Warning this episode contains details that some listeners may find disturbing. In 2003, in the scorching heat of Death Valley, two hikers made a grim discovery. The remains of Patricia Parton, a woman who had been missing for five years. Her case, however, is not isolated. Patricia was one of five women, all called the witches, who were the inner circle of a controversial cult. All of them have vanished.
Tonight, we look into the complex and fascinating questions surrounding the continuing mystery of the five vanished witches, exploring what happened to Patricia and the possible whereabouts of the other four women who disappeared alongside her. This is a study of strange. Welcome back to the show. I am Michael May, and sitting across from me is Mariah Clapp. Hi, Mariah. How are you doing? Hello, and thank you for inviting me to this auspicious occasion. Yes, it is a pleasure to have you.
So I'll be very blunt and honest with the audience. This is a story you brought to my attention, and I had to have you on a because it would be fun to have you on for it. But also, this is such a huge story with so many details, so many lies, so many name changes, cult weirdness, exercises, books, and there's so much to get Ahold of that it is. It's just a massive story and I definitely need help. So both of us have been doing research on this story to, to try to share it. So it's a wild one.
I feel like I need to come up with a phrase to tell everybody, like buckle up, everybody. It's gonna get wild and crazy, but I don't I don't have any lines prepared and I don't like that one. Do you have any do you have any lines to get us started? Put on our shamanic robes together. Yeah. Oh, that's more appropriate. Put on your shamanic robes. Sit down.
And I feel like it's more meaningful that we're two way people saying that things are since the story is entirely about, not entirely about, but it is mostly about appropriation abuse. Right? Absolutely. And so it makes sense. I'll also say this to listeners, to people that may know this story or are interested in this story. So you're listening to hear more or hear a different take on it. I there's no way we can cover everything in this story.
There's just absolutely no way we'd have to spend a year long, sort of like documentary podcast project to actually tell everything. So we just won't cover everything, but we will cover what we think is important and to tell the story. But if there's something we missed or something we misconstrued, let me know. I would love to do a follow up on this, so feel free to write in a study of stranger at gmail.com and let us know. It looks like you get excited about that too.
Like, I'd love to. Yeah, I want to hear. I want people to write in things. There's like a small but spirited group of people engaged in this topic. So. So I'm going to start telling the story, and you jump in when you feel like you need to know, or I'll ask questions along the way. So in 1998, five women left their home in Los Angeles. Oh, I'd never practice pronouncing their names. Maria. Okay, so Tatia, Tatia. Abelard I said Tatia, I had to, but I heard somebody on an interview chased her.
But they also could be wrong, so who knows? So I'm going to say Tatia, Adeline, Florinda, Donna Gro, Talia Bay, Patricia Parton, and Kylie Lundell. I will say everybody has different names, multiple multiple names. It's the better way to phrase that. So just be aware and I will come back to that a little bit later on. So word was that these women had told others that they were going on a trip.
They were leaving town for a while, and weeks later a red Ford Escort was found abandoned in Death Valley. Death Valley. It is the lowest elevation in the United States. It's in California, and it's a place where I believe the hottest temperatures on the planet have been recorded, if not the hottest. It's like some of the hottest and where this Ford was found was not an easy place to drive to. It's an area that it's recommended to have an off road vehicle.
And it's essentially yeah, it's just essentially off road. And it's near a place called Panamint Dunes. And a park ranger named David Brenner found the car, searched the area for its owner, couldn't find anybody, and noted that the car was strange because there's a lot of abandoned cars in Death Valley, but this one had been cleaned out, meaning not like stuff had been stolen, but essentially anything that would identify the owner was out of the car. There was no identifying stuff left.
I'm sure they could still use a license plate and Vin to search who it was, and that's what they did. And they found out it belonged to a woman named Patricia Parton. Parton and other women, the other women I mentioned earlier were nowhere to be seen. No one had seen them in weeks. No one had heard from them. They were missing. And perhaps Parton's car was a clue. Lewis Marquez, Talia Bai's brother, went to the police in 1999, begging for authorities to investigate. They didn't.
Probably because there's probably like rules around you have to have more information or something like that. But police didn't start investigating. That's very generous, Mike. Yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right. I'm being very generous about it. Five years after Parton's Red Ford was found in Death Valley, two hikers discovered the remains of a dead body near the Panamint Dunes area.
And it wasn't until 2006 that they were able to conclude that this was the dead body of Patricia Parton, but none of the other bodies have been found. All right. I'm going to pause, just for a second. Mariah, is there anything about discovering the car or the body that you want to add to any of that? Well, the body, I think, was found with the I always love the detail of of the pink jogging. Yeah. The pink. Did you say that? And I oh, I didn't know, I didn't know that was great.
Yeah it was, it was a pink outfit and I've read it, I've read one article that they found the skull and then the body later, but then I other articles, it sounds like it was all together. So there is a little bit of like conflicting. I'm not sure they found the skull. Oh, maybe that's what it was. Maybe it's that they couldn't find the skull. And I will say, like all of these details, this entire story is like a such a patchwork of guesses, facts and myths all at once.
