For years, whenever people complain to me that Paulo Coelho is a superstar all over the world but oh-so-sadly underappreciated in the United States, I’ve told them, “America already has a phony Latino mystic: Carlos Castaneda.” Well, in last week’s Salon, Robert Marshall decided to dig into the whole crazy saga of “the 20th century’s most successful literary trickster,” whose books can often be found next to Coelho’s on the New Age shelves.
Readers of a certain age will recall The Teachings of Don Juan and A Separate Reality, and how those books and their sequels continued to make a vital contribution to Simon & Schuster‘s balance sheet even after being fairly well debunked (Nasdijj and James Frey had nothing on this guy!), but had you heard that the day after Castaneda died, four of the women in his inner circle vanished off the face of the earth? And that the skeleton of a fifth—”Patricia Partin, Castaneda’s adopted daughter as well as his lover”—was found in Death Valley last year? Wild stuff, the sort of tale from Hollywood’s underbelly that would make a great Bruce Wagner novel… if Wagner didn’t actually have a small but significant part in the story. I don’t know if there’s any lessons for contemporary publishers to draw from all this: Dan Brown seems to have done exquisitely well for himself by spinning explicitly fictional webs around his mishmosh of occultism, without having to pretend It’s All True. Then again, John Perkins seems to have done a pretty good job transforming himself from a minor New Age shaman-wannabe into a bestselling “economic hit man” by maintaining the same sort of hallucinatory relationship with reality that made Castaneda such a sensation… and then there’s all the 2012 hoopla that hasn’t even begun to peak yet…