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American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda
Twenty years in the making, American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda unravels the story of the secretive faux-anthropologist who pulled off one of the greatest literary hoaxes in modern history. Both an investigation of the techniques employed by charismatic narcissists and a study of the cult dynamics that still shape American life, American Trickster defies conventional biography. It emerges as a chilling allegory for the Trump era, a trenchant critique of academia’s complicity in distorting and erasing Indigenous culture, and a deep dive into the mechanics of New Age spiritual abuse.
*
In 1968, the University of California Press published Castaneda’s first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, which described his supposed encounters with a Yaqui shaman who initiated him into a secret world of peyote-fueled visions and ancient knowledge never before shared with a “Westerner.” Castaneda was quickly hailed as a revolutionary figure. Admirers ranged from John Lennon and Joni Mitchell to Federico Fellini, George Lucas, and Octavio Paz. His books became international bestsellers and remain the most popular titles ever published on Native American spirituality—despite having little to no connection to actual Indigenous practices.
With the endorsement of some of anthropology’s leading figures, his work at first went unchallenged. Then, in 1973, Time magazine published a searing exposé revealing that Castaneda wasn’t who he claimed to be. As his academic credibility unraveled, he turned inward, building a secretive cultic group that blurred the line between fiction and reality. When Castaneda was diagnosed with liver cancer, he told his disciples he would not die, but burn from within and ascend to another realm—and invited them to join him. After his death in 1998, five of his closest female followers vanished. They are widely believed to have taken their own lives.
*
In 1968, the University of California Press published Castaneda’s first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, which described his supposed encounters with a Yaqui shaman who initiated him into a secret world of peyote-fueled visions and ancient knowledge never before shared with a “Westerner.” Castaneda was quickly hailed as a revolutionary figure. Admirers ranged from John Lennon and Joni Mitchell to Federico Fellini, George Lucas, and Octavio Paz. His books became international bestsellers and remain the most popular titles ever published on Native American spirituality—despite having little to no connection to actual Indigenous practices.
With the endorsement of some of anthropology’s leading figures, his work at first went unchallenged. Then, in 1973, Time magazine published a searing exposé revealing that Castaneda wasn’t who he claimed to be. As his academic credibility unraveled, he turned inward, building a secretive cultic group that blurred the line between fiction and reality. When Castaneda was diagnosed with liver cancer, he told his disciples he would not die, but burn from within and ascend to another realm—and invited them to join him. After his death in 1998, five of his closest female followers vanished. They are widely believed to have taken their own lives.
682 pages, Paperback
Published June 23, 2026
About the author
Ru Marshall
2 books31 followersRu Marshall is a nonbinary writer and visual artist. Their novel, A Separate Reality, was released by Carroll & Graf in 2006 and was nominated for a Lambda Award for debut fiction. Their writing has appeared in Salon, N + 1 online, The Evergreen Review, The Kenyon Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Waxwing, The Barcelona Review, Your Impossible Voice, Another Chicago Magazine, and many other publications. They have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received the 2016 Hazel Rowley Prize from BIO, the Biographers International Organization. Their visual work has been exhibited at Participant Inc., Art in General, White Columns, and numerous other venues. They have received grants and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. They grew up in Phoenix Arizona. They live in Brooklyn. www.rmarshallstudio.com
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
July 2, 2026
★★★★★ Eighteen years of waiting, and worth every one
Full disclosure before anything else: I'm not a neutral party. I was a student of Carlos Castaneda's from 1995 until his death in 1998, I've spent more than twenty-five years documenting his group, and Ru Marshall interviewed me and drew on my session notes and archival research for this book. So read what follows knowing I have skin in this story. That said—this is the biography I once hoped to write and eventually concluded I couldn't, and Marshall was the right person to write it.
American Trickster is the most complete portrait yet assembled of Castaneda, the man and the myth. It operates on several levels at once—biography, intellectual history, cult analysis, psychological excavation—and it succeeds on all of them. What lifts it far above the earlier debunking books is that debunking was never the point. Plenty of writers have shown that the don Juan fieldwork was fabricated. Marshall's ambition is understanding: how did one Peruvian immigrant's lies become a UCLA doctorate, a bestselling series, a system of physical practices, and finally a closed cult tied to multiple probable deaths?
The Peruvian chapters supply, for the first time in any account I've seen, genuine context—the family secrets, the illegitimacy and shame, the watchmaker father Castaneda set out both to surpass and to discredit. The section on his UCLA mentor Harold Garfinkel and his "breaching experiments" is the most analytically brilliant thing I've encountered on this subject. Marshall shows exactly how Castaneda took an academic method for exposing the fragility of social reality and turned it into a tool for permanently severing his followers from their former lives—with, crucially, no debriefing at the end. As someone who lived through those assignments, I felt the recognition land like a blow.
The chapters on how the inner circle formed, and on the women who ultimately vanished, are harrowing and unforgettable. I knew several of these people. Reading the recovered testimony about them—what they said, what they were told, what became of them—was painful in the way only the truth can be. Marshall has the restraint to state the most devastating facts plainly and let them stand.
The closing psychological synthesis, reading Castaneda through the framework of traumatizing narcissism, is more persuasive to me than any simpler "he was a sociopath" verdict—and it doesn't flinch from the discomfort of admitting that the books still work on a reader even after you know everything. That honesty is part of why I trust the whole enterprise.
The research is staggering: new Peruvian sources, the Garfinkel archives, interviews no one else obtained. The prose moves between analytical rigor and real poetry. I have exactly one small disagreement—about where the missing women's remains are most likely hidden—which I've laid out at length elsewhere, and which changes nothing about my admiration for the book.
If you want to understand the Castaneda phenomenon, or cults and how they recruit, reshape, and damage people, read this. It's engrossing, humane, and formidably intelligent. Eighteen years in the making, and a genuine landmark.
