June 24, 2025 • 55 mins
Not many are aware that one of the most successful “new age” authors, Carlos Castaneda, lead a cult. The women that made up the inner circle of his cult were called “the witches” and five of them disappeared soon after Castaneda’s death in 1998. In an all too familiar trope, Castaneda’s mythology was built on lies, narcissism, hypocrisy, and abuse, yet the witches remain missing. Did they commit mass suicide, or are they in control of the cult’s workshops (Tensegrity) and publishing empire.
Theme Music by Matt Glass: https://www.glassbrain.com/
Instagram: @astudyofstrange
Support the Show! astudyofstrange.substack.com/
Website: www.astudyofstrange.com
Hosted by Michael May
Email stories, comments, or ideas to astudyofstrange@gmail.com!
©2025 Convergent Content, LLC
LINKS
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8088.Carlos_Castaneda
https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B000APXVFG
https://www.altaonline.com/dispatches/a60923618/carlos-castaneda-cult-geoffrey-gray/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Warning this episode contains details
that some listeners may find disturbing.
In 2003,
in the scorching heat of Death Valley,two hikers made a grim discovery.
The remains of Patricia Parton, a womanwho had been missing for five years.
Her case, however, is not isolated.
(00:22):
Patricia was one of five women,all called the witches,
who were the inner circleof a controversial cult.
All of them have vanished.
Tonight, we look into the complexand fascinating questions
surrounding the continuing mysteryof the five vanished
witches, exploringwhat happened to Patricia and the possible
(00:43):
whereabouts of the other four womenwho disappeared alongside her.
This is a study of strange.
Welcome back to the show.
I am Michael May, and sittingacross from me is Mariah Clapp.
Hi, Mariah. How are you doing?
Hello, and thank you for inviting meto this auspicious occasion.
(01:06):
Yes, it is a pleasure to have you.
So I'll be very blunt and honestwith the audience.
This is a storyyou brought to my attention,
and I had to have you on a becauseit would be fun to have you on for it.
But also, this is such a huge storywith so many details,
so many lies,so many name changes, cult weirdness,
(01:28):
exercises, books, and there's so muchto get Ahold of that it is.
It's just a massive storyand I definitely need help.
So both of us have been doing researchon this story to, to try to share it.
So it's a wild one.
I feel like I need to come upwith a phrase to tell everybody,
like buckle up, everybody.
It's gonna get wild and crazy, but I don'tI don't have any lines prepared
(01:50):
and I don't like that one.
Do you have anydo you have any lines to get us started?
Put on our shamanic robes together.
Yeah. Oh, that's more appropriate.
Put on your shamanic robes. Sit down.
And I feel like it's more meaningfulthat we're two way people saying that
things are sincethe story is entirely about,
not entirely about, but it is mostlyabout appropriation abuse.
(02:11):
Right? Absolutely.
And so it makes sense.
I'll also say this to listeners, to peoplethat may know this story
or are interested in this story.
So you're listening to hear moreor hear a different take on it.
I there's no waywe can cover everything in this story.
There's just absolutelyno way we'd have to spend a year long,
(02:32):
sort of like documentary podcast projectto actually tell everything.
So we just won't cover everything, butwe will cover what we think is important
and to tell the story.
But if there's something we missedor something we misconstrued, let me know.
I would love to do a follow up on this,so feel free to write
in a study of stranger at gmail.comand let us know.
(02:53):
It looks like you get excitedabout that too.
Like, I'd love to. Yeah, I want to hear.
I want people to write in things.
There's like a small but spiritedgroup of people engaged in this topic. So.
So I'm going to start telling the story,and you jump in
when you feel like you need to know,or I'll ask questions along the way.
So in 1998,five women left their home in Los Angeles.
(03:16):
Oh, I'd never practicepronouncing their names.
Maria. Okay, so Tatia, Tatia.
Abelard I said Tatia, I had to,but I heard somebody on an interview
chased her.
But they also could be wrong,so who knows?
So I'm going to say Tatia,Adeline, Florinda, Donna Gro, Talia Bay,
Patricia Parton, and Kylie Lundell.
(03:38):
I will say everybody has differentnames, multiple multiple names.
It's the better way to phrase that.
So just be aware and I will come backto that a little bit later on.
So word was that these women had toldothers that they were going on a trip.
They were leaving town for a while,and weeks later
a red Ford Escort was foundabandoned in Death Valley.
Death Valley.
(03:59):
It is the lowest elevationin the United States.
It's in California,
and it's a place where I believethe hottest temperatures on the planet
have been recorded, if not the hottest.
It's like some of the hottestand where this Ford was
found was not an easy place to drive to.
It's an area that it's recommendedto have an off road vehicle.
And it's essentiallyyeah, it's just essentially off road.
(04:20):
And it's neara place called Panamint Dunes.
And a park ranger namedDavid Brenner found the car, searched
the area for its owner,couldn't find anybody,
and noted that the car was strangebecause there's a lot of abandoned cars
in Death Valley,
but this one had been cleaned out, meaningnot like stuff had been stolen, but
essentially anything that would identifythe owner was out of the car.
(04:42):
There was no identifying stuff left.
I'm sure they could still usea license plate
and Vin to search who it was,and that's what they did.
And they found out it belonged to a womannamed Patricia Parton.
Parton and other women,
the other women I mentionedearlier were nowhere to be seen.
No one had seen them in weeks.No one had heard from them.
They were missing.
And perhaps Parton's car was a clue.
(05:03):
Lewis Marquez, Talia Bai's brother,
went to the police in 1999,begging for authorities to investigate.
They didn't.
Probablybecause there's probably like rules around
you have to have more informationor something like that.
But police didn't start investigating.
That's very generous, Mike.
Yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right.
I'm being very generous about it.
Five years after Parton's Red Fordwas found in Death Valley, two hikers
(05:24):
discovered the remains of a dead bodynear the Panamint Dunes area.
And it wasn't until 2006that they were able to conclude that
this was the dead bodyof Patricia Parton, but
none of the other bodies have been found.
All right.
I'm going to pause, just for a second.
Mariah, is there anything about
discovering the car or the bodythat you want to add to any of that?
(05:46):
Well, the body, I think, was
found with the I always love the detail ofof the pink jogging.
Yeah. The pink.
Did you say that?
And I oh, I didn't know,I didn't know that was great.
Yeah it was, it was a pink outfitand I've read it, I've read one article
that they found the skulland then the body later,
but then I other articles,it sounds like it was all together.
So there is a little bitof like conflicting.
I'm not sure they found the skull.
(06:08):
Oh, maybe that's what it was.
Maybe it's that they couldn'tfind the skull.
And I will say, like all of these details,this entire story
is like a such a patchwork of
guesses, facts and myths all at once.
And I think that's part of the journey.
So that's it? Is it? It definitely is.
And there's a lot of questions aroundPatricia Parton.
(06:29):
They were.
Her death was claimed to bean undetermined, undetermined.
Thank you.So it's an undetermined cause of death.
And meanwhile,Tasha Aberlour, Florinda Donner,
Talia Bay and Kylie Lund,all they remain missing to this day.
So who are all of these womenwe've been talking about?
Well, they were all born with differentnames, except for Patricia Parton.
(06:51):
I think I'm using her birth namewhen I say her. Yes.
You're mixing it up like that. Yeah.
And they had all changed their namewhen they began following
the very successful new author,Carlos Castaneda.
And Carlos referred to the members of hisinner circle, these women as the witches.
Or you also hear
check mules, although apparently notall of them were considered check mules.
(07:12):
Have you figured that out at all? Yes.
It seems as though the rankingswere probably shifting
at different times, and that's whyI've just kind of stuck to the witches.
Because definitely
that includes
all the womenthat are like key to this story, I think.
Absolutely.
And Chuck mules, that is a term thatit references a Mesoamerican sculpture.
