Carol Tiggs Chronology: Truth Defier

2024 Update: Carol Tiggs Chronology 25 Years On

Update Introduction

What we can now conclude, 25 years after the first version of this chronology was published, is that Carol’s behavior–which includes going to lengths to maintain the absurd story that Castaneda “burned with the fire from within,” and that the missing women who committed suicide following his death were “traveling”–is consistent not only with narcissistic personality disorder, just like Castaneda, but is also that of a sociopath. Unlike Castaneda, however, she is not the rare “charismatic guru” type of narcissist. She lacks that type’s ability to “read” people that Castaneda possessed in spades. She also has none of his preternatural gift for storytelling, or even inventing believable and consistent lies. All she had to go on was her relative attractiveness for an individual of her age, and the grandiose but unsustainable stories he left behind that caused gullible Castaneda followers to project super powers on her, at least until she opened her mouth. Welcome to the Carol Tiggs Chronology.

From Carol’s behavior over the years, both with Castaneda in the picture and without, it is pretty clear she lacks any kind of moral compass, and will simply use people for her own ends, no matter the harm that causes. She has been around the New Age bullshit block long enough that she’s picked up some techniques for conning the most gullible, including the basic hypnosis induction techniques Castaneda had her learn in the early ’90s from videotapes and books. But she has no skill at telling effective stories–for example, she could not and would not ever write the book about her supposed sorceric experiences that was long claimed to be in the works–and is apparently too lazy even to put in the minimal effort needed to keep her stories straight.

She has at least been smart enough to stay out of the public eye for most of the last 25 years. Given she is a Stanford grad, she’s clearly not stupid. But she stumbled badly on her first outing at a Cleargreen workshop in 17 years as detailed below, not only making up a melodramatic and patently absurd story about her childhood, but also claiming a technique she had just learned that summer in getting certified as a vocal yoga instructor had been taught to her by don Juan in their first supposed meeting. It is highly unlikely then that she will ever make the mistake of appearing in public like that again. 

Carol’s very sad workshop “comeback” after all these years only confirmed what those of us who had watched and known her through the years had long come to realize: Carol is nothing without the svengali who scripted, staged and oversaw her appearances as one of the two most important living protagonists of his elaborate myth. As Bruce Wagner told Amy Wallace following Castaneda’s death regarding Carol, “She is no more fit to take on the job of leader than I am to redo the plumbing in your house.” Far from being a supremely powerful “sorceress” who “rides the Death Defier,” or even “superpussy,” she is a pathetic victim of her own and Castaneda’s grandiose web of lies aimed at making a narcissist loser seem special enough to merit others’ attention and admiration. And the supreme irony, in my mind, is that all these years after Castaneda’s death and her elevation as a supernatural being, Ms. Tiggs and the few other remaining charlatans at Cleargreen are reduced to peddling bogus “breath techniques,” exactly like the many gurus Castaneda claimed to have once visited and that he mercilessly lampooned to us in Sunday sessions.

Whereas Taisha Abelar was an intelligent and talented true believer, and Florinda Donner was a naturally charismatic serial liar and sociopath, Carol is basically just a sociopathic but inept nobody without a puppet master around to transform her into a “magical being.” Based on the material I reviewed and people I spoke to in putting together this updated chronology, I have nothing but contempt for how Carol has operated and treated people. Her choices, actions and inaction have generated nothing but increasing suspicion and ridicule of Castaneda’s legacy. She deserves to be shunned and what’s left of the Cleargreen organization disbanded. As we know, however, from the painful national spectacle of Donald Trump, pathological narcissists never admit their misdeeds or failures. They will blame it on others, and otherwise make up lies and excuses until their dying day.

Yes, the cult of Castaneda is a story of victims and villains. Carol was both–a victim of Castaneda’s years of abuse and manipulation–but her own misdeeds, abuses of trust and outright fraud make her the singular villain of the post Castaneda years. In honor of all the people whose trust and faith she abused and crapped on, it is time to update the ludicrous and sad chronology of one Carol Tiggs.

Preface to Chronology’s First Publication in 1999

“Carol Tiggs went away. She was not living in the mountains of New Mexico, I assure you.” (Carlos Castaneda, on Carol’s ten-year departure, in March 1994 Details Magazine)

“Our endless categorizing and taxonomizing closes us into itself and renders us incapable of considering the possibility that someone like Carol Tiggs could go somewhere else for ten years and then return. Carol really was physically gone and she was not in this world for those years.” (Statement by Kylie Lundahl at July 19, 1997, Seattle Tensegrity workshop)

“Uh, well, sorcerers can be in two places at one time.” (Cleargreen shareholder Nyei Murez, in April 1999, responding by telephone to Linda Zoontjens’s questions about Carol Tiggs being married when she was supposed to be in the Second Attention.)

Added 2024: Cleargreen 1999 website statement responding to revelations from the original publication of the Carol Tiggs chronology here on Sustained Action: “Carol Tiggs left, and was gone for ten years, anchored somewhere else in infinity. During those ten years, a projection of Carol Tiggs would sometimes return here to live in the world we know. It took Carol Tiggs—the being who was gone—ten years to return here, to reintegrate her energy body (dreaming body) and her physical body into one being.”

If “the hinge of sorcery is the mystery of the assemblage point,” it’s a fair summation of Castaneda and Co.’s repeated explanations for going public with the teaching of Tensegrity and other supposed sorceric techniques in the early 1990s that the “hinge” for this was the mysterious “return” of Carol Tiggs after supposedly disappearing “bodily” into the Second Attention – from 1973 to 1983. But whereas Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar produced books that tell us a lot about what they claimed to have experienced and learned from the sorcerer’s world, all we know about Carol Tiggs’s experiences are a few contradictory stories in three of Castaneda’s books, and a limited sheaf of surprisingly varying stories from several workshops.

Carol, unlike the others closest to Castaneda, decided to remain on the scene in L.A. after Castaneda’s death on April 27, 1998. In May 1998, during a telephone conversation she initiated in an effort to ferret out how much I knew, Carol told me that despite an original plan that she should leave with the others, “a non-decision decision kept me here.” She also did not expressly confirm Castaneda’s death, but stated vaguely that Castaneda was “in one place” and that the other five, including the other two ‘witches,’ were “elsewhere, looking around.” Nonetheless, in the month following Castaneda’s death, Cleargreen (the for-profit organization Castaneda founded to organize the Tensegrity workshops) went to great lengths to lump Carol in with the other witches (who left town at the end of April 1998) in describing how Castaneda’s “remaining apprentices” received messages and instruction from “the Witches.”

This chronology is based on statements made at Tensegrity workshops, in the books and at interviews, along with facts gleaned from documents that are in the public domain and interviews with people like Carol’s mother, who knew her at various times of her life.

Early Years

August 1, 1945 – Lt. Max Edward Pohlman, U.S. Navy Medical Reserve Corps, son of Dr. and Mrs. Augustus G. Pohlman of Los Angeles, married Harriet Strong Witbeck, daughter of Charles Strong Witbeck and Ruth Ainsworth, in Santa Barbara. The ceremony was performed at Trinity Church. The young couple honeymooned at El Encanto, Santa Barbara, and later went to Coronado. Mrs. Pohlman was a graduate of Stanford University and Tobe Cobren Fashion School, New York City. Lieutenant Pohlman had graduated from St. Louis University Medical School. (From August 2, 1945, edition of the Pasadena Star News.) During Wolrd War II, Lt. Pohlman had been assigned to the 4th Marine Regiment. He was captured and held as a Japanese prisoner of war, and ultimately liberated from the Bilibid POW Camp, which was in the heart of Manila, the Philippines. (Source: National Archives)

November 24, 1947, at 6:32 AM – Kathleen Adair Pohlman (who will later call herself “Carol Tiggs”) is the first child born to Harriet Witbeck Pohlman, age 30, and Max Edward Pohlman, age 36, at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. She is named after her paternal grandmother–Kathleen L. Black. The family is then living at 820 So. Madison, Pasadena, the city in which Harriet had lived since 1920. [Per birth certificate.] Astrologically, Carol is a Sagittarius with Sagittarius rising, Moon in Aries.

1950s – Carol reminisced about her early childhood to Amy Wallace when she spent days at Amy’s home both in the weeks prior to Castaneda’s death and after. She told Amy she was so sick and asthmatic as a child that when her parents went out to parties and left her, she asked them as they were leaving, “Will I still be here when you get back?” She also told Amy she felt ignored by her parents growing up, since Harriet and Max were so “into” and exclusively focused on each other.

1960 – 1966 – Kathleen “Chickie” Pohlman attended Polytechnic School in Pasadena, California, beginning in 7th grade, and graduated there in 1966. Her boyfriend for over a year prior to his graduation in 1965, a year before Chickie, was C.J. Russell. In a message he wrote to Amy, David Worrell and me on May 21, 2002, after he came across the info about his one-time girlfriend on SustainedAction, he described “Chickie,” when he knew her, as “exceedingly charming, intelligent, curious, and fun, and, I thought, beautiful in a unique way.” Although C.J. went east to study architecture at Cornell, he kept in touch with her off and on until around 1976. When they were dating, C.J. found Kathleen’s parents to be, by far, “the most permissive parents” of any of his friends. He reported she had no curfews, no restrictions of any kind that he knew of, in stark contrast to his conservative parents. Despite this permissive familial atmosphere, though, C.J. says “she was also the best behaved person I knew. While all the rest of us were smoking, partying and drinking and being naughty adolescents, she partook of none of it. She always enjoyed herself at the parties, and was definitely part of the social action, but did not drink, smoke, do any drugs (they weren’t on the scene yet) or do anything wild or crazy.” C.J. also described her as “a real scholar” and “one of the most intelligent girlfriends I ever had.” He said she “spoke fluent French, got very good grades, and seemed to do so more for the sake of learning than anything else.” C.J. shared with Amy that Kathleen could talk to her mother about anything, and Harriet would usually respond with a bemused smile and total acceptance. Kathleen related that type of reaction to him on many occasions. One time, he remembered, when they had stayed out til about 4 AM on a date, he asked her the next day if everything was OK with her parents. (He was 15 or 16 at the time and his parents had given him hell and grounded him.) Kathleen told him Harriet had just laughed and kidded her about it. Kathleen was “mortified,” telling him “I hate it when she laughs at me like that!”

[October 1965 – Castaneda ended his apprenticeship with don Juan (per The Teachings of Don Juan.]

September 1966 – June 1967 – Kathleen Pohlman was a student at U.C. Berkeley, where she pledged Kappa Alpha Theta sorority in 1966. Her picture with her sorority in the student yearbook identifies her as Chickie Pohlman. The Thetas won the Powder Puff Derby that year. (Source: 1967 U.C. Berkeley Student Yearbook)

Trip to Mexico – 1967

Summer 1967 – Kathleen Pohlman attended summer school at a private university in Mexico City (per Harriet Pohlman)

Late 1966 or ’67? – Carol purportedly first encountered don Juan in Mexico City at age 19 (per her lectures at the Longmont, Colorado, and Mexico City workshops in April 1995 – see summaries below). [Note: These accounts differ from Castaneda’s account described in The Eagle’s Gift (1981) See below.]

[April 1968 – Castaneda resumed his apprenticeship with don Juan (per A Separate Reality).]

September 1967 – June 1968 – Kathleen Pohlman was a student at U.C. Berkeley

Summer 1968 – Kathleen Pohlman attended summer school at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

September 1968 – June 1969 – Kathleen Pohlman was a student at Stanford University.

Summer 1969 – Kathleen Pohlman studied at the Stanford University campus in Florence, Italy. During that summer she traveled to Russia. (I in fact have a postcard Harriet Pohlman sent me that was part of a stash of postcards she said Kathleen collected on that trip to Russia. It depicts a 1911 painting of Spring at the Trinity Monastery by Konstantin Iuon from the State Russian Museum in Leningrad.) Her one-time boyfriend C.J. Russell who was studying in Fontainebleu, France, that same summer, met her in Paris for a brief time to see the sites together and catch up. He reported in his correspondence with Amy in 2002 that at no time did Kathleen mention any relationship with Castaneda, or any influence from don Juan. He described her then as “her usual ebullient self.”

1968-1969? – C.J. Russell, who had known Kathleen since they dated at Polytechnic High School in the mid-60’s, and who remained friends with her for the next 10 years or so, dropped by the Pohlman house in Pasadena and met Mark Silliphant there. C.J. gathered he and Kathleen were in a serious relationship at the time. [Mark Silliphant who was briefly married to Patty Partin (later Nury Alexander, aka the Blue Scout) in early 1977, after having met her in 1976, is known to have been a member of Castaneda’s “inner circle” for a time in the seventies. He was also known during this time as “Mark Austin,” which is interesting since Carol’s legal name from November 1972 to May 1988 was “Elizabeth Austin.” Mark had enrolled at UCLA as a Theater Arts major in September 1972, but left the school in March 1974 without obtaining a degree.]

September 1969 – June 1970 – Kathleen Pohlman was a student at Stanford University where she graduated with an AB in Art in June 1970.

Summer – Fall 1970 – Kathleen Pohlman registered for classes at Pasadena City College, though she didn’t complete any coursework there.

First Enters Castaneda World

1970 – early 1971? – Kathleen was introduced to Castaneda by Mark Silliphant. Carol’s mother Harriet told me she met Florinda, then “Gina,” in 1971, when Florinda gave her a copy of The Teachings of Don Juan. (William Patrick Patterson, a student of Lord John Pentland, who Gurdjieff appointed to lead the “Work” in America, wrote in his 2008 book The Life & Teachings of Carlos Castaneda, that Kathleen Pohlman was a student of Pentland and that Castaneda first met her at a weekend he spent in St. Elmo, the home of the Gurdjieff Foundation in San Francisco. Patterson wrote that Castaneda received his invite to St. Elmo after having first attended a Gurdjieff Movements demonstration in Los Angeles in 1970. Patterson’s account, however, all seems to be based on second-hand information. He wasn’t there when the meeting purportedly happened, and he doesn’t say who his source was for that information.)

July 31, 1971 – Carol’s father, Max Edward Pohlman, died in a head-on collision on his way to Laguna Beach, California. He was born October 17, 1911, graduated from the Saint Louis University with a B.S. degree in 1930 and an M.D. from the School of Medicine in 1934. He was licensed in 1936. He served in the U.S. Navy medical corps during 1940-46, and was a Japanese prisoner of war in the Philippines as mentioned above. He was board certified in 1945 in the specialty of ENT, or Otolaryngology. He was a member of the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology, as well as of the American Otological Society. He was at least a part-time professor of medicine at UCLA, and at the time of his death, a faculty member, department of surgery, at the University of Southern California. He also wrote at least one book, The Medical Itch (1964 Obolensky Press), under the pseudonym Claude Benjamin, and plays. Other pseudonyms were Max Edwards, and Marion E. George (per Contemporary Authors database). Under the pseudonym Claude Benjamin he also wrote a play in collaboration with Claude Binyon called The Soft Touch. His play Bilibid (yes, the name of the POW camp he was liberated from) was produced by the Pasadena Playhouse. According to C.J. Russell, Carol’s one-time boyfriend, Max was “something of a Renaissance man”: “Not only was he a respected and successful MD, he also wrote plays, two of which were produced off Broadway. He taught himself languages (German, and I think Italian as well), immersing himself in their study while at home, and then going over there to live for six months to a year to really learn to speak them.”

July 1971 – Carol was living in Westwood, presumably with Castaneda or nearby. (Her mother Harriett remembered her supposedly studying at UCLA when her father died.)

1971- 1985 – Kathleen lived with her mother, Harriet Pohlman, with occasional breaks. The original family home was in Pasadena but Harriet was living in Laguna Beach in the summer of 1971, and then moved to Pacific Palisades after her husband Max died. Harriet met Castaneda a couple of times when he came by the house, and was aware he was trying to get Carol to break with her family. (Per my conversations with Harriet in November 1999)

October 3, 1972 – Kathleen Adair Pohlman filed in L.A. Superior Court for a change of name to Elizabeth Austin. She listed her birth date as November 24, 1947, in Hollywood, and her residence as 10528 Wilshire Blvd., #3, LA 90024. She further stated her father was deceased, and that her mother, Harriet W. Pohlman, resided at 1276 Rimmer, Pacific Palisades. The final decree was filed November 14, 1972. [L.A. Superior Court Case No. WEC 27161.]

[Note: some months before, on April 5, 1972, a Beverly Madge Ames — formerly the wife of Frederic A. Guilford, who is thanked for typing the manuscript of The Teachings of Don Juan in the foreword to that book — filed a petition for change of name to “Beverly Evans,” becoming the first of Castaneda’s group to receive a final order changing her name. Case No. C26610. Florinda, had previously filed for a change of name to “Christina Casablanca,” but withdrew her application before it became final.]

Carol ‘Leaves’?

1973 – Carol Tiggs supposedly “left” with, or around the same time as, don Juan’s party (i.e., depending on whether you go by the account in The Eagle’s Gift, where the Nagual woman left with, and on the same day as, don Juan’s party, or the account in The Art of Dreaming, where Carol’s departure with the Death Defier preceded that of don Juan’s party by an undisclosed period, but certainly more than a day). [See below for relevant book excerpts.] According to Carol’s mother, however, Carol was actually living with her, mainly in the Pacific Palisades, for 14 years–from 1971 to 1985. You would think her mother might have noticed if she’d disappeared for 10 of those years. Also during those years, as detailed below, Carol married, got divorced, and studied acupuncture. And it was her mother’s address she gave as her address in the paperwork filed in connection with the dissolution of her marriage in 1984 and 1985.

