Ramon Medina Silva waterfall balancing
by Sandy McIntosh and Randy Stark
Did don Juan and don Genaro exist? While the weight of evidence suggests that they were never flesh-and-blood persons, we still might be able to learn something instructive about the people on whom they were modeled. Richard de Mille researched this question, first in his book, Castaneda’s Journey (1976) and later in The Don Juan Papers (1980). Thirteen years later, Jay Courtney Fikes, building on de Mille’s research, was able to offer new insights and necessary corrections to de Mille in his book, Carlos Castaneda, Academic Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties (1993).
Why were these researchers, de Mille and Fikes, particularly interested in examining Castaneda’s work?
Richard de Mille, who has been the most rigorous delver into the question of Castaneda’s literary honesty, is the son of the director, Cecil B. de Mille. In the early 1950’s, L. Ron Hubbard lured him into becoming his right-hand man for a time, until de Mille began to smell a rat. Once he’d convinced himself that Hubbard was a fake and that he had wasted his time as his apologist, he vowed he’d never again be trapped by a false guru. With the publication of Castaneda’s first book, de Mille thought he was onto something genuine. But then, with Castaneda’s refusal to produce field notes or satisfactorily explain inherent contradictions in his books, de Mille grew alarmed. He soon decided to pursue Castaneda with the idea of getting at the truth, seemingly, with a vengeance.
Jay Courtney Fikes was inspired to become an anthropologist after reading Castaneda’s first four books. He imagined that he might become a shaman while earning his doctorate at the University of Michigan. With the help of the Mexican government, he set out to live and work with the Huichol Indians. In the course of his fieldwork Fikes began to harbor suspicions about Castaneda’s honesty. “My ethnographic research on aboriginal Huichol ritual, and study of the ‘ethnographic’ anomalies infecting the work of Castaneda prompted me to conclude that [his] ‘findings’ are best interpreted as a manifestation of the American popular culture of the 1960s” and not works of genuine anthropology.
The following excerpts from de Mille and Fikes focus on the origins of don Genaro’s breathtaking demonstration of “shamanic balance” as detailed by Castaneda in A Separate Reality (1971).
Let’s start at the waterfall . . .
[Richard de Mille (1976) (pages 112-113)]:
In the summer of 1966 Ramón Medina showed Peter Furst what it meant to have balance. Knowing his anthropologist friend lacked the power to see the narrow bridge a Huichol shaman must walk to cross the great chasm separating the ordinary world from the otherworld beyond, the curandero determined to give him a concrete demonstration of physical balance in this world standing for spiritual balance in that world.
Ramón led his party to a spectacular waterfall, from whose edge the water dropped hundreds of feet to the valley below. As his Huichol companions sat in a semicircle to watch, Ramón took his sandals off, gestured to the world directions, then leapt–or flew–from one rock to another with arms stretched wide, often landing but a few inches from the slippery edge. Now he vanished behind a boulder, now he stood motionless on the brink of destruction, but never did he or his Huichol observers show the slightest concern that he might fall, though the visitors from California were terrified.
On [Castaneda’s] narrative [date] 17 October 1968 don Genaro led his party to the bottom of a roaring waterfall, where don Juan, Carlos, Nestor, and Pablito sat down in a straight line to watch. Genaro took his sandals off, then climbed the hazardous 150 feet, several times seeming to lose his footing and hang in the air by his fingertips. Reaching the top, he leapt out upon the edge of the fall, where he seemed to be standing on the water. There he perched for a long time, occasionally leaning out into space with no visible support, but mostly standing unaccountably still, resisting the rushing current. Though his performance struck terror to Carlos’s heart, the watching Indians evinced no concern for his safety. At the end Genaro turned a lateral somersault to vanish behind a boulder.
In the spring of 1970, having been Associate Director of the UCLA Latin American Center since 1967, Peter Furst organized a series of lectures on the ritual use of hallucinogens, during which he and Carlos Castaneda presented their respective accounts of shamans manifesting agility or magic atop lofty Mexican waterfalls. Though Castaneda’s version had the observers sitting in a straight line at the bottom rather than a semicircle at the top, though it added levitation and Bolivian somersaulting, and though the rocks Ramón landed on were easier to make out than Genaro’s (possibly because of the observers’ different location), Furst recognized Castaneda’s account as “strikingly similar” to his own. In Flesh of the Gods he reproduced it as a footnote, with no further comment.