And I think that's part of the journey. So that's it? Is it? It definitely is. And there's a lot of questions around Patricia Parton. They were. Her death was claimed to be an undetermined, undetermined. Thank you. So it's an undetermined cause of death. And meanwhile, Tasha Aberlour, Florinda Donner, Talia Bay and Kylie Lund, all they remain missing to this day. So who are all of these women we've been talking about? Well, they were all born with different names, except for Patricia Parton.
I think I'm using her birth name when I say her. Yes. You're mixing it up like that. Yeah. And they had all changed their name when they began following the very successful new author, Carlos Castaneda. And Carlos referred to the members of his inner circle, these women as the witches. Or you also hear check mules, although apparently not all of them were considered check mules. Have you figured that out at all? Yes.
It seems as though the rankings were probably shifting at different times, and that's why I've just kind of stuck to the witches. Because definitely that includes all the women that are like key to this story, I think. Absolutely. And Chuck mules, that is a term that it references a Mesoamerican sculpture. So it's something that Carlos kind of usurped from, from again, a metro, a Mesoamerican culture.
And they, they all that helped develop a program that Castaneda taught called tensegrity registered trademark. By the way, can I say that, and they helped run his company Clear Green, and they had written books as part of this network of content. In 1998, soon before all these women disappeared and Patricia was found, Carlos Castaneda had died. And soon before he died, he changed his will, leaving a lot of money and control of his company to the widgets. Done, done done. All right.
So I think we should share some information about each of these women just so people can get to know them a little bit better. Do you what do you want to tackle that? Maria? Yeah, I think I'm going to start with the most enigmatic of many enigmatic characters, which is the Amalia marquez Talia Bay. So Amalia marquez is her born name, and Talia Bay and I. Maybe she's meant to be called Talia, but I never say her name without saying Talia Bay.
And I also think I usually try to call her Amalia because her family has been so, one of the more active families, I think, in trying to find her. Yes. Yeah. And I think, like the outcomes for them, are a little bit more rooted in getting their loved one back than necessarily, I don't know, acknowledging the journey they went on. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, Amalia was from Puerto Rico. Most of these women are about the same age, with one exception. Two exceptions, but we'll get to them later.
So she's born in Puerto Rico in 1955, and she moved to LA, specifically, I believe, to seek Carlos out because she wanted to learn from him. And I believe that before she arrived there, she had a life as an entrepreneur and businesswoman to some degree. But I couldn't find a lot of details about that. She did eventually become the president of Clear Green, and it sounds like she was kind of like the financial brains behind the operation. So I think she brought a lot of those skills with her.
And and I believe that she developed some more what later on. And I think that she joined a bit later than the other, some of the other women. So that's actually more or less the extent of information I have on her. Did you find anything on her? Did I not really know? No. That's you. I think you even did that more than I did, because I didn't even know she was born in Puerto Rico. But no, she's she's definitely one that has less information for sure. Yes. For sure.
So we'll put her aside for a second, and then I'm going to zoom back to the original three. And these three are really important because they're the ones that he started with. Yeah. And they're the three that he was like made this core family with. But I guess we'll get to that later. So the three are number one. Cathleen Pullman aka Carol Tiggs aka muni Arraf aka can we say pussy in this? Yeah, absolutely. Go for it.
AKA Super Pussy. AKA Elizabeth Austin, Chickie, the Nungua woman and my favorite, the Death to Fire. That's awesome. And just to clarify, and I hope I'm not stepping on some sort of plan, you had to to introduce everybody, but she's somebody that's not missing. Correct? She is not missing. She's alive. And there may have been a brief period of uncertainty about where she was. But she was never there was never anyone trying to seek her out.
Yeah, I will say it can be a little confusing because prior to this disappearance, where the final disappearance earlier in her life, when she initially joined up with Castaneda, she did leave for a while. After being part of this initial group, she left, I think, for around ten years. And so, she during that time, I believe, was studying acupuncture and having a marriage. But when she came back, I think that Castaneda explained it as her being on a journey in a, in an alternate dimension.
And I think sometimes it can get confusing whether that happened. But that was earlier, that was done and gone before these other women went missing. So she was like the mother figure of the group. I'm trying to think. I think she actually did. She? Oh yeah. She oh, you know what? Sidebar. Because you like, is the man she was married to was Rebecca Damon's ex-husband. What what I did what about her? I guess she married him later.
I forget we're just a little confusing, but she was definitely married to the same man that Rebecca De mourning was at one point. Wow. So a little Hollywood sprinkled in there. But she supposedly met Carlos when he was in a time of strife, and they both have very different versions of how they met, but they're both bonkers, and they essentially both involve them, both having a spiritual moment of of profound, rebirth, death in a desperate moment. I probably classified a lot of different ways.
And then they came into each other's lives and had sex for nine days in a spiritual, sexual, situation with her super pussy. And as part of that process, she passed some of her death, defy death to fire magic into Carlos while receiving some of Carlos's Nograles sperm magic. Nice, nice. Love it. That classic story I would say to you that out loud. 330 but she, like most of the other women in this story, were students. She was a student at UCLA when she met Carlos.
She, like some of the other women, had a father who was not in the picture. He had died in a car crash. He would eventually go on to help develop tensegrity in her later time and had a lot of, a lot of influence around recruiting other witches. So she was like a mother figure to some of these other witches that came along. And she's one of two women who was a little bit older than the other key, the other key members. Right. Those were all the really fun.