September 5, 1974 – Castaneda, Taisha (as “Annamarie Carter”), Florinda (as “Regine Thal”), Beverly Evans and Mary Joan Barker signed Articles of Incorporation for Hermeneutics Unlimited, subsequently filed with the California Secretary of State on Sept. 10, 1974. [Corporation’s specific purpose was “the production of documentary ethnology.” Authorized to issue 750 shares of stock at $100 par value. All five directors were listed at 9200 Sunset Blvd., Suite 418, LA 90069.] [Note: The important thing to note about this document is that Carol Tiggs — then “Elizabeth Austin” — is not one of the five incorporators.] [Further note: Corporation’s name is later changed, in 1984, by an amendment by its “sole shareholder” –Castaneda — to Laugan Productions, Inc.]

Carol’s Life in L.A. When She was Supposedly in the ‘Second Attention’

1974 or 1975 – Elizabeth Austin attends an acupressure workshop at Ron and Ilona Teagarden’s Accupuncture Studio.

1974 or 1975 – Elizabeth’s one-time high school boyfriend, C.J. Russell, saw her for the last time. He was living in Pasadena at the time and knew Elizabeth was taking classes in UCLA where he was also taking a course in structural engineering to brush up for his architecture licensing exam. He got her phone number either from Harriet or a mutual friend. Elizabeth was then living in an apartment on Wilshire Blvd. After one of his classes, he picked her up and took her out for coffee. He believes she was in graduate school at UCLA, and was earning money by writing questions for a game show (“Family Feud,” or something similar). He reported in his message to Amy in 2002 that the two had a good long chat and brought each other up to date on their lives. He doesn’t recall any mention of Castaneda, except that she might have asked if he’d read his books. He had read and enjoyed The Teachings of don Juan. C.J. reported that he tried to reach her a few times after that, but his course ended and he got involved in another relationship soon thereafter. He remembered Kathleen/Elizabeth not wanting him to see her apartment because she was embarrassed it was such a mess. One night he came by after class to say hello, but she wasn’t in. He could see through the glass why she was embarrassed. “She truly was a slob, but I found it endearing.” he wrote.

September 24, 1975 – Castaneda executed a three-page will leaving his entire estate, in equal shares, to Mary Joan Barker, Annamarie Carter, Beverly Evans and Regine Thal. (If these four predeceased him, his estate was to go to the UCLA Department of Anthropology.) [A copy of this will was filed by lawyers representing Castaneda’s executor, Deborah Drooz, in a response to C.J. Castaneda’s motions in the 1999 probate proceedings.] [Note again: Elizabeth Austin was not one of Castaneda’s four potential heirs.]

Fall 1977? – Probably when Carol Tiggs started at the California Acupuncture College, from which she graduated in 1980. [California’s basic licensing requirement for acupuncturists originally went into effect in 1975. Prior to 1985, only three, or possibly as little as two years, of academic training were requred for licensure. In 1985 the California Legislature required that acupuncturists have four academic years of training prior to licensing.]

October 25, 1980 – Elizabeth Austin, age 32, married Canadian-born Marc Benoit LeBel age 33. [The marriage certificate indicates it was a first marriage for both; Co. Reg. 39821, State File # 80-136642 P. The certificate also indicates that Carol was living at the time at 1276 Rimmer Ave., Pacific Palisades, her mother’s home, and was a graduate student, having completed 18th grade. The witnesses were Tom L. Zinche and Camille Bertolet, and the wedding was performed by Rev. C.J. van Loon, of the Universalist Church, at 3007 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica.] Camille had known Elizabeth since the acupressure workshop with Ron and Ilona Teagarden that they both attended in 1974 or ’75.

1981 – Castaneda’s The Eagle’s Gift was published by Simon and Schuster [deals with la Gorda and the other apprentices left behind; ends with Castaneda saying good-bye to the Nagual woman and don Juan’s party] Castaneda’s first description of a Nagual woman begins on p. 118. (All page number references are to the hardback versions.) He tells la Gorda about having once seen a young woman with don Juan, leading to his assumption that don Juan was not celibate. He describes her as “tall, slender, and very young.” La Gorda then remembers having seen a young woman driving don Juan and Genaro in a small white car. Castaneda connects this with the white Volkswagen he had seen the woman drive. Later, Castaneda remembers an old Mexican song, and dreams of someone playing it on a guitar. This brings back an intense recollection of the Nagual woman: “[T]he most important being on earth for la Gorda and myself.” La Gorda independently recalls who the woman with the white car was. Then she remembers she used to sit with her and don Juan in the plaza in Oaxaca. La Gorda tells Castaneda, “She was your partner. You two were a team. And I was her ward. And she entrusted you to deliver me to her someday.” Castaneda remembers that it was the Nagual woman — unnamed — who “used to supply me with books of poetry. She kept stacks of them in the trunk of her car. It was at her instigation that I read poems to don Juan.” After la Gorda suggests the Nagual woman is “shipwrecked” or “probably marooned” somewhere, Castaneda protests, “No! No! She’s not here any more.” p. 128. 

La Gorda and Castaneda then work on recalling her. Later Castaneda describes the Nagual woman helping to rescue him when he was stuck in the yellow sulfur world. Further on, don Juan details the “Rule of the Nagual,” which includes the following: “In order to make sure that the first Nagual man would lead his party to freedom and not deviate from that path or become corrupted, the Eagle took the Nagual woman to the other world to serve as a beacon, guiding the party to the opening.” And later, “When the first Nagual and his party were ready to go through the passageway, the first Nagual woman was waiting there to guide them. They were ordered then to take the new Nagual woman with them to the other world to serve as a beacon for her people, leaving the new Nagual man in the world to repeat the cycle. . . . . At the moment of leaving the world, when the new Nagual woman is with them, the Nagual’s number is seventeen.” p. 180-1.
  
In the chapter entitled, “The Nagual Woman,” Castaneda relates that “Almost immediately after finding me [i.e., 1960? Carol Tiggs was all of 13 years old then], don Juan encountered a double woman. He did not put me in touch with her through a scheme, as his benefactor had done with him, but devised a ploy, as effective and elaborate as any of his benefactor’s, by which he himself enticed and secured the double woman.” He then describes how, when don Juan was living in Arizona, he had found this double woman working at a government office where he went to fill out an application. He returned virtually every day for three months, then offered to thank her for her help by taking her to see an Indian dancer, who turned out to be don Juan himself. 

In a later chapter, when Silvio Manuel “sees” that the problem with Castaneda’s original party is that Castaneda was not the right nagual for them, the Nagual woman, but not Castaneda, is included in the discussions of don Juan’s party. The Nagual woman then supervises Castaneda and la Gorda in a series of not-doings. Silvio Manuel tells them he is using la Gorda and Castaneda “to probe into the possibility that we could someday help the other apprentices by ushering them into another world, in which case they could accompany the Nagual Juan Matus and his party in their definitive journey. He reasoned that since the Nagual woman had to leave this world with the Nagual Juan Matus and his warriors, the apprentices had to follow her because she was their only leader in the absence of a Nagual man.” This was the reason the Nagual woman was supervising them in their not-doings. p. 239. After events on a bridge, don Juan’s party and all his apprentices meet at the house, where “the Nagual woman made the male apprentices sit against the east wall; she made the women sit against the west wall. She then led me to a place directly behind don Juan. We sat there together.” p. 306. After the members of don Juan’s party impart their last bits of advice to Castaneda and make their farewells, “The Nagual woman came to me last. She sat down and held me in her lap as if I were a child. She exuded affection and purity. . . . . She then revealed a portion of the rule that applies to the three-pronged Nagual. She was in a state of ultimate agitation and yet she was calm. Her intellect was peerless and yet she was not trying to reason anything out. Her last day on earth overwhelmed her. She filled me with her mood. It was as if up to that moment I had not quite realized the finality of our situation. . . . . I realized that I would never again see her. That was unbearable!” p. 312-13. After Castaneda falls on the floor with the Nagual woman, imagining they are both bleeding, don Juan and his party, with the Nagual woman, stand in front of him in a row and then “disappeared in to the blackness of the mysterious slit that had appeared in the room.” Don Juan then presses Castaneda’s back, telling him that he understands Castaneda’s pain, and that “the affinity of the Nagual man and the Nagual woman is not something that can be formulated.” p. 314. Don Juan tells Castaneda that don Juan and his party will leave that day at dusk. Castaneda ends the book with a description of his jump with Pablito and Nestor from the precipice “[a]t dusk that afternoon . . . at the precise moment when [don Juan] and all of his warriors had kindled their awareness.” p.315.]

April 5, 1981 – Carol’s acupuncture license was issued, under the name Elizabeth Austin. [It is now in the name of Muni Alexander. Carol’s husband, Marc LeBel, who graduated from the California Acupuncture College the same year, was issued his license the same day.] Carol’s license number is AC1178.

1983 – Carol Tiggs “returned” from the Second Attention, supposedly finding herself in Tucson, AZ, according to subsequent workshop lectures (see below).

1984 – Castaneda’s The Fire From Within is published by Simon and Schuster [foreward thanks H.Y.L. – i.e., Castaneda’s longtime kung fu teacher and sometime healer, Howard Lee] [Could the appearance of this book and its flattering description of the Nagual woman be what encouraged Carol to “return to the fold”?] [P. 274-5: “A young woman was standing by the couch as if she had just stood up as I came in. She was lean and tall, exquisitely dressed in a tailored green suit. She had dark-brown hair, burning brown eyes that seemed to smile, and a pointed, finely chiseled nose. Her complexion was fair but had been tanned to a gorgeous brown. I found her ravishingly beautiful. She seemed to be an American. She nodded at me, smiling, and extended her hands with the palms down as if she were helping me up . . . . Her hands were long and beautiful. She spoke to me in Spanish with a faint trace of an accent.” On page 281, a pleasant sweet scent provokes Castaneda to remember, “Carol, the nagual woman! I had been with her only the day before. How could I have forgotten her? . . . . Was it possible, I asked myself, that I had woken up in her house in Tucson, Arizona, two thousand miles away?” And don Juan’s response to his question about why he didn’t remember the Nagual woman: “Only when your assemblage point shifts can you recollect her. She is like a phantom to you, and so are you to her. You’ve seen her once while you were in normal awareness, but she’s never seen you in her normal awareness. To her you are as much a personage as she is to you. With the difference that you may wake up someday and integrate it all. You may have enough time to do that, but she won’t. Her time here is short.” p. 282.]

December 28, 1984 – Marc LeBel filed for divorce from Elizabeth Austin. They later filed a joint petition for summary dissolution, listing his address as 821 Third St., #106, Santa Monica 90403. They claim no community assets or liabilities. Elizabeth’s mailing address was 1276 Rimmer Dr., Pacific Palisades 90272. Final judgment was entered on July 22, 1985. [The one-page community property agreement they sign provided that “[a]ll cutlery goes back to the wife.” So did a 1970 Karmann Ghia, hair dryer, and savings account at Home Savings & Loan. Husband agreed to buy from the wife 1 living room couch at $200, 1 refrigerator at $50, 1 bed at $100, 2 bookcases at $70 and 1 set of dishes at $30. The husband also agreed to relinquish four itemized Visa cards and a May Company card. They also stated they were storing another $2000 worth of community property, the proceeds of which they would share when it had been sold. L.A. Superior Court Case No. WED045350, filed in Santa Monica.]

[Note: Marc LeBel, OMD, continued to practice acupuncture in L.A. and was listed in the 2000 Santa Monica telephone book as having offices in both Marina del Rey and Santa Monica.]

[1985? – Florinda attended the wedding of Jacques Barzaghi [longtime aide to former Gov. Jerry Brown] and sees Celeste Fremon (who had written an interview with Castaneda for Seventeen Magazine under the name Gwyneth Cravens, and spent considerable time with him in 1972, whom Florinda had not seen since attending a Barzaghi party with Castaneda in 1982). Florinda confided to Celeste that “all of the apprentices are in a terrible emotional state,” describing how “one of their sorcery teachers had turned old before their eyes. Like the picture of Dorian Gray. It was like something you’d imagine seeing in a science-fiction movie, but we actually saw it happen,” according to Florinda. She also said that Carlos was very ill and living in Arizona. “We don’t know what to do,” she said. “We are waiting for him to lead us. But he doesn’t know what to do either, so we just have to wait.” [From July 3, 1998, L.A. Weekly remembrance of Castaneda by Celeste Fremon.]]

October 3, 1985 – Castaneda executed an 11-page will in Beverly Hills leaving his estate in four equal shares to Mary Joan Barker, Regine Thal (aka Florinda Donner), Annamarie Carter and Nuri Alexander. Barry R. Wilk and Jerome A. Ward are named as co-executors (witnesses are E. Coventry Fatmore and Edward Friedman). In the will, Castaneda “expressly and intentionally omitted” Adrian Gerritsen, Jr., aka C.J. Castaneda, and Maria del Rosario (“Charo”) Peters (apparently Castaneda’s natural daughter, from his first marriage in Peru). [Note: Elizabeth Austin – i.e., Carol – is not a beneficiary.]

Carol Rejoins Castaneda World

Late Fall [?] 1985 – Carol is reunited with Castaneda at a lecture at Phoenix Bookstore in Santa Monica. [See description below from March 1994 Details Magazine piece. Alexis Therese Burzynski, later known as Renata Murez, is reportedly seated beside Carol during this lecture.]

April 5, 1988 – Elizabeth Austin filed for change of name to Muni Alexander. She listed her place of birth as Hollywood, CA; residence as 1376 1/2 Midvale Ave.; mother’s name as Harriet Witbeck Pohlman, at 1276 Rimmer Ave., Pacific Palisades, 90272; and father as Max Edward Pohlman, deceased. Name change was effective May 20, 1988. [L.A. Superior Court No. Central C682126.]

1988? – Tracy Kramer and Bruce Wagner met with Carol Tiggs at Bel Air Hotel [?] to pitch her on making movies of Castaneda’s books. [Wagner purportedly first met Castaneda in 1988 per his declaration in Deborah Drooz’s summary judgment motion in the probate proceedings in January 1999.] Florinda told Amy, however, that she actually first met Bruce Wagner and his then wife, actress Rebecca de Mornay, at a party. When the couple was introduced to the rest of the group, they initially made a big fuss about Rebecca, according to Florinda, saying she was the “warrior” they were waiting for. Soon, however, perhaps because Ms. de Mornay was nonplussed about the group’s attention, their focused turned to Bruce, who Castaneda ultimately indicated was the one they had been waiting for. Bruce and Ms. de Mornay were married December 16, 1989, so one would think their introduction to Castaneda and Co. came closer to that date. Ten months from the couple’s wedding they had separated, on November 4, 1990, according to the petition for dissolution of marriage Bruce filed on November 20, 1990. Judgment of dissolution was entered May 26, 1991.

March 1991 – Jacobo Grinberg, a brilliant Mexican academic and scientist, visited Castaneda and his group in Los Angeles for a week with his wife Teresa and several others. Grinberg’s account of that visit, at Castaneda’s invitation, and further encounters with Castaneda in Mexico shortly thereafter, can be found here. The sessions with Castaneda’s group that he attended sound virtually identical to what I experienced in regular meetings with Castaneda from 1995-1997. Grinberg described Carol Tiggs, who did not say much, as appearing “from another world, distant and ethereal.” He also recounts Castaneda and Carol taking him and several others to Tula in 1991 where Castaneda claimed to show the group where he and Carol Tiggs had their supposed encounters with the Death Defier, later described in Castaneda’s book The Art of Dreaming (1993). He indicated Carol “nodded” to confirm what Castaneda was telling them.

October 1992 – Florinda lectured a crowd of 200 at the Jewish Cultural Center in Berkeley, at a promotional event for her book sponsored by Gaia Bookstore. Amy Wallace reconnected with Florinda there, after having first met Castaneda and Taisha in the early 1970s, and Florinda in 1980. The reconnection began with Amy seeing in a Berkeley newspaper that Florinda was going to be speaking that night at Gaia Books, a New Age, feminist bookstore a few blocks from Amy’s Berkeley home. Amy got there early, before the lecture hall opened, so she went into the bookstore across the street and immediately saw Florinda. Florinda now has very short, inch-high, spiky hair. Florinda hugged her and told her “Carlos will be so happy I found you.” She then introduced Amy to the taller, “curvaceous, almond-eyed creature with salt-and-pepper hair” who was with her as “Carol Tiggs. She’s the nagual woman.” Florinda explaine quickly that the nagual woman was the female equivalent of Carlos, his twin sister, so to speak, and a leader of their group. Carol burst into a “ridiciulous pseudo-rock song: ‘nagual wooomaan . . .’ she warbled in a Joni Mitchell meets Robert Plant shriek.” Amy records in Sorcerer’s Apprentice that aside from this outburst, “Carol was remote and mysterious, with a moody cast to her dark blue eyes. She spoke little, and she and Florinda seemed to be opposites, the sun and the moon. . . . She appeared to lack the social graces that Carlos, Anna-Marie and Florinda excelled in.” At the end of Florinda’s lecture she introduced Carol to the audience as the nagual woman who had “disappeared into Infinity–also referred to as ‘the Second Attention’–for ten years, body and all. It felt to Carol like a second,” Florinda told them, “she lost all sense of time.” She continued, “When Carol miraculously reappeared, jogging in her sweat suit . . . she opened the magical door that allowed me to be here tonight, the door that has allowed Carlos to begin giving public appearances.”

