1. In 1973, Castaneda received a PhD at UCLA for his Sorcery: A Description of the World as well as a good deal of subsequent criticism for never producing the field notes required for such a degree in anthropology. Michael Harner, who has been one of the few anthropologists never to disbelieve Castaneda’s accounts as purely ethnographic, was not surprisingly one of the members of Castaneda’s defense board. In fact, Castaneda’s work, which is virtually identical to his third book Journey to Ixtlan, was based on interviews with an old Yaqui Indian called Juan Matus (the very Don Juan from the books), which were “documented at great length in three volumes of field reports, the third of which was accepted as his dissertation at the University of California.” In Richard de Mille, The Don Juan Papers: Further Castaneda Controversies (New York: Ross Erikson, 1980), 2.
2. Nagual is the word chosen by Castaneda—that is, the one he learns from Don Juan—to refer to the leader of the group of sorcerers. He also uses the word as a conceptual reference to the indescribable, the second attention, the separate reality, or the spirit. The word nagual comes from the Aztec language, also known as Mexicano or Nahuatl, used in the documents collected or redacted in the sixteenth century by the Spanish conquistadors. Deriving from the Nahuatl term nau-alli, it means sorcerer, witch, or wizard, according to Rémi Siméon, Diccionario de la Lengua Nahuatl (México: Siglo Veintiuno, 1994), 304. It is still used today by many groups in Mexico and Central America, and its current meaning is mostly that of nagualismo—that is, the metamorphosis of the shaman into animal. See Chapter 1’s discussion of “nagualismo” based on Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Medicina y Magia (México: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1973), 104. For more on the Nahuatl language, see the following:
3. Angel María Garibay K., Llave del Nahuatl (México: Ed. Porrúa, 1994); and
4. Marcos Matías Alonso, Vocabulario Nahuatl-Español (México: Plaza y Valdes, 1996).
5. Two of Castaneda’s women companions have published their own books about their experiences. See Taisha Abelar, The Sorcerers’ Crossing (New York: Arkana, 1992); and