Speaker 1: Hopefully the connection will take in. Okay, we're live. Hi,
Speaker 1: this is William Ramsey. Welcome to William Ramsey Investigates On
Speaker 1: today's show. I have a very special guest. His name
Speaker 1: is Robert Robert or goes by Roberto Marshall. We're going
Speaker 1: to talk about a podcast that he's involved in on
Speaker 1: a subject I was very interested in. The title of
Speaker 1: that podcast is Trickster The Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda,
Speaker 1: somebody who is very popular in the sixties, kind of
Speaker 1: a culture countercultural figure, but there's also some interesting aspects,
Speaker 1: kind of a shadow world in his background, and mister
Speaker 1: Marshall is going to talk more about that. So, Robert Marshall,
Speaker 1: are you there.
Speaker 2: I am here and glad to be here.
Speaker 1: Awesome. Well, thanks for bringing to the interview For people
Speaker 1: who may not have heard your name or this project.
Speaker 1: Can you talk about your background and what led you
Speaker 1: to compile all of this audio together in this podcast Trickster.
Speaker 2: Sure. I'm a novelist and quite some time ago I
Speaker 2: published novel that was kind of a coming of age
Speaker 2: novel set in the seventies with a crisis of faith theme,
Speaker 2: but the faith was New Age religion. And the name
Speaker 2: Carlos Castaneda just came up a lot, and I had
Speaker 2: read his books when I was a kid, and when
Speaker 2: it came out, my agent suggested that I write a
Speaker 2: little article about whatever happened to Carlos Costeneda, and I
Speaker 2: started looking into it and just went down a rabbit
Speaker 2: hole which hopefully I'm about to emerge from. My biography
Speaker 2: of Constaneda is coming out next fall from University California Press.
Speaker 1: Cool, congratulations. What's the title of that book.
Speaker 2: Than Carlos Costaneda American Trickster? And I should say from
Speaker 2: the start that I'm the co producer of the podcast Trickster,
Speaker 2: but the director of it is Frank Horton, so I
Speaker 2: need to give him give him credit for that.
Speaker 1: Okay, apologize for that. Can you talk about so you
Speaker 1: got into Carlos Castia Maybe the simple question is who
Speaker 1: was Carlos Castaneda.
Speaker 2: Sure, well, just to start with, Carlos reach began to
Speaker 2: rise to fame in nineteen sixty eight with the publishing
Speaker 2: of a book called The Teachings of Don Juan, A
Speaker 2: Yucky Way of Knowledge, And at the time, Carlos was
Speaker 2: actually a dropout from the University of California Graduate Program
Speaker 2: in Anthropology, and this book very quickly became the time
Speaker 2: they called them underground best sellers. Then it quickly became
Speaker 2: an over ground bestseller. And in it he told the
Speaker 2: story of how he had met a shaman, Don Juan,
Speaker 2: in the Sonoran Desert, who had introduced him to three psychedelics,
Speaker 2: to datura, to mushrooms, and to peote, and even more importantly,
Speaker 2: to an entire way of seeing the universe that had
Speaker 2: supposedly never before been revealed to a Westerner, so called Westerner.
Speaker 2: And for about five years these books went pretty much unquestioned,
Speaker 2: at least publicly within academia and in the mainstream media.
Speaker 2: He was lavishly praised by pretty much everyone in New
Speaker 2: York Times, Harper's You Name It. By the mid seventies,
Speaker 2: some doubts began to up here. In the end, it
Speaker 2: turns out basically absolutely everything was made up. They were
Speaker 2: novels that he managed to pass off as anthropology. But
Speaker 2: he was never really publicly taken down in the way
Speaker 2: that say, somebody like James Frye and wrote a million
Speaker 2: of little Pieces was with by Oprah and Carlos's books
Speaker 2: continue to sell well he continues to have a worldwide following,
Speaker 2: and in the nineties he had always He started to
Speaker 2: develop a cult in the nineteen sixties, and I don't
Speaker 2: just mean a kind of cult in a sense of
Speaker 2: a cult following, but a real cult with mostly women
Speaker 2: who changed their names, cut off their families most of them,
Speaker 2: not all of them, and followed him. In the nineties,
Speaker 2: that group went public. They started holding seminars and workshops.