(pages 189-190):
“Carlos Castaneda and I often talked about shamans and sorcerers, and his deep understanding of these matters contributed greatly to my own thinking,” wrote his fellow graduate student Barbara Myerhoff, whose mother had wisely taught her a rather unusual idea – that dreams were real – and who had been present that day in 1966 when Ramón balanced on the waterfall. Myerhoff’s photo of Ramón’s birdlike stance shows the shadow of a semicircular cloud like the one Castaneda describes. Myerhoff’s field notes from 1966 contained other likely models for persons and events in Castaneda’s books: a Pablo was younger than a Carlos; an old man named Francisco was quite as impish as dG; Ramón, like dG, knew of ten levels of knowledge; and Huichol shamans were materially poor but spiritually rich, as the urchins Carlos felt sorry for were just as well off as he because any one of them could become a man of knowledge. Myerhoff’s dissertation on the Huichol peyote hunt was accepted at UCLA in 1968.
[de Mille (1980) (Preface)]:
Barbara G. Myerhoff, pilgrim in Wirikuta, witness at the waterfall, warrior in the jungle of Academe, turned to the study of her own people, saying: “I will never be a Huichol Indian . . . but I will be a little old Jewish lady.” She was wrong about the second part. With scarcely a word of warning, fierce, implacable death overtook her at 49, in the midst of her work, unwilling to go, a mournful loss to all who knew her. On reading Alvaro Estrada’s oral autobiography of Maria Sabina and contrasting it with the eclectic audacities of her friend Carlos Castaneda, Myerhoff wrote:
Indigenous traditions deserve accurate and respectful preservation, and these records must be distinguished from imaginative works . . . It is the obligation of the lettered to make written records of the lore of the unlettered simply a record – not a mirror of ourselves or our needs and fantasies.
(pages 339-343)
RdeM: Do you still feel some reluctance to talk about Carlos for the record?
BGM: I really have never talked about him in public before, largely because the subject seemed so ripe for dissension and controversy, and I thought there was so much value in what he was doing. I didn’t want to simply debunk it.
RdeM: You felt a conflict about it?
BGM: Yes, between my loyalty to Carlos – and to some of my friends at UCLA who were involved with him – and my profession as an anthropologist.
RdeM: What made you change your mind about discussing it?
BGM: Your book, which put the whole thing in a new light. I began to see Carlos as doing a massive, half humorous teaching operation, and I thought he wouldn’t mind my talking about him, because I think he really wants comment from those he has fooled.
RdeM: If that’s so, why did it take you a whole year to get round to talking to me?
BGM: For a long time it was hard for me to make my peace with the foolishness I felt about being so naïve, about being completely taken in.
RdeM: You felt foolish.
BGM: Yes, and on a lot of levels, personal to professional. But then I thought about how I had really only had delight and amusement from Carlos and, in the long run, enlightenment, which is more than you get from most people. So I decided it was okay to feel foolish.
RdeM: Most people who play a trick on you don’t give you pleasure and information as a compensation.
BGM: That’s right.
RdeM: I suppose his biggest trick on you was feeding your waterfall story right back to you.
BGM: That was a very interesting incident. I mean, it never crossed my mind that his description of don Genaro on the waterfall proved anything except that I was doing good fieldwork because I had come up with an observation and interpretation so much like his. When he said, “Oh, that’s just like don Genaro,” it was very validating for me.
RdeM: How do you feel about it now?
BGM: The feeling of validation remains, the feeling that we were both talking about the same serious and important manifestation of Mexican shamanism.
RdeM: Even though his part of it was made up on the spot, the feeling of mutual understanding and significance remains.
BGM: Yes.
RdeM: He must have a remarkable ability to resonate to things people tell him.
BGM: Oh, he does.
RdeM: The stories he makes up exactly fit the person he is talking to.
BGM: They’re mirrors. It’s happened over and over. So many people describe their conversations with Carlos, saying, “I know just what he’s talking about.” But each one tells you something different, something that is part of his or her own world, which Carlos has reflected. “It’s all really sexual,” they say, or “it’s all psychological,” or “mystical” or “shamanic” or whatever they’re into. His allegories, the stories he tells, seem to validate everybody.
RdeM: Paul Radin said Trickster was everything to every man.
BGM: Exactly. You remember the dedication in The Teachings: “For don Juan – and for the two persons who shared his sense of magical time with me.” It’s completely anonymous. Anybody who had known Carlos in the sixties could put himself or herself into that dedication, and a lot of us did.
