2024 Update Summary
[My profound thanks to Paul M. for his feedback on a draft of this updated chronology, and for his invaluable translation of portions of Manuel Carballal’s La Vida Secreta de Carlos Castaneda (2018) which is referenced below.]
Some of the stories later told at workshops that are in no way mentioned in Being-in-Dreaming (despite the fact that that book seemed aimed at detailing all of Florinda’s relatively few encounters with don Juan during the period covered by that book) include:
- Twice being taken up into the hills by don Juan (with Taisha on hand for at least one of these times) to disrobe and experience the “wind”;
- Don Juan’s request that Florinda “find out about intent for him,” and her returning months later after exhaustively researching the subject, only to have him ask her, “Why do you want to be a stupid cunt all your life?”;
- Being told by don Juan not to use other people for help with her research in the Amazon (when she had earlier claimed in The Witch’s Dream that this instruction was given to her by Old Florinda long after don Juan was gone);
- Don Juan showing her his penis after instructing Old Florinda to “show me her pussy”;
- Don Juan telling her she should never wear panties, and that female “discharges” are only the result of “the womb [being] ill because of not using its second function”;
- Don Juan giving her the “not-doings” of not wearing clothes, wearing different shoes on each foot, and adorning her naked body with insects or vegetables;
- Don Juan telling her to cut her long beautiful hair (although she had earlier claimed at a different workshop that the short length was the result of having lice and getting totally shaved following her trip to the Amazon, long after don Juan was gone);
- Asking don Juan about the female entity that grabbed Castaneda’s VW van when she was driving it (with Taisha as passenger) in L.A.; and
- “Going out socially with don Juan,” including once explaining peevishly to don Juan why she had turned down going out for dinner with don Juan, Castaneda, Taisha, Carol and Old Florinda.
Meanwhile, Shabono, Florinda’s 1982 account of living for a year (in 1976? 1977?) with Yanoámo Indians in the Amazon, not only filches details, terminology and whole scenes from a real account of a white woman’s experience of living with those Indians that was published in 1971, but is also impossible to fit within Florinda’s known and documented presence in Los Angeles during the mid-seventies (so much so that her former doctoral committee published a letter in 1983 stating they were “puzzled” how a graduate student, who did not leave UCLA until the fall of 1977, would never have mentioned to any of her advisors such harrowing and exciting anthropological experiences, which she variously indicated to interviewers took place in 1975-1976 or 1976-1977). And the account in her 1985 book The Witch‘s Dream of many months–immediately before the year in the Amazon–supposedly spent with traditional curers in Venezuela is similarly contradictory of the known facts of Florinda’s life in Los Angeles during that period.
Florinda’s credibility further suffers from the many other claims she made during the course of workshops that can readily be proven false. For example, she claimed “Tycho Thal,” the so-called “Orange Scout” was her natural daughter (from a liason with “a huge, fat Indian from Oaxaca,” through a process “very much directed by don Juan”). In reality, the younger “Ms. Thal” is actually the former Premajyoti Galvez y Fuentes, who only got involved with Castaneda and company in the early ’90s, and who filed to change her name to Tycho Thal in September 1993. Florinda also claimed that “Blue Scout” was Carol’s daughter; that Florinda had first met Kylie in Norway (where Kylie was supposedly from), when Kylie was actually from the midwest; and, in introductions of the “non-group” group on a couple of occasions in 1997, that Reni was “finishing her law degree,” Zaia “had” her Ph.D., and that “Dr. Miles Reid” was a “surgeon.” [While those who discount these various fabrications as mere “stalking” are certainly free to do so, please note how many of these false statements seem intended to aggrandize the people referred to, seemingly in an effort to heighten their importance and credibility as people having real “sorceric” teachings to impart.]
As the following chronology further details, Florinda failed at every opportunity to be honest with journalists as to the fact she had never received a PhD from UCLA. Along with Taisha, she permitted photos of herself both to be taken and published in martial arts magazines in 1974 and 1975, despite Castaneda and company’s repeated claim that don Juan instructed his apprentices not to allow their pictures to be taken. She and Taisha likewise posed for photos at Florinda’s brother’s wedding in Caracas in 1975. She responded to a 1997 question about the whereabouts of Josefina and the other Little Sisters by claiming they had “left” in 1985, whereas on a few occasions at workshops in 1993, Florinda had described at length the then-current occupations of the Genaros and Little Sisters, whom she claimed they still interacted with. Finally, there is the story of Old Florinda and don Genaro trashing Florinda’s brand new sports car by sending it down a hill into a ravine, which Florinda told at four different workshops from 1996 to 1997.
That story usually ended with the claim Florinda no longer drove (except to back the car out of the driveway, or around the block) because of Old Florinda’s injunction against her driving (purportedly both because her fast driving was endangering her life, and distracting her from her sorceric tasks). In reality, in the years before Florinda claimed to be a “disciple of don Juan,” she admitted in a 1983 interview with the Los Angeles Times that she no longer drove because she had “accumulated too many tickets and forfeited her license.” Research documented in the chronologies also shows that her four-year-old sports car was identified as her separate property when Florinda’s divorce became final in November 1972.
The chronology–an ordering of the key events of Florinda’s life, as discernable from public records, her books, statements made in interviews and at workshops, and interviews with her parents and brother, as well as others who knew her at various times in her life–further identifies documents linking Florinda with Castaneda that have been unearthed to date, including her aborted petition to change her name to “Cristina Casablanca” (a name that Castaneda later urged another girlfriend to take) in the fall of 1972, and her being one of the incorporators of Hermeneutics Unlimited, along with Castaneda, Taisha, Beverly Evans and Joanie Barker, on September 5, 1974. Florinda’s marriage to Castaneda in 1993 (under their respective legal names) is also documented, along with her marriage the following year (apparently without the benefit of an intervening divorce) to Castaneda’s agent and one-time Tensegrity “Element” Tracy Kramer. The chronology concludes with Florinda’s departure, along with Castaneda’s other four closest women associates, and presumed suicide upon his death in April 1998, and Cleargreen’s subsequent repeated invocation of her name as one of the three “supervising” the current workshops, along with their purported, but highly unlikely, stories about instructors’ prior encounters with Florinda related to their teaching of Tensegrity.
Florinda Donner Chronology: Thal Tales – 2024 Edition
February 15, 1944 – Regine Margarete Thal was born in Amberg, Bavaria, Germany (per her Petition for Naturalization, dated February 10, 1971). [Her birth in Germany as indicated on this petition was confirmed by her younger brother, Ulrich Thal, in interviews with Manuel Carballal for his book La Vida Secreta de Carlos Castaneda (2018). In Witch’s Dream, however, she wrote, in the context of being told she needed to return to the place of her birth for an assignment from a witch in that book, that Venezuela was where she was born. She indicated in a name change application filed August 18, 1972, that her father’s name was Rudolf Thal, then living in Caracas, Venezuela. In a name change application filed October 4, 1985, she claimed both parents were deceased and that their names were Rudolph Thal and Carolina Claussnitzer. Ulrich Thal confirmed their mother’s name was Katarina Claussnitzer.]
1949 – Florinda’s parents, Rudolf and Katarina Thal, emigrated to Venezuela, along with Regine, Regine’s older sister, and brothers Ludwig and Ulrich. Regine grew up there and became a Venezuelan citizen.
1950s – Florinda told Amy Wallace (then known to the group as “Ellis”) in the mid-90s a favorite memory of her childhood in Caracas: “I had a toy farm, Ellis, and I made all the dolls mate and breed, not only the cows and pigs. I controlled them all, and I loved it! That was my dream, my delight! I always knew I wanted to grow up and run my own human farm, with living people, who I could pair and mate, and whose lives I could play with just like my toy farm dolls!”
1950 – 1956 – Regine Thal attended Colegio Humboldt de Caracas, finishing the 6th grade of primary school there. In a 1973 radio interview, she said she was president of her class there every year from kindergaten through sixth grade. Brother Ulrich described her as extremely restless as a child, never tired. She had a heart condition known as “small heart,” also referred to as “neurocirculatory asthenia,” associated with a small heart shadow on the chest roentgenogram, characterized by weakness or fatigue even after mild exertion, palpitation, dyspnea, and fainting, many of which resemble symptoms in patients with chronic fatigue. Despite this condition she was very active, and her brother said “there was no party where she wasn’t invited and the protagonist.”
1952 – Florinda’s parents bought a plot of land in Colonia Tovar, a mountain town about 41 miles west of Caracas that had been founded by German immigrants in 1843 and that is called “the Germany of the Caribbean.”
1957 – 1961? – Regine was sent to England to study English. She earned a bachelor of languages degree.
1962? – Regine got a job with VIASA Airlines in Caracas, welcoming VIPs at Simón Bolívar International Airport in Maiquetía, Venezuela. That’s where she met Edward M. Steiner, a vice president of Signal Gas & Oil Company.
1966 -1967 – Regine and Edward Steiner spent a few months living in Maracaibo, Venezuela, and then in Mexico before moving to Los Angeles.
December 7, 1966 – Florinda (then Regine Thal) married Edward M. Steiner (a petroleum engineer from Houston) in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. [Per 1972 divorce petition.]
1967 – When Rudolf Thal retired, Florinda’s parents built a home in Colonia Tovar. They lived there in the summer, and spent winters in Germany, in Hirschau, a village in the Bavarian forest near Nuremberg.
December 5, 1967 – Regine Margarete Steiner was admitted to the U.S. for permanent residence. [Alien Registration No. A17 201 677 ca]
1968 – 1970 – Regine and Edward Steiner lived in Manhattan Beach, a beach community south of Los Angeles. Edward travelled a lot for work, to Africa and South America, and Florinda got bored at home. That was why she decided to enroll in UCLA in 1970.
July 1970 – Florinda first met members of don Juan’s party, according to her book Being-in-Dreaming: An Initiation into the Sorcerer’s World. [Florinda described this first meeting in chapter 1, where she explained she decided to cross the border into Mexico “on an impulse,” after attending the baptism of a friend’s child in Nogales, Arizona. As she was leaving the party, one of the other guests, Delia Flores, asked Florinda for a ride to Hermosillo. They spent the night at a hotel in Hermosillo where Florinda had a nightmare, causing her to insist that, “Nothing in the world will make me stay in this hotel. I’m returning to Los Angeles this very instant.” Hardback edition, p. 3.
Delia offered to take Florinda to a healer to “cure” her of her nightmares. It took four hours to reach the healer’s house, “in the outskirts of Ciudad Obregon.” There Florinda, in a “dream,” met Esperanza and four other women, including Old Florinda; Mariano Aureliano [don Juan]; and an “acrobat” who introduced himself as “Mr. Flores.” Later Florinda was asked, “How did you end up in the United States?” Florinda explained she “wanted to go to school,” and that she “was in England first, but I didn’t do much except have a good time.” Florinda was then asked “Are you in search of a man?” She responded, “I suppose I am. What woman isn’t? . . . . Do you have someone in mind? Is this some kind of test?” p. 29. [Note: Florinda is apparently already in the mood to file for divorce, although she doesn’t do so until two years later.]
Delia then took Florinda to meet Esperanza again, this time not in dreaming. At the end of the day, Florinda was given a map and the suggestion that she return to Los Angeles by way of Tucson, where she was to meet Delia at a certain coffee shop specified on the map. When she got to the coffee shop the next afternoon, however, she was met instead by Mariano Aureliano. (Chapter 4) While driving there, Florinda realized she had lost track of a whole day in Ciudad Obregon. After some explanations, Aureliano took Florinda to act out a scene at a diner with a cook he supposedly had a grudge against. Florinda was made to wear a wig and to place a fly on her plate, which later turned out to be a cockroach. The cook was not ruffled, and Florinda was annoyed to later find a spider crawling out from a lettuce leaf. (A few chapters later, we learn that the cook, Joe Cortez, was, of course, Castaneda.)
[Note: Here’s a useful take on Florinda’s description of these events by David Worrell, keeping in mind that Florinda was married at the time: “She is supposed to have been in Nogales, AZ, attending a baptism (on a Saturday), and decides afterwards to give a stranger a ride to Hermosillo where she then decides to spend the night. Then, in the middle of the night (early Sunday morning), she decides to leave and go way down into Mexico to see some curer (it took until two hours past dawn to reach the place). Next, she spends the whole day down there in Mexico, having all sorts of odd experiences, and eventually falls asleep and takes a nap (where she apparently loses an entire day (Monday). Then she spends another day (Tuesday) coming back via Tucson where she horses around with this bunch of odd strangers in some restaurant (including Castaneda, who was supposedly working there, although he was still a student himself at this time), before finally . . . driving back to L.A., all with no mention whatsoever of some possibly worried hubby back in LA.”
David further points out the following discrepancies between Florinda’s claim in Being-in-Dreaming that Castaneda was working as a cook in a Tucson diner in July 1970, and Castaneda’s own description of when he performed the “sorcery task” of working as a cook, and how his books characterize his 1970 activities: In Castaneda’s first Magical Blend interview (which took place in 1980 or ’81, after Second Ring of Power was published in 1977), he claimed that after don Juan left it was the “Toltec woman” who assigned these work “tasks” to him, la Gorda and the Genaros. In that interview, he purportedly described “tasks” of “the last three years”: “The way of teaching of the Toltec Woman is to put us into situations . . . . One of the many tasks was that of cook in those roadside cafes. La Gorda accompanied me that year as a waitress. For more than a year we lived there as Jose Cordoba and wife!” Well, the earliest that “task” could have been, based on this interview, is 1974. And that’s a hell of a long way from July 1970. But even if the interview is somehow in error on the time frame, or Castaneda lied about the time frame, there is still a problem with this little stint of “being a cook” back in 1970, because back then Castaneda himself was still a student. (He didn’t receive his Ph.D. until 1973.) So how could he have spent a whole year being a cook? In A Separate Reality, Castaneda claims only that during 1970 he was taking time off from seeing don Juan and that he spent much of this time working on his field notes. Somewhere near the beginning of 1970, after seeing don Juan in December, he said: “I did not return to Mexico for months.” The next record is from October, 1970.]
September 1970 – Regine Margarita Thal, later known as Florinda, enrolled at UCLA (presumably with credit given for classes elsewhere, since she received her B.A. in ’72).
February 10, 1971 – Regine Margarete Steiner’s Petition for Naturalization was filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, California. The petition listed her address as 2901 Alma Ave., Manhattan Beach, CA 90266. It included an Affidavit of Witnesses signed by Michele N. Nies and William H. Haley, both Manhattan Beach residents, who signed the notarized oath that they had known petitioner (Regine) since February 1, 1968, and that she “has been physically present in the United States for at least 19 months” since that date.
March 26, 1971 – Regine Margarete Steiner’s Petition for Naturalization was granted and certificate no. 9370236 issued.
1971 – Castaneda’s A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan, was published by Simon and Schuster. [Covers the time period from April 2, 1968 – October 18, 1970.]
Fall 1971 – The first point at which Florinda’s encounter with Castaneda in the UCLA lecture hall, described in Chapter 6 of Being-in-Dreaming, might have occurred, since she told Castaneda toward the end of that chapter: “I’ve been studying anthropology since last year” [and only enrolled at UCLA in the Fall of 1970]. “And I don’t really know why . . . . Two subjects that interest me more are Spanish and German literature. To be in the anthropology department defies all I know about myself.” p. 90.
[In chapter 5 of Being-in-Dreaming, Florinda was hiking in the Santa Susana Mountains in Los Angeles when a fog descended and she encountered two men. One introduced himself as “Jose Luis Cortez,” or “Joe,” and his friend as “Gumersindo Evans-Pritchard.” They then indicated that Gumersindo’s estranged father was the famous social anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard, on whom Florinda was doing research for a paper “this term at UCLA.” When Florinda, who introduced herself as a Swede named “Carmen Gebauer,” asked Joe if he was from Argentina (because of his inflection), he told her he was Mexican. In chapter 6, Florinda was seated in a lecture at UCLA where the guest speaker was Joe Cortez, better known around UCLA as Carlos Castaneda, “a well-known anthropologist who had done extensive fieldwork in Mexico,” according to Florinda’s friend who was seated next to her.
Florinda confronted Castaneda at the end of his lecture for lying about his name and the identity of his friend Gumersindo, who he admitted was really named Nestor. As they talked further, Castaneda revealed he had “written a couple of books about sorcery.” He asked her if her name was really “Cristina Gebauer,” and she corrected him, “Carmen Gebauer,” confessing it was the name of a childhood friend she had used. Castaneda then told her the story of his “childhood girlfriend, Fabiola Kunze,” which Florinda suspected was made up, but which contained details that “only a daughter of a German family in the New World would know.” p. 87. Castaneda then embraced Florinda, and she began to cry. At the end of the chapter, Florinda and Castaneda drove to the Santa Susana Mountains and sat overlooking the Indian burial mound, where they’d previously met.]
March 1, 1972 – Florinda and her husband, Edward M. Steiner, separated. [Per divorce petition filed on April 10, 1972.]
April 10, 1972 – Florinda (as Regine M. Steiner) filed for divorce from Edward Steiner, her husband of 5 years and 4 months. [Case No. SWD38436, Los Angeles Superior Court]
May 20, 1972 – Regine M. Steiner (Florinda) and Edward M. Steiner executed a Marital Settlement Agreement. The agreement recited “Whereas, since the marriage of the parties on December 7, 1966, unfortunate differences have arisen between them, and ever since March 1, 1972, they have been living separate and apart . . ..” Husband got sole rights to their joint bank account at Security Pacific. Florinda received as her separate property “the 1968 Kharmann Ghia automobile.” [Interesting, since Florinda later claims at four different workshops that her “brand new sports car” had been destroyed by Old Florinda and Genaro, and that she was thereafter barred by Old Florinda from driving. See below.] Husband got the 1966 Cadillac convertible. Florinda transferred to Husband her interests in their duplex and lot at 2901 Alma Ave., Manhattan Beach, “subject to the right of rent-free possession of said property by Wife” prior to their sale of the property. Husband got to keep his 100 shares of Pennsylvania Railroad Co. common stock and his employee benefit plans at Signal Oil and Gas Co. Husband also got the right to the furniture and furnishings at the Manhattan Beach duplex, subject to Florinda’s “reasonable use thereof” until the residence was sold or she vacated the premises “whichever shall first occur.” Husband agreed to pay to Florinda, in cash, $16,000, of which $3,000 had already been paid, and the remaining $13,000 was to be paid at the close of escrow on sale of the duplex. Husband assumed sole responsibility for the promissory note from Allstate Savings for $65,000 on the property, a second mortgage of $5,000, a loan from Security Pacific for $2,000 and a Barker Brother’s charge account balance of $900. The parties agreed to waive spousal support and inheritance rights.
June 14, 1972 – Florinda filed a financial declaration in her divorce proceedings against Edward M. Steiner. She gave her age as 28, her occupation as “Student,” and listed a fake social security number.
August 7, 1972 – Hearing on Florinda’s divorce action. [Edward M. Steiner didn’t show, and an interlocutory judgment of divorce was granted, which provided that on entry of the final decree, the wife’s name would be restored to Thal.]
September 5, 1972 – Regine M. Steiner (Florinda) filed a petition for change of name to “Cristina Casablanca” [a name that Castaneda later suggested Gloria Garvin change her name to] in L.A. Superior Court. Petition recited that petitioner was born in Germany on February 15, 1944; that she presently resided at 308 Westwood Plaza, Apt. B-304, LA; that her father was Rudolf Thal, who resided at Colonia Tovar, Caracas, Venezuela; and that the reason for the name change request was “Petitioner will shortly be leaving for an extended period of employment South America where a spanish forname [sic] and surname will be of practical assistance in her work. [Case No. WEC26788] [petition later withdrawn]
September 8, 1972 – Regine Thal received a BA in Anthropology from UCLA.
October 27, 1972 – Florinda’s lawyer filed for withdrawal of her petition to change her name (Regine M. Steiner) to Cristina Casablanca.
November 2, 1972 – Final judgment of dissolution filed in Florinda’s divorce action. [SWD38436]
[March 5, 1973 – Time Magazine cover story, “Carlos Castaneda: Magic and Reality.”]
[March 23, 1973 – Castaneda received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from UCLA.]
1973 – Castaneda purchased compound on Pandora Avenue in Westwood where he lived with Joanie Barker, Annamarie Carter, Beverly Evans and Regine Thal.
Spring 1973 – Florinda submitted a proposal to UCLA faculty for a study of curanderos in Tucipata, described as an urban center on the Orinoco river in Venezuela. The proposal stated she had already made a visit to this town.
1973 – Don Juan and his party (except Old Florinda and Zuleica) departed the world. [See, e.g., Bruce Wagner’s 1994 Details Magazine piece: “In The Fire From Within Castaneda wrote that don Juan and his party evanesced sometime in 1973 — fourteen navigators gone, to the ‘second attention.’”]
1973 – Florinda’s younger brother Ulrich Thal visited her in Los Angeles. He met Castaneda on that trip when he came to the hotel where Ulrich was staying for breakfast. Ulrich thought he was lovely, empathetic, charismatic, and was impressed that he listened and seemed interested in what Ulrich had to say. Florinda by contrast, “didn’t listen, she was always interrupting.”
Late 1973 – early 1974? – Florinda and Castaneda visited Florinda’s parents in Colonia Tovar, Venezuela, and stayed for three days. Florinda introduced Castaneda to them as her husband. (Florinda remained in touch with her parents, calling them virtually every week, throughout the rest of her life until April 1998.)
January 13, 1974 – Regine’s ex-husband, Edward M. Steiner, died in Hawaii, at age 44. (He had apparently moved to Honolulu after the divorce. His father, H.C. “Pat” Steiner, who had been vice chairman of Goodyear Australia, had settled there in 1958. He had also remarried, a Phyllis M.S. Wong. Edward M. Steiner is buried in Diamond Head Memorial Park.)
June 14, 1974 – Regine Thal received her Masters in Anthropology from UCLA.
1974 – Florinda’s younger brother Ulrich Thal again visited her in Los Angeles. He didn’t meet Castaneda this time, but Florinda did take him to the group’s compound in Westwood. He said Regina was devoted to martial arts at the time, and competed in international championships, for example in Peru, along with Annamarie Carter.
September 5, 1974 – Castaneda, Taisha (as Annamarie Carter), Florinda (Regine Thal), Beverly Evans and Joanie (as Mary Joan Barker) signed Articles of Incorporation for Hermeneutics Unlimited, subsequently filed with Secretary of State 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 Suite 418, 9200 Sunset Blvd., LA 90069.] [Name was later changed to Laugan Productions, Inc.]
November 1974 – Samurai, the official publication of the All-American Karate Federation, published an article by Mauricio Hernandez on “Karate and Women,” in which “Gina Thal” was pictured. [I thought don Juan’s apprentices weren’t supposed to have their pictures taken.] The same issue contained Ms. Thal’s article, co-written with Annamarie Carter, entitled “Karate for Children.”
[June 13, 1975 – Taisha received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from UCLA.]
1975 – Florinda and Annamarie Carter travelled to Venezuela for the wedding of Florinda’s brother Ulrich to his fiance Clara in Caracas. Both posed for wedding photos. This visit was the last time Ulrich would see his sister. The two were only there for the day, leaving the next day.
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.)
April 1976 – Florinda was advanced to doctoral candidacy in UCLA’s Department of Anthropology.
[1976 – Richard de Mille’s Castaneda’s Journey: The Power and the Allegory was published.]
1976? – Florinda’s UCLA graduate committee approved her dissertation proposal for the study of curing practices at Curiepe, on the coastal region of Venezuela.
1976 – 1977 – The year that Florinda claimed, in a 1982 interview with the St. Petersburg Times, to have lived with the Yanomami. (See April 25, 1982 article below.) This would have had to have followed the months she supposedly spent living with a curer in Venezuela, as described in her 1985 book The Witch’s Dream [see below], followed by over a year in the tiny jungle village described in her 1982 book Shabono [see below].
