Book cover image for American Trickster by Ru Marshall

Multi-level Examination of a Legendary Hoax & the Psychology Behind it

This article reviews Ru Marshall’s new biography of Carlos Castaneda: American Trickster.

Review by Richard Jennings

OR Books, New York and London, 2026. Paperback ISBN 978-1-68219-461-4.

Table of contents

Introduction

I am thrilled to report that a book I have been waiting to read and report on here for over 18 years has finally arrived, and it is a doozy! The most complete portrait yet assembled of Carlos Castaneda — the person and the myth. Operating simultaneously on many levels, the book is part biography, part intellectual history, part cult analysis, and part philosophical excavation. The writing is philosophical and poetic by turns, capable of both sustained analytical argument and lapidary compression. The 33 chapters, organized into four major sections and running to nearly 600 pages of text before the notes and index, represent a genuinely staggering achievement of research and synthesis.

But first in the interest of full disclosure, and to give you a better sense of my perspective as a reviewer, a little background on my history with Ru’s project and my own journey as a Castaneda student and documentarian.

I became a student of Castaneda’s and interacted with him and others in his inner circle from 1995 until his death in 1998. I created this website, sustainedaction.org, over twenty-five years ago, and have gradually added my own material and that of others interested in this topic. This site has ultimately served both to document the cultic nature of Carlos Castaneda’s group and to raise urgent questions about what happened to the five women closest to him — women who disappeared around the time of Castaneda’s death in April 1998 and whose remains, with the exception of those of his supposed “daughter,” Nuri the Blue Scout, have never been found.

Following Castaneda’s death, with my close friend Amy Wallace—who had been one of Castaneda’s many lovers and who was also his student– I tried to make sense of the phenomenon we had lived through. Amy kept me posted on what was happening with what remained of Castaneda’s inner circle after he died, providing information about what the “Witches” had told her in the months leading up to his death, and what Carol Tiggs and others were claiming in the months that followed. I began months of research—through legal documents publicly available at the L.A. County Courthouse, in marriage records for Las Vegas, in U.S. immigration archives, and elsewhere—to learn who Castaneda and the people in his group actually were. What I discovered was that virtually everything Castaneda had told his students about his personal history and that of the people around him—including the supposed “apprenticeships” of the Witches to don Juan’s imaginary group of sorcerers–was false.

At the beginning of 1999, I started a private email group for attendees of the Castaneda workshops and private sessions, and then this website, to share what I was learning about Castaneda and his inner circle. Many months later, I realized that between the hundreds of pages of notes I had taken in workshops and private sessions, as well as the new information I had gleaned from all my research, I had material that could be the basis of a comprehensive biography of Castaneda. I ultimately wrote a full book proposal for such a biography, but by late 2000 I realized the psychological toll of my cult experience, and my generally depressed state by that point made it impossible for me to imagine continuing to dwell in the Castaneda material to the extent necessary to further research and write the biography I had in mind. Instead, by then Amy had decided to write a memoir of her experiences with Castaneda and his group, so I gave her my notes and research which helped her to produce her 2003 book, A Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

Ru Marshall contacted and interviewed me in 2006 while writing what became a landmark piece for Salon magazine. I was most impressed with that piece and thought they did exceptional work with very difficult material. When Ru later told me they were working on a biography and asked for the extensive notes I had kept from Castaneda’s sessions and workshops, and for further interviews, I readily agreed. I believed then, and certainly feel now with the result in hand, that Ru was the right person to write the biography I had decided I couldn’t.

That was eighteen years ago. American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda was worth the very long wait.

What Marshall Set Out to Do

It is easy, in retrospect, to frame a biography of Carlos Castaneda as a debunking exercise — and many have tried. There was, after all, no shortage of material: Richard de Mille had exposed the fraudulent fieldwork decades ago; journalists and researchers had chipped away at the mythology for years; and the disappearance of the five women after Castaneda’s death provided, for those paying attention, the most tragic evidence of all that something had gone very wrong inside his inner circle.

But Marshall’s ambition in American Trickster is considerably larger and more demanding than debunking. Their goal is understanding — in the fullest possible sense. What made this particular Peruvian immigrant’s lies so persuasive that they generated not only a UCLA doctorate and bestselling series of books, but an entire synthetic philosophy, a set of physical practices called Tensegrity, and ultimately a closed cult that resulted in multiple probable deaths? What were the intellectual, psychological, cultural, and biographical roots of such an elaborate “maneuver,” that was ultimately, for some, so destructive?