So those are the background you need on her. The next one is Marion Simcoe, and her Cassidy name was the Tasha Abelard, aka Anna Marie Carter, aka Ricky. Not as many as some of the other people, but she still they they love their names. Do lieutenant players and names. She is one of the women who was missing. She was 19 when she met Carlos and was studying anthropology, at UCLA. She went on to get her PhD, so we can also call her doctor Marianne Simcoe, if we feel like it.
She moved on to the compound originally with the previous Kathleen, and then another lady will meet that. I'm obsessed with. And she is one of the people who claims to have spent time with Don Juan. First, we'll learn about Don Juan later, though, I guess. Yeah. And she wrote a book called The Sorcerers Crossing a Woman's Journey. And one of the things I noticed is a lot of these different women published books. And Carlos obviously published a lot of books from huge publishers.
Like they're all none of these people are publishing books from little Hole in the wall publishers. There's like Viking and Simon Schuster. Penguin. Yeah. And we'll, we'll, we'll get to that a little bit later. But the, yeah, this, this whole network of things around Carlos is it's huge in the publishing world. He was a highly successful author with these sort of spiritual and spiritual and New Age books. Yeah. So I'll, I will get into that a little bit later on to explain to everybody.
But yes, I think most of these women helped author or authored their own books. Yes, part of this company and yeah, most of them with very big publishers, which is part of part of the story we'll get into. Yes. And the lifestyle around that. So one of the other key things about Marianne is she was she loved karate in the martial arts. And so her and the next woman that we'll introduce are the genesis of white. And she became such a critical part of this whole story. Absolutely.
I love that it was like her and her bestie in their martial arts class. And then they meet him. But some of the other things that are interesting about her, she claimed to have spent some time, living as an ape girl in a tree. She spent some time, pretending that she was, pretending might be not the way she characterized it. She spent some time as a man named Ricky, and she used, like, a prosthetic in her pants to help her seduce women. During that period.
And I think she wrote about both of those things in that book. Not that you need more. Those are actually you don't even need any words so much already. So what's her deal? And then there's my. Okay, this is the last of the first three. And Michael, I'm obsessed with this woman. This is. And I will use her. She originally was named Régine Margarita Thol, but her name that she adopted was Fleur. And a doner gro, or phyllo dough, which I don't love. That nickname. I'm going to call her Fleur.
And, because this is the name she used, she hardly had any pseudonyms. This is the name she used on her books. I believe she actually adopted that name before becoming, like, fully immersed, even in, in the Castaneda world. So her background is fascinating. I found conflicting reports, but I believe the accurate one is that she was born in Germany. Okay. Her family immigrated to Venezuela in 1946.
And when I hear about German people emigrating to Venezuela in 1946, you know, I need to look that stuff up. So I was trying to find anything I could to give context to this, because we know she's like this blond white woman. And I looked up the background of her name. There are very traditional. Her parents names are very traditional German names, and she was born in this town called Amberg.
And Hamburg has a fascinating history because they had a Jewish population beginning pretty early after their community was founded. And like the first and second century, however, there were hundreds of years of oppression and persecution towards the Jews of this community. And so they came and went kind of over the years. And eventually, when it became World War Two, there were hardly any left. There were like 12 Jewish people left in this community.
And so after the war, this community was part of the area that was under I wrote a whole thing down so I wouldn't mess it up. Okay. So, it became a center for housing, mostly Jewish Jewish refugees, and it was a part of Bavaria that was in the American sector. It also had a large army base on it. So it went from being a place that had pretty much gotten rid of its entire Jewish population, to a place that all of a sudden had like a lot of Jewish people and American soldiers living in it. Right.
And so that led to them leaving the her family. In theory, that's when they left as 1946. It would have been a year or two after all that happened. And they lived in Caracas. And so I was like, well, where were all these German immigrants living in Venezuela? And let me tell you, that's a fascinating one as well. So I don't know for sure that she lived in this particular settlement. But there was this one settlement in the mountains in Venezuela outside Caracas. Did you read about this, Michael?
Not for this story, but I think I know what you're talking about. But it's like they're recreating Germany in this, like, little town, right? Is that what you're. Yeah, yeah. And if you Google it, I didn't write down what it's called, so I'll look it up in a second. But it looks like Germany. Like it looks like Bavaria. It has all the same Bavarian architecture. They it was a very small community. They were controlling who was allowed to live there.
So they were assimilating to the parts of, of Venezuelan culture and South American culture that they liked. But also very much bringing their own German bubble there. Yeah. So aside from being, an enclave, it also has all these, like, tones of racial purity, which I feel like comes up a lot throughout this story. And that's why I'm so curious about these roots here. Like me, she was maybe potentially raised in a similar, if not the same community. And so that's her background.
And then as she grew up, she was actually, but really, really fascinating in her own right. So she when she met Carla, she was doing karate with her bf Marianne. And they were both, like, excelling in anthropology. And, Florinda spoke like 3 or 4 languages. And she was really cultured and, and I'm sure people there loved her. And I'm sure she had, like, a confidence that was just very compelling.
