How to Handle Snakes; Navigating the Trauma of Losing Faith
“I’m worried about this junk you’ve been writing on the Internet saying that Castaneda made up all his stories about don Juan,” Harold, a friend I’d met at one of Castaneda’s sorcery workshops said.
We had arrived at LAX from separate parts of the country and ran into each other in the airport lobby, both headed for the latest Castaneda workshop. We were early and decided to walk on the beach from Venice to Santa Monica, several miles.
While we walked, we talked about the material I’d posted.
“That stuff you’ve been writing,” Harold said. “It scares me.”
Harold told me that that he had grown up in a Texas family, true believers in the Church of God with Signs Following. This sect trusted in the power of prayer, that to prove their faith they must handle poisonous snakes. “I learned to do it, holding these spooky things. I was never worried that I’d get bitten because I believed in the supremacy of prayer. But then I heard a fearsome whisper that was making the rounds: It seems that George Hensley, the founder of the church, had himself died after a snake bit him during a service he was conducting. My parents confirmed this but said they were sure it was because Hensley had lost his faith and become an apostate. The power of prayer was not to be doubted! The Church was righteous!
“In any case, I did come to doubt. In fact, I gave up religion, all beliefs, including my trust in my parents. I was lost to myself until I read Castaneda’s books. You take don Juan and Carlos Castaneda away from me and I’m in trouble.”
“Isn’t it better,” I said. “To question some belief, something you suspect to be false—just like those snakes—than to hold onto something blindly, a falsehood that could eventually injure or kill you?”
“No,” he said. “Trust me, it isn’t. I know this for sure: Without don Juan and Carlos I’m nothing. They’re all I’ve got.”
Harold’s despair, his belief that Castaneda, his guru, held the key to immortality, or at least to a lingering human happiness, was doomed, as is the despair of other Castaneda enthusiasts who, beyond the enjoyment of his books, took his challenge to live that life seriously, as non-literary actuality.
Some members of Castaneda’s Sunday Group, those who spent hours in close contact with him, have reacted to his death in both positive and negative ways. Some have discarded Castaneda’s Tensegrity (or Magical Passes) as a mockery of unquestioning spiritual therapy and entered analysis in which they can force themselves to examine their beliefs; others have gotten themselves into trouble by drinking or drugs. Some have disappeared into the desert.
Why shouldn’t forcible separation from one’s dream through the death or unmasking or one’s guru be tragic? Especially if, as Harold confessed, one has pledged one’s life to that guru and discovered there was really nothing reliable there. As Leonard Cohen, in one of his songs, apologized for making God or Jesus (or Buddha?) into something imaginary: an idealized fantasy, a ghost. “Only one of us was real,” Cohen sang. “And that was me.”
Perhaps the most tragic fates were visited on those closest to Castaneda: The Witches and the Chacmools. When last heard of, they had disappeared, driven to the desert, and perhaps leapt from a cliff, mimicking what Castaneda had told them don Juan did to “burn with the first from within.” Only one has been found.
The body of the Blue Scout—Nury Alexander—at least her skeletal remains, was positively identified in 2006 by advanced DNA testing of bones that had been discovered by hikers in 2003 in the remote Panamint Dunes region of Death Valley National Park. The fact that an abandoned red Ford Escort found in the same area had been identified as belonging to her in May 1998 is what led local investigators to do the DNA testing. Gaby Geuter, who followed the Witches and Castaneda for months at close range, had a theory. “The Castaneda story starts in the desert,” Geuter said, “and at least for this woman it also ends in the desert.”
©️ 2024 by Sandy McIntosh, all rights reserved
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