December 1977 – Regine Thal left the UCLA graduate program, without receiving a Ph.D.
1978 – Castaneda, Florinda, Taisha and Joanie Barker visited Byron de Ford in Costa Rica. Castaneda gave a lecture in a room adjacent to the National Theater of Costa Rica, and a talk at the home of playwright Daniel Gallegos. Ramón de León remembers Florinda on this occasion as “an adorable and strange creature, totally blonde, short hair, a very cute ‘casquette’ type,” whom Castaneda nicknamed “my Nibelunga.” He further described her as blue eyed, with “penetrating gaze, nervous smile, very mischievous and even hard.”
1980 – Amy Wallace met Florinda when Castaneda brought her to the Wallace family home in Brentwood, California, where Amy was visiting from Berkeley while working on the second Book of Lists with her family. Castaneda and Florinda took Amy to a seafood restaurant in Santa Monica. Amy was struck by Florinda’s fiery, brazen sexuality, in contrast to the relatively demure Annamarie Carter, especially after the two revealed to her that Florinda and Annamarie had spent over a decade in each other’s nearly constant company at that point. Florinda told Amy that she and Annamarie drove each other “nearly berserk,” and that they used their irritation with each other to “hone” themselves. “Even a small thing, like who got to use the washing machine, was grounds for training–deconstructing–the ego.”
[1980 – Richard de Mille’s critical tome, The Don Juan Papers, was published.]
1981 – Castaneda’s The Eagle’s Gift was published by Simon and Schuster. When Silvio Manuel “sees” that the problem with Castaneda’s party is that Castaneda was not the right nagual for them, the Nagual woman supervised Castaneda and la Gorda in a series of not-doings. After an incident on a bridge, don Juan’s party and all his apprentices met 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.” p. 306. [Taisha and Florinda were apparently not in this group. La Gorda is, however, mentioned throughout the book.] Castaneda ended the book by describing 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.
September 3, 1981 – Castaneda signed a power of attorney naming Regina Thal, who likewise executed a power of attorney naming Castaneda. [Both documents were recorded on September 21, 1981: 81-09369832 and 09369833.]
September 4, 1981 – Castaneda revoked the power of attorney he had previously granted to Anna Marie Carter. [Document was recorded on December 23, 1981 as 81-0918985.] [Note: Mt. St. Helens erupted cataclysmically the previous year, on May 18, 1980, and Castaneda later stated at Sunday and night sessions that Taisha had invested a lot of their monies in Mt. St. Helens real estate before the eruption.]
April? 1982 – Florinda’s Shabono: A visit to a remote and magical world in the South American rainforest, was published by Delacorte Press. [A May 9, 1982, L.A. Times ad included a prominent quote from Castaneda. Florinda dedicated the book to “the five-legged spider that carries me on its back.” It was a Book of the Month Club alternate.]
In Chapter 1, Florinda explained she accepted a friend’s offer to go hunting up the Orinoco River at the urging of Dona Mercedes [the “Mercedes Peralta” she later writes about in 1985’s The Witch’s Dream], “one of three curers” she was working with “in the Barlovento area.” Florinda indicated she had been planning to return to Los Angeles, and that the Orinoco hunting trip was supposed to be for two weeks. This trip, which led to Florinda’s months with the Yanomama Indians purportedly described in Shabono, therefor occurs “[a]fter transcribing, translating, and analyzing the numerous tapes and hundreds of pages of notes gathered during months of field work among the three Barlovento curers” (notes that she and dona Mercedes later burn, per the scene described in Shabono). A week later, then, Florinda was “on my way in a small plane to one of the Catholic missions on the upper Orinoco with my friend,” to meet the other members of the hunting party, who had set out by boat a few days before with the gear and provisions necessary for two weeks in the jungle.
On arrival, Florinda suddenly decided to forego the hunting trip and instead to spend the two weeks at the mission. A couple days later, and against the advice of the priest who ran the mission, Florinda was on her way into the jungle with an old native woman, Angelica, and their guide, Milagros. Some days later, Angelica died, and Florinda continued with Milagros to the tiny settlement (or “shabono”) that Angelica had come from, and which becomes the primary focus of Florinda’s book. Six months later, Florinda sent a letter back to the mission by way of Milagros informing the priest of her plan “to stay for at least two more months with the Iticoteri,” and asking him to so inform her friends in Caracas. (Trade paperback version p. 61.) Florinda continued to learn the tribal language and to find out what she could about the practices of the “shapori,” the Yanomama term for shaman, and their use of “epena,” a hallucinogen.
Florinda was later warned about what the shapori of another tribe would do if he got his hands on her: “’A shapori isn’t an ordinary man. He wouldn’t want you for his pleasure. A shapori needs the femaleness in his body.’” An older woman, Hayama, asked her, “‘Do you know where that femaleness is?’” When Florinda responded, “no,” Hayama “looked at me as if she thought I was slow-witted. ‘In the vagina,’ she finally said, almost choking on her laughter.” p. 270. Hayama described the “old shapori” as “stronger than any man in the shabono,” and claimed, “’There are nights when that old man goes from hut to hut, sticking his cock inside every woman he can find.’” Id.
Milagros returned, some weeks later, with pencils and soap for Florinda from the mission. Florinda described Milagros entertaining the tribe with exaggerated and absurd stories about the white men. According to Florinda, “If ever anyone in the audience dared to doubt the veracity of his account, Milagros, in a very dignified manner, would turn to me. ‘White girl, tell them if I’m lying.’ No matter how much he had exaggerated, I never contradicted him.” p. 196.
Florinda was ultimately taken back to the mission by Iramamowe, a shapori, who, en route, drugged and had sex with Florinda, who recorded: “I no longer knew if I was awake or dreaming. At moments I vaguely remembered old Hayama’s words about shamans needing the femaleness in their bodies.” p. 288. Florinda described the experience in an odd mix of simple description and dream imagery: “I was crushed by the weight of his body and my arms folded beneath his chest. He whispered words into my ears that I could not hear. . . . . Iramamowe’s heavy body held me; his eyes sowed seeds of light inside me; his gentle voice urged me to follow him through dreams of day and night, dreams of rainwater and bitter leaves. There was nothing violent about his body imprisoning mine. Waves of pleasure mingled with visions of mountains and rivers, faraway places where hekuras dwell. I dance with the spirits of animals and trees, gliding with them through mist, through roots and trunks, through branches and leaves. I sang with the voices of birds and spiders, jaguars and snakes. I shared the dreams of all those who feed on epena, on bitter flowers and leaves. . . . . Greedily I drank the dark bearer of visions until once again I was suspended in a timelessness that was neither day or night. I was one with the rhythm of Iramamowe’s breath, with the beat of his heart, as I merged with the light and the darkness inside him.” p. 287-88.
When the drug wore off, Florinda imagined Iramamowe might keep her there rather than return her to the mission, so she bashed him in the head with a water gourd. After they patch up this little misunderstanding, Iramamowe explained, “I wanted to take the hekuras I once saw in your eyes,” i.e., tiny humanoid spirits that the older shapori had “seen within her” also. “’Every time I lay with you and felt the energy bursting inside you, I hoped to lure the spirits into my chest,’ Iramamowe said. ‘But they didn’t want to leave you.’ He turned his eyes to me, intense with protest. ‘The hekuras would not answer my call; they would not heed my songs. And then I became afraid that you might take the hekuras from my body.’” p. 292. He then sent her on her way back to the mission by canoe, and she gave him “the stone the shaman Juan Caridad gave me” as a parting gift.
On her return to the mission, instead of taking the priest up on his offer to “radio your friends in Caracas to pick you up with their plane,” Florinda hung out for an extended period. She was grateful that the two other Europeans there never “asked me where I had been for over a year, what I had done, or what I had seen,” since “I would not have been able to answer—not because I wanted to be secretive, but because there was nothing to say.” p. 299. Milagros showed up, and Florinda told him, “I’m going back to Los Angeles.” After a brief conversation regarding the lack of words for “thank you” or “goodbye” in their language, Florinda noticed that Milagros was gone. She concluded the book with the following lines: “From across the river, out of the distant darkness, the wind carried the Iticoteri’s laughter. ‘Goodbye is said with the eyes.’ The voice rustled through the ancient trees, then vanished, like the silvery ripples on the water.” p. 301.
April 25, 1982 – The St. Petersburg Times published an article on Florinda and Shabono by Maria D. Vesperi entitled, “Mystery clouds the air in tale of Indian life.” According to this article, Florinda stated that she lived with the Yanomami during 1976-77. The reviewer, Vesperi, had a Masters and Doctorate in Anthropology from Princeton. In relevant part, the review reads: “Ms. Donner’s text provides no new information about traditional Yanomami culture–and no information at all about their current situation. The knowledgable reader is also left to wonder when and under what auspices Ms. Donner’s fieldwork as an anthropologist was conducted. Isabel Geffner, publicity manager for Delacorte, seems unconcerned about Ms. Donner’s lack of documentation or other evidence of authenticity. ‘We hoped anthropologists wouldn’t review the book,’ she told the St. Petersburg Times.
. . . . Tracing Ms. Donner’s credentials is not an easy job. She is not affiliated with any major anthropological association, has no previous publications in the field, and has not completed a doctoral dissertation.
. . . . Ms. Donner herself is hard to contact. But she did respond–through Delacorte–to a request for a telephone interview. She called several times ‘from a friend’s house,’ but claimed the Times could not return the calls because she doesn’t have a telephone. [Doesn’t sound like the Florinda I knew, who was constantly on the telephone, interfacing for Castaneda.]
Ms. Donner said she legally changed her name four years ago, thus explaining the confusion at UCLA. She prefers to keep her original name a secret.
. . . . Ms. Donner confirms that she is currently ‘off the record’ at UCLA. She has not really decided whether to finish her graduate studies, and does not plan an academic career. But she does plan to continue her research into shamanism and curing–research she has pursued over the past 10 years in association with Castaneda. ‘This is not research that will be published.’ she says firmly.
Ms. Donner says she lived with the Yanomami during 1976-1977. She did not plan to make her trip a ‘study’ and did not take notes on her experiences. She says Shabono was written later ‘as an exercise’ and was never really intended for publication.
Despite Ms. Donner’s claim, Shabono has found its way into print. It reportedly has been selected as a Book-of-the-Month Club offering, complete with a glossary of Yanomami words and their phonetic pronunciations.
Delacorte Press dismisses concern over the book’s omissions as bad faith on the part of academic writers who resent popularization. Yet there is a long-established tradition of ‘popular’ anthropology, stretching from the early writings of Margaret Mead to the recent works of Marvin Harris. While these books differ widely in theory and scope, they share a respect for the reader’s right to evaluate content – based on an open presentation of the how, where and why of the authors’ research. The mystery and hocus-pocus surrounding Shabono leads this reader to believe that it will not find a place among them.”
May 9, 1982 – The Los Angeles Times published a book review of Shabono [front page, book review section] that took a dim view of the book as factual anthropology, calling it instead “anthro-romance.”
1982 – Castaneda and Florinda attended a dinner party given by Jacques Barzaghi, California Governor Jerry Brown’s longtime advisor. [Celeste Fremon, who first met Castaneda and Florinda while interviewing Castaneda in 1972 for articles that subsequently appeared in Seventeen and Harper’s, recounted seeing them again there in her July 3, 1998, L.A. Weekly memoir.]
Sept. 11, 1983 – The Los Angeles Times published an article by Ann Japenga, “The Saga of a Cultural Crossover,” based on an interview with Florinda. The following are excerpts from this article (with my commentary appearing in blue): “Currently pursuing her Ph.D. at UCLA [not true at the time: see letter from Florinda’s former doctoral committe below], Donner divides her time between field work from her base in Caracas, Venezuela, where she grew up, and a small apartment in Westwood furnished only with a typewriter, folding table and sleeping mat. She doesn’t drive a car (there is no speed limit in Caracas, she explained, so driving in Los Angeles by Caracas rules, she accumulated too many tickets and forfeited her license). [Oh, so that’s why she no longer drove the ’68 Karmann Ghia she salvaged from her 1972 divorce. She should have told Old Florinda, it would have saved her having to shove that imaginary “brand new sports car” into the ravine.]
As a child growing up in Caracas, Donner used to hike into the jungle surrounding the city to hunt orchids with her parents, immigrants from Germany and Sweden. Once she met a 7-year-old girl who had lived deep in the jungle among the Indians. It was Donner’s first exposure to the hidden world beyond the fringes of the forest. Donner recalled that the meeting left a great impression on her: ‘She (the girl) showed me a shrunken head, one with white hair. I knew that the white hair had once been blonde, like mine. Then she started to dance around and around. She was completely wild. I was enchanted.’
When she came to UCLA, Donner first studied healing practices in El Monte and other nearby communities, but her ambition was to study the Latin American curing practices her nanny had introduced her to. Donner traveled to Barlovento and lived for a year in a one-room shack with an old healer woman who chain-smoked cigarettes.
Donner soon reached an impasse in her studies. She said she witnessed successful healings—particularly in the realm of psychiatry—but the old woman’s practices were inconsistent. There was no way for Donner to make her research conform to a thesis. The healer argued: ‘What difference does it make what I do now and what I did a few months ago? [Or “what I say now and what I’ll say at workshops in a few years?”] All that matters is that the patients get well.’
While she was struggling with a solution to her academic problem, Donner was invited by another old woman to accompany her to her village deep in the jungle. In hopes of observing healing practices far from the influences of white society [not a rationale for the hike she gives in Being-in-Dreaming], Donner followed. She left with a knapsack, sneakers and a diary. Donner recalled: ‘I didn’t expect to be gone more than a month. I had only one pair of jeans. I didn’t have enough shampoo.’
One day a group of children playing with Donner’s belongings mischievously burnt her notepads on the hearth and dumped them into the river. [Well, at least those kids were thorough.] . . . .
‘The fear left me then,’ Donner recalled. ‘It didn’t matter anymore if I would ever come back.’ [But what about your desperate love for Castaneda, as you described it to don Genaro in Being-in-Dreaming? Wouldn’t you miss him? See summary of Being-in-Dreaming.]
In a sequence she describes as more amusing than frightening, a neighboring tribe made a bungling attempt to abduct Donner. She was in great demand because the Indians believed she might be that rare thing—a female shaman. [Damn, seems like these kinds of abductions happen any time Flo gets around those native peoples—even when she’s just minding her own business, dancing naked on tabletops in Houston. See summary of Being-in-Dreaming.]
‘From the very beginning, they thought I had powers,’ Donner said. ‘They thought I had spirits in my chest.’ In a ritual usually reserved for men, Donner partook of the hallucinogenic epena (snuff from the bark of an epena tree) and had a vision of a hummingbird hekura, or spirit, residing in her chest. It served to increase the fascination she held for the Indians, who already were uncertain how to regard the slender blonde anthropologist [manque].
Donner’s strange appearance had other advantages. Most anthropologists are to an extent excluded from the lives they study because they are men. Larger than their subjects, and often bearded after spending months in the field, they are seen to be in competition for women and game.
Donner on the other hand, appeared androgynous and insignificant when seen beside the tribe’s big-boned women. No one saw her as a threat. ‘Even the women weren’t jealous of me because their men didn’t like me,’ Donner said. [Well, unless you count those two shapori who were supposedly so anxious to get into your shredded jeans.]
‘If I go into the field now, it’s so easy for me to be an anthropologist,’ Donner added. ‘I know it’s because I’ve learned to follow certain precepts.’
Donner said professors have told her that to defend herself against the scorn of hard-line anthropologists, she should complete work on her Ph.D. [Apparently not UCLA professors, who didn’t even know who “Donner” was until she got in touch with them after this article appeared.] Although she continues work on her thesis [a baldface lie, see letter from her former doctoral committe below], Donner said she doesn’t feel the need to prove her professionalism. [Some tasks are just too large, even for sorcery.]
1983 – An article by Rebecca B. De Holmes of Caracas, Venezuela, was published in American Anthropology [Vol. 85, p. 664], entitled, “Shabono: Scandal or Superb Social Science?” De Holmes described extensive similarities between Florinda’s book and events and language contained in Ettore Biocca’s Yanoáma (Dutton 1971), the oral autobiography of Helena Valero, a Caucasian girl kidnapped by Venezuelan Indians. See Comparison of Shabono with Yanoáma.
December 1983 – Letter from Florinda’s former doctoral thesis advisors concerning questions about Shabono was published in Anthropology Newsletter. (American Anthropological Association): “As the former committee of a previously registered graduate student, now turned author, it is incumbent on us to provide some information to the serious implications raised by Holmes (AA 1983:664), who strongly suggests affinities of this book with a previously published account of life with the Yanoáma by Helena Valero (1971). When Shabono was first published, this committee did express our concern privately to a prominent Yanomama scholar. Since that time three issues now force us to make a public statement. The first is the commentary by Holmes; the second is the fact that the author of Shabono, Florinda Donner, has been reported by the press as currently pursing her studies at UCLA (Japenga 1983), and the third is the reported chronology of the Yanomama peregrination which appears to show that it was done while Donner was a student under our supervision. . . . . It should be immediately pointed out that the publication of Shabono was four years after Donner had allowed her graduate studies at UCLA to lapse, and that there had been no formal connection between this student and her committee since the fall of 1977. Indeed, on publication of this book in 1982, this committee was not even aware that its author was our ex-student. It was only after one reviewer, learning from the publishers that Donner had been at UCLA and eventually tracking down her chairman, that the connection was made (reported in Vesperi 1982). On learning that her student identity had now been discovered, Donner telephoned the chairman and acknowledged that she had changed her name and written this book.
Briefly, all that we are advised to report on Donner’s graduate career is the historical record. She entered the anthropology department as a graduate in 1972. She was advanced to doctoral candidacy in April, 1976. She applied successfully for leave of absence for 1977-78, after which time she never re-registered. It is true to state that Ms. Donner was in good scholastic standing when she left.
Donner’s graduate committee approved her dissertation proposal, which was for the study of curing practices at Curiepe, on the coastal region of Venezuela, which she subsequently reported. It may be pertinent to state that the graduate record indicated that another research proposal was earlier made in the spring of 1973 for a study of curanderos in Tucipata, described as an urban center on the Orinoco river in Venezuela. This proposal stated that she had already made a visit to this town.
All the time that Donner was under our supervision she never informed this committee of any extended visit, research or contact with the Yanomama. We find it perplexing that she failed to tell us of this undoubtedly exciting trip and of her traumatic experiences with the people there. Thus this committee regrets that we are unable to provide any information on this reported field experience. It would be helpful if Donner had been precise as to exactly when this trip was made. In Shabono there are no dates whatsoever. It was only subsequent to publication of the book that some dates have been reported to reporters for local presses. These dates have left this committee further puzzled. From Vesperi (1982) the chronology was given out as 1976-77. From Japenga (1983) the dating was extended to ‘about 10 years ago’. This implies that the period was 1974-75, or perhaps 1975-76, which would mean that it was before her research visit to the coast. It is possible that we will never know for sure, as from the helpful interview with Japenga (1983) we learn that ‘Donner said she gave up keeping track of the years when she lived with Ritimi, Tutemi and Texoma, her Yanomama friends, who never saw a need to count higher than three’.” [For the complete text of this letter, click here.]
[1984 – Castaneda’s The Fire From Within published by Simon and Schuster]
1984? – Florinda’s mother Katarina typed the manuscript of Florinda’s The Witch’s Dream from Florinda’s handwritten notes. (Ulrich Thal learned this years later when he was in Germany at his parents home and discovered the notes and typed manuscript.)
October 1984 – Castaneda travelled to Rome with Florinda, apparently to meet Federicio Fellini. Fellini had reportedly wanted to make a movie inspired by Castaneda’s books for years. Florinda and Castaneda both liked to tell stories about the trip. Florinda told Amy that Fellini once rented a car during the trip to show them the countryside. she said he was a terrible driver, not having driven in years, but that he insisted on being their chauffeur. In the front seat beside him was his mistress, and she claimed the two had their hands in each other’s laps while he veered down country roads. Florinda said, “He was too vain to wear his glasses, so he nearly killed us. I was scared to death!” They stopped frequently to drink, and Marcelo Mastroianni joined them. Castaneda claimed Fellini was “in looove with Gina. ‘My darling,’ he would say, ‘you are tiny but you cut like a deadly knife.’ He nicknamed her ‘my little knife.'” Florinda told Amy she loved to sit on Fellini’s lap, “and feel his cheek. In spite of all the alcohol, his skin was smooth and soft, like a child’s, a woman’s.” They both told Amy that Fellini had been infatuated with Florinda, and claimed the director had sent her a dozen roses every day for six months when they returned to Los Angeles.
?July 4, 1985 – La Gorda allegedly died of a brain aneurysm at Castaneda and the Witches’ compound in Westwood. [In 1991, per Jacobo Grinberg’s account of the story as Castaneda told it to him and other visitors from Mexico, it happened the same day as the Mexico City earthquake in 1985, September 19. At a December 1995 Sunday session, Castaneda gave the date as July 4, at 4 PM. A review of all death certificates for females on that date in L.A. County failed to turn up any that matched the information given for la Gorda.] Castaneda, Taisha and Florinda are all on hand, and later sometimes attribute la Gorda’s death to “egomania.” At the Rim Institute in 1993, they explained that la Gorda “got tired of waiting around for Carlos and tried to leap by herself. She died as a result and we buried her.” A participant at another early workshop reported Florinda describing how la Gorda grabbed her by the arm, telling her they were going to leave together. Castaneda, at a Sunday session, said, “Taisha never lost her cool, and told la Gorda to ‘change channels.’ She even blew on her ear to try to move her to change channels, but la Gorda was too locked into her compulsion. Florinda and I ‘went to pieces.’” According to Castaneda, “another fatso,” Cecilia, had to be admitted to a mental institution following la Gorda’s death. Castaneda blamed himself for not seeing that la Gorda had an ego fixation.
[July 8, 1985 – Cecilia Evans, a.k.a. Beverly Evans, nominated and appointed Anna Marie Carter as “the conservator of my person in the event the Court finds it necessary to appoint such a conservator in my behalf. Regine Thal signed as the process server. A hearing was scheduled for Aug. 22, 1985. Case No. P 700369]
1985 – Old Florinda “burned with the fire from within” following la Gorda’s death. [At Omega in 1995, Florinda described watching her from her kitchen window, seeing the orange tree in blossom behind her–clearly a description of the Westwood compound. Old Florinda was allegedly wearing a white dress and sunbonnet.]
1985? – Florinda attended the wedding of Jacques Barzaghi [longtime aide to former Gov. Jerry Brown] and saw Celeste Fremon (who had interviewed Castaneda for the Seventeen Magazine article written by 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 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 Baker, Regina Thal (a.k.a. Florinda Donner), Annamarie Carter and Nuri Alexander. Barry R. Wilk and Jerome A. Ward were named as co-executors. He “expressly and intentionally omitted” Adrian Gerritsen, Jr., a.k.a. C.J. Castaneda, and Maria del Rosario (“Charo”) Peters. (Barry R. Wilk was Castaneda’s lawyer at the time, and in a declaration in the 1999 probate proceedings he stated he began to represent Castaneda in 1975, and that he counseled Castaneda “on his purchase of the Westwood property where he and members of his household resided for the past two and a half decades.”)
October 4, 1985 – Regine Margarita Thal filed for change of name to Florinda Donner. She listed her place of birth as Amberg, Germany; current residence as 11343 Missouri Ave.; stated her parents were both deceased [not true] and that their names were Rudolph Thal and Carolina Claussnitzer. (Her mother, Katarina, was, however, very much alive in 1985, and according to brother Ulrich, actually typed up the manuscript for Florinda’s book Being-in-Dreaming from her handwritten notes.) She listed her nearest living relative as “Annamarie Carter, sister,” residing at 10429 Eastborne Ave. Change was effective Nov. 22, 1985. [C568735].
