In my college course in the philosophy of the occult it would be impossible to ignore Castaneda, and I would hardly want to. His books are dramatic presentations of an ideal of magical involvement that are among the most powerful and compelling to be found in any literature. To ignore them because don Juan may be solely a creature of Castaneda's imagination would be to sidestep a major challenge to conventional religious and social ideals. After all, if the image of the sorcerer as "the man of knowledge" is an attractive one, it may not really matter that it has been embodied in a curious type of fiction rather than in the records of a factual encounter.

Carlos Castaneda has definitely touched a nerve in modern consciousness. In an industrialized society, it is difficult to feel respected as a true individual: "the games people play" include the totality...