All the things I read about her was that she was basically like the other the other compelling force in the house besides Carlos. I've been waiting to share that part first. I'm so excited. I'm so glad that's over. I can't believe I didn't write down the name of the town, though. I'll look it up. Yeah. So one of the things I noticed, so she wrote she wrote a book called Charbonneau A visit to a Remote and Magical world in the South American Rainforest. That's the whole title. Wow. It's so long.
And, yeah, it's a rabbit hole. I could really go down far with that one. But the synopsis or the CliffsNotes, I should say, is that very similar to what Carlos had done with his writing? She basically appropriated other people's work and research and experiences and then frame them as if they were her own, including a true life account of a woman who actually spent her life in captivity with the indigenous peoples. That this book was supposedly about.
So I say that because rude Florinda, very wrong to steal this woman's life and make it your own, very, very rude. Florinda, if you're listening, and I feel like she is, we'll get to that. Of course she might. Yeah, I don't know. Very rude. She wrote a couple other books, including, The Witch's Dream, which I got a copy of and started reading a little bit.
She was described as intellectual and rebellious, and she has this quote that is from, Amy Wallace, who has one of the only Pers people who's written a firsthand account of her experiences while living in this environment.
And she says if Lorena told her once that one of her dreams as a child was to own a farm where she controlled everybody, including the lives, not just the livestock but also the people, and that she would be breeding the people and choosing which people would breed with others. So when you hear that in the context of her background, it's a lot. It's a lot. And I feel like if I were going to label anyone else in the story besides Carlos a narcissist, it would definitely be Florinda.
Yeah, I don't know. I'm not a doctor, but that is some wild and deeply rooted worldview. Yeah, shaping, stuff. And yeah, she was only photographed a couple times ever. Which kills me. As with all of these. So that's Florinda. I'm obsessed with Florinda. Nice, nice. I don't know why I'm saying nice, but I. You know, it's exciting. It's it is nice to be able to have someone else that will indulge this obsession to this degree, because usually I have to get people a little drunk and corner them.
So the rest of my theory is about this. All right. So moving on. The, next the next witch that would eventually disappear. You've heard her name is Kylie Lindahl, but she was born as Deanne Albers, aka Kylie Lund, aka Kylie Lundgren, aka Astrid. And I think some of these, like Astrid, are. They're like cute little household pet names. So her background is quite fraught. As with some of, the other women, but hers in particular. She, lost her mother early. She was kind of raised by her sister.
She had two kids really early, like high school. She dropped out of high school to have her two children. And because she didn't have, a partner in her life and she didn't have her education, she struggled a lot. She ended up getting to some petty crime, and some other troubles. She had a lot of housing insecurity. So when she ended up joining Carlos, unlike some of these other women, like, she was really coming from a place of having known. Yeah, real, real struggle.
Yeah. And I feel like had such a fierce motivation to create a life for herself based on that. Having so much struggle, so little control that being able to be more self-possessed, at least that way, it seems like she probably perceived it. And she's the woman that you see, if anyone Googles any of this, she's the woman that probably is like the face of this more than anyone else, because she's the image that comes up and the research tensegrity. Yes. Yeah, she's the first.
She's the first one I ever researched after you and I started talking about it, because there's a great piece in the Alta Journal about her that leads into the story of Carlos Castaneda. And she's also the main person leading the exercises that you do see in the videos of tensegrity. Which again, we'll come we'll come to that a little bit later on. But yeah, you're definitely right. I see her more than anybody else. That's for sure. For sure.
And I realize I just, I understand now that I don't have to get through all of my information all at once. It's all right. Okay. And finally, we have the woman whose skeleton was found in the desert, Patricia Lee Parton, aka Nouri Alexander, aka Claude, aka Patricia Scylla Fant, aka The Blue Scout. Yeah. Which of all of the women. I think she has the most mythology from her time living in the Castaneda household? She was brought into the home when she was 19. I'm sorry.
And she was introduced to Carlos when she was 19. And she was a waitress. She had actually just gotten married to this guy. And this guy had been studying with Carlos for a while and brought her to a meeting. And the way that worked out is like a couple weeks after they got married, she was like, I'm divorcing you because this guy is way more compelling. So that's where the Scylla Fant came from is she was married to a man with that last name and got it.
During her time there, she adopted a child like persona for the vast majority of her time, where there's backstory that maybe we'll get into. But basically, she was a supernatural being to Carlos, and he really nurtured that in her. And so she operated in this place where she was both studying anthropology at UCLA, giving lectures, teaching tensegrity, and also, though at home, playing with dolls, being tended to, being petulant, to her housemates.
And then on top of all of this, Carlos would eventually adopt her. He had called her his daughter for a long time. He did eventually adopt her legally. And so he she also was having sex with him. So we'll get into the sex stuff later. But I think it's important to her, too, just with her to just note she was infantilized for her entire experience that we're going to talk about and was both treated like a child and like a full blown sexual partner. Partner is not the right word.
But that's how she was treated by. Yeah. And I think it's important to also mention when she was adopted by Carlos. She's an adult. And yet they still went through this process of formally adopting her.