1985 – Florinda’s The Witch’s Dream, with a Foreword by Carlos Castaneda, was published by Simon and Schuster. [Castaneda wrote, in his two-page foreword: “The work of Florinda Donner has a most special significance for me. It is, in fact, in agreement with my own work, and at the same time it deviates from it. Florinda Donner is my co-worker. We are both involved with the same pursuit; both of us belong to the world of don Juan Matus. . . . . This proximity to Florinda Donner under any other circumstance would unavoidably engender a sense of loyalty rather than one of ruthless examination. But under the premises of the warrior’s path, which we both follow, loyalty is expressed only in terms of demanding the best of ourselves. That best, for us, entails total examination of whatever we do. Following don Juan’s teachings, I have applied the warrior’s premise of ruthless examination to Florinda Donner’s work. I find that for me there are three different levels, three distinct spheres, of appreciation in it. The first is the rich detail of her descriptions and narrative. . . . . The minutiae of daily life, which is commonplace in the cultural setting of the characters she describes, is something thoroughly unknown to us. The second has to do with art. . . . . The third is the honesty, simplicity, and directness of the work. . . . . I can’t help having a warrior’s sense of admiration and respect for Florinda Donner, who in solitude and against terrifying odds has maintained her equanimity, has remained faithful to the warrior’s path, and has followed don Juan’s teachings to the letter.”]
Florinda explained in her author’s note, “In the midseventies, I made a trip to [the northeastern Venezuelan state of] Miranda. Being at that time an anthropology student interested in healing practices, I worked with a woman healer. To honor her request for anonymity, I have given her the name Mercedes Peralta, and I have called her town Curmina.” Florinda further claimed she recorded everything about her dealings with and observations of Peralta in a field diary, and that this book “consists of portions of my field diary and the stories of those patients who were selected by Mercedes Peralta herself. The parts taken from my field diary are written in the first person. I have, however, rendered the patient’s stories into the third person. This is the only liberty I have taken with the material, other than changing the names and the personal data of the characters of the stories.”
Chapter 1 summarizes Florinda’s exposure to don Juan and “nagualism.” She asserted: “Naguals take off the mask that makes us see ourselves and the world we live in as ordinary, lusterless, predictable, and repetitious and put on the second mask, the one that helps us see ourselves—and our surroundings—for what we really are—breathtaking events that bloom into transitory existence once and are never to be repeated again.” (Paperback edition, p. 4.) She explained this book “is not a story about that nagual . . . It is not my task to write about him or even to name him. There are others in his group who do that.” Id. She then related that this nagual “took me to Mexico to meet a strange, striking woman,” Florinda Matus, and that this story is “of one of the many things she made me do.” [This is different from what she later says happened in Being-in-Dreaming, where she wrote that she met the Nagual and Florinda on the same day, and interacted with them together. According to her account there, she was taken down to meet both of those people by another woman, Delia Flores.] The rest of this chapter and the next relate Florinda Donner’s attempts to get Old Florinda to give her greater specificity regarding the following suggested task: “You don’t have to follow it, but if you do, you should go alone to the place where you were born. . . . . Go there and take your chances, whatever they may be.” (Page 6.)
In Chapter 2, Florinda claimed, “Years later, following Florinda’s suggestions, I finally went to Venezuela, the country of my birth.” (Page 8.) She further claimed Old Florinda had admonished her not to “seek counsel from anyone around me during the trip. Knowing that I was in college, she strongly advised me not to use the trappings of academic life while in the field. I should not ask for a grant, have academic supervisors . . . .” Florinda stated her arranging to go to Venezuela on an informal visit followed the original suggestion “[y]ears later.” On the very same page, however, she claimed “[Old] Florinda praised me for my speed and thoroughness.”
During the course of Florinda’s increasingly desperate attempts to get more guidance on the details of her “task” from Old Florinda, Old Florinda remonstrated her confusingly, “I’m not your teacher; I’m not your mentor; I’m not responsible for you. . . . . I took you under my wing because you have a natural ability to see things as they are . . . .” (Pages 12-13.) Having been stood up by Old Florinda at the airport, where Old Florinda had promised to give her more “specific detailed information” on what she should do on her trip, Florinda found a note from Old Florinda when she ultimately unpacks her suitcase that “instructs” her more “specifically”: “Your plans should be as follows. Pick anything and call that the beginning. Then go and face the beginning. Once you are face to face with the beginning, let it take you wherever it may. . . . . Be realistic and frugal, so as to select wisely. Do it now! P.S.: Anything would do for a start.” (p. 14.)
In her Caracas hotel room, Florinda claimed “I came to experience first hand the solitariness Florinda had talked about. . . . . I even thought of taking the plane back to Los Angeles. My parents were not in Venezuela at the time, and I had been unable to contact my brothers by telephone.” An ex-Jesuit priest at a party she happened to be invited to urged her to go to the town of “Curmina,” and specifically to look up “Mercedes Peralta” there, telling her, “I don’t know how I know it, but I know you’re dying to be with the witches of Curmina.” p. 16.
Florinda explained: “Under [Old] Florinda’s guidance, I had met and worked with spiritualists, sorcerers, witches, and healers in northern Mexico and among the Latino population of southern California.” She related Old Florinda’s classification of such people as either spiritualists, sorcerers and witches, or healers, or a combination of all three. She claimed, “[Old] Florinda was convinced that a person who successfully restored health, whether a doctor or a folk healer, was someone who could alter the body’s fundamental feelings about itself and its link with the world—that is, someone who offered the body, as well as the mind, new possibilities so that the habitual mold to which body and mind had learned to conform could be systematically broken down. Other dimensions of awareness would then become accessible, and the commonsense expectations of disease and health could become transformed as new bodily meanings became crystallized.” p. 17. Florinda tracked down Peralta in “Curmina,” and easily succeeded in getting her to take her in, and to let her document her healing methods. When Florinda responded to Peralta’s invitation to stay with her by telling her she had “planned to stay at least six months in the area,” Peralta told her that as far as she was concerned, “I could stay for years.” p. 22.
As Florinda got to know Peralta, Peralta let her in on a secret: “I am a medium, a witch, and a healer. Of the three, I like the second because witches have a particular way of understanding the mysteries of fate.” p. 45. Later, regarding family attachments, Candelaria, an associate of Peralta’s, told Florinda “witches have very little attachment to parents or children. Yet, they love them with all their might but only when they are facing them, never when they turn their backs.” p. 71. She was also told that “When a witch intervenes [in someone’s fate], we say it’s the witch’s shadow that turns the wheel of chance . . . .” p. 79. Florinda was told the “dedication” or “determination” to wish something “without a single doubt . . . is what witches call a witch’s shadow.” p. 94. Florinda noted that Old Florinda would have explained this in terms of “intent: a universal, abstract force responsible for molding everything in the world we live in” that, “under special circumstances . . . allows itself to be manipulated.” p. 127. Most of the book is then devoted to relating the haunting stories Peralta introduced her to, as “concrete examples of ways of manipulating something nameless.” Peralta supposedly called the “act of manipulating it . . . a witch’s shadow,” and the “result of that manipulation she called a link, a continuity, a turn of the wheel of chance.” p. 128. [This concept reminds one of the theme of Castaneda’s much later Wheel of Time book. Interestingly though, in view of the disdain don Juan and Castaneda seemingly had for “love” and personal attachment, a number of these stories involve passionate attachments and overpowering, if not mystical, tales of love.]
Florinda was told about a type of witch, “curiosas,” that sound a lot like don Juan’s purported associates: “[C]uriosas were witches who were no longer concerned with the obvious aspects of sorcery: symbolic paraphernalia, rituals, and incantations. ‘Curiosas,” she whispered, “are beings preoccupied with things of the eternal. They are like spiders, spinning fine, invisible threads between the known and the unknown.” (p. 199.)
A male clairvoyant friend of Peralta’s explained, “Clairvoyants have glimpses of things they don’t understand and then make up the rest.” (p. 210.) This same gentleman started to sound a lot like don Juan when he told Florinda, “A sorcerer chooses to be different from what he was raised to be . . . . He has to understand that witchcraft is a lifelong task. A sorcerer, through witchcraft, weaves patterns like webs. Patterns that transmit invoked powers to some superior mystery. Human actions have an endless, spreading network of results; he accepts and reinterprets these results in a magical way. . . . . A sorcerer’s hold on reality is absolute. His grip is so powerful, he can bend reality every which way in the service of his art. But he never forgets what reality is or was.” (p. 216.)
The story of a man who killed his wife and child, and ended up devoting himself to his love of the sea leads to the explanation: “We can make our own link with one single act. It doesn’t have to be as violent and desperate as Benito Santos’ act, but it has to be as final. If that act is followed by a desire of tremendous strength, sometimes, like Benito Santos, we can be placed outside of morality.” (p. 160.)
At the end of the book, Florinda returned to Los Angeles, “and then I went to Mexico to face [Old] Florinda.” (p. 303.) Old Florinda urged her to see if she could use her “numerous tapes to write my dissertation.” Florinda thought she had intellectually mastered Peralta’s system of interpretation and the way healers see themselves, but “after transcribing, translating, and analyzing my tapes and notes, I began to doubt my intellectual mastery of healing.” (p. 304.) She found that her notes “were ridden with inconsistencies and contradictions, and my knowledge of healing could not fill in the gaps.” Id. So, “[Old] Florinda then made a cynical suggestion: either alter the data to fit my theories or forget about the dissertation altogether; I forgot about the dissertation.” Id. But Florinda noted that, “[Old] Florinda has always urged that I look beneath the surface of things.” Following that advice with respect to her experiences with Peralta, Florinda realized she was left “with a document about human values . . . that witches, or even ordinary people, are capable of using extraordinary forces that exist in the universe to alter the course of events, or the course of their lives, or the lives of other people.” She summarized that Peralta referred to the course of events as “the wheel of chance” [remarkably similar in concept and terminology to what Castaneda, toward the end of his workshop and literary career, referred to as “the wheel of time”], and the process of affecting it as “the witch’s shadow.” Id.]
[Late Fall [?] 1985 — Carol was supposedly reunited with Castaneda at a lecture at Phoenix Bookstore in Santa Monica. (See description from Bruce Wagner’s March 1994 Details Magazine piece.)]
1985 or 86? – Kylie Lundahl purportedly aided Florinda at an art gallery in Oslo, Norway (where Florinda ridiculously claimed Kylie was from), when Florinda vomited “after eating too many French chocolates on the plane.” A year later, Kylie supposedly followed Florinda to Los Angeles, showing up at their agent’s office. [From Florinda’s lecture at Omega.] [Kylie’s change of name in 1989 listed her birthplace as Webster City, Iowa. Her October 30, 1997, declaration in Castaneda’s suit against Victor Sanchez stated that she had “been working with Carlos Castaneda since 1986,” that she was employed in 1994 by Toltec Artists, and that Castaneda put her in charge of “copyright surveillance” in 1993.]
1988 – Carmina Fort met several times with Castaneda and Florinda Donner (per Carmina Fort’s Conversationes con Carlos Castaneda published in 1991 in Madrid).
[July 30, 1988 – Tracy Kramer, Castaneda’s agent, married Katherine McCubbney Palmer-Collins – Cert. #1988 0 22519.]
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 focus 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.
Late 1989 – Per interview in chapter 11 of the Trickster podcast, film producer Janet Yang was invited to a session with Castaneda at a dance studio in Santa Monica where several women and a couple of men were present. The invitation came after Yang and her film production partner Oliver Stone had a meeting with Castaneda and his agent Tracy Kramer (following an announcement Yang and Stone took out in Variety regarding the formation of a production entity called Ixtlan). Nury was present at the dance studio session and Janet recalled she seemed “damaged,” and nervous, “like a deer in the headlights,” in contrast to the very extroverted Florinda.
[January 30, 1990 – Tracy Kramer filed for divorce against Katherine Ann Kramer. Final judgment was filed Aug. 16, 1990. D 261187.]
[1990 – A revised edition of De Mille’s The Don Juan Papers: Further Castaneda Controversies is published. In a footnote, de Mille noted Castaneda’s blurb praising Florinda’s Shabono, and Rebecca B. De Holmes’s critique of the book as probable plagiarism. He also noted Castaneda and Florinda had the same literary agents and, in 1972, had been fellow graduate students in the UCLA Dept. of Anthropology, “where Donner’s 1976 doctoral committee would include professors Price-Williams, Edgerton, and Langness.”]
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. Grinberg relates in this piece that Florinda gave Castaneda a hard time for separating the men in Grinberg’s party from the women on their first day there. 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 Florinda as “strong and direct” and the most like Castaneda of everyone in his group.
1991 – Florinda’s Being-in-Dreaming: An Initiation into the Sorcerer’s World was published by Harper San Francisco. [A summary of relevant portions of the first six chapters appear above. In Chapter 7, Florinda described her first trip to Mexico with Castaneda to meet don Juan, which he had proposed “out of the blue,” less than 24 hours before, “while we were eating in a Japanese restaurant in downtown Los Angeles.” p. 93.] [The school term was over, indicating that this trip might have been during the holidays in late ’71, or at the beginning of the summer of 1972. Florinda refers to “suddenly” remembering her “other trip to Sonora a year before,” which she previously noted was in July 1970.]
They spent the night – “in separate rooms” – in a motel in Yuma, Arizona. Florinda described the scene she made after imagining throughout the drive that Castaneda was going to make a pass at her when it came to sharing a room. Instead, when he returned from the motel office, he told her they had two rooms left for them and that she could take the quieter one. Florinda wrote that she had wanted the opportunity to refuse his expected advances, but that he had seen through her. After she surprised herself by then suggesting they “sleep in the same room—in two beds, that is,” he made her livid by joking, “Stay in the same room and have you take advantage of me in the middle of the night. Right after my shower. No way!” p. 95. The next day they drove all day, “meandering along out-of-the-way roads,” while Castaneda entertained her with songs and stories. She described him as “a born mimic. His uncanny imitation of every conceivable South American accent—including the distinctive Portuguese of Brazil—was more than mimicry, it was magic.” p. 97.
Somewhere near the city of Arizpe, a thin man flagged them down. On entering the house, Florinda was shocked to recognize Delia Flores and Mariano Aureliano, who responded to her accusation of having tricked her by claiming, “You haven’t been tricked. I told you from the beginning that I would blow you to him,” meaning Castaneda. p. 100. The thin man turned out to have been “Mr. Flores,” who introduced himself to her, after she awoke from fainting, as “Genaro Flores.” He explained Castaneda was also known as “Charlie Spider” and “Isidoro Baltazar,” and that he was “the new Nagual.” Don Juan told her she was now to refer to Castaneda by the latter name. Genaro asked her, “Are you in love with Isidoro Baltazar,” and Florinda surprised herself by saying “yes,” even when he asked again, “Are you really madly, madly in love with him?” Don Juan and Genaro then bombarded her with questions about how and when she first met Castaneda. Florinda wrote, “By the time I had gone over the events for the fourth and fifth time, I had either improved and enlarged my story with each telling, or I had remembered details I wouldn’t have dreamed I could remember.” p. 105.
Don Juan and Genaro explained Castaneda had “seen through her,” but that he didn’t’ “see well enough yet,” since he had not figured out that don Juan had sent her to him. They then explained that Castaneda was a sorcerer, but that “[t]o be a man of knowledge is something else. For that, sorcerers have to wait sometimes a lifetime.” When Florinda asked for an explanation, they told her: “A man of knowledge is a leader. Sorcerers need leaders to lead us into and through the unknown. A leader is revealed through his actions. Leaders have no price tag on their heads, meaning that there is no way to buy them or bribe them or cajole them or mystify them.” p. 106. They also made her recall seeing a “sentry, from another world” on their route, who was a signal to Castaneda that it was okay to bring Florinda to them.
Florinda begins Chapter 8 by claiming that, at that point, “the sequence of events, as I remember it, becomes blurry.” p. 112. Clara introduced herself, in a dreaming session. Clara explained that although Delia “delivered” Florinda into their world, it was Old Florinda who first found her, “a couple of years ago at a party you attended with your boyfriend. A plush dinner in Houston, Texas, at the house of an oilman.” p. 116. Florinda explained she had “gone with a friend who flew in his private jet from Los Angeles just to attend that party and flew back the next day. I was his translator.” Id. Florinda described the party to Clara, claiming that, “It was the first time I had been to Texas. . . . . The oilman had hired entertainers.” Id. Clara explained that Old Florinda had then instructed Delia to go to Nogales to fetch Florinda at the baptism party, which Delia crashed by claiming she was with Florinda. When Florinda protested that Old Florinda could not have known she was going to attend the party, because she’d accepted the invite on “the spur of the moment,” Clara explained: “[Old] Florinda is your mother more than any mother you ever had.” p. 118.
Old Florinda then appeared, and after don Juan calmed Florinda down, she kissed Old Florinda passionately. p. 120. Old Florinda was over 5’10″, while Florinda was a little more than 5’1″. Florinda felt that she’d “known her from the day I was born.” Florinda was introduced to another stalker woman—Carmela—who, along with Old Florinda and Delia made up the group’s stalker team. Florinda was told that she was like them—”you can deal with people”—and that she was like Old Florinda in particular. She was then reminded more about the party at which Old Florinda had found her: “First, I had taken a long horseback ride with the host, in my evening gown and without a saddle, to show him—after he dared me and bet I couldn’t do it—that I was as good on horseback as any cowboy. I had an uncle in Venezuela who had a stud farm, and I had been on a horse since I was a toddler. Upon winning the bet, dizzy from the exertion and alcohol, I took a plunge in his giant pool—in the nude.” p. 124. Old Florinda told her she took it as a sign when Florinda “brushed me with your naked buttocks.” Old Florinda told her, “’I liked the fact that you were killing yourself just to show off. You were a clown, eager to draw attention to yourself at any cost, especially when you jumped on a table and danced for a moment, shaking your buttocks shamelessly, while the host yelled his head off.’” p. 125.
[David Worrell, tongue-in-cheek, characterized the paragraph above as follows: But, but Regine had been married since 1966, and they apparently owned a duplex in LA. So here “a couple of years ago,” i.e. 1968, married two years, Regine gets in a private jet with some ‘friend,’ and ends up dancing naked on a Texas tabletop, while hubby is at home reading the paper and mowing the yard?]
Florinda was then given instruction on recalling memories, and told “if you push your vagina by putting pressure on your clitoris, you’ll remember what Mariano Aureliano told you” . . . . P.126. When Florinda won’t do it, Carmela offered to push her vagina for her. By herself again, Florinda had a chance to reflect and recalled the history of “mental illness” in her family: “[B]oth my great-grandfather and my grandfather, at the onset of the First and Second World Wars, respectively, committed suicide upon realizing that everything was lost to them. One of my grandmothers blew her brains out when she realized that she had lost her beauty and sex appeal.” p. 130. When Old Florinda returned to her, she began to ask about the other women Isidoro Baltazar told her “had been entrusted to him and that it was his sacred duty to help.” p. 134. Old Florinda told her that don Juan has “blown” a few other women to Castaneda, who “don’t resemble you physically, yet they are like you.” Id. Florinda became concerned when she found out Castaneda had gone off with don Juan to the mountains. Florinda, finding herself alone on waking, wandered through the women’s rooms, met the caretaker, and was led to where Esperanza was, in a small house. Esperanza showed her her shaven, smooth genitals, and urged Florinda to touch her. Esperanza “opened the lips of her vagina with her fingers.” p. 152. Florinda found herself “aroused in a most peculiar manner. . . . . My overwhelming desire to jump on top of her took me completely by surprise and was counterbalanced by the fact that I didn’t have a penis.” p. 153. Eventually, Florinda was taken to a room with a hammock that she was told was hers.
When Castaneda returned, they hugged, and Castaneda explained don Juan had told him about her a year before. Don Juan had told him “he was entrusting a weird girl to him,” whom he described as “’twelve o’clock in the morning of a clear day which is neither windy nor calm, neither cold nor hot, but alternates between all those, driving one nuts.’” p. 162. Castaneda admitted he had assumed don Juan was talking about his then girlfriend, whom Florinda then asked him about. Castaneda became annoyed, telling her, “This is not a story of facts. This is a story of ideas.” Id. He explained he had told her so she would see “how idiotic I am,” for thinking he could find out for himself who was the girl don Juan described. He added, “I’ve even involved a married woman with children in my search.” Id. [This seems like a reference to Cecilia Evans, formerly Mrs. Beverly Guilford.] As the two headed back to L.A., Florinda thought they had been at the Witches’ house for two days, but Castaneda revealed it was actually twelve, and that both of them had somehow lost track of ten days.
In Chapter 12, Florinda described Castaneda’s “office-studio” in Westwood: “one rectangular room overlooking a parking lot, a small kitchen, and a pink-tiled bathroom.” He took her there on their return from Sonora, and she later spent a lot of time there, even in his absence, over the next several months. She relates that “[w]ithin three weeks I found myself a new apartment, about a mile down the street from the UCLA campus, right around the corner from his office-studio,” where he set up “a second twin bed for her, a card table, and a folding chair—identical to his—at the other end of the room.” p. 173. Six months follow, during which “Sonora became a mythological place for me.” p. 174. She complained about not having met the other women “who had been entrusted to him by the old nagual.” Castaneda described them to her as “attractive, intelligent, accomplished—they all possessed advanced university degrees—self-assured, and fiercely independent . . . linked to him by ties of affection and commitment that had nothing to do with the social order.” Id.
One night, when Castaneda was gone, Florinda went over to his apartment to cut the uncut pages on his new books. Old Florinda was there, and reminded her, “Didn’t Isidoro Baltazar tell you not to come here while he’s in Mexico?” p. 180. As they talked, Old Florinda teased her about her feelings for Castaneda, remarking, “I’m so happy you feel so at home here . . . [t]he security you must feel in such a little nest, knowing you have a companion.” p. 181. She then added “in a most facetious tone that I should do everything I could to make Isidoro Baltazar happy and that included sexual practices, which she described with horrendous directness.” Id. Old Florinda echoed Castaneda in telling Florinda that she hadn’t changed. Florinda protested she had found a new apartment, moved, and left “everything I owned behind.” [Note: This would seem to place this encounter, if it actually occurred, sometime in the Fall of 1972, at least six months after Florinda’s separation from Edward Steiner.] At Old Florinda’s advice, Florinda began to do “dreaming,” and recollected everything she had done during her 10 lost days at the Witches’ house, i.e., interacted at length with the other witches, including Nelida, Hermelinda and Zuleica.
After Castaneda’s return, Florinda drove out to the beach. She then decided to drive by herself to the Witches’ house, and proceeded all night, all the way to Tucson. From there she took “the same route Isidoro Baltazar had followed” on their first trip together. p. 194. The witches at first made themselves scarce, and the caretaker told her she was a “stalker,” i.e., a person who has “a knack for dealing with people.” p. 199. He further explained, “What has been baffling . . . is that you are a great dreamer. If it wouldn’t be for that, you’d be like Florinda—less the height and the looks, of course.” Id. He had her remember her first encounter with the witches in dreaming, and she recalled an additional two women beyond the four of them she had previously remembered. The caretaker explained: “’The other two are your source of energy. They are incorporeal and not from this world.’” He also told her, “’Since you are not in the planet of the dreamers . . . your dreams are nightmares, and your transitions between dreams and reality are very unstable and dangerous to you and to the other dreamers. So Florinda has taken it upon herself to buffer and protect you.’” p. 200.
