Hopefully the connection will take in. Okay, we're live. Hi, this is William Ramsey. Welcome to William Ramsey Investigates On today's show. I have a very special guest. His name is Robert Robert or goes by Roberto Marshall. We're going to talk about a podcast that he's involved in on
a subject I was very interested in. The title of that podcast is Trickster The Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda, somebody who is very popular in the sixties, kind of a culture countercultural figure, but there's also some interesting aspects, kind of a shadow world in his background, and mister Marshall is going to talk more about that. So, Robert Marshall, are you there.
I am here and glad to be here.
Awesome. Well, thanks for bringing to the interview For people who may not have heard your name or this project. Can you talk about your background and what led you to compile all of this audio together in this podcast Trickster.
Sure. I'm a novelist and quite some time ago I published novel that was kind of a coming of age novel set in the seventies with a crisis of faith theme, but the faith was New Age religion. And the name Carlos Castaneda just came up a lot, and I had read his books when I was a kid, and when it came out, my agent suggested that I write a little article about whatever happened to Carlos Costeneda, and I started looking into it and just went down a rabbit
hole which hopefully I'm about to emerge from. My biography of Constaneda is coming out next fall from University California Press.
Cool, congratulations. What's the title of that book.
Than Carlos Costaneda American Trickster? And I should say from the start that I'm the co producer of the podcast Trickster, but the director of it is Frank Horton, so I need to give him give him credit for that.
Okay, apologize for that. Can you talk about so you got into Carlos Castia Maybe the simple question is who was Carlos Castaneda.
Sure, well, just to start with, Carlos reach began to rise to fame in nineteen sixty eight with the publishing of a book called The Teachings of Don Juan, A Yucky Way of Knowledge, And at the time, Carlos was actually a dropout from the University of California Graduate Program in Anthropology, and this book very quickly became the time they called them underground best sellers. Then it quickly became
an over ground bestseller. And in it he told the story of how he had met a shaman, Don Juan, in the Sonoran Desert, who had introduced him to three psychedelics, to datura, to mushrooms, and to peote, and even more importantly, to an entire way of seeing the universe that had supposedly never before been revealed to a Westerner, so called Westerner. And for about five years these books went pretty much unquestioned, at least publicly within academia and in the mainstream media.
He was lavishly praised by pretty much everyone in New York Times, Harper's You Name It. By the mid seventies, some doubts began to up here. In the end, it turns out basically absolutely everything was made up. They were
novels that he managed to pass off as anthropology. But he was never really publicly taken down in the way that say, somebody like James Frye and wrote a million of little Pieces was with by Oprah and Carlos's books continue to sell well he continues to have a worldwide following, and in the nineties he had always He started to develop a cult in the nineteen sixties, and I don't just mean a kind of cult in a sense of a cult following, but a real cult with mostly women
who changed their names, cut off their families most of them, not all of them, and followed him. In the nineties, that group went public. They started holding seminars and workshops. Thousands of people came to sim Because Carlos was the most mysterious author in the world, he never allowed himself to be photographed. There are very few extant recordings of his voice voice, so when it came out that Carlos Costaneda had had emerged, this was a huge thing among
his followers. He told his followers that they would if they had enough will, and they practiced something called tenseegrity, which he claimed was a movement technique that had been passed down by twenty five generations of tultec Shamans, that they would be able to make a leap into another
their dimension and they would not have to die. When Carlos died in nineteen ninety eight from liver cancer, yeah, five five of these women disappeared, and the remains of one of them, Nurie Alexander, was later found in.
Right. She was found in Death Valley, Right, And that kind of is the beginning of right, that's the beginning, right, that's the beginning of the story. But he even on his current Amazon page, it's a fake picture of him. So he engendered this kind of mysterious kind of element about his care about his outward authorship. But he really was a was it anthropology student at UCLA? Correct?
Absolutely, and in a certain sense he was a real anthropologist. He studied anthropology. When it came to a very narrow field of anthropology, he actually knew a great deal. He knew everything that he needed to know to pull off what I think is the you know, certainly up there with the Piltdown Man as the greatest hoax in the history of anthropology and probably the greatest literary hoax ever.