Speaker 2: Thousands of people came to sim Because Carlos was the
Speaker 2: most mysterious author in the world, he never allowed himself
Speaker 2: to be photographed. There are very few extant recordings of
Speaker 2: his voice voice, so when it came out that Carlos
Speaker 2: Costaneda had had emerged, this was a huge thing among
Speaker 2: his followers. He told his followers that they would if
Speaker 2: they had enough will, and they practiced something called tenseegrity,
Speaker 2: which he claimed was a movement technique that had been
Speaker 2: passed down by twenty five generations of tultec Shamans, that
Speaker 2: they would be able to make a leap into another
Speaker 2: their dimension and they would not have to die. When
Speaker 2: Carlos died in nineteen ninety eight from liver cancer, yeah,
Speaker 2: five five of these women disappeared, and the remains of
Speaker 2: one of them, Nurie Alexander, was later found in.
Speaker 1: Right. She was found in Death Valley, Right, And that
Speaker 1: kind of is the beginning of right, that's the beginning, right,
Speaker 1: that's the beginning of the story. But he even on
Speaker 1: his current Amazon page, it's a fake picture of him.
Speaker 1: So he engendered this kind of mysterious kind of element
Speaker 1: about his care about his outward authorship. But he really
Speaker 1: was a was it anthropology student at UCLA? Correct?
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and in a certain sense he was a real anthropologist.
Speaker 2: He studied anthropology. When it came to a very narrow
Speaker 2: field of anthropology, he actually knew a great deal. He
Speaker 2: knew everything that he needed to know to pull off
Speaker 2: what I think is the you know, certainly up there
Speaker 2: with the Piltdown Man as the greatest hoax in the
Speaker 2: history of anthropology and probably the greatest literary hoax ever.
Speaker 2: Because one thing that distinguished Carlos from other cult leaders
Speaker 2: and hoaxers was that he was brilliant and at his best,
Speaker 2: he was a very good writer. His cult, I call
Speaker 2: it a culture cult, because you had to be you
Speaker 2: had to be pretty highly educated and well read and smart.
Speaker 2: He wasn't he At the end, he loosened things up,
Speaker 2: but he wasn't just taking anybody there. And just to
Speaker 2: go back to your question, Carlos was a great storyteller,
Speaker 2: and he knew how to get people to go along
Speaker 2: with those stories and then repeat those stories, and those
Speaker 2: became part of the public record. And so one of
Speaker 2: the great challenges in writing this biography was to sift
Speaker 2: through kind of countless fantasy stories that he had made up,
Speaker 2: you know, to begin with his name. You know, his
Speaker 2: real name is Carlos Costeneda. You know, every single thing
Speaker 2: that people thought they knew about him was not true.
Speaker 1: Wow, it's really incredible. He's from like he claimed he
Speaker 1: was from Brazil, but he was really from Peru. He
Speaker 1: had a different last name. So he really just created
Speaker 1: this whole He was like the really kind of an
Speaker 1: American huckster who came and started a whole new identity. Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's a I think of them as a huckster
Speaker 2: of you know, both both Americans Americas. But one thing
Speaker 2: that he did figure out pretty fast was that he
Speaker 2: could say almost anything. This is in the sixties and
Speaker 2: early seventies in California about what was going on south
Speaker 2: of the Rio Rand. And you know, Gringas believed it
Speaker 2: all and he knew as good khan Min do what
Speaker 2: people wanted to hear and what the society wanted to
Speaker 2: hear at the moment. And it was a time when
Speaker 2: there was a huge revaluation of traditional you know, white
Speaker 2: North American attitude it's towards Indigenous people and an attempt
Speaker 2: to come to terms with some of the horrific history.
Speaker 2: And rather than making people deal with, you know, the
Speaker 2: horrible reality of it, he gave them this magical fantasy
Speaker 2: indian who would lead them, you know to other realms
Speaker 2: and other and other realities.
