Letters to the Editor
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A Yankee Way of Knowledge
Just thought I'd draw everyone's attention to Donald Barthelme's very funny send-up of this whole "don Juan" business that dates, if I'm not mistaken, from the late sixties: "The Teachings of Don B: A Yankee Way of Knowledge".
But, laughs aside: The point made above by kenkapkk, about the negligible difference between Castaneda's bullshit and Joseph Smith's prophecy, is well taken. Also his point about whether the historical Jesus ever existed being largely irrelevant, from the perspective of a particular kind of Christianity (my own, for instance). Still, none of this is to say that Castaneda's hoaxterism is somehow the equivalent of the more established religions. What sets the Judeo-Christian-Islamic triumvirate (and of course Hinduism, Buddhism, and other eastern religious traditions) apart from minor cults is precisely the fact that they managed to establish themselves historically, and by doing so, to build up a lively and diverse tradition in which entire societies are able to understand themselves and the world. The difference can be put down to an accident of history, of course, but that doesn't make it any less relevant.
To go back to J. Smith for a moment: If Mormonism looks kooky to a lot people right now, that's partly because it's relatively young and still in a very dogmatic and doctrinaire stage of its development. It's basically fundamentalist and literalist, in other words. If it survives for another few hundred years, there's at least a chance that it will enter the phase of self-questioning and self-reinterpretation that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (yes, Islam, too) all entered into long ago.
For the record, I'll say Castaneda's books are pretty laughable (although they certainly had me going, when I was fifteen or sixteen), but I also don't think the division between cult and religion can be drawn in sharp lines. As I said a moment ago, it generally takes a long time to say about these things. (But God help our great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren if this Scientology business starts getting taken seriously by people other than desperately self-obsessed Hollywood types....)