(07:36):
So it's something that Carloskind of usurped
from, from again,a metro, a Mesoamerican culture.
And they,they all that helped develop a program
that Castaneda taught called tensegrityregistered trademark.
By the way, can I say that,and they helped run his company
Clear Green, and they had written booksas part of this network of content.
(07:59):
In 1998, soonbefore all these women disappeared
and Patricia was found,Carlos Castaneda had died.
And soon before he died,he changed his will,
leaving a lot of moneyand control of his company to the widgets.
Done, done done.
All right.
So I think we should sharesome information about each of these women
(08:22):
just so people can get to know thema little bit better.
Do you what do you want to tackle that?
Maria?
Yeah, I think I'm going to startwith the most enigmatic of many
enigmatic characters,which is the Amalia marquez Talia Bay.
So Amalia marquez is her bornname, and Talia Bay and I.
Maybe she's meant to be called Talia,but I never say her name without saying
(08:45):
Talia Bay.
And I also think I usually try to call herAmalia because her family has been
so, one of the more active families,I think, in trying to find her. Yes.
Yeah.
And I think, like the outcomesfor them, are a little bit more rooted
in getting their lovedone back than necessarily,
I don't know, acknowledging the journeythey went on.
(09:07):
Yeah, yeah.
So anyway, Amalia was from Puerto Rico.
Most of these women areabout the same age, with one exception.
Two exceptions,but we'll get to them later.
So she's born in Puerto Rico in 1955,
and she moved to LA, specifically,I believe,
to seek Carlos outbecause she wanted to learn from him.
(09:29):
And I believe thatbefore she arrived there, she had a life
as an entrepreneurand businesswoman to some degree.
But I couldn'tfind a lot of details about that.
She did eventually becomethe president of Clear Green,
and it sounds like she was kind of likethe financial brains behind the operation.
So I think she broughta lot of those skills with her.
And and I believe that she developedsome more what later on.
(09:51):
And I think that she joined a bit laterthan the other, some of the other women.
So that's actually more or lessthe extent of information I have on her.
Did you find anything on her?
Did I not really know? No. That's you.
I think you even did that more than I did,
because I didn't even knowshe was born in Puerto Rico.
But no, she's she's definitely onethat has less information for sure.
(10:12):
Yes. For sure.
So we'll put her aside for a second,
and then I'm going to zoomback to the original three.
And these three are
really important because they're the onesthat he started with.
Yeah.
And they're the three that he was likemade this core family with.
But I guess we'll get to that later.
So the three are number one.
Cathleen Pullman aka Carol Tiggs
(10:35):
aka muni Arrafaka can we say pussy in this?
Yeah, absolutely. Go for it.
AKA Super Pussy.
AKA Elizabeth Austin,
Chickie, the Nungua woman and my favorite,
the Death to Fire.
That's awesome.
(10:56):
And just to clarify, and I hope I'mnot stepping on some sort of plan,
you had to to introduce everybody,but she's somebody that's not missing.
Correct? She is not missing. She's alive.
And there may have been a brief periodof uncertainty about where she was.
But she was never there was never anyonetrying to seek her out.
Yeah, I will sayit can be a little confusing because prior
(11:19):
to this disappearance,where the final disappearance earlier
in her life, when she initially joined upwith Castaneda,
she did leave for a while.
After being part of this initial group,she left, I think, for around ten years.
And so, she during that time, I believe,
was studying acupunctureand having a marriage.
But when she came back,I think that Castaneda explained it
(11:41):
as her being on a journeyin a, in an alternate dimension.
And I think sometimes it can get confusingwhether that happened.
But that was earlier, that was doneand gone before these other women
went missing.
So she was like the motherfigure of the group.
I'm trying to think.
I think she actuallydid. She? Oh yeah. She
oh, you know what?
Sidebar.
Because you like, is the man she wasmarried to was Rebecca Damon's ex-husband.
(12:05):
What what I did what about her?
I guess she married him later.
I forget we're just a little confusing,but she was definitely married
to the same manthat Rebecca De mourning was at one point.
Wow. So a little Hollywoodsprinkled in there.
But she supposedly met Carloswhen he was in a time of strife,
and they both have very different versionsof how they met,
(12:27):
but they're both bonkers,and they essentially both involve them,
both having a spiritual moment ofof profound,
rebirth, death in a desperate moment.
I probably classifieda lot of different ways.
And then they came into each other's livesand had sex for nine days
in a spiritual, sexual,
(12:48):
situation with her super pussy.
And as part of that process,she passed some of her death, defy death
to fire magic into Carlos while receivingsome of Carlos's Nograles sperm magic.
Nice, nice.
Love it.
That classic storyI would say to you that out loud. 330
(13:08):
but she,
like most of the other womenin this story, were students.
She was a student at UCLAwhen she met Carlos.
She, like some of the other women,had a father who was not in the picture.
He had died in a car crash.
He would eventually go onto help develop tensegrity in her later
time and had a lot of, a lot of influencearound recruiting other witches.
(13:29):
So she was like a mother figure to some ofthese other witches that came along.
And she's one of two women
who was a little bit olderthan the other key, the other key members.
Right. Those were all the really fun.
So those are the backgroundyou need on her.
The next one is Marion Simcoe,
and her Cassidy name was the TashaAbelard,
(13:50):
aka Anna Marie Carter, aka Ricky.
Not as many as some of the other people,but she still they they love their names.
Do lieutenant players and names.
She is one of the women who was missing.
She was 19 when she met Carlosand was studying anthropology, at UCLA.
She went on to get her PhD,so we can also call her
(14:13):
doctor Marianne Simcoe,if we feel like it.
She moved on to the compound
originally with the previous Kathleen,and then another lady will meet that.
I'm obsessed with.
And she is one of the people who claimsto have spent time with Don Juan.
First, we'll learn about DonJuan later, though, I guess.
Yeah.
And she wrote a book called
(14:34):
The Sorcerers Crossing a Woman's Journey.
And one of the things I noticed is a lotof these different women published books.
And Carlos obviously publisheda lot of books from huge publishers.
Like they're all
none of these people are publishing booksfrom little Hole in the wall publishers.
There's like Viking and Simon Schuster.
Penguin.
Yeah. And we'll, we'll,we'll get to that a little bit later.
(14:57):
But the,
yeah, this, this whole
network of things around Carlos is it'shuge in the publishing world.
He was a highly successfulauthor with these
sort of spiritual and spiritualand New Age books.
Yeah.
So I'll, I will get into that a little bitlater on to explain to everybody.
But yes, I think most of these womenhelped author or authored their own books.
(15:19):
Yes, part of this companyand yeah, most of them
with very big publishers, which is part ofpart of the story we'll get into.
Yes. And the lifestyle around that.
So one of the other key things about
Marianne is shewas she loved karate in the martial arts.
And so her and the next woman that we'llintroduce are the genesis of white.
And she became such a critical partof this whole story.
(15:43):
Absolutely.
I love that it was like her and her bestiein their martial arts class.
And then they meet him.
But some of the other thingsthat are interesting about her,
she claimed to have spent some time,living as an ape girl in a tree.
She spent some time, pretending that
she was, pretendingmight be not the way she characterized it.
She spent some time as a man named Ricky,and she used, like,
(16:06):
a prosthetic in her pantsto help her seduce women.
During that period.
And I think she wrote aboutboth of those things in that book.
Not that you need more.
Those are actually
you don't even need any wordsso much already.
So what's her deal?
(16:28):
And then there's my.
Okay, this is the last of the first three.
And Michael, I'm obsessed with this woman.
This is. And I will use her.
She originally was named RégineMargarita Thol,
but her name that she adopted was Fleur.
And a doner gro,
or phyllo dough, which I don't love.
That nickname.I'm going to call her Fleur.
And, because this is the name she used,she hardly had any pseudonyms.
(16:52):
This is the name she used on her books.
I believe she actually adopted that namebefore becoming, like, fully
immersed, even in, in the Castaneda world.
