In 1968 the University of California Press published the master’s degree dissertation of a UCLA anthropology student who’d gone to Arizona to conduct a field study of southwestern Indians’ medicinal plants. In the Yuma bus depot, the student, Carlos Castaneda, met an old guy named Juan Matus, who turned out to be a Toltec sorcerer. Matus fed him hallucinogens—jimsonweed, peyote, psilocybin mushrooms—and told him he would reveal the “secrets that make up the lot of a man of knowledge.” Under the influence of drugs, Castaneda says he turned into a crow, talked to coyotes, and communed with the
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