

Carlos Ce'sar Arana Castaneda immigrated to the U.S. in 1951. He was born Christmas Day 1925 in Sao Paolo, Brazil, or Cajamarca, Peru, depending on which version of his autobiographical accounts can be believed. He was an inveterate and unrepentant liar about the statistical details of his life, from his birthplace to his birth date, and even his given name remains in some doubt.

"Much of the Castaneda mystique is based on the fact that even his closest friends aren't sure who he is," wrote his ex-wife, Margaret Runyan Castaneda, in a 1997 memoir that Castaneda tried to keep from being published.

Whoever he was, whatever his background. Castaneda galvanized the world 30 years ago. As an anthropology graduate student at UCLA, he wrote his master's thesis about a remarkable journey he made to the Arizona-Mexico desert. Hoping to study the effects of certain medicinal plants, Castaneda said he stopped in an Arizona border town and there, in a Greyhound bus depot, met an old Yaqui Indian from Sonora, Mexico, named Juan Matus, a brujo, or sorcerer, or shaman, who used powerful hallucinogens to initiate the student into an occult world with origins dating back more than 2,000 years.

Under Don Juan's strenuous tutelage, which lasted several years, Castaneda experimented with peyote, jimson weed and dried mushrooms, undergoing moments of supreme ecstasy and stark panic, all in an effort to achieve varying "states of nonordinary reality." Wandering through the desert, with Don Juan as his psychological and pharmacological guide, Castaneda said he saw giant insects, learned to fly, grew a beak, became a crow and ultimately reached a plateau of higher consciousness, a hard-won wisdom that made him a "man of knowledge" like Don Juan.

The thesis, published in 1968 by the University of California Press, became an international bestseller, striking just the right note at the peak of the psychedelic 1960s. A strange alchemy of anthropology, allegory, parapsychology, ethnography, Buddhism and perhaps great fiction, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge made Don Juan a household name and Castaneda a cultural icon.

Many still consider him the godfather of America's New Age movement. In one of the few profiles with which Castaneda cooperated, Time magazine wrote: "To tens of thousands of readers, young and old, the first meeting of Castaneda with Juan Matus is a better-known literary event than the encounter of Dante and Beatrice beside the Arno."

After his stunning debut, Castaneda followed with a string of bestsellers, including A Separate Reality and Journey to Ixtian. Soon, readers were flocking to Mexico, hoping to become apprentices at Don Juan's feet.

But the old Indian could not be found, which set off widespread speculation that Castaneda was the author of an elaborate, if ingenious, hoax.

"Is it possible that these books are nonfiction?" author Joyce Carol Oates asked in 1972. "I realize that everyone accepts them as anthropological studies, but they seem to me remarkable works of art, on the Hesse-like theme of a young man's initiation into 'another way' of reality. They are beautifully constructed. The dialogue is faultless. The character of Don Juan is unforgettable. There is a novelistic momentum."

Such concerns have all but discredited Castaneda in academia.

"At the moment, [his books] have no presence in anthropology," said Clifford Geertz, an influential anthropologist.

But Castaneda's penchant for lying and the disputed existence of Don Juan never dampened the enthusiasm of his admirers.

"It isn't necessary to believe to get swept up in Castaneda's otherworldly narrative," wrote Joshua Gilder in the Saturday Review.

"Like myth, it works a strange and beautiful magic beyond the realm of belief. Sometimes, admittedly, one gets the impression of a con artist simply glorifying in the game. Even so, it is a con touched by genius."

Drooz agreed, saying it was an honor to represent a man with Castaneda's high moral purpose and impish charm. "I'm a very cynical, skeptical, atheistic lawyer, and I was deeply, deeply touched by Castaneda," she said.

To the end, Castaneda stubbornly insisted that the events he described in his books were not only real but meticulously documented.

"I invented nothing," he told 400 people attending a 1995 seminar that he conducted in Anaheim. "I'm not insane, you know. Well, maybe a little insane."

Even his death certificate, apparently, is not free of misinformation. His occupation is listed as teacher, his employer the Beverly Hills School District. But school district records don't show Castaneda teaching there.

