Don Juan and the Sorcerer's Apprentice

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arduous. It entailed the destruction, by Don Juan, of the young anthropologist's interpretation of the world; of what can, and cannot, be called "real." The Teachings describes the first steps in this process. They involved natural drugs. One was Lophophora williamsii, the peyote cactus, which, Don Juan promised, revealed an entity named Mescalito, a powerful teacher who "shows you the proper way of life." Another was Jimson weed, which Don Juan spoke of as an implacable female presence. The third was humito, "the little smoke"—a preparation of dust from Psilocybe mushrooms that had been dried and aged for a year, and then mixed with five other plants, including sage. This was smoked in a ritual pipe, and used for divination.

Such drugs, Don Juan insisted, gave access to the "powers" or impersonal forces at large in the world that a "man of knowledge"—his term for sorcerer —must learn to use. Prepared and administered by Don Juan, the drugs drew Castaneda into one frightful or ecstatic confrontation after another. After chewing peyote buttons Castaneda met Mescalito successively as a black dog, a column of singing light, and a cricketlike being with a green warty head. He heard awesome and uninterpretable rumbles from the dead lava hills. After smoking humito and talking to a bilingual coyote, he saw the "guardian of the other world" rise before him as a hundred-foot-high gnat with spiky tufted hair and drooling jaws. After rubbing his body with an unguent made from datura, the terrified anthropologist experienced all the sensations of flying.

Through it all, Castaneda often had little idea of what was happening. He could not be sure what it meant or whether any of it had "really" happened at all. That interpretation had to be supplied by Don Juan.

Why, then, in an age full of descriptions of good and bad trips, should Cas-taneda's sensations be of any more interest than anyone else's? First, because they were apparently conducted within a system—albeit one he did not understand at the time—imposed with priestly and rigorous discipline by his Indian guide. Secondly, because Castaneda kept voluminous and extraordinarily vivid notes. A sample description of the effects of peyote: "In a matter of instants a tunnel formed around me, very low and narrow, hard and strangely cold. It felt to the touch like a wall of sol id tinfoil...! remember having to crawl towards a sort of round point where the tunnel ended; when I finally arrived, if I did, I had forgotten all about the dog, Don Juan, and myself." Perhaps most important, Castaneda remained throughout a rationalist Everyman. His one resource was questions: a persistent, often fumbling effort to keep a Socratic dialogue going with Don Juan:

" 'Did I take off like a bird?' "

"'You always ask me questions I cannot answer...What you want to know makes no sense. Birds fly like birds and a man who has taken the devil's weed flies as such.' "

"'Then I didn't really fly, Don Juan. I flew in my imagination. Where was my body?' " And so on.

By his account, the first phase of Castaneda's apprenticeship lasted from 1961 to 1965, when, terrified that he was losing his sense of reality-and by now possessing thousands of pages