Full disclosure before anything else: I'm not a neutral party. I was a student of Carlos Castaneda's from 1995 until his death in 1998, I've spent more than twenty-five years documenting his group, and Ru Marshall interviewed me and drew on my session notes and archival research for this book. So read what follows knowing I have skin in this story. That said—this is the biography I once hoped to write and eventually concluded I couldn't, and Marshall was the right person to write it.
American Trickster is the most complete portrait yet assembled of Castaneda, the man and the myth. It operates on several levels at once—biography, intellectual history, cult analysis, psychological excavation—and it succeeds on all of them. What lifts it far above the earlier debunking books is that debunking was never the point. Plenty of writers have shown that the don Juan fieldwork was fabricated. Marshall's ambition is understanding: how did one Peruvian immigrant's lies become a UCLA doctorate, a bestselling series, a system of physical practices, and finally a closed cult tied to multiple probable deaths?
The Peruvian chapters supply, for the first time in any account I've seen, genuine context—the family secrets, the illegitimacy and shame, the watchmaker father Castaneda set out both to surpass and to discredit. The section on his UCLA mentor Harold Garfinkel and his "breaching experiments" is the most analytically brilliant thing I've encountered on this subject. Marshall shows exactly how Castaneda took an academic method for exposing the fragility of social reality and turned it into a tool for permanently severing his followers from their former lives—with, crucially, no debriefing at the end. As someone who lived through those assignments, I felt the recognition land like a blow.
The chapters on how the inner circle formed, and on the women who ultimately vanished, are harrowing and unforgettable. I knew several of these people. Reading the recovered testimony about them—what they said, what they were told, what became of them—was painful in the way only the truth can be. Marshall has the restraint to state the most devastating facts plainly and let them stand.
The closing psychological synthesis, reading Castaneda through the framework of traumatizing narcissism, is more persuasive to me than any simpler "he was a sociopath" verdict—and it doesn't flinch from the discomfort of admitting that the books still work on a reader even after you know everything. That honesty is part of why I trust the whole enterprise.
The research is staggering: new Peruvian sources, the Garfinkel archives, interviews no one else obtained. The prose moves between analytical rigor and real poetry. I have exactly one small disagreement—about where the missing women's remains are most likely hidden—which I've laid out at length elsewhere, and which changes nothing about my admiration for the book.
If you want to understand the Castaneda phenomenon, or cults and how they recruit, reshape, and damage people, read this. It's engrossing, humane, and formidably intelligent. Eighteen years in the making, and a genuine landmark.
Read
July 3, 2026I devoured this 638 page act of will--
The power of research, and willingness to confront the insanity of this story is beyond impressive- it is a Superpower.
Like a Patricia Highsmith novel, Ru tells us immediately who did it. There is no mystery- Carlos "Casteneda" - author of the Don Juan books -was a fraudster's fraud- a liar beyond most human's ability and yet one of the most persuasive manipulators in the 1960's-90's sea of American cults filled with liars and manipulators- for he succeeded in lying to the UCLA Anthropology program, US and global publishing, millions of readers, and in the end a bevy of young crazy woman who always seem to surround these kinds of people.
The book's far larger gift is a social history of the era with all kinds of people popping up in strange and enticing ways. Fellini is here. Susie Brights father, a linguist at UCLA. The family that wrote The Book of Lists. The same Agnes we recently met in Chase Joynt and Morgan M Page's film "Framing Agnes." Barbara Meyerhoff- who was on the scene in the feminist movement in the 1980's. And more, more, more.
Ru shows how American penchant for extra-realist explanations is as old as the nation itself. They take us to Madame Blavatsky, various Yogis and their disciples like Christopher Isherwood, to Timothy Leary and Baba Ram Dass, to Jim Jones and Charles Manson. All throughout there are always those young dew-eyed women and some men and their children who make them the center of their lives.
It also speaks to contemporary Christian evangelical insanity and the crazy love so many Americans have for Trump etc. But the Carlos Castaneda case has a fascinating racial component as the male academic white establishment had their own reasons for legitimizing him.
Anyway- the crazier the story gets, the more intense the story-telling becomes, and the final third of the book is an exhaustive effort to make something so confusing: other people's psychosis-legible.
This is an amazing achievement- and while the book will not get the attention it deserves because it is coming from Or Books- an excellent but small press- it is hard to imagine that it can be ignored by future scholars trying to document and understand the inexplicable.
The power of research, and willingness to confront the insanity of this story is beyond impressive- it is a Superpower.
Like a Patricia Highsmith novel, Ru tells us immediately who did it. There is no mystery- Carlos "Casteneda" - author of the Don Juan books -was a fraudster's fraud- a liar beyond most human's ability and yet one of the most persuasive manipulators in the 1960's-90's sea of American cults filled with liars and manipulators- for he succeeded in lying to the UCLA Anthropology program, US and global publishing, millions of readers, and in the end a bevy of young crazy woman who always seem to surround these kinds of people.
The book's far larger gift is a social history of the era with all kinds of people popping up in strange and enticing ways. Fellini is here. Susie Brights father, a linguist at UCLA. The family that wrote The Book of Lists. The same Agnes we recently met in Chase Joynt and Morgan M Page's film "Framing Agnes." Barbara Meyerhoff- who was on the scene in the feminist movement in the 1980's. And more, more, more.
Ru shows how American penchant for extra-realist explanations is as old as the nation itself. They take us to Madame Blavatsky, various Yogis and their disciples like Christopher Isherwood, to Timothy Leary and Baba Ram Dass, to Jim Jones and Charles Manson. All throughout there are always those young dew-eyed women and some men and their children who make them the center of their lives.