Also, though he was said to have no family, the death certificate lists a niece, Talia Bey, who is president of Cleargreen Inc., a company that organizes Castaneda seminars on "Tensegrity," a modern version of ancient shaman practices, part yoga, part ergonomic exercises. Bey was unavailable for comment.

Further, the death certificate lists Castaneda as "Nev. Married," though he was married from 1960 to 1973 to Margaret Runyan Castaneda, of Charleston, W.Va., who said Castaneda once lied in court, swearing he was the father of her infant son by another man, then helped her raise the boy.

The son, now 36 and living in suburban Atlanta, also claims to have a birth certificate listing Castaneda as his father.

"I haven't been notified" of Castaneda's death, said Margaret Runyan Castaneda, 76, audibly upset. "I had no idea."

When he wasn't writing about how to better experience this life, Castaneda was preoccupied by death. In 1995, he told the Anaheim seminar:

"We are all going to face infinity, whether we like it or not. Why do we do it when we are weakest, when we are broken, at the moment of dying? Why not when we are strong? Why not now?"

But when interviewed by Time in 1973, he was more succinct about the end, directing the reporter to a favorite piece of graffiti in Los Angeles that summed up his view:

"Death is the greatest kick of all. That's why they save it for last."

Keith Thompson (obituary date 27 June 1998)

SOURCE: "To Carlos Castaneda, Wherever You Are," in New York Times, June 27, 1998, p. A15.

[In the following obituary, Thompson, an author, discusses the trickster role Castaneda played.]

When I heard that the coroner's certificate listed his occupation as Beverly Hills schoolteacher. I was amused. But I wasn't surprised. Why shouldn't rumors about Carlos Castaneda's death be as exaggerated as his life?

Castaneda's death was reported a week ago, two months after it occurred. He is likely to be credited, in his footnote in history, as one of the most notorious, charming and unapologetic tricksters of the century. Which is why I'll never know for sure whether the Carlos I met that day five years ago was him, or rather some Carlos-not.

Castaneda had agreed to sit for an interview, for Paris Review. The editor, George Plimpton, said that as far as he knew it would be the legendary anthropologist-sorcerer-author's first on-the-record conversation, in two decades.

Mr. Plimpton wanted to know if I was up for a chat with a cultural icon whose obsession with secrecy made Salinger and Pynchon raging extroverts by comparison.

You bet.

I was 14 when Castaneda stepped from the anonymity of graduate school in 1948 with a book called The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, the first of a series chronicling his "apprenticeship" to a Yaqui Indian sorcerer named Don Juan Matus. The books described sensational encounters with hundred-foot goats, human heads that turned into crows, cars disappearing in broad daylight, the same leaf falling four times.

On their face, Castaneda's claims were ludicrous. Precisely for that reason, they were epistemological lighter fluid for a generation burning to discover new realities, new consciousness—a generation burning for experience, so long as it was intense.

When the Establishment slammed Castaneda, it only proved he was cool. Attempts to explain away his adventures as peyote-induced only made the prospect of peyote more tantalizing. The Teachings of Don Juan gave my generation glimmers of what Sunday-morning-only religion seemed determined to vaccinate against—the sacred, up close and personal.

A quarter century later, Castaneda's literary agent insisted on Howard Hughes-style ground rules: no photos or tape recorder. (Easy enough; hire a stenographer.) The interview took place in the conference room of a modest office in Los Angeles.

The person who introduced himself to me as Carlos Castaneda was contagiously mirthful. His eyes were large and clear. They might have been gray.

Since I was on assignment for a literary magazine, I was eager for Castaneda to talk about his creative process. When, how, where do you write, and why? He politely demurred, saying Don Juan had taught him the importance of "erasing personal history."

"The more you are identified with people's ideas of who you are and how you will act," he said, "the greater the constraint upon your freedom."

(Advice to Bill Clinton: If things get any tougher, try "sorcerer's privilege.")