RdeM: In Castaneda’s Journey I called Carlos a Rorschach man, a man on whom people project their inner worlds.
BGM: That’s right, and the first day we met he did it with me. I was telling him about the sprinklers on the VA hospital lawn near UCLA. They’re the old-fashioned kind that send sprays whipping around, sparkling in the sun. I told him about driving down the freeway and almost feeling I was being drawn into it, and then he described it to me from above, the way he had seen it as a crow, when he was flying over it.
RdeM: Right after you had said it.
BGM: Yes. (Laughing) We saw a lot of each other toward the end of that summer, because we were both working everyday in the library. And this is where my feeling of deep gratitude and affection for him comes in, because my father was dying of cancer, very horribly, and Carlos was kind and very helpful to me. We were two vulnerable, pitiful, impotent, confused little creatures together in that horrible time and place.
RdeM: How was he kind? He let you talk about it, and he understood?
BGM: More than that. He was genuinely giving and consoling. He talked to me about things I didn’t know anything about. About death “being with you, beside you on the mat.”
RdeM: He helped you to cope with the impending death of your father.
BGM: Yes, very much. And I helped him too. He was struggling – and I really think he was; I don’t think that part was bull. He was struggling with the idea, as he put it, that he was somewhat crazy. He kept saying he was struggling with madness. I never saw him look so miserable. He didn’t think he was going to make it through UCLA. He had lost his little boy. Many of his colleagues and associates on campus were cold, stuffy, positivist types. He wasn’t being well treated. Every day he’d come chugging up to the campus with his briefcase, and no matter how poor he was and in the hottest weather he always wore proper, three-piece, dark flannel suits. All day, every day, he’d sit from nine to five in one of those little carrels in the library writing his book, looking like a businessman.
RdeM: Did you ever get any idea how he made a living?
BGM: He told me some stuff. He had investments or something like that.
RdeM: No job?
BGM: I think he had a part-time job coding in a research project for the ethnomethodologists, at the Neuropsychiatric Institute. He used to go down there often.
RdeM: Were you married during that period?
BGM: Oh yes. But my husband and I were both absorbed in our dissertations, and we didn’t have much left over for each other. Carlos seemed so lonely and wretched and panic-stricken himself that I found consolation in his company.
RdeM: Did you ever feel physically attracted to him?
BGM: Yes, but not in the usual way. He was not an ordinary man. He was a pixie.
RdeM: Well, how did you feel attracted to him?
BGM: It’s hard to put into words. It wasn’t a simple erotic man-woman bond. It was as though we entered a bubble of pretending and playfulness together. It was an intimacy made out of impossibility and weirdness. And it was an escape from the ordeal we were going through.
RdeM: Was it like children playing together?
BGM: Uh-huh. There was a lot of poking and giggling. Romping almost. We had a kind of omnipotent, aggrandized view of ourselves, which we also laughed at.
RdeM: While at the same time you felt miserable, wretched, powerless . . .
BGM: Yes. We kept telling each other we were the serious, important, imaginative, powerful ones, and all those others, those idiots who were torturing us, were the crazy ones. We said one day we’d show them, and our biographers would laugh at them as we were laughing. It was a grand conceit. You can imagine the fun we had years later when we met and told each other it had come true. In a way. More for him than for me, of course. But we exulted in the partial realization of our childish vision of omnipotence. By then we had both completed our degrees and published our books.
RdeM: When did you first see the manuscript of The Teachings?
BGM: That August. He was so disgusted with it he threatened to burn it. I took it home with me for a few days and told him I was going to xerox it and keep a copy. I was afraid he might actually destroy it. We went over a lot of it together. I remember telling him it was pointless to put in that awful “Structural Analysis.” And the term “sorcerer,” which I felt he misused. And “Yaqui,” for which there seemed no cultural justification. I didn’t like the name “don Juan,” which I thought was too much like the literary prototype and therefore confusing. I wanted him to call the book A Path with Heart, and leave out “sorcerer” and “Yaqui” altogether. We argued endlessly about those things, but he went ahead and did everything his own way. I think history has proved my criticisms right, but that’s another story. Anyway, it was the beginning of a long and curious friendship. Later we would have sporadic, intense meetings every six months or so, when we’d talk all day or through the night.
(page 333)
The central figure in Huichol religion is the mara’ akame, or shaman-priest, and the mara’ akame best known to outsiders is Ramón Medina Silva, whose teachings and leadership were chronicled by anthropologists Barbara Myerhoff and Peter Furst.