Speaker 1: Right. He called them Don Juan. Right, so Don Juan
Speaker 1: was a bruo or kind of a magic person from
Speaker 1: an indigenous magician. But also he gave them also the
Speaker 1: opportunity to see drugs as a spiritual thing, which they
Speaker 1: really wanted. So you're absolutely right that he did that.
Speaker 1: In the intro, I mean, the chapter one had so
Speaker 1: many famous names and famous people who were influenced by Castaneda.
Speaker 1: Can you talk about that.
Speaker 2: Absolutely? I mean everyone was interested in people. You know,
Speaker 2: Joni Mitchell named an album after him. Don Lung's reckless daughter.
Speaker 2: Mark Gay was a big fan. Oliver Stone is a
Speaker 2: huge fan the Eagles, and you know, all kinds of
Speaker 2: of of novelists were into him, and people, you know,
Speaker 2: people in the arts tended to be very drawn to
Speaker 2: these books. I think in because Carlos when he was
Speaker 2: back in Peru, he was an art student, and a
Speaker 2: lot of his appeal was that he you know, he
Speaker 2: wrote about these things with that with that knowledge. So yeah,
Speaker 2: the first person who really called him out was Joyce
Speaker 2: Carlos in a nineteen seventy three letter in New York Times,
Speaker 2: where she wrote, oh, I don't know, am I the
Speaker 2: only one who thinks these books are actually novels? And
Speaker 2: other people have had their doubts. But what Carlos knew
Speaker 2: was that when you get a consensus of people going
Speaker 2: along with something, and when they have a kind of
Speaker 2: emotional investment in a belief, you know, whether it's Santa
Speaker 2: Claus or whether it's Donald Trump, because it's really the
Speaker 2: same principles that are at work, and when all of
Speaker 2: the people who are around them also believe the same thing,
Speaker 2: it becomes very hard for people to say they were wrong.
Speaker 1: To go against the.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're conformist animals, and Carlos before studying anthropology, when
Speaker 2: he was an undergraduate studied psychology, he took a one
Speaker 2: class specifically in you know, manipulation of behavioral manipulation of
Speaker 2: people living in group situations. And what he went on
Speaker 2: to do in the cult was really to just apply
Speaker 2: the same kind of maneuvers that he had used to
Speaker 2: get his PhD at UCLA and to get published by
Speaker 2: University of California Press, which also happens to be my publisher,
Speaker 2: So God bless him. And yeah, he knew that people
Speaker 2: come to their beliefs not through reason but through emotion.
Speaker 2: There's a vast body of psychological experimentation that backs that up,
Speaker 2: and Carlos studied it.
Speaker 1: And he implemented it. And can you talk about how
Speaker 1: he he put together this group you call a cult
Speaker 1: and what was its what were central ideas?
Speaker 2: You know, the thing was a cult is as far
Speaker 2: as I know, it always starts with one person, with
Speaker 2: one leader and one follower. And that started really almost
Speaker 2: the same time that he began working on his first book,
Speaker 2: and that was in nineteen sixty and it stayed, you know,
Speaker 2: very small at first, but I think the key things
Speaker 2: that Carlos. Carlos lived in fantasy and he needed other
Speaker 2: people to join that fantasy with him. And that's one
Speaker 2: way of looking at what cults really are. And there's also,
Speaker 2: of course the ego reinforcement and the and the narcissism.
Speaker 2: Because there's something that happens at the very beginning of
Speaker 2: the teachings of Don Juan. It's kind of extraordinary that
Speaker 2: no one noticed, which is that Don Juan, who is
Speaker 2: the Brujo, as you said, and you know, most people
Speaker 2: called him Mishanan, even though Carlos actually didn't use that
Speaker 2: word for him. The Brujo. The sorcerer says to Carlos,
Speaker 2: it's been revealed me that you are the chosen one, now,
Speaker 2: you know. I normally kind of a lot of alarm
Speaker 2: bells should sort of go off off when somebody is saying,
Speaker 2: you know that they are the chosen one. But Carlos
Speaker 2: was such an artful writer that he kind of weaves
Speaker 2: this in as he weaves in all so and this, uh,
Speaker 2: I think this is the first time I've spoken on
Speaker 2: the air about this, that he's he's a disciple of
Speaker 2: the devil, he's a diablero. That Don Juan is a
Speaker 2: dia blero, which is, you know, it's the kind of
Speaker 2: brujo who gains his powers from devil worship. But that's
Speaker 2: it's so subtly done in the first books that you know,
Speaker 2: you could easily overlook it because there's all of this
Speaker 2: other magical, amazing stuff going on in the later books,
Speaker 2: which were you know, they sold well, they were all
Speaker 2: best almost all of them are best sellers in the
Speaker 2: York Times.
