Over the last twenty years, I've watched numerous friends and acquaintances drift in and out of infatuation with the work of supposed anthropologist and would-be sorceror Carlos Castaneda, whose best-selling series of books about a caustic Indian shaman and his disciple set thousands of people on spiritual quests, inspired copycat works, and were responsible for at least a half dozen people I knew trying Peyote. The skeptic in me always told me that as pretty a picture as these books painted, something wasn't right about Castaneda- not that anyone at the time had much interest in my wet-blanket opinions, and in those pre-internet days, I didn't have any way to prove it. After all, wasn't Carlos a bona-fide anthropologist, who became involved in the Shaman's world in spite of his own scholarly detachment? My fellow anthropology students understood, Castaneda was a bad word on campus, even if he was a luminary to my friends- fans of the Don Juan books had pestered the Yaqui Indians into almost total seclusion, so the real anthropogists were not fans.

Eventually, though, word filtered down that Castaneda's Shaman was a work of fiction, but the fans just shrugged it off- Don Juan may not be real, they would tell me, but the spiritual teaching's in the books were unimpeachable. And so it never occcurred to me to go any further than a shrug- when one's friends are in the throes of spiritual infatuation with a questionable teacher, there's not much one can do about it, and overall, the whole thing seemed pretty harmless. I hadn't really given the Don Juan business much thought for a few years when I stumbled over Salon's recent piece describing Castaneda's death and its aftermath, which appears to have included the suicides of many of his close followers, adding a real Jonestown spin to the story.