Some say he was a breakthrough academic and visionary shaman. Others say he was a sham. Either way, Carlos Castaneda shaped a generation of mystical thinkers and magic mushroom eaters.
In 1968, at the height of the psychedelic age, Castaneda published The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, the first of twelve books describing his apprenticeship to an Indian shaman, and his journeys to the âseparate realityâ of the sorcerersâ worlds.
Like Herman Hesseâs Steppenwolf and Aldous Huxleyâs The Doors of Perception, The Teachings of Don Juan and its sequels became essential reading for legions of truth seekers. Castaneda himself became a cult figureâseldom seen, nearly mythological, a cross between Timothy Leary and L. Ron Hubbard: a short, dapper, Buddha-with-an-attitude who likened his own appearance to that of a âMexican bellhop.â
Though Castaneda had more than ten million books in print in seventeen languages, he lived in wily anonymity for nearly thirty years, doing his best, in his own words, to become âas inaccessible as possible.â Most people figured he had a house somewhere in the Sonoran Desert, where heâd studied with his own teacher, a leathery old Indian brujo named Don Juan Matus.
In truth, Castaneda lived and wrote for most of that time in Westwood Village, a neighborhood of students and professors in Los Angeles, not far from UCLA and Beverly Hills. Upon his death in 1998, things became even more murky.
A year-long investigation into the mysterious life and impeccable death of Carlos Castaneda, as told by his wife, his adopted son, his mistresses, and his followers.
âCastaneda wasnât a common con man, he lied to bring us the truth. His stories are packed with truth, though they are not true stories, which he said they are . . . This is a sham-man bearing gifts, an ambiguous spellbinder dealing simultaneously in contrary commoditiesâwisdom and deception.ââCastaneda scholar Richard de Mille
Mike Sager is a bestselling author and award-winning reporter. For more than forty years he has worked as a writer for the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, GQ, and Esquire. Sager is the author of more than a dozen books and eBooks. Many of his stories have inspired documentaries and films, including the classic Boogie Nights. He is the founder and publisher of The Sager Group, a content brand. For more information, please see Mike Sager.
Sager plays Virgil in the modern American Inferno . . . Compelling and stylish magazine journalism, rich in novelistic detail.
Like his journalistic precursors Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, Sager writes frenetic, off-kilter pop-sociological profiles of Americans in all their vulgarity and vitality . . . He writes with flair, but only in the service of an omnivorous curiosity and defies expectations in pieces that lesser writers would play for satire or sensationalism . . . A Whitmanesque ode to teeming humanityâs mystical unity.
Mike Sager is the Beat poet of American journalism, that rare reporter who can make literature out of shabby reality. Equal parts reporter, ethnographer, stylist, and cultural critic, Sager has for twenty years carried the tradition of Tom Wolfe on his broad shoulders, chronicling the American scene and psyche. Nobody does it sharper, smarter, or with more style.
I can recognize the truth in these storiesâtales about the darkest possible side of wretched humanity. Sager has obviously spent too much time in flop houses in Laurel Canyon.
A good example of why we keep reading about âmagical teachersâ... Mike Sager has done a great journalistic job answering this one; not only has he read extensively about Carlos Castanedaâincluding reading all of Castanedaâs own outputâbut he also interviewed lots of people from his entourage. ⊠He also unpacks the lies, and, boy, there are lots of themâŠ