Speaker 1: Millions of copies, millions and millions of copies.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, easily. I mean, there's no way to know exactly,
Speaker 2: but you know, well, I mean a long long time ago,
Speaker 2: they passed ten million copies. The later books are just
Speaker 2: to put a blowing they're really crazy, you know, because
Speaker 2: he's at first he wanted to have academic credibilities. He
Speaker 2: you know, was very careful, and it's all longer that
Speaker 2: he stayed within his own kind of fantasy world and
Speaker 2: developed this cult around him that reinforced him, you know,
Speaker 2: the deeper off into it.
Speaker 1: He went, would you consider that going into the occult?
Speaker 2: Going into the occult?
Speaker 1: Did you say, yes, a cult? Like he hear the question, No,
Speaker 1: it's okay, I'm just saying like you say that in
Speaker 1: the beginning he was a diabe the area or a
Speaker 1: double worshiper, but as he got later on, did you
Speaker 1: feel like that double worship was more emphasized in the
Speaker 1: later books.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that what happens is this. I think
Speaker 2: that at the beginning, it's one of many ideas that
Speaker 2: he's playing around with. You know, He's Carlos was very hostile,
Speaker 2: you know, with some good reason toward Christianity, especially toward
Speaker 2: toward the Catholic Church, and that goes into issues in
Speaker 2: his childhood in Peru, and also the probability that he
Speaker 2: was a crypto Jew, that he was descended from the
Speaker 2: secret Jews of of Peru. But as what happens in
Speaker 2: the seventh you know, at first he's riding high, He's
Speaker 2: on the cover of Time magazine. Everybody wants to meet him. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he he couldn't be bigger. And it happened very suddenly.
Speaker 1: But then in the.
Speaker 2: Late seventies, once some of his uh, you know, his
Speaker 2: vast plagiarism began to be revealed, people at U c
Speaker 2: l A whose respect he actually always really wanted very deeply,
Speaker 2: began to avoid him and shun him and you know,
Speaker 2: he read his reviews. He knew what was what was
Speaker 2: going on in the culture at large, and I think
Speaker 2: this took him into a dark, dark place where some
Speaker 2: of the ideas about devil worship and Don Juan being diablero,
Speaker 2: which may have been kind of more playful or not
Speaker 2: necessarily totally committed to. By the end of the seventies,
Speaker 2: he was. He was. He was very sery about it.
Speaker 1: Wow, fascinating. I didn't know that. And so how did
Speaker 1: he what happened after he kind of got exposed in
Speaker 1: the late seventies, How did Carlos Castanada his life progress
Speaker 1: from there?
Speaker 2: Well, you know, the thing is people, because nobody knew
Speaker 2: anything about him, it was possible to project and imagine
Speaker 2: all kinds of, you know, mysterious things going on. For
Speaker 2: the most part, he was living in Westwood, you know,
Speaker 2: about a fifteen minute walk from the UCLA campus, in
Speaker 2: this house with uh. The first they were called he
Speaker 2: called these women who were his followers. First they were
Speaker 2: called the winds. Later he called them the witches. And
Speaker 2: he he, I think, had a kind of fantasy of
Speaker 2: establishing this sort of alternate academy, you know, and he
Speaker 2: slowly began to you know, gather more followers. He was
Speaker 2: always very busy having a career as a compulsive seducer.
