Reviews and Recommendations to appear soon.
Including Books, Films, Websites, Music, Festivals of a Psychedelic Nature!
Read, seen or been involved in anything that you want to share,
then email a review upto 200 words (and upto 3 .jpg images x 400kb photographs) to
psychedelic_malik@yahoo.co.uk
Tales of Power
The Changing Reputation of Carlos Castaneda
From student to guru, Carlos Castaneda has enjoyed fame, notoriety and ridicule from his descriptions of his apprenticeship with the Mexican shaman Don Juan. Waning interest in the materialistic 1980s has left his reputation sadly depleted, but with the current increasing awareness of spirituality and shamanism, Carlos and his teacher are once more popular and respected.
The publication of The Teachings of Don Juan (1968) took the world by storm. Carlos’s struggle for spiritual achievement through psychedelic drugs built on the earlier findings of Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception (1954), suggesting extending the senses to the unseen world through the use of mescalin, and for Carlos, other natural drugs such as Psilocybe and Jimpson Weed.
By the time Carlos’s third book was published in 1972, his opinions and understanding of Don Juan’s Way of Knowledge had dramatically changed. He admitted that he had made erroneous conclusions and that his enforced drug use had been necessary to shake his view of the world, and was merely a single part of the true way. The realisation made Castaneda review the last nine years, highlighting different aspects of Don Juan’s teachings.
As Carlos progressed his experiences became stranger and harder for his audience to accept. Tales of Power (1974) was perhaps one of Carlos’s greatest yet deepest books, involving many new concepts to digest. With the changing culture and the increasing strangeness of Carlos’s revelations, interest narrowed to a smaller section of society. When The Eagle’s Gift (1981) described how he had still incorrectly remembered past events, his credibility was increasingly called into question. Sales of later books were dramatically lower, but with a hardcore fan base supporting him for many years.
In the last decade and particularly since Castaneda’s death in 1998, interest has renewed, with Carlos’s last book and several other authors from Carlos’s circle adding to the depictions of Don Juan’s world. Many of the techniques and teachings of the Mexican shamans are paralleled in the western esoteric tradition, and today millions still read and follow his writings. Carlos’s problem was that he progressed faster than the society of his audience, but perhaps we are at last beginning to catch up.
Copyright © Andrew Smith