It also speaks to contemporary Christian evangelical insanity and the crazy love so many Americans have for Trump etc. But the Carlos Castaneda case has a fascinating racial component as the male academic white establishment had their own reasons for legitimizing him.
Anyway- the crazier the story gets, the more intense the story-telling becomes, and the final third of the book is an exhaustive effort to make something so confusing: other people's psychosis-legible.
This is an amazing achievement- and while the book will not get the attention it deserves because it is coming from Or Books- an excellent but small press- it is hard to imagine that it can be ignored by future scholars trying to document and understand the inexplicable.
July 11, 2026
Gee, I wish Patrick Radden Keefe had written this biography. He seems to know how to generate organizing principles that make his non-fiction focused and engaging.
This was a hot mess of well-researched DETAILS that are presented in a swirl of exposition that just made this book tedious to read.
I was at UCLA in 70,71 when Castaneda was strutting around campus. I read The Teachings and subsequent books. I loved the books and was willing to entertain the unknown worlds of magic, drugs, and sorcery. I read them as non-fiction and was fascinated.
To find out that Castaneda was a fraud, a liar, and a con man seems like an interesting story to tell.
Unfortunately, although Marshall's research seems extensive, their writing is undisciplined and chaotic. This book needed editing and focus.
It failed to keep me engaged.
Disappointing.
This was a hot mess of well-researched DETAILS that are presented in a swirl of exposition that just made this book tedious to read.
I was at UCLA in 70,71 when Castaneda was strutting around campus. I read The Teachings and subsequent books. I loved the books and was willing to entertain the unknown worlds of magic, drugs, and sorcery. I read them as non-fiction and was fascinated.
To find out that Castaneda was a fraud, a liar, and a con man seems like an interesting story to tell.
Unfortunately, although Marshall's research seems extensive, their writing is undisciplined and chaotic. This book needed editing and focus.
It failed to keep me engaged.
Disappointing.
July 2, 2026
From the very beginning, I kept sensing that the author had an axe to grind. This book reads like a jilted lover, still in love, but at the angry and vindictive stage. What is the author so butt-hurt over? I hoped I would find out as I read.
I quickly became tired of the words “liar," “hoax,” “cult,” and “manipulative.” The writing teacher Brenda Ueland taught that if you want your reader to either love or hate your character, you present the facts and descriptions, and let the reader come to their own conclusion. I wasn’t allowed any space to form my opinion. The book is a constant barrage of anything negative related to the books, teachings, and life of Carlos Castaneda.
The almost cliché litany of accusations ran the usual gambit:
-Carlos was a product of incest (Was that his fault?)
-Carlos was secretly gay (Is that a bad thing?)
-Carlos’ follower has a Nazi connection because her parents were German (What’s a good smear without Nazis?!)
-Carlos had his follower Amy Wallace murdered (From the grave?)
-Carlos had low self-esteem (Strange for such a powerful sorcerer?)
That’s just a predictable taste. I literally laughed out loud at these and others.
Of course, if you don’t agree with the author, and you are someone who came to your own conclusion about Don Juan, Carlos, the books, and the teachings, you get labeled a “Juanist,” the first time I ever heard that.
Using quotes and opinions from a cult enforcer and Castaneda-hater, Richard DeMille, who just so happened to have kidnapped a woman for his cult leader L Ron Hubbard, and “a report from an important if highly unreliable source,” the author relinquishes dignity and integrity, citing anyone who has something negative to say about Castaneda.
Even his “friend,” Amy Wallace, didn’t have her whole story presented and the author can now put his name on the list of yet another man who used her. Read her book, Sorcerer's Apprentice,
for a more balanced and insightful story of her and Castaneda.
Near the end I got my questions answered. Not about Carlos, I came to my own conclusion and did my own research years ago. (The vast majority of the information has been out there for decades.) I’m talking about the author, a person who titled one of his books A Separate Reality. Hmm, trying to ride Carlo Castaneda’s coattails using the same name for your own book? No, that would be way too obvious.
The author admits “The story of my manuscripts path to publication may, someday, make an interesting footnote to the Castaneda story. It’s not time to tell it in full.”
Yet on page 477 he writes: “Mystery: a plot device in the [Castaneda] books. Something is always being held back, not yet revealed. Secrets, in real-world fictions of cults: tools for keeping followers hooked.”
Plain and simple to me, but I’ll let you come to your own conclusion, unlike Mr. Marshall.
If you are looking for some tidbits of Carlos Castaneda’s biography and personal history, this book has a few for you. If you are looking to read about heaps of crap piled on Carlos Castaneda, this book has it in spades!
I quickly became tired of the words “liar," “hoax,” “cult,” and “manipulative.” The writing teacher Brenda Ueland taught that if you want your reader to either love or hate your character, you present the facts and descriptions, and let the reader come to their own conclusion. I wasn’t allowed any space to form my opinion. The book is a constant barrage of anything negative related to the books, teachings, and life of Carlos Castaneda.
The almost cliché litany of accusations ran the usual gambit:
-Carlos was a product of incest (Was that his fault?)
-Carlos was secretly gay (Is that a bad thing?)
-Carlos’ follower has a Nazi connection because her parents were German (What’s a good smear without Nazis?!)
-Carlos had his follower Amy Wallace murdered (From the grave?)
-Carlos had low self-esteem (Strange for such a powerful sorcerer?)
That’s just a predictable taste. I literally laughed out loud at these and others.
Of course, if you don’t agree with the author, and you are someone who came to your own conclusion about Don Juan, Carlos, the books, and the teachings, you get labeled a “Juanist,” the first time I ever heard that.
Using quotes and opinions from a cult enforcer and Castaneda-hater, Richard DeMille, who just so happened to have kidnapped a woman for his cult leader L Ron Hubbard, and “a report from an important if highly unreliable source,” the author relinquishes dignity and integrity, citing anyone who has something negative to say about Castaneda.