After the lecture, Amy watched as a friend of hers, an avid Castaneda fan, corralled Carol and asked her what 10 years in another dimension had been like. Amy “found her reaction shocking. She backed into a corner, stuttering and perspiring heavily. A crowd gathered around her. ‘I . . . uh . . . I don’t remember . . .. I can’t, um . . .’ She continued backing up until she hit a wall, then lowered her head like a trapped mule, pushed frantically through the crowd, stumbling as she went, until she reached safety at Florinda’s side. The crowd was puzzled by her anxiety to run from this question, and so was I.”

Before the two left for the airport, Florinda gave Amy a P.O. box number to write her and send her Amy’s books. After the meeting, Amy read Florinda’s new book and wrote to tell her she loved it. She also sent her Amy’s recently published first novel, and her previous book, The Prodigy, about William Sidis, the child genius. Florinda called her back quickly to tell her the books impressed her. She then told her more about the circumstances of Carol’s supposed reappearance after being 10 years in the Second Attention, and about what that meant for Castaneda and the rest of them. As Amy recollects in Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Florinda told her: “‘Carlos, Taisha, and I almost died when Carol left–we teetered on the edge of evaporation! She, the nagual woman. . . was supposed to be a glowing beacon, shining her light to lead us to the other side. But we couldn’t find her, not even. in our dreams. We were devastated, struggling to survive. When Carlos saw her jogging he tried to chase her, but she got away. A few weeks later, boom!–Carlos saw her face in the audience while giving a lecture at the Phoenix Bookstore in Santa Monica. . . . Amy, she had total amnesia about her experience! Gone from the world for ten years! Disappeared! All she remembers is waking up in Arizona, wandering around, and noticing the buildings were taller. She said she dug up buried stashes of money don Juan had told her to hide. . . . Well, this was the omen! It meant we could go public after twenty year s of hiding! Castaneda could speak to his readers, and could tell the world about the three of us--we have been his biggest secret for twenty years! That’s why I wrote my book about don Juan’s training–a woman’s way is a different path, and then, Taisha’s training was completely different from mine. And now we’ve found you, Amy . . . .”

?November 1992 – Taisha Abelar spoke at Gaia Books in Berkeley, CA, to promote The Sorcerer’s Crossing. Amy Wallace attended. Carol Tiggs was there and Taisha introduced her. After the lecture, Amy joined them for dinner at a local restaurant. The conversation turned to astrology. Amy brought up the Enneagram, another typology system popularized in large part by the books of Helen Palmer, a psychologist based in Berkeley, and the Enneagram exemplar seminars she organized there. (Amy had appeared on one or more of Helen’s Type 2 exemplar panels.) Carol blew up at Amy, “Didn’t you understand anything tonight?! It’s all a big mystery, a question mark–that was the WHOLE point! And now you’re making categories!?” [Years later Carol told Amy that Castaneda “forbade her to take a class or otherwise pursue her deep interest in the Enneagram.”] Amy invited the two to her house, a ten-minute walk from the restaurant. They were disgusted by her cats, although Taisha complimented the fish tank. Carol said little until she noticed a row of autographed letters framed with photographs lining the wall of the master staircase. These were gifts from Amy’s parents: letters by Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde and Charles Baudelaire, favorite authors of Amy. Carol sneered, “How disgusting–look who you admire–men.” Proust particularly irritated her. “You have to get rid of them,” she commanded.

January/February? 1993 – Florinda returned to Gaia Books for a lecture event. Carol was on hand (as were Zaia Alexander and Tycho Thal, the Orange Scout). Amy was there and introduced one of her closest friends to Florinda and Carol, a woman who loved Castaneda’s and the women’s books. Afterward, Florinda and Carol took Amy aside and whispered to her that her friend was overweight and badly dressed, exclaiming, “That’s your friend? Are you kidding?”

The Myth Grows: Carol Tiggs Joins with the ‘Death Defier’

1993 – Castaneda’s The Art of Dreaming was published by HarperCollins. Castaneda begins by explaining he had previously written about the first party don Juan had found for him, but “I have never mentioned the second group of apprentices; don Juan did not permit me to do so.” [Even though don Juan was gone by ‘73, before Tales of Power was published?] “He argued that they were exclusively in my field and that the agreement I had with him was to write about his field, not mine. The second group of apprentices was extremely compact. It had only three members: a dreamer, Florinda Donner-Grau; a stalker, Taisha Abelar; and a nagual woman, Carol Tiggs.” p. x. He further explained, “It took me fifteen years of uninterrupted work, from 1973 to 1988, to store enough energy to rearrange everything linearly in my mind. I remembered then sequences upon sequences of dreaming events, and I was able to fill in, at last, some seeming lapses of memory. . . . . Being in possession of most of the pieces of don Juan’s lessons in the art of dreaming, I would like to explain, in a future work, the current position and interest of his last four students: Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar, Carol Tiggs, and myself.” p. xi. Carol Tiggs takes the stage again when Castaneda revisits his rescue from the “foggy, yellowish world.” This time he explains he was caught there by the inorganic beings, after voicing his intent to rescue the Blue Scout. When he comes to, don Juan explains to him that he had rounded up “everyone I could get hold of, especially Carol Tiggs,” to go off to the inorganic beings’ realm to save him. p. 138. In responding to his own party’s questions as to what is to be done with the scout, don Juan explains, “It is a most serious problem, which the nagual here has to resolve. He and Carol Tiggs are the only ones who can free the scout.” p. 140. Later the dreaming emissary gives Castaneda instructions on what “Carol Tiggs and I had to do to liberate the scout.” p. 146.
  
In Chapter 10, Castaneda explains that, while he had met Taisha Abelar in the world of everyday life a few years before, he was now meeting Florinda Grau and Carol Tiggs in “the world of everyday life.” In Mexico City, don Juan tells him that Carol Tiggs is arriving on a flight from Los Angeles “exclusively to fulfill the last dreaming task” of the third gate of dreaming with Castaneda. p. 187. Castaneda goes with Carol to her room in the St. Regis Hotel, where they supposedly get catapulted with all of their physicality by the inorganics into another world. Don Juan then recommends that he and Carol “see as little of each other as possible” to avoid being used and taken by the inorganics. p. 198. Castaneda is introduced to the death defier at the church in Tula, and “dreams her dream” — i.e., fourth gate dreaming. He then wakes up in the churchyard, where Carol had found him naked and unconscious, with his head on Tiggs’s lap. As he talks to her he is surprised that she has lost her lisp, and that she seems remarkably articulate, knowledgeable and philosophical compared to how he’d remembered her. When Castaneda tells her about the death defier being a woman, Carol reveals that she too has been “dreaming” with the death defier, a “couple weeks” before, when “She made me see how she actually escaped her captors.” p. 245. Carol then asks him how he likes the clothes she is wearing. Castaneda explains, “Carol was always exquisitely dressed. If there was anything certain about her, it was her impeccable taste in clothes. In fact, as long as I had known her, it had been a running joke between don Juan and the rest of us that her only virtue was her expertise at buying beautiful clothes and wearing them with grace and style.” p. 247. Carol then explains that they are now “intending in the second attention,” and that the death defier had made Castaneda fall asleep there, and Carol in Tucson. p. 249. They then go to the Hotel Catedral, where Castaneda tells Carol that he “absolutely adore[s]” her. Carol then explains that the death defier’s gift to him “was the wings of intent. And with them, you and I are dreaming ourselves in another time. In a time yet to come.” p. 253. When Castaneda awakes, he’s alone, and the hotel desk manager tells him that the American woman who had rented the room just left a moment before. Castaneda then walks to don Juan’s house, finding him and his companions in the “throes of agitation.” After Castaneda explains about Carol having found him, as she had told him she had been sent by don Juan to do, don Juan explains “Carol Tiggs hasn’t been with us at all. And you’ve been gone for nine days.” p. 255. When they return to the hotel, “[t]he same manager I had spoken to earlier obligingly listened to our description of Carol Tiggs, but he flatly denied ever having seen her or me before” The manager calls on the hotel maids for corroboration. p. 256. Castaneda also sees that he is no longer wearing Carol’s clothes, with which she had rescued him, but his own. Don Juan then figures out that the death defier “made use of Carol Tiggs’s energy body, in some obscure, ominous fashion . . . and created the Carol Tiggs of the hotel, a Carol Tiggs of sheer intent.” p. 258. Don Juan then shares the following realization: “I believe there is no longer any Carol Tiggs. There isn’t any woman in the church either; both have merged and flown away on the wings of intent, I believe, forward. The reason the Carol Tiggs of the hotel was so worried about her appearance was because she was the woman in the church, making you dream a Carol Tiggs of another kind; an infinitely more powerful Carol Tiggs.” Id. Don Juan further surmises that the death defier’s gift consisted of “endless dreaming possibilities. One of them was your dream of Carol Tiggs in another time, in another world; a more vast world, open-ended; a world where the impossible might even be feasible. The implication was not only that you will live those possibilities but that one day you will comprehend them.” p. 259. Finally — after Castaneda asks “What do you think happened to Carol Tiggs?” — don Juan explains, “Carol Tiggs is gone. But someday you will find the new Carol Tiggs, the one in the dream hotel room.” p. 260. When Castaneda again asks, “What do you mean she’s gone?” don Juan responds, “She’s gone from the world.” Castaneda ends the book with don Juan reminding him, “This is dreaming. You should know by now that its transactions are final. Carol Tiggs is gone.” Id.

Spring 1993 – Amy Wallace attended her first night class with Castaneda and his group at Dance Home in Santa Monica. During his remarks to the group, in between movement practices, Castaneda announced Carol had lost her set of keys to Nury’s apartment. Castaneda berated Carol, “This is intolerable, to have lost the keys! Unthinkable. For a sorceress? For Carol, the nagual woman?” Carol stayed frozen while Castaneda railed, “We could all die because of this! If she lost our daughter’s house key, Claude might have flown away into the unknown, destroying us all! We’d all be finished! Kaput!! But Amy Wallace is here. We’re only here tonight because of Amy Wallace. Because of her, we may still have a chance.” In the car with Carol and Florinda later, Amy asked, “What the hell was that all about, Carol, that business with the keys? Wasn’t that a little harsh?” Florinda responded, “No! No, Amy, no. That was not human, that was a very powerful sorcery technique. If you view this kind of talk from the world’s point of view, it’s abuse. As sorcerers, we use it as a magical method for destroying our self-importance. You have to make a choice.” Amy turned to Carol, “Well, what would you have done if I hadn’t been there?” Carol responded, “Turned my face to the wall. Turned and walked away, until I died.”

Mid-1993 – Carol Tiggs lectured at East West Bookstore in Menlo Park.

The Witches’ First Workshop

July 23-25, 1993 – Florinda, Taisha, Carol and the Chacmools’ first workshop, at the Rim Institute in Arizona. [Per Kylie at Omega in 1995, the workshops were first suggested by Michael Kraft of the Rim Institute, and they were “all surprised when Castaneda agreed.”] According to a letter in issue 4 of the Nagualist, Florinda stated during this workshop that don Juan and his party did not make their leap, and were stuck in the world of the inorganics. She indicated that the group was too heavy to extricate itself, and that Carlos and the Witches intended to join them and to supply the energy needed for them all to leave the world of the inorganics. An additional summary appears on page 14-15 of that issue of the Nagualist, where Carol is quoted as saying she was with Castaneda when he planted the power plants given to him by Vicente and the allies appeared and asked him for a ride. (This might help explain why a chapter read by Nury at the Feb. 1997 Long Beach Workshop detailing this appearance of the three allies was ultimately omitted from the publication version of The Active Side of Infinity.)  

J.J. Stoecker remembered that Florinda described la Gorda’s death by claiming that la Gorda had seen that, together with Taisha and Florinda, they had enough energy to join don Juan’s party. She grabbed Taisha and Florinda by the arms to join together energetically, but Taisha and Florinda struggled and broke free just as they were “taking flight.” La Gorda hadn’t counted on their resistance, and purportedly continued her attempt, even though the struggle had weakened her. La Gorda then allegedly collapsed into a corpse of an old woman before their eyes. Florinda also blurted out that the Blue Scout was Carol Tiggs’s daughter, and that her daughter was the Orange Scout. This gave rise to audience questions about sex and energetic holes. Florinda explained that a sorceress can simply cause one of her eggs to start dividing “by an act of will,” but that normally no warrior would want this because it would cause a huge “energetic hole.” In the case of the scouts, asserted that they had their own energy, but no body, so they could be conceived and delivered without sex or causing “holes” in the mother either. According to J.J., when Carol was later asked about the scouts, she didn’t address Florinda’s story of parthenogenesis, but simply did a turn on the edge of the platform, like a runway model in a fashion show, asking “See any holes?” Carol also explained that, to her, the essence of sorcery was “body snatching.” She claimed sorcerers empty themselves out completely and refurbish themselves like an apartment house that is trying to attract a more upscale clientele. A sorcerer then waits in emptiness for something abstract to descend and take possession of them. Carol also mentioned that her book, Tales of Energy, would be published soon. Carol demonstrated the Death Defier’s eye with six participants (see description of this on p. 4 of Issue 5 of the Nagualist). About 100 people attended.

Carlos Marries Carol

September 29, 1993 – Carlos “Aranha” married “Carol Muni Tiggs Alexander” in Las Vegas. Marriage license No. C 472425 lists this as Carol’s first marriage, and her date of birth as Nov. 24, 1957, in Arizona, and her parents as John Michael Alexander and Carol Tiggs of Arizona. [Just two days before, Carlos Castaneda had married Florinda Donner in Vegas.]

October 14-17, 1993 – The Witches appeared at a four-day workshop at Akahi Farms in Maui. Carol spoke the third night, and all four took questions on Sunday morning. Notes quote them as saying they were “testing out the workshop format, and had reformulated them in the last year.” They recommended Tai Chi, demonstrated some “sorcery passes”; otherwise topics were consistent with later workshops — recapitulation, phenomenology, intentionality, and courtship rituals taking energy. Carol said she was lost for two years after her “return” in 1983, and that she wandered around disoriented. When she wandered into the Phoenix Bookstore in 1985 where Castaneda was giving a lecture, Castaneda went to her and asked, “Where have you been my little freak of nature?” She said she was “slowly remembering things again.” Carol gave the death defier’s eye to, I think, seven people, including J.J. Stoecker and Michelle (later known as Rylin DeMaris), who suffered a psychotic break or something in the following days and ended up depending on Carol’s “healing.” The last sentence of Van’s notes on the final Q&A session with all three states: “They avoid chronological histories so that people won’t know their personal history, they keep from a linear discussion, they don’t cross reference with each other.”

Carol Denies Being Elizabeth Austin

October 17? 1993 – Camille Bertholet, who had been one of the two witnesses at Carol’s wedding to Marc LeBel, noticed Carol (whom she had known as Elizabeth Austin) seated with a group of short-haired women on the plane from Maui a couple rows in front of her. She walks by and says, “Hello Elizabeth.” Carol responds, “Oh my god! No, my name is Carol.” Dumbfounded, and certain it was Carol because even though her hair was different, her teeth were unmistakable, Camille asked, “You’re not Elizabeth Austin?” Carol insisted she wasn’t and Camille just exclaimed, “Oh my god! You have a clone walking around.” When Camille later reports this encounter to Marc, he tells her, “That’s how she acts when she is around Castaneda.” [I had been planning to contact Marc, but Camille told me, protectively, that he was very sweet, “very, very private,” and “just doesn’t want to get involved.” She also opined Marc was probably really crushed when Carol reunited with Castaneda, thinking, “Oh, you’re going back to him.”]

March 1994 – Details Magazine contained Bruce Wagner’s “The Secret Life of Carlos Castaneda: You Only Live Twice.” In the article, Bruce quoted Castaneda as saying, “There is someone who goes into the unknown and waits for us to join her. She’s called Carol Tiggs — my counterpart. She was with us, then vanished. Her disappearance lasted ten years. Where she went is inconceivable. It does not yield to rationality. So please — suspend judgment. . . . . Carol Tiggs went away. She was not living in the mountains of New Mexico, I assure you. One day I was giving a lecture at the Phoenix Bookstore and she materialized. My heart jumped out of my shirt fomp fomp fomp. I kept talking. I talked for two hours without knowing what I was saying. I took her outside and asked her where she had been — ten years! She became cagey and started to sweat. She had only vague recollections. She made jokes. The reappearance of Carol Tiggs opened an enormous door — energetically — through which we can go. . . . . Her return gave us a new ring of power; she brought with her a tremendous mass of energy that allows us to come out. That’s why we are available at this moment.”
  
Taisha was quoted: “We felt Carol Tiggs on our bodies when she was gone. She had tremendous mass. She was like a lighthouse, a beacon. She gave us hope — an incentive to go on. Because we knew she was there. Whenever I would become self-indulgent, I felt her tap me on the shoulder. She was our magnificent obsession.” Bruce asked: “When they spoke of ‘crossing over,’ did that mean with their physical bodies? [Taisha] replied that changing the Self didn’t mean the Freudian ego but the actual, concrete Self — yes, the physical body.”
 
