Carlos Castañeda

Carlos Castaneda (December 25, 1925– April 27, 1998) was a Peruvian-American writer, trained as an anthropologist. Starting in 1968, Castaneda published a series of books that describe alleged training in shamanism that he received under the tutelage of a Yaqui "Man of Knowledge" named Don Juan Matus. While Castaneda's work was accepted as factual by many when the books were first published, the character of Don Juan and the training he described is now generally considered to be fabricated and to have little relation to the actual cultural practices of the Yaqui. Castaneda's early writings featuring Don Juan were bestsellers with the general public, and are considered to be a significant influence on neoshamanism and the New Age movement more broadly.

The first three books—The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, A Separate Reality, and Journey to Ixtlan—were written while he was an anthropology student at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Castaneda was awarded his bachelor's and doctoral degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles, based on the work he described in these books. Castaneda's later works have a greater focus on religious themes. Always reclusive, and following increasing doubt about the veracity of his encounters with Don Juan, in the early 1970s, Castaneda withdrew from the public eye, and began cultivating a following of young female devotees whom he called his "witches" or "chacmools" who he demanded cut off contact with their families, change their names, and sexually submit to him.

At the time of his death in 1998, Castaneda's books had sold more than eight million copies and had been published in 17 languages. Following his death, five of his closest female devotees went missing. The car and skeletal remains of one of them, Patricia Partin, were later found in Death Valley, though the fate of the other four remains unknown.