[de Mille (1980) (pages 338-339)]:
Having closely examined Castaneda’s account, I said in Castaneda’s Journey the similarity [between Myerhoff and Furst’s waterfall accounts of Ramón and Castaneda’s of Genaro] was a little too striking to escape suspicion, but I had no clue to a startling anachronism documented for the first time here. In the separate, narrative reality, Carlos first met don Genaro on 2 April 1968, the day he tried to give a copy of The Teachings to don Juan. On 17 October of that narrative year he saw Genaro balance on the waterfall. In the ordinary world of calendars and committee meetings, however, Barbara was concurrently defending her dissertation, page 94 of which told how she had been astonished by Ramón’s agile leaps at the edge of the chasm. Though Castaneda had said in 1966 Ramón was “just like don Genaro,” Carlos would not set eyes on Genaro for another two years – a virtuosic display of precognition in a supposedly failed apprentice recently withdrawn in dismay from the reality-breaching experiments of his demanding tutor.
While writing Castaneda’s Journey I tried to elicit comments from Barbara, but she would say nothing, fearing my inquiry might be just one more misconceived attempt to belittle a man toward whom she felt not only gratitude but admiration and affection. On the surface, this was the typical reluctance of the Castaneda partisan, and I found it unsurprising. What did surprise me was Barbara’s change of heart when she had read Castaneda’s Journey, in which she was relieved to find a more or less sympathetic treatment of her friend but startled by some convincing evidence that he was operating on a plane of reality quite different from the one where fieldwork is usually done. She wrote to me, suggesting we compare viewpoints.
A year went by before we got together, a delay I attribute not to my formidability but to Barbara’s discomfort in redefining an important friendship and to her difficulty in reconciling personal loyalties with professional obligations. If one’s colleague or dear friend turns out to be a hoaxer, what should one do? Polar reactions are easy: stubbornly assert the authenticity of don Juan, or angrily fling Castaneda into the ashcan. What takes both insight and courage is to assimilate the contradictions, weighing personal and social costs against public and private benefits and coming to terms at last with the conflict. Like Paul Riesman, Barbara Myerhoff is one of the few Castaneda subscribers to display impeccable equilibrium while crossing the bridge of second thoughts to a balanced judgment of Trickster-Teacher instead of falling into the chasm of emotional turmoil, where one is chewed up by the jaguars of resentment or swallowed by the anaconda of rationalization.
(pages 343-346)
RdeM: How did Carlos meet Ramón?
BGM: It was in the spring [of 1971]. Ramón had come up to Los Angeles to exhibit his yarn paintings at the Museum of Natural History, and he and Lupe [his wife] were staying at my house in the San Fernando Valley. They were camping in my son’s bedroom. Literally. They moved all the furniture to the sides of the room and built a little cooking fire in the middle of the room.
RdeM: How could they do that?
BGM: They used a little metal sheet. And they threw their trash and orange peels all over the room. It was a mess like you would not believe. My son couldn’t fathom what was going on.
RdeM: How old was he?
BGM: Three. He was astonished. Anyway, I told Carlos, and he was eager to meet Ramón. He had often talked about taking me down to meet don Juan – in fact, we’d made two dates to do it, which didn’t come off – and I had said, “One day you must meet Ramón.” We’d always done this “comparing of our shamans.” So Carlos came right out. I was glad to have him there, because I was teaching full time and couldn’t be with Ramón and Lupe as much as I wanted.
Ramón was an incredible trickster. Each morning that I drove him to USC, just when we’d get to the freeway interchange, where you have to pay close attention to the merging traffic, he’d begin to tell me some ethnographic tidbit that put several other things into place that I’d wanted to know, and I’d be caught between the need to learn and the need to survive. Very much like don Juan’s trickster style of teaching, which is one of the most valid things Carlos has portrayed. It’s typical of North American and Central American shamans.
Ramón’s certainty of his own powers was very impressive to see. I gave a party for him at my house, and when it was over and the guests were taking gracious leave of him, he said, very nicely without any arrogance, that it had been a pleasure for all of them to meet him.
RdeM: What happened when he and Carlos met?
BGM: They saw each other!
RdeM: What did they see?
BGM: The same kind of person. We had dinner in a funny little Mexican restaurant, and they started to laugh at once and didn’t stop. They both saw the world from some lofty position that made it look ridiculous. Being around the two of them was like entering a separate reality. They really saw and believed and dwelt in another realm. Once I walked with Ramón through the May Company [a big department store] when he was dressed in very ordinary American cloths because he had sold all his Indian clothing to buy tape recorders and transistor radios. People stopped and stared at him. He looked like a Mexican fruitpicker, but he had a presence that was extraordinary. Talk about the glance of kings! There are people who have this sense of another realm, and they move differently through this realm because of it. Carlos and Ramón had that.