So her background is fascinating.
I found conflicting reports,but I believe the accurate
one is that she was born in Germany.
Okay.
Her familyimmigrated to Venezuela in 1946.
(17:15):
And when I hear about German
people emigrating to Venezuela in 1946,you know, I need to look that stuff up.
So I was trying to find anything I could
to give context to this, because we knowshe's like this blond white woman.
And Ilooked up the background of her name.
There are very traditional.
(17:35):
Her parentsnames are very traditional German names,
and she was born in this towncalled Amberg.
And Hamburg has a fascinating historybecause they had a Jewish population
beginning pretty earlyafter their community was founded.
And like the first and second century,however, there were hundreds of years
of oppression and persecutiontowards the Jews of this community.
(17:55):
And so they cameand went kind of over the years.
And eventually, when it became WorldWar Two, there were hardly any left.
There were like 12 Jewishpeople left in this community.
And so after the war,
this community was part of the area
that was under I wrote a whole thing downso I wouldn't mess it up.
(18:19):
Okay.
So, it became a center for housing,mostly Jewish Jewish refugees,
and it was a part of Bavariathat was in the American sector.
It also had a large army base on it.
So it went from being a place
that had pretty much gotten ridof its entire Jewish population,
to a place that all of a suddenhad like a lot of Jewish people
and American soldiers living in it. Right.
(18:41):
And so that led to themleaving the her family.
In theory, that's when they left as 1946.
It would have been a year or twoafter all that happened.
And they lived in Caracas.
And so I was like, well,
where were all these German immigrantsliving in Venezuela?
And let me tell you,that's a fascinating one as well.
(19:02):
So I don't know for sure that she livedin this particular settlement.
But there was this one settlement in themountains in Venezuela outside Caracas.
Did you read about this, Michael?
Not for this story, butI think I know what you're talking about.
But it's like they're recreatingGermany in this, like, little town, right?
Is that what you're. Yeah, yeah.
And if you Google it,
(19:22):
I didn't write down what it's called,so I'll look it up in a second.
But it looks like Germany.
Like it looks like Bavaria.
It has all the same Bavarian architecture.
They it was a very small community.
They were controllingwho was allowed to live there.
So they were assimilating to the partsof, of Venezuelan culture
and South American culturethat they liked.
But also very muchbringing their own German bubble there.
(19:44):
Yeah.
So aside from being,
an enclave, it also has all these,like, tones of racial purity,
which I feel like comes upa lot throughout this story.
And that'swhy I'm so curious about these roots here.
Like me, she was maybe potentially raisedin a similar, if not the same community.
(20:04):
And so that's her background.
And then as she grew up, she was actually,
but really,really fascinating in her own right.
So she when she met Carla,she was doing karate with her bf Marianne.
And they were both, like,excelling in anthropology.
And, Florinda spoke like 3 or 4 languages.
(20:25):
And she was really cultured and,and I'm sure people there loved her.
And I'm sure she had, like, a confidencethat was just very compelling.
All the things I read about herwas that she was basically like the other
the other compelling force in the house
besides Carlos.
I've been waiting to share that partfirst.
(20:46):
I'm so excited.
I'm so glad that's over.
I can't believe I didn't write downthe name of the town, though.
I'll look it up. Yeah.
So one of the things I noticed,
so she wrote she wrotea book called Charbonneau A visit
to a Remote and Magical worldin the South American Rainforest.
That's the whole title.
Wow. It's so long.
And, yeah, it's a rabbit hole.
(21:07):
I could really go down far with that one.
But the synopsis or the CliffsNotes,I should say,
is that very similarto what Carlos had done with his writing?
She basically appropriated other people'swork and research and experiences
and then frame them as
if they were her own,including a true life account of a woman
(21:29):
who actually spent her life in captivitywith the indigenous peoples.
That this book was supposedly about.
So I say that because rude Florinda,
very wrong to steal this woman's lifeand make it your own, very, very rude.
Florinda, if you're listening,and I feel like she is, we'll get to that.
Of course she might. Yeah, I don't know.
(21:51):
Very rude.
She wrote a couple other books, including,
The Witch's Dream, which I got a copy ofand started reading a little bit.
She was
described as intellectual and rebellious,
and she has this quote that is from,
Amy Wallace, who has one of the only Perspeople who's written
a firsthand account of her experienceswhile living in this environment.
(22:14):
And she says if Lorena told her oncethat one of her dreams
as a child was to own a farm
where she controlled everybody,including the lives,
not just the livestockbut also the people, and that she would be
breeding the people and choosingwhich people would breed with others.
So when you hear that in the context
(22:35):
of her background,
it's a lot.
It's a lot.
And I feel like if I were going to labelanyone else in the story besides Carlos
a narcissist,it would definitely be Florinda.
Yeah, I don't know.
I'm not a doctor, but that is some wildand deeply rooted worldview.
Yeah, shaping,
(22:57):
stuff.
And yeah,
she was only photographeda couple times ever.
Which kills me.
As with all of these.
So that's Florinda.
I'm obsessed with Florinda.
Nice, nice.
I don't know why I'm saying nice, but I.
You know, it's exciting.
(23:17):
It's it is nice
to be able to have someone elsethat will indulge this obsession
to this degree,because usually I have to get people
a little drunk and corner them.
So the rest of my theory is about this.
All right.
So moving on.
The, next the next witchthat would eventually disappear.
(23:38):
You've heard her name is Kylie Lindahl,
but she was born as Deanne Albers,
aka Kylie Lund, aka Kylie
Lundgren, aka Astrid.
And I think some of these,like Astrid, are.
They're like cute little householdpet names.
So her background is quite fraught.
As with some of,the other women, but hers in particular.
(24:01):
She, lost her mother early.
She was kind of raised by her sister.
She had two kids really early,like high school.
She dropped out of high schoolto have her two children.
And becauseshe didn't have, a partner in her life
and she didn't have her education,she struggled a lot.
She ended up getting to some petty crime,and some other troubles.
(24:22):
She had a lot of housing insecurity.
So when she ended up joining Carlos,unlike some of these other women, like,
she was really comingfrom a place of having known.
Yeah, real, real struggle.
Yeah.
And I feel likehad such a fierce motivation
to create a life for herselfbased on that.
Having so much struggle,so little control that being able to be
(24:44):
more self-possessed, at least that way,it seems like she probably perceived it.
And she's the woman that you see,if anyone Googles any of this,
she's the woman that probably is likethe face of this more than anyone else,
because she's the image that comes upand the research tensegrity. Yes.
Yeah, she's the first.
She's the first one I ever researchedafter you and I started talking about it,
because there's a great piecein the Alta Journal
(25:06):
about her that leads into the storyof Carlos Castaneda.
And she's also the main personleading the exercises
that you dosee in the videos of tensegrity.
Which again, we'll comewe'll come to that a little bit later on.
But yeah, you're definitely right.
I see her more than anybody else.
That's for sure. For sure.
And I realize I just, I understand now
(25:27):
that I don't have to get through all ofmy information all at once.
It's all right.
Okay.
And finally, we have the womanwhose skeleton was found in the desert,
Patricia Lee Parton, aka Nouri
Alexander, aka Claude, aka
Patricia Scylla Fant, aka
(25:51):
The Blue Scout.
Yeah.
Which of all of the women.
I think she has the most mythologyfrom her time living in the Castaneda
household?
She was brought into the homewhen she was 19.
I'm sorry.
And she was introduced to Carloswhen she was 19.
(26:12):
And she was a waitress.
She had actually justgotten married to this guy.
And this guy had been studying
with Carlos for a whileand brought her to a meeting.
And the way that worked outis like a couple weeks
after they got married,
she was like, I'm divorcing youbecause this guy is way more compelling.
So that'swhere the Scylla Fant came from is
(26:33):
she was marriedto a man with that last name and got it.