Even his “friend,” Amy Wallace, didn’t have her whole story presented and the author can now put his name on the list of yet another man who used her. Read her book, Sorcerer's Apprentice,
for a more balanced and insightful story of her and Castaneda.
Near the end I got my questions answered. Not about Carlos, I came to my own conclusion and did my own research years ago. (The vast majority of the information has been out there for decades.) I’m talking about the author, a person who titled one of his books A Separate Reality. Hmm, trying to ride Carlo Castaneda’s coattails using the same name for your own book? No, that would be way too obvious.
The author admits “The story of my manuscripts path to publication may, someday, make an interesting footnote to the Castaneda story. It’s not time to tell it in full.”
Yet on page 477 he writes: “Mystery: a plot device in the [Castaneda] books. Something is always being held back, not yet revealed. Secrets, in real-world fictions of cults: tools for keeping followers hooked.”
Plain and simple to me, but I’ll let you come to your own conclusion, unlike Mr. Marshall.
If you are looking for some tidbits of Carlos Castaneda’s biography and personal history, this book has a few for you. If you are looking to read about heaps of crap piled on Carlos Castaneda, this book has it in spades!
Review of advance copy
You know, I really wanted to like this book. After all, I put in a purchase request with our local public library. And I did like the first two-thirds...then came the turgid, repetitive final third. For a casual reader, such as myself, a heavy editorial hand would be a blessing.
As a product of the weird, wacky, drug-fueled late Sixties/early Seventies I read The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. I remember finding it enjoyable, if somewhat improbable. You see back then, as now, I find the supernatural and the so-called spiritual to be an immense crock of shit. And back in that day I did my obligatory amounts of psychedelics. Never astral projected. Never saw ghosts. Or demons. Or deities of any sort. If anything I always felt the drug experience gave me insight in seeing through the fog of mystic bullshit that had grown up about the cultural milieu of that period of time.
Anyway, and maybe it was after I read Castaneda's second offering of don Juan's "wisdom," A Separate Reality: Further Conversations With Don Juan, that I smelled caca del toro. Yet so great is the human desire to "believe" in some mystic, overarching power outside our own psyche that when some huckster comes along and says he has the keys to heaven, we bite. Up to the bobber. And Castaneda hooked many learned academics in anthropology at UCLA. And he cast his bait at a propitious time. LSD, psilocybin, and to a lesser extent, marijuana opened many, too many, to that there is a world outside and as real as the physical universe in which we live.
A few in academia caught on that Castaneda was more charlatan than a legitimate anthropologist. But I think they remained low-key because most had been taken in. No one wants to admit he/she has been duped.
Now the part of this book that just bored the hell out of me is when Castaneda pretty much casts off the mantle of a legitimate anthropologist to morph into a fulltime cult leader. From that point on the book becomes a litany of Castaneda's sexual conquests. They are primarily women who are the product of the petite bourgeoisie, white-collar suburbs, with the exception of a young working-class woman from small town Iowa. The mini-biographies of these women, and a few men, went on ad nauseam. But I suppose author Ru Marshall felt a full story of Castaneda's suckers was necessary,especially for future sociology, psychology and anthropology majors. For me, a casual reader, not so much.
Interestingly I finished reading on the birthday of the biggest con-artist in US history, to date, our president, Donald J. Trump.
As a product of the weird, wacky, drug-fueled late Sixties/early Seventies I read The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. I remember finding it enjoyable, if somewhat improbable. You see back then, as now, I find the supernatural and the so-called spiritual to be an immense crock of shit. And back in that day I did my obligatory amounts of psychedelics. Never astral projected. Never saw ghosts. Or demons. Or deities of any sort. If anything I always felt the drug experience gave me insight in seeing through the fog of mystic bullshit that had grown up about the cultural milieu of that period of time.
Anyway, and maybe it was after I read Castaneda's second offering of don Juan's "wisdom," A Separate Reality: Further Conversations With Don Juan, that I smelled caca del toro. Yet so great is the human desire to "believe" in some mystic, overarching power outside our own psyche that when some huckster comes along and says he has the keys to heaven, we bite. Up to the bobber. And Castaneda hooked many learned academics in anthropology at UCLA. And he cast his bait at a propitious time. LSD, psilocybin, and to a lesser extent, marijuana opened many, too many, to that there is a world outside and as real as the physical universe in which we live.
A few in academia caught on that Castaneda was more charlatan than a legitimate anthropologist. But I think they remained low-key because most had been taken in. No one wants to admit he/she has been duped.
Now the part of this book that just bored the hell out of me is when Castaneda pretty much casts off the mantle of a legitimate anthropologist to morph into a fulltime cult leader. From that point on the book becomes a litany of Castaneda's sexual conquests. They are primarily women who are the product of the petite bourgeoisie, white-collar suburbs, with the exception of a young working-class woman from small town Iowa. The mini-biographies of these women, and a few men, went on ad nauseam. But I suppose author Ru Marshall felt a full story of Castaneda's suckers was necessary,especially for future sociology, psychology and anthropology majors. For me, a casual reader, not so much.
Interestingly I finished reading on the birthday of the biggest con-artist in US history, to date, our president, Donald J. Trump.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
My review in the Arts Fuse.
https://artsfuse.org/329322/june-shor...
Back in the ’60s, anyone claiming to be cool would have been obliged to plow through Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968). Claiming to be the acolyte of the mysterious title shaman, Castaneda convinced distinguished anthropologists of his credentials and won academic credibility. That book and its sequels were met with critical acclaim and inspired legions of followers, including many of the celebrities of the day.