Bruce concluded, “Before I met [Castaneda] a final time, I was scheduled to see the mysterious Carol Tiggs for breakfast. Twenty years before, she had ‘jumped’ with don Juan Matus’s party into the unknown. Unimaginably, she had returned, somehow triggering a veritable road show of sorcerers. I was feeling more and more uneasy about our pending appointment. Each time the Large Question loomed (‘Where the hell were you those ten years?’), it evanesced. I felt like I was on the tracks; Carol Tiggs was waving from the caboose.”

1994 – After Taisha’s lecture at East West Bookstore in January 1994, there were no further workshops or lectures in the U.S. until Castaneda’s appearance in Sunnyvale on Dec. 3, 1994. [A hint as to what might have been happening is suggested by a source from Milwaukee printed on p. 13 of Issue 4 of the Nagualist. This person had asked Tracy Kramer’s secretary why no further workshops were being offered at the time and was told, “They were surprised to find the new nagual as fast as they did.” This person was further told that the group had all returned to Mexico and that no further workshops were being offered in 1994. This would seem to coincide with the group’s increased involvement with Tony Karam, the head of Casa Tibet in Mexico. Tony was the one who had captured the Flyer photo – displayed by the group at several workshops in 1995 — at an event involving the Dalai Lama that Tony had organized.]

Fall? 1994 – Carol Tiggs took members of Cleargreen to Tula, where she put them into dreaming, undoubtedly using the hypnosis induction techniques she had studied at Castaneda’s direction. This event is according to subsequent accounts by Reni and others at workshops the following year. (See entry for March 14 & 16, 1995, below.)

July 22, 1994 – A fictitious business name statement for Elemental Films was recorded [document no. 94-1369443], listing The 300 Movies Company as registrant (Bruce Wagner, President); and Toltec Artists as registrant (at 183 N. Martel, LA 90036), signed by Muni Aranha Alexander, Florinda Donner Grau, Tracy Kramer and Bruce Wagner.

November 1994 – Magical Blend #44 contained Merilyn Tunneshende’s first piece, “Dreaming within the Dream.” [Merilyn is billed as “of the sorcerers’ party of Carlos Castaneda.” Merilyn concedes, “Carlos, Florinda and Taisha have presented excellent accounts of their instruction, and good explanations of the goals of the training.” Tunneshende claims she is the original Nagual woman, and still involved with la Gorda (“Maria Tena, who I call Butterfly Woman”), the Genaros and doña Soledad.)]

1994 -1999 – Carol resided at 1220 Selby Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90024.

March 14 & 16, 1995 – Philosophical Research Society-sponsored workshop with Kylie, Reni and Nyei I attended at John Marshall High School women’s gym in Silverlake area of Los Angeles. The second night, Reni began by saying she wanted to clarify a point about Carol Tiggs she had been asked about individually after Tuesday’s session. She said she had been asked why they had said there was so much energy available since the return of Carol Tiggs. Reni explained that Carol is basically the Death Defier, having absorbed the Death Defier’s energy in the ten years she spent in the Second Attention. She further explained that in recent months the three of them had seen Carol Tiggs in Tula. She took them into a dream while they were all awake, “another example of Carol’s tremendous energy.”

Nyei next elaborated on a previous question about parallel worlds, saying she knew it was a very confusing concept. She explained that the Witches “don’t share subjectivity with us,” so it was difficult for them to describe phenomena that are so much outside our awareness. In Nyei’s words, she said they were “all recently pulled into a weird darkness, at the center of which was Carol Tiggs.” She described it as “a mysterious, subtle place,” said that “Carol is beautiful, young, funny, delightful, and the most enjoyable person you could imagine,” and claimed what they experienced with her in Tula and again recently was nonetheless “awesome and very hard to describe.” She said she had known Carol for many years, “but I feel I don’t really know her at all.” Because Carol merged with the Death Defier, they entered into a dream that the Death Defier maintains. The Death Defier “holds the root of another Carol Tiggs of endless mystery and darkness and beauty,” and “if one is willing to suspend judgment something happens that can’t be described.” In the recent experience, she said the three of them all heard a song or tune that pulled them into a “beautiful mystery.” At that point, in response to a questioner who interrupted to ask who the Death Defier was, Nyei explained the Death Defier’s traditional involvement with don Juan’s lineage and that when Castaneda met with the Death Defier, Castaneda didn’t want the Death Defier’s traditional gift in return for the Nagual’s energy. As a result, when Carol Tiggs subsequently met with the Death Defier, they merged so that the Death Defier “rides” on Carol Tiggs. Castaneda also merged with the Death Defier in the period of nine days described at the end of The Art of Dreaming. Carol assertedly merged with the Death Defier for ten years, and when she returned she was “both.” And she’s continuing to “uncover” and to “merge” more since her return.

March 24-26, 1995 – Maui Workshop [According to J.J.’s notes, Florinda said Carol Tiggs came back after ten years and that Carlos had found her in a bookstore when he was giving a lecture. When he saw her at the lecture, Castaneda reportedly just stood there babbling as he looked at her. So Castaneda gave a few lectures in that bookstore (the Phoenix Book Store in Santa Monica, now defunct) to pay them back. The notes further state: “The return of Carol Tiggs, the nagual woman, brought a new mood to the group. During his lecture, Carlos saw Carol’s glow in the back of the store. She had returned after ten years! For two hours he just babbled through the lecture, so shocking was this development.”]

April 20, 1995 – A fictitious business name statement is recorded for the Chacmool Center for Enhanced Perception, listing 12 names, including Nuri Alexander, Kylie Lundahl, Julius Renard, and Tycho Thal. [95-0654347].

April 21-23, 1995 – Colorado workshop at Raintree Plaza Hotel and Conference Center in Longmont. Carol recounted her first encounter with Castaneda and don Juan, when she was 19. She said she had been in Mexico City studying art history. She described herself as a spoiled girl who spoke with a pronounced lisp she thought made her adorable. One night, when walking alone in Alameda Park, she noticed an old man and a young, short, stocky man both staring at her from a short distance away. They looked like “coarse Mexicans” to her. She started to walk fast in order to distance herself from them, but they kept approaching. The young man came up close to her and she heard the old man say, “Don’t let her get away. Grab her by the leg if you can.” The young man was at a loss as to what to do. He said, “Are you an American? What’s your name? How old are you? Do you have a boyfriend?” Carol was truly panicking at this point and threatening to scream for the police, when the old man let out a tremendous belch. She found herself frozen to the spot and announced, “My name is Carol Tiggs. I’m 19 years old and I don’t have a boyfriend.” The young man (Carlos) “was revolted by my lisp,” she said. She told them where she was staying and they visited her while she was in Mexico. By the time she returned home, “a fog had closed in around the memory of those two men.” Upon her return, she told her parents about her vague half memories of being accosted by two Mexicans and her inability to remember what happened after that. Her parents thought she had been drugged and molested. They sent her to a psychiatrist. She proceeded with her life as an art history student in college. Carol also said she and Castaneda had dreamed together the preceding week.

May 19-21, 1995 – Mexico City Workshop at Sheraton Maria Isabel Hotel with Carol, Florinda, Taisha and the three Chacmools. Carol spoke Friday night. Carol again described when she first met Castaneda at the Alameda Park in Mexico City and how don Juan hooked her first with a loud “burp” and then with his eyes, and let her know that she was a “double” woman and that Castaneda was energetically the same as her. Then she talked about her disappearance for more than ten years from this world and said that for her it had been like a dream but that time lost its significance during that event. According to notes, Carol said, “When I was back from this place I found myself in Tucson, Arizona, ten years later. It was hard for me even to recognize the place but I’m sure that don Juan knew beforehand that this was going to happen because he made me hide plastic packs with money in different parts of this and other towns which at the time seemed to be absurd for me but at this moment I understood perfectly. So I went and retrieved one of these packs and with this money I went to L.A. and lurked there for awhile in a zombie state until I found out that Castaneda was going to give a lecture at the Phoenix bookstore at Santa Monica. I went and Castaneda saw me and he talked for two hours without knowing what he said because he was astonished at seeing me there.” According to another notetaker: “She then told the story of how she had been gone for ten years ‘which seemed like ten hours’ to her. She returned to Tucson, went looking for her old house, which was gone, realized that something was wrong (ten years had passed), found her secret ‘caches’ of cash (that don Juan had told her to hide) and went to L.A. and found Castaneda giving a lecture at the Phoenix bookstore.” Carol also reportedly stated, “Energetically Carlos and I have been very distant for the past three years. Some time ago Carlos made an energetic jump and maybe this is what has kept us apart (energetically), but three weeks ago I again woke up in this strange world.” Carol also revealed that Castaneda was writing another book, and stated that “Carlos is naming a chapter of the book he’s now writing ‘The Return of Carol Tiggs.’” [That chapter, later read by Nury at the 1996 Pasadena workshop, was ultimately omitted from the published version of Active Side of Infinity.]

Carol Takes Cleargreen Members on Scripted Tula Tour

May 20, 1995 – Likely date of Carol Tiggs’s “top secret” speech and tour for Cleargreen insiders at Tula. In the speech, that was scripted for her by Castaneda, she claims, “I was once an M.D. and I am now pursuing my degree in symbolic logic.” (Neither of those things, of course, were true.) Using the Cathedral and then the plaza in Tula as backdrops, she tells the group the highly X-rated version of her supposed encounter with the Death Defier in the Cathedral (which involved a lot crotch flashing and fingering as described in detail in the speech). After they mutually pleasure each other, the Death Defier offers to make Carol a “superpussy.” In an insult to Nuri and making the ridiculous claim that Carol’s looks had dramatically changed as a result of the Death Defier encounter, Castaneda has Carol tell the group via the scripted remarks, “Of course I have to tell you that I didn’t look then as I look today. I looked like Nuri, a twerp. The death defier took my nose, my twiggy body … The death defier was, naturally, the spitting image of that thing in the museum, the one I look like now.” [The pictures of you here in your Chronology, of course, tell a different story.] Castaneda had her take them from the plaza to the hotel where they supposedly spent nine days fucking. The “stage directions” Castaneda wrote for her in the speech tell Carol: Walk them to the hotel, after showing them the two restaurants of the town. Stand at the corner and point to the last two rooms, at the very corner, on the second floor. He then has her tell them, “I as the new creature who wasn’t Carol Tiggs took Carlos there and inspite [sic] of the fact he was my brother I seduced him as if there is no tomorrow. But I wasn’t Carol Tiggs, I was something else. Something bound and determined, cold and yet passionate. When I closed my eyes I could see scenarios that didn’t belong to any experience, strange beings like shadows come to me and examine me. They poked me and turned me around, looking for something unsaid.” And the sorcery porn story continues like that for a few more paragraphs before shifting to Carol supposedly waking up and trying to track down Castaneda 10 years later. Castaneda has her conclude with these claims about the Death Defier: “She said that she had been alive for thousands of years not because she was greedy for life but because she loved life and mankind. Her one dream, which had nothing to do with survival, was to help mankind reach a level of reason and intelligence which we do not have. She said that we are ritualistic and repetitious and we have deleriums [sic] of grandeur that have no justification. We are a mess. She said that to evoke her name in Tula would be like a cue to wake her. And that there could be some daring beings who would evoke her name in my presence. By invoking her name in my presence which is her presence, their internal dialogue would stop and they may even catch a glimpse of dreams upon dreams that were woven in this marvelous locale, now occupied by this absurd crummy little town.” She also invoked the creature’s supposed name and read the Nahuatl poem the Death Defier supposedly gave her.

Carol then led the group to the nearby park and had them gather in a group bordering the grass. She selected Taisha, Florinda, Kylie, Reni, Nyei, Bruce and Tracy, grouping them on the lawn. She stared into their eyes (wearing her black contact lenses), whispered the Death Defier’s name into one ear, and instructed them to fall stiffly into the arms of two helpers. (This came to be known as Carol giving them “the Eye,” which she did for selected individuals on a number of occasions, including at a workshop the next year where I was one of those selected to go on stage and receive it from her.) Per Amy’s account in Sorcerer’s Apprentice, each of the seven fell back and lay quietly, except Bruce, who went into spasmodic convulsions. After a few minutes, Carol “woke” them with her assistants’ help.

May 26-29, 1995 – Omega Institute workshop in Rhinebeck, New York – The third night, the Chacmools, Florinda and Taisha fielded questions (in lieu of Carol’s scheduled speech, since Carol had supposedly “crashed” after the workshop in Mexico). Florinda claimed she and Carol had each given birth to one of the scouts. “Carol Tiggs disappeared for ten years, reappearing at the Phoenix Bookstore after trying to find the clan for months. . . . . Carol Tiggs lately is absorbed by recollecting.” Nyei: “The Blue Scout is Carol Tiggs’s daughter. Carol Tiggs gave birth to her.” Nyei said that she first met Carol Tiggs and the Blue Scout at a Tensegrity workshop [note: this first meeting was pre-1993 presumably, before they were using the term “Tensegrity” or giving workshops] to which Florinda had invited Nyei. Nyei was told that Tiggs was the Blue Scout’s mother. Since Nyei had heard that Castaneda’s clan was “into stalking and tricking people,” and saw that Tiggs “looked only 25 (and seems to be getting younger),” Nyei was insistent that she wasn’t going to be fooled so easily. Nyei went to the Blue Scout and asked her, “You’re Carol Tiggs’ mother, aren’t you?” Nyei also claimed that the Blue Scout was “gone for about ten years, from the chronological ages of seven to 17,” returning about a year before Tiggs did. During this time, Florinda and Castaneda allegedly took care of her.
 
Kylie: “Tonight Carol Tiggs couldn’t come.” She made it to Mexico City, but really wanted to come to Omega to use this workshop as an “echo chamber,” to explain where she’d been during the ten years that she was gone. “Carol Tiggs hadn’t wanted to go to Mexico — where she needed translation for material that depends on subtlety. But she went there to practice telling the story of her experience. She manifested there, and didn’t return as the Carol Tiggs we knew. That’s why we are all working to bring her back.” Kylie also explained: “For 30 years the disciples of the old Nagual remained in isolation. The only one who spoke was Carlos. Carol Tiggs returned, which she wasn’t supposed to do, since, according to tradition, the rule called for the Nagual Woman to go with the previous nagual’s group, and to remain on the other side to help the new nagual’s group across the void. But Carol came back instead of waiting to help them across. This changed everything dramatically for them. The old Nagual’s disciples were now alone in the world, and they opened this world. Tensegrity is a result of that opening.”
  
A man asked an astrological question about the Mayan calendar and Castaneda’s group’s role in “planetary evolution.” Taisha responded that they didn’t think there was a correlation between what they do and Earth cosmology; that the energy or power they draw on is “beyond that,” in her opinion. “Our discipline is much vaster than the standpoint of ordinary earth and human interpretation. For example, where the Scouts come from is way beyond human imagination, like places that have two or three rotating suns. The only answer for us as to what is happening now in our world is because Carol Tiggs returned. A woman asked a question about the death defier and Carol Tiggs. Florinda responded that the Death Defier “is riding Carol Tiggs. On one level, she is Carol Tiggs.” In fact, after the Mexico City experience, they said, “we don’t know at the moment whether she is the Carol Tiggs we have always known. We’re trying to bring her back in dreaming, which is very hard when we have to be so much in the world, delivering a workshop for four days.”
  
Taisha responded to a question about Carol Tiggs and the Death Defier by saying that Tiggs’s merging with the Death Defier was explained in the Art of Dreaming, because of the gift of nagual energy Castaneda made to the Death Defier. But something even now has changed. “We don’t know right now if there is a Carol Tiggs. Every time she takes us in a dream to old Tula, she changes. On this recent trip to Mexico, she changed further. She’s in transition — re-dreaming or reorganizing energetic units into something else, we don’t know what yet.” Carlos and Carol always had the same energy, as don Juan said, but what the Death Defier caused was some kind of total merging of this energy.

Cleargreen Launched

June 16, 1995 – Cleargreen, Inc., was incorporated, by filing articles of incorporation executed by George Short.

July ?, 1995 – Revised schedule for the August intensive is announced, dropping down to one three-week intensive instead of the previously announced three three-week workshops. (On July 27, a quarter-page ad for the workshop appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.) [A one-page explanation from the Chacmools as to how the three-week workshop would differ from the weekend seminars included the following peculiar statement: “In addition, a very personalized attention will be given to every one of the participants in order to isolate those who are most able to perform the movements. This selection will be the base of our future free scholarships and work-study programs.”]