Castaneda spent the remainder of the interview recounting the tales that had made him (in)famous. How he had met the evasive Don Juan in an Arizona bus station. How the old Indian had badgered him to grasp that there is more than one reality, and such a thing as magic that isn't illusion. Nothing new; it was all in his books. Nor was I surprised when a poker-faced Castaneda insisted, as he had for three decades, that Don Juan was no figment of his imagination.

I am an anthropologist, he declared.

I wasn't sure whether to laugh or yawn—or cheer. Try as I might, I couldn't make my response to Castaneda fit any single box.

On the one hand, the spiritual force of his books doesn't require Don Juan to be other than an allegory. Still, my pre-interview research turned up convincing evidence that Castaneda the graduate student had talked openly and in great detail about his adventures with Don Juan six years before The Teachings was even published. If he made up Don Juan entirely out of tie-dyed whole cloth, he did so well in advance, when he didn't have an obvious need to. So in terms of credibility, I was willing to cut him some slack.

Then, near the end of the interview, Castaneda let slip that his grizzled mentor was no more. Pressed, he confirmed that Don Juan had chosen to "displace his assemblage point from its fixation in the conventional human world." The master had "combusted from within."

I took this to mean the old coot had retired from an exhausted plot line.

Maybe Castaneda's account of Don Juan's demise would meet Kenneth Starr's standard for a leak to Newsweek. But I couldn't blame Mr. Plimpton for declining to publish an interview that shed so little light on Castaneda as a writer.

New Age Journal eventually bought the piece. I got paid enough to recover my costs—flight, rental car, hotel and the hefty stenographer's fee.

There ends my story. But not quite.

Castaneda promised that day to send me an autographed copy of his book The Art of Dreaming. It never came. When I read his obituary, I had to accept that it never would. But what if I was wrong about that?

After all, Castaneda insisted he was never married, yet court records showed he had been. He claimed at least two different birth dates and locations. He wrote that he had grown a beak, changed into a crow and learned to fly. His death certificate preposterously called him a public school teacher.

Could this most practiced of pretenders have faked his own demise? To even consider the possibility was to imagine a degree of duplicity beyond my comprehension.

Well, almost. Carlos, do you think you could send me that book?

Peter Applebome (obituary date 19 August 1998)

SOURCE: "Mystery Man's Death Can't End the Mystery," in New York Times, August 19, 1998, pp. El, E3.

[In the following obituary, Applebome discusses the legal conflicts resulting from Castaneda's unpublicized death.]

Once he began publishing his best-selling accounts of his purported adventures with a Mexican shaman 30 years ago, Carlos Castaneda's life and work played out in a wispy blur of sly illusion and artful deceit.

Now, four months after he died and two months after the death was made public, a probate court in Los Angeles is sifting through competing claims on the estate of the author whose works helped define the 1960's and usher in the New Age movement.

His followers say he left the earth with the same elegant, willful mystery that characterized his life. The man he used to call his son says Castaneda died while a virtual prisoner of cultlike followers who controlled his last days and his estate.

Given that Castaneda's literary credibility, marital history, place of birth, circumstances of death and almost everything else are in dispute, the competing claims—including questions about the authenticity of his will and his competence to sign it—are not surprising. But they are providing a nasty coda to the life of a man whose books, which sold 8 million copies in 17 languages, are alternately viewed as fact, metaphor or hoax.

Admirers say the areas of dispute, most famously whether the purported shaman and brujo (witch) Don Juan Matus ever existed, are peripheral to the real issues Castaneda explored in his books.

"Carlos knew exactly what was true and what was not true," said Angela Panaro, of Cleargreen Inc., the group that marketed Castaneda's teachings and seminars near the end of his life. "But the thing that's missing when people talk about Carlos is not whether Don Juan lived or not, or who lived in what house. It's about becoming a voyager of awareness, about the 600 locations in the luminous egg of man where the assemblage point can shift, about the process of depersonalization he taught."

The luminous egg, assemblage point and processes of depersonalization are all part of the practice of Tensegrity, a blend of meditation and movement exercises that Castaneda taught in his final years as a way for people to break through the limitations of ordinary consciousness. Skeptics say they sum up a career characterized, in the end, by literate New Age mumbo jumbo and artful deception.

