John Wisniewski, who has done other interviews for this blog, returns with an interview with the author of an important new book. Ru Marshall is the author of American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda.
Marshall's publisher, O/R Books, says the new book, released June 25 this year, "unravels the story of the secretive faux-anthropologist who pulled off one of the greatest literary hoaxes in modern history." Reviewers seem to agree. Publisher's Weekly, for example, said it is "an entrancing biography." The New York Times review, by Kurt Andersen, called the book "illuminating and relevant."
When I was a college student in the 1970s, a friend of mine persuaded me to read Castaneda's breakthrough book, The Teachings of Don Juan. I remember finding the book's revelations of insight gained from indigenous psychedelic practices hard going, but others were more impressed. The publisher's blurb notes, "Admirers ranged from John Lennon and Joni Mitchell to Federico Fellini, George Lucas, and Octavio Paz. His books became international bestsellers and remain the most popular titles ever published on Native American spirituality—despite having little to no connection to actual Indigenous practices." It seems hilarious to me that Castaneda actually apparently didn't use drugs, as Marshall reveals.
Michael Johnson, writing about Castaneda for this blog in 2022, surmised, "At present, my main model of Castaneda is that he never went to the Sonora Desert and probably wrote all the Don Juan books from sources in the library at UCLA. When he submitted his thesis, he was asked to show his field notes, and basically: the dog ate 'em, and they signed off on his degree anyway."
Ru Marshall is an American artist, writer and critic. They labored for 20 years on the Castaneda biography. See also the official website.
You can also read Mr. Wisniewski's interview with Nick Herbert, his interview with Adam Gorightly, the Tea Krulos interview, the David Halperin interview, and two interviews of John Higgs, here and here.
JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Are there many who believed in Carlos Casteneda, as far as his writing is concerned?
RU MARSHALL: There were millions. Although exact figures are impossible to ascertain, he was among the four or five bestselling nonfiction authors of the 70s, and his books continued to sell handsomely well into the 80s. For the first five years following the publication of The Teachings of Don Juan, almost no one publicly questioned the authenticity of his work. That rare exception being Gordon Wasson.
Did Don Juan Matus exist? No. He was a fictional creation.
JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Did Casteneda have a coven of witches who were his companions?
RU MARSHALL: I wouldn’t use the word “coven.” Castaneda never called it that. But there were three women, Taisha Abelar, Florinde Donner Grau, and Carol Tiggs whom he referred to as his witches, and who claimed (falsely) to have met Don Juan. Florinda and Taisha both disappeared immediately following his death in 1998, and all evidence points to they’re having committed suicide to follow him into the next dimension.
JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Would you consider Casteneda to be a cult leader?
RU MARSHALL: You bet. Definitions of a cult vary, but the one I employ in American Trickster is as follows: a tightly bounded social group the underlying purpose of which is the aggrandizement of the leader or leaders at the expense, psychological but also financial, emotional, so forth, of the followers. Castaneda’s followers were told to cut off their families, leave behind partners, pets, and jobs to become part of his magical, alternative family. It rarely ended well.
JOHN WISNIEWSKI: What was Casteneda's early life like?
RU MARSHALL: This is sort of too massive a question to answer. He was born in Cajamarca Peru, his birth name was César Arana. He came from the not quite so wealthy branch of an extremely wealthy family. Although his parents were revolutionaries, he was, on his father’s side, descended from one of the most infamous genocidiares in Peruvian history. Carlos attended art school in Lima, where, shortly before fleeing to the U.S., he impregnated a thirteen year old girl.
JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Why were Casteneda's documents and paper work burned by his followers, at the time of his death?
RU MARSHALL: One of the central principles of his work and in his cult was the mandate to “erase personal history.” He did not want his real story told. This didn’t make my life easy.
JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Does the Casteneda cult continue to this day?
RU MARSHALL: I no longer pay close attention to this, but it appears to still exist, although it is likely less cultlike than when Carlos was alive. But you can still take classes in Tensegrity, the faux Toltec movement practice which Carlos and the witches suggested could provide the opportunity for eternal life.
JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Did Casteneda use drugs to alter his consciousness?
RU MARSHALL: Shockingly, there is almost no evidence that he did. He gave them to others, and artfully plagiarized accounts by others. In interview after interview, I was told, “he only did them with Don Juan.” But there is definitive evidence that don Juan was a fictional creation. I came across only one eye witness account of Carlos ever using any psychoactive plant or drug—Datura. And, in this account, by Jack Leoffler, he did it wrong. No one got high. He clearly never used mushrooms, since his account in his books has him getting high by smoking them. This doesn’t work.
JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Have his works proven to be an influence on the New Age movement?
RU MARSHALL: Absolutely. He is quoted often, and still regarded with reverence by many.
JOHN WISNIEWSKI: Why was Casteneda's life so often shrouded in mystery?
RU MARSHALL: Because he went to great lengths that it be so. He had far too much to hide.
As we are going to do an online reading group pretty soon on Robert Anton Wilson's Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy (I don't have details yet, I need to discuss them first with Eric Wagner), I thought I would share something I had missed: A review of the first book of the trilogy, The Universe Next Door, by the prominentt science fiction fan and book reviewer James Davis Nicoll. The review was posted in January 2024, but I missed it at the time.
Here is a sentence that seems to capture his views: "I don’t regret rereading this book despite it being a dated hot mess." There are other mixed comments in the review.
Obviously, i like the book better than he does, but it's something else to discuss .
Beethoven in 1818, i.e. around the time his Piano Sonata No. 29 was written. (Source).
Part VII BEETHOVEN
By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger
We have entered the Hammerklavier Zone. We will not leave until the Schroedinger's Cat study group finishes, if then. For the last six years I found myself dwelling in an exercise in the fifth circuit chapter of Prometheus Rising where Bob told the reader to attend a Sufi weekend seminar . Now I find myself in a dinner party in Schroedinger's Cat surrounded by concert pianists, all of whom got invited so the host could discuss the Hammerklavier with them. Steven De Groote got invited, and he brought along a few of his students including my friend Jai Jeffryes. Steven kindly allowed me to tag along. I recognize Charles Rosen, Vladamir Horowitz, Glenn Gould, Maurizio Pollini, Martha Argerich, Alfred Brendel, Murray Perahia, Arthur Rubenstein, Sviatoslav Richter, Radu Lupu, Rudolf Serkin, Peter Serkin, and Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.
I remember when Jai first told me about the Hammerklavier back in August 1980. He saw a Rudolf Serkin LP of the Hammerklavier in a used record store. A week or so later Jai, his friend Jim, and I sat in Jai's dorm room listening to either the Serkin or Brendel recording of the sonata. Jim commented that every pianist but Pollini sounded like "they were about to fall off the end of the piano bench at the end of the sonata." In 2005 Rafi Zabor turned me on to Solomon's recordings of Beethoven's late piano sonatas. I mentioned Jim's comment about the Hammerklavier to Rafi, and he said Solomon didn't sound ready to fall off the piano bench at the end of his recording.
I used ChatGPT to make this picture depicting Atlantis shortly before they discovered advanced AI and destroyed themselves.
Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary were very interested in computer technology, and typically technology positive, but alas they left us before AI really got going. I wish I knew what they would have said.
I have been reading many articles lately about the purported dangers and benefits of AI. One article I would particularly recommend is a Substack piece by Tracing Woodgrains, We Will Never Have “Normal Times” Again. Here is a bit of it:
Forget your instinct to dismiss, honed by years of promises of a crypto revolution or NFTs or another Next Big Thing, while all that changed in your life was a new iPhone and the social media takeover of the world. Forget all of that, and just look. Five years ago, you probably did not know what OpenAI was, and Anthropic barely even existed. Five years ago, if you wanted to get a computer to do something, you wrote by hand in machine-tailored language.
The article pairs well with the Fareed Zakaria piece I mentioned in this earlier blog post. I got zero comments, but I am happy with that post.
If you want optimistic takes on AI, you can read Richard Hanania and Deep Left Analysis For pessimism, there a new Michael Johnson and Ted Gioia.
In a comment for the Hanania piece, one of my favorite bloggers, Scott Sumner, wrote: "While I am pretty dismissive of the jobs fears associated with AI, I am agnostic on the safety issue. I don't know enough to have an intelligent opinion, but FWIW my biggest fear is not misalignment, it's alignment. More specifically, AI alignment with a rogue scientist that wishes to produce a global pandemic--the virologist equivalent of that Malaysian pilot that ditched his plane in South Indian Ocean. Again, I have no idea if that's possible, but I worry more about evil people working with cooperative machines than I do about evil machines."
UPDATE: AI safety update posted Sunday by Scott Alexander.
The one-volume omnibus editon of the Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy, which I suspect is the one we will have to use for our upcoming discussion group, has considerable cuts in comparison to the original three books that were published separately. The Wikipedia article references the cuts, but the best detail I can find is in Eric Wagner's very useful An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson.
Eric's book (in the Lexicon section, in the entry "My favorite Wilson book," says, "The one volume Schrödinger's Cat has about 212 pages cut, plus some slight revisions." So the cuts are considerable.