August 1-20, 1995 – Culver City Intensive Workshop. Castaneda spoke at all but one session, and gave three-hour lectures on Sundays. None of the Witches lectured. On August 3, Castaneda introduced Florinda Donner-Grau, Carol Tiggs and Taisha Abelar as “don Juan’s other disciples.” He characterized the four of them as “the four original musketeers.” A man yelled out that he hadn’t caught the names, so Castaneda introduced them again. Carol Tiggs quipped that they had “paid the man to say that” [so they could be introduced properly]. Castaneda then stated: “We are the original apprentices of the nagual Juan Matus. The fact that I never wrote about them was an agreement. I agreed with don Juan just to write about his world.” Florinda later explained to a small group that gathered around her at one point that all of them were there each day to “focus their energy on Carlos, to keep it all in place.” She claimed, “He’s not usually here for such a long time.” In an early lecture during these three weeks, Castaneda told us, “Carol disappeared for ten years, into the inconceivable.” Of those ten years, “we have vague glimpses, linear glimpses, a pseudo–explanation.” According to tradition, Carol Tiggs, as the Nagual woman, was to have stayed in the second attention. “This would have been the time to guide us over.” But one day at the Phoenix Bookstore, a person asked a question. Castaneda looked over and saw a different glow of awareness (sorcerers have a different hue) and saw it was Carol. “I continued to talk for two hours. I don’t know what I said.” Then later, after they went to talk, Castaneda didn’t know “what happened” at the corner of 5th and Santa Monica. “Suddenly I was in bed and I didn’t know what had happened. When Carol came back, she brought in the Chacmools. With her return,” he claimed, “we are no longer an insular group. We’re without a guide. We’re not going Juan Matus’s way. We were insular. She’s the one who made it possible to talk to people.” Previously they followed the way of perceiving and acting of the men and women of ancient times in which don Juan had instructed them. On returning, Carol Tiggs changed the totality, “and now she’s the big wheel. And Taisha –– oh, it goes without saying.” Castaneda talked about some guy who had a theory about the “conspiracy of agreement.” He gave as an example Carol Tiggs’s mother, “who is such a know-it-all.” She would ask him, “You know I went to Stanford, don’t you?” He would respond, “Yes.” (“She had only told me that 10,000 times.”) “My sorority has this little obscure journal. Funny thing, the August issue had an article discussing just what you’ve been saying. Of course, it didn’t go into as much detail as you have. Carlos, you little devil, you read so much, you are just amazing! You must have read it, didn’t you?” (Castaneda mimicked himself nodding meekly to her.) “This is the conspiracy of agreement.” By complimenting him she gets his agreement. “I said I opened the door for you, but actually Carol Tiggs did. I’m trying to hold it open) mimicking someone straining to hold open a door), but the decision is up to you.” (The cost was $1000 for one section, or $1500 for both sections. Certificates were given at the end to 179 people who attended the whole thing.)

August 25, 1995 – Taisha Abelar executed the annual corporate information statement for Laugan Productions, Inc. This statement changed the address from Martel Ave. to 11901 Santa Monica Blvd., Suite 596, LA 90025, listed Taisha as CEO, Muni Aranha as Secretary, and Florinda Donner-Grau as CFO. Taisha listed herself as agent for service of process, and the purpose of the corporation as “Research & Production.”

[September 11, 1995 – First session of what became the “Sunday group.” First meeting was from 1-4 PM at a large dance studio at 1711 Stewart Street, in West L.A.]

Carol Gives Another Version of Meeting don Juan

October 6-8, 1995 – Workshop at Culver City High School Cafetorium. Carol briefly described meeting don Juan again as a young art student, studying in Mexico, her intent being to act as a “cultural bridge” to the Spanish-speaking world. She then described in detail the fateful day on which she met the Death Defier. As a result of this meeting, she said, “there are three possibilities as to whether Carol Tiggs still exists. The first is that she does, the second is that she doesn’t, and the third is that she has the essence of Carol Tiggs, but also something else.” She described it as a “hot, bright day.” She mimicked herself lisping. There was a little cut-out door into the church that required one to step over to get inside. As she nervously started to step over (which she demonstrated) a hand reached out and grabbed her by the arm to pull her in. In an eerie, gravel voice, the Death Defier, whom she couldn’t bring herself to look at, said, “I’m pleased to see you Carol Tiggs. I’ve been watching you a long time.” Carol found the mention of her name flattering and somehow soothing. The Death Defier told her to look at her, but she couldn’t. But Carol’s energy body felt drawn to her. The Death Defier told her, “I’m all woman,” and grabbed Carol’s other hand and placed it on her breast. The Death Defier then kissed Carol on the lips, and Carol fell back onto the floor, her long hair disheveled, lisping, in a horrified tone, “But people will see us.” (Carol explained her horrified reaction by saying that, “at the time, I was a serious heterosexual.”) The Death Defier responded that no one could see, because “we’re dreaming within a dream.” The Death Defier told Carol that she wanted something from her, and would give her anything in return. Carol couldn’t answer. The Death Defier said it was not something she could decide for her, that it was totally up to Carol, but that “It would be a great adventure.” This was the key phrase to convince Carol, who was always looking for adventures. So Carol said “Yes.” The Death Defier then said, “Let’s change this dream and sit beside the Sea of Awareness.” Carol said she was excited, envisioning they were going to the beach. The Death Defier took her back outside through the small doorway. They went from the blackness of the church to the brilliance of the outdoors. It was very bright, and eventually, Carol said, she started getting “some flashes of something. The sea awareness was somehow alive, like I thought God was as a child, and impersonal but somehow personal to each person.” As a person, she felt “like a speck, but somehow very intimate with this impersonal entity. Then I suddenly felt pain in my left foot. I found myself walking in the streets of Tucson. I saw a newspaper, and the date was ten years later.”
  
Carol claimed she then struggled to become aware of her surroundings, to recover, and to find the money she’d buried per don Juan’s prior instructions. She then went to find her “brother” Carlos. She calls him her brother “because we have the same configuration of energy.” She found him at the Phoenix Bookstore, where “he talked for an interminably long time as a result of the shock of seeing me.”

Carol described how they had learned that, upon returning from her ten years in the second attention, she had acquired “the sorcerer’s eye.” One evening Carol was looking at Castaneda and his eyes were glassy and the side of his jaw dropped. She was afraid he was having a stroke. She figured she would have to give him an injection, and somehow focused on the stimulation point in the scrotum as the place to do it. She asked Castaneda if he wanted “the thin needles or the thick needles?” (This was an ongoing joke between them.) He mumbled, “Why ask? You know you’ll give me the thick anyway.” Then he hit her. She was just thrilled that he was alright. Then she went home and was looking at herself in the full length mirror in her bedroom. Next thing she knew she started feeling a pain in her leg and head and realized she’d “mesmerized” herself and had been leaning against the mirror for five hours. In the ensuing days, she found that her left eye had the effect of stopping people. She started practicing and used it at the supermarket, where they wouldn’t charge her. She did it with lots of people, and it had “very disturbing results” with some. All she is doing, she claimed, is “stopping them for a moment. You can come back to that moment and try to extend it, in bits, with Tensegrity.”

October 13-15, 1995 – Workshop at Culver City High School Cafetorium. [Carol did not speak this time, being said to have “fallen, energetically.”]

Carol Marries Bruce Wagner

October 20, 1995 – Bruce Alan Wagner married “Carolina Leonora Aranha” in Las Vegas. Marriage license No. C 678795 listed Bruce’s date of birth as March 22, 1954, in Wisconsin, and his parents as Morton Wagner and Bernice Maletz, both of New York. He stated it was his first marriage [not true, since he was previously married in Las Vegas to the actress Rebecca DeMornay, and later divorced in Los Angeles]. Carol listed her date of birth as January 16, 1958, in Texas. She listed her father as Joseph Aranha of Portugal and her mother as Leonora Steele of Oregon. She also stated it was her first marriage.

November 10-12, 1995 – Workshop at Culver City High School Cafetorium. [During Carol’s lecture, she talked about herself in the third person, saying that she was no longer “the original Carol.”]

December 1995 – Yoga Journal article published “Carlos Castaneda’s Tensegrity,” by Holly Hammond. Hammond reported that “Although the four [Florinda, Taisha, Carol and Castaneda] began working together almost 30 years ago, they had a long-time agreement not to speak with one another about their own training or sorcery experiences, in order to maintain the integrity and energy necessary for the work.” Hammond described the change in this arrangement as follows: “As Castaneda tells it, he was giving one of his rare talks at a bookstore in Los Angeles when he spied a woman in the audience whom he recognized as Carol Tiggs. He had not seen her in 10 years, because she had been off in the ‘sea of awareness,’ a realm in which awareness is used as a medium of travel. Her return signaled a new, more public phase in the work of the four sorcerers. By her return, Carol Tiggs was making a decision to lift the traditional veil of mystery and secrecy and present the teaching of the sorcerers to a larger world. In this spirit, Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar wrote books describing their training . . . .” In May or June of 1995, Holly reported that she called Kylie “and we chat about the successful workshops they’ve done in Colorado and New York. But the teaching tour of Europe had to be cancelled, she says, because Carol Tiggs has once again disappeared: ‘Something has happened energetically, in dreaming, and we haven’t been able to pull her back, so there’s no way we could focus on more wokshops.'” Article also stated that “Carol is an M.D.”

[December 9-10, 1995 – Review Workshop at Anaheim Convention Center, Room C. Only Castaneda lectured. This is remembered chiefly as the occasion on which the Chacmools came to an end, due to infighting between Kylie and Renata.]

[January 30, 1996 – Two statements from Cleargreen issued on the Cleargreen website, then run by Garrett W. Griggs. The first further described the monthly journal; the second, signed by Castaneda, emphasized the doing of Tensegrity and tried to discourage “the collecting of data about Castaneda, his books, his lectures, his personal data.” The message seemed to be responding to posts on the two Internet mailing lists in the preceding months about Castaneda’s birthdate and pictures.]

February 16, 1996 – Cleargreen website announced Castaneda could no longer give lectures outside of Los Angeles, which don Juan had assertedly told him was his “center of energy and activity.” Ominous in tone, it warned, “He drew a message for you from total inner silence in Mexico City and in Oakland, but in doing so, he dispersed his energy, nearly uncontainably.” It also announced Carol Tiggs would “take over for the next workshop” in Oakland.

March 1-3, 1996 – Women-only workshop on “The Female Energy Body,” at UCLA. Carol, Taisha, Florinda, Castaneda and Nury all spoke. Castaneda: “Don Juan could never have addressed a group such as this tonight. He was interested only in himself and his group. But things changed for us when Carol Tiggs came back from a ten-year absence. Her return opened everything up.” In her lecture, Carol claimed she had spent so much of her time in the other worlds that this world was strange for her. Carol said she spends more time in other realities — in other layers of the onion — than in this world. Castaneda: “People used to say I made don Juan up!” Then, sweeping his arm, pointing to the first row where the witches were sitting, he said, smiling and looking aghast at the same time, “Well, I couldn’t make up these creatures! Make up Carol Tiggs??!! I’m scared to death of her!”

March/April 1996 – Psychology Today published article by Benjamin Epstein, “My Lunch with Carlos Castaneda,” who had attended the December 1995 Anaheim workshop. Q: “According to your book The Eagle’s Gift, Don Juan Matus didn’t die, he left, he ‘burned from within.’ Will you leave or will you die?” Castaneda: “Since I’m a moron, I’m sure I’ll die,” Castaneda replied. “I wish I would have the integrity to leave the way he did. . . . I have this terrible fear that I won’t. But I wish. I work my head off—both heads—toward that.” The writer later explains: “The Art of Dreaming ends with Castaneda recounting an episode in the mid-70s when he and Carol Tiggs were ‘dreaming’ in a hotel room in Mexico City, and Tiggs disappeared into those dreams. (She was on a journey in the ‘second attention,’ a state of consciousness not devoured by the ‘flyers.’) According to Castaneda, she reappeared 10 years later in a bookstore in Santa Monica, where he was giving a talk. It was the reconstituted Tiggs who provided the impetus to compile the ‘magical passes’ of Tensegrity. According to Castaneda, Don Juan taught four disciples separate lines of ever-changing magical passes. The other two, Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar, have each published accounts of their apprenticeships, both markedly different from Castaneda’s but endorsed by him.”

March? 1996 – An article by Marie-Therese De Brosses is published in Paris Match entitled, “J’ai vu naitre une Secte” The writer had attended the December ‘95 Anaheim workshop, and the theme of her piece was that a new cult was forming. [Castaneda mentioned this piece indignantly a few times in Sunday and night sessions.]

? 1996 – Workshop tentatively scheduled for Paris was canceled, assertedly “due to some legal complications concerning insurance and taxes.”

April 19-21, 1996 – Second Oakland Workshop, at the Oakland Convention Center. Carol, speaking on Sunday, said she didn’t much visit the inorganics’ realm, unlike Taisha, so she was going to take us to the “organic realm.” She claimed it was very difficult for the Witches to describe their experiences in words, so she was very impressed at how eloquent Taisha was. Carol said she didn’t do well in English. She would get her school papers back marked, “Expand this. Develop. Ambiguous.” Although she is a visual person, she doesn’t see the scenes when she is recapitulating. She claimed she and Castaneda are “the same energetically, but two people who are the same energetically don’t necessarily get along with each other.” She remarked that he always comes out better in the story. She joked that “people who are compulsive always come out looking better in description. There’s nothing like compulsion to make you look good.” She’s “the slob.” When “Castaneda cooks he has everything arranged, everything wrapped up in neat little bundles, all the pieces he needs, and he knows exactly how many seconds each thing takes.” He was always tense. She wanted things to be calmer, more moderate. “With him it’s always intense, ‘We’re going to die!’ Or, ‘This is complete shit!’” And he had all these little rituals, like his “power walking,” which she would call “jogging,” which irritated him.

April 1996 – According to Cleargreen payroll records for the month [an incomplete scrap of financial information filed as part of C.J. Castaneda’s motion in the probate proceeding in 1999], Muni, Florinda, Taisha and Tycho each received a salary for the April ‘96 workshop of $2,727.58. Castaneda, who wasn’t there, received a salary of $4,567.61. Kylie, Renata, Nyei, Darien, Erin, Fabricio, Grant and Talia each received a workshop salary of $1,238.26. Rosa, Margarita, Brandon, Michelle and Ellis each received a salary of $569.08.

July 20-25, 1996 – Intensive Tensegrity Workshop at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion [Carol performed the following song: “I’ve done a bad thing, I’ve done a bad thing. I should be punished, and then I should die. And when I am dead, I should be punished, some more!”]

October 30, 1996 – Cleargreen shareholder distribution of $447,411 net income [another incomplete scrap of financial information, per documents filed with C.J. Castaneda’s motions in the 1999 probate proceedings]. Of 102,864 shares, Muni, Taisha, Florinda, Nury, Talia and Fabricio each had 12.9618% of the shares. Kylie, Nyei, Reni, Darien, Zaia, Erin, Haley and Gavin each owned 2.7775% of the shares. Tracy and Bruce had 5 shares each, or .00149%. Somehow these percentages translated to payments of $28,497 to Talia, $9,799 to Muni, $9,658 to Kylie, $7,321 to Florinda, $7,270 for Taisha, $5,171 to Nuri, $5,048 to Fabricio, $2,696 each to Bruce and Tracy, $2,504 to Renata, $2,331 to Nyei, $2,227 to Zaia and $1,854 to Tycho (also known as “the Orange Scout”).

November 29-December 1, 1996 – Pasadena Workshop at the Pasadena Center Exhibition Building. Castaneda and Taisha spoke, and Nury read the chapter from the book in progress, Memorable Events (published in 1998 as The Active Side of Infinity), about Carol Tiggs’s return. [This chapter was not included in the final, published version of Active Side of Infinity.] Castaneda criticized the adherence to tradition in his lineage, and asserted “Now there are no rules.” They had hoped that explaining things would help people arrive at realization and make the jump. There hadn’t been that much progress that way, however, so in the future they were going to emphasize practical actions more. Castaneda said that don Juan gave him the task of taking care of the three witches, and said that to manage them was as difficult “as changing the chain of a chain saw while it’s running.” Carol claimed that Castaneda recently saw himself as a bundle of energy, which was “a sign that he was on the verge of leaving.” The umbrella of energy they assertedly received from don Juan was gone; “as we make the final turn, we are going to have to do so on our own power.” We were also told that Castaneda felt “with his exposed knees” that Carol’s mother was “not her mother.”

December 2, 1996 – Castaneda gave a lecture at the Dance Factory in Santa Monica for the Spanish-speaking Pasadena workshop participants. Castaneda reportedly told the group that he and the others “will be leaving soon because Carol is starting to burn,” and that Talia Bey woild remain to continue running things after they leave, because of her “appropriate, green-hued energy.”

January 31, 1997 – Cleargreen shareholder distribution of $137,333 from retained earnings of $596,876. (This time Talia scooped up $34,097, Kylie snagged $18,758, Muni raked in $12,419, Nyei at $10,146 edged out Renata’s $10,124, Florinda manifested $9,941, Taisha blinked in $9,890, Nuri registered $7,791, Fabricio grabbed $6,668, Bruce and Tracy each pulled in $6,043, Zaia liberated $2,574, Tycho generated $2,201, and Grant slammed down $632.) [Another accounting scrap from documents filed as an exhibit to C.J. Castaneda’s motion in the probate proceedings.]

February 1997 – Interview with Castaneda published in Uno Mismo (in Chile and Argentina), “El Mundo de don Juan al Alcance de Todos,” by Daniel Trujillo Rivas – translation was on Cleargreen’s website for months. [When asked why are they now talking publicly about the teachings, instead of mentioning Carol’s return, Castaneda responded: “What compels us to disseminate don Juan Matus’s ideas is a need to clarify what he taught us.”]