During dreaming on a following night, Florinda overheard catty conversation and gossip among the witches, including references to Nelida being “the only one who could accommodate [Aureliano’s] enormous, intoxicating organ,” and about Clara exposing herself twice daily to Castaneda. They also described Zuleica as having fits of insanity and cleaning the house from top to bottom, “even the rocks in the patio or around the grounds.” p. 205. As Florinda was eating later with the caretaker, he asked why she was upset and she related these comments. He explained they were describing her: “’They used the four women of the dreamers’ planet as a false front to describe to you, the eavesdropper, what you really are: a slut, with delusions of grandeur.’” p. 207. Later she was persuaded to take a nap with the caretaker, whom she had been suspecting of really being Esperanza in disguise. As he prepared for his nap, the caretaker exposed himself and his “supple, hairless, and smooth” male genitals.
On her return to L.A., Florinda found that she began “to acquire enough energy to dream,” and that she finally understood what the witches had told her: “Isidoro Baltazar was the new nagual. And he was no longer a man.” p. 212. This realization also assertedly gave her “enough energy to return periodically to the witches’ house.” [Assuming this chronology tracks Florinda’s real life chronology in some respect, she must now be referring to something like the late fall of ’72 or early ‘73.] Florinda claimed that at the witches’ house, “I interacted with all the sorcerers of the nagual Mariano Aureliano’s party. They didn’t teach me sorcery or even dreaming. According to them, there was nothing to teach. They said that my task was to remember everything that had transpired between all of them and me during those initial times that we were together.” Pp. 212-13.
Florinda asked Castaneda about intuitive knowledge and sudden flashes of insight. He told her, “to know something only intuitively is meaningless. Flashes of insight need to be translated into some coherent thought, otherwise they are purposeless. . . . If they are not constantly reinforced, doubt and forgetfulness will ensue, for the mind has been conditioned to be practical and accept only that which is verifiable and quantifiable.” p. 218.
Chapter 15 finds Florinda setting off with Castaneda for a second trip together to the witches, during which Florinda planned to “read sociological theory” and write an important paper. They end up at Esperanza’s house, but this time it’s not in the outskirts of Ciudad Obregon, but over a hundred miles south of there, between Navojoa and Mazatlan. (Florinda cannot understand this discrepancy from her memory of her initial visit there, and it is never ultimately explained.) The following morning, Florinda found Castaneda had departed again with don Juan, and, after some encouragement from Esperanza, she spent the next three days working on her paper. The caretaker, whom she assumed was illiterate, goads her into asking for his advice on her paper. He looked it over and advised her that she has “too many footnotes, quotes, and undeveloped ideas.” p. 233. She was pulled into “dreaming,” and saw how to rearrange and rewrite the paper, taking a number of notes until she loses consciousness. Later Nelida told her the caretaker was the only one in the house besides Vicente who had read every book in their library, and explained: “To reach a degree of knowledge, sorcerers work twice as hard as normal people . . . [s]orcerers have to make sense of the everyday world as well as the magical world. To accomplish that, they have to be highly skilled and sophisticated, mentally as well as physically.” p. 245. They also gave her a quick course on “sorceress lib,” telling her, among other things, that the Inquisition “was a systematic purge to eradicate the belief that women have a direct link to the spirit.” p. 248.
At the beginning of Chapter 17, Castaneda is pacing nervously around his studio. He told her they were going to Mexico, and she joked, “Are you going to marry me there?” p. 252. He told her, “There is no more time.” p. 253. As they drove through Arizona, Florinda suddenly felt, with an unaccustomed “absolute certainty,” that “something was wrong.” Id. Castaneda nodded and told her, “The sorcerers are leaving.” She asked when, and he responded, “Maybe tomorrow or the next day . . . [o]r perhaps a month from now, but their departure is imminent.” Id. She sighed, “They have been saying that they’re leaving since the day I met them, more than three years ago . . . .” Id. When they arrived, Castaneda vanished from her side, and the caretaker told her the rest “are inside” but “can’t see you at the moment . . . [t]hey were not expecting you.” p. 254. Florinda raked leaves, and then saw Old Florinda. A bright blue butterfly landed on Florinda’s hand and left a diamond ring on her middle finger “in the shape of a triangular butterfly.” p. 255. She walked with Old Florinda, who explained the ring was a gift, that they were now “dreaming,” and that she gave her the ring as she was “crossing.” She also explained the ring was made by the Nagual Elias in dreaming. Old Florinda also explained that she and Zuleica were staying behind. Later Florinda woke up and saw Zuleica, who explained that “when I dream, I am Esperanza and something else, too.” In other words, Esperanza was Zuleica’s “dreaming body.” p. 262.
Florinda saw that the caretaker had been essentially motionless for two days, and he explained to her that no leaves had fallen during that time. She asked him if it was true the others “are leaving forever.” He told her they already had, and that “they took Isidoro Baltazar with them.” p. 271. Neither the caretaker nor Old Florinda could tell her whether Castaneda was gone forever, and the book ends without resolving that question. She went on a hike, in dreaming, with Esperanza, who turned into the caretaker and instructed her to get naked with him and take a dip in an otherworldly pool. For a moment, a naked Esperanza was standing where the naked caretaker had been. Esperanza explained that she was also the caretaker, and Florinda checked her vagina, parting “the lips to make sure the penis was not hidden somewhere in there.” p. 285.
For three months, Florinda waited for Castaneda to return, and then drove “nonstop to the witches’ house” [apparently not yet barred by Old Florinda’s proscription against driving] where she waited another seven days. Old Florinda appeared to her and told her she didn’t go with don Juan and his party, and that neither did Zuleica. She explained: “We are here because we don’t belong to that party of sorcerers . . . [w]e do, but then we don’t really. Our feelings are with another nagual, the nagual Julian, our teacher.” p. 293. She further explained “we need more energy to take a greater jump and join perhaps another band of warriors, a much older band. The nagual Julian’s.” Id. Zuleica later appeared to Florinda, and started to spin. Florinda explained, “She was going to perform a dance in order to gather cosmic energy. Women sorcerers believe that by moving their bodies they can get the strength necessary to dream.” p. 297. Zuleica then instructed her on the nature of naguals, including the fact that “Naguals are unreproachful in their actions and feelings, regardless of the ambushes—worldly or otherworldly—placed on their interminable path.” p. 300. Zuleica also claimed Castaneda had been ready to leave for a long time, in the sense that “when the face of self-reflection and the face of infinity merge, a nagual is totally ready to break the boundaries of reality and disappear as though he wasn’t made of solid matter.” p. 301. Zuleica further advised the mourning Florinda that now she had to “dream dead,” meaning to “dream without hope . . . without holding on to your dream.” p. 303. Zuleica concluded the book by asserting, “For some of us, to dream without hope, to struggle with no goal in mind, is the only way to keep up with the bird of freedom.” Id.
Feb. 1992 – DIMENSIONS (Canadian New Age magazine) published article, “Being-In-Dreaming–Florinda Donner in Conversation with Alexander Blair-Ewart.” Florinda, who is described as living in Los Angeles and Sonora, mentioned that she had been giving lectures in conjunction with this book, whereas she did nothing regarding the publication or promotion of her two previous books. She also explained, “Actually I’m not an apprentice of don Juan. I was an apprentice of Castaneda who was an apprentice of don Juan. And I am one of the ‘sisters’ who were actually of the women of Florinda, and she gave me her name. So, in that sense, it is a myth which exists.” [Interesting admission at Florinda’s first interview: “I’m not an apprentice of don Juan.” The claim that she was don Juan’s apprentice as opposed to Castaneda’s seemed to get started with Castaneda’s publication of The Art of Dreaming the following year.]
When asked about there being “an unbroken lineage from the ancient Toltecs right down to modern times” and “what the pattern of the myth actually is,” Florinda responded: “Well, there is no pattern of the myth. That’s why the whole thing is so baffling, and so difficult. When I first got involved with these people my main quest, my main aberration . . . was that I wanted to have some rules and regulations about what the hell it is I had to do. There were none. There is no blueprint. Because each new group has to find their own way to deal with this idea of trying to break the barriers of perception.” In a later response, she explains: “For [Castaneda], whatever the people he is working with—and there are six of us—it’s a matter of decision. That’s all. Our decision is all that counts, nothing else.”
As to Castaneda’s “original group of apprentices,” Florinda said, “Castaneda is the last of his line. There is no one else. There’s a group of Indians that we work with. You see, Don Juan, in a weird way made almost a mistake with Castaneda. And he rallied right away. His circle of apprentices—and I think it’s in Tales of Power and The Second Ring of Power, when he talks about the people in Oaxaca and the Little Sisters and all those people. And then, years later, Don Juan realizes that that’s not the way Castaneda is going. Castaneda was even more abstract than Don Juan was. His path was a totally different path. And then when he gathered these other people, because the people that are with Castaneda, we all met Don Juan before we met Castaneda. Actually there was only five of us before—four of us and Castaneda.” Florinda also claimed, “When I was in school, I was just a step away from going into graduate school, and I had been in this world for two or three years, and I said, ‘What am I doing by continuing school? Why should I get a Ph.D.? It is absolutely redundant.’ And Don Juan and all the women [who should have been gone already at least a year before Florinda received her Masters degree] said it’s absolutely not redundant, because in order to reject something you have to understand it at its most sophisticated. . . . . And for them it was extremely important that all of us are very well trained. Everyone working within this little group has a degree. There are historians, anthropologists, librarians.”
She also volunteered that, “Don Juan was interested in women, and people always ask, ‘Well, how come there’s always so many women? Do you have orgies? Is there all kinds of stuff going on?’ He said, ‘No, it’s because the male doesn’t have the womb. He needs that magical “womb power (laughter).’” She also mentioned “two people that have come in contact with us, and they are there. I mean, we’re never together anyway; each person lives on their own, and just from time to time we do get together. Originally we had this little class when Castaneda was here. He teaches certain very interesting movements, basically to store up energy. So, these people have been there for two years, and they’re changing little by little. And it’s amazing. You see, if you let something go, something in you will know.”
A final question: “Why would a woman read this book Being-in-Dreaming?” Florinda responded: “Very interesting, hmmm. Well, if nothing else, I think people who have been interested in the Castaneda work, would be interested to see it presented from a female’s perspective, from somebody who has been in that work for over twenty years. I do approach the problems differently, probably more directly.”
April 1992 – Magical Blend #35 contained Brian S. Cohen’s “Being-in- Dreaming: Florinda Donner Interview.” In response to the question, “How do you describe yourself, and what are you currently doing?” Florinda responded: “I am an anthropologist who no longer practices anthropology, and I have an interest in non-Western healing practices. My work with the Yanomamo Indians in South America was the subject of my first book, Shabono. I then did another study in which I worked with a healer in Northern Venezuela. [Note: This reversed the chronology of the two “studies” that is set forth in Shabono.] By that time I had already been exposed to the world of don Juan, and carried a desire to continue with it. I am no longer involved in academic research. What I am trying to do now, along with the other people who are involved in the same quest, is to work and live the way don Juan taught us, within a whole other world that he and his cohorts opened for us.” Later, she explained, “One of the first exercises all sorcerers do—one that I did not do for years because I didn’t believe in it—is a recapitulation of their lives with all the people with whom they have had any kind of interaction.” And, “Don Juan was the nagual of a group of 14 sorcerers. Castaneda is the nagual of a much smaller group.”
When asked, “When you first came across Castaneda, he was working as a cook in Tucson as part of a task assigned to him by don Juan. Did you have an assigned task?” Florinda responded: “My task was to finish school [note: she enrolled at UCLA after she purportedly met them in July 1970], get a Ph.D., and continue to study. . . . . All the people in this group have upper degrees, because when you plunge into the darkness, if your mind is not so keen and so well trained from a rational point of view, you cannot make sense out of what you find in the darkness.” And, in a similar vein, later in the interview: “The world of the sorcerer is a sophisticated world; it is not enough to understand its principles intuitively. One needs to absorb them intellectually. Contrary to what people believe, sorcerers are not practitioners of obscure, esoteric rituals. Sorcerers are men of reason. They have a romance with ideas. They have cultivated reason to its limits, for they believe that only by fully understanding the intellect can they embody the principles of sorcery without losing sight of their own sobriety and integrity. This is where sorcerers differ drastically from other people. Most people have very little sobriety and even less integrity.”
Florinda also opined: “Buddhism is a system that works inside the social order. Sorcery doesn’t work within the social order. To truly embody sorcery, one has to be almost outside the social order. It is not that one is a deviant, but that one has to extract oneself.” But, seemingly contradictorily, she concluded, “Only by being challenged by our daily life, by what we know, will we be able to change. The pressure always becomes such that we cannot uphold this new rationale, precisely because we are being pressured. And we are only going to be pressured by the world we know.”
[1992 – Taisha’s The Sorcerers’ Crossing, was published by Viking Arkana]
[mid-1992 – Castaneda invited people to attend evening sessions, generally three days a week]
August? 1992 – Florinda appeared at a small book signing event in Berkeley for Being-in-Dreaming sponsored by Gaia Bookstore and held across the street from the bookstore in the Gaia Annex. [Carol Tiggs was on hand but not introduced. There were no chacmools or other “guardians” on hand on this occasion.]
October 1992 – Florinda lectured a crowd of 200 at the Jewish Cultural Center in Berkeley, at a lecture sponsored by Gaia Bookstore. Amy Wallace reconnected with Castaneda and Florinda, 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 across from the store where the event was to take place opened, so she went into the bookstore and immediately saw Florinda. Florinda then had 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 explained quickly that the nagual woman is 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 recorded 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.”
In her lecture, Florinda said don Juan called his female apprentices “the Crazy Cunts.” The audience asked a lot of questions about the sexual energy lines between male and female partners. Florinda said the seven years of abstinence mentioned in her book as being needed to break the lines was a rule of thumb, but that it could take less. A woman asked if lesbian sex was better for women because they did not have to deal with some man draining their energy. Florinda responded that sexual energy lines could exist between same-sex partners. She also mentioned don Juan was “very sexually active.” Florinda mentioned having seen don Juan in a San Francisco hotel room. At the end of Florinda’s lecture she introduced Carol to the group 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 recollected 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 – Body, Mind & Spirit #6 published an interview with Florinda Donner by Ken Eagle Feather & Carol Kramer, “Being-in-Dreaming.” Upon being asked “What are dreaming and stalking in this tradition,” Florinda answered: “[O]ne is either an Abelar or a Grau. I am a dreamer, so I am a Grau. Sometimes I use that name, either as Grau-Donner, or Donner-Grau, depending on my mood.” Later in the interview, on the same topic, she stated: “Dreaming and stalking form a nearly indivisible unit of action. A sorcerer has to practice both of these aspects, and yet, one is better at one or the other. Besides Castaneda, my closest cohort is Taisha Abelar. The sorcerers paired me with her from the very beginning. She is a stalker. To me, she looks like a dreamer–she is tall and thin and ethereally beautiful. She is sweet and patient and good-natured. And yet, she is the most agressive being I know. She gets things done with minimal effort and fuss.”
To the question, “How many people are in your group?”, she responded: “Not enough. There were sixteen sorcerers in the nagual Juan Matus’s group. Together, they had the mass and energy to perform astounding feats. Our group, comprised of Castaneda, Taisha Abelar, myself, and a few other elusive, mysterious people I am not at liberty to name, has too few.”
The next question was, “What happened to the people Carlos Castaneda wrote about in his books?” Florinda answered: “We are often with the little sisters–Lydia, Josefina, and Rosa–and the Genaros–Nestor, Pablito, and Benigno–either in Mexico or Los Angeles. However, their pursuits are different from ours. They are struggling to formulate and attain concrete goals extremely similar to the goals of the sorcerers of antiquity. For instance, Nestor, a practical botanist, wants to find a plant or clump of plants in the tundra which, according to the sorcerers’ calculations, are over 300,000 years old. He wants to find them and sell them to the Japanese pharmacologists for their regenerative properties. He thinks that those plants will enhance the sexual potency of men.”
“The women are equally involved in pursuits of this nature. Another example: Lydia wants to find a sorcerers’ cure for AIDS, slowly emptying a sick person’s body from the virus invasion by transmitting it to a tree. La Gorda had an attack of such intense self-importance in 1985 that she believed she was the only one of us who could lead us to freedom. She died in a futile attempt to reach beyond her energetic capabilities. Soledad is extremely well situated as a movie producer. She uses her arts in sorcery to gather money for her projects. Her motto is: Dollars from any source for movies.”
“When La Gorda died, Carol Tiggs (the nagual woman) returned, which means to us that the sorcery configurations of don Juan’s world are no longer applicable to us. We are on our own. Our group is composed of Carlos Castaneda, Taisha Abelar, Carol Tiggs and myself. Since we cannot see eye to eye with the concrete interests of the other apprentices, we have found ourselves in the odd situation of being explorers in a new territory, trying to find viable directions.”
“Carlos Castaneda’s readers will soon hear from him. Taisha Abelar, Carol Tiggs, and I found that it was imperative that Carlos send his manuscript on the art of dreaming to his agent for publication. Carlos finished writing it years ago, but believed that it was too outlandish for consideration. Taisha, Carol, and I disagreed vehemently and succeeded.”
In response to the question of why the nagual was the leader, Florinda claimed: “Carol Tiggs, as the nagual woman, could very easily be the leader of our group. However, it is a sorcerer’s belief that women are universes in themselves. As universes they have no interest whatsoever in leading other universes! Sorcerers also believe that maleness is an extension of femaleness. Therefore, it is antithetical to the spirit of womanhood to lead. The nagual is not quite a leader; he is the person who lends the sorceresses soundmindedness, sobriety, and purpose. He can do this because of the heavy conditioning he suffered under the hands of the previous nagual.”
Late 1992 – Florinda Donner lectured at a bookstore in Westwood.
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?” During her lecture, Florinda hinted that not only don Juan, but Castaneda was sexually active, although in his books he claimed to be practicing celibacy at don Juan’s insistence. She also again introduced Carol as the Nagual Woman. She caused consternation among many in the audience when she stated, “We believe don Juan is lost in Infinity, in the Second Attention . . . trapped in what we call a ‘layer of the onion.’ We are trying to gain enough energy, enough mass, to boost him to freedom, and we search for him in dreaming. We’re hoping that the collective intent in this room will help us.” As Amy reported in Sorcerer’s Apprentice, this was breathtaking news for Castaneda readers, who believed don Juan had achieved the ultimate liberation described in the books.
1993 – Castaneda’s The Art of Dreaming was published by HarperCollins. Castaneda began by explaining he had previously written about the first party that 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 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. In Chapter 10, Castaneda explained that, while he had previously 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.”]
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.”
Weeks later, in a conversation over lunch at a seafood restaurant in Santa Monica, Castaneda told Amy she was a stalker, just like Taisha. Amy told him Florinda had told her she was a dreamer like her. Castaneda responded, “Pah! That’s just because she likes you. No, no, no. Taisha Abelar is infinitely more powerful than little Flo. Florinda Donner is nothing.” Amy defended Florinda, telling Castaneda she “is just as powerful!” Castaneda insisted, “She is not! She’s nothing next to Taisha Abelar! No, no, no — Taishita knows precisely where to sign–on the dotted line.”
As the year went on and Amy got more involved with the group, it was Florinda who suggested to her that she should sleep with Castaneda, telling her, “you’d love it–he’s great! He can go on forever.” Amy initially expressed shock and disinterest, but the topic had been broached, and Florinda continued to encourage her to consider it. Castaneda proceeded to court her.
[July 7, 1993 – Castaneda Mailing List –castaneda@earth.com — established as the first use of the Internet I’m aware of devoted to sharing personal experiences related to the concepts covered in the books of Castaneda, Florinda and Taisha.]
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. 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 claimed they (the witches) had just returned from visiting Lidia and Rosa in Mexico. She said that they had become curanderos, and were trying to find a way to transfer the AIDS virus from people into trees. “Soon trees will be dying all over Mexico,” Florinda joked. When asked about Pablito and Nestor, she said they had become master carpenters, and had a thriving business in Oaxaca. Soledad, Florinda said, was a producer of soap operas in Mexico City. What became of the others, she didn’t say. [Beginning in May 1995, these “other apprentices” were said to have been recently whisked away by don Juan into the Second Attention.)
Florinda also blurted out that the Blue Scout was Carol Tiggs’s daughter, and that Florinda’s 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, she 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?” About 100 people attended.
September 14, 1993 – Florinda Donner filed for change of name to Florinda Donner Grau. She listed Amberg, Germany, as place of birth; 183 N. Martel Ave., #220 as present address; and Taisha Abelar, “sister,” as nearest living relative. Change was effective Oct. 25, 1993. [SS 005026 in Santa Monica.]
September 14, 1993 – Premajyoti Galvez y Fuentes (known, at least from mid ’93 through ’96, as “the Orange Scout”), filed for change of name to Nayely Tycho Aranha Thal. She listed her address as 1675 Manning Ave., #2, 90024; place of birth as Mexico D.F. (area around Mexico City), Mexico; and nearest relative as Florinda Donner, “mother,” at 183 N. Martel Ave., #220, 90036 (old Toltec Artists address). [SS 005027 in Santa Monica].
September 27, 1993 – Carlos Castaneda married Florinda Donner in Las Vegas. Marriage license No. C 472101 listed Castaneda’s date of birth as 12/25/31 in Peru and his parents as Frank Castaneda and Susan Novoa of Peru. It stated it was his first marriage. Florinda Donner was listed as the wife’s name by “legal name change.” Her date of birth was listed as Feb. 15, 1944, in Germany. Her parents were listed as Rudolph Thal and Katarina Claussnitzer of Germany. She also claimed it was her first marriage. [Two days later, Carlos “Aranha” married “Carol Muni Tiggs Alexander” in Las Vegas.]
October 14-17, 1993 – The Witches appeared at a four-day workshop at Akahi Farms in Maui [Florinda speoke the first night, Taisha the second, Carol the third and all four took questions on Sunday morning. Notes quoted Florinda as saying they were “testing out the workshop format, and had reformulated them in the last year.” She claimed they had “noticed a difference in the people who returned later having done the recapitulation.” She also said something about some people being able to “take just one year instead of twenty” before they are “ready to jump into the unknown.” She explained, “Don Juan’s group had enough energy to shift us into the second attention and reduce us to nothing.” She also claimed, “We are the last of our line; our group doesn’t have the strength for another cycle.” They recommended Tai Chi, demonstrated some “sorcery passes”; otherwise topics were consistent with later workshops–recapitulation, phenomenology, intentionality, courtship rituals taking energy. Van’s notes on final Q&A session with all three reported, “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.”]
? 1993 – Florinda Donner called in for a radio interview on “Earth Mysteries Show,” with Haines Ely, KVMR Grass Valley. Florinda said: “According to don Juan, he said, illness and disease didn’t really exist in his world because it is basically . . . I don’t want to say it’s self inflicted because that’s going too far, but we do make ourselves sick with stress. And the stress basically comes because the ego cannot deal with the world outside.” Ely followed up with, “Is there any particular portion of the body where we store these energy blows?” Florinda responded: “Well it depends. Usually we store those energy blows in our weakest part . . . . For instance, if you’re under stress, let’s say you feel certain pains, or you feel drained, you get a cold, I mean you know your body better than anyone else. Well, that is exactly where the blow is going. [It] varies person to person. For instance, I have very weak bronchitis, whenever I get drained, I start coughing very, very badly so whether it is just something physically or I really got stressed out, you know, I start coughing.”
Florinda described growing up blond and cute in South America: “I was the greatest thing that ever lived, I mean, the world validated my idea of the self. I grew up in South America, I had advantages just by the mere fact of the way I looked. Children know how to manipulate that extremely well; I was President in my elementary school from kindergarten until sixth grade. I was in Venezuelan schools . . . there were very few blond children. I mean, I was treated like a little goddess and I believed that that was my inherent right.”