It was all made up, the so-called indigenous Yaqui wisdom a mishmash of Eastern and Western philosophy and New Age claptrap. Now he is largely forgotten or recognized as a fraud or a symptom of a decadent age.
Though no Manson, Castaneda’s malignancy did take its toll. In true crime fashion, Ru Marshall’s American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda opens with the discovery of a skeleton in Death Valley, identified years later as the remains of one of the cult leader’s many missing followers. These were mostly women whose names were repeatedly changed by their master, one of the classic methods of mind control Castaneda employed. It becomes confusing keeping track, and Marshall helpfully provides a glossary of the names of victims, accomplices, and useful idiots, and their various permutations. The list includes some people you would think should know better, like Oliver Stone, Federico Fellini, and Irving Wallace.
With painstaking detail, they (Marshall identifies as non-binary) cuts through Castaneda’s lies to his true origins. Born Carlos Arana in 1925 (not ten years later as he would later claim) in Cajamarca, Peru, he apparently was a descendant of Julio César Arana, a rubber baron whose treatment of the indigenous people he enslaved makes Kurtz in Heart of Darkness look like Mother Teresa. Is that a clue into Castaneda’s own pathology, claiming as his own the wisdom of people whom his ancestor murdered and exploited?
Not until the end of the book does Marshall address the obvious connections with MAGA, concluding, reluctantly, that, unlike Castaneda’s movement, it does not fulfill the definition of a cult because it is not “sharply bounded.” As such it is something worse: by embracing the masses, it compounds the evil.
– Peter Keough
https://artsfuse.org/329322/june-shor...
Back in the ’60s, anyone claiming to be cool would have been obliged to plow through Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968). Claiming to be the acolyte of the mysterious title shaman, Castaneda convinced distinguished anthropologists of his credentials and won academic credibility. That book and its sequels were met with critical acclaim and inspired legions of followers, including many of the celebrities of the day.
It was all made up, the so-called indigenous Yaqui wisdom a mishmash of Eastern and Western philosophy and New Age claptrap. Now he is largely forgotten or recognized as a fraud or a symptom of a decadent age.
Though no Manson, Castaneda’s malignancy did take its toll. In true crime fashion, Ru Marshall’s American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda opens with the discovery of a skeleton in Death Valley, identified years later as the remains of one of the cult leader’s many missing followers. These were mostly women whose names were repeatedly changed by their master, one of the classic methods of mind control Castaneda employed. It becomes confusing keeping track, and Marshall helpfully provides a glossary of the names of victims, accomplices, and useful idiots, and their various permutations. The list includes some people you would think should know better, like Oliver Stone, Federico Fellini, and Irving Wallace.
With painstaking detail, they (Marshall identifies as non-binary) cuts through Castaneda’s lies to his true origins. Born Carlos Arana in 1925 (not ten years later as he would later claim) in Cajamarca, Peru, he apparently was a descendant of Julio César Arana, a rubber baron whose treatment of the indigenous people he enslaved makes Kurtz in Heart of Darkness look like Mother Teresa. Is that a clue into Castaneda’s own pathology, claiming as his own the wisdom of people whom his ancestor murdered and exploited?
Not until the end of the book does Marshall address the obvious connections with MAGA, concluding, reluctantly, that, unlike Castaneda’s movement, it does not fulfill the definition of a cult because it is not “sharply bounded.” As such it is something worse: by embracing the masses, it compounds the evil.
– Peter Keough
Read
August 22, 2026I stopped reading after 530 pages- something I very rarely do. I just couldn’t do anymore. Interesting topic and well researched but needed a strong editor - preferably one who hates the gratuitous and excessive use of sentence fragments as much as I do.
September 3, 2026
While I do think this is an important book, it didn't hit the mark for me. I was, like many young people during the 70s, very infatuated with Castaneda. I read his first 4 books and even attended a Tensegrity seminar. But then I kind of stopped believing, if you will. I had high hopes this this book would answer many of my questions, like how did he make believers out of some great anthropological academics, or what happened to the "witches." Unfortunately my answers are not answered. I'm not sure there are answers, as much as Marshall endeavors to have an answer for very aspect of Castaneda's life. I thought the book was tooooooooooo full of this minutia. For me it was unnecessarily weighted down and confusing. For someone who drank more of the Kool-Aid than I did, it may be enthralling. One thing is clear from the book. Castaneda was a liar. That is about all I got out the this 600+ page book. The title is perfect. How can you define or explain a trickster? The answer is you can't, not even in 658 pages.
Thank you to Goodreads for this copy.
Thank you to Goodreads for this copy.
September 11, 2026
Ok, so Castenada was a liar. Didn’t need to read the remaining bazillion pages.
August 18, 2026
This is a biography where we learn more about the writer’s philosophy than that of the subject. Would have been much better had she/they stuck to the facts rather than filled in the blanks with speculation and her thoughts on current politics.
July 18, 2026
The Con Man Behind Don Juan
I read American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda because Castaneda had a strong impact on me when I was a teenager. I read most of his books up to The Power of Silence and spent years wondering whether the stories were true. I recently went back and reread the whole sequence, this time continuing through The Active Side of Infinity and Taisha Abelar’s The Sorcerer’s Crossing. Ru Marshall’s biography appeared at the right moment.
The book is engaged and well researched. Castaneda comes alive on the page as someone who was already a bullshitter in Peru, then moved to California and became a con man and cult leader who managed to capture the attention of the UCLA anthropology department and, later, the world. Marshall traces the publication of The Teachings of Don Juan and the books that followed, while showing in painful detail how Castaneda manipulated the people around him. What gives the account weight is the sourcing, including interviews with people who knew and surrounded him over more than three decades.
This is not a book for the casual reader. It is long, detailed, and deep in Castaneda’s life and circle, and I can imagine it becoming tedious for someone without a prior interest in the subject. But for anyone interested in the man behind Don Juan, it is a must-read.