RdeM: What else happened between them?
BGM: They capered around a lot, playing like children. They exchanged gifts. One day Carlos took Ramón to a “power spot” he had discovered in the Santa Monica Mountains. Carlos wanted to know if Ramón really saw it as a power spot. Ramón agreed that it was a wonderful power spot. He started jumping up and down and farting, and he said, “I’ll show you what a power spot it is!” And, in Carlos’s words, he took a crap in it. He had been unhappy that there was no place at my house to go to the bathroom. That is, there was a bathroom, but he thought it was not a proper place to defecate. He was reluctant to use my garden, and so he had been very uncomfortable. Carlos’s power spot was a marvelous solution. If Carlos had taken himself too seriously, he might have been offended. He had invited Ramón up there in a very serious mood, to validate the power spot, and here was Ramón using it for a toilet. Carlos thought that was absolutely hilarious, and afterwards he would tell this funny story on himself.
RdeM: Did you hear the story from Ramón too, or just from Carlos?
BGM: Just from Carlos.
RdeM: So you don’t know whether it really happened that way.
BGM: True, I don’t. And then there was another strange episode. Some time after Ramón was murdered in Mexico, Lupe phoned Peter Furst, or a relative of hers phoned him, to say she was all right and everything had at last gotten back to normal. Carlos went down there looking for her, and when he came back he was very agitated and upset. He said people were after her, and she was terrified and afraid to go out of the house. Just the opposite of what Peter had heard.
RdeM: Do you think he really did go down there to find her?
BGM: He could have.
RdeM: Or he could have made it all up.
BGM: Yes, but why would he make up such a story? Let’s suppose he invents things all the time. Why would he invent that particular story? And why would he be upset? He seemed alarmed and afraid. I think he told it to me over the phone.
RdeM: I don’t know why he would make up the story, but I also don’t know why he would come back with a story that doesn’t match what other people say. Did you ever have any confirmation of his story?
BGM: No, but at that time nobody had any reason to doubt him, you understand. So many things he said and wrote about seemed so right. One reason people get so upset when you call him a hoaxer is that he teaches in a concrete if allegorical form. His story comes to them as direct experience. Zap! It hits them, and they know it’s right.
RdeM: It has the certainty of art rather than the dubiousness of fact.
BGM: Exactly. So you are attacking not just him but their own private experience, which has truth value for them. The form he teaches in is essential. It’s as important as the content. His allegory. His mirroring. He gives us in a concrete form things we had abstractly conceptualized but didn’t know how to articulate or use. He does that beautifully. That’s where he’s a gifted teacher.
RdeM: Some writers, including me and Joyce Carol Oates, have interpreted the Structural Analysis as a parody of social science.
BGM: I hope it is! (Laughing)
RdeM: Well, it must be. It’s much too arch and insistent and repetitive to be sincere. It’s a punishment for anybody who would take it seriously.
BGM: That’s very well put.
RdeM: Lawrence Watson was no doubt sincere when [according to Castaneda] he helped write it, but Carlos was just playing one of his many tricks on colleagues.
BGM: And then he acknowledged Larry’s help in print.
RdeM: Sure he did. He likes to rub it in. One interesting item in the Structural Analysis was a rather ironical admission that the mushrooms don Juan smoked wouldn’t burn.
BGM: I wondered about that. But why would he admit it?
RdeM: Maybe somebody questioned the feasibility of smoking mushroom dust, but he already had it in his manuscript where faculty members had read it, so he covered his aspirations by saying the dust was merely ingested.
BGM: (Laughing) When I first met Arnold Mandell, he threw me with the theory that Carlos had cooked up the Structural Analysis with some graduate students as a joke.
RdeM: Watson had just finished his graduate work, but I don’t think he was in on the joke. The joke was on him, along with the rest of the community of gullible scholars.
BGM: The last time I saw Carlos, I said something about how much I wanted from life, and Carlos said: “Don Juan would say, ‘We are peegs for life!'” I remember laughing to myself and thinking: “Pigs for life? Don Juan would never say that!” Because don Juan was basically ascetic. So it struck me even then as some part of Carlos speaking. He used the don Juan accent, but the phrase was definitely his own, it seemed to me.