She asserted, “We have not retreated from the world but we are not in the world in the sense that whatever makes us react like our fellow man, we have curtailed this to the minimum. It doesn’t really matter what they do to us anymore. How they bang us.” As to other philosophical systems, Florinda said: “In terms of what we know from the sorcerers of the lineage of don Juan, it’s only one line what we know, you see? I am sure there are many other systems of knowledge that express, let’s say the terminology; the vocabulary is different, but ultimately the intent is the same. It is not that the different systems of knowledge . . . this system of knowledge is extremely pragmatic. It truly gives us the way, if you are interested, to follow certain . . . I don’t want to say rules and regulations, because there are none, but does give us a very pragmatic way of trying to implement something that in other traditions we can only read about.”
Florinda responded to a question about her relationship with her family: “Actually I think I am the only one that has any kind of relationship with the family because of my circumstances. When I first entered, if there is such a thing, entered into the sorcerers world, I cut myself off, purposefully, from most people that I knew including my parents of course. My parents did not know for about ten, twelve years whether I was dead or alive. It was a very calculated move, because of the sorcerers’ point of view is that for us to change, for us to be able to change, we need to cut off from the people who know us so well because, not that they do it maliciously, but they prevent us from changing because they already know what we are and nothing that we do will make them change their mind. . . . . [Old] Florinda at one time said “Look, it doesn’t matter, why not just go and see your parents?” and at that time, you know, I had been working, you know I was doing . . . I was an anthropologist, actually I was in contact with one brother and from time to time I would let him know–I just wanted to at least re-assure them that I was not dead. I said I was involved in something that I had to cut myself off. Personally, I had parents who were extremely understanding and let’s say, at least from my perspective, it went very well. When I, let’s say, re-established contact with my parents, it was extremely interesting to see that my relationship with my parents was much more loving and understanding than it had ever been before.”
November 1993 – Florinda and Taisha, along with the Chacmools, gave a workshop at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.
Late 1993? – Florinda visited her parents in Germany for a week, bringing along Tycho, the Orange Scout, whom she introduced as her daughter. She told her parents a story about having been very ill when she gave birth, and having fainted. When she woke up she claimed they told her that her daughter was stillborn. She claimed that years later she found out the girl had been given to a very wealthy family in Mexico. While Florinda was there, Castaneda reportedly called her every day. (Per Ulrich Thal’s interviews with Manuel Carballal.)
March 1994 – Details Magazine contained Bruce Wagner’s “The Secret Life of Carlos Castaneda: You Only Live Twice.” [Bruce quoted Florinda as describing the collective consensus of their books as “intersubjectivity among sorcerers,” but then inaccurately described the “players”–i.e., Castaneda, Florinda, Carol and Taisha)–as “all Ph.D.’s from UCLA’s department of anthropology” and “stupendous methodologists whose academic disciplines are in fact oddly suited for describing the magical world they present.” [In fact, only Castaneda and Taisha held Ph.D.’s.] Bruce wrote, “When Donner-Grau first encountered don Juan and his circle, she thought that they were unemployed circus workers who trafficked in stolen goods. How else to explain the Baccarat crystal, the exquisite clothes, the antiquarian jewelry?” He also quoted Florinda describing the first time Castaneda took her to Mexico to see don Juan: “We went via this long, snaky route—you know, the ‘coyote trail.’ I thought he was taking a weird route so we wouldn’t be followed, but it was something else. You had to have enough energy to find that old Indian. After I don’t know how long, there was someone on the road waving us in. I said to Carlos, ‘Hey, aren’t you going to stop?’ He said, ‘It isn’t necessary.’ See, we had crossed over the fog.” Article noted that Castaneda had spoken before groups in San Francisco and L.A., and that the Witches had recently given lectures in Arizona, Maui and at Esalen. Bruce claimed he “met with Castaneda and ‘the witches’ over a period of a week at restaurants, hotel rooms, and malls.”]
April 1994 – Magical Blend #42 contained Keith Nichols, “Castaneda’s Clan: an exclusive interview with three of the female warriors of Carlos Castaneda’s sorcery lineage: Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar, Carol Tiggs.” When asked, “Why are the women of this lineage just beginning to come out and speak about their practices?” Florinda responded: “Well, there is a fundamental difference in the way males and females perceive and respond to reality. Females, such as Taisha, Carol, and I, didn’t write about anything for twenty years. [Actually, of course, Florinda’s first book mentioning her involvement with don Juan and Old Florinda came out in 1985, only 15 years after she allegedly first met them.] This is the fundamental difference: females need to embody a system of belief before they can write about it. While males build their bridges of understanding with words, women build their understanding with their life.” Florinda also claimed, “I love books; I’m an avid reader. Now Carlos hasn’t read a book in over twenty years. I know that because he gave all his books to me. . . . . Well, I’ll be reading something and then I’ll ask Carlos a question. He’ll be quiet for about ten minutes and then he’ll give me an explanation of exactly what I have been reading. At that point, I know that he’s been out there grabbing that knowledge from elsewhere. And this ability has no limitation; I can ask him something about physics and he immediately gives me a bonafide answer.” Florinda also said that Castaneda “recently” took “a group of twenty people to a small church in Mexico,” and that “[w]hile in the church, he took the whole group into a state of dreaming, and journeyed into another world.” She also explained: “When sorcerers enter into dreaming, the first thing they will usually encounter is a bank of fog. When you see this fog you are pulling at something else energetically. In a way, sorcery is like Chinese Medicine in that it treats the body as if it were a field of energy.”
June/July 1994 – Dan Lawton anonymously published the first issue of Nagualist: The Nagualist Newsletter and Open Forum (with articles on dream crystals, recapitulation crates, and Tula information). [Four more issues were published, with the last, dated Feb./March 1995, announcing the end of the publication at the request of Cleargreen.]
[1994 – There were no Tensegrity workshops this year, only a few lectures prior to Castaneda’s appearance in Sunnyvale on Dec. 3, 1994. A hint as to what might have been going on was suggested by a source from Milwaukee printed on p. 13 of Issue 4 of the Nagualist. This person 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 the group had all returned to Mexico and 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. The event involving the Dalai Lama, where Tony captured the Flyer photo, took place in ‘94.]
June 23, 1994 – Florinda “Grau” married Tracy Kramer in Las Vegas. Marriage License no. C 540511 listed Tracy’s date of birth as 4/4/1954 in California. His father was Searle Kramer of Michigan and his mother was Jan Freidberg of California. He listed this as his second marriage, after a final divorce in 1989. Florinda Grau listed her date of birth as Feb. 14, 1954, in Venezuela. She listed her father as Ray Rommel of Germany and her mother as Florinda Matus of Venezuela. She indicated it was her first marriage.
July 22, 1994 – A fictitious business name statement for Elemental Films was recorded [94-1369443], listing The 300 Movies Company (Bruce Wagner, President) and Toltec Artists as registrants (at 183 N. Martel, LA 90036), signed by Muni Aranha Alexander, Florinda Donner Grau, Tracy Kramer and Bruce Wagner.
[Late Summer 1994[?] – Taisha lectured and signed books at On the Edge Books on Main Street for a crowd of about 45-50 people, mostly women. Taisha apologized for not being a great public speaker, and recommended they hear Florinda, “who always keeps people riveted.”]
Fall 1994 – Florinda spoke during Women’s Career Week at Sony Pictures. [Bruce and Tracy were on hand. The talk was announced the day before at a concert at Sony, and “Doctor Florinda Donner-Grau” was characterized as an anthropologist who was “going to talk about the role of women in society.” People were allowed to reserve seats, and tables were set up, as if for a large business presentation, with gourmet appetizers being served and about 60 people on hand.] Florinda, dressed in black, first described who they were and what they did. She said, “We are the cohorts of Carlos Castaneda, but don’t get me wrong–we’re not his women.” She mentioned the rainforest activist she knew who had a lot of children and asked, “How can you expect to save the rainforests if you are driving around in a big Mercedes”? People wanted to know what one would get out of their practices. Florinda responded, “There is no there there. We have no temple; there is no place you can be with us. You just recapitulate and work on your own.” She also indicated she didn’t live too far away. She was asked if Castaneda was celibate, and responded that, at the present time, he was “trying that.” She also mentioned Taisha was the better speaker, and would have people “in stitches.” She was also asked whether don Juan got stuck, and responded that they suspected he was in the “Inorganics’ world” and was trying to find a way “to catapult himself out.”
November 1994 – Magical Blend #44 contained Merilyn Tunneshende’s first piece, “Dreaming within the Dream.” [Merilyn was billed as “of the sorcerer’s party of Carlos Castaneda.” Tunneshende stated, “Carlos, Florinda and Taisha have presented excellent accounts of their instruction, and good explanations of the goals of the training.” Tunneshende claimed she was the original Nagual woman, and involved with la Gorda (“Maria Tena, who I call Butterfly Woman”), the Genaros and doña Soledad.)]
[December 3, 1994 – Castaneda gave a two-hour-and-15-minute lecture to about 100 people in Sunnyvale, California. (Notes appear on pp. 18-19 of Issue 5 of the Nagualist. He described the gathering of the Tibetans at the Pyramids in Mexico, and the photo of the Flyer. He claimed the Genaros and little Sisters were “all doing fine living good lives, but would not follow me.” He also described don Juan’s “burning” in a novel way: “Don Juan burned with an incredible implosion of energy as he held his awareness in his hands. Then he took off like a bullet.”)]
March 24-26, 1995 – Workshop in Maui with Florinda, Taisha and the Chacmools at the Ritz-Carlton, Kapalua. Florinda claimed that one night, when she was a student in Los Angeles, she was driving Castaneda’s VW Microbus [note: this must have been before she was barred by Old Florinda from driving], waiting for a light to change on a dark street. Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye she saw a woman dressed in black grab her driver’s side door handle. The woman’s eyes were wild. She grinned dementedly at Florinda, her expression distorted by enormous protruding teeth. The strange woman’s hair was black, and Florinda had the idea, or “knew,” that it was dyed (which she attributed to “our insistence and tendency, even in the face of the unknown, to judge and explain everything”). Frightened, Florinda screamed and jammed her foot on the gas pedal. She took off down the road, but the woman ran alongside, keeping up with her. Now terrified, Florinda sped up, accelerating to 80 miles per hour. The woman kept pace, running and holding onto the door handle for a long time, until Florinda finally looked again, and she was gone.
Florinda immediately went to see don Juan [an episode not mentioned in Being-in-Dreaming]. She told him about the woman and what had happened. Don Juan seemed concerned. He thought for awhile, and then, in a serious voice asked, “Was the woman farting?” Florinda was stunned. She made don Juan repeat his question. He asked again if the woman had been farting. Florinda claimed she was not only unhinged by the question, she was greatly annoyed with don Juan for not taking her very serious situation seriously. “No, no,” don Juan insisted with a straight face, “A woman running that fast must have been farting.” No matter how annoyed Florinda became with him, even shouting that he was a senile old man, don Juan persisted in questioning whether the woman had been farting. Eventually, Florinda gave up and told don Juan that if he wasn’t going to take her situation seriously then neither was she. “Good,” said don Juan. “When confronted by the unfathomable, a warrior either makes a joke about it or he takes it seriously, and it destroys him.”
Florinda related other manifestations, instances of perceiving awarenesses “that crossed somehow into this realm.” One was that of a creature that looked like a cat but had a rabbit’s back end and big teeth. She joked about her tendency to see things with big teeth.
Florinda described the motivating force behind the behavior of people in don Juan’s group, and now in Carlos’s. She called it a “blank check of sheer affection” that they had given to each other. She recalled Carlos describing don Juan as “always giving 100% of his attention to anyone who talked with him–more, Carlos pointed out, than anyone in the social world ever gives to anyone else.” The reason that sorcerers can give this intensity is because they have retained a greater amount of abstract awareness than ordinary people, who usually are preoccupied only with themselves. Issuing such a check is also “a tremendous warrior’s challenge.” Florinda declared she had given Taisha her check of sheer affection but, “although Taisha was beautiful and brilliant, she had a horrendous side to her personality and was not the easiest person to get along with.” She mentioned don Juan and Genaro were so focused that when one was not there, they didn’t know you existed, which used to make her mad before she knew that don Juan was “energetically so hard.” She realized that to trust the Nagual meant “to trust him with one’s life totally.” Given the chance to do it again, she said that, certainly, she would do it again, only “with more discipline.”
Florinda talked about Old Florinda. She would wear “a robe of energy.” Florinda would always see it as something like a bathrobe that Old Florinda would wear with one of her breasts hanging out. Don Juan and Old Florinda would jokingly ask Florinda how she liked Old Florinda’s robe. The old nagual would ask Old Florinda to take off her robe in front of Florinda. Then one day, she saw that Old Florinda had never had a real robe on at all. It was her interpretation system that influenced or distorted her seeing the sheer energy robe of Old Florinda.
Florinda claimed don Juan Matus was not of this world but could operate within it. He was a businessman and dealt with lawyers. She said that she went out socially with him. [Such outings, which one would think would be events worthy of mention in her book, which otherwise seems to detail every time she saw don Juan, are never mentioned in Being-in-Dreaming.] She never met the nagual Julian but heard lecherous tales about him. She claimed Old Florinda was very wealthy. Don Juan too, had money but she didn’t know what name he had it under.
Florinda claimed Old Florinda took her to a house with gold bricks in the floor. Old Florinda told Florinda that the house was hers if she could find it again. [Another episode omitted from Being-in-Dreaming.] Florinda said don Juan gave them all nicknames and hers was “Greed.” She claimed Old Florinda left her a cache of jewelry in dreaming. She claimed Carlos Castaneda was “not very well off at all.” [With only an estimated $10-20 million in book royalties. But all those tuition and other living expenses of his women to cover.] She claimed some Italian writer who could not get an interview with Carlos just made up his article, including “scandalous deeds” such as “Carlos Castaneda, the California guru, living with women ‘servants.’” In reality, Florinda said, Castaneda “gives away his wealth, supporting people in Mexico as well as” the rest of them. She claimed “sorcery provides,” but one must, in turn, give it away to get it once again. One must not be attached.
Florinda related how the women of don Juan’s party doted on don Juan. She joked he “couldn’t even go to the bathroom without them.” They adored him, though, as “the nagual, the one which brings freedom, abstract and total freedom.” They “were, of course, free from the mundane assertions such behavior would normally conjure in the day to day world.” This led Florinda to discuss how men are more fragile than women. “They are energetically,” but society also “sets it up for them to be pampered needlessly.” Florinda talked about how women are ingrained with the need to help “the poor baby men.” At the airport they had seen men in suits, business types, trying to get coffee for themselves. They were there without their wives to get their coffee for them, “poor babies,” and Florinda described how they had felt the impulse to go over and help them! She also mentioned how, on the plane, she was cramped and had a stiff neck. She spent the time planning her speech while “an ally rubbed my neck.”
Florinda also described “ushers,” those allies (or anything else, i.e., omen/spirit) that usher us into any unknown or new thing. She described one of her ushers, explaining that one day she was ironing, “naked as is my usual custom,” when she felt what she perceived as a furry dog rubbing between her legs. She claimed it was an ally rubbing up against her, “an inorganic being.”
Florinda went on to say, probably in response to a question, that allies were not bad or good, that there really is no good or evil. “We are navigators of infinity, navigators of perception.” She claimed Castaneda was “really out there” and that they, the women disciples, were “doing everything we can to keep up.” Florinda claimed it would be “very easy” for them “to fly off into the unknown. The whole affair is so easy and that is why it is so hard to accomplish.” Florinda emphatically stated that she and her group were totally and completely given to the sorcerer’s way of life. She said the reason those in the audience were there was “because you’re not happy” or ” you’re missing something in your lives.” She claimed she would be “a fat wife or something horrible like that, hating my husband and my kids,” if it were not for this path.
Florinda added that Carlos had been “pretending to be retarded for the past three years and that, because of this, he would never really be retarded.” In regards to Tensegrity, Florinda mentioned that “Carlos taught it when he was around.” She also emphasized, as the Chacmools would later in the seminar, that Tensegrity was not a fixed thing. The movements were always changing. “Tensegrity is always changing,” Florinda said, “because Carlos is always dreaming.”
However, at other times the Chacmools as well as Taisha would say that Tensegrity “came from four strands of magical passes each given individually to the four disciples of the old Nagual.” These passes, they indicated, were combined into the Tensegrity.
Florinda claimed we were all petty tyrants and that mothers are “the biggest petty tyrants.” When asked about losing one’s edge she said women lose more in having children than men do, but men do lose some too. She said we can reclaim our lost energy by cutting the connection to children. “Besides,” she claimed, “we don’t love our children anyway.”
Someone asked about la Gorda’s eye (as described in the Second Ring of Power). Florinda said she didn’t know anything about this. There were a few questions along these lines that Florinda reportedly got a bit flustered over.
She reported that a “well off, sick, crazy young friend of ours” was always insulted by Castaneda “because he always opened himself up like a balloon to be popped.” This guy [Tony Karam], however, took a picture of a flyer.
Florinda said, possibly in response to a question, that there were “inorganic awarenesses present in the hall” they were in. Some, she said, appeared brownish or grayish, likes puffs or spirals. She claimed she could see them but we could not because 90 percent of our energy went into holding up our self-reflection and self-importance (“don Juan used 98%,” she claimed).
Florinda said she had seen just about every movie there was. She loved movies so much the other sorcerers had a nickname for her–“the movie whore.” Florinda claimed sorcery changes and heightens one’s awareness “in weird ways,” like the senses. She claimed Castaneda could “find chocolate anywhere.” She also said she loved to read as well as watch movies. She claimed, “Carlos doesn’t read anything but the Enquirer.” She also mentioned she used to practice Shotokan karate at college.
The notes also seemingly mention Cecilia Evans—i.e., “a woman associated with us who started hearing voices and couldn’t ‘snap out of it’ as a stalker would.”
April 20, 1995 – A fictitious business name statement was recorded for the Chacmool Center for Enhanced Perception, listing 12 names, including Florinda Donner-Grau, Nuri Alexander, Kylie Lundahl, Julius Renard, and Tycho Thal. [95-0654347].
May 19-21, 1995 – Mexico City Workshop at Sheraton Maria Isabel Hotel with Carol, Florinda, Taisha and the three Chacmools. Florinda closed on Sunday. [The 1,000 attendees were broken into two groups to learn Tensegrity–500 on Saturday, and the other 500 on Sunday.] Florinda thanked Tony Karam for “translating so beautifully.” Sorcerers, Florinda claimed, “bring love into your head, because the heart is too capricious.” Nobody is with them, she assured, even the Chacmools. “There is no group, we are not living together, our lives are lonely and isolated.
“Here are the three premises of the path of the sorcerer. The first premise is that we are perceivers. This is almost as tautological as saying that a bald person is someone who has no hair on his head. However, accepting it with the body and not just the head is a difficult task. Sorcerers believe that, at birth, a baby has a chaotic perception and we do our best to socialize very well. The world is an interpretation, and philosophers, especially Husserl, wanted to capture, understand what is perceived, to perceive without judgment. But when they asked Edmund Husserl how you could do that he responded, very offended, “I don’t know, motherfuckers, I am a philosopher.” Sorcerers, yes they can suspend judgment, put a parenthesis on it. To a philosopher one must at first see when there was a certain thought for the first time, but for sorcerers it is to know that we are perceivers. [She proceeded to tell the story of Old Florinda being naked that she had told previously at the Maui workshop.]
“Sorcerers and philosophers agree that perceiving is an act of intent, but we claim it is a pragmatic act while the philosophers think that it is something intellectual. The second premise we came to talk about is that it is unnecessary to anthropomorphize everything we perceive: the sorcerer realizes that we do it all the time.” Carol and Carlos, Florinda claimed, “are one luminous mass, have moved out of energy parameters of the luminous egg. Carol and Carlos know, however, that there is something that continues to govern our interpretation.” She mentioned Carol seeing the ’40’s actor Gerald Mohr in her dreams. “‘Dreaming’ is not lucid dreaming, but the use of the automatic movement of the assemblage point that turns the dream into ‘dreaming.’ When the seer begins to see, talk about headless monks, monsters, sexy women, fairies. Carlos spoke with a coyote which, in turn, was understood to him in Spanish, Argentine and Portuguese.” Florinda then also mentioned the old woman that accosted her while driving with Taisha and her experiences with being “taken by the wind.”
“Finally, the third premise of sorcerers is that everything we perceive is neither good nor bad, but it’s just there.”
Someone asked, “Is there another group of warriors?” Florinda responded, “No. The group of Zacatecas went to the Old Nagual. The idea of lineage the Old Nagual gave us was coming from the time of the conquest and at that time remained a secret knowledge for survival. Don Juan’s lineage will end, but not knowledge.” She insisted, “The only thing to expect is that something will change in each one of you from the practice of tensegrity and recapitulation. Coming to Los Angeles to practice tensegrity with us is absurd because we have no group, no group.”
Asked how holes or pits produced by children affect the energy of the parent body to make the leap: “No way, we all have the same chance. Carol has a daughter, the Blue Scout, and the Orange Scout is my daughter, myself and a dad who does not know who he is.”
Florinda finally explained that Castaneda’s book The Second Ring of Power said that Doña Soledad “Fought with her son to the death to keep him from stealing her energy, but the Witches today no longer agree with that, because they have seen people with children who are tireless workers. People married with children this way at least have a chance in their impeccability. Our interest as Witches is to navigate in the sea of the unknown.
“I recapitulated anywhere, Taisha only did it in a cave. Try to use the same chair, the most important thing about recapitulation is to do it every day, for five minutes, for half an hour, or one hour. We do it in the movies, going here, going out, in all places. It is only important that the first pass is methodical.” Florinda claimed, “Tensegrity movements are dream movements continually changing, and therefore we modify them. . . The Old Nagual was changing them all the time and I was angry, but that is because nothing is consistent.”
She also claimed, “The old Nagual disintegrated into energy pure and, when he burned, total awareness. The old Nagual jumped to another layer of the onion. Where? We do not know, but he did not die and that is the desire we have. We know how not to die.” Florinda asserted, “Third attention, second attention, layers of the onion, assemblage point, are ways of describing something so there’s no words.” She added, “We will not rob you of energy because we want nothing of the everyday world. What’s going to happen is that every time you have more energy.” When practicing Tensegrity, suffering from diarrhea or fainting is normal. “The first time I almost fainted. There’s no reason to be annoyed, consciousness is moving to be in you.
“The knowledge has never been secret. Every nagual is the modality of his time, and Carlos Castaneda is very academic.” Why did don Juan speak like a German philosopher? “In order to adapt to the interests of Castaneda.” Carlos had not broken, then, with the secret tradition, but their task was to write. “To don Juan that knowledge was never secret. The Old Nagual was a Yuma Indian and spoke perfect English, Spanish, Yaqui and Mazatec.”
Asked if you have to be celibate, Florinda claimed, “The old Nagual said we are all the product of a boring fuck so we do not have enough energy, and our sexual energy is the most powerful. Being celibate is something very personal. It is very boring to do it for religious reasons. If someone is going to die from not having sex, then you have it. This is a question only you can answer. Stop having sex to see what happens. The Old Nagual was a dirty old man, but he had great energy.” Florinda also claimed, “It is not advisable to practice fasting tensegrity, you should walk very well eaten. We eat everything. The Chacmools do not take sugar, no coffee, no alcohol, but that is something totally personal. The Old Nagual told me not to take sugar, no coffee, no alcohol. But today Taisha had some exquisite liquors! The Old Nagual ate everything, but in moderation.And I hope to drink a tequila tonight.”
