Sep 23, 2026 · 1 hr 11 min · 21 segments
A gripping exposé of deception, cult power, and the long shadow of Carlos Castaneda, the man behind the biggest literary hoax of the twentieth century. Twenty years in the making…
Roo MarshallGuest
Emily DuftonHost
For listeners who may not know the name Carlos Castaneda, since he did die almost 30 years ago back in 1998, who was he and why did he become such a phenomenon?
Carlos Castaneda began his rise to fame in 1968 when the University of California published a book titled The Teachings of Don Juan, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, which purported to tell of this young anthropologist's initiation with a Yaqui shaman in using datura and peyote and mushrooms into an entire kind of way of knowledge that supposedly had never before been revealed to a Westerner.
And for about five years, at least publicly, was accepted or went basically unquestioned as a legitimate work of anthropology.
And yeah, he had an enormous number of fans, especially among the kind of the culturati and the literati and people like John Lennon and Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan and Federico Fellini.
And The New York Times raved and raved and raved about him and Harper's and The Nation.
And not until 1972, when somebody who happened to be named Joyce Carol Oates wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times saying, am I the only person who thinks that these are actually novels, not anthropology? Did public questions begin to emerge? There was never one kind of moment, you know, a la James Fry and Oprah, if people remember that, where he was, you know, really publicly unmasked.
I mean, it's, it's very hard to quantify, but like I would say maybe in the top four nonfiction, um, bestsellers of the 1970s.
Um, but slowly, slowly, slowly that began to fade, but all the while he had a- another life going on, um, which was that he was fomenting a cult.
And, um, that group remained very, very small at first, but began to grow larger and went public in the 1990s, and they started teaching something called Tensegrity, which they claimed was a, uh, basically a martial arts, uh, movement technique passed down by, uh, 24 or 25 generations of Toltec shamans, nevermind that the Toltecs had disappeared like 800 years ago or something.
Um, anyway, and it was a little different than other kind of, um, uh, aerobic exercise practices in that if you did it perfectly, there was the promise that you would not die.
And in the books, um, Don Juan, who is the, the supposed shaman who's actually, you know, a fictional creation, has, you know, vanished and gone up into the heavens in a ball of light, and Carlos told his followers that he would do the same.
And then, yeah, um, when he did actually die a natural death of liver cancer in 1998, um, his followers attempted to keep that secret, and five of them vanished, and the skeleton of one, his adopted daughter and lover, Nury Alexander, were later found in Death Valley.
For listeners who may not know the name Carlos Castaneda, since he did die almost 30 years ago back in 1998, who was he and why did he become such a phenomenon?
Carlos Castaneda began his rise to fame in 1968 when the University of California published a book titled The Teachings of Don Juan, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, which purported to tell of this young anthropologist's initiation with a Yaqui shaman in using datura and peyote and mushrooms into an entire kind of way of knowledge that supposedly had never before been revealed to a Westerner.
And for about five years, at least publicly, was accepted or went basically unquestioned as a legitimate work of anthropology.
And yeah, he had an enormous number of fans, especially among the kind of the culturati and the literati and people like John Lennon and Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan and Federico Fellini.
And The New York Times raved and raved and raved about him and Harper's and The Nation.
And not until 1972, when somebody who happened to be named Joyce Carol Oates wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times saying, am I the only person who thinks that these are actually novels, not anthropology? Did public questions begin to emerge? There was never one kind of moment, you know, a la James Fry and Oprah, if people remember that, where he was, you know, really publicly unmasked.
I mean, it's, it's very hard to quantify, but like I would say maybe in the top four nonfiction, um, bestsellers of the 1970s.
Um, but slowly, slowly, slowly that began to fade, but all the while he had a- another life going on, um, which was that he was fomenting a cult.
And, um, that group remained very, very small at first, but began to grow larger and went public in the 1990s, and they started teaching something called Tensegrity, which they claimed was a, uh, basically a martial arts, uh, movement technique passed down by, uh, 24 or 25 generations of Toltec shamans, nevermind that the Toltecs had disappeared like 800 years ago or something.
Um, anyway, and it was a little different than other kind of, um, uh, aerobic exercise practices in that if you did it perfectly, there was the promise that you would not die.
And in the books, um, Don Juan, who is the, the supposed shaman who's actually, you know, a fictional creation, has, you know, vanished and gone up into the heavens in a ball of light, and Carlos told his followers that he would do the same.
And then, yeah, um, when he did actually die a natural death of liver cancer in 1998, um, his followers attempted to keep that secret, and five of them vanished, and the skeleton of one, his adopted daughter and lover, Nury Alexander, were later found in Death Valley.
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