Reading [The Second Ring of Power] I felt like the man going to St. Ives. Don Juan has gone by, leaving a band of apprentice sorceresses and their magical cats and kits to multiply his teachings. The dusty magus, now only remembered, gave earlier Castaneda books a personality and an interest absent here. In The Second Ring of Power we have only the residue of myth, odds and ends of folklore that suggest Castaneda has finally run out of material….

As journalism, The Second Ring of Power is mind-mush. It is anecdotal anthropology and monochromatic drug vision. As religious teaching, it is repetitive and banal. As fiction—which is how I've come to read Castaneda—it is mute. (p. 38)