February 15-16, 1997 – Intensive Review Workshop in the “blue pyramid” on the Cal State University Long Beach campus. Castaneda, Taisha and Carol all spoke as part of a very short lecture format. Nuri read a chapter from the book in progress, then titled Memorable Events, describing the three beings Castaneda meets in the desert after planting the seeds — a man who wants to become an agent, a screenwriter and a lesbian (i.e., Tracy Kramer, Bruce Wagner and Zaia Alexander, who had all been classmates together at some point). [That chapter is not ultimately contained in The Active Side of Infinity when it is published in 1998.]

April 1, 1997 – Interview with Carol Tiggs, Taisha Abelar and Florinda Donner-Grau by Concha Labarta published in Spain’s Más Allá. [In answering the first question about why they have gone public after a long period of anonymity, the three repeated that, “The return of Carol Tiggs in 1985 marked a total change in our goals and aspirations. . . . Traditionally, Carol Tiggs’ role was to guide us to make that crossing. When she returned, she automatically transformed the insular goal of our private journey into something more far-reaching. That’s why we decided to end our anonymity and teach the magical passes of the shamans of ancient Mexico.”]

March 28 & 29, 1997 – Heaven’s Gate group suicide was reported March 27. I attended a night session with Castaneda each of the two next evenings. Carol was on hand both nights, as was most of Cleargreen. Bruce greeted us with the Star Trek “V” salute, saying “Hale-Bopp” as we arrived. Early on, Castaneda commented, “I heard that several of the Heaven’s Gate group had had themselves castrated some months before they ‘left.’ What is this? You need your balls to be able to journey. They were waiting for a spaceship to pick them up and take them to heaven. There is no heaven. Infinity is a constant battle, a struggle. There is no heaven where they’re going to be taken care of, where everything is going to be made nice. This is the Flyers talking.” Taisha mentioned that they had had quarters and five dollar bills packed near them. Kylie excitedly added that the brother of the actress who played Lt. Uhura on Star Trek was one of them. Castaneda said that the same issue of the Los Angeles Times that had so many articles about the cult “had on the cover a big picture of rituals for Easter in which people are acting out the crucifixion of Christ.” Carol pointed out that it was on the cover of the “Life and Style” section. “The newspaper didn’t seem to see any inconsistency in condemning the cultish behavior of this little group and celebrating this accepted cult and its rituals. Castaneda continued, “The leader had been in a mental institution. We love that. So they cut off their balls so they didn’t have to think about sex. To be pure. You need your balls. Don’t cut off your balls.
It’s some weird mixture of awareness and technology, that they think awareness requires this advanced technology of the aliens. This idea that their pure souls, what was left from their bodies, was going to be ‘collected by the mothership’ reminds me of China, when they used to have someone come around each morning collecting the shit. ‘Any shit today?’ People would be paid for their shit, because they’d use it for fertilizer. Here they have the idea that the spacecraft is coming down to collect our shitty souls. It’s like the way they killed monkeys where I grew up. They’d build these cement holes and put nuts in them. The holes were just big enough for the monkeys to put their hands in, but not big enough to pull their fists out. I saw it: the next morning you find these monkeys with their hands bloodied. Sometimes they manage to break their fists and pull them out, but they can’t let go of the nuts. We’re like that. We’re not willing to let go of this little thing we see–these little idealities. We grab and hold on and they take us to our deaths, just like the monkeys.”

The next night, Castaneda told us, “You should get the newspaper that has all the articles about the Heaven’s Gate cult, as well as the cover story on the flagellation ritual. And the article about the head of the Japanese Aum cult,” apparently in the business section, “that he sells an ounce of his ‘bodily fluids,’ his piss and blood, for $8,000. Collect those things. I wish I’d started collecting them earlier. I should have started with Jonestown.” Florinda jumped in, “Yeah, there were 900 killed then.” Castaneda responded, “Ugh, don’t say that! You don’t know the number.” Then he turned in my direction and asked, “What was the number?” I responded, “Over 900,” so Florinda made a gesture to him, as if to say “pay me the bet.” Castaneda suggested, “Have a collection of these newspaper articles, and when people ask you what you’re doing or what’s your problem with the social order, you can show them. These are artifacts of the Flyers.”

June 17, 1997 – References to a letter by an “Ex-Cleargreen employee” appeared on the Ixtlan electronic mailing list. The letter appears to many to have been written by Tunneshende or her supporters. Excerpts say Carol Tiggs was “La Gorda,” and attribute  her “disappearance” to “time she spent in a recovery facility for obese compulsive eaters.” The letter also stated, “No. There were no Native informants, but Castaneda embellished his data with phenomenology, Alfred Kroeber, Aldous Huxley, and others. . . . . There were no ‘Indian apprentices of don Juan.’ Taisha Abelar . . . was ‘Josefina.’ She was also ‘Nanny’ in Margaret Castaneda’s book, the woman who read bedtime stories to C.J., the boy C.C. tried to claim as his son.”

July 19, 1997 – Greg and Gabi’s videotape shows Castaneda hammering a trellis against the perimeter wall of the compound, and later, Castaneda, Florinda and Carol driving toward Westwood.
– I had dinner with Castaneda, Florinda and Carol at 6 PM at the Moustache Café in Westwood. The reservations were in Florinda’s name. [Florinda ordered rack of lamb and mashed potatoes instead of the vegetables it came with. Carol then ordered the same thing and I followed suit. Castaneda, however, wanted the whitefish special, with a cilantro butter sauce, which he asked to be put on the side. When the waitress asked us if we wanted wine, Florinda blurted out “no,” and the rest of us also indicated no. Castaneda then “explained” to the waitress that Florinda “is Mormon.” Ex-Senator Alan Cranston was seated in the booth next to ours.] Among other things, Florinda and I talked about our individual experiences of visiting Europe for the workshops earlier that summer. Florinda told us she and the others “couldn’t wait to get out of Berlin” and described the hotel they were staying at in East Berlin, where the surroundings were “depressing.” Castaneda mentioned Nury had seen a guy in East Berlin whose shoes were disintegrating, and that she had wanted to buy him new shoes. Florinda also mentioned walking down the ramblas during the Barcelona workshop and seeing six tall Germans, who “made her nervous,” noting that there was “something very cold” about German kids. I joked they must have been “the Boys from Brazil,” to which Florinda responded, “no, they were from Germany,” but Carol got the reference and explained it. Castaneda told us he couldn’t wait to get out of Rome, because it “stank.” Carol or Florinda asked him if he hadn’t liked it when he was going to art school there, and he admitted that he had liked Florence. He also described Spain as “smelly and decrepit.” Castaneda claimed he had once been planning to marry a Japanese woman, and had the ring for her. But she saw him with a Mexican girl sitting in his lap, and told him to stay away from her or “she would knife me.” Castaneda also told a “shaggy dog story” about a tall guy he had known who owned a Volkswagen in which he used to pick up hitchhikers. The guy would ask them where they wanted to go, but regardless what they said, he would take them to a distant spot, like Agoura, and drop them off there. The guy had supposedly altered the seat of his car too, so that he looked like he was of normal height when sitting in the driver’s seat. Castaneda talked about his relationship with a famous Mexican artist, Oscar Tamayo, who lived in New York, which came up because Margarita Nieto was then cataloging for an art dealer in Palm Springs who had cornered the market on another brilliant Mexican artist. He also told us about the widow of a guy who had died after an unsuccessful bypass operation. When she was told she needed the same operation, he claimed she responded, “Fuck you.” Castaneda told us she had a lover, and that when her end came, she was taking a swim and asked her lover to fix her a margarita: “A strong one, make it so I can taste it.” As she was sipping away, she remarked, “There is something about this margarita that’s most unusual, like I’ve never tasted before.” Then she keeled over and died. They all seemed to think that was a great way to go. Castaneda told us he had gotten hit “by a big blast.” He also mentioned that “Lorenzo” [Bruce Wagner] had been planning to go on an expenses-paid trip to Europe, and that if he had gone, they “wouldn’t have been able to do Phantom Theater.” Lorenzo was “just saved by the skin of his teeth,” but he “didn’t know it.” Lorenzo didn’t go, but in some way he caused Castaneda to be “hit with a blast.” He didn’t explain what the blast was. At the beginning of the meal, Castaneda gave me a present wrapped in orange tissue paper with a white ribbon, which turned out to be an object he claimed had belonged to the Nagual Lujan. It was a small, carved ivory vase, about 4″ tall, with a detached green wooden base. There are different scenes on each of its four sides. Castaneda claimed it had been part of a pair, but the other one was “lost in dreaming.” He explained he “couldn’t sustain the Sunday class”–that it “had become too difficult” and he couldn’t keep meeting with us–but that somehow, with this gift, he wanted “to create a link.” Castaneda’s energy throughout the meal seemed lower than usual, and he seemed to have a hard time speaking loud enough for us to hear him without straining.]

July 19, 1997 – One-day workshop at Seattle Central Community College Student Activity Center Gymnasium. Kylie talked at length about the reality of Carol’s being gone for 10 years, and claimed she and the other Chacmools “took it rather lightly” for a long time, and “did not truly comprehend the true gravity of the event.” She further asserted, “Our endless categorizing and taxonomizing closes us into itself and renders us incapable of considering the possibility that someone like Carol Tiggs could go somewhere else for ten years and then return. Carol really was physically gone and she was not in this world for those years. To this day, Carol is still trying to unravel the mystery of where she actually was.” [From Vini Sargenti’s notes.]

August 2, 1997 – Zaia gave a talk at Midnight Special Bookstore on the Promenade in Santa Monica, with Florinda, Carol and others in attendance.

August 16, 1997 – 5 PM – Sorcery Theater Rehearsal and party at the compound on Pandora. [Felix Gutsmuths and I attended, along with most of Cleargreen. Carol played several major roles, including the nearly comatose “guru” in a sketch with Carola (roles later reprised at the August 23-27, 1997, workshop by Miles and Brandon).]

August 23-27, 1997 – Intensive Workshop “The Not-Doings of the Sorcerers of Ancient Mexico,” at L.A. Convention Center. Taisha described their “shamanistic unit” of ten women and six men, saying some had been brought in by Carol Tiggs ten years ago, when she returned from her absence, while others had been brought in as few as two years ago. Carol said that because we have been brought up and socialized as members of western civilization we always place the blame for things on somebody else. We do not take responsibility for our actions. She said this is the price tag of being at the mercy of energy and awareness other than our own. “All of our social molds have been taken from Bobby [their nickname for our personal “Flyer”]. As a result, we have become just like him; petty, sluggish, lazy and unwilling to take responsibility.” Carol talked about Castaneda’s recent “breakthrough to a new vibratory level,” saying that the implications were “staggering” and that they may “not be able to formulate what exactly it means for some time, if ever.” Carol then related something Carlos said to her recently that was “the most exquisite thing I had ever heard.” He had grabbed her by the arm and said, “I never thought I’d live forever . . . let’s do it!” [Note: A 1996 John Woo film entitled “Once a Thief” depicts two members of a secret police unit pausing in front of a high rise window, which represents the cops best chance of escaping pursuing mobsters. Before they crash through the window, one of the cops turns to the other and asks, “Did you expect to live forever? Let’s do it!”] Q&A period – “What made it possible for you to go public?” Florinda responded that their going public had to do with the return of Carol Tiggs. That event had made energy available to them that would not have been otherwise.

Sept. 1997 – “Of Sorcery and Dreams: An Encounter with Carlos Castaneda,” by Michael Brennan published in The Sun. [Author had, at age 16, been in a LaBerge lucid dreaming study. He attended the second Oakland workshop. In setting the background, the author writes that Carol’s return had “ripped a hole in the fabric of the universe. Castaneda, Donner-Grau and Abelar were thoroughly disconcerted by the implications of this event. In the end, Tiggs persuaded her fellow travelers to adopt a radical new approach to their work: for the first time, they would present the teachings of don Juan openly . . ..”]

September 23, 1997 – $536,000 worth of income was distributed to Cleargreen, Inc., shareholders (including $70,786 to Muni, $71,536 to Florinda, $70,536 to Taisha, $66,925 to Nuri, $70,786 to Talia, $71,536 to Fabricio, $14,480 to Nyei and Reni and $17,680 to Kylie.) [Again, only an incomplete scrap of Cleargreen financial information, per documents filed by C.J. Castaneda in connection with his motions in the probate proceedings.]

October 11 & 12, 1997 – Workshop at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York [Miles said, “Thirteen years ago, Carol came back from being away for ten years. She decided to teach the magical passes to anyone interested . . . No! To anyone with the guts to go through the door of perception.” Zaia explained that for a man and woman to practice the not-doings together, they must be egoless, without competition or the need for control. Currently only she and Miles were able to practice the not-doings as a male/female team. She also explained that it was not possible for Castaneda and Carol Tiggs to have as harmonious a relationship as she and Miles because Tiggs would dominate Castaneda.]

October 22, 1997 – Castaneda signed a will witnessed by Patricia Essig and Brian T. Mayeda. In it he states that he “legally adopted Nury Alexander as my daughter,” and intentionally omits Adrian Vashon (C.J.). His estate is to be given 50% “to those of Tisha [sic] Abelar, Florinda Donner Grau, Muni Alexander, Nury Alexander and Haley Van Osten who survive me, in equal shares,” and 50% “to those of Kylie Lundahl, Talia Bey, Naya [sic] Murez, Maria Guadalupe Blanco, Zaia Alexander, Carola Alexander and Fabiana Pompa who survive me, in equal shares.”

November – December 1997 – Florinda called me about putting together some people to buy the Westwood compound. I eventually came up with Paul, Daniel and maybe Kathleen and her husband James. This eventually turned into a project to convince Joanie Barker the house was being sold so she would move out of her little apartment over the garage. Paul, Daniel and I came over three times to take measurements, or to “review” the renovation work being done around the compound, and then have tea with the Florinda, Taisha and Carol.

December 13-14, 1997 – Mexico City Workshop at Expotek 2001 near Alameda Park. Florinda attended, with Zaia and Miles leading the passes. (Amy Wallace was Florinda’s companion for this event, at Castaneda’s invite. She reports in Sorcerer’s Apprentice that Carol howled with laugher at the lavish introductions Castaneda wrote for Zaia and Miles, who were to appear as the first male-female Tensegrity instruction team: the “Team of Awareness through Harmony,” representing the possibility of asexual love between the sexes. They were to demonstrate a new, arduous form called “the Code,” supposedly kept secret for generations. Castaneda had scripted Florinda to introduce them as, “Dr. Zaia Alexander, a professor of languages and Germanic studies at the University of California” and “Dr. Miles Reid, a physician and a surgeon.” She claimed these “doctors” get along so well because they share an energetic connection. The scripted remarks had Florinda tell the audience that it “never ceased to amaze” Castaneda’s group how much men and women hate each other. “In ancient times women were on the throne. They turned sorcery from something abstract and sublime into something pragmatic, applicable to the everyday world. The men eventually de-throned them but the result of this discord caused back then is still felt today. Currently Zaia and Miles are the only pair that can teach the not doings together. There are others that are currently working on it.” This made Carol cackle because, “They’re the two biggest egomanias in the place–and they actually bought their own advertising! The nagual’s trick worked! They believe that crap, and it shuts Zaia up–superb!” Carol explained that Miles was “a bone Carlos has thrown to Zaia, to keep her distracted and self-important so she won’t whine,” since Nury had transferred her fickle affections to Halley. Meanwhile, Zaia was rude and cutting to Amy during the trip, and Florinda finally let her have it, warning her if she didn’t stop it immediately, Florinda was going to send her home on the plane and leave Miles to teach the passes they were supposed to teach jointly by himself.)

December 14, 1997 – Muni Alexander received certification of having completed 18 hours of continuing education from Samra University of Oriental Medicine in a course entitled, “Tibetan Ayurveda for Acupuncturists.” [From materials filed as part of C.J. Castaneda’s motion in 1999 probate proceedings.]

December 1997 – Carol told Amy, “You’re my time bomb.” When Amy asked her what she meant, she said, “You know too much.”

January 1998 – Harper Collins published Castaneda’s Magical Passes: The Practical Wisdom of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico. [The only mention of Carol Tiggs in this book is on three occasions listing her as one of the four disciples of don Juan, along with Castaneda, Taisha and Florinda, and in connection with the womb passes that were assertedly given to Carol.]

Castaneda’s Final Days

February -April 1998 – As Castaneda’s health dramatically declined in his final months due to advanced liver cancer and diabetes, Carol Tiggs, Florinda Donner and Taisha Abelar, along with Kylie Lundahl and Talia Bey, were the five he gathered around him every morning to read him headline stories from the L.A. Times and New York Times, and then to sit, without responding, to Castaneda’s blistering personal attacks and critiques. Amy Wallace, whose nearby home and pool were the Witches primary respite during these months, heard from all three of them what they were enduring and she paints a vivid picture of it in Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Carol used acupuncture on him until he became too sensitive for the needles, and then she blew on the acupuncture points. Florinda blamed Carol for not curing him. Before full dementia set in, Castaneda set most of them on hunts for a large boat they could all decamp to while they awaited his death, and had them search out detailed information on living at sea. Between sleeping and dictating, and eating when he could, Castaneda watched TV and videos, with Carol being the one frequently sent to fetch war movies he might not yet have seen. Castaneda had told us many times in Sunday class sessions that if he ever contracted cancer he would blow his brains out. In reality, though, once diagnosed, he depended on the constant attentions of the women long closest to him, whom he tortured and berated even as they were going through their own personal grief at the imminent death of their teacher/lover/benefactor, who some of them had clearly thought might help lead them to immortality. Toward the end, Castaneda was suffering diarrhea and making major messes of his sick bed.

