This book is a classic, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out why.

I mean, it’s not that it’s a bad book. But neither is it especially gripping, despite the claims to the contrary included inside the covers in the 1975 4th edition printing I recently picked up as part of a trilogy at a local used book shop. I haven’t researched it in any great depth, but apparently over the years there has been a good deal of controversy over whether or not Carlos Castaneda, the author of this book, simply invented the character of Don Juan, or at least extrapolated from real people and experiences to create this quasi-anthropological account of Yaqui Indian sorcery.

Leaving the veracity of it aside, the first half of the book reads as a rather dry, seeming factual account of Castaneda meeting and convincing an old native man, Don Juan, to teach him about peyote - the psychedelic cactus. Over time, Don Juan takes Castaneda on as an apprentice and introduces him to the pathways of the “man of knowledge” and of the sorcerer. And perhaps more importantly, he introduces him to the psychedelic “allies” of datura, and the “little smoke” - a mixture derived from psychedelic mushrooms.

Accounts of Castaneda’s psychedelic voyages occupy a relatively small part of the text, though they seem to be of central importance. The characters of Don Juan and Castaneda are really not sketched out at all, which maybe is a factor in why certain people have alleged none of this stuff ever actually happened. For some reason though, that controversy doesn’t interest me overly much, nor do Castaneda’s trip reports. Anyone who is familiar with drug literature (or the direct use of psychedelics) won’t find much insight into those experiences contained within this text. Or at least, that’s my opinion anyway.

One of the things I did really enjoy, though it was not given much coverage in the text was that Don Juan required Castaneda to grow, care for, collect and prepare all of the psychedelic substances himself before he could actually use them. As I’ve written elsewhere, I am beginning to think that this firsthand intimately physical experience of plants may be just as important - if not moreso - than the actual psychedelic experiences these plants offer.

The second half of this book is a quasi-anthropological breakdown of the teachings of Don Juan into a classification system invented by Castaneda. I mostly just skimmed through this section as it didn’t really shed any new light for me on what had been expressed within the first portion of the book. And if anything, it lacked the sense of life that the first part contained. It may have been written by Castaneda more in the hopes of lending his book an air of scholarly legitimacy; it’s hard for me to say either way.

While I didn’t especially love this book and while I read it I didn’t feel much impact from it, I have to say that I have found myself coming back to some of the ideas expressed in it later on. I will be thinking through a certain problem or reading something else, and all of a sudden, I will see how one of Don Juan’s teachings connects very elegantly to the subject at hand. So it has had more of a “slow-roasting” effect on me than I was anticipating.

That said, I’m not especially eager to read any of the other two books in the trilogy that I picked up, although I have heard they are substantially different (another point people use to challenge their authenticity). In the end, I’d say this book is one of those things to read only if you are interested in the so-called “classics” of psychedelia.