Bell Hammer Song

Don Juan

One can hear the groans when "Don Juan," the Yaqui sorcerer, was mentioned, my self included. Yet, the interest continued, perhaps because we could not resist the sorcerer and his apprentice (Carlos Castaneda, the anthropology graduate student from UCLA who authored the books).

Think of Mickey Mouse in Walt Disney's "Fantasia." It was very compelling when Mickey's magic with the mop and bucket overtook him. Anecdotally, he was the apprentice of a greybeard sorcerer.

Historically, there was the famous alchemist, Paracelsus, who fascinated Jung. There were also Goethe and Faust, confronting the Devil's questions. Then, there were the Celtic Merlin and the Old Norse Gandalf, among other wizards and magicians of note.

Who does not like magic, or Nick Drake? A rabbit in a top hat, doves up the sleeve? Card tricks, mystery stories, seances, table-tapping? Not to mention, the ouija board.

In the subsequent controversy surrounding the truth of the non-fictional character, Don Juan, I find it hard to believe the books were not authentic field reports, even if Castaneda had access to the world's best libraries on shamanism, such as the libraries at UCLA. There existed a continuity between the humanity of the characters and esoteric shamanic training, even if the apprenticeship between graduate student and a weathered old Indian whom he met at a bus stop seemed blatantly absurd at times.

Castaneda's journey began with the search for authentic information on psychotropic plants. He approached the brujo who immediately saw through him. Thus, his world was "stopped." In the course of his apprenticeship (which was conducted in the context of a true relationship, not a weekend "initiation" at a retreat center), Don Juan confided to him the purpose of "power plants" was to open up psychologically-blocked people. They were not necessary if you were an Indian.

Don Juan was puzzled himself about Castaneda being pointed out to him through omens to be his successor. He concluded Castaneda was a "three-pronged" naqual, instead of the more common "four-pronged." Even if it was double-talk, or more probably Castaneda's confusion as an apprentice, many stunning truths rang out in their applicabilty to the human situation. Don Juan was a Toltec shaman of ancient Mexico who could "see."

The first book introduced the characters, especially Don Juan's eccentric person, which was not like any person in traditional or conventional society. The second strongly suggested "power plants" were necessary to open the conditioned person to the esoteric secrets of knowledge. In Castaneda's case, Don Juan used Mescalito the Teacher (peyote), Datura (the Devil's Weed) and the mushrooms of psilocybin (the Little Smoke).

The reader endured the systematic steps of "the lizard sorcery," the shamanic shape-shifting of the mushroom ingestion and the dangers of the Datura root, stems and flowers. After books one and two, Castaneda left one with the rigors of field anthropology, the problems of being an observer who was an apprentice of the shaman and alien concepts of another world which conflicted with one's own cultural milieu.

In the third book, everthing changed. Carlitos was inroduced to his Benefactor, Don Genaro, who terrified him. Don Juan revealed himself as the Teacher who prepared the apprentice for the Benefactor. The point-of-view of the book shifted also to the heightened states of non-ordinary reality which, like the power plants, could be induced by "stopping the world," "erasing personal history" and "dusting the link with intent."

"The Journey to Ixtlan" was more poetic and ecstatic than the first two books. It highlighted the humor shared by Juan and Genaro and Carlos' increasing involvement in sorcery on "the path of knowledge." The Toltec plants of ancient Mexico were quite different than recreational drugs of the modern time: marijuana, cocaine, et cetera. Don Juan considered the individuals who used drugs to be fools, not participants in the hardship of learning to become "a man of knowledge."