Reality Swamp
The Devil in Carlos Castaneda: American Trickster & a Sorcerer's Redemption, Part Two
As those who have read Dark Oasis know, or if you have heard me talk about John De Ruiter, I have had my own up-close-and-personal experiences of being in a “cult.”
As I used to say in my excess-filled youth, “Try everything once.”
I even extended that philosophy to injecting heroin (when I was twenty). Had the opportunity arose, I would have swum with sharks (like my brother did); been crucified in the Philippines (ditto); jumped out an airplane (ditto again, he broke his leg). Is a pattern emerging?
It seems I shared (or aped) a family compulsion to risk life and limb to experience the extremities of my (human) potential.
One thing my brother would never, ever, have submitted to was to be part of a spiritual cult! Or spiritual anything. He was a “self-made man” (or sham). A clothes-Horsley.
Of course, I didn’t knowingly join a cult. No one does (unless they are really under cover). But with hindsight, that was what I did. It was even, to a degree, why I did it (i.e., to have that experience, and then write about it; a method writer whose cover was so good I believed it myself).
Because of that, as with occultism, psychedelics, and other “wrong moves” in my bio, I can now speak with authority about what it’s like to be in a cult. More to the point, about what makes us (or at least me) susceptible to cults.
The allure of delusion.
I have ceased putting the word “cult” in quotes, but only for convenience’s sake. Any use of the word should be in quotes, because one man’s cult is another man’s sect, is another man’s religion, is another man’s social reality. (Women too.)
The only cure for delusion is disillusion. In extreme cases, dissolution.
Compared to my current disillusionment around Castaneda (which pertains to the last two-thirds of my life, though mostly the middle third), my immersion in de Ruiter’s dream-state took up a relatively brief period, from late 2008 to early 2011, when it all came unraveled. That’s just two and a half years, from honeymoon to bust-up.
On the other hand, it was much more of a public fiasco and full-on crisis than this current process. For one thing, I was publicly proselytizing about JdR and spreading his influence to my own online group, forum, and workshops (the Stormy Weather Existential Detective Agency, or SWEDA).
Anybody who followed me at all knew I was “all-in” with JdR (many of them were skeptical). The revelations pertaining to JdR’s creepy backstage behavior led to the collapse of SWEDA, and the loss of my sole source of income.
It also came full on the heels of the loss of my brother to heroin, my mother to stomach cancer/starvation, and—as it seemed at the time—my marriage too, getting pulverized by the pressure of it all. Full-on crisis, probably the worst of my life.
I retreated to Guatemala to recombobulate in early 2011, taking with me my cat Garbanzo, and from there moved to Estonia, as a temporary station from which to attend several Dave Oshana retreats, in Finland. I only returned to Canada, and to my wife, in late 2013, once the Plutonian fall-out of my soul had de-radiated.
How did I get roped into the JdR cult? I couldn’t entirely blame my wife for it (much as I wanted to), even though it was her who first told me about him (“the Second Coming on legs,” or something like that). I listened to a couple of audios and watched him on YouTube, and was pretty skeptical. But then—something happened.
My first “real” (irony intended) encounter with de Ruiter was in “the second attention.” I was asleep and dreaming in my government-supplemented Hampstead flat when I “woke up” somewhere else—naked, my eyes closed, lying on an upright slab, pretending to be asleep while I tried to figure how what the hell was happening. De Ruiter was on one side of me, another man was at the other side, and (though I couldn’t see, I could sense) a bunch of dark-clad people sitting in front of me, watching while JdR cleaned my body with a strange instrument (including my penis)!
Even after all this time, with the intensity of the memory faded, I cannot dismiss this experience as a self-generated fantasy. As I said, I didn’t think much of de Ruiter at the time I had the experience. It was the experience that persuaded me to believe in him. It was not belief that generated the experience.
Post-Castaneda Timeline
The current sense of loss or disillusionment around Castaneda is not actually new. As a literary figure, as a nagual, a sorcerer, I long ago lost any trust in CC. Ever since reading Sorcerer’s Apprentice and hearing about his sordid sexual shenanigans, his miserably mundane death of liver cancer, and the probable suicide of the witches. However it began, CC’s sorcery journey ended in the worst possible way.