Even Margaret Runyan Castaneda, who had been married to him, while admiring Castaneda and his work, says she doubts Don Juan ever existed and believes his name came from Mateus, the bubbly Portuguese wine the couple used to drink.

Carlos Castaneda rocketed from obscure anthropology graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles to instant, if elusive, celebrity in 1968 with the publication of The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, a vivid account of the spiritual and pharmacological adventures he had with a while-haired Yaqui Indian nagual or shaman, Don Juan Matus. He said he met Don Juan at a Greyhound bus station in Nogales, Ariz., in the summer of 1960 when Castaneda was doing research on medicinal plants used by Indians of the Southwest.

In that book, its sequel, A Separate Reality, and eight, others, he described his apprenticeship to Don Juan and a spiritual journey in which he saw giant insects, learned to fly and grew a beak as a part of a process of breaking the hold of ordinary perception. Admirers saw his work as a gripping spiritual quest in the tradition of Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception. Skeptics wondered how much was true.

But despite Castaneda's obsessive pursuit of total anonymity—he refused to be photographed or tape recorded and almost never gave interviews—he became a figure of international notoriety, and the books continued to sell well after his vogue passed.

In recent years he surfaced with a new vision, the teaching of Tensegrity, which is described on the Cleargreen Web site as "the modernized version of some movements called magical passes developed by Indian shamans who lived in Mexico in times prior to the Spanish conquest." He even made public appearances and spoke at seminars promoting the work.

Tensegrity, its organizers say, allows followers to perceive pure energy, "zillions of energy fields in the form of luminous filaments" and break the chains of normal cognition.

Unknown to customers who turned out for the seminars—which cost $600 and more, where they could buy Mr. Castaneda's books. $29.95 videos and Tensegrity T-shirts reading "The magic is in the movement"—Castaneda was dying of cancer while describing his route to vibrant good health.

Indeed, although only his inner circle knew about it for two months, he died on April 27 at his home, surrounded by high hedges in Westwood, a well-to-do section of Los Angeles, where he lived for many years with some of the self-described witches, stalkers, dreamers and spiritual seekers who shared his work.

At a brief hearing in probate court in Los Angeles last week, the man whom Castaneda for many years called his son challenged the will Castaneda apparently signed four days before his death. The judge, John B. McIlory, set a hearing date of Oct. 15 for the case.

C. J. Castaneda, also known as Adrian Vashon—whose birth certificate cites Carlos Castaneda as his father, although another man was actually his father—says Cleargreen became a cultlike group that came to control Castaneda's life.

"Those people latched onto him, stuck their claws in him and rode him for all he was worth," said C. J. Castaneda, 37, who operates two small coffee shops in suburban Atlanta and calls himself a powerful brujo: "I don't believe the will has my father's signature, and I don't believe he was competent to sign it three days before he died."

Deborah Drooz, Carlos Castaneda's lawyer, who was named executor of his estate, said she witnessed the signing along with another lawyer and a notary public. She said that Carlos Castaneda was completely lucid when he signed the will, and that C. J. Castaneda had no claims to the estate. She denied that Carlos Castaneda's followers were anything akin to a cult and said C. J. Castaneda's claim did not constitute a serious legal challenge.

"No one, none, of Dr. Castaneda's followers participated in the writing of the will," she said. "And one thing that was very clear for years was that Dr. Castaneda had not had a relationship with C. J. Castaneda or Adrian Vashon for years, and he was very clear he should not benefit from Dr. Castaneda's death."

By conventional standards, Mr. Castaneda's death was highly unusual.

Invariably described as an impeccable person who kept his affairs in perfect order, Castaneda apparently signed the will on April 23, and then died at 3 A.M. on April 27 of what his death certificate said was metabolic encephalopathy, a neurological breakdown that followed 2 weeks of liver failure and 10 months of cancer. The signature is partly obscured, and C. J. Castaneda and his mother, Mrs. Castaneda, say it does not look like his signature.