And I would say just to put it in the back of everybody in to tease as we will get into theories at the end of this whole story about what could have happened to Patricia and what could have happened to the other missing, which is and Patricia obviously has slightly unique because they have found her body. But one of the theories is that, the other witches did not like her, and I'll just sort of leave it at that because she is she is unique in this group of people.
She also went on to be one of the driving forces of the magazine that their organization put out, called Warriors Way, and she wrote poetry for it, which is extremely dark, so I'll save that for later. But I have some of it written down. Oh you do. Oh, that's great with it. Yeah. So that is everybody, right? I'm not forgetting anybody. Yes, those are all of the key women. But I will say just for a little bit more use, I am referencing Amy Wallace quite regularly, so I do want to point her out.
She was not in the group of women who went missing. She was, not kind of in the same. She didn't have the same story as the other women did. She joined the household. And I don't even know she ever really lived in the household, but she joined the cult. So let's just say, later in life, even though she had met Carlos for at a very young age, she didn't become pursued by their by their group and by him until later in life.
And she is the one person who wrote a book length account of her time there. And so when I mentioned Amy Wallace and she has since passed away, but that's what I'm mentioning. And she, in her own right, was an accomplished writer and had a whole life. So she's worth mentioning. And then there are these two random ladies, that we won't get into, that are still alive. And then Margaret Runnion the wife. The wife? Yeah. The ex-wife and sort of mother. Right.
So, if it's not clear, everybody, this is a cult we're talking about. You can. I did mentioned something earlier in the beginning here. And, you can tell the the way we're talking about a household in, in writings and different names. This is a cult. This is the background of this whole thing. And tensegrity is one of the names for the cult, because that is a thing that they teach and train, by the way. It still exist. It is still going on. People, learn about it.
I think you can get certified to teach about can and people aren't aware that it's associated with a cult. And it's really funny because when I started researching this and you, you get led to places like Reddit or you get led to YouTube videos, or you get led to articles and you'll see in the comments of people being like, oh, this changed my life and blah, blah, blah. This is so great. And and people are just a little unaware of some of the darker elements that's behind this.
And like other cults, Castaneda, the the father of this cult column, he preached about suicide in these different realms of things, which we'll probably get into a little bit more, I'm sure. And by most accounts, people theorize that because his inner circle, the witches are missing, that one of the things that could have happened is they all committed mass suicide. But only Patricia Parton has been found alone.
So some have tried to search that surrounding area near where her body was found, because maybe the other women are out there somewhere, but yet they have not found anybody. And that's only one theory. We'll get to more theories as we keep going through this story. So I would assume the next step in this. Maria, correct me if I'm wrong or add anything you want to add first, but I think we got to rewind now.
You believe we rewind sound to Carlos Castaneda and learn about him and where this all started. Yes, I want to share one quick fantasy, which is just that if the sky were the limit and time and borders and money were no object, I would like to say that we would give the listeners, a deeply more experiential, journey where we would go and get certified in tensegrity, 100% documented meticulously, and that I'm so sorry we can't do that. But what a thing to imagine. Absolutely.
So if anybody out there wants to fund that, I am happy to take on that project. I'm sure Maria would love to be part of it. Let's do it. We're open for business. Send me an email, a study of stranger gmail.com, and we'll figure out the financial details to make that happen. It would be incredible. And Netflix, if you're listening, I know you want that series. So come on, someone put your money where your heart is and us. So Carlos Castaneda, he was born in Peru on Christmas Day in 1925.
Although I will say there's there's some arguments against that. But in my best research, he was born in Peru on Christmas Day in 1925. He came to the United States in 1955. I don't know the exact motivation behind this move, but I will say in the 60s he started lying about his age. He was older than he was telling people he was. He was 5 or 6 years younger. He was 5 or 6 years older than what he was telling people. Excuse me.
He became a naturalized citizen in 1957, and in 1958 he enrolled in UC at UCLA in anthropology. And in 1960 he married Margaret Runyon, who you mentioned, and he adopted her son, C.J., who's also known as Adrian Vachon. I think currently I should also mention he wanted to be an artist. Right. Maria like that was his original. His backstory is a lot like Hitler's. Hitler's? Yeah. And he claimed that he studied overseas for art, but it turns out he never did. Yeah, that was definitely a lie. Yeah.
And so you're starting listeners, dear listeners, you're starting to pick up. There are a lot of lies that come out with, Carlos Castaneda story The Age and also where he's from becomes a big lie because he's lies to people about where he's actually from, that he studied art overseas all of it a lie. So just follow those breadcrumbs as we go along. Put it this way, if this were a podcast about the true parts of Carlos Costa in his life, we wouldn't have to make it a double episode. That's right.
A minute long episode. Exactly. And not nearly as interesting. So fortunately for us podcasters, it is very interesting. So from what I could tell, and please correct me if I'm wrong here, he wasn't necessarily like a bad husband or father to KHJ, like I couldn't find many stories that he was a bad husband. He definitely wasn't great, but that's very. I'm comfortable calling him a bad husband.
But okay, so you're saying I don't think there's any real history of or knowledge of him, like beating her eating up. Exactly. So I guess if that's what metric. He was a great husband by that metric. He was great. But he did leave. He did leave to go study in Mexico. So essentially he specialized in Native American shamanism as he was studying anthropology and shamans. I'm sure people are also familiar with them in general, sort of speaking very generic generically. They're healers, right?
