Some 'facts' about Carlos Casteneda and his works:
- He received his doctorate in anthropology after submitting the texts of his first three published works as his thesis. Yes, just as you read them, that was what he got his doctorate for.
- Although in Castaneda's books, Indian shamans smoke magic mushrooms, and the practice has passed into the psychedelic subculture as a means of consuming these, there is no known documented instance of this practice in a traditional shamanic setting. Instead, there are references to smoking mushrooms in order to preserve them, like you would smoke kippers. It's actually thought quite unlikely that, smoked, psilocybes have any (non-placebo) psychoactive effect, not least because they don't burn1.
- A close study of the itineraries given in Casteneda's early works shows that both Don Juan and Carlos have no difficulties surviving for long periods in fierce conditions such that hardened explorers would not venture into them for more than one or two hours at a time.
- Castaneda's supervisor for his PhD was none other than Harold Garfinkel, the sociologist who invented ethnomethodology, famous for his 'breaching experiments' where the experimenter flagrantly broke the rules of conventional behaviour in order to demonstrate the existence of those rules. (One wonders whether the granting of Castaneda's PhD was such an experiment, conducted on the academic community..)
This being said, I love the books (at least the early ones) but prefer to view them as major
literary works rather than straightforward anthropology (or straightforward
sorcery, for that matter.)
1. This is a contentious issue. It should be noted Castaneda is not claiming that the mushroooms do burn, but says that they are ingested as a fine powder, being drawn into the lungs with the rest of the smoking mixture. Here's one view of this:
[Castaneda] described the use and hallucinogenic effects of a smoking mixture consisting of dried mushrooms with the addition of other dried plants as sweeteners. The mushrooms were vaguely suggested to be a Psilocybe
species, possibly P. mexicana. There are substantial scientific reasons to believe that these reports are not authentic but fictional. For instance, no voucher specimens are cited, and Schultes (pers. com.1991) was unable to ascertain from Castaneda whether voucher specimens
had been collected. The suggestion that these mushrooms could have been P. mexicana must be refuted on the basis of their habitat (De Mille 1980). What is more, the smoking mixture is unlikely to have contained sufficient psilocybin to elicit the profound effects described by Castaneda. In addition, psilocybin is said to be largely degraded during smoking in a pipe, whereby its availability is further reduced by condensation and deposition on the inner surface of the bowl and stem of the pipe (Siegel 1981). In other words, if proper attention had been given immediately to dose and to way of administration, scientific doubts about the authenticity of Castaneda's accounts would have
arisen sooner.
- Considerations in the Multidisciplinary Approach to the Study of Ritual Hallucinogenic Plants, Peter A. G. M. De Smet, From Ethnobotany: Evolution of a Discipline. ISBN 0-931146-28-3
But of course this emanates from the very same 'rigorous', 'scientific' approach that Castaneda mocked so in his works.