Early 1998 – Carol, after hearing from Florinda that Amy was sexually frustrated, suggested to Amy that she hook up with Brandon. Per Sorcerer’s Apprentice, she told Amy, “I’ve tried him, and he’s nice and normal and all the parts are in working order.” Amy called and made a date with him for that evening, mentioning along the way that it was Carol’s idea. Carol showed up that evening too, while the two were fixing margaritas in Amy’s kitchen. She seemed shocked to see them, commenting “You look like a tableau of pure lust.” Carol told Amy she had come over because “I just saw something . . . horrible, horrible. I can’t talk about it. I have to get in the pool and wash it off.” She and Amy did laps in the pool for awhile with Brandon bided his time in the dining room. Carol described to Amy the blood she and Florinda saw in the Orange Scout’s apartment that day. “Florinda changed the bed. She . . . she shits blood. Everywhere. Florinda vomitted in the car. She won’t stop vomitting.” After Carol got dressed and left, Amy and Brandon continued their tryst. Carol called Amy the next morning, berating her for having used her name in inviting Brandon over. Carol’s tirade indicated her guilt over neglecting Castaneda the preceding night when she came over to use Amy’s pool: “Your evil power pulled me to your house! And Carlos was sick, he might have died that night, and I was in your pool, all because your lust pulled me–you and I are joined, and you invoked my name! I’ve been doing this for thirty years, and YOU don’t have a clue what you’re doing! . . . I made it back just in time! The nagual could have died because of your lust! . . . You BETRAYED me–everybody betrays me! The betrayers are always the ones I let come the closest. We’re all betrayers–I should know–I’ve betrayed!”

February 7-8, 1998 – Not-Doing Workshop at Pomona Fairplex Convention Center. Florinda began by explaining how the Tensegrity workshops came about. It all started when Carol came back and changed everything. Her return was an unprecedented occurrence in the lineage of the sorcerers up to that point. She had apparently left with don Juan’s party ten years before, thus fulfilling her role as the Nagual woman of Castaneda’s party. Carol’s sudden reappearance was quite a shock and “threw open doors energetically for all of us as far as what was possible.” It also confirmed once and for all that the four of them — Florinda, Taisha, Carlos and Carol — were in fact the end of don Juan’s lineage. Carol’s return is what gave them the energy and motivation to publicly open up and reveal the secrets of the sorcerers’ world which they had been so meticulously taught by don Juan and his party of warriors. Carol’s return meant there was no longer reason to keep their knowledge of the magical passes veiled in secrecy.

March? 1998 – Carol told Amy Wallace that Florinda, Taisha, Kylie and Talia had all acquired guns. One day, when Carol visited Amy after leaving Carlos asleep, she told her, “I don’t want to go with them. Only you and Lorenzo [Bruce Wagner] are strong enough to hold me here, to be my anchors. You have the most life force, and I need your chi, I need you. You’re one of the pillars holding everything up. You keep me from going crazy, and if I don’t carry my end, everything will crash. So you have to keep acting as if they’re important! Keep giving everything to them [meaning Florinda and Taisha]–that protects me from going crazy, they’re sucking me dry. . . .Don’t let this all end up meaning nothing. Will you intend me to stay?” Amy agreed and later “voiced that intent,” even though it pitted her against Florinda’s wish, as Amy understood it, that all the key women leave together. Amy rationalized to herself that Florinda hadn’t chosen to take her with them, while Carol was there, alone, and wasn’t going to abandon her.

Late March? 1998 – Castaneda’s condition worsened. Florinda told Amy, “It’s bad, Ellis, very bad. It could be a year, or just a week.” Days later she called Amy to ask if Kylie could come over to burn her papers in Amy’s fireplace. Kylie arrived and explained, “It takes so long with the shredder.” She only had one bag, so Amy took her to the small fireplace in her bedroom. As Amy helped her toss the papers into the flames, she saw galleys for Castaneda’s books being burned, and Kylie’s personal papers–poetry, drawings and a diary. Amy asked Kylie how she felt about what was happening. Kylie told her, “I know exactly what to do. If I don’t go with him, I’ll do what I have to do. It’s too late for you and me to remain in the world–I think you know exactly what I mean. It’s been too late for both of us for a long time.” Amy told her Carol had asked her and Bruce to help Carol stay, and explained she had given Carol her word. Kylie responded, nodding, “Yes, I heard something about that. The nagual doesn’t care one way or another, and Taisha is fine about it. But Florinda is upset. She’s not taking it well, she wants Muni to leave.” Kylie told Amy she was worried there would be suicides among others in the group, “maybe even out there, among them . . . . We told the nagual we were all very disturbed about that. He said ‘What?!’ As if he didn’t know what we were talking about!” She continued, “So, we asked him if he wanted the seminars to continue. . . . He said, ‘I don’t give a shit–if they want to have them, fine; otherwise, forget about it. It doesn’t make any difference to me.'” Kylie shook her head and told Amy, “We convinced him that he should give them something to do. Otherwise . . . they actually might . . . . So he dictated directions–he gave tasks to Darien, Aerin, Nyei and Reni, telling them to keep the seminars going. But he doesn’t care about Cleargreen or the seminars. So Carol chose Reni to be president of Cleargreen. Talia is going to tell her.” In response to Amy commenting, “That’s good, I suppose,” Kylie said, “What else would they all do? I’m surprised he didn’t foresee how big a risk this is.” She then thanked Amy and told her she loved her. When Kylie hugged Amy and lifted her up, as she had done before, Amy knew it was their last hug.

April 4, 1998 – Workshop at Santa Monica College Gymnasium, 2-9:30 PM. [Florinda, Taisha and Carol were all on hand, for the last time. Carol seemed positively giddy. Amy and I were aware she was then having a fling with one of the Elements, who was only 19. At one point she fell over a woman who was standing with her behind the “bookstore.”]

April 23, 1998 – Castaneda signed six-page will leaving his estate to be channeled through the Eagle’s Trust, established by a Trust Agreement signed the same day, and specifically disinheriting C.J. Castaneda and Margaret Runyan. He also signs a quitclaim deed, apparently on the house, to the Eagle Trust, Deborah Drooz as Trustee, which is recorded on April 29, 1998 [98-0715277], along with a quitclaim deed to First American Trust Company [98-0715276].

April 24, 1998 – Castaneda entered a coma from which he did not awake, ultimately passing three days later.

Castaneda Dies

April 27, 1998 – Castaneda’s Death Certificate, signed by Angelica Duenas, MD, reported his death at 3 AM that date, his cremation on that date by Spalding Mortuary in Culver City, and the disposition of the remains to Talia Bey on 4/28/98 (Death Cert. lists immediate cause of death as metabolic encephalopathy for a period of two days, triggered by liver failure for a period of two weeks, due to hepatocellular cancer for a period of 10 months — i.e., since July ‘97.) Carol told Amy she wore “widow’s weeds” when she went to the mortuary to arrange for the cremation. Meanwhile, Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar, Kylie Lundahl and Talia Bey left in two cars after cleaning out their apartments, cancelling their phone services and utilities, and having given away their jewelry and other precious objects to Amy and other Cleargreen members in the preceding weeks.

April 27, 1998 – At 3:30 pm, Amy called Taisha’s number, as Taisha had requested the previous day, and the line is dead. She called Florinda’s and Castaneda’s with the same result. Carol’s was off the hook. In the days that followed, Carol admitted to Amy that Taisha and Florinda committed suicide. 

Carol’s Conflicting Stories About Castaneda’s Death & the Missing Women

April 27-May ?, 1998 – In the days that follow, Carol initially told the remaining Cleargreen contingent that Castaneda “burned with the fire from within,” and that the others who had left had done so in pairs in the Westwood compound. She claimed Castaneda and Nury went together, then Florinda and Taisha, and Kylie and Talia. Cleargreeners were given tours of the compound, being shown where the “burning” departures supposedly happened in particular rooms, some even being told Taisha had all her magical jewelry on her to “charge it,” before leaving individual items to women in the group.

May 2, 1998 – Workshop at Santa Monica College Gymnasium. Carol spoke briefly at beginning, mentioning how Old Florinda had stayed behind for them. She expressed her thanks, and appeared tearful. Mood was somber, and I had a sense that something had happened. Carol spoke only 10 minutes instead of scheduled 30. Carol said that after don Juan’s party left, an “event” occurred that caused them to decide to teach the magical passes to the public. She said that “big” Florinda, who was called that because she was “so tall and elegant and packed an incredible wallop,” was left behind after don Juan’s party left to “fine tune the four of us.” [Note: If Carol left with don Juan’s party per the books, she should not have been around to get further training from Old Florinda, who should herself have been gone before Carol’s “return” in 1985.] (Her voice broke, but she recovered quickly.) She said one of the reasons they had brought Tensegrity public was to search for something big Florinda had foretold before she left. She had said that if the four of them had enough “gall” to continue to pursue the path of the warrior with all they had that someday a time would come when the mood of the ancient sorcerers would be completely removed from the passes. Instead of being heavy, cold and detached, they would find a new mood, one that was light and very precise. “That time has finally arrived,” she declared. “It occurred right here in this room last month at the last workshop.” She claimed she had witnessed it for herself, and ascribed it to a combination of the energy of the participants and the instructors. She said that a new mood had begun and would prevail from now on. Later on Zaia said that “giving it their all” in instructing us was their way of saying thank you for all the help they had received.

May 2, 1998 – When I called Florinda and Kylie’s phone numbers, they were disconnected. I reported this to Amy and she began sharing with me what she knew. In the following days and months, as Amy and I tried to process what’s going on and the various stories being told the Cleargreen group, I began my research into court, marriage, divorce, real estate and probate records to see what I could learn about the missing women and other key members of Castaneda’s entourage. Amy had given me the tip that Castaneda “married” Carol and Florinda in Las Vegas over the years.

[May 2, 1998 – Nury’s red Ford Escort found abandoned on a dirt road near the Panamint Dunes in Death Valley. In the succeeding days, after Park Ranger Dave Brenner, who had inspected the vehicle and taken pictures, called Cleargreen since the car was registered to Cleargreen’s address. Amy was working there when Brandon took the call. Days later, one or more L.A.P.D. officers came to the office and met with Tracy Kramer. Tracy subsequently drove to the Death Valley, and others in the group were afraid he was going to commit suicide.]

May – June 1998 -In the weeks following Castaneda’s death, Carol confided the truth in Amy Wallace, whose Westwood home she visited virtually every day, to relax in the pool and get away from the remaining Cleargreeners who were seeking her guidance as their sole remaining leader. She repeatedly told Amy that Florinda, Taisha and the others died. She also told her a lurid story about Nury having called her from a Death Valley motel after botching a suicide attempt. She had told Amy that when Nury took off for the desert, she had left her apartment a mess that she, Tracy Kramer and Brandon Scott had to clean up. They then divided up her more valuable things and distributed them to members of the group. After supposedly getting Nury’s call, Carol claimed she drove to the desert with a lot of cash for Nury, finding her “covered in blood.” She told Amy that Nury “clung to my leg pathetically,” saying over and over she was “worthless, a total failure.” Carol claimed she told Nury to go to Ireland and start a printing business. Personally, I think this was just one of Carol’s many lies. It’s hard to imagine her driving hours to Death Valley to take money to Nury. And if Nury was bleeding when she found her, why wouldn’t she take her to the hospital or otherwise get her medical attention? At any rate, as Sorcerer’s Apprentice details, Nury was the one who had long before taken Carol’s place as Castaneda’s favorite. Carol had suffered years of humiliation and abuse because of Nury. Would she really have gone out of her way to drive hours to the desert to take money to her, when she knew she’d really left town to die? That story doesn’t make any sense and I don’t believe it happened.

Carol also made many telling statements to Amy indicating her feelings toward others in the group. Soon after Castaneda’s death, she told Amy, “I don’t like what left and I don’t like what stayed!” At another point, she said she didn’t go with the other women because she “didn’t want to be under them anymore.” As the weeks went on, she complained about the Cleargreeners, “They’re all after me! He’s gone and they want to suck me dry. Why can’t they take care of themselves?” “I feel like all these assholes are puppies sucking on my tits!” She also confided, “My heart is broken . . . utterly broken . . . Carlos broke it, Ellis, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it. I’m sure going to need a lot of therapy!” She also asserted that Amy “had everything in life,” while she herself “had had nothing.” At one point, she exulted, after a relaxing swim in the pool, “I have all the power now! I do! I’m the only one who knows what really happened, and everyone wants me for that!”

Eventually Carol described to Amy her final conversation with Florinda: “Florinda was getting ready to leave. No ‘I-love-yous,’ nothing. She was so mean. Then suddenly, at the doorway, she turns to me and says, ‘Muni, were you ever jealous of the nagual and his women?’ So I said,, ‘No, Florinda, I wasn’t. I had other issues with him believe me, but that wasn’t one of them . . . I don’t get jealous. I mean, hey, after all I was Pimp Number Two.’ Then Florinda smiled and said, ‘Well . . . he did have a lot of women, you know.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Now she wants to SHARE?’ She says, ‘I just wondered,’ and turned and walked away. No hug, no kiss, no than-you, no goodbye, nothing.'”

While continuing her affair with Bruce, Carol was also seeing Marcos, a 19-year-old former Sunday group member who was simultaneously involved with Halley. One day she admitted to Amy that because she and Halley both wanted Florinda’s new, deluxe mattress, she arranged to make love to Marcos on the mattress in Florinda’s former room, that Halley was now occupying, knowing Halley was coming home any minute. Halley did walk in on the couple and go hysterical. Carol told her, “I just did it to show you how possessive you are.” Carol achieved her immediate objective–Halley forfeited her claim to the mattress.

May 7, 1998 – Cleargreen issued an unsigned letter to Munich workshop registrants saying that “due to an energetic shift that could not be foreseen, none of [the three female students of don Juan] will be available to lecture at this seminar,” and that instead, lectures would be conducted “by the members of our German team of shamanistic instructors, each of them an apprentice of Carlos Castaneda, Taisha Abelar, Florinda Donner-Grau and Carol Tiggs.” Because of the change, they reduce the price.

May 8, 1998 – Castaneda’s will was filed with L.A. Superior Court. Letter signed by Fabricio as CFO announced that the Friday night lecture for the Mountain View workshop had been canceled.

May 23-24, 1998 – Munich Workshop. [Again, no mention of Castaneda’s death or the reason for the Witches’ pulling out of the workshop, even though probate filings have been made and notices sent both to the heirs and the specifically disinherited.] Darien described how she had asked the Witches for help with her talk, saying that only Carlos had answered, telling her it was a task she had to do by herself. She was also given the advice that each word a shaman pronounces is a promise to infinity. (Carla Luciani’s notes report that when she asked Fabricio why the Witches hadn’t come, he told her “Oh, but they’ll be at the Ontario workshop in August.”)

June 6, 1998 – One-day workshop in Los Altos at Foothill College Gymnasium. [Renata kicked off the workshop by asserting, “I belong to Carol Tiggs.”]

June 13, 1998 – New York City one-day workshop in basketball gymnasium at Hunter College. Rylin DeMaris introduced as “the newest energy tracker.”

Castaneda’s Death Becomes Public

June 19, 1998 – Los Angeles Times’ obituary of Castaneda appeared on page 1. [Obituary appearing the next day, June 20, in the New York Times detailed how Castaneda’s putative adopted son, C.J. Castaneda, was responsible for making the death public.]
   – Until they left the telephone unanswered, starting at around 2 PM, Cleargreen staffers gave different responses to callers asking where the Witches are. Some people were told “they are traveling,” others were told “they are in the Second Attention.”

June 22, 1998 – Cleargreen website put up Cleargreen’s official statement, which included the following assertion: “For don Juan, the warrior was a being . . . who embarks, when the time comes, on a definitive journey of awareness, ‘crossing over to total freedom.’ Don Juan described this option to his apprentice: ‘…warriors can keep their awareness, which is ordinarily relinquished, at the moment of dying. At the moment of crossing, the body in its entirety is kindled with knowledge. Every cell at once becomes aware of itself and also aware of the totality of the body.’ Carlos Castaneda left the world the same way that his teacher, don Juan Matus did: with full awareness. The cognition of our world of everyday life does not provide for a description of a phenomenon such as this. So in keeping with the terms of legalities and record keeping that the world of everyday life requires, Carlos Castaneda was declared to have died.”

July 31 – August 2, 1998 – Ontario Intensive Workshop, Ontario Convention Center, Exhibit Hall A. Carol spoke on the 2nd, beginning, “I am Carol Tiggs. I was the only one energetically available for this evening.” She advised that sorcerers stuff themselves with experience before they leave, and described Castaneda as having “left the world saturated with awareness.” She discouraged people from the notion that they could join or catch up with don Juan or Castaneda. “They are running and we are running behind them. It is now impossible to stay like we were. Just do the work.” She also purported to speak for the other two Witches. This was Carol’s last public appearance, until she showed up at the September 2015 Cleargreen workshop in Sochi, Russia, described below.