They make medicines and things like that. I know it's a fairly mundane way to describe shamans, but I think most people have a feel for what they are. And what made Carlos stand out to his teachers and peers at UCLA was that he was from South America, and although a lot of his white peers just thought he was Mexican, so it made sense that he was studying Mexican, shamanism. And he did tell people that he was also from Brazil at one point.
I don't know why or why he started lying about that. And in May of 1960, he left to go study in Mexico. He wanted to learn about shamanism firsthand on the ground. So he went to the state of Sonora, and he wanted to meet the Yaqui people, the indigenous peoples of the area and parts of southwest U. US and the Yankees believed that the universe. This is just a very generalized statement, just so people understand the basis of this.
But Yankees believe that the universe has multiple dimensions, different planes of being that we as humans, we can't access all those planes of being. And this includes the dream world. And Carlos thought all of this would be great for his thesis. This is a wonderful topic. I'm going to dive into this and sit here in Mexico and study all of this and write a thesis about it.
And he wanted to find shamans and healers, and people kept telling him, according to his his own words, people kept telling him to meet someone named Don Juan Matisse or Mateus, Mateus Mateus. I like my TOS, I do too. That's the way I've heard. I've heard it both ways. But I like Mateus better, so I'm going with that. And Maria, do you know the story that he shared about how he met Don Juan? Did you ever learn that the one about being at the bus station?
Yeah. Yeah. So he was he was trying to find Don Juan, apparently was really hard to find him. And he ran into him at a bus station, I think in Arizona or New Mexico. I can't remember exactly now. And he approached him and he started telling him, hey, I'm writing this thesis. I'm studying shamans. Talk with me, work with me, let's do it. And Don Juan wouldn't speak, didn't say a word. And then the guy's bus showed up and down one of the bus and left.
And it's during this meeting that Carlos claims that he felt something, something very life changing, this amazing energy that he couldn't quite describe. So he got in his car and he, like, chased the bus. And when the bus stopped, he was right there to meet Don Juan again. And he approached him again and he said he that he felt this energy and he had to learn from it firsthand. So because of this, I guess this very direct and aggressive approach. Don water Don one said, yeah.
All right. I'll help you. I'll teach you. I'm jumping around a little bit here, but Don Juan had said something about plants, and that plants have these different spirits, and one of the very special plants that has a different spirit is peyote. And if you eat peyote, the ancient spirit would speak and communicate with you. But sometimes this was a dark, scary vision and Carlos had to try it himself. And allegedly when he had been terrified of drugs his whole life.
But he ended up trying peyote because Don Juan told him to and he had a vision. He sick. Carlos said that he had a memory of his life. Flash basically through his mind in an instant, and then it was all gone before he saw a large black dog turn into a blinding light. And Carlos spoke to Don Juan about this vision. And Don Juan was very impressed that he had this vision. And he told Carlos that, all right, you can learn everything from me.
I will teach you everything, my son or I don't think he said that, but there you go. Here. I'm going to read it real quick. I want to read a quote just because I thought this is a great way to explain it. This is from Tensegrity Wikividi.com, a great source of information, actually. Here's the quote. Castaneda wrote that he was identified by Don Juan Meadows as having in the energetic con configuration of a Negro who, if the spirit chose, could become a leader of a party of warriors.
He also used the term negro to signify that part of the perception which is in the realm of the unknown, yet still reachable by man, implying that for his party of seers Don Juan was in some way a connection to that unknown Castaneda. Often Richard referred to the unknown realm as non ordinary reality, which indicated that this realm was indeed a reality, but radically different from the ordinary reality experienced by human beings. So yeah, I just thought that was a very interesting there.
Do you know how long he studied with Don Juan? I think it was book. Well, I think it was supposedly 4 or 5 years. Yeah. And it was he'd go back and forth. That's that's what I heard, too. And I heard that he, like, talked to his wife and was like, hey, I gotta go study in Mexico. And that the way he tells it, she was like, yeah, do it.
That sounds great for you. But I'm sure, as families do, I'm sure it's not that easy just to have the, the but the husband and father in the household be like, I'm going to go to Mexico for a while. I don't know when I'm back and, and disappear, but, yeah, he studied for 4 or 5 years. And my favorite part of this story, because I don't know how college worked back then, but he returned to UCLA after all this time and had written a manuscript and was like, here you go, here's my thesis.
And I'm like, I think it's fair to say that the UCLA anthropology department during this era was probably not holding the standard for academic regularity. What on earth would make you say that? It's almost like he's studying a certain topic around people that studied anthropology at the time at UCLA. Yeah, yeah, it's really it's really interesting. But that is what he did.
He returned to UCLA with this manuscript, and I'm just going to assume he dropped it on his professor's desk and was like, here you are my thesis. Thank you. I'll take an A. And he did. I think he got an A. And he did graduate, with a degree in anthropology. And the the thesis was titled The Teachings of Don Juan a Yaki Way of Knowledge. And this would go on to become a book. It was published as a book. And he wrote, I believe, 12 books total over his life after this first one.