During her time there,
she adopted a child
like persona for the vastmajority of her time,
where there's backstorythat maybe we'll get into.
But basically,
she was a supernatural being to Carlos,and he really nurtured that in her.
(26:56):
And so she operated in this placewhere she was both studying
anthropology at UCLA, giving lectures,teaching tensegrity,
and also, thoughat home, playing with dolls,
being tended to,
being petulant, to her housemates.
And then on top of all of this,Carlos would eventually adopt her.
(27:18):
He had called her his daughterfor a long time.
He did eventually adopt her legally.
And so heshe also was having sex with him.
So we'll get into the sex stuff later.
But I think it's important to her, too,just with her to just note
she was infantilized for her entireexperience that we're going to talk about
and was both treated like a childand like a full blown sexual partner.
(27:42):
Partner is not the right word.
But that's how she was treated by.
Yeah.
And I think it's important to also mentionwhen she was adopted by Carlos.
She's an adult.
And yet they still went throughthis process of formally adopting her.
And I would say just to put itin the back of everybody in to tease
as we will get into theoriesat the end of this whole story
about what could have happened to Patricia
(28:02):
and what could have happenedto the other missing, which is
and Patricia obviously has slightly uniquebecause they have found her body.
But one of the theories is that,the other witches did not like her,
and I'll just sort of
leave it at that because she isshe is unique in this group of people.
She also went on to be one of the drivingforces of the magazine
(28:23):
that their organization put out, calledWarriors Way, and she wrote poetry for it,
which is extremely dark,so I'll save that for later.
But I have some of it written down.
Oh you do.
Oh, that's great with it. Yeah.
So that is everybody, right?
I'm not forgetting anybody.
Yes, those are all of the key women.
But I will say just for a little bitmore use, I am referencing
(28:44):
Amy Wallace quite regularly,so I do want to point her out.
She was not in the group of womenwho went missing.
She was, not kind of in the same.
She didn't have the same storyas the other women did.
She joined the household.
And I don't even knowshe ever really lived in the household,
but she joined the cult.
So let's just say, later in life,even though she had met Carlos
(29:05):
for at a very young age,she didn't become pursued by their
by their groupand by him until later in life.
And she is the one person who wrote a booklength account of her time there.
And so when I mentioned Amy Wallaceand she has since passed away,
but that's what I'm mentioning.
And she, in her own right, was anaccomplished writer and had a whole life.
(29:27):
So she's worth mentioning.
And then there are these two randomladies,
that we won't get into,that are still alive.
And then Margaret Runnion the wife.
The wife?
Yeah.The ex-wife and sort of mother. Right.
So, if it's not clear, everybody,this is a cult we're talking about.
You can.
I did mentioned something earlierin the beginning here. And,
(29:50):
you can tell the the way
we're talking about a householdin, in writings and different names.
This is a cult.
This is the backgroundof this whole thing.
And tensegrityis one of the names for the cult,
because that is a thing that they teachand train, by the way.
It still exist.
It is still goingon. People, learn about it.
I think you can get certifiedto teach about can
(30:13):
and people aren't awarethat it's associated with a cult.
And it's really funnybecause when I started researching this
and you, you get led to places like Redditor you get led to YouTube videos,
or you get led to articles and you'll seein the comments of people being like, oh,
this changed my life and blah, blah, blah.
This is so great.
And and people are justa little unaware of
some of the darker elementsthat's behind this.
(30:37):
And like other cults, Castaneda,the the father of this cult column,
he preached about
suicidein these different realms of things,
which we'll probably get into a little bitmore, I'm sure.
And by most accounts, people theorizethat because his inner circle,
the witches are missing,that one of the things
that could have happenedis they all committed mass suicide.
(30:58):
But only Patricia Partonhas been found alone.
So some have tried to searchthat surrounding area near where
her body was found,because maybe the other women
are out there somewhere,but yet they have not found anybody.
And that's only one theory.
We'll get to more theoriesas we keep going through this story.
So I would assume the next step in this.
Maria, correct me if I'm wrong or add
(31:18):
anything you want to add first,but I think we got to rewind now.
You believe we rewind sound
to Carlos Castaneda and learn about himand where this all started.
Yes, I want to share one quick fantasy,which is just that if the sky
were the limit and time and bordersand money were no object,
I would like to say thatwe would give the listeners, a deeply more
(31:41):
experiential, journey where we would goand get certified in tensegrity,
100% documented meticulously,and that I'm so sorry we can't do that.
But what a thing to imagine. Absolutely.
So if anybody out there wants to fundthat, I am happy to take on that project.
I'm sure Maria would loveto be part of it.
Let's do it.
We're open for business.
Send me an email,a study of stranger gmail.com,
(32:02):
and we'll figure out the financial detailsto make that happen.
It would be incredible.
And Netflix, if you're listening,I know you want that series.
So come on, someone put your moneywhere your heart is and us.
So Carlos Castaneda,
he was born in Peruon Christmas Day in 1925.
(32:24):
Although I will say there'sthere's some arguments against that.
But in my best research, he was bornin Peru on Christmas Day in 1925.
He came to the United States in 1955.
I don't know the exact motivationbehind this move,
but I will say in the 60she started lying about his age.
He was older than he was telling peoplehe was.
(32:47):
He was 5 or 6 years younger.
He was 5 or 6 yearsolder than what he was telling people.
Excuse me.
He became a naturalized citizen in 1957,and in 1958
he enrolled in UC at UCLA in anthropology.
And in 1960 he married Margaret Runyon,who you mentioned,
and he adopted her son,C.J., who's also known as Adrian Vachon.
(33:10):
I think currently I should also mentionhe wanted to be an artist.
Right. Maria like that was his original.
His backstory is a lot like Hitler's.
Hitler's? Yeah.
And he claimed that he studied overseasfor art, but it turns out he never did.
Yeah, that was definitely a lie. Yeah.
And so you're starting listeners, dearlisteners, you're starting to pick up.
There are a lot of lies that come outwith, Carlos Castaneda story
(33:31):
The Age and also where he's from becomesa big lie because he's lies to people
about where he's actually from, thathe studied art overseas all of it a lie.
So just follow those breadcrumbs as we goalong.
Put it this way, if this were a podcastabout the true parts of Carlos
Costa in his life, we wouldn'thave to make it a double episode.
(33:52):
That's right.
A minute long episode. Exactly.
And not nearly as interesting.
So fortunately for us podcasters,it is very interesting.
So from what I could tell,and please correct me if I'm wrong here,
he wasn't necessarily like a bad husbandor father to KHJ,
like I couldn't find many storiesthat he was a bad husband.
(34:15):
He definitely wasn't great,
but that's very.
I'm comfortable calling him a bad husband.
But okay,so you're saying I don't think there's
any real history of or knowledge of him,like beating her eating up.
Exactly.
So I guess if that's what metric.
He was a great husband by that metric.
He was great.
But he did leave.
He did leave to go study in Mexico.
(34:37):
So essentially he specialized
in Native American shamanism as he wasstudying anthropology and shamans.
I'm sure people are also familiarwith them in general,
sort of speaking very generic generically.
They're healers, right?
They make medicines and things like that.
I know it's a fairly mundane wayto describe shamans,
but I think most people have a feelfor what they are.
(34:57):
And what made Carlosstand out to his teachers
and peers at UCLAwas that he was from South America,
and although a lot of his white peersjust thought he was Mexican,
so it made sense that he was studyingMexican, shamanism.
And he did tell peoplethat he was also from Brazil at one point.
I don't know whyor why he started lying about that. And
(35:21):
in May of
1960, he left to go study in Mexico.
He wanted to learn about shamanismfirsthand on the ground.
So he went to the state of Sonora,and he wanted to meet
the Yaqui people, the indigenous peoplesof the area and parts of southwest U.
US and the Yankeesbelieved that the universe.
This is just a very generalized statement,just so people understand
(35:43):
the basis of this.