I read American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda because Castaneda had a strong impact on me when I was a teenager. I read most of his books up to The Power of Silence and spent years wondering whether the stories were true. I recently went back and reread the whole sequence, this time continuing through The Active Side of Infinity and Taisha Abelar’s The Sorcerer’s Crossing. Ru Marshall’s biography appeared at the right moment.
The book is engaged and well researched. Castaneda comes alive on the page as someone who was already a bullshitter in Peru, then moved to California and became a con man and cult leader who managed to capture the attention of the UCLA anthropology department and, later, the world. Marshall traces the publication of The Teachings of Don Juan and the books that followed, while showing in painful detail how Castaneda manipulated the people around him. What gives the account weight is the sourcing, including interviews with people who knew and surrounded him over more than three decades.
This is not a book for the casual reader. It is long, detailed, and deep in Castaneda’s life and circle, and I can imagine it becoming tedious for someone without a prior interest in the subject. But for anyone interested in the man behind Don Juan, it is a must-read.
October 1, 2026
Before I heap praise, can we talk about the book's writing style? I found it telegraphic to a fault, and kept cringing at the breaking of beloved (to me, at least) grammar rules. Like (and here I emulate the author's style): the continual flouting of the basic rule that a sentence should contain both a subject and verb. And: the continual use of periods to break up sentences that would be clearer (in addition to more grammatical) if left in one piece. Example: "Garfinkel acknowledged the breaching experiments weren't really experiments. Rather: demonstrations." This example brings us to Marshall's other favorite writing quirk: incessant use of the colon. These stylistic tics made me wonder if Marshall had transcribed much of his text directly from his notes, without bothering to transform his jotted thoughts into full-length sentences. I found the style distracting, and it also in places made the book feel like one long rant.
I also had a hard time with the frequent brief paragraphs, usually *** separated out by stars ***, that tell about some small event or observation that has no clear connection to main line of narration. These snippets become more frequent towards the end of the book, and are all the more confusing when they fail to name the person who made an observation or told about an event. Is the author trying to convey the increasing fragmentation of Castaneda's mind and/or the increasing nonsensicalness of the events occurring? Or is this just bad editing?
Like others, I also felt that the author included too much detail. For instance, I didn't feel like I needed to hear so much backstory about Castaneda's less noteworthy/interesting groupies. I had a hard time keeping them all straight and kept leafing back through the book to find pictures of them. (Putting their pictures up front with the character list would have helped in this regard.) The only ones who really stood out personality-wise were Amy (poor Amy!), Nury (ditto!), Florinda (no comment), and Bruce.
But criticisms notwithstanding, what a tour de force this book is! And how fascinating! I was up until 2AM several nights in a row binging it. I had read Castaneda's first 4 books back in the '70s and they're all still on my shelf, right next to "Storming Heaven"! (I'm thinking of trashing them now, though.) I had already read de Mille's first book outing CC as a fraud, so wasn't surprised by that aspect of Marshall's book (although it was very fun to learn the juicy details of how UCLA faculty first fell for it and then were so irritated when they found out the truth, how Joyce Carol Oates was the first to publicly point out the BS aroma, etc.) But I had no idea that CC had developed an actual cult around him and that seemingly intelligent (some of them, at least) people had fallen for the utter craziness of his purported belief system and all the emotional and sexual abuse he inflicted on them, much less that at least one of his followers had killed herself! I was also very interested in and enlightened by the discussions of anthropological and philosophical theory about altered states of reality, and the psychology of deception and of cult leaders. And of course much of what Marshall covers in these areas is highly relevant to U.S. politics today, as he occasionally (gently) points out.
Finally, the book is just plain JUICY! Psychedelics, narcissistic "gurus", sex and drugs in '60s-'80s Southern California, true crime, and cameo appearances by/intersections with Fellini, Irving Wallace, Timothy Leary, Rebecca DeMornay, and many many more! It's a wonderful combination of serious scholarship and serious entertainment! Thank you so much for your service, Ru Marshall!
I also had a hard time with the frequent brief paragraphs, usually *** separated out by stars ***, that tell about some small event or observation that has no clear connection to main line of narration. These snippets become more frequent towards the end of the book, and are all the more confusing when they fail to name the person who made an observation or told about an event. Is the author trying to convey the increasing fragmentation of Castaneda's mind and/or the increasing nonsensicalness of the events occurring? Or is this just bad editing?
Like others, I also felt that the author included too much detail. For instance, I didn't feel like I needed to hear so much backstory about Castaneda's less noteworthy/interesting groupies. I had a hard time keeping them all straight and kept leafing back through the book to find pictures of them. (Putting their pictures up front with the character list would have helped in this regard.) The only ones who really stood out personality-wise were Amy (poor Amy!), Nury (ditto!), Florinda (no comment), and Bruce.
But criticisms notwithstanding, what a tour de force this book is! And how fascinating! I was up until 2AM several nights in a row binging it. I had read Castaneda's first 4 books back in the '70s and they're all still on my shelf, right next to "Storming Heaven"! (I'm thinking of trashing them now, though.) I had already read de Mille's first book outing CC as a fraud, so wasn't surprised by that aspect of Marshall's book (although it was very fun to learn the juicy details of how UCLA faculty first fell for it and then were so irritated when they found out the truth, how Joyce Carol Oates was the first to publicly point out the BS aroma, etc.) But I had no idea that CC had developed an actual cult around him and that seemingly intelligent (some of them, at least) people had fallen for the utter craziness of his purported belief system and all the emotional and sexual abuse he inflicted on them, much less that at least one of his followers had killed herself! I was also very interested in and enlightened by the discussions of anthropological and philosophical theory about altered states of reality, and the psychology of deception and of cult leaders. And of course much of what Marshall covers in these areas is highly relevant to U.S. politics today, as he occasionally (gently) points out.