May 20, 1995 – Likely date of Carol Tiggs’s “top secret” speech and tour for Cleargreen insiders at Tula. For a summary, see the Carol Tiggs Chronology. After the speech, Carol 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 following excerpts are taken from my nearly verbatim notes, taken in shorthand while they were speaking (a practice they barred beginning with the August 1995 three-week workshop). [For a complete account of this workshop click here.] Florinda spoke the first night, Taisha the second, and the Chacmools the third, with the Chacmools, Florinda and Taisha fielding questions (in lieu of Carol’s speech, since Carol had supposedly “crashed” after the workshop in Mexico). Florinda explained she, Taisha and Carol were “the original disciples of don Juan.” They had all allegedly been drafted into the sorcerers’ world more than 25 years ago. “We had a long period of incubation, including 10 years with don Juan [actually, in Florinda’s case, if one believes her own chronology, barely 3] and 10 more under Old Florinda.”
Florinda: “Energy opened up for Castaneda when he jumped into the abyss. We don’t understand what happened ourselves: we saw him jump [strange, then, that in Being-in-Dreaming Florinda claims to have been in Mexico when don Juan’s party left, but relates there that she neither saw them leave nor Castaneda jump], and Castaneda resurfaced ten hours later in Westwood, in his apartment at the intersection of Westwood Blvd. and Wilshire Blvd. Carol Tiggs disappeared for 10 years, reappearing at the Phoenix Bookstore after trying to find the clan for months.”
Florinda digressed, claiming “Carlos doesn’t read anymore like an ordinary person–he sleeps on top of books all day, because his liver and spleen were taught to absorb heavy, philosophical type tomes. His legs down to his ankles read thrillers. Unfortunately, he has no spot on his body for reading letters. His penis doesn’t read at all; he can’t even read Playboy with it.” She claimed she and Carol Tiggs “placed a batch of letters on his buttocks one day while he was sleeping, and when he woke he said he’d had the best sleep ever, but had felt alligators, snakes and barracudas biting into his back. His head is only good for reading magazines–Time, Der Speigel and Hola.” So Florinda read his letters to him. Women, Florinda claimed, because of their wombs, have an even greater capacity to read than men, but can only do so for a few pages at a time. “Unfortunately, we destroyed so many books this way [i.e., reading with their vaginas], that now we read like anyone else.”
Florinda claimed they all have to obey Kylie. “Kylie won’t let Taisha tell her stories, because they make everyone cry. She won’t let Castaneda watch TV or drink coffee, and doesn’t let Carol Tiggs eat because she gets too fat. But she lets me do anything. That’s because we’re both ‘Baltic’–from the same planet.”
“The Old Nagual was extremely pragmatic and was different with each one of us in technique and mood. With me he was concrete and lewd.” Florinda claimed he told her that every time she saw Old Florinda, Old Florinda was naked. Playing on how we perceive in everyday world everyone as being clothed, Florinda claimed sorcerers can appear fully clothed even when they are really naked. They “wear a coat of sheer energy.” Old Florinda used to walk around in what appeared to be a silk robe, which in itself scandalized Florinda, and don Juan walked in on them once and told Old Florinda to take off her clothes. Old Florinda responded “Whatever you want,” and she appeared “naked and gorgeous.” Don Juan told Florinda, “Blondie, feast your eyes.” Then he asked her where was the robe, and there was none. Old Florinda was just naked. Don Juan did the same with Castaneda, but Castaneda always thought it really was a physical robe, and that “because he was so busy hiding his erections, it gave them enough time to hide the robe from him.” Florinda claimed she did the same to the Chacmools now. Renata Murez came to her room at 6 PM that night, very nervous. Florinda didn’t have anything on, but Reni supposedly saw her as fully clothed. We don’t see either that among us are bell-shaped, and also candle-like undulating, dark chocolate shapes — the Inorganic Beings we coexist with, that move energetically at a much lower speed than we do. Only through dreaming can we balance our energy sufficiently to see them. One day in Los Angeles Florinda was ironing naked, practicing the “robe of energy,” when she felt a furry thing sliding between her legs. She thought she had left the door open and that a stray dog had come in, “but, of course, it was an inorganic being.”
One day when Florinda was driving with Taisha to class in their VW van in Los Angeles, an old woman grabbed onto the door. They sped up to lose her, but only lost her when they finally turned from Olympic onto Wilshire, where there were more lights. Don Juan laughed when Florinda described the woman as very old, with crooked teeth and horrible breath. He said, “I think you smelled her farts,” commenting dryly to the others in the room that anyone who runs at that speed would, of necessity, have to fart. He even asked those assembled, “Wouldn’t she need to fart a great deal?” and they all solemnly agreed. Later an “inorganic friend” showed up that was a mixture between a cat and a rabbit, “with the most horrible teeth.” Don Juan allegedly told Florinda to quit anthropomorphizing the inorganics, because her “fixation on teeth” was unhealthy. Florinda claimed don Juan took Taisha and Florinda into the hills [interesting, because Florinda complains in Being-in-Dreaming of never having met any of Castaneda’s other women associates, even as late as don Juan’s departure in ’73], and said they would have to take off their clothes and lean by a rock. Once the “wind” came they were to join Old Florinda down the hill. Florinda waited, but of course there was no wind. She had given up and was going to leave when she felt a tremendous force of energy enter “the hole between my legs,” causing her to run down the hill “in the air” screaming. Don Juan was waiting at the bottom with Old Florinda, and they “stopped the wind.” They howled with laughter at her. She told them she had been “raped” by the wind, and beat on them. Don Juan told her if she had only done it properly she would have learned something.
A man asked a long question about whether what had happened to Castaneda and Carol Tiggs had changed the group’s path. Florinda responded that the question they were then dealing with was “Are we condemned to interpret forever? Is that what we’re stuck with? Our hope is the two scouts, blue and orange, who have a different kind of energy, acting as our energetic guides, indicates that there is a way to bridge that interpretation limitation.” A woman asked, “Why the short hair?” Florinda explained she had been shaved bald after “living with the lamas” in the seventies and getting a bad case of lice. When it grew out it was “like this.” Also, hair is basically dead. “It is practical and propitious to have short hair.”
A man asked about don Juan’s current situation. Florinda said, “We don’t really know. We believe he is in another layer of the onion, another world, but we don’t really know.” A man asked, “Can you talk about sexual activity?” Florinda complained jokingly, “I always get this question; it always comes to me.” Then she said, “Castaneda is supposed to be celibate. I hope he is.” (Florinda then took off her glasses, joking “I’d rather not see your faces when I talk about this.”) “The old Nagual said all of us are ‘bored fucks,’ in the sense that we were conceived in total or semi-boredom. So our energy is at a mediocre level. Therefore it is better that we not spend it wastefully.”
A man asked a question about formlessness. Florinda claimed the most formless in their group were Castaneda and Carol Tiggs. “If nothing was pulling them to stay here, they would hardly remain. I always remind Castaneda that he owes me to take me with him, because he kept me from departing with Old Florinda.” A man asked whether we should form groups. Florinda said no, that even their group is really very solitary. “Something energetically connects us. It is not because we eat or live together. (We might go to movies together.)” There was no guarantee even that they would all leap together.
I asked a question about where gays and lesbians fit into the sorcerers’ view of the world, given that the books are pretty “heterocentric.” Florinda responded that the books reflect the tradition of “a bunch of old Mexicans,” who were very “uptight about sexuality,” and that’s why the books leave it out. “Lesbians were not real for them. The only thing don Juan commented when the subject of homosexuality came up was that he didn’t understand why some gays and lesbians live in couples just like heterosexuals”; he seemed to wonder why they didn’t take advantage of being outside the norm. “Moralistically, it didn’t matter to him.” In her view, males get along better with each other anyway. “Males don’t like females. Yes, we’re good sexual partners and mothers, but ultimately, energetically, you prefer your own kind. And women do too.” As a society, we haven’t much explored if women can love each other, beyond just when they are both miserable.
A man asked about the impact of children on our luminous eggs. Florinda claimed both she and Carol Tiggs had each given birth to a scout. Florinda had the orange one. “It doesn’t have that much impact, except one just has to work harder or run faster. We may have holes, but it pushes us to work harder.”
A man asked about the death of la Gorda. Florinda said, “She died 10 years ago in a burst of ego. She thought she was the Nagual, because don Juan had said she was a ‘peerless dreamer.’ She was impatient with Carlos taking too long and Carol Tiggs not being around. She combusted–she almost leapt, but she couldn’t hold it, because her drive was sheer egomania. So she died in our arms.”
Someone asked a question about the abyss [that Castaneda supposedly jumped into around the time of don Juan’s departure]. Florinda explained that when Castaneda jumped, he “changed energetically.” She also claimed “Nestor, Pablito and the Little Sisters joined don Juan not long ago.” [Indeed, this departure would have to have been in the first few months of 1995, because in Castaneda’s December 1994 lecture he was still saying that the Genaros and Little Sisters were “all doing find, living good lives.” Maybe Castaneda and company finally decided to “off” this fictional gang following Merilyn Tunneshende’s claim of being involved with the Little Sisters.]
A woman asked how the Chacmools were “chosen.” Florinda explained she had met Kylie “10 or 15 years ago, at an art gallery in Oslo.” (In an aside, Florinda claimed, “Kylie’s a great artist.”) Florinda had gotten sick there “from having eaten too many French chocolates on the plane. I vomited and Kylie nursed me.” Kylie knew about Castaneda. Florinda told her to “come visit,” without really meaning it, and “Kylie showed up at our agent’s a year later.” Florinda “told her to go away, but she continued on her own until something in her changed and there was no way to refuse her. Energetically they became Chacmools, because of what they did. So many have tried to be with us, and they either go mad or don’t like it because our life is too harsh.”
A man observed that “the rule”[as described in Castaneda’s early books] seemed to have changed, and asked whether that means that what had been written is no longer pertinent. Florinda said “No, that’s not true. What’s been written is a bona fide account of a process and practices. Taisha’s metaphor is of water going over pebbles in a river. The pebbles are still there, there’s just new water running over them.” Florinda said she used to ask don Juan for the rules, what to do. “I used to fight him, telling him I was German, and that if he’d just tell me what to do, I’d do it. When I was planning to do anthropology research in the Amazon, he just told me not to use other people, including my parents, for connections and help, which was my usual way. He told me to do it on my own.” [According to her books, however, it was Old Florinda who gave Florinda these instructions. It is also interesting that don Juan, who is supposed to have left in 1973, is supposedly giving Florinda instructions for her alleged Amazon field research that she did not claim to have done until 1975 or 1976.] She claimed she almost killed him when he told her, “All you have is that you’re blond and blue eyed in a country where that matters.” But it changed her.
A man asked about the story about the dog in The Witch’s Dream. Florinda avoided responding, saying, “That was so long ago.” She explained she was told she had to do her thesis work outside of Mexico, that otherwise it would be too easy. “I found a healer. The first version of the thesis hadn’t been accepted; it wasn’t scientific enough for UCLA.” This healer believed that energetically we are related to those connected with us–our parents, etc.
A man asked, “Isn’t the ultimate quest total freedom?” Florinda said, “That’s just an idealization unless we raise our awareness. Otherwise it’s mental masturbation. Don Juan’s party burned from within, making the plumed serpent configuration, with one last round for our eyes. [Hmm, even in Being-in-Dreaming Florinda does not claim to have seen this.] Sixteen people disappeared. Old Florinda disappeared after la Gorda died, because we were all responsible and Old Florinda cussed us out. For us to let that happen,” Old Florinda called them incompetents, etc. So Old Florinda determined to make the leap alone. “There’s an orange tree in front of my window, and Old Florinda had on a white dress and sunbonnet. I saw briefly a light, but thought Old Florinda was just hiding when she vanished. But no, she was just suddenly gone, with only a strange vibration behind her that went through the trees and left the orange blossoms shaking. Old Florinda wanted to take me, but Castaneda didn’t want me to go so he pushed me out of the way.” Florinda also commented at some point about Castaneda’s clan all being “connected by having been at the Anthropological Institute at UCLA at some time.”
During an extended question and answer period on Sunday night that took the place of Carol’s scheduled lecture, Florinda said Carol Tiggs “seems to be our energy source,” and claimed she, Carol Tiggs and Taisha had taken the shape of a “tube,” and were “tubing their energy to the Chacmools.”
Nyei: “The Blue Scout was also gone for about 10 years, from the chronological ages of seven to 17, returning about a year before Carol Tiggs did. During this time, Florinda and Castaneda took care of her.”
Renata: “What Castaneda didn’t know at the time [that he freed the Blue Scout from the Inorganic Beings’ world] was that there was another unit of energy behind the Blue Scout–the Orange Scout–that was also trapped. Castaneda’s effort freed her as well. Don Juan was very concerned, knowing that Carol Tiggs would have to give birth to free the Blue Scout. The matter of the Orange Scout was even more difficult, however, because no one wanted to help. Finally, Florinda said, ‘Fuck it! I’ll do it.'”
A man asked whether the Chacmools knew where the scouts came from. That question seemed to stump the Chacmools, so Florinda came up to answer, followed by Taisha. Florinda said the scouts are both, in a weird way, “our beacon.” She claimed, “they act from total egolessness; even their appearing to fight with each other is a great delight to us, since the scouts know they can’t live without each other.” [Note: Apparently they found a way by ’97, when the “Orange Scout” was sent away.] The group believed they have some energy from “way beyond.” She claimed, “We don’t know who the scouts’ fathers are.” (In Mexico City, Florinda had joked that in the case of her child, the father was “a huge, fat Indian from Oaxaca.”)
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, “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.” Florinda then mentioned the Orange Scout had called her that morning. She commented, “It is a big mistake to call me before noon,” and yet Florinda’s door was being knocked on that morning at 8:00 AM. The Orange Scout just, “wanted to talk to Mommy.” But Florinda was, at first, enraged. In Florinda’s words, “Nothing is colder than a witch’s tit.” She concluded, “The only way we can reach Castaneda or Carol Tiggs now is through dreaming.”
A man asked how long it took them to recall their Second Attention experiences. Florinda quipped, “Not as long as Carlos.” As a German, she said she was “very focused on time.” When Fabrizio drove them to an antique store in town that day, she insisted they be back by three, knowing if she didn’t they would still be there. When they got back to the car, she claimed, it was one minute to three.
Florinda claimed her first recapitulation helped her to understand Heidegger, and even to read him in German somehow, “although my reading ability in German is normally pretty low. The recapitulation opened up synapses that expanded my mental abilities.” Florinda claimed, “Don Juan, being from Yuma, Arizona, spoke English very well and used to use the horrible term ‘cracked cunts’ in referring to the women.” She also claimed, “Carol Tiggs’s intent was to return, and that intent had to have existed for a long time. Don Juan knew we would find themselves in our current circumstances, and his intense training of us in a variety of techniques was because he knew we would be needing it.”
A man asked Florinda how she manipulated her energy to have the Orange Scout born through her. Florinda responded, “The way we do it in the world.” The Orange Scout was “in me energetically. The process was very much directed by the Old Nagual, not that he was there at the time.” In response to a question about Castaneda having a son, and the impact of children on one’s edge, or having children causing a hole in one’s luminous egg, Florinda claimed that a child, especially the first born, “does take the edge. “This does make it harder [to pursue the sorcerer’s path], but not impossible. Castaneda never had a son. He was given a boy to raise, but that child was taken away from him when the child was six-years-old. [This is obviously a reference to C.J. Castaneda, Margaret Runyan Castaneda’s son who now goes by the name “Adrian Vashon,” and who unsuccessfully challenged the probate of Castaneda’s 1998 will. For more about C.J.’s relationship to Castaneda click here.] And Castaneda contributed a great deal of energy to the birth of the Blue Scout.”
Florinda claimed Florinda Grau used to tell her, “If you beat me, it’s a matter of ego. If I beat you, it’s controlled folly, because to me, it doesn’t matter.” A woman asked how the Chacmools came into the sorcerers’ world. Kylie responded that Florinda got sick on chocolates in Norway, and “I was completely taken with her. To me, Florinda was like some sprite from a German forest. As I listened to Florinda, I recognized something I always hoped was true,” i.e., that there was “a being that wasn’t duplicitous. It pulled me. Florinda passed out in my arms, and Castaneda says that’s the moment when I began to guard her. Florinda left, but I followed her to L.A., not even bothering to pack.” [So Kylie is repeating what she knows is an absolute fabrication about her supposedly first meeting Florinda. Interesting.]
Nyei claimed her introduction to the group was “a three-fold story: I was introduced to them twice. I went to a lecture by Florinda, but I was late, and was told by others there that I had nearly missed her.” Nyei then realized she’d have been there much earlier [meaning she had had a prior opportunity to be introduced to them], but was “lost in trying to become a genius poet, and had to get burned out on that first. By some great luck I found Florinda. Then Taisha and Kylie came and stole me from my parents’ house. Florinda had invited me to a Tensegrity class. I felt an energetic change on one level immediately. Taisha and Kylie came to help me ‘move some things,’ and before I knew it I was out of my parents’ house and going with them–they weren’t just moving furniture, they were taking me too. Once I arrived with them, they ignored me completely and told me to recapitulate.”
A man asked, “What’s the rule of the three-pronged nagual?” Florinda responded dramatically, but somewhat jokingly, “There are no rules!” In response to a question about the jobs they worked at, Florinda claimed her current job was as a translator, and that “I write about sorcery, feminism and phenomenology, and take care of the Chacmools and the Orange Scout. The Chacmools work at Toltec Artists.” Taisha said she had another persona who was a professional “who does accounting and bill paying and investments. It took me years to train for this. When I get back to Los Angeles, this person has to kick in to deal with a lot of work. I also cook and clean.” Florinda jumped in to say that Taisha, “doesn’t clean.” Taisha continued, claiming “All of us do mundane things, but they are transformed, becoming true pleasure.”
A woman asked whether any of them were in relationships when they came into the sorcerers’ world and, if so, whether the relationship survived. [Laughter] Florinda responded, “How could it? We are truly solitary beings. And no, we don’t have a relationship with Carlos.” She said they all go to the movies together, and that their interactions with each other were pretty mundane. “We don’t sit around asking each other what process we experienced.”
A man asked about the role of academia in their world. Florinda responded that Castaneda thinks that “only by training the mind to its limits can we make sense of the world out there. Academia played an important role for us too simply because it’s Castaneda’s ‘mood.'” Taisha and Florinda claimed to be very interested in phenomenology. Only Florinda was interested in feminism. “To truly be in the world, one can use professors as petty tyrants,” Florinda suggested. Florinda claimed she and Taisha usually wrote each paper twice: “once for ourselves and once for the professor.”
Someone asked Florinda whether she was really wearing clothes or not. She said she had “thought about practicing the sheer robe of energy on you, but one needs sandals for that, and I didn’t bring any. You can’t do it wearing socks.” Florinda also said at some point that she and Taisha had adjoining apartments.
June 16, 1995 – Cleargreen, Inc., was incorporated, by filing articles of incorporation executed by George Short on June 15.
July ?, 1995 – Revised schedule for the August intensive was 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.”]
July 21, 1995 – Humberto Fontanez filed in the Santa Monica branch of the Los Angeles Superior Court for change of name to Fabricio Magaldi. He listed his birthdate as October 17, 1947; birthplace as Puerto Rico; and nearest living relative as “Florinda Donner-Grau, cousin.” Effective Sept. 11, 1995. [SS 006093]
August 1-20, 1995 – Three-week intensive workshop at Culver City High School “cafetorium.” 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.” (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 annual corporate information statement for Laugan Productions, Inc., changing the address from Martel Ave. to 11901 Santa Monica Blvd., Suite 596, LA 90025; listing Taisha as CEO, Muni Aranha as Secretary, and Florinda Donner-Grau as CFO; and the purpose of the corporation as “Research & Production.”
August 25-27, 1995 – Florinda and the Chacmools appeared at Mishka Productions-sponsored workshop in the Crystal Ballroom of the Radisson Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. Florinda joked, “Kylie locks Carlos away under her bed” to prevent him from drinking cappuccinos. “She’ll keep him locked away for weeks at a time, and when he returns he’s cranky and irritable.” Florinda explained “cappuccinos are Carlos’s vice, just as movies are mine.” She acknowledged “I go and see every movie that comes out. Except that I’ll never go to see Waterworld.” But later, she admitted she probably would sneak in to see it “when nobody’s looking.” Florinda claimed, “Carlos has been ready to burn from within for two years now.” She explained that one day “I came into the room and Carlos had shrunk down to about two-feet long [she held out her arms to indicate the size].” When she saw this, she thought that they would all be leaving soon. “So I went and found Taisha and told her to throw out everything that she didn’t want to leave behind.”
After several questions about the contents of dreams, Florinda said the content of dreams is “worthless.” What is important is engaging the dreaming attention. She also claimed “when the double is ‘seen,’ it looks exactly like the physical body.” She emphasized that the double was not the luminous cocoon. Florinda also mentioned the Nagualist, reportedly saying she couldn’t believe that anyone would actually publish instructions on the proper dimensions of a recapitulation box. Florinda said she and Carlos used to go to an all-night restaurant called “Ships” on Westwood Blvd in L.A. They would go there around 2 or 4 am, after “jumping into the abyss” (dreaming). Florinda claimed she would have the most magnificent (“and worthless”) dreams after these early morning meals. Florinda asserted that when don Juan and his party “burned from within,” Castaneda was present. She explained “he couldn’t bear the thought of the Nagual leaving, so he jumped into the abyss.” She also asserted that “there really is an abyss, 800 feet straight down” somewhere in Mexico.
Regarding the cost of the workshops, Florinda claimed she was there “for free and not charging anyone even a cent.” She then pointed at the Chacmools saying, “These are the people who are charging money. They’re doing it.” (The cost was $300. About 250 attended.)
[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.]
October 6-8, 1995 – Workshop at Culver City High School Cafetorium. Florinda claimed Carol Tiggs’s eyes when she had spoken Saturday morning were black instead of their usual blue. When she is like that, Florinda claimed the rest “all stay in bed,” and “Castaneda runs for the hills.” (Note: This was the black contact lens trick they employed a number of times. By having someone like Florinda “point” out the supposed change in the eye color, they set up the conditions for hypnotic suggestion.)
She mentioned there were starting to be a few films that have “more of a women’s perspective” than in past years. She had recently seen, The Making of an American Quilt, and was amazed at one scene where a woman honestly talks about never having loved her husband. “They didn’t go all the way with this, though, and at the end she is recanting what she said.” Someone asked if she recapped her experiences with don Juan. Florinda said she doesn’t recap him, but later explained she had recapped the embarrassing moments she had with him. A woman asked about the “luminous worms” that men leave in women and that take seven years to go away. Florinda said this was indeed true, as was the fact that having children made holes in the luminous shell. She also claimed a “good recapitulation can get rid of them in seven days.”
Florinda addressed the “poor me” issue. She said it was meaningless to complain one doesn’t have the benefit of a teacher like don Juan, or Carlos. She said Carlos had complained don Juan had the benefit of don Elias and don Julian, that she had complained Carlos had had more interaction with don Juan and his party than she had, and the Chacmools complained they never met don Juan. It was all unimportant. “There are no better or worse circumstances, and there are no rewards associated with sorcery. It is an endless challenge, and that’s all. We all face infinity alone–energy is all that matters.”
Someone asked whether facing infinity alone implied the nagual’s party was separated after the abstract flight. Florinda answered that the final destination of the nagual’s party is “not known,” but that we were “all facing infinity alone right now, even in this crowded room.” She told us she did not agree with don Juan’s extreme strategy for erasing personal history by leaving behind everything you knew. They were “not asking you to give up your families or your lives,” she said. “What matters is detachment, which follows from losing self-importance, which is a product of energy.” At another point during the weekend, when a group of us gathered around Florinda, she mentioned having recently seen the film Showgirls. Jerry Garcia had recently died and someone mentioned it. She talked about the drummer in the Grateful Dead having taken her to one of their concerts, and that they had seated her in the front and brought her backstage afterward. She met Garcia and found him “very nice.” She mentioned also that she was just back from Mexico. She told a story about having worn high heels when they arrived off the plane in Scottsdale, and hearing a woman under her breath comment that it was “ridiculous for her to be wearing high heels to do Tensegrity.” She also said the eyes indicate the measure of energy a person has. She was asked when Old Florinda left and said it was in 1985, jokingly adding “at 10 AM.”