Speaker 2: That's you know, it would require an endless book to
Speaker 2: chronicle all of that. He was definitely a some kind
Speaker 2: of sexual compulsive, so he's busy with that. And he'd
Speaker 2: loved to just play mind games on people. That took
Speaker 2: up a lot of time. And he was writing. He
Speaker 2: was a prolific writer, you know. And I think in
Speaker 2: away what led to him taking the cult public and
Speaker 2: having these workshops and making making a much more theatrical
Speaker 2: project was simply the need for excitement and the need
Speaker 2: to you know, keep his followers excited. There's always a
Speaker 2: thing with him of like, oh, something amazing is right
Speaker 2: around the corner. It's something incredible, it's going to be revealed.
Speaker 2: And that's in the books, and it was true in
Speaker 2: real life too, because somebody knew would be brought into
Speaker 2: the group and it would be you. You, You are
Speaker 2: the magical one. You have the special energy, and you
Speaker 2: are going to take us to what you call it,
Speaker 2: you know. The second attention was was often what he
Speaker 2: called it, which just meant another world. But he never
Speaker 2: he never defines just what it is this amazing thing
Speaker 2: that they're going to reach.
Speaker 1: And what were the doctrines of tense segrety.
Speaker 2: God. That is really hard to say. Well, yeah, I
Speaker 2: mean I can say it. It's very abstruse. One important
Speaker 2: thing about Carlos was that his mentor was a fellow
Speaker 2: named Harold Garfinkel, who is a professor of sociology at UCLA,
Speaker 2: who was a you know, some people say it's one
Speaker 2: of the top ten sociologists of the twentieth century. And
Speaker 2: this gets into some pretty abstruse stuff, but the gist
Speaker 2: of it is that we assemble our own realities. One
Speaker 2: of the central tenets of Don Juang, of the Shaman
Speaker 2: of Costaneda, and of his mentor Garfinkel is that reality
Speaker 2: is an agreed upon description. In other words, you can
Speaker 2: look at a house from a certain angle describe it
Speaker 2: one way. I'll look at it from another way and
Speaker 2: describe it a different way. Both of those things are valid.
Speaker 2: But when we can agree upon how to describe it,
Speaker 2: that's what most people consider reality, which is true enough.
Speaker 2: You know, for the nation state, there's no United States.
Speaker 2: If people don't agree that there is, there's no money.
Speaker 2: People don't agree that money is real. Carlos though, took
Speaker 2: that to be also about the physical world, that there
Speaker 2: are no rocks or trees or buildings without that. And
Speaker 2: this does get around to tense secrity because the idea,
Speaker 2: and it's totally wacky, basically, is that through doing these
Speaker 2: movements you will assembol your perceptions of reality differently and
Speaker 2: thus enter another world. If you listen to the to
Speaker 2: the recordings, watch the videos of tense Segrity, or read
Speaker 2: anything about it, you know it's just endlessly complicated. And
Speaker 2: that's you know, another thing that cult leaders, some cult
Speaker 2: leaders like to do is just get some some people
Speaker 2: past absolutely be completed, and that will exhaust it. You know,
Speaker 2: it's all crap because they were claiming this was stuff
Speaker 2: that we just handed down from.
Speaker 1: Right that came out of this Seamanic background. He lost them.
Speaker 1: I guess we lost them right there. Let's see Carlos Castaneda.
Speaker 1: One of the interesting things if you guys are listening,
Speaker 1: if you want to go to the podcast Trickster the
Speaker 1: Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda, you can see that he
Speaker 1: was influenced by al Thos Huxley and the Doors of perceptions,
Speaker 1: so he integrated some of that stuff into tenseegrity. And yeah,
Speaker 1: he was an interesting guy. Came from Peru and uh,
Speaker 1: these books are all over the place, very influential in
Speaker 1: the sixties. I think it was George Lucas who said
Speaker 1: that the dynamic between Obi Wan and Luke Skywalker was
Speaker 1: the dynamic between Carlos Castaneda and Don Juan, the so
Speaker 1: called Brewo. But that part of actual Mexico. My understanding
Speaker 1: is that I had all kinds of weird cults and
Speaker 1: all kinds of strange occultism and things like that, going
Speaker 1: way back and back to the Spanish conquest. It's my
Speaker 1: understanding of all that stuff. But we'll see if mister
Speaker 1: Marshall is going to make it back aer here or not. Sure.