RdeM: But you still thought there was such a person as don Juan.
BGM: I’m not sure there isn’t. There may very well have been, in the beginning, an experience with a concrete person. Otherwise, why would Carlos have said to me, “Come down. Meet him. Come with me”? I’m still not convinced he was completely lying to me, all of the time.
RdeM: I think I want you to believe he was.
BGM: I know you do.
RdeM: Because I think I see him truly, and I want you to see him the same way.
BGM: Well, Richard, I have to tell you, there is still an element of mystery in it for me. Because I find things in it that convince me. Even the waterfall episode was not just Carlos reflecting me back to me. There was something else besides.
[Jay Courtney Fikes (from The Murder of Ramón Medina Silva)]:
When Ramón Medina Silva was murdered [in a drunken brawl] on June 23, 1971 he was almost as famous as Carlos Castaneda’s teacher, don Juan Matus. Reports from Barbara Myerhoff and Ramón Medina’s widow indicate that Castaneda’s character, don Juan Matus, closely resembled Ramón Medina. Although Ramón Medina was a Huichol Indian, two anthropologists, Peter Furst and Barbara Myerhoff, turned him into a Huichol mara’acame and full-fledged singer, which he was not. “He (Medina) was cynically exploited, even after his tragic murder, and turned into something he wasn’t.”
Today most professional anthropologists lacking research experience among the traditional Chapalagana Huichol still have the mistaken impression that Ramón Medina was a Huichol “shaman,” and a well-qualified representative of traditional Chapalagana Huichol culture. But Ramón Medina’s popularizers, Furst and Myerhoff, did not conduct ethnographic research among the traditional Huichol. Nor did they use traditional Huichol singers (shamans) as informants. Nor did they provide candid reports about Ramón Medina and his relatives, accounts comparable to those published in Spanish by the Mexican writer and journalist, Fernando Benitez. Accordingly, Ramón Medina and his relatives appear to inhabit a touching and colorful fantasyland.
[de Mille (346-350)]:
RdeM: Margaret Castaneda told me she didn’t believe a word of the don Juan story, but she was sure something of the kind had happened to Carlos earlier in his life, which he was dramatizing in the don Juan books. She was very interested in spiritual experiences, and was sure he had had some. Another instance, I think, of people looking into the Rorschach man for their own deep sources.
BGM: Perhaps, then, I look into him for the mystery I need and you look into him for the clarity you need.
RdeM: Touché.
BGM: Or perhaps I just don’t want to re-examine my original judgments.
RdeM: If you came around to my point of view, would you lose something valuable?
BGM: I don’t know. I’ve considered the worst possibility, and I no longer find it odious – that I was completely taken in and a fool.
RdeM: Not everybody who is completely taken in is a fool. If the deceiver is very clever, he doesn’t deceive only fools. There’s a whole profession based on that, called magicians.
BGM: All right. But there’s a part of me that’s not content with a psychological explanation of what Carlos is doing. Somehow from my experiences of fieldwork I get a feeling he is building on an exchange with another person. I’m not ready to give that up.
RdeM: If the source he’s drawing on is made vague enough, one would never have to give it up. It recedes into inaccessibility.
BGM: Maybe it’s an archetypal figure, that trickster-teacher, but it doesn’t come only from inside Carlos. That’s my feeling.
RdeM: Why doesn’t it?
BGM: Because over and over he reveals in himself qualities that don’t match don Juan: inflatedness, narrowness, rationalizing, rigidity.
RdeM: Pearl Pollard Curran wrote four million words in the name of Patience Worth, a disembodied spirit from the seventeenth century. There was no plausible explanation of where all this jumbled up archaic material could come from, and it looked very much as though an external source named Patience Worth were furnishing it through Mrs. Curran. An alternative explanation was that Mrs. Curran’s personality had split into two parts.
BGM: What you say is entirely plausible. Don Juan is clearly the “Other” for Carlos.
RdeM: How do you feel about that interpretation?
BGM: It appeals to me, because I have a hard time reconciling the Carlos I knew, or think I knew, with the one who is supposed to be a hardboiled, manipulative deceiver. Don Juan may be a subpersonality, or a personification of a part of Carlos that was underdeveloped and could be developed and manifested in the stories. That seems much more plausible to me than the swindler theory.
RdeM: What swindler theory?
BGM: The conscious, careful, diabolical plan to write fake fieldnotes for eight years, get them published by the University Press, add two best selling volumes, and get an anthropology Ph.D. for the whole megillah.