October 13-15, 1995 – Workshop at Culver City High School Cafetorium. [Florinda explained she had “left out of my book the part about using the penis to point. Men can always raise their awareness higher than women’s, because their organ is always pointing down.” Castaneda later said Florinda and Taisha lived next door to each other, and that “Florinda sometimes pounds on the wall to see if the inorganic beings are there, because she’s afraid of them. She sends me in to find Taisha, and Taisha is not there initially but suddenly materializes and says she was there all the time. ‘Liar!’”]
November 10-12, 1995 – Workshop at Culver City High School Cafetorium. Theme was “Intersubjectivity.” Castaneda, Carol, Florinda, Taisha and Nury all spoke. Florinda claimed she “was a somnambulist as a child. My father used to tie ‘whoopee cushions’ around my feet.” Don Juan’s group supposedly saw her energy and helped her “channel it into dreaming.” She explained “I like to think of myself as a stalker though, because I think I know how to deal with people well.” (She indicated she was the only one in the group that attended parties and went to movies. She told us “I even have a bathroom phone because I’m such a social butterfly.”)
She claimed she used to see the “cat rabbit” creature. She also claimed Castaneda wouldn’t go near “her house” because he was so appalled by it. “It finally left and has been gone for a long time, but recently Talia saw it, and then Kylie saw it too, hopping around by her car, and it frightened her and made her sick.” Florinda cited, as an example of intersubjectivity, a healer in Mexico who needed a particular pass and the intersubjectivity of eight witnesses to do her healing. “She couldn’t deal with more than eight” people being present. Sorcerers have intersubjectivity too, she explained, interpreting their experiences. She advised one could enter someone else’s subjectivity “by moving your assemblage point to the same place as theirs.” She claimed, “an eagle has taken me places in my dreams. Either it’s a giant eagle, or I am very small–I prefer the former explanation.” Then two years ago she started seeing it near the trash area where she lived, “standing on top of a barrel eating a pigeon. It spoke to my mind to tell me I could walk around it but to get no closer.” She claimed “the others have seen a bird leaving when they come over, and drops of blood and feathers on the ground.”
December 1995 – Yoga Journal published “Carlos Castaneda’s Tensegrity,” by Holly Hammond. Hammond reported “Florinda knew Castaneda at UCLA, where she received her PhD in anthropology shortly after he did.” [The Yoga Journal apparently took Florinda’s word about the doctorate and did not bother with fact checking.] Florinda also “explained”: “Although the four 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.” This reportedly changed on Carol’s return from 10 years “off in the ‘sea of awareness.’” The article also contaied pictures of the Chacmools striking fierce poses on Maui.
[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. Florinda described how don Juan used to tell her go outside and “offer your pussy to the wind.” She claimed don Juan told Old Florinda to “show me her pussy, which she did.” Then don Juan showed her his penis and she thought it was the biggest one she’d ever seen. [Another poignant episode omitted from Being-in-Dreaming.] Don Juan made a sexual gesture at her which horrified her, but Old Florinda told her not to worry because “it hadn’t worked since 1934.” Old Florinda said “don Juan claimed it was 1937, but she knew for a fact that it was 1934 . . . on a Saturday . . . at 3:00.” Old Florinda supposedly took Florinda out to the courtyard and had her take her panties off, lift her dress and lie exposed for the “wind,” or abstract force. So Florinda, lying there, fell asleep. Next thing she knew, she was “being fucked.” She started screaming and yelling, thinking “it’s one of those ‘Mexicans!’” Don Juan supposedly told her she should never wear panties, but Florinda asked, “What about discharge?” Don Juan allegedly claimed “all those female complaints are because women only use their womb for one function,” and that “the womb is ill because of not using its second function.” Florinda advised that women should “not fight it if the abstract force tries to penetrate you.”
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. Florinda lectured the first night, Taisha Saturday night, and Carol Sunday morning. Florinda claimed that for many years Castaneda had a copy of don Juan’s birth certificate. He had done something for don Juan that required the certificate, and don Juan had told him to keep it, remarking he could “really surprise people some day” by identifying who don Juan really was. But after a number of years, Castaneda burned the certificate. Don Juan’s party was said to be delighted with this act, and Florinda claimed this was the moment when Castaneda “ceased to be an anthropologist.”
Florinda said her father was a military man. She grew up with two brothers who were “taller, stronger and louder than I was. But I learned to assert myself.” When the brothers jumped in the river, she also jumped. Later, she learned “to take money for everything.” In this way, she claimed, she “became terribly authoritarian.” She asserted she had tried to continue like this after having entered into the world of the sorcerers. She claimed don Juan had changed her. “I used to be a tyrant. Now I’m just bossy.”
Florinda claimed don Juan had asked her to “find out about intent for him.” At first she laughed, but he gave her what she thought was a very good reason for doing this “research,” and that was that “Carlos is very concerned about intent and intentionality.” Florinda had the sense “this old Indian” wanted to bone up on the philosophical concepts Castaneda was interested in. So she spent months reading and going to all the professors of sociology and philosophy at UCLA to learn “everything I could about intent, intentionality and phenomenology.” She then felt “well prepared to lecture don Juan for hours on the subject.” But he wasn’t interested in hearing her lecture. She asked him why he had made her go through all this work, and he responded, “Why do you want to be a stupid cunt all your life?” This was very shocking to her, since no one–man or woman–had ever used that term to refer to her before. Later, “when I reached total inner silence,” a woman’s voice asked her the same thing—”in German!” (“Warum willst du dein ganzes Leben eine dumme Fotze bleiben, wenn du dich ändern kannst?”) She claimed this slang term was at least as bad, if not worse, in German. Don Juan also told her she should open her “cunt” up to “the wind.” She didn’t like the word, but didn’t like “vagina” either–“it’s too Latin.” So he suggested a nicer word: “How about pussy?”
The first time she experienced “the wind,” Old Florinda supposedly told her to take off her panties and sit outside. Florinda experienced it, but went to sleep right away. When she woke up, she felt this weight on top of her and an object penetrating her vagina. She was sure that “one of the old Indians” was violating her, but they weren’t—”it was ‘the wind.’” The second time, Old Florinda and don Juan took Florinda up a hill where she had to take off all her clothes and wait. Don Juan and Old Florinda were to meet her at the bottom of the hill with her clothes. Since she had fallen asleep the first time, this time she was determined to “stay awake and find out what happened.” Suddenly “all this anger started coming up” in her about different “tricks” they had pulled on her, and she became convinced this was another one. She became so enraged she “started running down the hill to tell them off once and for all.” As she was running, she felt the wind enter her, so that when she approached them she yelled that she’d been “raped” by the wind. Old Florinda told her she was an “asshole.” She told her that, like Florinda, she had experienced it on the first try, but said she had enjoyed it. Don Juan supposedly claimed if he had a womb he would be “doing it all day and all night.” Florinda claimed she told him if he did have a womb, he might think differently about it. Once she assertedly said to don Juan: “You are a dirty old man!” Don Juan answered: “I am dirty and I am old, but I am not a dirty old man.”
Florinda also explained that, for sorcerers, it is a “defeat” to leave alone. They want to go with a group. She was asked about Old Florinda going alone and responded that, yes, she did, but the reason she hadn’t gone with don Juan’s party is that she had wanted to store up extra energy to try to catch up with her original party, led by the Nagual Julian. Zuleica had stated the two of them (old Florinda and Zuleica) had stayed behind “to help the new nagual on his way.” Each of the sorcerers in their current group, she asserted, would be capable to burn from the fire of within alone. But this “would be a failure for the sorcerer, because he will be solitary.”
Florinda asserted “not only the uterus but every organ of the human being has a second function which is hidden by our socialization.” She also claimed a woman whose uterus has been extracted has to work like a man to reach inner silence–“she has to use the totality of her self.” Thanks to the uterus, it is easier for a woman to reach this state, but once a man has arrived at this point he will be even more powerful than a woman.
Someone asked about Castaneda’s health. She explained he was supposed to stay in his “center of well being,” which was Los Angeles, but that he had gone to Mexico to do a workshop and then come up to Oakland to do a workshop. After that he became seriously sick. Despite the fact he had assertedly “jumped grooves” numerous times, he became so energy depleted he couldn’t jump grooves. What happened was that a doctor “appeared”—she claimed they hadn’t called for the doctor–and this doctor had to “go to where we were” to treat Castaneda. In other words, the doctor allegedly couldn’t treat Castaneda using standard medical procedures. When Castaneda got that sick, Florinda claimed, he would “make the leap by himself instead of staying here with no vitality.” But he had “made this promise to intent that he would take all of us when he left,” so he “got better so that he could do that.”
She distinguished don Juan’s group from theirs by saying don Juan’s “had a lot more mass–there were 16 of them.” Don Juan’s group also had the purpose of training others to continue their lineage. “But the five of us don’t have that mass.” [People were surprised when she said “five,” but the fifth, we gathered from her next statement, was the so-called Blue Scout.] She claimed the Blue Scout was very talented and could just “go off” in an instant. She was later asked to clarify why she said five. She responded, “Oh, did I say five?” Then she looked down at the group in the first two rows and said, “Well, you count.” She then explained that the “five” were the “basic group, the students of don Juan.”
A man commented, “You had someone training you, I don’t have that. What if I’m doing the Tensegrity and something happens? I don’t want to see a 14-foot inorganic.” Florinda replied, “You poor baby. You don’t have a teacher.” She explained the workshops “are an unfolding of intent.” She explained that, at first, they just lectured and “thought that would be it. Now we are doing these workshops.” People ask, “When is the next workshop? Can you tell me the schedule?” But it’s “very weird” for them to have “a week in July on the schedule, because we don’t even know if we’re going to be here.”
A question was asked about the ideal conditions in the Witches’ house in Mexico. She said such ideal conditions are “not good in the long run.” She herself wanted to stay there, she claimed, but the sorcerers sent her back to Los Angeles to accomplish her tasks. She was asked more sex questions: “What is it about the sex act that is bad for energy?” She said she had been hearing some of the people who were at the August workshop had been doing the movements, recapitulating, and still had “a boyfriend or girlfriend or are married, and they intensely want to have sex.” She said, “If you are obsessing about it, you should probably just do it.” You shouldn’t be obsessing about it. But it was not a matter of morality. “Celibacy is more of a religious concept. Sorcerers aren’t celibate in that sense. They just have a different attitude about it. Sex [for sorcerers] is divorced from the social order. It’s not about power, control and manipulation for them.” For sorcerers, “sex isn’t about ‘luuuv.’” She claimed she was not “in the situation of having to please a boyfriend, husband or lover. The problem with sex is more all the things that accompany the sex act rather than the act itself.”
She was asked about losing “the edge” to children. She said “that’s true, especially with the first child, who takes the bulk of the edge, but you just have to work harder. It’s hard work anyway. It’s not that big a deal.” A woman asked a question about near-death experiences and whether people who have had them and later write about them are describing entering into the Inorganic Beings’ world. Florinda said she thought it was “entirely possible,” but explained she hadn’t had a near death experience, and “all I know is what it is like to enter the Inorganic Beings’ world.” She also mentioned the Tibetan Book of the Dead as another possible description, “in particular cultural terms, of entering that world,” but claimed she didn’t know very much about it.
Florinda was asked if there were other ways to enter the Inorganic Beings’ realm, since she had said “through silence was one way,” and that that was a very natural way for women. She responded another way, as described in The Art of Dreaming, is having enough energy to follow a scout. “Burning with the fire from within is another way.” At the end, someone asked, “What’s the rule of the three-pronged Nagual?” Florinda first joked that it was “to make the witches happy.” Then she said it was “to fulfill his promise to intent to take us all with him, so we could all go together.” Asked about Castaneda’s health, Carol said, “Our brother Carlos could not join us because he is battling an infection. We do not know the nature of his illness. A sorcerer cannot avail himself of traditional medicine; he must rely on the spirit, and on his own resources. Before a sorcerer reaches the threshold where his body no longer functions, he will choose, if he can, to kindle the awareness of his entire being, in order to leave this world intact and whole. And our brother Carlos has made a promise to include us in that final act. But we do not know if this is the time of his leaving.” Taisha said that while Florinda had said the preceding night there were “just five or ten of them, who made up the group, who would be going,” as a result of “the movement” that Taisha had seen there–“the change”–her feeling was that she was “opening it up to the possibility that more of you could go with us.” The cost of this workshop was $300, and about 450 attended. (The workshop was also described in a Sept. 1997 article in The Sun.)
April 1996 – According to Cleargreen payroll records for the month filed as part of C.J. Castaneda’s motion in the probate proceeding in 1999, Florinda, Taisha, Muni 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 at which Castaneda, the three Witches and Nury Alexander all spoke. Florinda told the story of her sports car being wrecked by Old Florinda, to keep her from driving. [Another episode wholly omitted from Being-in-Dreaming.] She explained she used to race cars in Brazil, how she lived for the track, and claimed she was either the first, or one of the first, female jockeys in that country. “I lived to drive, and loved to drive fast.” She claimed she paid all cash for a new car, “a nice little sporty model.” She took it to Tucson, without telling anyone else she had left L.A., got a hotel room in Tucson, showered, ate, cleaned up, and took off for northern Mexico. As she got closer to the sorcerer’s house, she began to have misgivings about buying the car, wondering what the sorcerers would say. When she got there, she claimed, they were all waiting for her. They admired the car, and it was suggested she let Old Florinda take it for a spin. Florinda said she didn’t think Old Florinda could drive. But suddenly, don Genaro did a somersault into the back seat and Old Florinda was in the driver’s seat, while Florinda was in the passenger seat, all before she knew what was going on.
Off they went, zipping up mountain roads, Old Florinda double-clutching and surprising Florinda with her expert driving abilities. They were going pretty fast and Florinda turned around to see Genaro in the back seat getting pretty green in the face. “Oh no!” she thought, “He’s going to get sick in my new car!” She had Old Florinda pull over and they got out of the car. Florinda was worried about where they had stopped, for it was a narrow, winding road, and the car was a good target for a fast truck that might be coming the opposite way. Old Florinda said she would push the car up to a corner, and that Florinda should help Genaro. As Florinda catered to Genaro, she watched Old Florinda push the car to the curve in the road. Once Old Florinda got to the curve, she paused, and released the brake. As Florinda watched, in disbelief, Old Florinda proceeded to shove the car into ravine below.
Florinda then saw the whole situation had been contrived: the ogling of the car, the request to drive, the positions in the car, Genaro getting car sick, the site they stopped at. She was furious. She claimed the car was not insured, and that she had used all her cash to buy the vehicle. There was no way she could buy another one. [Good thing she got to keep her four-year-old sports car in her 1972 divorce settlement. Hmm, but that would have been about the same time as this incident, wouldn’t it, since Genaro supposedly left with don Juan in 1973?] They walked back to the sorcerer’s house, Florinda yelling at Old Florinda for what she had done. They locked her out of the house and Florinda cried since it had never been locked on her. Later she found it open, but her hammock was gone and she cried again. Finally, Old Florinda convinced her it was her concern for her that made her trash the car. Florinda was in her care, and she had seen that driving was not in her best interest. To that day, Florinda claimed she did not drive. She claimed she “gets to park the cars and occasionally chauffeur,” which she took great delight in, but that she did not own a car, nor drive one otherwise.
Florinda also described Taisha’s inorganic “pigeon.” It was allegedly legless, and about the size of a dog. It moved around on its stomach. Taisha wanted to bring it to the lecture that day. Carol and Florinda had “tried to talk her out of it,” fearing it would scare everyone. Taisha managed to sneak it into the car, but Carol and Florinda found it just before they arrived. Florinda claimed “Carlos is no longer here. His awareness, probably 90% of it, is now out there, facing ‘It.’ He’s not really here with us any more, and it takes a lot of energy for him” to lecture and answer questions.
September 27-29, 1996 – Mexico City Workshop at Palacio de los Deportes, near the airport. Florinda and Taisha were on hand. During the first part of her talk Florinda related the story she had told at Westwood about her “brand new red car,” that “Big” Florinda pushed into the ravine; her rage at subsequently being locked out of the house and then being reduced to tears on the doorstep. Finally, when she found the door had been unlocked, she described going to “her” room and finding no place to lay down as her hammock had been taken away. All these “maneuvers” had “pushed me beyond my limits.” Don Genaro was there and when she asked him why they had done what they did, he told her that, due to her predilection, it was the only way to really get her attention, to force her to change. Anything less and she would have just kept being her same old self. The second part of her talk focused on the passion of the warrior that drives a sorcerer on: “the passion for the unknown, for the adventure and whatever situation they find themselves in as they navigate.” She then played a recording of a song don Juan supposedly used to listen to, entitled “Adelante” (“Come in”). About 1200 people were on hand.
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, Florinda, Carol and Taisha spoke, and Nury read the chapter from Memorable Events (Castaneda’s work in progress) about Carol Tiggs’s return. Castaneda criticized the adherence to tradition in his lineage, and said “now there are no rules.” They had hoped that explaining things would help people arrive at realization and make the jump, but “there hasn’t been that much progress that way,” so in the future they would emphasize practical actions more. Castaneda said don Juan gave him the task of taking care of the three witches, and noted that to manage them is “as difficult as changing the chain of a chain saw while it’s running.” Florinda spoke for an hour. She described not-doings don Juan had suggested, including not-doings of clothing, involving walking around naked (but not in public) with various bugs pasted to her tits. She joked that on a bad day she’d use only flies. On other days she’d use butterflies and beetles. When don Juan suggested she tie tomatoes to her genital area, she was appalled. She claimed she never viewed clothing quite the same again. [She apparently failed to remember any of this when she wrote Being in Dreaming, however, which seemed to cover virtually all of her non-“dreaming” interactions and conversations with don Juan.] There were about 750 participants, and the cost was $400, or $300 for those who had attended three prior workshops.
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.) [Accounting scrap from documents filed as an exhibit to C.J. Castaneda’s motion in the probate proceedings.]
February 15-16, 1997 – Intensive Review Workshop on the Cal State University Long Beach campus. [Florinda did not lecture or appear, but spoke two days later to the German-language participants, on February 18.]
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. Florinda was one of the few Cleargreen group missing on March 28 but on hand March 29. On March 29, 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.”
April 1, 1997 – Interview with Carol Tiggs, Taisha Abelar and Florinda Donner-Grau by Concha Labarta [Spanish workshop organizer] appears in Mas Alla in Spain. [“In your most recent books, Being-In-Dreaming and The Sorcerers’ Crossing, you talk about personal experiences that are difficult to accept. Accessing other worlds, traveling into the unknown, making contact with inorganic beings, are all experiences which challenge reason. The temptation is either not to believe such accounts at all, or to consider you as beings that are beyond good and evil, beings that are not touched by sickness, old age or death. What’s the everyday reality for a female sorcerer? And how does living in chronological time fit with living in magical time?” The Witches responded: “Your question, Miss Labarta, is too abstract and farfetched. Please forgive our frankness. We are not intellectual beings and are not in any way capable of taking part in exercises in which the intellect engages words which in reality don’t have any meaning. None of us, under any agreement, are beyond good and evil, sickness, or old age.” They also explained: “The old nagual and his cohorts died an alternative death, which is possible for any one of us, if we have the necessary discipline. All we can tell you is that the old nagual and his people lived life professionally, meaning that they were responsible for all their acts, even the most minute ones, because they were extremely aware of everything they did. Under such conditions, to die an alternative death is not such a farfetched possibility.”
April 18-20, 1997 – Mexico City Seminar at the Palacio de los Deportes, Pabellon Ferial Este, entitled, “Six Series of Tensegrity.” [Florinda spoke twice for about half an hour each time, and presented a song that, roughly translated, begins: “Mexico, sweet and beloved, if I die away from you, let them say that I’m asleep, and let them bring me back here.”]
? 1997 – Nayely Tycho Aranha Thal (a.k.a., the “Orange Scout,” and assertedly Florinda’s “daughter”), who was enrolled at UCLA as “Tycho Aranha,” left the university without paying her final bill, and was no longer seen at workshops.
June 20-22, 1997 – Barcelona workshop [Florinda and Taisha spoke. Florinda again told the story about Old Florinda pushing her new sports car down the ravine. Florinda claimed they avoided sugar, alcohol and coffee, although don Juan had “an occasional beer” and Florinda liked chocolate. About 700 attendees; the cost was $595.]
June 27-29, 1997 – Berlin workshop at Max-Schmeling-Halle, in the Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn Sportpark. Florinda gave the first two lectures. Florinda was asked, “Isn’t the sorcerers’ world cold and impersonal?” She responded, “Impersonal yes. We are all alone facing the unknown. There is no group, we are a unit focused to reach a moment of inner silence. We are a unit who are united energetically, not in everyday life, we are individuals, we live apart. We only come together in our purpose.” In response to the question, “When did la Gorda, Josefina and the others leave?” Florinda answered “in 1985.” [As to “Josefina and the others,” this statement contradicts the stories she told about their current activities at the Rim Institute in 1993 and other early workshops. In fact Florinda and Castaneda were still referring to the Little Sisters as still being around at workshops and lectures through the end of 1994.]
Florinda again told the sports car story, explaining she used to love to drive, and was a very good driver. She claimed Old Florinda told her she could not drive anymore. Once she had bought a new car, a convertible, and she drove down to Sonora to show Old Florinda the car. She was very excited, and suggested they go for a drive. Up to that point Florinda had no idea that older Florinda knew how to drive. They drove up into the mountains and watched the beautiful sunset.
Then Old Florinda pushed the car down the mountain. It was completely wrecked. Florinda was very upset, had no insurance and had paid for the car in cash. Old Florinda said that was even better, then she could not buy a new one for quite a while. “But there is no good public transportation in Los Angeles, I need a car,” she pleaded. Old Florinda supposedly responded, “No you don’t. You have plenty of friends you can call who will be delighted to drive you.” But she told us she “didn’t want to call Carlos because I didn’t want him to know what I was doing.” Florinda claimed this act was an example of “the pragmatism of the old sorcerers.” Florinda claimed she had used driving “to avoid really doing anything.” She suggested we are all using some habit to avoid “doing the work,” and that we need a pragmatic solution, though it doesn’t have to be that drastic.
Workshop was organized by Clair, a vegetarian, workshop-organizing commune from southeastern France. The fees were 980 DM, or $595. Eventual net income was $238,725, after expenses of $140,775, which was split 75/25 between Cleargreen ($152,187) and Clair, per materials filed by C.J. Castaneda in the probate proceedings.
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 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 had been “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.]
August 2, 1997 – Zaia gave a talk at Midnight Special Bookstore on the Promenade in Santa Monica, with Florinda, Carol and others in attendance.
Early August 1997 – Greg Mamishian and Gabi Geuther were caught by Nyei picking up the trash bags that had been put outside at Castaneda’s compound on Pandora, where Florinda, Taisha and Joanie also lived.
August 16, 1997 – 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. (The cost was $1200, or $1,000 for prior workshop attendees, with about 850 attendees.) Florinda, reading a statement [written by, or in conjunction with, Castaneda, as the Witches’ statements at later workshops invariably were], said the old nagual, don Juan, had given them his very best. He hit them with everything he had. When he realized Carlos didn’t have the energetic configuration or temperament for anything but ending the lineage, he put Big Florinda in charge of pulling them back together and recovering after he and the rest of his party left. They weren’t worth a plugged nickel, Florinda said. “You couldn’t have made a whole person from the four of us put together.”
