Don Juan Matus

Don Juan Matus is a major character in the series of books on Native shamanism by Carlos Castaneda. He is described as a Yaqui Indian to whom Castaneda was introduced somewhere around the U.S.-Mexico border beginning in the early 1960's. The actual existence of don Juan has long been disputed. In response to their review of Castaneda's third book Journey to Ixtlan, Joyce Carol Oates wrote a letter to the New York Times Book Review expressing her bewilderment at their review for what she saw as an obvious fiction.

In Castaneda

As a character in Castaneda's books, don Juan tells Carlos (the personage representing Castaneda) that he is a brujo (Spanish for sorcerer or witch), which is a sort of healer, sorcerer or shaman, who had inherited (through a lineage of teachers) an ancient Central American practice for refining one's awareness of the universe. In the books, Don Juan was an expert in the cultivation and use of various psychotropic plants (specifically, psychedelic mushrooms, datura, and peyote) found in the Mexican deserts, which were used as aids to reach states of non-ordinary reality in the philosophy he conveyed to Carlos.

In the books don Juan is unmarried, and presented as an old man of indigenous ancestry, with great strength and agility, who spoke excellent Spanish but had never been to college, and lived his entire life in poor conditions. Don Juan's philosophy might be summed up in a passage from Castaneda's first book, ''The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge:

For me there is only the traveling on the paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge for me is to traverse its full length. And there I travel—looking, looking, breathlessly.

Castaneda's books featuring don Juan Matus

The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968) ISBN 0-520-21757-8
A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan (1971) ISBN 0-671-73249-8
Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan (1972) ISBN 0-671-73246-3
Tales of Power (1974) ISBN 0-671-73252-8
The Second Ring of Power (1977) ISBN 0-671-73247-1
The Eagle's Gift (1981) ISBN 0-671-73251-X
The Fire from Within (1984) ISBN 0-671-73250-1
The Power of Silence: Further Lessons of Don Juan (1987) ISBN 0-671-73248-X
The Art of Dreaming (1993) ISBN 0-06-092554-X
The Active side of Infinity
The Wheel of Time

In subsequent works

In their writings, Taisha Abelar and Florinda Donner-Grau also included the character of don Juan Matus, although he went by different pseudonyms such as Mariano Aureliano. In all of these books don Juan Matus was a nagual who was leader of a group of practitioners of tradition of perceptual enhancement.

References

External links