Don Juan and the Sorcerer's Apprentice

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weighed 140 Ibs. and came from Latin America. But he was Peruvian, born on Christmas Day, 1925, in the ancient Inca town of Cajamarca, which makes him 48, not 38, this year. His father was not an academic, but a goldsmith and watchmaker named Cesar Arana Burungaray. His mother, Susana Castaneda Navoa, died not when Carlos was six, but when he was 24. Her son spent three years in the local high school in Cajamarca and then moved with his family to Lima in 1948, where he graduated from the Colegio National de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe and then studied painting and sculpture, not in Milan, but at the National Fine Arts School of Peru. One of his fellow students there, Jose Bracamonte, remembers his pal Carlos as a resourceful blade who lived mainly off gambling (cards, horses, dice), and harbored "like an obsession" the wish to move to the U.S. "We all liked Carlos," recalls Bracamonte. "He was witty, imaginative, cheerful—a big liar and a real friend."

Sister. Castaneda apparently wrote home sporadically, at least until 1969, the year after Don Juan came out. His cousin Lucy Chavez, who was raised with him "like a sister," still keeps his letters. They indicate that he served in the U.S. Army, and left it after suffering a slight wound or "nervous shock" —Lucy is not sure which. (The Defense Department, however, has no record of Carlos Arana Castaneda's service.)

When TIME confronted Castaneda with such details as the time and transposition of his mother's death, Castaneda was opaque. "One's feelings about one's mother," he declared, "are not dependent on biology or on time. Kinship as a system has nothing to do with feelings." Cousin Lucy recalls that when Carlos' mother did die, he was overwhelmed. He refused to attend the funeral, locked himself in his room for three days without eating. And when he came out announced he was leaving home. Yet Carlos' basic explanation of his lying generally is both perfect and totally unresponsive. "To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics," he says, "is like using science to validate sorcery. It robs the world of its magic and makes milestones out of us all." In short, Castaneda lays claim to an absolute control over his identity.

Well and good. But where does a writer's license, the "artistic self-representation" Castaneda lays claim to, end? How far does it permeate his story of Don Juan? As the books' sales mount, the resistance multiplies. Three parodies of Castaneda have appeared in New York magazines and papers lately, and the critics seem to be preparing to skewer Don Juan as a kind of anthropological Ossian, the legendary third century Gaelic poet whose works James Macpherson foisted upon 18th century British readers.

Castaneda fans should not panic, however. A strong case can be made that the Don Juan books are of a different order of truthfulness from Castaneda's pre-Don Juan past. Where, for example, was the motive for an elaborate scholarly put-on? The Teachings was submitted to a university press, an unlikely prospect for bestsellerdom. Besides, getting an anthropology degree from U.C.L.A. is not so difficult that a candidate would employ so vast a confabulation just to avoid research. A little fudging, perhaps, but not a whole system in the manner of