The Teachings of Don Juan
Carlos Castaneda was a graduate student in anthropology at UCLA,
gathering information on various medicinal herbs used by the Indians
in Sonora, Mexico, when he met the old Yaqui Indian, Don Juan. The
Teachings of Don Juan is the story of the first five years these two
men spent together as master and pupil. The sequels, A Separate
Reality, Journey to Ixtlan, Tales of Power, The Second Ring of Power
and The Eagle's Gift are all published by Arkana.
For Don Juan and for the two persons who
shared his sense of
magical time with me
Contents
Introduction 13
Part one The Teachings 27
Part two A Structural Analysis 187
Appendices 235
Foreword
This book is both ethnography and allegory.
Carlos Castaneda, under the tutelage of don Juan, takes us through
that moment of twilight, through that crack in the universe between
daylight and dark into a world not merely other than our own, but of
an entirely different order of reality. To reach it he had the aid of
mescalito, yerba del diablo, and humito - peyote, datura, and
mushrooms. But this is no mere recounting of hallucinatory
experiences, for don Juan's subtle manipulations have guided the
traveller while his interpretations give meaning to the events that we,
through the sorcerer's apprentice, have the opportunity to
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experience.
Anthropology has taught us that the world is differently defined in
different places. It is not only that people have different customs; it is
not only that people believe in different gods and expect different
post-mortem fates. It is, rather, that the worlds of different peoples
have different shapes. The very metaphysical presuppositions differ:
space does not conform to Euclidean geometry, time does not form a
continuous unidirectional flow, causation does not conform to
Aristotelian logic, man is not differentiated from non-man or life
from death, as in our world. We know something of the sha