Because one thing that distinguished Carlos from other cult leaders and hoaxers was that he was brilliant and at his best, he was a very good writer. His cult, I call it a culture cult, because you had to be you had to be pretty highly educated and well read and smart. He wasn't he At the end, he loosened things up,
but he wasn't just taking anybody there. And just to go back to your question, Carlos was a great storyteller, and he knew how to get people to go along with those stories and then repeat those stories, and those became part of the public record. And so one of the great challenges in writing this biography was to sift through kind of countless fantasy stories that he had made up, you know, to begin with his name. You know, his
real name is Carlos Costeneda. You know, every single thing that people thought they knew about him was not true.
Wow, it's really incredible. He's from like he claimed he was from Brazil, but he was really from Peru. He had a different last name. So he really just created this whole He was like the really kind of an American huckster who came and started a whole new identity. Right.
Yeah, he's a I think of them as a huckster of you know, both both Americans Americas. But one thing that he did figure out pretty fast was that he could say almost anything. This is in the sixties and early seventies in California about what was going on south of the Rio Rand. And you know, Gringas believed it all and he knew as good khan Min do what people wanted to hear and what the society wanted to
hear at the moment. And it was a time when there was a huge revaluation of traditional you know, white North American attitude it's towards Indigenous people and an attempt to come to terms with some of the horrific history. And rather than making people deal with, you know, the horrible reality of it, he gave them this magical fantasy indian who would lead them, you know to other realms and other and other realities.
Right. He called them Don Juan. Right, so Don Juan was a bruo or kind of a magic person from an indigenous magician. But also he gave them also the opportunity to see drugs as a spiritual thing, which they really wanted. So you're absolutely right that he did that. In the intro, I mean, the chapter one had so many famous names and famous people who were influenced by Castaneda. Can you talk about that.
Absolutely? I mean everyone was interested in people. You know, Joni Mitchell named an album after him. Don Lung's reckless daughter. Mark Gay was a big fan. Oliver Stone is a huge fan the Eagles, and you know, all kinds of of of novelists were into him, and people, you know, people in the arts tended to be very drawn to these books. I think in because Carlos when he was back in Peru, he was an art student, and a lot of his appeal was that he you know, he
wrote about these things with that with that knowledge. So yeah, the first person who really called him out was Joyce Carlos in a nineteen seventy three letter in New York Times, where she wrote, oh, I don't know, am I the only one who thinks these books are actually novels? And
other people have had their doubts. But what Carlos knew was that when you get a consensus of people going along with something, and when they have a kind of emotional investment in a belief, you know, whether it's Santa Claus or whether it's Donald Trump, because it's really the same principles that are at work, and when all of the people who are around them also believe the same thing, it becomes very hard for people to say they were wrong.
To go against the.
Yeah, we're conformist animals, and Carlos before studying anthropology, when he was an undergraduate studied psychology, he took a one class specifically in you know, manipulation of behavioral manipulation of people living in group situations. And what he went on to do in the cult was really to just apply the same kind of maneuvers that he had used to get his PhD at UCLA and to get published by University of California Press, which also happens to be my publisher,
So God bless him. And yeah, he knew that people come to their beliefs not through reason but through emotion. There's a vast body of psychological experimentation that backs that up, and Carlos studied it.
And he implemented it. And can you talk about how he he put together this group you call a cult and what was its what were central ideas?
You know, the thing was a cult is as far as I know, it always starts with one person, with one leader and one follower. And that started really almost the same time that he began working on his first book, and that was in nineteen sixty and it stayed, you know, very small at first, but I think the key things that Carlos. Carlos lived in fantasy and he needed other people to join that fantasy with him. And that's one
way of looking at what cults really are. And there's also, of course the ego reinforcement and the and the narcissism. Because there's something that happens at the very beginning of the teachings of Don Juan. It's kind of extraordinary that no one noticed, which is that Don Juan, who is the Brujo, as you said, and you know, most people called him Mishanan, even though Carlos actually didn't use that
word for him. The Brujo. The sorcerer says to Carlos, it's been revealed me that you are the chosen one, now, you know. I normally kind of a lot of alarm bells should sort of go off off when somebody is saying, you know that they are the chosen one. But Carlos was such an artful writer that he kind of weaves this in as he weaves in all so and this, uh, I think this is the first time I've spoken on the air about this, that he's he's a disciple of
the devil, he's a diablero. That Don Juan is a dia blero, which is, you know, it's the kind of brujo who gains his powers from devil worship. But that's it's so subtly done in the first books that you know, you could easily overlook it because there's all of this other magical, amazing stuff going on in the later books, which were you know, they sold well, they were all best almost all of them are best sellers in the York Times.
Millions of copies, millions and millions of copies.