But Yankees believe that the universehas multiple dimensions, different planes
of being that we as humans,we can't access all those planes of being.
And this includes the dream world.
And Carlos thought all of thiswould be great for his thesis.
This is a wonderful topic.
I'm going to dive into this
and sit here in Mexico and studyall of this and write a thesis about it.
(36:06):
And he wanted to find shamans and healers,and people kept telling him,
according to his his own words,people kept telling him to meet someone
named DonJuan Matisse or Mateus, Mateus Mateus.
I like my TOS, I do too.
That's the way I've heard.I've heard it both ways.
But I like Mateus better,so I'm going with that.
And Maria, do you know the storythat he shared about how he met Don Juan?
(36:29):
Did you ever learn that the oneabout being at the bus station?
Yeah. Yeah.
So he was he was trying to find Don Juan,apparently was really hard to find him.
And he ran into him at a bus station,I think in Arizona or New Mexico.
I can't remember exactly now.
And he approached him and he startedtelling him, hey, I'm writing this thesis.
(36:49):
I'm studying shamans.
Talk with me, work with me, let's do it.
And Don Juan wouldn'tspeak, didn't say a word.
And then the guy's bus showed up and downone of the bus and left.
And it's during this meetingthat Carlos claims that he felt something,
something very life changing, this amazingenergy that he couldn't quite describe.
So he got in his carand he, like, chased the bus.
And when the bus stopped,he was right there to meet Don Juan again.
(37:13):
And he approached him again and he said he
that he felt this energyand he had to learn from it firsthand.
So because of this, I guess this
very direct and aggressive approach.
Don water Don one said, yeah.
All right. I'll help you. I'll teach you.
I'm jumping around a little bit here,but Don Juan had said something
(37:35):
about plants, and that plantshave these different spirits,
and one of the very special plantsthat has a different spirit is peyote.
And if you eat peyote, the ancient spiritwould speak and communicate with you.
But sometimes this was a dark, scaryvision and Carlos had to try it himself.
And allegedly when he had beenterrified of drugs his whole life.
(37:58):
But he ended up trying peyote because DonJuan told him to and he had a vision.
He sick.
Carlos said that he had a memoryof his life.
Flash basically through his mindin an instant, and then it was all gone
before he saw a large black dogturn into a blinding light.
And Carlosspoke to Don Juan about this vision.
And Don Juan was very impressedthat he had this vision.
(38:20):
And he told Carlos that, all right,you can learn everything from me.
I will teach you everything, my sonor I don't think he said that, but
there you go.
Here.
I'm going to read it real quick.
I want to read a quote just because Ithought this is a great way to explain it.
This is from Tensegrity Wikividi.com,a great source of information, actually.
(38:42):
Here's the quote.
Castaneda wrotethat he was identified by Don Juan Meadows
as having in the energetic con
configuration of a Negro
who, if the spirit chose, could becomea leader of a party of warriors.
He also used the term negroto signify that part of the perception
which is in the realm of the unknown,
yet still reachable by man,implying that for his party of seers
(39:04):
Don Juan was in some waya connection to that unknown Castaneda.
Often Richard referred to the unknownrealm as non ordinary reality,
which indicated that this realm was indeeda reality, but radically different
from the ordinary realityexperienced by human beings.
So yeah, I just thoughtthat was a very interesting there.
(39:26):
Do you know how long he studied withDon Juan?
I think it was book.
Well,I think it was supposedly 4 or 5 years.
Yeah. And it was he'd go back and forth.
That's that's what I heard, too.
And I heard that he, like, talked to
his wife and was like, hey,I gotta go study in Mexico.
And that the way he tells it,she was like, yeah, do it.
That sounds great for you. But I'm sure,
(39:47):
as families
do, I'm sure it's not that easyjust to have the, the but the husband
and father in the household be like,I'm going to go to Mexico for a while.
I don't know when I'm back
and, and disappear, but,yeah, he studied for 4 or 5 years.
And my favorite part of this story,
because I don't know how college
worked back then, but he returned to UCLAafter all this time and had
(40:08):
written a manuscript and was like, hereyou go, here's my thesis.
And I'm like,
I think it's fair to say thatthe UCLA anthropology department during
this era was probably not holdingthe standard
for academic regularity.
What on earth would make you say that?
It's almost like he's
studying a certain topic around peoplethat studied anthropology at the time
(40:31):
at UCLA.
Yeah, yeah,it's really it's really interesting.
But that is what he did.
He returned to UCLA with this manuscript,and I'm just going to assume
he dropped it on his professor's deskand was like, here you are my thesis.
Thank you. I'll take an A. And he did.I think he got an A.
And he did graduate,with a degree in anthropology.
And the the thesis was titledThe Teachings of Don
(40:55):
Juan a Yaki Way of Knowledge.
And this would go on to become a book.
It was published as a book.
And he wrote, I believe, 12 bookstotal over his life after this first one.
And they became all of them, especially
this first one, the teachings of DonJuan became a huge hit.
It was selling 16,000 copies a weekwhen he started it.
(41:18):
It started off making a lot of moneypretty quickly.
And in those early years,the first few books
he wrote,just to give you a sense of these, in 1971
he wrote a separate realityFurther Conversations with Don Juan.
In 1972, he wrote journey to X-Line,
and then in 1974, tales of Power.
(41:39):
And all of them are about this man, Don.
One matters, all right.
Anything I'm forgetting is in there.
No, but I do wantI think there's it's important
to provide some context to that eraand what was going on,
because I keep seeing in different places,people will say that he was
the godfather of the New Age movement,and I think that's extremely reductive.
He was one piece of thismassive mass situation that was happening,
(42:02):
that gave rise to an enormous amountof potential
for capitalist gain in waysthat had not really been explored before.
So like in the 1950s, it was like,
oh, teenagers are our way to make moneyoff of off of the working class.
And then it became, oh, betterment.
And so we're kind of seeing it againnow, which I think is fascinating.
Yeah, we know a lot of the thingsthat are going on in this story,
(42:24):
I think are coming up againnow, but it was just this massive thing
where there wereso many different ways to,
be in this field.
And it also was taking place at a timewhen psychedelic medicine
and plant medicinewas being used in psychotherapy,
or had been being used in psychotherapyfor quite a while,
and then had eventually become lessaccessible
(42:45):
because the government was like,no more fun for you.
And so, like when you imagine this weirdomaking a ton of money
and being this huge, huge bestseller,it didn't happen.
He wasn't like a phenom wherethis all of a sudden came out of nowhere.
There was very much likea fertile environment for him
(43:05):
to grow and thrivein that he did not make.
He entered, he enter.
And that's a
I'm really gladyou made that point, actually,
because I think that's really importantto think about.
And it does showthat everything's connected,
like these thingsdon't come out of nowhere.
There is this movement,you know, obviously everybody knows about,
like the hippie movement,the free love movement.
But you can see that evolving as the 70scome about and into this world.
(43:29):
And also these are published,I think, these first handful of books,
they're all published by Simon Schuster.
If I'm not incorrect,which is a huge publisher.
So someone over there found thismanuscript and was like, you know
what, guys?
This could be a big hitand started publishing it.
So you're right,it is a very capitalistic kind of thing,
and he's just hitting it at the right timewhere he's able to.
(43:50):
Yeah, absolutely.
I also heard I'm
glad you mentioned the governmentsort of talking about psychedelics,
but I did read that, CarlosCastaneda is one of the many, many points.
But he was a big influenceon the government cracking down on that
and making it peyote illegaland other psychedelics illegal.
Because of the power of this,the New Age movement
(44:11):
was driving a lot of peopleto get involved and try psychedelics.
And so, yeah, and then they came around,it started shutting that down,
which may lead to tensegrity, which ismore of this like physical movement
instead of taking drugs,getting into this kind of thing.
Right. I'm.
Yeah, I'm glad you said that.
