The chronology of Florinda Donner-Grau, one of the three supposed Witches (i.e., fellow apprentices of Castaneda’s teacher don Juan) and one of the five women closest to him who disappeared after Castaneda’s death, has been revised and updated here. This 25th anniversary edition of the chronology that was originally published here in 1999 is 20% longer than the original and packed with new information that has come to light over the past two and a half decades.
Here are key findings and takeaways from Richard Jennings’s introductory summary of the updated chronology:
I was much too easy on Florinda in my 1999 introduction to her chronology. I do identify, in that original introduction below, the huge barrage of lies and contradictions that made up Florinda’s three books and later sorcery apprenticeship stories she told at workshops. In retrospect, though, I let my great affection and admiration for Florinda cloud my judgment when it came to fully comprehending her consistently pathological behavior. This is someone who not only reveled in lying on a constant basis, and doing so for the sheer joy of it, but who also employed those lies in the pursuit of her other great joy and passion– the manipulation and control of others.
. . . .Unlike Carol Tiggs, though, she didn’t envision a future for herself without Castaneda. She couldn’t see a way to continue to do what she loved–shamelessly lie and manipulate others–in his absence. As she frequently told Amy, and as I heard her say too, “There is no game without the Nagual.” She knew her position and power were totally derivative of Castaneda, so she could not see a way to continue once he was gone. Like Taisha, Kylie and Talia, I am firmly convinced she committed suicide right after Castaneda passed. But unlike them, I don’t think she was doing it in a misguided attempt to “join Castaneda.” I think she simply figured she didn’t have anything to live for once her power and position were obliterated by his death.
The conundrum though is that of the four women who disappeared (five counting Nury, who we know died in the desert), given her having lived in other countries, being multilingual, and her demonstrated facility for interacting with diverse groups of people, she clearly had the experience and skills that would have enabled her to make a new life for herself–in a different country, with a different identity–much more successfully than the other three. But like the other three, Castaneda’s death effectively cancelled the life she had known and loved. She fully expected Castaneda’s passing would cause the facade of his lineage to collapse, revealing the phoniness of his philosophies she had employed so skillfully to establish and maintain her authority. Without his powerful personality and charisma, as well as his financial support, her power to manipulate and control a group of individuals was simply going to evaporate. She could no longer be the gatekeeper and master manipulator of Castaneda world without Castaneda in it. As detailed below, it also seems she may have had health issues that could have compounded her willingness to abandon her life at the relatively young age of 54.
. . . . In reviewing my 1999 introduction, I also don’t think I was as tough on Florinda’s literary output as I should have been. Those three books are absolutely nothing but a pack of lies, and narcissistic ones at that.
Her first book, Shabono, was entirely plagiarized from one obvious source. The idea that anybody with even one foot in academia could imagine they could get away with such a fraud reveals her fundamental audacity. Her mentor Castaneda was, by contrast, much more careful in basing his stories and philosophy on a variety of sources. And when real anthropologists and her own former faculty advisors blew the whistle on her shameless fiction, she managed to avoid suffering any real consequences for her mendacity, instead gliding right into writing and publishing another piece of “antro-romance.” . . . .
She moved on from those two pieces of fiction to supposedly telling the story of her own apprenticeship with don Juan and his party. In doing so, she had the benefit not only of Castaneda’s many books, but also of spending years listening to him fashion those stories, retelling them differently each time. He had given her both a rich milieu and ready-made characters from which to fashion her tale, that was in turn designed to buttress and confirm Castaneda’s long debunked claims to have been taught by a Yaqui Indian sorcerer. But she couldn’t help but contradict even that fictional book by telling new fictions on a regular basis in the course of the workshops the group produced from 1993 until Castaneda’s death in 1998. . . .
So the ultimate picture I now have of Ms. Donner-Grau is of a sociopathic personality who was able to use her relationship with Castaneda and her innate people skills in order to realize her dream of being able to manipulate and control a group of individuals who felt they had nowhere else to go. With his demise, that world and her position in it were going to evaporate. She didn’t want to hang around to witness that collapse. She was an action oriented person, and she decided to join her three colleagues in the one option they saw for themselves that would not only take them out of a world they no longer had any use for, but that also might serve, at least in a small way, to help sustain the myth.
The Florinda I loved and admired was a mythic creation. The fact that she was clear eyed at the end about what she was doing and why she was doing it–in contrast to Taisha, Kylie and Talia–is, I suppose, some comfort. Like her, I cannot now imagine how she would have gone on without the accomplice who enabled her to tell such bald faced lies and get away with it for as long as she did.
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