Roots: The Peruvian Origins

The first section, “The Old Revolution,” opens in contemporary Cajamarca, Peru, and in doing so it immediately establishes something no previous account of Castaneda has managed: genuine context. César Arana, the future “Carlos Castaneda,” was born into a family shaped by layers of shame and concealment that Marshall argues — persuasively — formed the psychic bedrock of everything that followed.

His parents were not married at his birth. His father, Nemesio, a watchmaker and self-made intellectual who read Spinoza and Kant, played chess, and owned a Victrola for classical music, would prove both a model to surpass and an authority figure to eventually mock and destroy. Marshall documents how Castaneda’s drive through his very long academic career was animated by two “complexly intertwined impulses: to surpass Nemesio as a ‘man of knowledge’ and to mock and discredit the kind of knowledge Nemesio valued.” The marriage documents reveal that Nemesio was ill when he and Susana finally wed — and what that illness was adds yet another layer to the family’s buried secrets.

Marshall also makes a case, grounded in careful archival research and interviews conducted in Peru, that the Aranas may have been among the region’s families of crypto-Jewish origin — descendants of Jews who publicly converted under the Inquisition while privately maintaining their faith and practices. This is speculative, and Marshall acknowledges it as such, citing a substantial body of scholarship on Peruvian crypto-Judaism to support the possibility. But it opens a genuinely illuminating angle on Castaneda’s lifelong obsession with concealment, his comfort with multiple shifting identities, and his deep attraction to esoteric traditions built around hidden knowledge available only to a chosen few.

The Aprista political movement — the dominant force in the Peru of Castaneda’s childhood — provides a further illuminating window. Marshall quotes a contemporary analyst on how Aprista rallies worked: they achieved “a violent psychological break with the world of established identities so that the individual may be absorbed (reborn) into the ineffable… As people find themselves in direct touch with some extraordinary personality symbolizing the transcendent, they experience a sense of power and energy.” Read this, and you have already encountered, in miniature, the dynamic that arguably animated large workshops conducted by Castaneda’s organization Cleargreen that I attended from 1995-1998.

Marshall conducted interviews in Cajamarca and recovered sources — including the young woman known to workshop goers in 1995 as the “10-year-old girl” who “made a choice,” Carola — who had not spoken to previous researchers. That depth of Peruvian material sheds genuine new light on events that, viewed only from North America, may otherwise seem inexplicable.

The Intellectual Engine: Garfinkel and the Breaching of Reality

The section I found most analytically brilliant, and which will likely surprise readers who haven’t previously encountered the material, is Marshall’s treatment of Castaneda’s teacher and mentor Harold Garfinkel, and the sociological tradition called ethnomethodology.

Garfinkel, a pioneering sociologist at UCLA, developed the concept of “breaching experiments” — deliberate violations of the unstated rules that hold social reality together, designed to expose how much of what we take to be objective fact is actually a continuous, collective performance. When Castaneda enrolled in Garfinkel’s seminars, he encountered an intellectual framework that seemed to confirm — and gave precise academic language to — his lifelong instinct that reality is not fixed but constructed, not discovered but made. The don Juan books are, among other things, an extraordinarily extended breaching experiment. Don Juan’s teachings consist almost entirely of instructions for violating consensus reality.

Marshall’s sharpest observation: in Garfinkel’s own experiments—including some in which students were instructed to treat and interact with family members as though they were complete strangers, thereby causing family members extreme bewilderment and worse—participants were eventually debriefed. Castaneda, in his more “radical iteration,” omitted this step. When we, his students, carried out our assignment “properly” — cutting off our families, erasing our personal histories, treating everyone from our previous life as a stranger — there would be no debriefing. The break would be permanent.

In another Garfinkel exercise Marshall describes, student participants were told they were going to be part of an experiment involving a new form of psychotherapy. Experimenters who were supposedly counselor trainees were going to listen to the participants tell them about problems or issues they were experiencing, with the counselors only allowed to respond with yes or no answers. Participants were not told the pattern of those responses was randomly generated from the beginning. As Marshall explains it, the “victims” invariably found the sessions helpful. The human tendency is to assume someone in a position of authority has “answers,” and to do our best to try to make sense of their directions. The way this tendency operates to empower would be gurus and cult leaders is made explicit with a passage Marshall quotes from Garfinkel in which Marshall invites the reader to try substituting “cult leader” for “adviser”: “Where the answers were unsatisfying or incomplete, the questioners were willing to wait for later answers in order to decide the sense of the previous one… Answers that were inappropriate were inappropriate for ‘a reason.'” When the leader says something that seems dishonest or abusive, the follower perceives it as done for hidden reasons she simply doesn’t yet understand.