Speaker 1: But the Trickster, the Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda. You
Speaker 1: can get that on iTunes, you can get it on
Speaker 1: how You're back still there? Yeah, it's okay. I kept talking.
Speaker 1: I kept talking. I kept talking. Yeah, I kept talking
Speaker 1: the whole time. So you kind of bought blacked out it.
Speaker 1: Yeah it's okay, you backed out right there, kind of
Speaker 1: a tense segrety. So leading up, so this is a
Speaker 1: serial womanizer as well, and it leads up. So he
Speaker 1: has these girls the Way choose and he passes away
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 3: What happens next, Well, they start, you know, tense Secretary
Speaker 3: really starts taking off in you know, in nineteen ninety
Speaker 3: and it's just one of the things that you know,
Speaker 3: it's they start with.
Speaker 2: A few workshops, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
Speaker 2: You know, more and more people are drawn in. You know,
Speaker 2: they're making Carlos was never motivated by profit, but he
Speaker 2: was supporting so many women that you know, they needed
Speaker 2: needed money for it. So by you know, by nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety five, it's a very big thing. And increasingly in
Speaker 2: these workshops, Carlos talks about taking the leap. We're all
Speaker 2: going to take the leap together. Now, if you've read
Speaker 2: the books, you'll remember at the end of book four,
Speaker 2: Carlos himself takes the leap, which is literally they're the
Speaker 2: character Carlos does, and that means that he jumps off
Speaker 2: a cliff and instead of it's to show his complete
Speaker 2: faith and the teachings of Don Juan, and because he
Speaker 2: has gone through this great source serh apprenticeship instead of dying.
Speaker 2: He he does not. He actually wakes up in in
Speaker 2: uh in Westwood, And so you didn't really really need
Speaker 2: too much to know that. You know, what he was
Speaker 2: talking about was that they would would do something similar
Speaker 2: and that they would do it together. Also, he starts
Speaker 2: becoming ill. Carlos, like many people of this ILK, you know,
Speaker 2: taught that illness was just a failure of the will.
Speaker 2: You know, it was you know, kind of in line
Speaker 2: with the whole kind of set teaching going back to
Speaker 2: Christian science. You know, he's not a big believer in
Speaker 2: in real science at all. So it was impossible for
Speaker 2: them to admit he might be very seriously ill. And
Speaker 2: it turned out that that he had liver cancer. But
Speaker 2: this had to be kept from from the followers, and
Speaker 2: I don't think, I think, very very late in the
Speaker 2: game were they able to even admit it to themselves
Speaker 2: at all, because it went straight against their most central
Speaker 2: kinds of beliefs, with which had to do with which
Speaker 2: was first all, the customer was not going to die.
Speaker 2: He was going to turn into a ball of light
Speaker 2: and send into the heavens. That was that was one
Speaker 2: of the teachings at that at that point but yeah,
Speaker 2: he wanted people to to go with him. And that's
Speaker 2: you know, basically, cult leaders do not like to be alone.
Speaker 1: And it sounds like Marshall Apple Marshall Apple White of what's.
Speaker 2: It's well, Apple White was exactly in nineteen ninety seven
Speaker 2: was really a year before, you know, and they're these
Speaker 2: chilling records of you know, car They're they're joking about
Speaker 2: and think, oh, you know, not we're not that called,
Speaker 2: you know, but Carlos was fully aware of of that.
Speaker 2: You know. It's I think the same thing happened on
Speaker 2: a vastly larger scale with Jim Jones or with Forrest. Yes, yes,
Speaker 2: you know, they know.