Oh yeah, easily. I mean, there's no way to know exactly, but you know, well, I mean a long long time ago, they passed ten million copies. The later books are just to put a blowing they're really crazy, you know, because he's at first he wanted to have academic credibilities. He you know, was very careful, and it's all longer that he stayed within his own kind of fantasy world and developed this cult around him that reinforced him, you know, the deeper off into it.
He went, would you consider that going into the occult?
Going into the occult?
Did you say, yes, a cult? Like he hear the question, No, it's okay, I'm just saying like you say that in the beginning he was a diabe the area or a double worshiper, but as he got later on, did you feel like that double worship was more emphasized in the later books.
Yeah, I think that what happens is this. I think that at the beginning, it's one of many ideas that he's playing around with. You know, He's Carlos was very hostile, you know, with some good reason toward Christianity, especially toward toward the Catholic Church, and that goes into issues in his childhood in Peru, and also the probability that he was a crypto Jew, that he was descended from the secret Jews of of Peru. But as what happens in the seventh you know, at first he's riding high, He's
on the cover of Time magazine. Everybody wants to meet him. Yeah, he he couldn't be bigger. And it happened very suddenly.
But then in the.
Late seventies, once some of his uh, you know, his vast plagiarism began to be revealed, people at U c l A whose respect he actually always really wanted very deeply, began to avoid him and shun him and you know, he read his reviews. He knew what was what was going on in the culture at large, and I think this took him into a dark, dark place where some of the ideas about devil worship and Don Juan being diablero, which may have been kind of more playful or not
necessarily totally committed to. By the end of the seventies, he was. He was. He was very sery about it.
Wow, fascinating. I didn't know that. And so how did he what happened after he kind of got exposed in the late seventies, How did Carlos Castanada his life progress from there?
Well, you know, the thing is people, because nobody knew anything about him, it was possible to project and imagine all kinds of, you know, mysterious things going on. For the most part, he was living in Westwood, you know, about a fifteen minute walk from the UCLA campus, in this house with uh. The first they were called he called these women who were his followers. First they were
called the winds. Later he called them the witches. And he he, I think, had a kind of fantasy of establishing this sort of alternate academy, you know, and he slowly began to you know, gather more followers. He was always very busy having a career as a compulsive seducer. That's you know, it would require an endless book to chronicle all of that. He was definitely a some kind of sexual compulsive, so he's busy with that. And he'd loved to just play mind games on people. That took
up a lot of time. And he was writing. He was a prolific writer, you know. And I think in away what led to him taking the cult public and having these workshops and making making a much more theatrical project was simply the need for excitement and the need to you know, keep his followers excited. There's always a thing with him of like, oh, something amazing is right around the corner. It's something incredible, it's going to be revealed.
And that's in the books, and it was true in real life too, because somebody knew would be brought into the group and it would be you. You, You are the magical one. You have the special energy, and you are going to take us to what you call it, you know. The second attention was was often what he called it, which just meant another world. But he never he never defines just what it is this amazing thing that they're going to reach.
And what were the doctrines of tense segrety.
God. That is really hard to say. Well, yeah, I mean I can say it. It's very abstruse. One important thing about Carlos was that his mentor was a fellow named Harold Garfinkel, who is a professor of sociology at UCLA, who was a you know, some people say it's one of the top ten sociologists of the twentieth century. And this gets into some pretty abstruse stuff, but the gist
of it is that we assemble our own realities. One of the central tenets of Don Juang, of the Shaman of Costaneda, and of his mentor Garfinkel is that reality is an agreed upon description. In other words, you can look at a house from a certain angle describe it one way. I'll look at it from another way and describe it a different way. Both of those things are valid. But when we can agree upon how to describe it, that's what most people consider reality, which is true enough.
You know, for the nation state, there's no United States. If people don't agree that there is, there's no money. People don't agree that money is real. Carlos though, took that to be also about the physical world, that there are no rocks or trees or buildings without that. And this does get around to tense secrity because the idea, and it's totally wacky, basically, is that through doing these movements you will assembol your perceptions of reality differently and
thus enter another world. If you listen to the to the recordings, watch the videos of tense Segrity, or read anything about it, you know it's just endlessly complicated. And that's you know, another thing that cult leaders, some cult leaders like to do is just get some some people past absolutely be completed, and that will exhaust it. You know, it's all crap because they were claiming this was stuff that we just handed down from.
