A review by atticmoth
The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda

1.0

There’s a certain type of guy whose interest in the study of ethnobotany stops at getting as fucked up as possible. I find this kind of boring and arrogant. Carlos Castaneda originally set out to write about the medicinal plants of Mexico, but settled on the study of three (one fungi, this book kept confusing the two): peyote, Datura, and psilocybin mushrooms under the apprenticeship of the titular Don Juan, a Yaqui elder. To be honest, most of the book just seemed like Carlos got pranked by a mentally ill old man. The sensationalist descriptions of his hallucinatory visions does more than any anti-drug campaign to make it seem exceedingly unpleasant, but on top of this, I found myself questioning what he (and by extension, the reader) even got out of it. Don Juan teaches a very masculinist philosophy, and only seems to offer gnomic esotericisms about power and being a “man of knowledge.” Not only that, his worldview is downright misogynist. Datura is said to be a female plant because “(1) it was possessive; (2) it was violent; (3) it was unpredictable; and (4) it had deleterious effects,” while Psylocibe is considered male because “(1) it was dispassionate; (2) it was gentle; (3) it was predictable; and (4) it had beneficial effects.” Talk about projection! 

There is talk of the events of this book being fabricated. I don’t really care, because it honestly makes the framework of an anthropology thesis really funny — but this doesn’t mean the second section (the “structural analysis”) fun to read at all. It was in fact one of the most obnoxious and conceited books I’ve ever read and I can only imagine the weirdest Silicon Valley tech bros getting something out of reading this.