RdeM: Doesn’t sound like the sort of thing one could work out in advance.
BGM: It sure doesn’t! (Laughing)
RdeM: As a long-range plan it’s preposterous.
BGM: He’s got to be improvising as he goes along.
RdeM: His need to perform the fantasy is so intense that he foists it little by little on everyone around him.
BGM: Doesn’t that sort of shoot down your UCLA conspiracy theory?
RdeM: In general, yes. Most of the professors who tolerated or endorsed his fantasies could have been duped by his perfect performance, but I still think one or two of them must have been a little more canny than that.
BGM: People are not as canny as you would like them to be, Richard. I endorsed his fantasies, and I’m not exceptionally stupid. The main difference – if you’ll excuse my saying so – between you and his academic supporters is not canniness but skepticism. They were ready to believe. You were ready to doubt. As it turned out, you had more points on your side. Maybe that was just luck.
RdeM: Maybe it was luck, or maybe it was the fact that I had some prior experience with charlatans. Most of us have never met a person like Carlos Castaneda.
BGM: That’s true.
RdeM: But you have had this unusual experience.
BGM: And I was bowled over by it.
RdeM: Did you ever visit Carlos where he lived?
BGM: Yes. During the time when my father was dying. Carlos was living about two blocks from the hospital, and I would frequently stop off there on my way back. He brewed me a special tea, from an herb called angelita, and we would exhort one another to courage. I felt he was very supportive, in a genuine, simple way.
RdeM: You found him always to have this gentle, healing quality?
BGM: When you could pin him down. Or when he came around. But if you had Expectation One, forget it. He was not someone you could count on to be there when you needed him.
RdeM: Did he ever show any hostility toward you?
BGM: Never. But on one occasion he showed fear, or something like it. Revulsion perhaps. I went to see him at another place he lived, in Westwood, to give him a costume that had belonged to Ramón. This was after Ramón had been murdered. I was visibly pregnant, and Carlos could tell from the timing that the child had been conceived while Ramón was living in my house. Or maybe I told him about it. Anyway, the idea seemed to terrify him.
RdeM: He thought it was Ramón’s child?
BGM: No, but for him I think it was something like stealing Ramón’s soul. He drew back aghast.
RdeM: Just like a woman, to steal the shaman’s soul.
BGM: Well, it was spooky. He recoiled from me. I had never felt anything like that from him before, and I left very quickly. Up to that point he had often called me a brujo, and I had always thought it was flattering, but on this occasion I didn’t feel like a sorcerer. I was very upset about Ramón’s death.
RdeM: This was your second child?
BGM: Yes. And I had an interesting episode with Carlos and my first child, another incident when he was a great friend to me. He came to visit me when my child was three months old, and had colic. Carlos sat there a long, long time watching me feed the baby. Three spoons of cereal into the mouth, two spoons out. You know how boring that is for anyone who is not a smitten mother, which I was, but Carlos was fascinated by it and kept whispering: “He’s a warrior. A warrior! He’s impeccable! You have to raise him to be impeccable!” Some of our long nights talking were about child rearing. He gave me some of the strangest advice anybody has ever gotten. Some of it wasn’t bad, but it was wild. He told me how impeccable my son was, which of course I wasn’t averse to hearing. Then I complained to him about how the baby had colic and I hadn’t slept much for three months, and he said: “Leave him to me.” And I said: “What are you going to do?” And he said: “Don’t ask. Leave the room.” So I left the room, and left my baby with him, until he called me back. He wouldn’t tell me what he had done, and I didn’t press him, but the baby never had colic again.
RdeM: (Laughing)
BGM: Now, of course, you know what happens to babies at three months.
RdeM: They give up colic?
BGM: They give up colic. On the other hand, from that day the baby never had colic again. Well, that delighted me. Carlos used to say: “You must never want to be with your children when they don’t want to be with you. You must never be too available. They must seek you out.” He was very big on that, and it so happened it was good advice for me, because I was overly seeking. Then I remember at the San Diego Anthropology meetings [in November 1970] he told me the story of scaring his little boy into good behavior. You remember what don Juan said about hiring somebody to pop out and scare the little boy. Carlos told me to do that. He told me he had done it. He told it to me as something he had done at the zoo. He told me lots of things I subsequently read in his books.
RdeM: Did he visit your classroom and talk to your students?
