Don Juan – An alleged Yaqui sorcerer and informant to Carlos Castaneda and the central character in his prolific series of Don Juan books, including The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, A Separate Reality, and Journey to Ixtlan. Castaneda received an M.A. and Ph.D. for his ethnographic work with Don Juan but Richard de Mille, Daniel Noel, and Jay Fikes, among other scholars, have deconstructed Castaneda’s Don Juan as an invention, with more in common with a psychedelic audience of the late 1960s and New Agers since, than with authentic Yaqui practices that creatively fuse indigenous and Christian, specifically Catholic, traditions. Don Juan’s teachings on the use of datura, peyote, and other entheogens were particularly appealing to 1960s psychedelic readers as well as to neo-shamans since then.
SOURCE:
Historical Dictionary of Shamanism by Graham Harvey and Robert J. Wallis 2007
