The book is separated into three parts. First, an account of the author’s experience as an apprentice to Yaqui ‘brujo’ (sorcerer) or ‘man of knowledge’ Don Juan. With him, the author is introduced to chewing peyote, ‘smoking’ magic mushrooms and using Jimson’s weed in a ritual context. Much of the text is explanations of arcane preparations of these substances and the rituals that go alongside them. As these drugs are mainly used recreationally in Western culture, but are often linked to more ‘spiritual’ experiences, this was the most interesting and best part of the book. The substances are anthropomorphised, to a greater or lesser extent, and characterised as ‘allies’, ‘protectors’ or ‘guides’. The author describes experiences like meeting the embodied form of peyote (‘Mescalito’), flying through the sky and other ‘non-ordinary’ realities during his apprenticeship. I often feel like huge amounts of indigenous knowledge must have been lost during colonial occupations and the relentless drive towards consumerism and Westernisation.
While the first part of the book was of some interest, I started to get annoyed by how the author always has ‘special’ experiences that impress his teacher. Don Juan is reported as saying that each of the substances can either ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ a person, which will eventually lead to them either ‘taking’ a person as an ally / disciple and allowing them to use their power, or ‘leaving’ them. The author is more or less always ‘liked’ and writes about how his experiences are special and mark him out as extraordinary according to Don Juan. A bit like religions or other cults, I sometimes think the primary motivation for adherents is to feel like they’re better than other people and I find this offensive. After a couple of hundred pages of instructions for obscure rituals and relentless self-congratulation on how well he is doing in his apprenticeship; I felt like Castenega was primarily an egotist and a bullshitter.
The second part of the book reads how I imagine an anthropology dissertation might be. This is unsurprising as Casteneda was an anthropology student at UCLA while writing these books. The author tries to categorise and systematise the substances he has taken, the rituals he has performed and how these have interacted to form a body of knowledge or course of study he has undertaken with Don Juan. This second section was more or less academic gobbledygook to me. It was annoying to read, deeply unclear and pissed me off so much I abandoned the third section of the book (an appendix), which is something I hardly ever do. I was extremely surprised to learn that the book had formed the basis for a PhD he received from UCLA. It crossed my mind that he made the book up, perhaps to get his PhD, perhaps to mock academic anthropology, but I don’t know if that fundamentally changes its quality as a text.
I wasn’t really sure what to make of this book. Read as a guide for someone who wants to perform these rituals it could be a valuable set of instructions as the descriptions are detailed. Although it also seems to indicate that any apprentice needs a teacher like Don Juan so I may be mistaken here. As a pure work of literature, I found it boring and couldn’t really get much out of it. The experiences the author has sound extraordinary. However, as anyone who has had to listen to stories of acid trips or other drug sagas will know, they’re rarely as engaging to the listener as they were to the experiencer. This left me a bit lost as to what the point of the book was. At this stage of my life, I’m probably not going to go to Mexico, sew up lizard eyes and mouths and smear my genitals with arcane preparations in the company of mysterious holy men. As I mentioned before, it does give a different perspective on the substances it describes from the one typically encountered in Western culture. The first section allows the reader to partially enter into the experiences of the author but it certainly isn’t a classic by my estimation. But beyond that, I found the book didn’t really speak to me and I got almost nothing out of it. Especially the godforsaken second section, which, like much academic writing I have read, is more or less meaningless to the layperson.
I didn’t enjoy this book and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone as all I really learned was that Castaneda thinks he is a very special person but isn’t a very special writer!
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