The death certificate is as much fiction as fact. It said he was never married, when he was married at least once and perhaps twice; that he was born in Brazil, when he was apparently born in Peru, and that he was employed as a teacher by the Beverly Hills School District, which has no record of his employment.

He was cremated within hours of his death. His death was kept secret for more than two months until word leaked out and was confirmed by his representatives, who said the death was kept quiet in keeping with Castaneda's lifelong pursuit of privacy.

His will cited assets worth just over $1 million, a modest figure for an author who sold so well and apparently lived simply. All his assets were given to a trust, called the Eagle's Trust, set up at the same time as the will. It is not clear how much in additional assets had already been placed in the trust, but a London newspaper recently estimated his estate at $20 million.

To C. J. Castaneda and his mother, the circumstances of Mr. Castaneda's death are so suspicious as to suggest that his life was being controlled by others.

But given that the unusual was the routine for Carlos Castaneda, extending to his own familial relationships, it is difficult to know how to evaluate the discrepancies.

C. J. Castaneda's parents were Mrs. Castaneda, who wrote about her life in a book, A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda, and a businessman named Adrian Gerritsen, a friend of Carlos Castaneda.

Mrs. Castaneda said she and Mr. Gerritsen conceived the child after she and Carlos Castaneda received a Mexican divorce she took to be official but turned out not to be valid. Carlos Castaneda put his own name on the boy's birth certificate, helped raise him for several years, paid for his schooling and continued to express affection in letters for many years, although the two seldom saw each other in recent years.

C. J. Castaneda said Carlos Castaneda's followers kept his father away from him. Ms. Drooz said the author made it clear he did not want to see him.

Richard de Mille, who published two books questioning Carlos Castaneda's veracity, said Castaneda filed legal papers marrying a Peruvian girl with whom he conceived a child in the 1950's, making her his only legal wife. The two never divorced, he said.

Carlos Castaneda originally said he was born on Dec. 25, 1935, in Sao Paolo, Brazil, the son of a university professor and a woman who died when he was 7. American immigration records indicated he was born in 1923 in Cajmarca, Peru, the son of a goldsmith, and that his mother died when he was 24.

Aside from his dubious biography and shamanlike tales of having doubles, pulverizing glass or powering cars with his spirit is the question of what to make of his books.

Few academics regard them as serious scholarship. Dr. Louis J. West, a psychology professor at the U.C.L.A., who knew Castaneda when he was completing his doctorate there, said the works were at least in part "science fiction." But that does not take away from their virtues of conveying mysterious places and alternative realities, he said.

"Carlos wrote beguilingly and well, and told very colorful tales that hold the interest and give descriptions of people and places and activities that are illuminating," he said.

Mr. de Mille is less forgiving.

"I wouldn't call him a fraud, because any sensible person would see through it," he said. "He could be charming and playful, but that doesn't make him honest or defensible or anything like that."

Even admirers tend to be skeptical of the Tensegrity seminars. Many find it hard to believe that Castaneda would spend almost three decades conveying and refining Don Juan's teachings only to start marketing a whole new version of it at the end.

"It really seemed to me that the Carlos Castaneda that I met and who was giving these workshops was not even the same person who had written the truly fine books on the teachings of Don Juan," said Barry Klein, a Castaneda admirer who tried the Tensegrity seminars briefly.

As to Don Juan's authenticity, many people believe Don Juan was at best a composite of things Mr. Castaneda read and experienced.

"I really think there was no Don Juan," Mrs. Castaneda said. "I think Don Juan was anyone with whom he had a conversation; like the Dialogues of Plato. I told him Plato probably never had anyone to talk with, but the Dialogues were his way of conveying both sides of things. I think that's what Carlos did."

Still, she's pretty sure that Castaneda is doing fine wherever he is.

"I did the numerology of the day he died," she said. "He ascended to a 22, and that's the highest you can get. He was very highly evolved, and I'm sure he won't come back to this world. I like the pseudo-sciences. They help me find my way and understand."