Don Juan and the Sorcerer's Apprentice

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only be acquired with the help of an "ally," a spirit entity which attaches itself to the student as a guide—of a dangerous sort. The ally challenges the apprentice when he learns to "see," as Castaneda did in the earlier books. The apprentice may duck this battle. For if he wrestles with the ally—like Jacob with the Angel—and loses, he will, in Don Juan's slightly enigmatic terms, "be snuffed out." But if he wins, his reward is "true power — the final acquisition of sor cery membership, when all interpretation ceases."

Up to now, Castaneda claims, he has chosen to duck the final battle with an ally. He admits to an inner struggle on the matter. Some times, he says, he feels strongly tugged away from the commitment to sorcery and back into the mundane world. He has a very real urge to be a respected writer and anthropologist, and to use his new found power of fame in tandem with the printed word to go on communicating glimpses of other realities to hun gry readers.

Apex. Moreover, like most men who have explored mystical separate realities and returned, he seems to have reentry problems. According to the books, Don Juan taught him to abandon regular hours — for work or play — and even in his apartment in Los Angeles he apparently eats and sleeps as whim occurs, or slips off to the desert. But he often works at his writing as many as 18 hours a day. He has great skill at avoiding the public. No one can be sure where he will be at any given time of day, or year. "Carlos will call you from a phone booth," says Michael Korda, his editor at Simon & Schuster, "and say he is in Los Angeles. Then the operator will cut in for more change, and it turns out to be Yuma." His few good friends do not give his whereabouts away to would-be acolytes, in part be cause his own experience is mysterious and he can't explain it. He has a girl friend but not even his friends know her last name. He avoids photographers like omens of disaster. "I live in this in flow of very strange people that are waiting for a word from me. They expect something that I can't give at all. I had a class in Irvine that was very large, and it looked like they were just waiting for me to crack up."

At other moments he seems decid ed to be a true sorcerer or bust. "Power takes care of you," he says, "and you don't know how. Now I'm at the edge, and I have to change my whole format. Writing to get my Ph.D. was my ac complishment, my sorcery, and now I am at the apex of a cycle that includes the notoriety. But this is the last thing I will ever write about Don Juan. Now I am going to be a sorcerer for sure. Only my death could stop that." It is a ro mantic role, this anthropological ges ture across a pit of entities which, in a different age, would have been called demons. Will Castaneda become the Dr. Faustus of Malibu Beach, attended by Mephistopheles in a sombrero? Stay tuned in for the next episode. In the meantime, his books have made it hard for readers ever to use the word primitive patronizingly again.