Marshall's Reviews > The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

This is a book about a Western student's apprenticeship under a Yaqui sorcerer named Don Juan. That's how the author thinks of it. It was more like getting high in the desert with an old man and playing with lizards.

I think this book was mistitled. A more accurate title would have been, The Drug Trips of Don Juan: An Indian Way of Drug Tripping. It's not about teachings or knowledge at all, at least not as I understand those words to mean. The entire book was a memoir of his drug trips and conversations about drug trips. That's it. The entire book.

I call it, "An Indian Way" because the Yaqui were never specifically mentioned at all in the book. Even Don Juan himself referred to himself as "an Indian."

There was also a bit of discussion of his culture's mythology and beliefs, which was basically personifying drug trips. Absurd claims were made, such as the ability to fly or turn into a crow while drug tripping. The author asked Don Juan whether he was ACTUALLY flying, or if he just imagined it, and Don Juan said, "you mustn't think that way." Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. The word "hallucinating" was never used.

The end of the book is a long, meaningless string of jargon words he made up, things like "put positive emphasis on the idea" and "the rule of the undertaking of non-ordinary reality," or some such nonsense. "Non-ordinary reality" was what he called hallucinating. Since they weren't imagined, then it was real, but not ordinary. Then there's two different realities, so let's make up a new term, "non-ordinary reality" to describe what are actually just drug trips.

Not being an anthropologist, I can't evaluate the quality of this book as a work of anthropology. From what I've read, anthropologists aren't thrilled with it either. I can only evaluate its quality as a memoir, and in that respect, it sucked. I could see how hippies in the 60's would love this book. "We're not being lazy and getting high, we're practicing Yaqui spirituality and experiencing non-ordinary reality!"