But I had my own way of damage-controlling those revelations. It was the sheer power and impact of his exposure to don Juan and the sorcerers’ knowledge that had derailed Castaneda, I reasoned. His books were still true, only that the message had consumed the messenger.
Oddly, I read the books and began my sorcerer’s quest just a couple of years before Castaneda went public, and it was then (so I believed) that his downward spiral began. I was “off the map,” homeless, by the time Castaneda emerged into the semi-public realm. Not that it was common knowledge. I don’t think I even heard about it until after he died.
I read the books around the spring of 1989, moved to Mexico in September of that year, and on a trip to the US, in early summer of 1990, I met my own don Juan. It was in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, in the form of a street shaman called Erik Pieper.
Erik was two years my junior but he completely convinced me of his sorcerous powers within the first hour of our meeting. Within a couple of days, if that, I had entered head-first into the sorcerers’ world. As it was for “Carlos” (at least as Castaneda told it), the magic was heavily fueled by psychedelics (mostly LSD).
I traveled back and forth between Oaxaca and the US, and bought a large property outside Taos, New Mexico, to build an end-times compound with Erik and the various hippies and deadheads we had picked up on our travels.
At the end of 1991, the bottom fell out of this plan. Following a Castanedian principle to erase my personal history, I threw away my inheritance, cut all ties with everyone I knew, and “disappeared” to darkest Morocco. I took CC’s third book, Journey to Ixtlan, with me. It provided solace in those first terrible hours and days.
I was less than a year in Morocco, homeless, begging and stealing to eat, and then acting as a “mule” for a Belgium Mafioso, before ending up in southern Spain, in the summer of 1992, reading Tarot on the street. Not counting a few odd-jobs as a boy and adolescent, this was the first money I ever earned.
I had my Tarot cards stolen in Madrid, and took a train to Pamplona, where I lived for a year, hand to mouth, teaching private English classes and reading Tarot, before I headed for a Benedictine monastery in France, thinking I could become a monk as a way out of the rat race.
It was Christmas Day 1993 at the Benedictine monastery when I read the newly released Art of Dreaming, which I had got on a trip to Paris. The book was a massive disappointment. It didn’t even seem to be written by the same author. It lacked the subtlety, depth, and eerie verisimilitude of the previous eight books. I still consider this the case. I think it’s an objective fact. Obviously, that’s a subjective opinion.
What’s more indisputable is this: If I had discovered Castaneda just five years later, my whole life might have been different. At the very least, I would have been less “sold” on the books, because the last one would have surely sowed some seeds of doubt. I might even have heard about the semi-public meetings, and gone to see him in LA, assuming I still had the means to do so.
As it was, I was in Pamplona (having realized monkhood was not for me) from 1994 to 1998, years in which CC and the witches were traveling to Spain regularly, and doing workshops. If I had heard about them, I would have done anything to have been there, even as broke as I was. Maybe Castaneda would have plucked me out of the crowd to be one of his castanets (or his castrati), as he did with Miguel Carballal or Tony Karam (who is now a wealthy Lama in Mexico, and who hasn’t responded to any of my emails).
I very much doubt I would have been accepted into his inner circle however. And if I had, I doubt I would have lasted long.
Why not? Because I don’t think I would have been sufficiently malleable or submissive to his will—any more than I was with John de Ruiter, once I started to glimpse what was behind his sorcerer’s facade. Hearing that de Ruiter flew first-class was the first tip-off for me. That was how sensitive I was to signs of corruption.
There is in me a strange combination of credulousness, impressionability, and a susceptibility to deception, with acute critical, analytical, deductive, and extremely skeptical faculties—i.e., a talent for smelling a rat. What a bizarre combination! It’s like what Pauline Kael wrote about me before she died: “He’s a hard-head as well as a hothead.”
The hothead rushes in where angels fear to tread. The hard-head takes notes the whole way, and comes out of the experience reasonably intact, with the inside dirt.
My First Horary Query
“Did Carlos Castaneda meet don Juan the way he recounted?”
Asked at 6:32 pm, July 18, 2026 in Taboada, Spain. The querent, Mr. Horsley.
Mrs. Horsley’s response:
Looks like a big fat no.
Final Judgment: The chart denies a literal meeting as recounted.
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