Right that came out of this Seamanic background. He lost them. I guess we lost them right there. Let's see Carlos Castaneda. One of the interesting things if you guys are listening, if you want to go to the podcast Trickster the Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda, you can see that he was influenced by al Thos Huxley and the Doors of perceptions, so he integrated some of that stuff into tenseegrity. And yeah,
he was an interesting guy. Came from Peru and uh, these books are all over the place, very influential in the sixties. I think it was George Lucas who said that the dynamic between Obi Wan and Luke Skywalker was the dynamic between Carlos Castaneda and Don Juan, the so called Brewo. But that part of actual Mexico. My understanding is that I had all kinds of weird cults and all kinds of strange occultism and things like that, going way back and back to the Spanish conquest. It's my
understanding of all that stuff. But we'll see if mister Marshall is going to make it back aer here or not. Sure. But the Trickster, the Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda. You can get that on iTunes, you can get it on how You're back still there? Yeah, it's okay. I kept talking. I kept talking. I kept talking. Yeah, I kept talking the whole time. So you kind of bought blacked out it. Yeah it's okay, you backed out right there, kind of a tense segrety. So leading up, so this is a
serial womanizer as well, and it leads up. So he has these girls the Way choose and he passes away in nineteen ninety eight.
What happens next, Well, they start, you know, tense Secretary really starts taking off in you know, in nineteen ninety and it's just one of the things that you know, it's they start with.
A few workshops, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. You know, more and more people are drawn in. You know, they're making Carlos was never motivated by profit, but he was supporting so many women that you know, they needed needed money for it. So by you know, by nineteen ninety five, it's a very big thing. And increasingly in these workshops, Carlos talks about taking the leap. We're all
going to take the leap together. Now, if you've read the books, you'll remember at the end of book four, Carlos himself takes the leap, which is literally they're the character Carlos does, and that means that he jumps off a cliff and instead of it's to show his complete faith and the teachings of Don Juan, and because he has gone through this great source serh apprenticeship instead of dying. He he does not. He actually wakes up in in uh in Westwood, And so you didn't really really need
too much to know that. You know, what he was talking about was that they would would do something similar and that they would do it together. Also, he starts becoming ill. Carlos, like many people of this ILK, you know, taught that illness was just a failure of the will. You know, it was you know, kind of in line with the whole kind of set teaching going back to Christian science. You know, he's not a big believer in in real science at all. So it was impossible for
them to admit he might be very seriously ill. And it turned out that that he had liver cancer. But this had to be kept from from the followers, and I don't think, I think, very very late in the game were they able to even admit it to themselves at all, because it went straight against their most central kinds of beliefs, with which had to do with which was first all, the customer was not going to die. He was going to turn into a ball of light
and send into the heavens. That was that was one of the teachings at that at that point but yeah, he wanted people to to go with him. And that's you know, basically, cult leaders do not like to be alone.
And it sounds like Marshall Apple Marshall Apple White of what's.
It's well, Apple White was exactly in nineteen ninety seven was really a year before, you know, and they're these chilling records of you know, car They're they're joking about and think, oh, you know, not we're not that called, you know, but Carlos was fully aware of of that. You know. It's I think the same thing happened on a vastly larger scale with Jim Jones or with Forrest. Yes, yes, you know, they know.
The Solar Temple. I don't know if you've ever heard of the Solar Temple go down alone? Right?
Oh yeah, oh yeah, And I think it's true, if I may say so, of Trump too. It's like he was willing to bring down everything rather than you know, go out and go out in humiliation, you know, if he could, if he could get away with that, and uh but you know, finally he died. Then there were five women and two of them were his witches. There was one of the witches, you know, at the last minute,
decided not to go, and she Carol Tiggs. She went on to become the kind of ethereal mother of the of the cult, which still continues used to this day and still teaches tensegrity around the world and in southern California. And then three other women, including Nuri, who was you know I mentioned earlier, who was his adopted daughter, and also one of his you know, countless women that he was I won't say how his lover, that's a little too generous, you know, women that he had sex with.
They disappeared. Her car was found in Death Valley pretty pretty soon after, but her the skeletal remains were not found until two thousand and three, and a positive identification wasn't made until two thousand and six, which was just about when I started to work on this article about whatever happened to Carlos Costaneda, and I somehow chanced upon this, and I was like, holy shit, this is a really intense story. And nobody one one newspaper in Nevada covered it,
nobody else did. It just went completely unremarked on.
Wow, fascinating. So these women disappeared and have they what has anybody researched it or found out whatever happened to him.
