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Among these possibilities, one thing is sure. There is no doubt that Castaneda, or a man by that name, exists: he is alive and well in Los Angeles, a loquacious, nut-brown anthropologist, surrounded by such concrete proofs of existence as a Volkswagen minibus, a Master Charge card, an apartment in Westwood and a beach house. His celebrity is concrete too. It now makes it difficult for him to teach and lecture, especially after an incident at the University of California's Irvine campus last year when a professor named John Wallace procured a Xerox copy of the manuscript of Ixtlan, pasted it together with some lecture notes from a seminar on shamanism Castaneda was giving, and peddled the result to Penthouse magazine. This so infuriated Castaneda that he is reluctant to accept any major lecture engagements in the future. At present he lives "as inaccessibly as possible" in Los Angeles, refreshing his batteries from time to time at what he and Don Juan refer to as a "power spot" atop a mountain north of nearby Malibu: a ring of boulders overlooking the Pacific. So far he has fended off the barrage of film offers. "I don't want to see Anthony Quinn as Don Juan," he says with asperity.
Anyone who tries to probe into Castaneda's life finds himself in a maze of contradictions. But to Castaneda's admirers, that scarcely matters. "Look at it this way," says one. "Either Carlos is telling the documentary truth about himself and Don Juan, in which case he is a great anthropologist. Or else it is an imaginative truth, and he is a great novelist. Heads or tails, Carlos wins."
Indeed, though the man is an enigma wrapped in mystery wrapped in a tortilla, the work is beautifully lucid. Castaneda's story unfolds with a narrative power unmatched in other anthropological studies. Its terrain—studded with organ-pipe cacti, from the glittering lava massifs of the Mexican desert to the ramshackle interior of Don Juan's shack—becomes perfectly real. In detail, it is as thoroughly articulated a world as, say, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. In all the books, but especially in Journey to Ixtlan, Castaneda makes the reader experience the pressure of mysterious winds and the shiver of leaves at twilight, the hunter's peculiar alertness to sound and smell, the rock-bottom scrubbiness of Indian life, the raw fragrance of tequila and the vile, fibrous taste of peyote, the dust in the car and the loft of a crow's flight. It is a superbly concrete setting, dense with animistic meaning. This is just as well, in view of the utter weirdness of the events that happen in it.
The education of a sorcerer, as Castaneda describes it, is