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VINCENT CRAPANZANO
resurrected, not as a text but as a social phenomenon, by American cul–
tural historians within the decade. Meanwhile the text that is Casta–
neda's will be lost.
To discuss the success of the trilogy is to lose sight of its subject
matter: the intimate confrontation of two men of very different worlds.
Despite Castaneda's embellishments - and there are undoubtedly many
- it is certainly one of the most complete, and certainly the most
dramatic, portrayals of such a meeting. The books are deceptively easy
to read, for one is quickly lost in the colorful, sometimes sensational,
often melodramatic descriptions of the sorcerer's other reality - Casta–
neda calls it "non-ordinary" - or in his tedious questioning of his mentor.
The books should not be read, though, as an accurate description of
Castaneda's apprenticeship, however accurate his reportage may be.
They should be read as a response to a confrontation with a person–
ality as strong and demanding as don Juan's.
Castaneda, an anthropology graduate student at U.C.L.A., sets
out for the Southewest in the summer of 1960 to learn more about
peyote. He tells us little about his life except that he had left home
years before and was an expert in "getting around." He meets don
Juan by accident in a bus depot and is spellbound. "... Never in my
life had any human being stopped my momentum so swiftly and so de–
finitely as don Juan did that afternoon," he comments, with customary
hyperbole, on his first meeting with the man who is to absorb his life
for at least the next twelve years. He is initiated into the world of the
sorcerer, the man of knowledge. He learns to see, to stop the world, to
be a warrior, to experience fear and something of the other enemies of
the man of knowledge: clarity, power, and old age. He writes.
It
sounds a little like the beginning of an epic, a spiritual adven–
ture of the sort that Joseph Campbell writes about. Castaneda is chosen,
fated,
cogido.
Unlike Turnbull, whose quest was from the start his own,
Castaneda discovers his quest only after meeting with don Juan. It is
dictated by the wily old man. He is tempted and then bullied, goaded,
humiliated, derided, and cajoled. He is insulted. Don Juan asks him if
he thinks they are equals. He says yes. Don Juan replies, "I am a hunter
and a warrior, and you are a pimp." H e is marched through burning
deserts, made to run up and down steep mountains, ordered to perform
apparently futile tasks such as trying to dig up a stump in total dark–
ness - one is reminded of Milarepa's master forcing him to build and
then destroy a hut again and again. He spends scary nights in the
chaparral, near mountain lions, in contorted positions. He is made to
