The Sorcerer's Apprentice

By ROBERT HUGHES

JOURNEY TO IXTLAN by CARLOS CASTANEDA 315 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.95.

In 1961 a 26-year-old anthropologist named Carlos Castaneda was poking about on a field trip in the Southwest, researching his thesis on medicinal plants used by local Indians. In an Arizona border town, while waiting for a bus, he met an old Yaqui Indian from northwest Mexico, Don Juan Matus. Don Juan was an exceptionally powerful "man of knowledge": a brujo, or sorcerer. Over the next ten years, Castaneda became his apprentice, as Don Juan initiated him into increasingly mysterious and alarming states of "non-ordinary reality" through the systematic use of three hallucinogenic plants: peyote, Jimson weed and psilocybe mushrooms. Thus far the outcome sounds predictable: student meets guru, blows mind, drops out and fries his brain cells with the Flesh of the Gods beneath a cactus. Not so: the young anthropologist turns out to be a man of tenacious curiosity. His meeting with Don Juan now seems one of the most fortunate literary encounters since Boswell was introduced to Dr. Johnson.

Indefatigably, and to the vast amusement of his old mentor, Castaneda scribbled down nearly every transaction and experience he had with Don Juan. The notes have resulted in three books: The Teachings of Don Juan (1968), A Separate Reality (1971), and now Journey to Ixtlan. As anthropological documents, they are already classics; no explorer has worked more lucidly at the very edge than Castaneda, describing a system of power and magic terrifyingly alien to his own culture. It is a world in which men can change into crows. Power objects and spirit allies operate inconsistently. There are iridescent talking coyotes and monstrous guardians in the form of hundred-foot-high gnats, and over all one feels the benevolent peyote spirit, Mescalito.

Wrong Question. This is naturally not a field accessible to the normal shard-counting anthropologist. "The failures of anthropology," says Castaneda, "come from our unwillingness to look at other cultures in their own terms. So we ask the wrong questions. In our world Don Juan's acts and experiences don't happen. They are impossible. They conflict with the description of reality we've been fed since we were little babies. So Don Juan just seems a crazy old Indian. But in his world, his way of knowledge is superb and absolutely congruous. My task was to grasp the units of meaning proper to sorcery, and learn Don Juan's way of describing the world."

Essentially, The Teachings and A Separate Reality were about the strategy by which Don Juan, one of the wiliest and most subtle men ever to live in print, used hallucinogens to reveal his descriptions of reality to Castaneda and so turn him into a man of knowledge himself. As a result, the books were greeted as landmarks by the counterculture. Indeed they are--but they are not "drug literature."

The elusive Castaneda confounds one's expectations: he is no hairy freak, but a voluble Brazilian-Italian given to white shirts, gray suits and highly polished black shoes. He rarely touches coffee--let alone grass--and confesses that he would be "terrified" to take peyote except under Don Juan's guidance. The phrase "drug culture" is ceaselessly bandied about in America. It is a swollen cliche, and not very descriptive either. Culture, as Castaneda would say, is consensus. Instead we have abundant drug use, which is a different matter.

Things are otherwise south of the Rio Grande. Psychotropic plants have been used ritually in South America for more than 2,000 years. The visions they induce are socially shared and, it seems, consistent with one another. That is the crucial difference. A Huichol Indian, for instance, goes to the peyote ceremony knowing that his encounter with the sacred cactus will confirm his tribal consciousness, its myths and traditional units of experience.

But for Don Juan, as he speaks from Castaneda's account, the getting of knowledge is more lonely; the sorcerer who "sees"--in other words, who can transcend the conventional descriptions of the world shutting off his unconscious flow of interpretations--inhabits a frightening place, full of omens and nameless entities, some hostile, others benevolent. His posture, Don Juan insists, must be that of "a warrior"--agile, perfectly disciplined, capable of acting with "controlled abandon." In the Yaqui sorcerer's system, drugs help in approaching this state by breaking the crust of ordinary perception and revealing the baffling dimensions of experience the sorcerer must deal with.

Mind Wrenching. Yet neither the peyote spirit Mescalito nor psilocybe mushrooms can guarantee the sorcerer's survival. That depends on his "impeccable will"; and Castaneda's third and finest book, Journey to Ixtlan, describes the forging of that will, as Don Juan--without drugs --communicates the lessons of the warrior's power to his obstinately Cartesian student in the bright burnt mountains and lava gorges of Mexico.

Castaneda is a brilliant, self-mocking and--one assumes, despite the weirdness of the narrative--truthful storyteller. The account of his apprenticeship to Don Juan, with grueling desert marches and arduous disciplines, apparitions and struggles in fog and bright sunlight, as well as some mind-wrenching magic tricks, makes hypnotic reading. Don Juan and his friend, a fiercely mischievous old Mazatec Indian brujo named Don Genaro, are credited with making Castaneda's parked, locked car vanish and then materialize again from, of all things, a hat.

Above all, Journey to Ixtlan is an astonishing document of friendship and moral responsibility. The warrior is existential man at full stretch. "For me," says Don Juan, "the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous desert, at this marvelous time. I wanted to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while; in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it." There could be no more profound gift from an old to a younger man. qedRobert Hughes

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