Don Juan and the Sorcerer's Apprentice

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they are anthropology, a specific and truthful account of an aspect of Mexican Indian culture as shown by the speech and actions of one person, a shaman named Juan Matus. That proof hinges on the credibility of Don Juan as a being and Carlos Castaneda as a witness. Yet there is no corroboration—beyond Castaneda's writings-that Don Juan did what he is said to have done, and very little that he exists at all.

Ever since The Teachings appeared, would-be disciples and counterculture tourists have been combing Mexico for the old man. One awaits the first Don Juan Prospectors' Convention in the Bruio Bar-B-Q of the Mescalito Motel Young Mexicans are excited to the point where the authorities may not even allow Castaneda's books to be released there in Spanish translation. Said one Mexican student who is himself pursuing Don Juan: "If the books do appear, the search for him could easily turn'into a gold-rush stampede."

His teacher, Castaneda asserts, was born in 1891, and suffered in the diaspora of the Yaquis all over Mexico from the 1890s until the 1910 revolution His parents were murdered by soldiers He became a nomad. This helps explain why the elements of Don Juan s sorcery are a combination of shamanistic beliefs from several cultures. Some of them are not at all "representative of the Yaquis. Many Indian tribes, such as the Huichols, use peyote ntually, both north and south of the border —some in a syncretic blend of Christianity and shamanism. But the Yaquis are not peyote users.

Don Juan, then, might be hard 1 find because he wisely shuns his pestering admirers. Or maybe he is a composite Indian, a collage of others. Or he could be a purely fictional shaman concocted by Castaneda.

Opinions differ widely and hotly, even among deep admirers of Castaneda's writing. "Is it possible that these books are nonfiction?" Novelist Joyce Carol Gates asks mildly. "They seem to me remarkable works of art on the Hesse-like theme of a young man's initiation into 'another way' of reahty. They are beautifully constructed. The character of Don Juan is unforgettable. There is a novelistic momentum, rising, suspenseful action, a gradual revelation of character."

Gulliver. True, Castaneda s books do read like a highly orchestrated Bildungsroman. But anthropologists worry less about literary excellence than about the shaman's elusiveness, as well as his apparent disconnection from the Yaquis "I believe that basically the work has a very high percentage of imagination " says Jesus Ochoa, head of the department of ethnography at Mexico s National Museum of Anthropology. Snaps Dr. Francis Hsu of Northwestern University: "Castaneda is a new fad. 1 enjoyed the books in the same way that I enjoy Gulliver's Travels." But Castaneda's senior colleagues at U.C.L.A who gave their former student a Ph.D. or Ixtlan emphatically disagree: Castaneda, as one professor put it, is "a native genius " for whom the usual red tape and bureaucratic rigmarole were waived; his truth as a witness is not in question.

At the very least, though, it is clear that "Juan Matus" is a pseudonym used to protect his teacher's privacy. The need to be inaccessible and elusive is a central theme in the books. Time and again Don Juan urges Castaneda to emulate him and free