Because just as a quick side note,anyone who's looking this guy up like you
(44:34):
maybe hear about an institute,which is, was a center in in Big Sur.
It still exists now.
And it was a place where people could go.
And it is a, a retreat center
that's built on sacredindigenous lands of the Aislinn tribe.
And a bunch of white guys co-opted
that in the 50sthrough the 70s to the present.
(44:55):
That's a separate thing.
So I won't get fully into that.
But I went there last spring,for a Tropic breathwork retreat.
And I just want to say,because it's similarly to to tensegrity,
the idea with hollow Tropic Breathwork wasthere
were these people who had been taking LSDand doing psychotherapeutic work,
and then the LSD became illegal,and they were like,
how do we replicate this usingwithout using drugs?
(45:18):
And so they they came up with this ideawhere you would basically manipulate
your body with oxygen
to create an induced stateof realization and visions and whatnot.
And so I went, I did that for a week.
It was wild.
But one of the things that was kind
of a moment of clarity for meand for my friend that I went with was
we were kind of led on to believethat we would be having
(45:39):
these really intense, intense visionslike that.
We'd be feeling like we were rebirthingourselves, being strangled by octopus.
They really built it upinto being this amazing thing.
And halfway through the week,I realized and said to my friend, well,
but they were taking LSD for ten yearsbefore they started doing this breathwork.
Yeah, and LSD doesn't just leaveyour system, and explains so much.
(46:02):
So I also think a lot ofwhat was happening in the 70s
was all these peoplewho'd been experimenting with psychedelics
for years suddenly had theirat least easy access cut off,
which generates so much, stuff like this.
What do we do with all thisenergy and progress?
What do we do with all this excitementnow that our goodies have been taken away?
(46:23):
Yeah, absolutely.
At that. Got it. Yeah.
That's a fascinating sort of rabbit holeto go down for sure.
And I will say two, obviously
Carlos is talking about in his bookpsychedelics.
That's a big part of of DonJuan's teachings
and incorporating that within the culturethat Carlos is writing about.
(46:45):
However,
as these books are coming outand he's starting to get very famous and
and his books are becoming morewell known, he is on the cover of time
magazine at one point, and peopleare paying more attention to his books.
And there are some questions
about this Don Juan gentlemanand that come up pretty much right away
as they get very popularand some inconsistencies with the stories.
(47:07):
One that I have not read the books,I've read bits of them,
but in the first book, Don one is verymysterious, is a very mysterious
fellow teaching thingskind of like Yoda or something.
And then then the second book, he'skind of like funny and jovial
and whatever, like the characterizationsort of changes of Don one.
And this really stood out to a gentlemannamed Richard de Mille,
(47:29):
and he immediatelywanted to know more about Don Juan.
He wanted to go to the source.
He wanted to see
field notes from the studiesas because this is an anthropology
student, he'sgoing to be taking field notes
and wanted more informationbecause he was very curious about it,
even though he was seeingthese inconsistencies.
And apparently when he contactedor someone else had contacted it,
(47:49):
contacted Carlos Castanedaand asked for field notes, Castaneda said,
oh, they're they're gone.
They were lost in a flood in Westwood.
And, there's they're not there anymore.
So that was weird.
And De Mille was actually pretty goodat spotting some fakery and things.
It's a very interesting guy.
He's the nephew of Cecil Be de Millethat I didn't even know until last night.
Super fascinating.
Dude has a very interesting story himself,but at one point he worked with L
(48:13):
Ron Hubbard from Scientology.
And so he has this this experience with,I don't know, chicanery.
And it's like the best wordI can think of right now.
And something about something about DonJuan was rubbing him the right way.
And there's a good reason for that.
And that is because DonJuan Matus does not exist.
Don Juan is not real.
He never existed.
(48:34):
He wasn't real at all.There's no better way to say it.
It was made up.
Carlos made him up.
And one of the things that kind of.
There's a lot of reasons why that peoplestarted to think that this was fake.
One of them is the psychedelics.
That'swhy you made me think of this right now.
And apparently the Yaqui culture,they do not do psychedelics.
The peyote is not part of it.
(48:54):
And yet Carlos was like,yeah, it's oh, this is all part of it.
And also, I think Richard de Milleand some other people noticed that
some of the stories that Carlos is writingabout were literally plagiarized
from other books, including some booksfrom like the early 1900s.
So they were finding parts that werecompletely copied from other works.
Yeah.
Somewhere you can go and look at them too.
(49:16):
I think they compiled a list of quotesright from the books,
and then source themto wherever they originally came from.
So if you're curious,I think that exists somewhere.
Which leads me to wonder,like Carlos, my man,
why did you choose this?
These people and peyote.
Like, why did you not like youhad all this research, that real research
(49:38):
with real information and still choseto combine these two things
that he knew or should have at leastknown, didn't go together.
Absolutely.
And it just kind of boggles, man.
It does make me think.
I wonder at first if he was just like,oh, I'm going to go have fun.
I'm going to go sleep
with a lot of women in Mexico or whatever,which is part of that's part of Carlos.
(50:01):
That's part of his whole thing.
Right?
And like, I'm just going to partyand I'll make something up for the thesis
like they think I'm studying.
They think I'm Mexican anyway.
Like, I'll just,you know, create a thing for a thesis.
I don't think he initially wrote itthinking, this is going to be a hit book.
I reallyI that's just my own personal theory.
I think he just startedas this is my thesis kind of thing, and
(50:22):
I don't have ChatGPT yet to writemy thesis, so I'll just make it up.
Yeah, I could be wrong.
I'd like to believe there's
an alternate timelinewhere Carlos wasn't like a destructive,
sociopathic manipulatorand and that he used those different,
same skills for goodand and the good that he used it for
(50:43):
was to just, like, do a complete on,on academia and anthropological studies.
Yeah.
Yeah, that would have been really funny
if he had done all thisand then eventually been like,
gotcha, idiots.
That would have been pretty fun, right?
So what happensnext is really interesting, though,
(51:06):
because as these books are coming outand people are starting to scrutinize
them, by the way, people still buy theseand totally believe and done one.
That to meis the most fascinating part of it.
I've already talked about it earlier.
When people talk about tensegrityand people like this
change is so great, it's so wonderful,
and the people still read these booksand think that one is real
and unknowingly, you know, notknowing the history of this whole thing.
(51:27):
A lot of podcasters, a lot of
well, you find out as well.
No, I didn't, but I'm not shocked
because I think podcasting,the podcasting world,
I think people can make good moneyon sort of the new age
health and wellness mental aspect things.
I think those can do quite well.
So I'm not surprised that people do it.
(51:49):
And I don't thinkpeople just do the research.
I don't think people are maliciouslysort of ignoring it
or that there's I'msure there's some bias that goes into it,
but I think people just find the book
and they're like,oh, this is a very popular book.
It's sold for years, and they read itand they get something from it
and not realizing that it's made upand not tied to anything specific.
That being said, the 70s becomesa very interesting time for Carlos
(52:10):
because even though he's got hit books,he has a career and his publishers
are not coming out publicly to say,oh yeah, it's fiction.
Like they keep calling it, you know, anew age book or health whatever.
The whateverthe category is, they don't change it.
When it comes out that this is all made upand he starts becoming more reclusive,
staying by himself, he ends up purchasing,
(52:32):
in the spring of 1973,two adjoining Spanish style bungalows
at 1672 Pandora Avenue in Westwood,
which is very close to the UCLA campus
and essentially he starts forming a cult.
And this is where the cult comes in.
And I think this is a great place to end.
(52:52):
Part one of the series of The Missing,which is before we get
into the cult stuff, any final thoughtsfor the stuff that we've covered so far?
Right.
Yeah, I do, since we're talkingabout his schooling more in this one,
there's a story that I really likeabout how his original thesis idea
(53:13):
was to studythe use of plants and indigenous.
I don't know if he had chosen specific,but he wanted to do his thesis
around plantsand the use of plant medicine.
