Did Carlos Castaneda hallucinate that stuff in the Don Juan books or make it up?
Dear Cecil: What’s the deal with Carlos Castaneda and The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge? I always thought he was just a nut job who ate too many mushrooms. But now I hear that the whole thing is fiction. Did Castaneda ever go to Mexico and eat peyote with an old Indian? Are any of his books true? Or is the whole thing completely made up? — Brian P. Carlos Castaneda. I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time. At least you frame the question properly. Except for a few lost souls, nobody really thinks that Castaneda turned into a crow, flew, fought with a diablera (witch) for his soul, etc. The issue is whether he hallucinated these events or simply invented them. There will always be disagreement, but the smart money is on the latter. Teachings, published in 1968 by the University of California Press, purports to be the first-person account of a UCLA anthropology student who meets an old man named Juan Matus at a bus station on the Mexican border while on a field t
