Burning Castenada

Posted on September 29, 2005 in Censorship College

Many years ago I burned a book. It was Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castenada. I was feeling persecuted at the time by a band of pot smokers who had used the paranoia that sometimes afflicts marijuana users to scare me into thinking that a joint I had smoked was laced with PCP. One particularly mean fellow told me that I had suffered irreversable brain damage. They mocked me for refusing to try other drugs including LSD and cocaine. This was too much. I rejected their friendship, avoided them entirely, refused to speak to them. It was necessary, although my girlfriend at the time did not think so. She put the entire focus on me.

It’s true that I was mentally ill. I probably should have been institutionalized. My limbs shook. I kept looking over my shoulder for the dangerous addicts. But I was not wrong in shutting these people out of my life.

A few months later, I ran into the fellow who told me that my brain had been damaged on the steps of the library. When I saw him, I turned my nose straight ahead.

“So you’re still playing this little ‘I won’t talk to you game'” he said. I did not answer him. My feet led me to sanctuary. My mind told me that even though there was a painful bubble about to explode in my chest, I had done the right thing.

[It is, in fact, recognized that the best way to deal with predators is to ignore them.]

The reason why I burned Journey to Ixtlan is that to me it represented that culture of which I had been a part. It gave license to the drug culture and drug predation which briefly ensnared me in the 1990s. I did not make a public display of the incineration. I just took the paperback to my parents’ fireplace, turned on the gas lighter, applied a match, stabbed it repeatedly with a poker, and watched the pages become like last autumn’s leaves and disintegrate into crisps.

I fully support the ALA’s campaign against book burning and book banning. Journey to Ixtlan remains in public libraries despite past efforts to ban it. I never supported these. The copy I burned was my own and for me, it was not an act of censorship. It was an exorcism.

* * *

Castenada has long been suspected of fabricating his stories:

Castaneda claims that he met Don Juan in 1960 at a bus station in Nogales, Arizona. At the time, Castaneda was a graduate student in anthropology doing research on medicinal plants used by Indians of the Southwest. He claims that Don Juan made him a sorcerer’s apprentice and introduced him to the world of peyote and visions. It is unlikely that a great shaman would pick someone up at a bus stop and make him a disciple, but we’ll never know since no one but Castaneda ever met Don Juan. Was Don Juan a hoax? Probably.

Here are a few other sources that investigate the Don Juan hoax:

• The Straight Dope on Castenada’s “adventures”
• The Skeptic’s Dictionary on Castenada
• Enpsychlopedia on Castenada

I did not burn Journey to Ixtlan because of these findings. Those came afterwards when Castenada could not come up with his source and subsequent investigators could not locate him. Once I asked Weston LeBarre, author of The Peyote Cult and a critic of Castenada, where he thought Castenada had done his field research.

“Probably in his West Los Angeles apartment,” said LeBarre.