Twenty years in the making, American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda unravels the story of the secretive faux-anthropologist who pulled off one of the greatest literary hoaxes in modern history. Both an investigation of the techniques employed by charismatic narcissists and a study of the cult dynamics that still shape American life, American Trickster defies conventional biography. It emerges as a chilling allegory for the Trump era, a trenchant critique of academias complicity in distorting and erasing Indigenous culture, and a deep dive into the mechanics of New Age spiritual abuse.*In 1968, the University of California Press published Castanedas first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, which described his supposed encounters with a Yaqui shaman who initiated him into a secret world of peyote-fueled visions and ancient knowledge never before shared with a Westerner. Castaneda was quickly hailed as a revolutionary figure. 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 spiritualitydespite having little to no connection to actual Indigenous practices.With the endorsement of some of anthropologys leading figures, his work at first went unchallenged. Then, in 1973, Time magazine published a searing expos revealing that Castaneda wasnt who he claimed to be. As his academic credibility unraveled, he turned inward, building a secretive cultic group that blurred the line between fiction and reality. When Castaneda was diagnosed with liver cancer, he told his disciples he would not die, but burn from within and ascend to another realmand invited them to join him. After his death in 1998, five of his closest female followers vanished. They are widely believed to have taken their own lives. Photograph Allen Frame Ru Marshall is a nonbinary writer and visual artist. Their novel, A Separate Reality, was released by Carroll & Graf in 2006 and was nominated for a Lambda Award for debut fiction. Their writing has appeared in Salon, N + 1, The Evergreen Review, The Kenyon Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Waxwing, The Barcelona Review, Your Impossible Voice, Another Chicago Magazine, and many other publications. They have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received the 2016 Hazel Rowley Prize from BIO, the Biographers International Organization. Their visual work has been exhibited at Participant Inc., Studio 10 Gallery, Art in General, White Columns, Baxter Street, Cathouse Proper, and numerous other venues. They have received grants and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. They grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. They live in Brooklyn. In the summer of 1967, some hundred and fifty thousand young people poured into San Franciscothe Summer of Love. Some indeed wore flowers in their hair. The invasion alarmed the authorities. The hippies, as theyd been media dubbed, rejected all authority. Or tried to (authorities of a new sort kept popping up). Rejected consumerism, or tried to (they soon found themselves commodified). Experimented with drugs: marijuana, hashish, speed, mushrooms, and LSD. Many had extraordinary psychedelic experiences. The veil of conventional reality had been rent. But what lay behind it? They knew theyd been changed. But how? Some turned to the Hindu and Buddhist traditions in their search for understanding. Some saw God. Others, something darker.Carlos Castaneda, then an unknown dropout from UCLAs anthropology grad program, did not come to San Francisco. Never would he have worn a flower in his hair. He had nothing but contempt for the behavior on display in the Haight. Hed no use for Timothy Leary or Allen Ginsberg. Peace and Love: Carlos wasnt into either.It wasnt only disgust that kept him from heading up the coast. He was immersed in the anguishing business of finishing the book that would change his life and many others, which would be released a year later by the University of California Press. It was titled The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge and was accompanied by endorsements from some of anthropologys most eminent figures, including Edmund Carpenter and Walter Goldschmidt, then the chair of UCLAs anthropology department, who wrote the forward. The name of Castanedas most important backer, the radical sociologist Harold Garfinkel, didnt appearexcept in the acknowledgments. Superlative reviews soon began to pour in.Its the fate of those authors who are remembered at all to exist in popular memory as a word or at best as a few. Melville: whales. Proust: memory. For Castaneda, the word is, undoubtedly, drugs. Although they appear in only two of his ten books, although he spent most of his career trying to escape the association, this link would never be broken. And certainly, for many, his books were little more than a prop in the theater of the psychedelic experience. But for others they were much more. In The Teachings, Castaneda writes of his purported apprenticeship with an elderly Yaqui Indian, don Juan, who initiates him into a strange, powerful sorceric world. The plot is simple: Will Carlos (the character) be able to let go of his Western worldview and its limiting rationalism, in order to become, in don Juans wordsor Castanedasa warrior, a man of knowledge? The books great reversal: The academic who has come to study the Indian shaman becomes instead the one whos scrutinized. Of just what use are all his objective tools of measurement on this journey across a border (which is, from the opening pages, a dense metaphor) when hes confronted by the powerful separate reality of don Juan?Who uses three psychotropic plants to instruct the fictional Carlos. Or, in the terms of don Juans world (which the reader must decide if shell accept, thus putting her in the same position as the character Carlos), the plantsdatura, also known as jimsonweed or the devils-weed, mushrooms, and peyoteare the teachers. And theyre compelling teachers. In contrast to the education Castaneda was receiving at UCLA, they taught through direct experience. Their lessons were terrifying. Under the tutelage of datura, Carlos turns into a crow, and sees as a crow sees while he flies as a crow flies. Later, demonstrating the extent to which hes still imprisoned by an academic mindset, he questions whether the experience was real. Don Juan then shreds this objective worldview into miniscule bits. But the question remains: Will Carlos ever be able to let go of the Western perspective to which hes so attached? Will he ever be able to see?This question echoed those confronted by millions whose minds psychedelics had blown open, as well as those often faced (but much less often discussed) by anthropologists in the field. To understand a phenomenon, was it sufficient to study the phenomenon from the outside (as the positivists, who then dominated the social sciences, believed)? Or did one need, in Castanedas words, to make the leap, to cross over and become the phenomenon? The Teachings demonstrated just how terrifying this choice could be. In the words of the UC Press, it demanded of its audience a revolution in cognition. Castaneda, as one anthropologist would put it, provided in concrete form things we had abstractly conceptualized but didnt know how to articulate or use. He turned ideas into dramasinto things.