Finally, the book is just plain JUICY! Psychedelics, narcissistic "gurus", sex and drugs in '60s-'80s Southern California, true crime, and cameo appearances by/intersections with Fellini, Irving Wallace, Timothy Leary, Rebecca DeMornay, and many many more! It's a wonderful combination of serious scholarship and serious entertainment! Thank you so much for your service, Ru Marshall!
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May 8, 2026American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda by Ru Marshall is a fascinating and deeply unsettling exploration of deception, charisma, and the dangerous power of mythmaking. Blending investigative biography, cultural critique, and psychological analysis, the book examines the rise and legacy of Carlos Castaneda, whose fabricated spiritual narratives captivated millions while distorting Indigenous traditions and enabling manipulation on a massive scale.
Marshall approaches the subject with remarkable depth and precision, tracing Castaneda’s transformation from celebrated literary and academic figure to the leader of a secretive and destructive cult. The book not only exposes the contradictions and fabrications behind Castaneda’s persona but also examines the systems that allowed his influence to flourish unchecked. The exploration of academia’s role, celebrity fascination, and the mechanics of spiritual abuse gives the narrative broader social and cultural relevance.
What makes the book especially compelling is its examination of how charismatic figures exploit vulnerability, belief, and the human desire for meaning. Marshall draws clear connections between Castaneda’s methods and modern patterns of manipulation, making the work feel timely and deeply relevant. The mystery surrounding the disappearance of Castaneda’s followers adds an additional layer of emotional gravity and haunting intrigue.
Themes of power, identity, manipulation, belief, and cultural exploitation run throughout the book, making American Trickster both intellectually engaging and emotionally impactful. Readers interested in biography, cult psychology, spirituality, cultural criticism, and investigative nonfiction will find this book absorbing, disturbing, and difficult to forget.
Marshall approaches the subject with remarkable depth and precision, tracing Castaneda’s transformation from celebrated literary and academic figure to the leader of a secretive and destructive cult. The book not only exposes the contradictions and fabrications behind Castaneda’s persona but also examines the systems that allowed his influence to flourish unchecked. The exploration of academia’s role, celebrity fascination, and the mechanics of spiritual abuse gives the narrative broader social and cultural relevance.
What makes the book especially compelling is its examination of how charismatic figures exploit vulnerability, belief, and the human desire for meaning. Marshall draws clear connections between Castaneda’s methods and modern patterns of manipulation, making the work feel timely and deeply relevant. The mystery surrounding the disappearance of Castaneda’s followers adds an additional layer of emotional gravity and haunting intrigue.
Themes of power, identity, manipulation, belief, and cultural exploitation run throughout the book, making American Trickster both intellectually engaging and emotionally impactful. Readers interested in biography, cult psychology, spirituality, cultural criticism, and investigative nonfiction will find this book absorbing, disturbing, and difficult to forget.
July 5, 2026
It says here that it took Ru Marshall twenty years to write this biography, ‘American Trickster’, yet I read it in one week! A truly thrilling page-turner, deeply stylistic, something along the lines of Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood.’ A true-crime investigation into the pathological mind of a cult leader who also happened to be one of the late twentieth century’s most celebrated writers, Carlos Castaneda. Last year’s big biography was Nicholas Boggs’s ‘Baldwin,’ this year Ru Marshall delivers the winner. Yet beyond your typical, chronological, episodic storytelling, this year’s biography is forced by its subject’s deception to consider the very form of biography, or truth-telling, itself. A perfect analogue for where our relativistic, post-modern-ish disposition has gotten us politically, or otherwise. Written with passion and bravado, it becomes obvious that Marshall is doing much more than simply telling us about a life lived, good or bad, advocate or critic, but questioning, as Castaneda did himself, the very nature of perception: what can be known, or how and why to believe something. If Castaneda, through his literature and later cult, was able to cast a spell on his followers, this book is the antidote to that spell. And further, offers a more wholesome, and ultimately more difficult, path to truth and self-knowledge. Read it, your mind will soar and your heart will break for the victims, who, as much as the women who died in the desert, could have easily been—and still yet—you, me, or the author, themself. Castaneda’s books are still out there in the millions, being peddled as truth, 'American Trickster' will help you see differently.
July 15, 2026
I received this book as a Goodreads giveaway. In “American Trickster,” Ru Marshall takes on the epic story of Carlos Castaneda, a UCLA anthropology grad student turned self-appointed guru. Castaneda became a counterculture icon with the publication of his first book, “The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge,” in 1968, purporting to find enlightenment via psychedelic mushrooms, peyote and the cryptic musings of Don Juan, an Indigenous spirit guide. That book and the stream of his that followed turned him into one of the world’s most widely read writers. Published at the the time as works of anthropology, the veracity of these books and the existence of Don Juan, were doubted from their original publication and there was eventually a consensus among critics and scholars that the books were largely fictional phenomenological ghost stories. Soon he was persona non grata in academia and getting negative reviews. His new books stopped selling. The discourse moved on.
The biography written by Marshall traces not only Castaneda’s rise to a Time magazine cover subject, but also his fall (after concerns about the authenticity of his work and a searing exposé revealing that Castaneda wasn’t who he claimed to be), and his final act where thousands of devotees paid handsomely to attend his workshops, which quickly turned cultlike. In the portrait that emerges from Marshall´s book, Castaneda appears as a manipulative trickster who took advantage of Americans hunger for seductive spiritual hoaxes.