Marshall’s extensive research included gaining access to the Garfinkel archives at U.C.L.A. where they made the astonishing discovery that Taisha Abelar—later one of Castaneda’s “witches” who wrote two books about her supposed apprenticeship with don Juan’s group of sorcerers—was a research assistant to Garfinkel when she was still MaryAnn Simko, a U.C.L.A. anthropology grad student. Marshall found she was assisting Garfinkel on a study about “lying.”

Marshall’s analysis extends well beyond Garfinkel. They trace Castaneda’s eclectic intellectual raids through Nietzsche, Hume, Wittgenstein, Buddhist philosophy, New Thought, Theosophy, and a remarkable roster of California spiritual entrepreneurs. They show how this self-taught provincial could simultaneously be laughably derivative and brilliantly synthetic. One particularly entertaining instance involves the Yogi Ramacharaka, whose occult teachings about luminous egg-shaped auras Castaneda incorporated wholesale into don Juan’s worldview — apparently unaware that “Ramacharaka” was the pen name of an attorney named William Walker Atkinson, who had authored some hundred pseudonymously published books. Carlos’s mysterious American Indian sorcerer was thus quoting a faux “Indian Indian.” Marshall’s verdict on this kind of assemblage is precisely right: “Anyone can steal, few can steal with Castaneda’s skill and aplomb, fewer still can then brilliantly combine their thefts.”

This intellectual genealogy also illuminates the books themselves, which Marshall reads as works of metafiction concealing what they call “phenomenological ghost stories.” On a third reading, they find The Teachings of Don Juan still “compelling, disturbing, uncanny. Even knowing all the pleasure Carlos took in deceit, there are still moments when — almost — I can’t believe it’s not true.” That acknowledgment — that the books still work on you, even in full knowledge of the hoax — is important. It is what explains Castaneda’s reach, and Marshall is brave enough not to look away from it.

Mark Fine and the Making of the Inner Circle

One of the most remarkable portions of the book tracks the long, strange relationship between Castaneda and the filmmaker Mark Fine, who spent years in the Castaneda orbit during the early formative period of the group, then broke away and eventually entered a Catholic religious order. Marshall writes that it took them five years to fully extract this story from Fine — a fact that is fully credible once you’ve read it.

What makes Fine’s account particularly valuable is that he was present during the period when the group first crystallized — when the “winds” (Castaneda’s then girlfriends) were beginning to transform into the witches of the later books, when the women who would eventually disappear were first being isolated and remade. Fine describes the precise mechanics of how Castaneda operated: the “love bombing,” the abrupt withdrawal of attention, the assignments designed to break his followers’ connections to the outside world, the gradual substitution of sorceric apprenticeship for ordinary human relationship. He describes the women’s house in Westwood with the two separate kitchens and the simple, tasteful furnishings; Judy, who did most of the cooking; Joanie’s room above the garage; and Carlos, who was said to have concreted over the garage drive himself.

Fine also witnessed what is perhaps the most disturbing incident Marshall recounts from this period: Castaneda, leaving a restaurant one evening, telling Fine and Mark Silliphant in a calm, matter-of-fact tone that to complete his initiation as the Nagual, he needed to plunge a dagger into a newborn infant’s heart and eat it. Marshall’s analysis of this moment — narcissistic? sociopathic? evil? or simply strategic, a calculated test of how far followers could be pushed? — is characteristic of the book’s analytical care. They hold multiple interpretations in tension rather than collapsing them into a single verdict.

Fine ultimately left. He still considers the experience, with all its horror, to have given him something real. Marshall’s observation that “almost every disillusioned follower with whom I spoke” felt the same way is among the more uncomfortable truths the book asks us to sit with — and one of its more honest.

The Women

The passages that hit hardest — that will hit hardest for any reader with some familiarity with this story — are those dealing with the women who disappeared.