BGM: Yes. He had just finished the manuscript of A Separate Reality. And he was superb. He did something I’ve seen only a few great teachers do. He gave the students an understanding of the provisional nature of reality. “You only see this chair once. After that you gloss. You see chair, instead of wood, shape, black. Only once do you have the first experience.” And then in the USC cafeteria, amidst the din, he tried to teach me to listen to silence instead of noise, to “find the holes between the sounds.” At that time I was playing with a chamber music group, and the fellow who played the oboe kept saying to me: “You’re not listening to the rests. You’re treating them as if they were absent instead of being part of the music.” In his aphoristic language, Carlos was teaching me the same thing. It was delightful having him as a teacher. He was at his best then.
RdeM: Beyond the time when you brought him the costume, did you ever see him off balance?
BGM: Only once, at a meeting in San Francisco. My husband saw Carlos across the room and hailed him with the quite ingenuous but outrageous comment that he was growing stout. Carlos was definitely not amused. Just for a blink he lost his cool. It was droll to see that little flicker of mortality in him, when he was already such a famous man.
[Fikes (11)]:
[If Myerhoff and Furst had] candidly and completely described the social matrix which shaped Ramón’s life and death, people such as the psychiatrist, Arnold Mandell, would not have been so dismayed about the motive for Ramón Medina’s murder. “I simply could not imagine that [Ramón’s murder] happening after reading their material about him and his life. It was as though his head had been invaded by a force not manifested anywhere else in their ethnographies.” It appears undeniable that Furst and Myerhoff were able to aggrandize Ramón Medina’s achievements by evading explanation of the context in which he lived and died. The witchcraft, envy, adultery, and abuse of alcohol Guadalupe tells of in recounting how her husband was murdered clearly illuminates a way of life more wretched than romantic. Moreover, Guadalupe’s testimony about Ramón Medina’s fathering a child with Leuteria, whom Benitez described as Ramón Medina’s mistress, contradicts the claim that Ramón Medina Silva became an authentic Huichol singer [because a five year-period of celebacy was the rule].
Although Professor Weigand concluded that Furst and Myerhoff “fabricated a mara’acame,” they may simply have rushed to publish their findings without recognizing that Huichols make distinctions between healers, singers, and cahuiteros. Their over-use of the term mara’acame, which my informants apply to animals, plants, or persons credited with “supernatural” power, may be a concomitant of indifference or imperviousness to how things really are among Chapalagana Huichols. Such profound indifference to ethnographic truth epitomizes Castaneda’s writing and exemplifies a kind of misrepresentation distinguishable from disinformation or fabrication. Myerhoff’s admission, that for Huichols aspiring to become healers and singers “there is no apprenticeship as such,” suggests she overcame such imperviousness to ethnographic truth. The extraordinary portrait of Ramón Medina has, for the past 25 years, complemented the titillating tales about don Juan Matus popularized by Carlos Castaneda. Furst and Myerhoff’s depiction of Ramón Medina is sensational and misleading because, with minor exceptions, it avoids meaningful discussion of the alcoholism, adultery, and political powerlessness endemic among Huichols living in urban centers and refugee settlements, and glosses over the collapse of traditional Huichol religion and social organization in such enclaves. Their hyperselective focus has obscured both traditional Huichol culture and Ramón Medina’s true status among the refugee Huichol. My research, like that of Fernando Benitez, indicated that Ramón Medina was caught in a conflict between Huichol culture and modem Mexican life. According to Benitez, ranchos in the refugee Huichol region where Ramón Medina lived were not integrated into aboriginal ceremonial centers such as San Andros, San Sebastian, and Santa Catarina. As a consequence, refugee Huichol ranchos have “improvised shamans deprived of the wisdom and power of the great mara’acames.” Benitez recorded numerous myths dictated in Spanish by Ramón Medina, but noted that true shamans spoke only Huichol.
[Fikes (74)]:
According to Guadalupe Rios, Ramón Medina was peering down into a canyon above a waterfall near Guadalajara, when Myerhoff suddenly had the idea of photographing him. She [Guadalupe] told me that Myerhoff had requested that Furst photograph Ramón. Her statement is tacitly confirmed by Furst’s taking credit for the photo. Guadalupe explained that they urged Ramón to walk further down into the canyon, and pretend to fly like a bird. She told me that this event had no cultural significance and that it was done at Myerhoff’s request to photograph Ramón. How Furst and Myerhoff decided this photograph of Ramón Medina on top of a boulder illustrated “shamanic balance” is a mystery as tantalizing as determining the real identity of don Juan Matus.
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