And and his advisor didn't let him andtold him that was a work for a botanist.
And so I have two thoughts to that.
One, it's like,that's the rigidity of academia,
because that's such a Western white wayof looking at at plant, at plant medicine
(53:36):
as not connected to human beingsand their behavior.
Of course, they're inherently linkedin a lot of these cultures.
And then to the other thingthat's funny to me about that is like,
what would that have been?Not any of this probably.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Yeah.
You had the whole the whole history ofthis whole thing would be very different.
That's pretty crazy.
(53:56):
Yeah.
So in our next part, stick around foror tune in next week for our second part
where we're going to get into makinga cult, starting a cult 101, I'll call it,
and how that led to followers, includingthe witches that we've talked about
and how the five womenfirst left and disappeared,
and then the theories behindwhat could have happened to everybody,
(54:20):
which gets very, very interesting.
So stick around for that.
All right.
Thank you, Maria, I will talk to you soon.
Thank you all for listeningto a study of strange.
Make sure to subscribe to the channelso you can catch part two of Tensegrity
and The Vanishing, which is comingvery soon.
I mentioned in the previous episodethat it is the summertime right now,
(54:42):
and as suchwe will not be releasing episodes
every week, probably about two timesa month, just until the summertime ends.
If during this time you find yourselfmissing strange stories and mysteries,
check out our Substack, which you can findthrough a support tab on our website.
A study of strange.com subscribersof the Substack get access
to additional content like articlesabout strange historical mysteries
(55:06):
and some scary things,and you also get access to episodes early.
So go ahead and check that out.
And until next time,thank you and good night.
Warning this episode contains details
that some listeners may find disturbing.
In 2003,
in the scorching heat of Death Valley,two hikers made a grim discovery.
The remains of Patricia Parton, a womanwho had been missing for five years.
Her case, however, is not isolated.
(00:22):
Patricia was one of five women,all called the witches,
who were the inner circleof a controversial cult.
All of them have vanished.
Tonight, we look into the complexand fascinating questions
surrounding the continuing mysteryof the five vanished
witches, exploringwhat happened to Patricia and the possible
(00:43):
whereabouts of the other four womenwho disappeared alongside her.
This is a study of strange.
Welcome back to the show.
I am Michael May, and sittingacross from me is Mariah Clapp.
Hi, Mariah. How are you doing?
Hello, and thank you for inviting meto this auspicious occasion.
(01:06):
Yes, it is a pleasure to have you.
So I'll be very blunt and honestwith the audience.
This is a storyyou brought to my attention,
and I had to have you on a becauseit would be fun to have you on for it.
But also, this is such a huge storywith so many details,
so many lies,so many name changes, cult weirdness,
(01:28):
exercises, books, and there's so muchto get Ahold of that it is.
It's just a massive storyand I definitely need help.
So both of us have been doing researchon this story to, to try to share it.
So it's a wild one.
I feel like I need to come upwith a phrase to tell everybody,
like buckle up, everybody.
It's gonna get wild and crazy, but I don'tI don't have any lines prepared
(01:50):
and I don't like that one.
Do you have anydo you have any lines to get us started?
Put on our shamanic robes together.
Yeah. Oh, that's more appropriate.
Put on your shamanic robes. Sit down.
And I feel like it's more meaningfulthat we're two way people saying that
things are sincethe story is entirely about,
not entirely about, but it is mostlyabout appropriation abuse.
(02:11):
Right? Absolutely.
And so it makes sense.
I'll also say this to listeners, to peoplethat may know this story
or are interested in this story.
So you're listening to hear moreor hear a different take on it.
I there's no waywe can cover everything in this story.
There's just absolutelyno way we'd have to spend a year long,
(02:32):
sort of like documentary podcast projectto actually tell everything.
So we just won't cover everything, butwe will cover what we think is important
and to tell the story.
But if there's something we missedor something we misconstrued, let me know.
I would love to do a follow up on this,so feel free to write
in a study of stranger at gmail.comand let us know.
(02:53):
It looks like you get excitedabout that too.
Like, I'd love to. Yeah, I want to hear.
I want people to write in things.
There's like a small but spiritedgroup of people engaged in this topic. So.
So I'm going to start telling the story,and you jump in
when you feel like you need to know,or I'll ask questions along the way.
So in 1998,five women left their home in Los Angeles.
(03:16):
Oh, I'd never practicepronouncing their names.
Maria. Okay, so Tatia, Tatia.
Abelard I said Tatia, I had to,but I heard somebody on an interview
chased her.
But they also could be wrong,so who knows?
So I'm going to say Tatia,Adeline, Florinda, Donna Gro, Talia Bay,
Patricia Parton, and Kylie Lundell.
(03:38):
I will say everybody has differentnames, multiple multiple names.
It's the better way to phrase that.
So just be aware and I will come backto that a little bit later on.
So word was that these women had toldothers that they were going on a trip.
They were leaving town for a while,and weeks later
a red Ford Escort was foundabandoned in Death Valley.
Death Valley.
(03:59):
It is the lowest elevationin the United States.
It's in California,
and it's a place where I believethe hottest temperatures on the planet
have been recorded, if not the hottest.
It's like some of the hottestand where this Ford was
found was not an easy place to drive to.
It's an area that it's recommendedto have an off road vehicle.
And it's essentiallyyeah, it's just essentially off road.
(04:20):
And it's neara place called Panamint Dunes.
And a park ranger namedDavid Brenner found the car, searched
the area for its owner,couldn't find anybody,
and noted that the car was strangebecause there's a lot of abandoned cars
in Death Valley,
but this one had been cleaned out, meaningnot like stuff had been stolen, but
essentially anything that would identifythe owner was out of the car.
(04:42):
There was no identifying stuff left.
I'm sure they could still usea license plate
and Vin to search who it was,and that's what they did.
And they found out it belonged to a womannamed Patricia Parton.
Parton and other women,
the other women I mentionedearlier were nowhere to be seen.
No one had seen them in weeks.No one had heard from them.
They were missing.
And perhaps Parton's car was a clue.
(05:03):
Lewis Marquez, Talia Bai's brother,
went to the police in 1999,begging for authorities to investigate.
They didn't.
Probablybecause there's probably like rules around
you have to have more informationor something like that.
But police didn't start investigating.
That's very generous, Mike.
Yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right.
I'm being very generous about it.
Five years after Parton's Red Fordwas found in Death Valley, two hikers
(05:24):
discovered the remains of a dead bodynear the Panamint Dunes area.
And it wasn't until 2006that they were able to conclude that
this was the dead bodyof Patricia Parton, but
none of the other bodies have been found.
All right.
I'm going to pause, just for a second.
Mariah, is there anything about
discovering the car or the bodythat you want to add to any of that?
(05:46):
Well, the body, I think, was
found with the I always love the detail ofof the pink jogging.
Yeah. The pink.
Did you say that?
And I oh, I didn't know,I didn't know that was great.
Yeah it was, it was a pink outfitand I've read it, I've read one article
that they found the skulland then the body later,
but then I other articles,it sounds like it was all together.
So there is a little bitof like conflicting.
I'm not sure they found the skull.
(06:08):
Oh, maybe that's what it was.
Maybe it's that they couldn'tfind the skull.
And I will say, like all of these details,this entire story
is like a such a patchwork of
guesses, facts and myths all at once.
And I think that's part of the journey.
So that's it? Is it? It definitely is.
And there's a lot of questions aroundPatricia Parton.
(06:29):
They were.
Her death was claimed to bean undetermined, undetermined.
Thank you.So it's an undetermined cause of death.
And meanwhile,Tasha Aberlour, Florinda Donner,
Talia Bay and Kylie Lund,all they remain missing to this day.
So who are all of these womenwe've been talking about?
Well, they were all born with differentnames, except for Patricia Parton.
(06:51):
I think I'm using her birth namewhen I say her. Yes.
