This article was published in 2024. Good luck finding a comedian willing to satirize it.
Perhaps nobody did more to discredit Anthropology as a science, as a university subject, and as a profession. I can't exactly say he's discredited religion, now can I?
Wallace’s account of her first “encounter” with Castaneda is chillingly clinical. His explanation of the act as a spiritual necessity to her is as bizarre as it is unsettling.
“You have to give your poto to the nagual,” Castaneda tells Wallace. Sex with him is not for pleasure, he claims. Sex is for sorcery reasons.
“For magical purposes we must have a ‘close encounter,’ ” he says. “It’s the only way left to us.… The hole between a woman’s legs is magic and when the nagual leaves his juice inside it goes directly to her brain.… It’s the fastest way.”
She is playful in response, not believing him. He is in his late 60s. He was friends with her father. She is 30 years younger. “Oh, are you a dirty old man guru, then?” she says.
“This is a serious proposition, chola!”
She isn’t interested. But Castaneda is relentless in calling her. Three times a day. Six times a day. Eventually, she relents. For their first time, they drive to a motel on Wilshire Boulevard. He doesn’t use a condom, claiming he has supernatural powers.
“Hey, you better not have gotten me pregnant,” she says.
“Me make you pregnant? Impossible! The nagual’s sperm isn’t human. It doesn’t match your juices. You’re human!”
The experience is cold, odd. She doesn’t want to repeat it, and she tells him so.
“That’s fine, chica, that’s fine,” she recalls him saying. “But let me tell you, being around the nagual is like being on a drug.… You’ll have to rest after seeing me. But you’ll want more of this drug.”
Despite her refusals, his calls kept coming, morning and night, as if he were always there. He oscillated between being sweet and romantic and erupting in rage. “You whore!” he said on more than one occasion. “You’re spoiled rotten—born with a silver spoon—up your culo!”
Link to the full (book length?) article: www.altaonline.com/dispatches/a60923618/carlos-castaneda-cult-geoffrey-gray/
Now tell me, honestly, do you suppose anyone can really understand the life of the body without also, in contrast, understanding the life of the mind? These believers drape the clothing of a human being over an animal, and wrap the skin of a wild animal over an exceedingly domesticated human being, trying to figure out which one excites them more --and then grow old, without understanding what it once meant to be young.