While there has been a lot of discussion from Wilson and Shea about the cuts made in Illuminatus!, I would like to know more about the cuts in SC. Why was the omnibus edition cut so much? Did Wilson himself make all of the decisions on what to cut, and what did he think about having to make the cuts? Was there any principle about the sorts of cuts that were made? I regard SC as a major work of fiction, and I am baffled that I know so little about these questions. Can anyone help?
With the ongoing discussion group for Charles Rosen's The Classical Style winding up soon, I thought it it be time to talk about another reading group I want to begin: The Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson. It seems to me that would be the major RAW work we haven't covered with the various online discussions here. It's a work that RAW apparently was particularly pleased with.
I still have my three paperbacks for the trilogy titles, e.g. The Universe Next Door, The Trick Top Hat and The Homing Pigeons. But if we are going to do a discussion, I think we have to use the one volume omnibus edition, as that is the one most easily available for everyone.
Eric Wagner and I have started talking about this. We are both willing to do blog posts to held lead the discussion. As per usual, everyone is invited to participate in the comments. But I also am open to blog posts by other folks; I'm not looking to exclude anyone who might want to talk about favorite sections of the trilogy, or favorite ideas discussed in it.
I am willing to listen to other ideas about the discussion group.
After a relaunch on Kickstarter, the Chapel Perilous audiobook has hit its goal. "The Campaign is not over yet however, and there is still time to get first dibs on the Chapel Perilous Audiobook," Prop Anon/Gabriel Kennedy notes. More details here.
Having finished putting out his broadcast of Ong's Hat: Compleat, Joseph Matheny is ready to announce his new project, Art is War: Fear and Loathing on the Internet, a current work in progress with a projected release date of late 2027, "An art manifesto for our changing times."
Here is a description of the project from his personal website:
At the end of the movie Apocalypse Now, after hacking Kurtz to death during a ceremonial ritual, Willard picks up Kurtz’s manuscript and walks past the awestruck indigenous tribe who now view him with deity-like reverence.
The manuscript contains Kurtz’s dark summation and inner thoughts on the war, famously featuring the scrawled or written phrase: “Drop the bomb. Exterminate them all!”
What did the manuscript say, and what did it have to do with art?
Watch my Substack for release announcements.
The latest newsletter has lots of interesting links. The plan is to put out a newsletter every month.
3. Church Music
By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger
Like many people my age, I used to love hanging out in record stores. Occasionally an album cover would catch my eye, and I would contemplate buying it. This didn't happen too often with classical albums, but it did with Jame Levine's 1991 album of Haydn The Creation. After years of reading Robert Anton Wilson, the eye in the pyramid design jumped out at me. I thought about buying it for decades, but I never did. Spotify doesn't seem to have that recording. Instead I put on one conducted by Kurt Moll. That album's cover uses a close-up of God and Adam's hands from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Oh well. I do plan to listen to it this week.
My friend Father Tim Lamm once gave a talk focused on Beethoven's Missa Solemnis for Catholic school teachers which I really enjoyed. Father Tim lent me Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, and I lent him Kerman's The Beethoven Quartets. I enjoyed Sullivan's book, and my copy of the Kerman still has a few softly penciled notes by Father Tim.
Ben Graham, the British Discordian writer, has announced he's completed his new novel, Savage Jubilee, and is taking preorders from his small press operation:
"Savage Jubilee is the second book in my ongoing American Underground sequence, a psychedelic odyssey through the 20th Century’s magical counterculture. The first book, Electric Tibet, dealt with the 1967 Human Be-In, treating it as a consciously magical act or hypersigil expressly designed to manifest the Summer of Love that followed. Savage Jubilee jumps back a generation to explore the less well-documented world of 1940s psychedelia, and charts the early adventures of one Lucien Bright Starr, black sheep scion of a wealthy white Hawaiian family, whose show-business ambitions are dashed when his budding psychic abilities bring him to the attention of the US wartime intelligence agencies, as well as more mysterious forces. Alongside encounters with Crowley, Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti and Aldous Huxley, we discover why Cole Porter’s Begin The Beguine is the secret theme song of the 20th century. It’s perhaps a more traditional novel than Electric Tibet, and over twice the length, but there’s still plenty of weirdness going on. It can be read as a prequel to Electric Tibet or as a standalone novel in its own right (though the next American Underground book, provisionally titled High Magick, will pick up directly where Savage Jubilee leaves off)."
Graham also is putting out a new edition of Electric Tibet and you can save if you order both books together. More details here.
#/media/File:Ludwig_Van_Beethoven_LCCN2003663903.jpg){kind=link}