And they became all of them, especially this first one, the teachings of Don Juan became a huge hit. It was selling 16,000 copies a week when he started it. It started off making a lot of money pretty quickly. And in those early years, the first few books he wrote, just to give you a sense of these, in 1971 he wrote a separate reality Further Conversations with Don Juan. In 1972, he wrote journey to X-Line, and then in 1974, tales of Power. And all of them are about this man, Don.
One matters, all right. Anything I'm forgetting is in there. No, but I do want I think there's it's important to provide some context to that era and what was going on, because I keep seeing in different places, people will say that he was the godfather of the New Age movement, and I think that's extremely reductive.
He was one piece of this massive mass situation that was happening, that gave rise to an enormous amount of potential for capitalist gain in ways that had not really been explored before. So like in the 1950s, it was like, oh, teenagers are our way to make money off of off of the working class. And then it became, oh, betterment. And so we're kind of seeing it again now, which I think is fascinating.
Yeah, we know a lot of the things that are going on in this story, I think are coming up again now, but it was just this massive thing where there were so many different ways to, be in this field. And it also was taking place at a time when psychedelic medicine and plant medicine was being used in psychotherapy, or had been being used in psychotherapy for quite a while, and then had eventually become less accessible because the government was like, no more fun for you.
And so, like when you imagine this weirdo making a ton of money and being this huge, huge bestseller, it didn't happen. He wasn't like a phenom where this all of a sudden came out of nowhere. There was very much like a fertile environment for him to grow and thrive in that he did not make. He entered, he enter. And that's a I'm really glad you made that point, actually, because I think that's really important to think about.
And it does show that everything's connected, like these things don't come out of nowhere. There is this movement, you know, obviously everybody knows about, like the hippie movement, the free love movement. But you can see that evolving as the 70s come about and into this world. And also these are published, I think, these first handful of books, they're all published by Simon Schuster. If I'm not incorrect, which is a huge publisher.
So someone over there found this manuscript and was like, you know what, guys? This could be a big hit and started publishing it. So you're right, it is a very capitalistic kind of thing, and he's just hitting it at the right time where he's able to. Yeah, absolutely. I also heard I'm glad you mentioned the government sort of talking about psychedelics, but I did read that, Carlos Castaneda is one of the many, many points.
But he was a big influence on the government cracking down on that and making it peyote illegal and other psychedelics illegal. Because of the power of this, the New Age movement was driving a lot of people to get involved and try psychedelics. And so, yeah, and then they came around, it started shutting that down, which may lead to tensegrity, which is more of this like physical movement instead of taking drugs, getting into this kind of thing. Right. I'm. Yeah, I'm glad you said that.
Because just as a quick side note, anyone who's looking this guy up like you maybe hear about an institute, which is, was a center in in Big Sur. It still exists now. And it was a place where people could go. And it is a, a retreat center that's built on sacred indigenous lands of the Aislinn tribe. And a bunch of white guys co-opted that in the 50s through the 70s to the present. That's a separate thing. So I won't get fully into that.
But I went there last spring, for a Tropic breathwork retreat. And I just want to say, because it's similarly to to tensegrity, the idea with hollow Tropic Breathwork was there were these people who had been taking LSD and doing psychotherapeutic work, and then the LSD became illegal, and they were like, how do we replicate this using without using drugs?
And so they they came up with this idea where you would basically manipulate your body with oxygen to create an induced state of realization and visions and whatnot. And so I went, I did that for a week. It was wild. But one of the things that was kind of a moment of clarity for me and for my friend that I went with was we were kind of led on to believe that we would be having these really intense, intense visions like that.
We'd be feeling like we were rebirthing ourselves, being strangled by octopus. They really built it up into being this amazing thing. And halfway through the week, I realized and said to my friend, well, but they were taking LSD for ten years before they started doing this breathwork. Yeah, and LSD doesn't just leave your system, and explains so much.
So I also think a lot of what was happening in the 70s was all these people who'd been experimenting with psychedelics for years suddenly had their at least easy access cut off, which generates so much, stuff like this. What do we do with all this energy and progress? What do we do with all this excitement now that our goodies have been taken away? Yeah, absolutely. At that. Got it. Yeah. That's a fascinating sort of rabbit hole to go down for sure.
And I will say two, obviously Carlos is talking about in his book psychedelics. That's a big part of of Don Juan's teachings and incorporating that within the culture that Carlos is writing about. However, as these books are coming out and he's starting to get very famous and and his books are becoming more well known, he is on the cover of time magazine at one point, and people are paying more attention to his books.
And there are some questions about this Don Juan gentleman and that come up pretty much right away as they get very popular and some inconsistencies with the stories. One that I have not read the books, I've read bits of them, but in the first book, Don one is very mysterious, is a very mysterious fellow teaching things kind of like Yoda or something. And then then the second book, he's kind of like funny and jovial and whatever, like the characterization sort of changes of Don one.
And this really stood out to a gentleman named Richard de Mille, and he immediately wanted to know more about Don Juan. He wanted to go to the source. He wanted to see field notes from the studies as because this is an anthropology student, he's going to be taking field notes and wanted more information because he was very curious about it, even though he was seeing these inconsistencies.
