Quick clarification: that quote is from Beals, not Meighan.
One of the strange aspects of the saga is the amount of sheer rubbish which has been written (and, presumably, said) about Castaneda by people who ought to know better. That article by Beals provides a good example. He writes,
Castaneda calls his first book The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968), and throughout his books variously labels Don Juan a shaman and a sorcerer, as if the two terms were synonymous.
Beals continues with several paragraphs disentangling the two terms and charging Castaneda with being misleading about their usage.
Whereas, actually, the word
shaman does not occur
at all in
any of Castaneda's books, until
The Art of Dreaming (1993), 15 years after Beals' article. And when, finally, the word does occur, Castaneda defines it succinctly and accurately.
In anthropological works, shamanism is described as a belief system of some native people of northern Asia - prevailing also among certain native North American Indian tribes - which maintains that an unseen world of ancestral spiritual forces, good and evil, is pervasive around us and that these spiritual forces can be summoned or controlled through the acts of practitioners, who are the intermediaries between the natural and supernatural realms.
Don Juan was indeed an intermediary between the natural world of everyday life and an unseen world, which he called not the supernatural but the second attention. His role as a teacher was to make this configuration accessible to me. I have described in my previous work his teaching methods to this effect, as well as the sorcery arts he made me practice, the most important of which is called the art of dreaming.
If anyone has any theories about how Beals could have got it so wrong, I would like to hear them.