August 14, 1998 – Carol reported to Amy that she wasn’t happy with how Debbie Drooz was handling the probate proceedings. Tracy and Bruce were going to talk to and work with her. With the estate tied up in probate, there was little money on hand. Carol told Amy the Germany workshop was almost a net loss. The one after that was “okay.” She told her Taisha had wanted to hide cash and Carol seemed to be indicating she wished they had. There was also some conflict with HarperCollins about the Magical Passes book. They had decided to only do two videos instead of four. (From my notes of one of my near daily telephone conversations with Amy.)

October 11, 1998 – Interview with Miles Reid, “Learning about Ancient Wisdom,” by Blanca Robleda, The News in Mexico City. [Miles claimed, “The three female students of don Juan Matus: Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar and Carol Tiggs, will supervise the instruction and development of the magical passes [for the workshops].”]

November 1998 – HarperCollins published Castaneda’s The Active Side of Infinity. [There is no mention of Carol in the book, despite the fact that a moving chapter from it about Carol’s “return” was read at the Nov.-Dec. 1996 Pasadena workshop. Could Castaneda have left it out because he was angry at Carol’s decision not to depart with the other Witches upon his death? Was he annoyed at her for the string of affairs she was having with men in the group while he was dying? Or did Carol have a hand in removing it, knowing that a quick check of public records would reveal she was not physically gone for ten years?]

[November 7-8, 1998 – Mexico City Workshop. Brandon and Miles responded to the question “Where are the Witches?” by claiming, “They remained to supervise the movement instructors. They supervise things as they develop. There are no hierarchies now.” To the question “What became of the Nagual’s party?” They answered: “The elements were not present (when he left?). Only the female companions of Don Carlos. Don Juan took his party of 16 warriors. Don Carlos didn’t. He made a bold energetic maneuver. He went away alone and left an energetic door open for whoever can go through it. Don Carlos said that he had a debt to the Spirit and he wanted to settle to that debt, leaving the opportunity so that anyone could follow him. Through the affection of the Nagual for his congeneres, he made a connection for each one of us with the infinite. He loved the sublime nature of the human race.”]

November 25, 1998 – Crossroads School special Tensegrity session that Reni had asked me to help organize, inviting a dozen or so of the prior Sunday Class group. Most of Cleargreen was on hand. We were given plastic bricks for special breathing passes. Miles read a nauseating statement about Castaneda having “set up” all of the workshops that follow, and asserted the Witches were supervising things, but “probably won’t” attend the workshops so as to avoid a “guru” mentality from setting in.

[January 1, 1999 – After I had a vivid and distressing dream involving Castaneda and Carol, I felt impelled to unburden myself of Castaneda related secrets. I launched the Sustained Action mailing list of former Sunday Group members and workshop goers as a means of ultimately disseminating what I was then learning about the real personal histories of Carol, et al. The move felt risky as I was then living in an apartment building in Culver City where other Cleargreen workshop goers lived, the apartment manager who had a key to my apartment was involved with Cleargreen, and Cleargreen knew where I lived.]

February 23, 1999 – Cleargreen website’s “Magical Passes Practitioners’ Log” repeated statement read by Rylin at the Pomona workshop: “The three female students of don Juan would like us to read the following to you: . . . . The three female students of don Juan said it’s fabulous to see what these practitioners, these apprentices are doing. You are apprentices, if you choose to be. There’s no group — what there is is an agreement on the art of attention. This is in full evidence today.”

Spring? 1999 – Amy and Carol had a fight during a telephone conversation. That evening Amy looked on her porch and found a dozen long stemmed roses, white with pale pink tips, each in an individual tube of water. She didn’t call Carol to thank her. The next day, she received a hysterical call from Carol, “You didn’t call me! I thought you’d thrown them away, so I went to your house at 6:30 this morning and went through your trash looking for them!” Amy apologized for not having called, because she hadn’t been ready to talk. She told her the roses weren’t in the garbage. Amy decided it was time to tell Carol the following: “Listen, Muni, I have something important to say to you. You seem to believe in a hierarchy of emptiness, and think that you’re at the top and I’m somewhere below you.” Carol responded, “There is a hierarchy of emptiness, and I am at the top. One day you’ll be ready to see this.” Amy told her maybe that was true, but that “for the moment . . . I don’t want any more of your advice.” Amy reports in Sorcerer’s Apprentice that they made it through one last lunch after that, but it was stilted. Amy quit calling Carol and Carol stopped calling her. Soon after, Reni called her, announcing, “Muni wanted me to tell you that she’s looking at your energy, and you look great.”

April 1999 – Interview by Concha Labarta (Barcelona workshop promoter) with Darien Donner, Gavin Allister and Brandon Scott in Spain’s Más Allá. [When asked “What is the situation at the moment of Carlos Castaneda’s cohorts, Florinda Donner Grau, Taisha Abelar and Carol Tiggs?” Darien responded: “The female students of Don Juan are here to supervise our efforts. We can say that they are our advisors. They want to see if it is possible for a group to pursue an abstract goal, and not follow a guru or a leader.”]

April 17, 1999 – Cleargreen website bulletin responded to selected questions. The final question and response are: “Why did the female students of don Juan stay here? Are they going to appear at workshops?” Answer: “The three female students of don Juan Matus are here to supervise the efforts of the Tensegrity instructors in making one of Carlos Castaneda’s most cherished dreams a reality: the dream of a unified body of individual practitioners of the magical passes resuming their interrupted journey of awareness. For the moment, they are not going to appear personally at the workshops because they want this dream to take wings. For Carlos Castaneda and for them, it is a dream in which a group of practitioners is focused not on a person or a group of persons, but on the abstract purpose of freedom of perception.”

June 5-6, 1999 – Barcelona Workshop (750+ attendees). Miles, in his intro, explained that the “remaining three disciples” had remained, in the same way that Florinda Matus had remained to complete the instruction of Castaneda and the Witches, to make sure the vision of a unified body of warriors became a reality. Gavin said that the spirit of the times dictated that today we no longer need Naguals or gurus to help us on the Warrior’s path. In Q&A, in answer to a question about one’s relationship with one’s family unit, they encouraged people to “be on the best of terms with our parents and have respect for what they have done for us.” [That sure didn’t sound like the advice Castaneda had continually given us about dealing with family members during Sunday sessions, so “revisionist nagualism” was already well underway.] When asked, “How can one be with your group?” they were told, “You are part of our group. There is no advantage that we have over you.” There were also Q&A’s in different languages. Rylin and Reni handled the English session. When asked, “How do the three witches teach you? Do they teach you directly, in dreaming, how?” one of them responded, “We don’t call on them, they call us. We may get a phone-call, we have meetings before workshops. They let us get on with it, they supervise us from afar.” In the French session, Nyei responded to a similar question: “How is your relationship with the female sorcerers?” Nyei reportedly said, “The female sorceresses follow the energy. They are always here to help us to teach magical passes. There is no way to forecast when we are going to meet them. It is up to us to make decisions. They give us direction but no orders.”

When asked about the Death Defier and where he/she is, they responded, “The Death Defier is here but he is not energetically available. He chooses freely to be in this world. His gift to Carlos Castaneda was that Carlos could leave the door open for anyone who wished to enter the warriors way to freedom.” Someone else’s notes said that the Death Defier was present in the seminar in some abstract form. “She feels her looks are too awesome for people to witness and so she prefers to remain in other realms.” They also said that it was “greatly due to the Death Defier’s instigation and energy that the passes were taught publicly, and that it had been her gift to Castaneda that he could leave an energetic door open for anybody who follows the warrior’s path to go through it.”

First Version of this Chronology Published; Cleargreen Reacts

June 23, 1999 – First version of this chronology was posted to Sustained Action list.

July 2, 1999 – In response, Cleargreen website posts the following statement: “Recently, we have received a number of reports and queries from practitioners of the magical passes concerning the emergence of a renewed interest in the personal history and data of Carlos Castaneda and his colleagues. [The statement then repeats a statement Castaneda had issued a couple of years before on the webpage attempting to deflect interest in his personal history.] Seers, the nagual told us, rather than trying to pigeonhole their fellow beings, prefer to dream them. They know that they have very little time in this organic form, and they want to spend it stuffing themselves with awareness, rather than with useless data. Many times people would make great efforts to meet and talk with the nagual, only to ask: ‘Where do you live?’ ‘How old are you?’ ‘Are you married?’ and the like. These are not the real questions, he told us, though they seem to be. The real questions are the ones we should ask ourselves, such as: ‘What are you doing with your life? Are you following a path with heart?’ If it is not a path with heart, he said, then we should have the courage to drop it, and find something that is, before our short  time on earth runs out. [They then quote a passage from Castaneda’s introduction to the 30^th anniversary edition of The Teachings of Don Juan, claiming that warriors can’t be concerned with “everyday matters” because “the only thing that matters is their encounter with infinity.”] For don Juan, this was an energetic fact. Like don Juan, and the seers of his lineage, Carlos Castaneda spoke in terms of energetic facts: conclusions arrived at by those seers based on their ability to see energy directly as it flows in the universe. In describing those energetic facts, Carlos Castaneda’s effort was to make a bridge – for his apprentices and for all the practitioners of the magical passes – between the cognitive world of everyday life and the cognitive world of the seers of ancient Mexico. He told us he had brought us to that bridge, but that crossing it would be the voluntary decision of each of us individually. For those interested – let’s do it!”

Late 1999 – Carol moved out of her Westwood apartment and in with her mother in the Pacific Palisades.

1999 – 2003 and beyond – Cleargreen’s lies about the whereabouts of Florinda, Taisha and the other Missing Women continue for years thereafter.

February 15, 2003 – Scattered bones are found in the Panamint Dunes by hikers. Subsequent investigation led Inyo County investigators to link the remains with the red Ford Escort Nury had abandoned nearby that was found on May 2, 1998.

February ? 2006 – The remains discovered by hikers in 2003 were positively identified as Nury Alexander’s using advanced DNA testing techniques. They were compared to DNA samples taken from Partin’s mother and three sisters.

May 27, 2006 – Carol’s mother Harriet Witbeck Pohlman died.

November 30, 2007 – Carol’s mother’s home in the Pacific Palisades sold for $1,705,000 (it was originally listed on September 20, 2007). Carol found another place to live in the same area.

Carol’s ‘Comeback’ – Sochi Workshop Appearance

July 2015 – Cleargreen announced a September three-day workshop in Sochi, Russia, would feature Carol Tiggs. This would be her first appearance at a workshop, or publicly at all, since the Ontario workshop she spoke at in early August 2018. The full title of this extravaganza, which was also to include Renata Murez, is: A Tensegrity® and Theater of Infinity® Workshop & Special Event for Beginners- Threads of our Destiny: Intent in our Life. This announcement further teased Carol would “be visiting workshops in Europe, Mexico, and the United States in the near future.” Russia is a notable venue for this first appearance because Cleargreen’s following there had long been particularly fervent and devoted–so much so that they had scheduled one or more workshops in the country virtually every year they organized workshops since 1999.

August 2015 – Carol Tiggs attended and completed, on August 15, 2015, a Vocal Yoga course, the “Heather Lyle Vocal Yoga” method, in a certification program with fingerboard exercises, straw exercises and tube exercises. The are still pictures of her, including the one below (Carol is in the back row, far left), from the certification class on the group’s Facebook page.



September 5-7, 2015 – Carol does indeed show up for two talks at the Cleargreen Tensegrity event in Dederkoi, Sochi Coast, Russia. At least two different sets of notes/summaries of her talks and responses to questions at this workshop can be found in this thread on Sustained Reaction. She began her first appearance with a version of her hypnotic trance induction technique, complete with the black contact lenses she used to wear for these on several occasions before Castaneda died. It’s a fairly effective technique, one she learned from books and videos on hypnotism that ended up for awhile in Amy’s garage and that I and David Worrell had a chance to review back in 1998. Since the theme of this workshop was Intent, she then purported to tell the story of the first “awakening” of her intent, after she claimed to have spent months in a sanitarium for children afflicted with asthma and other serious ailments. Per the summaries of her talk on SR, the facility was more like a concentration camp or even a death camp because most of the children that came there did not last long. Carol claimed she would make a friend and they would form an alliance…but then her new friend would get sicker and die. Carol told the crowd she wanted more than anything to leave that terrible place and could not understand why her “race car driver father” had not come to get her. But unbeknownst to her, her father had been in an accident and gotten amnesia, and in the family drama around that, she was forgotten and abandoned at the sanitarium. So she ended up there for months. Finally, fed up, she claimed she at last said, “No!” The Russian translator yelled, “Nyet!” Carol repeated “Nyet!” and slashed her hand down in front her. Melodramatically, she claimed this was her intent awakening from her real self, saying “No more! I am going to change it all!” She then claimed that was when her father suddenly regained his memory, jumped from his bed and asked, “What about Chickie?” That being his pet name for her. So the same day her father and the family all allegedly came to claim her from the imaginary horrible place they had allegedly left her. Not only that, but the next week, the whole clinic was “shut down” because of their bad practices. “No more children ever died there.” And since then Carol claimed she had had no more asthma attacks!” [Another lie. And what crappy telenovelas was Carol watching anyway, that inspired such a ridiculous attempt at a tearjerker story?] The crowd was then instructed on standing and saying “Nyet!” to whatever they want to change, and slashing their hands. Renata joins in helping lead the attendees to do this.

This strikes me as a perfect example of what a lazy and lousy liar Carol is compared to Castaneda and Florinda. They at least specialized in plausible lies, well told, that weren’t patently ridiculous on their face. A sanitarium for kids with asthma in suburban Los Angeles in the late 1950s? Where kids keep dying for months, unreported, with no action? And her father in this scenario is a race car driver? Dr. Max Pohlman, the ear, nose and throat doctor, who not only paid to send her to the best private school in town, but then to U.C. Berkeley and Stanford, as well as expensive summer school programs at Harvard and elsewhere? And her long suffering mother Harriett simply forgot she deposited her first born in a sanitarium for months because of the shocking race car accident that her husband never had? Shame on you for such melodramatic drivel Carol!

But the insanely lame coup de grâce for Carol’s first Cleargreen appearance in 17 years (besides refusing to answer any questions about what happened to her when she was gone for 10 years, or the fate of the missing women, despite attendees having left questions along those lines for her in a box for that purpose) was when she introduced a supposed “energy body” technique to attendees by making up a ridiculous story as to don Juan having taught it to her when they first met. This story–used to make the “straw phonation” technique she had learned the month before when becoming a certified vocal yoga instructor seem special and “sorcereric”–wildly contradicts the two prior versions of her first meeting with don Juan that she and Castaneda had given. (For David’s comparison of the now three very different stories of Carol first meeting don Juan, see this post.) [Thanks to “Senor Wenceslao” on Sustained Reaction for ferreting out and blowing the whistle on this lazy fabrication.]

In sum, Carol’s very sad workshop “comeback” after all these years only confirmed what those of us who had watched and known her through the years had long come to realize: Carol is nothing without the svengali who scripted, staged and oversaw her appearances as one of the two most important living protagonists of his elaborate myth. As Bruce Wagner told Amy Wallace following Castaneda’s death regarding Carol, “She is no more fit to take on the job of leader than I am to redo the plumbing in your house.” Far from being a supremely powerful “sorceress” who “rides the Death Defier,” or even “superpussy,” she is a pathetic victim of her own and Castaneda’s grandiose web of lies aimed at making a narcissist loser seem special enough to merit others’ attention and admiration. And the supreme irony, in my mind, is that all these years after Castaneda’s death and his elevation of Ms. Tiggs as supernatural being, she and the rest of the remaining charlatans at Cleargreen are reduced to peddling bogus “breath techniques,” exactly like the many gurus Castaneda claimed to have once visited and mercilessly lampooned to us in Sunday sessions.

April 16-17, 2016 – Carol was advertised by Cleargeen to be at, and apparently did appear at a workshop in Merida, Mexico, for which I can find no notes or even a summary on the Internet now–it was that memorable. The other once teased appearances never materialized. One can assume that the easily punctured lies she told at her very anticlimactic Sochi appearance, together with the complete lack of workshop activity now from Cleargreen, makes the likelihood of any more public outings from the Nagual Woman virtually nil. The circus appears to have finally closed up the tent and its star attraction has quit for good, albeit 25 years too late.

2023 – Dun & Bradstreet listed Muni Aranha as the contact for Laugan Productions, Inc., 9301 Wilshire Blvd., #507, Beverly Hills CA 90210. They also showed the annual income (for those Tensegrity videos) as $110,000, down 4% from the prior year.

June 24, 2024 – Muni Aranha left a positive review for the good service she had getting her Honda Accord smog checked at Santa Monica Motors. Maybe she didn’t realize they post those on their website.

Reni Replaces Carol as Cleargreen CEO

July 10, 2024 – Carol is replaced as Cleargreen CEO by Renata Murez on the annual corporate information statement Cleargreen files with the California Secretary of State as California stock corporation. [Muni had been listed as CEO in the prior year’s filing.]

©️ 2024 by Richard Jennings, all rights reserved

• Carol Tiggs Speech to Cleargreen Group at Tula
• Blue Scout Chronology
• Florinda Donner Chronology
• Taisha Abelar: Chronology of a True Believer
• True Believers believe in ‘Energy’
• Cleargreen’s statement ‘responding’ to questions regarding Carol Tiggs & Reactions thereto