And apparently when he contacted or someone else had contacted it, contacted Carlos Castaneda and asked for field notes, Castaneda said, oh, they're they're gone. They were lost in a flood in Westwood. And, there's they're not there anymore. So that was weird. And De Mille was actually pretty good at spotting some fakery and things. It's a very interesting guy. He's the nephew of Cecil Be de Mille that I didn't even know until last night. Super fascinating.
Dude has a very interesting story himself, but at one point he worked with L Ron Hubbard from Scientology. And so he has this this experience with, I don't know, chicanery. And it's like the best word I can think of right now. And something about something about Don Juan was rubbing him the right way. And there's a good reason for that. And that is because Don Juan Matus does not exist. Don Juan is not real. He never existed. He wasn't real at all. There's no better way to say it.
It was made up. Carlos made him up. And one of the things that kind of. There's a lot of reasons why that people started to think that this was fake. One of them is the psychedelics. That's why you made me think of this right now. And apparently the Yaqui culture, they do not do psychedelics. The peyote is not part of it. And yet Carlos was like, yeah, it's oh, this is all part of it.
And also, I think Richard de Mille and some other people noticed that some of the stories that Carlos is writing about were literally plagiarized from other books, including some books from like the early 1900s. So they were finding parts that were completely copied from other works. Yeah. Somewhere you can go and look at them too. I think they compiled a list of quotes right from the books, and then source them to wherever they originally came from.
So if you're curious, I think that exists somewhere. Which leads me to wonder, like Carlos, my man, why did you choose this? These people and peyote. Like, why did you not like you had all this research, that real research with real information and still chose to combine these two things that he knew or should have at least known, didn't go together. Absolutely. And it just kind of boggles, man. It does make me think. I wonder at first if he was just like, oh, I'm going to go have fun.
I'm going to go sleep with a lot of women in Mexico or whatever, which is part of that's part of Carlos. That's part of his whole thing. Right? And like, I'm just going to party and I'll make something up for the thesis like they think I'm studying. They think I'm Mexican anyway. Like, I'll just, you know, create a thing for a thesis. I don't think he initially wrote it thinking, this is going to be a hit book. I really I that's just my own personal theory.
I think he just started as this is my thesis kind of thing, and I don't have ChatGPT yet to write my thesis, so I'll just make it up. Yeah, I could be wrong. I'd like to believe there's an alternate timeline where Carlos wasn't like a destructive, sociopathic manipulator and and that he used those different, same skills for good and and the good that he used it for was to just, like, do a complete on, on academia and anthropological studies.
Yeah. Yeah, that would have been really funny if he had done all this and then eventually been like, gotcha, idiots. That would have been pretty fun, right? So what happens next is really interesting, though, because as these books are coming out and people are starting to scrutinize them, by the way, people still buy these and totally believe and done one. That to me is the most fascinating part of it. I've already talked about it earlier.
When people talk about tensegrity and people like this change is so great, it's so wonderful, and the people still read these books and think that one is real and unknowingly, you know, not knowing the history of this whole thing. A lot of podcasters, a lot of well, you find out as well. No, I didn't, but I'm not shocked because I think podcasting, the podcasting world, I think people can make good money on sort of the new age health and wellness mental aspect things.
I think those can do quite well. So I'm not surprised that people do it. And I don't think people just do the research. I don't think people are maliciously sort of ignoring it or that there's I'm sure there's some bias that goes into it, but I think people just find the book and they're like, oh, this is a very popular book. It's sold for years, and they read it and they get something from it and not realizing that it's made up and not tied to anything specific.
That being said, the 70s becomes a very interesting time for Carlos because even though he's got hit books, he has a career and his publishers are not coming out publicly to say, oh yeah, it's fiction. Like they keep calling it, you know, a new age book or health whatever. The whatever the category is, they don't change it.
When it comes out that this is all made up and he starts becoming more reclusive, staying by himself, he ends up purchasing, in the spring of 1973, two adjoining Spanish style bungalows at 1672 Pandora Avenue in Westwood, which is very close to the UCLA campus and essentially he starts forming a cult. And this is where the cult comes in. And I think this is a great place to end.
Part one of the series of The Missing, which is before we get into the cult stuff, any final thoughts for the stuff that we've covered so far? Right. Yeah, I do, since we're talking about his schooling more in this one, there's a story that I really like about how his original thesis idea was to study the use of plants and indigenous. I don't know if he had chosen specific, but he wanted to do his thesis around plants and the use of plant medicine.
And and his advisor didn't let him and told him that was a work for a botanist. And so I have two thoughts to that. One, it's like, that's the rigidity of academia, because that's such a Western white way of looking at at plant, at plant medicine as not connected to human beings and their behavior. Of course, they're inherently linked in a lot of these cultures. And then to the other thing that's funny to me about that is like, what would that have been? Not any of this probably.
Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. You had the whole the whole history of this whole thing would be very different. That's pretty crazy.
Yeah. So in our next part, stick around for or tune in next week for our second part where we're going to get into making a cult, starting a cult 101, I'll call it, and how that led to followers, including the witches that we've talked about and how the five women first left and disappeared, and then the theories behind what could have happened to everybody, which gets very, very interesting. So stick around for that. All right. Thank you, Maria, I will talk to you soon.
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