The anthropologist who became the leader of the shaman cult

While browsing an antique shop in Quito, I came across a book called Shabono: A Visit to a Remote and Magical World in the South American Rain Forest, written by an anthropologist named Florinda Donner. Published in 1982, I expected it to be like most academic texts: interesting but long-winded and dusty. Instead, I got a compelling adventure that would put even Indiana Jones to shame.

The book begins with Donner, a German immigrant studying anthropology in California who feels hopeless. She has spent weeks on the Venezuela-Brazil border shadowing indigenous healers who refuse to reveal the secrets of their profession. As she prepares to return to the United States empty-handed, she befriends a kind but crazy old woman who wants to introduce her to her village deep in the rainforest. The woman dies on the journey, and when Donner arrives at the village, she attends a ceremony drinking banana soup flavored with the woman’s ashes.

And that’s just the first few chapters. Donner later experiences existential hallucinations after snorting Epená, a tryptamine derivative, and narrowly avoids being kidnapped by another tribe.

The story of Shabono is so compelling that I could hardly believe it was true, which – it turns out – wasn’t. While the book was praised for its writing style, it was torn apart for a lack of academic rigor. Some anthropologists believe Donner made it all up, claiming she never left the US and plagiarizing the account of a Brazilian woman once held captive in the same region of the Amazon.

As shocked as I was to learn all of this, the rabbit hole turned out to be much, much deeper.

It’s hard to separate Florinda Donner’s story from Carlos Castenada’s. Castenada, like Donner, was a California-based anthropologist who has been accused of fabricating his studies on indigenous healing. He claims to have met don Juan Matus, the Yaqui sorcerer who is the focus of his 1968 bestseller The Teachings of Don Juan, while waiting for a Greyhound bus in Arizona. Critics questioned don Juan’s existence, and Castenada, disliking being questioned, offered no help in trying to locate him.

Although shunned in academic circles, The Teachings had a major impact on the general population. Castenada’s memories of inhaling psilocybin mushroom dust and turning into a crow after smoking devil’s weed were required reading for anyone involved in the sex and drug culture of the late ’60s.

Though he might be a lousy anthropologist, Castenada was a master storyteller who knew how to use his gift to enchant those around him. After the publication of his third Don Juan book, Castenada – now a multi-millionaire – bought a two-story house in Los Angeles’ Westwood Village. It was here that his personal literary following would flourish into what some would now consider a full-fledged cult.

One of Castenada’s followers was Gloria Garvin, who sought him out after reading The Teachings while under the influence of hashish pumpkin pie.

“You’ve always been like a bird, like a little bird in a cage,” Garvin recalled, as Castenada had told her when they first met. “You want to fly, you’re ready, the door is open – but you just sit there. I want to take you I’ll help you ascend Nothing can stop you if you come with me.” Castenada kept in touch, urging her to study anthropology at UCLA, his alma mater.

Also from UCLA, Castenada recruited Florinda Donner, whose credits he helped write Shabono and The Witch’s Dream.

Castenada referred to his favorite followers as his “witches”. The witches lived with him on the Westwood compound and wore identical short haircuts. They also claimed to have met the semi-fictional Don Juan. Witches recruited other witches at Castenada’s L. Ron Hubbard-inspired lectures and seminars on shamanism and human transcendence – preferably “women with a combination of brains and beauty and vulnerability,” according to ex-devotees interviewed by Salon.

In order to become a true witch, it is said, one must sleep Castenada, who presented himself to the public as celibate.

Testimonies claim that Castenada’s followers had all the hallmarks of a cult. Followers were pressured to cut ties with their friends and family. Only Donner, who was intellectually and spiritually equal to Castenada, kept in touch, albeit sporadically, with her parents. After being separated from loved ones, Castenada encouraged them to quit their jobs to make them financially dependent on him. Conformity was rewarded, mostly in the form of his coveted affection.

Despite his obsession with immortality, Carlos Castenada died of liver cancer in April 1998. “Befitting a man who turned secrets into aesthetics,” reported the New York Times when news of his death broke after being withheld for weeks, “even his age is uncertain.”

As one secret left the world, another entered. A day after Castenada’s death, Donner and three other women near Castenada disconnected their phones and seemingly vanished into thin air. Patricia Partin, Castenada’s adopted daughter, was also missing. Your abandoned Ford Escort has been found in Death Valley. Years later, her remains were also found there.

None of the disappearances have been properly investigated by the LAPD, and so far every citizen journalist and internet sleuth trying to uncover the witches’ fate has hit a dead end.

Ex-followers believe the women took their own lives. In life, Castenada often spoke of suicide, presenting death as a gateway to a higher plane of existence. As his health deteriorated, the witches reportedly acquired weapons. Taisha Abelar, one of the witches who disappeared alongside Donner, started drinking but told those around her she was “in no danger of becoming an alcoholic” because, as Salon quotes, “I’m walking.” Also, per the Salon, Castenada had told Partin to take her Ford Escort “and drive it to the desert as soon as possible” if “you ever need to ascend to infinity.” Suspicious, but ultimately inconclusive.

Those who survived Castenada are convinced that he really believed everything he preached. As one ex-follower told Salon, “He became more and more mesmerized by his own reverie.”

The witches seem to have done it too. In Shabono, thunder presents fiction as fact. While she may have initially attempted to stage fiction for fact in order to gain fame and fortune, the reader gets the stronger impression that the further the young anthropologist delved into her own fantasy world of life and death, the harder it became , drugs and mysticism dared to separate the real from the imagined.

In any case, it’s a really, really well-written book.