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Carlos Castaneda
Peruvian-American author (1925-1998) · United States · Writers · Died at 72
Carlos Castaneda is read about 1,330 times a day, in 44 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 15 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 390 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?An anthropologist who turned invented shamanic encounters with a Yaqui sorcerer named Don Juan into bestselling books - then retreated into seclusion with a group of female followers he called his "witches," five of whom vanished after his death.
Also in Deutsch
Photos 8
In their own words 10
This series of specially selected quotations was gathered from the first eight books that I wrote about the world of the shamans of ancient Mexico.
There is a question that a warrior has to ask, mandatorily: Does this path have a heart?... All paths are the same: they lead nowhere.
Power rests on the kind of knowledge that one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless? They will not prepare us for our unavoidable encounter with the unknown.
In their orbit
About this person
Carlos Castaneda was born in Peru on December 25, 1925, and trained as an anthropologist at UCLA, where he began publishing accounts of his apprenticeship under Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui "Man of Knowledge." The first three books - The Teachings of Don Juan, A Separate Reality, and Journey to Ixtlan - earned him both undergraduate and doctoral degrees and became bestsellers that shaped the New Age movement, though the figure of Don Juan is now widely regarded as fabricated. As questions about the veracity of his work mounted in the early 1970s, Castaneda withdrew from public life and surrounded himself with young women he demanded rename themselves, sever family ties, and submit to him sexually. By his death on April 27, 1998, his books had sold over eight million copies in 17 languages. Five of his closest devotees disappeared after he died; one, Patricia Partin, was later found as skeletal remains in Death Valley, while the other four have never been located.
Writers from the United States 6
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