Lots of people, lots of people have researched it. You know. The most important things I think to know is that after many attempts to find anything, there's no trace of any kind of financial activity on their part. And these were women, for the most part, who had been with them, you know, some one of them from the early sixties on. They did not have any other skills other than to be, you know, a magical being, which was you know, part of the appeal. You've got to be, you know, a witch.
You know, you meant to be this very exciting being the world. But that was their job, you know, and your your middle age, late middle age, You're suddenly supposed to go out and make your way in the world with that. That's a challenge. The other thing is that they did not, in particular get along with each other. You know. It was always a thing of kind of who's who does Carlos, you know, love the most, or
who's who's in the golden light at the moment. So, you know, I cannot say with certainty that they committed suicide, nor can I say with certainty that they went to death valley. But the The other overwhelming thing is that if you listen to or read the transcripts of of these workshops and in ours, it's basically endless talk. If you can know how to decode it about suicide, you know, they don't call it suicide, they call it taking the leap.
But there's there, there's there's just pretty endless evidence that that was the plan, you know, So I don't think it's too out there too to conclude that. And they could. You know, it would have been very difficult in a way for them not to have done it, because it would have been impossible within the inner circle to say this is a really bad idea, because you would have been thrown out, and that was they had been trained for years, you know, not to do that. And in
a cult, you're you are, you're trick. People don't join cults because there's a sign that says, hey, it's a called I want to join. They join because they go to a meeting of something. They're in the wrong place at the wrong time, they are targeted, and the leader or the leader's minions they practice love bombing. They will tell this person how amazingly special and wonderful they are, and you know, we all like to hear that. And
he did the same thing with his UCLA professors. You know, he told them their theories were being validated by a mystical Indian. They loved it. And then you get people addicted to this kind of love bombing, and then you tell them to really be with us. You have to leave your parents, you have to leave your boyfriend, and then you've got them.
And do you know how many people he accumulated into his foot? Yeah, it's said, it is said. Do you know how many people you accumulated?
It's really hard to say, well, because there are many different kind of layers to the onion. You know, at one point I did a whole kind of map of the of the cult, and you know, people came in and out to a certain degree. But let's say there are by the end, they are about one hundred I'm
sayings on the radio. I'm not sure I actually should, but there are you know, if not, the very core group is small, it's about fifteen people, and then there's you know, about one hundred people circling outside of that, and then you know, then there are you know, a few thousand people who come to the seminars and you know to some degree, are you know, following the path.
And there are a lot of people who never even you know, meat Cuss Nata or the witches, who are following the path on their own because he says to you know, cut off these attachments in his books. And people think that by doing this, they're going to you know, find on Juan and all of the terrible problems they have will be solved.
And he left a substantial estate, correct.
Not really, No, that's uh, that is a that is an urban rumor. You know, people thought he had a ton of money, but now supporting you know, he was supporting like if I don't know, quite a few women. At the time of his death, it had been for years. The books were not selling the way that they that they used to. He had some he owed a ton of money to the I R S. He had in a state of about four hundred thousand dollars when he died, which I think was probably a massive disappointment to those
to those close to him. People people thought he had millions and millions of dollars, but he did not.
Well, where can people find what's the best place for people to find and listen to the podcast and when can they expect to see your book?
Yeah, go to www. Www Trickster podcast dot com. That's Trickster podcast dot com. And for the book. Well, I'm I'm in the middle of uh, you know, changing my name, you know, like Carlos and so forth. But you can go to my my traditional website, which is www. Dot Robert Marshall dot net. There will be a new one soon, but it will direct you there. Or just write to you know, University of California and say, hey, when's it
coming out? It should be it should be next September, but Robert might happen on time.
True Robertmarshall dot net. And do you have social media if somebody wants to read out, reach out to you or email?
Yeah, I'm on Facebook, I'm on I'm on Facebook, I'm on Instagram, and I'm on Twitter, but nobody follows me. So maybe this will be the beginning of something. And I'm so not on Twitter. I'm not even sure what my handle is. I I think it's Diane Finis and YC.
Gotcha. And you have on your website you have a contact information.
Maybe the right thing.
Sure, whatever you want, you can send it. I'll put it in the show notes, I'll put it in the show Cool. And it's Robert Marshall and the podcast is Trickster. How many lives, Yeah, Trickster, the many lives of Carlos Castadia. Thank you so much, Robert, Trickster podcast, Trickster podcast.
It's great, Thank you all. Thank you very fun.
Yeah, cool, thanks so much, appreciate it. Okay, are you too,