Carlos Castañeda: Ostatni Nagual czy Narkoman-Plagiator?

Carlos Castañeda wrote twelve books. He sold eighteen million copies. He earned a doctorate from one of the most prestigious anthropology departments in America. And he left behind not a single verifiable proof of the existence of the man he wrote about throughout his life. Don Juan Matus—an old Yaqui shaman, teacher, spiritual guide, nagual—appears in each of these books. He appears nowhere else. No other researcher who went looking for him in the Sonoran Desert found anything but their own astonishment. This film is an investigation. Not into whether magic exists. But into who the man who sold it was. The investigation reveals: three different birth dates in three different official documents. A doctoral dissertation with descriptions of fieldwork sessions that contradict the botanical calendar of the Sonoran Desert. Don Juan's philosophical dialogues, whose propositional foundations overlap with Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations from 1953. Gordon Wasson's report to Harvard in 1956, with descriptions of ritual dialogues that match Castañeda's transcripts by more than sixty percent of the time. Cleargreen Incorporated, incorporated in California in 1993, conducted weekend seminars for three hundred to five hundred dollars with a photography ban. Five women from his inner circle who disappeared within weeks of Castañeda's death in April 1998. Zero official missing persons reports for them in the Los Angeles County missing persons registry. The remains of Patricia Partin—Castañeda's adopted daughter and closest disciple—found in Death Valley in 2003 and identified by DNA analysis in 2006. The four remaining women remain unaccounted for to this day. The question this film poses is not simple. Does a map leading to a real location cease to function when we discover it was drawn at a desk from someone else's scraps? And what do we do with a map with bones beneath it? Sources and literature Carlos Castañeda - The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, University of California Press, 1968 Carlos Castañeda - A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan, Simon & Schuster, 1971 Richard de Mille - Castaneda's Journey: The Power and the Allegory, Capra Press, 1976 Richard de Mille (ed.) - The Don Juan Papers: Further Castaneda Controversies, Ross-Erikson, 1980 Amy Wallace - Sorcerer's Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda, Frog Books, 2003 Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen), 1953 R. Gordon Wasson - ethnomycological report for the Center for the Study of Ritual Mushrooms, Harvard University, 1956 Alfred L. Kroeber — Handbook of the Indians of California, Bureau of American Ethnology, 1925 Maurice Merleau-Ponty — Phénoménologie de la perception, Gallimard, 1945 Marcelle Clements — Interview with Carlos Castañeda, Rolling Stone, 1977 Robert Marshall — The Dark Legacy of Carlos Castaneda, Salon.com, April 2007 Inyo County Sheriff's Department — DNA Identification of the Remains of Patricia Partin, Panamint Dunes, Death Valley, 2006 Alexandra Merritt — Structure Analysis of Cleargreen Incorporated, Cultic Studies Review, 2001 Norah Fleischer — Interview, Los Angeles Times, 2003