Speaker 1: The Solar Temple. I don't know if you've ever heard
Speaker 1: of the Solar Temple go down alone? Right?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, oh yeah, And I think it's true, if
Speaker 2: I may say so, of Trump too. It's like he
Speaker 2: was willing to bring down everything rather than you know,
Speaker 2: go out and go out in humiliation, you know, if
Speaker 2: he could, if he could get away with that, and
Speaker 2: uh but you know, finally he died. Then there were
Speaker 2: five women and two of them were his witches. There
Speaker 2: was one of the witches, you know, at the last minute,
Speaker 2: decided not to go, and she Carol Tiggs. She went
Speaker 2: on to become the kind of ethereal mother of the
Speaker 2: of the cult, which still continues used to this day
Speaker 2: and still teaches tensegrity around the world and in southern California.
Speaker 2: And then three other women, including Nuri, who was you
Speaker 2: know I mentioned earlier, who was his adopted daughter, and
Speaker 2: also one of his you know, countless women that he
Speaker 2: was I won't say how his lover, that's a little
Speaker 2: too generous, you know, women that he had sex with.
Speaker 2: They disappeared. Her car was found in Death Valley pretty
Speaker 2: pretty soon after, but her the skeletal remains were not
Speaker 2: found until two thousand and three, and a positive identification
Speaker 2: wasn't made until two thousand and six, which was just
Speaker 2: about when I started to work on this article about
Speaker 2: whatever happened to Carlos Costaneda, and I somehow chanced upon this,
Speaker 2: and I was like, holy shit, this is a really
Speaker 2: intense story. And nobody one one newspaper in Nevada covered it,
Speaker 2: nobody else did. It just went completely unremarked on.
Speaker 1: Wow, fascinating. So these women disappeared and have they what
Speaker 1: has anybody researched it or found out whatever happened to him.
Speaker 2: Lots of people, lots of people have researched it. You know.
Speaker 2: The most important things I think to know is that
Speaker 2: after many attempts to find anything, there's no trace of
Speaker 2: any kind of financial activity on their part. And these
Speaker 2: were women, for the most part, who had been with them,
Speaker 2: you know, some one of them from the early sixties on.
Speaker 2: They did not have any other skills other than to be,
Speaker 2: you know, a magical being, which was you know, part
Speaker 2: of the appeal. You've got to be, you know, a witch.
Speaker 2: You know, you meant to be this very exciting being
Speaker 2: the world. But that was their job, you know, and
Speaker 2: your your middle age, late middle age, You're suddenly supposed
Speaker 2: to go out and make your way in the world
Speaker 2: with that. That's a challenge. The other thing is that
Speaker 2: they did not, in particular get along with each other.
Speaker 2: You know. It was always a thing of kind of
Speaker 2: who's who does Carlos, you know, love the most, or
Speaker 2: who's who's in the golden light at the moment. So,
Speaker 2: you know, I cannot say with certainty that they committed suicide,
Speaker 2: nor can I say with certainty that they went to
Speaker 2: death valley. But the The other overwhelming thing is that
Speaker 2: if you listen to or read the transcripts of of
Speaker 2: these workshops and in ours, it's basically endless talk. If
Speaker 2: you can know how to decode it about suicide, you know,
Speaker 2: they don't call it suicide, they call it taking the leap.
Speaker 2: But there's there, there's there's just pretty endless evidence that
Speaker 2: that was the plan, you know, So I don't think
Speaker 2: it's too out there too to conclude that. And they could.
Speaker 2: You know, it would have been very difficult in a
Speaker 2: way for them not to have done it, because it
Speaker 2: would have been impossible within the inner circle to say
Speaker 2: this is a really bad idea, because you would have
Speaker 2: been thrown out, and that was they had been trained
Speaker 2: for years, you know, not to do that. And in
Speaker 2: a cult, you're you are, you're trick. People don't join
Speaker 2: cults because there's a sign that says, hey, it's a
Speaker 2: called I want to join. They join because they go
Speaker 2: to a meeting of something. They're in the wrong place
Speaker 2: at the wrong time, they are targeted, and the leader
Speaker 2: or the leader's minions they practice love bombing. They will
Speaker 2: tell this person how amazingly special and wonderful they are,
Speaker 2: and you know, we all like to hear that. And
Speaker 2: he did the same thing with his UCLA professors. You know,
Speaker 2: he told them their theories were being validated by a
Speaker 2: mystical Indian. They loved it. And then you get people
Speaker 2: addicted to this kind of love bombing, and then you
Speaker 2: tell them to really be with us. You have to
Speaker 2: leave your parents, you have to leave your boyfriend, and
Speaker 2: then you've got them.