Marshall traces the story of Kylie Lundahl (whose real name was Dee Ann Ahlvers, born in Webster City, Iowa, on April 5, 1956) from her earliest years through her recruitment and eventual disappearance. Her older sister’s description is heartbreaking in retrospect: “Dee was a psychological and emotional Evel Knievel… She was on earth to stretch herself to the limit. And was always looking for people who could take her there.” I knew Kylie in the final period of the group’s existence. She was a force of nature, high-energy, and entirely committed.

The passage Marshall recovered from a former member named Muriel brings that knowledge into brutal focus. Kylie had told Muriel she kept a bottle of pills in her closet in case the group had to make a sudden escape. And Carlos, Muriel recalls, told Kylie on more than one occasion: “If you have to leave, you can get in your little car and drive off a cliff in the desert. If you did that, you’d fly. You wouldn’t really die.” He said it several times.

Equally harrowing is Carola’s account of the night following Castaneda’s death, when she and Zaia were summoned to the house, where Florinda and Taisha were waiting. They were told Carlos had “left.” Told that Nury, Kylie, and Talia had “gone with him.” Florinda gave Carola a sum of cash — five to ten thousand dollars — and told her this would be the last time they’d see each other. I knew Florinda. She was among the most vivid human beings I have ever encountered. Reading Carola’s account, I found myself grateful Marshall had managed to get her to tell it.

One detail among many that lodged in me: Judy Ames — who would become, in the books, the terrible and powerful witch La Gorda — put her two sons, ages seven and four, on a plane to visit their grandparents in the summer of 1979. She told her older son Adam she might not see him again. “Oh Mom,” he said, “of course I’ll see you again! I’ll be back after the summer’s over.”

Neither Adam nor Eric ever saw their mother again.

There is no analytical apparatus needed around that fact. Marshall is right to state it plainly and move on.

The Psychological Synthesis

The final section of American Trickster attempts something ambitious: not merely to catalog Castaneda’s damage but to understand the structure of the mind that produced it. Drawing on Daniel Shaw’s work on traumatizing narcissism, Heinz Kohut’s analysis of charismatic leadership, and Sam Vaknin’s self-analysis as someone with narcissistic personality disorder, Marshall argues that Castaneda’s books may actually give us something quite rare: a window into a consciousness of this particular kind.

Rather than revealing a person incapable of feeling, Marshall suggests, the books reveal “Castaneda’s struggle with or fear of being such an individual. Of not being fully human, of being a monster. A fear that, perhaps, makes him monstrous.” Throughout the oeuvre, don Juan is teaching Carlos, over and over, that the beings he encounters are not truly human. This is not incidental to the philosophy. It is the philosophy.

Marshall connects this to the deeper history: the conquest, the half-buried shame, the illegitimacy, the family’s layered secrets. “Castaneda endeavored to create a symbolic order all his own, a community he controlled entirely. The need to shatter the egos of others was a justification, continuation, and mirror of his own condition. In which he couldn’t experience himself as real.”

This is a psychologically sophisticated reading, and I find it more persuasive than the simpler “he was a sociopath” account — though it doesn’t exclude sociopathy. The more precise term Marshall settles on, via Shaw, is “traumatizing narcissist”: someone who, having experienced profound humiliation in early life, develops a compensatory delusion of omnipotence and then extracts that compensation from everyone around him. Castaneda’s expulsion from Cajamarca — and, before that, the buried horrors of his family’s history — were precisely such humiliations.

On SustainedAction, in the early 2000s, I had shared the work on narcissism and narcissistic authoritarian cult leaders by Len Oakes and others that helped me better understand the phenomenon I had survived. The literature on traumatizing narcissism and high-demand groups has advanced significantly in recent years, and Marshall cites the best of it. This final section of the book sends you back to the beginning with new eyes.

More Gems for Castaneda Scholars, and a Respectful Disagreement: Death Valley

Having read the previous books aimed at debunking Castaneda, especially those by Richard de Mille (which are summarized on this site), I found Marshall’s reports on what they learned from extensive interviews with de Mille quite fascinating. The chilling backstory to de Mille’s obsession with unmasking Castaneda’s hoax, as Marshall uncovers it, includes de Mille’s intense involvement with Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, who had in the early 1950s gotten his personal assistant and student, de Mille, to do some unconscionable and illegal things to support his guru.

