Sorcerer's Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda

by Amy Wallace

admiration for The Man, a book Lennon claimed had changed his life.

Her first book, Shabono, was an account of her time among the Yanamomo Indians. It was accused of being plagiaristic: allegedly she had lifted her story directly from an Italian author’s published account, had “lost” her field notes (like Carlos), and had been denied her degree by UCLA.

‘We’re all nothing but bags of stories.’ Stories

In keeping with his suggestions, I threw away my book reviews. (One member of the group burned her birth certificate, thinking it would help her destroy her old, evil self—only to have to reapply for it.) I gave away all the objects I loved. These acts made me feel closer to what Carlos called “It,” and gave me hope that he would notice my hard work and sacrifice and love me even more.

I suspected he couldn’t resist making an attack on the infrastructure of any family, so violently did Carlos despise ordinary family life, although he had always been partial to David.

Sexuality with disciples sets up hierarchies of preference where disciples compete for status through who is attracting the guru more. If

If you live with a cripple, you will learn to limp. —Plutarch

The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very own prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.

Carlos often used to say, “The world should have followed Mesmer instead of Freud”—and without it I don’t think I would have weathered the sorcerers’ world at all. Later I investigated Mesmer’s life and learned that he had begun as a sincere teacher and ended as a corrupt guru. Carlos, I believe, was too literate not to have known this.

The process of my discovery that I was part of a harem was, as I have remarked, very slow indeed.

There was the power of my passion for Carlos. Additionally, there was adventure, there were exotic magic rituals, there was the elated sense of being on the vanguard of evolution. There was the group pride in being “amoral”—morality was part of “the social order,” and we were beyond that. Morality was for bored fucks.

people who are being callously manipulated believe they are freer than anyone else … the underlying message is that they are on the cutting edge of evolution.”

I took this as one of many signs that although Carlos had begun as a genuine seeker, a true philosopher, he had ended as a tyrant watching over a cult of terrified followers. Power had wielded its legendary seductions, illness had weakened him terribly. But nothing, I believe, can subtract from the sincerity and beauty of his early works. To take their wisdom and leave the rest would be to take the best of Castaneda.