Review: The guru who loved to lie: The wild celebrity and dark secrets of author Carlos Castaneda

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Book ReviewAmerican Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos CastanedaBy Ru Marshall OR Books: 682 pages, $30If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.The 1970s were thick with New Age spiritual fads and movements, from the benign (crystals) to the unspeakably toxic and cultic (Jonestown).Somewhere in the middle of that woo-woo spectrum lies the work 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, seduced millions of readers, plenty of them no doubt hoping that with the proper dosage they, like Castaneda, might also transform into a crow and soar across the purple skies of the dusty Southwest.That Castaneda’s books were largely flimflam isn’t in dispute.

But Ru Marshall’s hefty biography, “American Trickster,” reveals the depth of his deception — and, just as potently, how easily people can be taken in by it.“He didn’t lie out of convenience or opportunism,” Marshall writes.“He lied because he loved to.

Lying was, for him, an art, and he did it exceptionally well.” This is a 1970s story, but anybody in the present can relate.Born in Peru (not Brazil, as he often claimed) in 1925 (not a decade later, as he often claimed), Castaneda demonstrated no particular intellectual promise.But in the mid-1950s, first at L.A.

City College and later at UCLA, he developed an affection for writing, philosophy and history.While pursuing a graduate degree in anthropology in the ’60s, he grew enchanted with Buddhism, Theosophy, existen...