Another one of the many fascinating details in the book for those of us who are longtime Castaneda scholars is Marshall’s report on anthropologist Timothy Knab’s attempts to confront Castaneda in person at two Mexico City press conferences held to publicize The Eagle’s Gift in July 1982. I hugely admired Knab’s authentic account of sorcery in his book A War of Witches that I summarized for SustainedAction here, so was delighted to read about Knab’s encounters with Castaneda that Marshall learned by interviewing him.

I want to note one substantive point of disagreement with Marshall’s analysis. Commenting on my 1998 investigation as reported on SustainedAction.org where I concluded Death Valley was unlikely to be where the remains of the missing women are hidden, Marshall indicates they do not share my conclusion.

My reasoning then, and now, runs as follows. Death Valley National Park, for all its apparent desolation, receives enormous visitor traffic — hikers, tourists, and backcountry explorers who regularly penetrate even its most remote sections. Any group planning to permanently conceal remains there would have had no realistic confidence they would stay concealed. The penultimate chapter of American Trickster recounts, with considerable narrative energy and a certain dark comedy, the search of the Big Four Mine near where the Blue Scout’s remains were found in 2006, outside of which Marshall’s team eventually found a striking mandala-like artwork. But after reading that chapter, I went looking online for footage of the mine and found hikers’ videos walking freely into and through it — confirming exactly the conclusion I had come to in 1998.

What I was comparing Death Valley to, in my original analysis, was the vast and genuinely unpopulated western Nevada desert — not far from the park, full of abandoned mines with intimidating fencing and essentially no visitor traffic at any time. Reasoning as I was from inside the group’s logic, imagining a location they would have previously scouted for an eventual “escape,” the abandoned and long neglected mines of western Nevada fit the requirements in a way Death Valley simply does not.

This disagreement doesn’t diminish Marshall’s chapter, which is compelling reading — and which makes for one of the more human, even comic episodes in what is otherwise a very dark story.

Why This Book Matters Now

We are, in 2026, considerably better equipped than we were in 1998 to understand what happened in Carlos Castaneda’s circle. The vocabulary of cult dynamics has entered mainstream culture. The literature on traumatizing narcissism, on high-demand groups, on the mechanics of love bombing and psychological reconstruction — all of it has advanced enormously in recent decades. American Trickster cites the best of that scholarship and applies it with precision.

But the book is not merely a case study in cult behavior. It is an investigation of the specific cultural and intellectual conditions that made this particular maneuver possible — the post-war California spiritual landscape, the countercultural hunger for experiences that transcended consensus reality, the academy’s willingness to grant Castaneda’s project the imprimatur of scholarship. Carlos Castaneda was, in Marshall’s formulation, “a mestizo author, who insisted on identifying himself as ‘European,’ who’d created an ‘Indian’ character who turns the world of the ‘Western’ character ‘Carlos’ inside out, revealing a supposedly Indigenous way of knowledge that was in fact based on German philosophy.” That synthesis — and its colossal success — tells us something important about the culture that embraced it.

For those of us who were directly involved — who, like me, spent years trying to work out what had happened and why — the book offers something rarer: a reckoning conducted from outside the experience, with the research depth and analytical range we lacked while living through it. Marshall spent eighteen years reporting, thinking, and writing this book; they also spent years fighting obstacles with publishers, a story told in the Afterword, and which deserves its own telling. The result is a work that will not settle the question of what happened to the five women who disappeared around the time of Castaneda’s death. But it does the most thorough job yet of explaining how they ended up in his circle, what was done to them there, and what the consequences of that look like when you follow the logic all the way to its end.

I strongly urge anyone wishing to understand the phenomenon of Carlos Castaneda and the popularity of his work, or anyone interested in cults and their mechanics and impact, to read this very engrossing and thoughtful book. Kudos to Ru for their perseverance, insights and clarity of expression. I know, from firsthand experience, that the material they were working with can take an immense toll emotionally. When you add to that the obstacles they encountered with publishers, especially the outrageous and self-serving attempts by those involved at University of California Press to get Ru to change their conclusions to take some of the onus off of that institution for publishing Castaneda’s early books, it is astonishing that they got through it all with such powerful results.

Richard Jennings founded sustainedaction.orgin 1999. He was a student of Carlos Castaneda from 1995 to 1998 and contributed session notes, documentation gleaned from court and other archives, and interviews to Ru Marshall’s research for this book.