The biography written by Marshall traces not only Castaneda’s rise to a Time magazine cover subject, but also his fall (after concerns about the authenticity of his work and a searing exposé revealing that Castaneda wasn’t who he claimed to be), and his final act where thousands of devotees paid handsomely to attend his workshops, which quickly turned cultlike. In the portrait that emerges from Marshall´s book, Castaneda appears as a manipulative trickster who took advantage of Americans hunger for seductive spiritual hoaxes.
July 29, 2026
It is hard to overstate how badly we need this book. Marshall has left no stone unturned, and the resulting portrait of Carlos Castaneda and his enduring, pervasive influence in modern spiritual culture is sobering and probably more relevant to your personal life than you would like. If you come from or engage with alternative/spiritual/New Age culture, or have loved ones who do – READ THIS BOOK. Anyone wondering how a social movement built by leftist crystal collectors could have dovetailed with MAGAism will glean some insights from this story. People who have survived encounters with cults, or whose loved ones have been taken in, will probably also be very grateful to read this book. The scale of Castaneda's project – literary hoax, academic trickery, self-obfuscation, flight from an unspeakably epic source of generational shame, paternity-dodging, cult-building, and obedience testing – is almost too much to take in. Out of 18 years of careful labour, Ru Marshall has laid it bare for us to gaze upon and shake our heads at. Holy moly. If this immense story touches your life somehow (and it probably does in some weird, unexpected way), then you should read this book in self-defense.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
As a child of the 70s, I grew up with Carlos Castenada’s books being read and discussed by my relatives, both my Chilean relatives and my American relatives. Later, I read the books and was absolutely entranced with the world of Don Juan and his magic, and later the magic of the brujas who followed Castenada. If I believed, could the power choose me?
American Trickster is a fascinating, far-reaching, mind-bending biography on Castenada, who posed as an anthropologist studying with a Mexican brujo, but made up everything. Or did he? Invoking Hume and Empiricism, the west’s obsession with “orientalism”, Sartre, Nietzsche, and so many other data points, Ru Marshall presents a tale of a real life trickster, con man, and wannabe cult leader who willed himself onto the bestseller lists for decades.
I’m absolutely obsessed with this book. I want to give a copy to everyone I know.
American Trickster is a fascinating, far-reaching, mind-bending biography on Castenada, who posed as an anthropologist studying with a Mexican brujo, but made up everything. Or did he? Invoking Hume and Empiricism, the west’s obsession with “orientalism”, Sartre, Nietzsche, and so many other data points, Ru Marshall presents a tale of a real life trickster, con man, and wannabe cult leader who willed himself onto the bestseller lists for decades.
I’m absolutely obsessed with this book. I want to give a copy to everyone I know.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Ru Marshall combines keen insight into human and social psychology with a novelist's ability to construct a gripping narrative. This brilliantly written biography takes us on a fascinating tour of the many mysteries surrounding the celebrated visionary, huckster, puppet master and cult leader known aa Carlos Castaneda, a tour that, precisely because it it so well-researched and articulated, radically increases our factual understanding of its subject's background, rise to celebrity and notoriety and his influence on both his closest followers and out culture, without ever pretending to have solved the ineluctable mystery at its core. This is a book that constantly challenges readers to question their own beliefs, that constantly intertwines the beautiful with the weird, the wacky with the tragic and the admirable with the unforgivable. It is definitely a door stopper, but I flew through it in a matter of days and felt decidedly wiser when I turned the last page and sad that my wild, illuminating journey had ended.
Review of advance copy received from Author
What an amazing book. I was able to obtain an advance copy. Many people have no idea of the backstory of Castenada, or even that his writings turned out to be fictitious. I certainly didn't. This well-researched book, delving into Castenada's beginnings as a child in Peru, is an eye-opener about a person who lied constantly and fooled so many people. I spoke with various friends while I was reading the boo,k and most had no idea about Castenada's real life or the way he affected the lives of those in his inner circle. The book is not short, but every page is filled with surprising details and insights. Indeed, a "good read" and Carlos was indeed a "trickster". It's an important contribution to understanding what was and remains an enormous social and cultural phenomenon.
Review of advance copy received from Author
Rarely have I met a book as edifying, gripping and wise as Ru Marshall's biography of Carlos Castaneda. Anyone who wants to understand how charisma, cults and, indeed, today's politics work, should read this. It gives us the vocabulary we need to comprehend what's going on in our divided country while showing us how vulnerable we all are to seduction.
Helen Benedict, author of The Soldier's House, and The Good Deed
Helen Benedict, author of The Soldier's House, and The Good Deed
Review of advance copy
An amazing, completely unhinged (complimentary) read. The writing itself is measured, funny, deeply sympathetic, and humane—a tactic that grounds a subject that is operatically dramatic, mysterious, and deeply complicated. You become personally invested in the history of Latin America, the internal lives of Castaneda’s partners/victims, and the machinations and history of an obscure-ish corner of anthropological theory. It’s an ambitious work, and it fulfills its ambitions.
September 7, 2026
A devastating tell-all, or as much as can be sorted though the multi-leveled Philip K. Dick-style intersection of realities. Also a bizarre soap opera about the Great American/Latinoid Spiritual Crisis. The chapter about the fucking around of Fellini alone would make a wild and crazy movie. Would make a killer miniseries. Now if we can just stop electing these narcissistic sociopaths . . .
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
An amazing biography analyzing how a pile of lies created an internationally famous "anthropologist" and millions of followers. A must-read for boomers and subsequent generations fascinated with the tragic cult of Carlos Castaneda.
August 13, 2026
A fascinating and exhaustive biography with resonance for today’s events.
September 24, 2026
Read Castaneda’s books in college. Didn’t realize at the time what a complete hoax and liar he was…..had a big following back then. Well written and lengthy. Really an expose on cults and how susceptible we all can be to these kind of people. Pertinent to today’s environment, and the multiplying force of the Internet, social media and AI
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