Speaker 1: And do you know how many people he accumulated into
Speaker 1: his foot? Yeah, it's said, it is said. Do you
Speaker 1: know how many people you accumulated?
Speaker 2: It's really hard to say, well, because there are many
Speaker 2: different kind of layers to the onion. You know, at
Speaker 2: one point I did a whole kind of map of
Speaker 2: the of the cult, and you know, people came in
Speaker 2: and out to a certain degree. But let's say there
Speaker 2: are by the end, they are about one hundred I'm
Speaker 2: sayings on the radio. I'm not sure I actually should,
Speaker 2: but there are you know, if not, the very core
Speaker 2: group is small, it's about fifteen people, and then there's
Speaker 2: you know, about one hundred people circling outside of that,
Speaker 2: and then you know, then there are you know, a
Speaker 2: few thousand people who come to the seminars and you
Speaker 2: know to some degree, are you know, following the path.
Speaker 2: And there are a lot of people who never even
Speaker 2: you know, meat Cuss Nata or the witches, who are
Speaker 2: following the path on their own because he says to
Speaker 2: you know, cut off these attachments in his books. And
Speaker 2: people think that by doing this, they're going to you know,
Speaker 2: find on Juan and all of the terrible problems they
Speaker 2: have will be solved.
Speaker 1: And he left a substantial estate, correct.
Speaker 2: Not really, No, that's uh, that is a that is
Speaker 2: an urban rumor. You know, people thought he had a
Speaker 2: ton of money, but now supporting you know, he was
Speaker 2: supporting like if I don't know, quite a few women.
Speaker 2: At the time of his death, it had been for years.
Speaker 2: The books were not selling the way that they that
Speaker 2: they used to. He had some he owed a ton
Speaker 2: of money to the I R S. He had in
Speaker 2: a state of about four hundred thousand dollars when he died,
Speaker 2: which I think was probably a massive disappointment to those
Speaker 2: to those close to him. People people thought he had
Speaker 2: millions and millions of dollars, but he did not.
Speaker 1: Well, where can people find what's the best place for
Speaker 1: people to find and listen to the podcast and when
Speaker 1: can they expect to see your book?
Speaker 2: Yeah, go to www. Www Trickster podcast dot com. That's
Speaker 2: Trickster podcast dot com. And for the book. Well, I'm
Speaker 2: I'm in the middle of uh, you know, changing my name,
Speaker 2: you know, like Carlos and so forth. But you can
Speaker 2: go to my my traditional website, which is www. Dot
Speaker 2: Robert Marshall dot net. There will be a new one soon,
Speaker 2: but it will direct you there. Or just write to
Speaker 2: you know, University of California and say, hey, when's it
Speaker 2: coming out? It should be it should be next September,
Speaker 2: but Robert might happen on time.
Speaker 1: True Robertmarshall dot net. And do you have social media
Speaker 1: if somebody wants to read out, reach out to you
Speaker 1: or email?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm on Facebook, I'm on I'm on Facebook, I'm
Speaker 2: on Instagram, and I'm on Twitter, but nobody follows me.
Speaker 2: So maybe this will be the beginning of something. And
Speaker 2: I'm so not on Twitter. I'm not even sure what
Speaker 2: my handle is. I I think it's Diane Finis and YC.
Speaker 1: Gotcha. And you have on your website you have a
Speaker 1: contact information.
Speaker 2: Maybe the right thing.
Speaker 1: Sure, whatever you want, you can send it. I'll put
Speaker 1: it in the show notes, I'll put it in the
Speaker 1: show Cool. And it's Robert Marshall and the podcast is Trickster.
Speaker 1: How many lives, Yeah, Trickster, the many lives of Carlos Castadia.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Robert, Trickster podcast, Trickster podcast.
Speaker 2: It's great, Thank you all. Thank you very fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, cool, thanks so much, appreciate it. Okay, are you too,