Florinda joked that Carlos had “made a lot of mistakes in his life” and that, over the years, she had been witness to most of them. One of the more recent and “imbecilic” things he did was to create what came to be known as the Sunday group. She explained that Carlos worked with a group of people intensively over a period of more than a year. “Carlos’s temperament is not like don Juan’s,” she claimed. She described Castaneda as “the ultimate hit-and-run artist.” She said he had decided he would try to influence this small group of people and “attempt to mold them into serious warrior-practitioners with only the force of his charismatic personality, his ability to talk at-length about anything, and his superior energy.” This was a “monumental error in judgment because all he had succeeded in doing was to make himself into their ‘guru.’ So the Sunday group was abolished.”
In her second talk, Florinda said she wanted to demonstrate to us what it “looked like” to move the attention to another position other than the “me” position between the toes. She said we could move our attention anywhere within the fringe of luminosity around our ankle level, and that this was preferable. She also made a distinction between moving the assemblage point and moving the “beam” of attention that comes from the assemblage point and fixates on a particular area or spot within the fringe of awareness. As a word of warning, before her demonstration, Florinda related how she had fallen back and banged her head in a hotel room while squatting on a bed doing this. She explained we should be very careful when we attempt to do this, and told the story of the first time she had succeeded doing it. She had been told to sit up on her knees somewhere soft, like in her bed, so that when she fell forward she would not hurt herself. Well, when she finally moved her attention away from the “me” position between the toes she claimed she fell not directly forward or back but kind of sideways and bashed her head open on a sharp, marble-slated night stand. So she admonished us to find somewhere safe to attempt this.
She then introduced Miles, telling us he wa “an actual MD.” She teased him, calling out, “oh, Doctor!” as he came up on stage to “spot” her. Florinda took a second or two of quiet as she leaned her head forward and down, then she went limp and began to fall forward. Miles supported her, of course, and as she became alert once again she spoke breathily, “Oh, thank you, Doctor!” She repeated the demonstration several times facing different sides of the audience.
With regard to self-importance and the Flyers, a story was related about an elderly couple who were friends of both Taisha and Florinda [quite possibly Joanie Barker’s parents]. They were both said to be presently in a nursing home. They were quite wealthy and prominent citizens of Los Angeles at one time. It was mentioned that the couple paid one million dollars a year to be attended to and to live at this facility. Despite their wealth, however, when someone wanted to give the woman a rose bush, the nursing home administrator refused to allow it. Later when a family friend put pressure on the administrator he seemingly acquiesced but still there was no rose bush. Florinda, upon hearing of this, had someone drive her up to the Santa Barbara area where she had words with the administrator, “Why don’t you let her have her fucking rose bush?” she asked. “Well, you don’t have to be so crude about it,” the administrator replied. “And you don’t have to be so fucking stupid!” Florinda shot back.
She said the administrator didn’t think it mattered all that much because the woman was so elderly and not all there. Florinda claimed he was hoping the elderly woman would die before they ever got the rose bush to her. Florinda used the administrator as a metaphor, saying we are all like him to some degree. We all believe we have more time than we really do. She went on to speak about the Dark Sea of Awareness and the force of Intent, how the two comprise the entire universe as it is perceivable by man.
In the evening, Florinda talked about the different ways don Juan allegedly referred to the Flyers, depending on his mood: “Panchito” in lighter moments, “Paco” at other times, and “St. Francis” if he was feeling morbid and morose, “as only a Nagual can be,” she said. Flyers are not intelligent or superhuman, they’re just there, and they’re just like us. All of our me characteristics are a reflection of them. But once we throw them off, once our sheen, our “condom of awareness,” rises back up to waist level, we see them for what they are. Then, because we live in a predatory universe, yet another entity enters the picture, a type of being she referred to as “Seymour.”
Florinda claimed that “when Carlos is feeling morbid and morose he will sit for hours watching a line of ants on a wall.” When someone would ask where he was, the joking reply would be, “Probably out gazing at ants.”
During a Q&A session, Florinda responded to a written question about their going public by explaining they “did not want to keep secrets that didn’t even belong to us.” Their going public had to do with “the return of Carol Tiggs.” That event “had made energy available to us that would not have been otherwise.” They decided, “based on seeing energy as it flows in the universe, that they would make the passes available to anyone who wanted to learn them. In order to accomplish this, they distilled the passes down into a form that made them readily useable by anyone of any body type or energetic configuration.”
“Where’s Carlos?” a man shouted from the back of the audience. Taisha and Florinda did not respond to his inquiry at first, so the man shouted until they answered him. Taisha and Florinda appeared unsure as to how to respond. “His energy and awareness are out there,” Taisha said finally. “He is the reason why we are all here.” “We’re trying to pull him back,” Florinda said quietly.
Another question was, “Do you have sex?” Florinda responded, “I don’t know, I guess it’s just the way I was raised. Two things you never ask a lady: one, never ask a lady what her age is, and two, never ask a lady if she is having sex. These are very personal issues. I will respond to this simply by saying that we use sexual energy to navigate infinity.”
Florinda also claimed the Tensegrity instructors “see energy directly as it flows in the universe.” She introduced the “shamanistic unit” by name, indicating their academic credentials and professions. Miles was an M.D. Brandon had a masters degree in psychology “and is a practicing psychologist specializing in domestic violence. Gavin has two Ph.D.s–one in biology, and one in Earth sciences. Fabrizio is an investment banker/consultant. Lorenzo is a writer/producer, and Julius is a producer/director. The Alexanders were Nuri and Zaia–both then pursuing Ph.D.s. And Reni and Nyei Murez, the cousins, were “English teachers.” She claimed, “Reni is finishing law school, Nyei is pursuing a career in editing. Talia Bey is the president of Cleargreen.” The credentials or current pursuits of Kylie, Aerin, Darien and Halley were not cited.
September 23, 1997 – $536,000 worth of income was distributed to Cleargreen, Inc., shareholders (including $71,536 to Florinda, $70,536 to Taisha, $70,786 to Muni, $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 22, 1997 – Castaneda signed a will witnessed by Patricia Essig and Brian T. Mayeda. In it he stated that he “legally adopted Nury Alexander as my daughter,” and intentionally omitted Adrian Vashon (C.J.). His estate was 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 Florinda, Taisha and Carol. During the course of our conversations, Florinda claimed that a bench in the garden was the “recapitulation bench” don Juan helped her build.
December 13-14, 1997 – Mexico City Workshop at Expotek 2001 near Alameda Park. Florinda spoke, 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 Florinda had a bad cold. She marveled at how Florinda rallied and spoke with verve and energy. Then as soon as she got off the podium she was shivering and sneezing. Zaia was rude and cutting to Amy during the trip, and Florinda finally let her have it, warning her that 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.) Florinda explained how the ancient sorcerers had learned the magical passes in dreaming and that the passes create a special awareness. Florinda then claimed that, for years, she, Carol, Taisha and Carlos had thought that not doings were all the crazy things don Juan had them do. She repeated the story about don Juan making her change her attitude about clothes. Clothes were very important to her. She was brought up to dress very elegantly. Don Juan first had her not tie one shoe, then to wear different laces on each shoe, then later to wear different shoes on each foot, then one high heel and one low heel. Then don Juan allegedly told her to get rid of all of her clothes, so she did and she went around naked. [None of this, of course, was mentioned in Being-in-Dreaming.] She wasn’t embarrassed at all about it so don Juan asked, “Why not add ornaments to your beautiful body?” When Florinda was happy, she claimed, she pasted dead butterflies on her breasts; when she was sad she used dead flies. Next don Juan suggested she tie bits of tomato to her pubic hairs. None of this bothered her, so don Juan told her to “cut your hair.” Florinda had beautiful hair. She didn’t want to cut it, and claimed that she whined “Who will love me if I cut off my beautiful hair?” Don Juan supposedly told her not to worry, that he would always love her. She confided she didn’t tell him she wasn’t concerned about an old man loving her. She was “worried that ‘Quique’ and ‘Tito’ wouldn’t love me anymore.”
She returned to Los Angeles and went to a psychiatrist who told her not to listen to “this crazy old Mexican,” and advised that she shouldn’t cut her beautiful hair. Eventually, she ended up cutting it in stages until it was its current short length. She claimed that now her hair was not capable of growing any longer. [This is a different short hair explanation than she gave in May 1995 at Omega, where she claimed she had been shaved bald after a bad case of lice from living in the Amazon–a trip that supposedly occurred a few years after don Juan was already gone.]
Florinda claimed “Carlos had started writing a book about the not doings several times but he would always destroy it before he was done because he sensed that what he was writing about was not really what don Juan meant by the ‘not doings.’” Florinda explained that the not doings “are not weird behaviors,” that those behaviors are a result of the not doings. She repeated “there is a vibratory force in the Universe that holds all things together, including ourselves. The not doings create a lull in this force. The result is indescribable and must be experienced,” and even then the understanding is not “ah yes, it is like this.” The “understanding” gained is allegedly more of a feeling.
Florinda reported, “In the past people would come to the seminars and say that the sorcerers were stealing energy from them. This is impossible. We are sealed units from which no energy may leave or enter. When we say we are tired or have no energy, what has happened is that our energy has disbanded to the edges of our cocoons. Tensegrity brings it back to our vital centers.” Florinda asked the participants to “suspend judgment” and to put “your prejudice aside and just do the movements.”
Don Juan supposedly asked her once how she was. Florinda responded “fine.” He then asked “Are you OK?” and she again responded “Yes.” “Is there anything the matter?” asked don Juan. “No” was her response. Then she noted, “You went out to dinner without me last night.” Don Juan responded, “You said you were tired.” Florinda said, “Yes, but you could have at least asked me to come.” Don Juan said, “If you were hungry, you should have just come along.” Florinda claimed, “But I didn’t want to spoil the good time you were going to have with Carlos, Taisha, Carol and Old Florinda.” [Note: In Being-in-Dreaming, of course, which purports to describe Florinda’s entire time with don Juan and his cohorts, Florinda never mentioned even having met Taisha or Carol while don Juan was still around. In fact, she several times referred to her frustration at not yet having met the “others that don Juan had blown” to Castaneda.]
In a later short lecture, Florinda asked the crowd, “Do you see that light behind me? That’s my assemblage point.” She then introduced “Dr. Zaia Alexander, a professor of languages and Germanic studies at the University of California” and “Dr. Miles Reid, a physician and a surgeon.” In the question and answer session that followed, someone asked, “When did Carlos die?” Florinda answers, “Don’t be ridiculous. He’s still alive.” Responding to a question about aging, Florinda stated: “The sorcerer’s way avoids the pitfalls or at least smoothes the way while we age. We all grow old, it is the natural way, but that doesn’t mean we have to suffer the effects of aging. By doing Tensegrity we can avoid the wrinkles, the illness. Yes we grow old, but we can grow old with vigor and vitality. When I first met don Juan he was at least 80 years old. He had all white hair and his face was all wrinkled, but you never thought of him as old because of his vitality.” She responded to another question by saying that la Gorda died in 1985, and that the others left at different times.
Question: “Where is don Juan?” Florinda: “He is beyond.” Question: “What is your relationship with Castaneda?” Florinda: “Carlos is a Nagual, which means he is no longer a man. Well, I mean he still has a penis and whatever else a man has, but he is no longer a normal man. We are all connected” [i.e., Carol, Taisha, Florinda and Carlos]. “He promised us he would take us with him. He could have burned from within years ago, but he is doing the impossible and remaining until we are all ready. He could have left long ago, but he is staying for us.”
December 1997 – Mexico City practitioners wrote their questions for Florinda, whose answers were printed in their newsletter, La Senda del Guerrero. The questions, which the practitioners put to Cleargreen through Verde Claro, were: “What are the differences between spirit and intent? Is there any other technique to preserve the unity of consciousness after death that is not the fire from within? Is it necessary to recapitulate ideas, like God? Some people close to us, like our wives or daughters or sons, feel that tensegrity creates a feeling of superiority, selfishness and intolerance. Can that be true?” Florinda responded, in writing: “First of all, I’d like to make an impersonal observation, after reading all your questions. By looking at the character behind the question I can see that you are total intellectuals, lost in the detail [or minutiae] of banal thinking. Does God exist? Does the spirit exist? Is the soul eternal? What can you tell me about heaven and hell? How the hell can a humble practitioner of the magical passes of the shamans of ancient Mexico answer such questions? What you want ladies and gentlemen is a dogma, a group of assertions made by egomaniacs that know God and have intimate relationships with him, of course, according to what they think. All these questions you’ve just formulated should be asked to one of those fat belly gurus that know everything. Subtract yourselves to just practicing and stop wasting your time on intellectual dilemmas. The practice of Tensegrity will give you the ability to answer your own questions, through a simple process that the old Nagual explained to us, but has taken a lifetime for us to realize. The practice of the magical practices of the sorcerers of ancient Mexico will make you discard the masturbations of the intellect automatically. After an intense practice, you won’t give a damn about everything that has been said about the inconceivable or the unspeakable. What can we petty human beings, beholders of a brain that hardly works, a brain that entertains itself with soap operas, say or speculate about the unknowable? All I can say, following the steps of the old Nagual without deviating from them, is that the recapitulation of our lives can give us a true answer. Without the recapitulation or the practice of Tensegrity, it is not possible to attain a genuine change of behavior. A worthy question that I found to address is the one regarding the idea that Tensegrity practice can increase self importance. Whoever believes that is not a practitioner of Tensegrity. He’s a hopeless egomaniac, seeking new ways of increasing his ego. Those kinds of beings exist and simply have no hope. So it’s just useless to talk or worry about them. They have a universal club and they get together to drink their cups of self-importance.” Signed, “Yours truthfully, your humble servant, Florinda Donner-Grau.”
January 1998 – Harper Collins published Castaneda’s Magical Passes: The Practical Wisdom of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico. [On page 79, introducing the magical passes supposedly originally taught to Florinda, Castaneda asserted: “Don Juan Matus regarded her as being very straightforward, so to-the-point that sometimes her directness became unbearable. Her activities in the sorcerers’ world, as a consequence of her directness, have always been geared toward the goal of evolution, or the transformation of the womb from a receptacle and promoter of fertility to an organ of awareness through which thoughts which are not part of our normal cognition can be processed.”]
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 painted a vivid picture of it in Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Carol used acupuncture on Castaneda 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.”
February 7-8, 1998 – Not-Doing Workshop at Pomona Fairplex Convention Center. “I am Florinda Donner-Grau,” Florinda said as the applause died down. Reading from notes, she welcomed us to the 33rd Tensegrity seminar and workshop, the first of which was held in 1994, she claimed. [Actually, July 1993.] Before that, she explained, they had met with people in informal groups but “hadn’t gotten anywhere,” so they decided to teach “in a more formal, regimented fashion.” She went on to give a short history of how the teaching of Tensegrity had come 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 allegedly 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 was what gave them “the energy and motivation to publicly open up and reveal the secrets of the sorcerers’ world which we 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.” The challenge for them had been to take the four separate individualized lines of passes they had been taught and render them usable to anyone, while removing “a certain morbid aspect that lingered from the mood of the sorcerers of ancient Mexico who had originally discovered the passes in their dreaming practices.” This is where the Energy Trackers and Elements supposedly came in. Their work “over several years” is what enabled a transformation of the passes into what we now know as Tensegrity, allowing them to be taught “to anyone who is interested.”
She introduced the team of Miles and Zaia as “Awareness through Harmony,” and the team of Nury and Halley as “Awareness through Sameness.” Then she claimed, referring to the latter team: “We believe the ancient sorcerers knew of such an occurrence, but don’t think that don Juan or the 27 generations of sorcerers before him ever saw it. The effect of these two is so powerful that we guarantee that everyone will feel the effects of the not-doing passes because of them. If not today, then after you leave the workshop.” Florinda’s written remarks further claimed: “Even Carlos feels the impact of Nuri and Halley leading the not-doing passes. When he is with them,” they “take him and smash his head into the ceiling again and again until it goes into the attic and he reaches a new level of awareness. He has gone into fits of rage over their effect on him because he’s too old to be affected by these young people!”
She further explained they had thought the not-doing passes taught in August ’97 were the final versions but, as allegedly happened to don Juan and Julian before him, “the more we focused on remembering the not-doing passes in order to teach them, the more complete versions of the forms slowly emerged.” In the past, she claimed, the not-doing passes “were taught to disciples in order for them to reach a new level of awareness. After this enhanced level of awareness was achieved, the not-doing passes were immediately forgotten until the need arose for them to be recalled and taught to others in turn by the next generation.” Florinda commented that “The Series of the Five Concerns” we were about to learn, “nicknamed the Westwood Series for where it was originally taught,” was “a very important series,” and one that was “extremely complementary to the practice of the not-doing passes.” It “stirred up energy in all directions.” The sorcerers of ancient Mexico, and those who came after, all assertedly considered the unique saturation engendered by the Westwood Series to be vital in performing the passes for not-doing.
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.
March 29, 1998 – Last video shot of Castaneda taken by Greg and Gabi on Pandora shows him very thin, dark and weak, but still ambulatory. Florinda is shown lifting him off the back seat, where he lies under a blanket.
April 4, 1998 – Workshop at Santa Monica College Gymnasium, 2 – 9:30 PM. [Florinda, Taisha and Carol were all on hand, and this was Florinda and Taisha’s last public appearance. Kylie wandered around for the last time, giving hugs.]
April 5-18? 1998 – Taisha comes to Amy’s Westwood home, blocks from the Pandora compound, to burn the group’s records and tax documents in Amy’s fireplace. There are so many crates of documents it takes days, including weekends. Taisha has to get drunk to do it, per Amy’s account in Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Amy reports Taisha burning photographs of Argentina, for example, whispering to Amy that she would never see it again. On one of those days, when Amy runs out of wine to give her, she makes her vodka cocktails. After a swim in Amy’s pool, Taisha announces, “Ellis, I’m not in any danger of becoming an alcoholic now, am I? This is okay, right? Because I’m leaving, so–it’s too late for me to become a drunk!” That night she got back to the compound and passed out in bed. Florinda called Amy to tell her she’d never seen her that drunk. Taisha spends the next day in bed and they claim to Castaneda she has “food poisoning.”
April 15, 1998 – Halley completed a second draft of a screenplay of Florinda’s The Witch’s Dream.
April 18, 1998 – Video showed new cars and van parked outside of the Pandora compound being packed up by Fabricio, Brandon and others between 5 and 6:30 PM.
April 22? 1998 – Amy picked Taisha up to go to a movie, but Taisha broke down when she got in the car, complaining that Talia was “trying to take his money”! She explained she wanted Cleargreen’s accountant to be given control of Castaneda’s accounts, for “when he gets better,” but “they want to give control to his lawyer!” Amy convinced Taisha to call Florinda about it. She did and Amy overheard Florinda explaining that “the money is not being taken away!” She told Taisha it was being put in the Eagle’s Trust, and that it would be safe there.
April 23, 1998 – Castaneda signed a 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 signed a quitclaim deed, apparently on the house, to the Eagle’s Trust, Deborah Drooz as Trustee, which was 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.
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. listed 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.) 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 was 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.
April 27-May ?, 1998 – In the days that followed, 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 that Old Florinda had stayed behind for them. She expressed her thanks, and appeared tearful. 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 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 was 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 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 reduced the price.
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. 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!” 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!”[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.]
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 thank-you, no goodbye, nothing.'”
Carol also indicated to Amy that Florinda had health issues going on in addition to her congenital “small heart” condition. Carol said Florinda had cysts on her breasts, and that she had been in the middle of undergoing root canal work when she left with the other three women. Greg and Gabi’s garbage can finds included Angelica’s prescriptions of hormone patches for Florinda.
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 had 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, claiming that only Carlos had answered, telling her it was a task she had to do by herself. (Carla Luciani’s notes reported 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 19, 1998 – Los Angeles Times’ obituary of Castaneda appeared on page 1. [Obituary detailing how Castaneda’s putative adopted son, C.J. Castaneda, was responsible for making the death public appeared the next day, June 20, in the New York Times.]
– Until they left the telephone unanswered, starting at around 2 PM, Cleargreen staffers gave different responses to callers asking where the Witches were. 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 also purported to speak for the other two Witches. This was Carol’s last public appearance for 17 years, until she showed up at the September 2015 Cleargreen workshop in Sochi, Russia.]
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 7-8, 1998 – Mexico City Workshop. In Q&A with written questions, Brandon and Miles responded to the question “Where are the Witches?” by asserting: “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. 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.” Gavin also reportedly described a fairly unlikely interchange he claimed to have once had with Florinda: “I am going to tell you the way in which I learned the saber tooth tiger breathing. Florinda asked me once, ‘What’s new?’ I did not know what to answer. I said I had bought a new German dictionary. Florinda responded, ‘OK, but what’s new?’ Then she asked me, ‘What do you want?’ Gavin said he answered: ‘Florinda, I want to be a warrior!’ Florinda allegedly responded: ‘Of course you want to be a warrior but what do you want?’ Finally she asked, ‘What are you doing to your world? Gavin, I see that your recapitulation needs something. You must awaken your body.'” Gavin reported that he thought to himself, “But what has the body to do with recapitulation? Shit! I do Tensegrity three times a day.” Florinda supposedly continued: “I want alertness, action, fluidity. I want you to act rapidly. I want breathing. You need to awake your left body which is decrepit.” Gavin claimed he asked, “But what’s wrong with my left side?” Florinda allegedly answered, “I am not talking about your left side. We all have both bodies but we privilege the right body, the rigid side, the side of routines: ‘eins, zwei, eins, zwei.’ The only problem you have is that you don’t know how to walk. Gavin, you need the saber tooth tiger to awaken you. She has gigantic lungs. You could learn a lot from these cats. They are animals of pure action. When they inhale so much air they take in consciousness. You need to see your life with other eyes. How can you see something new if your right body already knows everything? You need to change. You need to learn the way of being with the left body.”
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 would 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 Florinda, 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.”
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 were: “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 stayed, “in the same way that Florinda Matus had to complete the instruction of Castaneda and the Witches, to make sure the vision of a unified body of warriors became a reality.” Miles also claimed when Castaneda left, “the door remained open for anybody who practiced Tensegrity and Recapitulation to attain freedom.” Gavin said the spirit of the times dictated that today we no longer need naguals or gurus to help us on the Warrior’s path. Gavin, in doing a riff about his supposed perfectionism, claimed he had focused so single mindedly while doing work in the Witches’ attic that he had gone through the ceiling and fallen on Florinda’s bed. [Note: This is an exaggeration. I was told that, while working in the attic, Gavin had made a small hole in the ceiling.] In a 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. We all have an appointment with Infinity. Then there were 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 the question “How is your relationship with the female sorcerers?” Nyei reportedly said, “The female sorceress follow the energy. They are always here to help us to teach magical passes. The 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.”
November 1999 – After I located a telephone number for Florinda’s parents, Katarina & Rudi Thal, at their home in Hirschau, Germany, Gaby Geuter called and spoke in German to them. They confirmed to Gaby that they had generally heard from Florinda on a weekly basis prior to March or April 1998. In their last conversation, Florinda had told them she was going on a trip with Annamarie and wouldn’t be reachable for awhile. They had not heard anything from her since, not even a postcard. When they read the previous summer that Castaneda had died, they became very concerned. At that point, Rudolf was in his 90s and feeble; Katarina was hard of hearing and in her 80s.
In the interviews Manuel Carballal (author of La Vida Secreta de Carlos Castaneda) conducted with Florinda’s younger brother Ulrich, many years later, he confirmed the family had never had any contact with Florinda again after her fateful final call to her parents prior to Castaneda’s death. And, of course, Castaneda estate trustee and lawyer Deborah Drooz confirmed to Talia’s brother Luis that none of the missing women had received any distributions of the monies they were entitled to under Castaneda’s will. Nonetheless, Cleargreen’s lies about the whereabouts of Florinda and the other Missing Women continued for years thereafter.
©️ 1999 and 2024 by Richard Jennings, all rights reserved
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