You're mixing it up like that. Yeah.
And they had all changed their namewhen they began following
the very successful new author,Carlos Castaneda.
And Carlos referred to the members of hisinner circle, these women as the witches.
Or you also hear
check mules, although apparently notall of them were considered check mules.
(07:12):
Have you figured that out at all? Yes.
It seems as though the rankingswere probably shifting
at different times, and that's whyI've just kind of stuck to the witches.
Because definitely
that includes
all the womenthat are like key to this story, I think.
Absolutely.
And Chuck mules, that is a term thatit references a Mesoamerican sculpture.
(07:36):
So it's something that Carloskind of usurped
from, from again,a metro, a Mesoamerican culture.
And they,they all that helped develop a program
that Castaneda taught called tensegrityregistered trademark.
By the way, can I say that,and they helped run his company
Clear Green, and they had written booksas part of this network of content.
(07:59):
In 1998, soonbefore all these women disappeared
and Patricia was found,Carlos Castaneda had died.
And soon before he died,he changed his will,
leaving a lot of moneyand control of his company to the widgets.
Done, done done.
All right.
So I think we should sharesome information about each of these women
(08:22):
just so people can get to know thema little bit better.
Do you what do you want to tackle that?
Maria?
Yeah, I think I'm going to startwith the most enigmatic of many
enigmatic characters,which is the Amalia marquez Talia Bay.
So Amalia marquez is her bornname, and Talia Bay and I.
Maybe she's meant to be called Talia,but I never say her name without saying
(08:45):
Talia Bay.
And I also think I usually try to call herAmalia because her family has been
so, one of the more active families,I think, in trying to find her. Yes.
Yeah.
And I think, like the outcomesfor them, are a little bit more rooted
in getting their lovedone back than necessarily,
I don't know, acknowledging the journeythey went on.
(09:07):
Yeah, yeah.
So anyway, Amalia was from Puerto Rico.
Most of these women areabout the same age, with one exception.
Two exceptions,but we'll get to them later.
So she's born in Puerto Rico in 1955,
and she moved to LA, specifically,I believe,
to seek Carlos outbecause she wanted to learn from him.
(09:29):
And I believe thatbefore she arrived there, she had a life
as an entrepreneurand businesswoman to some degree.
But I couldn'tfind a lot of details about that.
She did eventually becomethe president of Clear Green,
and it sounds like she was kind of likethe financial brains behind the operation.
So I think she broughta lot of those skills with her.
And and I believe that she developedsome more what later on.
(09:51):
And I think that she joined a bit laterthan the other, some of the other women.
So that's actually more or lessthe extent of information I have on her.
Did you find anything on her?
Did I not really know? No. That's you.
I think you even did that more than I did,
because I didn't even knowshe was born in Puerto Rico.
But no, she's she's definitely onethat has less information for sure.
(10:12):
Yes. For sure.
So we'll put her aside for a second,
and then I'm going to zoomback to the original three.
And these three are
really important because they're the onesthat he started with.
Yeah.
And they're the three that he was likemade this core family with.
But I guess we'll get to that later.
So the three are number one.
Cathleen Pullman aka Carol Tiggs
(10:35):
aka muni Arrafaka can we say pussy in this?
Yeah, absolutely. Go for it.
AKA Super Pussy.
AKA Elizabeth Austin,
Chickie, the Nungua woman and my favorite,
the Death to Fire.
That's awesome.
(10:56):
And just to clarify, and I hope I'mnot stepping on some sort of plan,
you had to to introduce everybody,but she's somebody that's not missing.
Correct? She is not missing. She's alive.
And there may have been a brief periodof uncertainty about where she was.
But she was never there was never anyonetrying to seek her out.
Yeah, I will sayit can be a little confusing because prior
(11:19):
to this disappearance,where the final disappearance earlier
in her life, when she initially joined upwith Castaneda,
she did leave for a while.
After being part of this initial group,she left, I think, for around ten years.
And so, she during that time, I believe,
was studying acupunctureand having a marriage.
But when she came back,I think that Castaneda explained it
(11:41):
as her being on a journeyin a, in an alternate dimension.
And I think sometimes it can get confusingwhether that happened.
But that was earlier, that was doneand gone before these other women
went missing.
So she was like the motherfigure of the group.
I'm trying to think.
I think she actuallydid. She? Oh yeah. She
oh, you know what?
Sidebar.
Because you like, is the man she wasmarried to was Rebecca Damon's ex-husband.
(12:05):
What what I did what about her?
I guess she married him later.
I forget we're just a little confusing,but she was definitely married
to the same manthat Rebecca De mourning was at one point.
Wow. So a little Hollywoodsprinkled in there.
But she supposedly met Carloswhen he was in a time of strife,
and they both have very different versionsof how they met,
(12:27):
but they're both bonkers,and they essentially both involve them,
both having a spiritual moment ofof profound,
rebirth, death in a desperate moment.
I probably classifieda lot of different ways.
And then they came into each other's livesand had sex for nine days
in a spiritual, sexual,
(12:48):
situation with her super pussy.
And as part of that process,she passed some of her death, defy death
to fire magic into Carlos while receivingsome of Carlos's Nograles sperm magic.
Nice, nice.
Love it.
That classic storyI would say to you that out loud. 330
(13:08):
but she,
like most of the other womenin this story, were students.
She was a student at UCLAwhen she met Carlos.
She, like some of the other women,had a father who was not in the picture.
He had died in a car crash.
He would eventually go onto help develop tensegrity in her later
time and had a lot of, a lot of influencearound recruiting other witches.
(13:29):
So she was like a mother figure to some ofthese other witches that came along.
And she's one of two women
who was a little bit olderthan the other key, the other key members.
Right. Those were all the really fun.
So those are the backgroundyou need on her.
The next one is Marion Simcoe,
and her Cassidy name was the TashaAbelard,
(13:50):
aka Anna Marie Carter, aka Ricky.
Not as many as some of the other people,but she still they they love their names.
Do lieutenant players and names.
She is one of the women who was missing.
She was 19 when she met Carlosand was studying anthropology, at UCLA.
She went on to get her PhD,so we can also call her
(14:13):
doctor Marianne Simcoe,if we feel like it.
She moved on to the compound
originally with the previous Kathleen,and then another lady will meet that.
I'm obsessed with.
And she is one of the people who claimsto have spent time with Don Juan.
First, we'll learn about DonJuan later, though, I guess.
Yeah.
And she wrote a book called
(14:34):
The Sorcerers Crossing a Woman's Journey.
And one of the things I noticed is a lotof these different women published books.
And Carlos obviously publisheda lot of books from huge publishers.
Like they're all
none of these people are publishing booksfrom little Hole in the wall publishers.
There's like Viking and Simon Schuster.
Penguin.
Yeah. And we'll, we'll,we'll get to that a little bit later.
(14:57):
But the,
yeah, this, this whole
network of things around Carlos is it'shuge in the publishing world.
He was a highly successfulauthor with these
sort of spiritual and spiritualand New Age books.
Yeah.
So I'll, I will get into that a little bitlater on to explain to everybody.
But yes, I think most of these womenhelped author or authored their own books.
(15:19):
Yes, part of this companyand yeah, most of them
with very big publishers, which is part ofpart of the story we'll get into.
Yes. And the lifestyle around that.
So one of the other key things about
Marianne is shewas she loved karate in the martial arts.
And so her and the next woman that we'llintroduce are the genesis of white.
And she became such a critical partof this whole story.
(15:43):
Absolutely.
I love that it was like her and her bestiein their martial arts class.
And then they meet him.
But some of the other thingsthat are interesting about her,
she claimed to have spent some time,living as an ape girl in a tree.
She spent some time, pretending that
she was, pretendingmight be not the way she characterized it.
She spent some time as a man named Ricky,and she used, like,
(16:06):
a prosthetic in her pantsto help her seduce women.
During that period.
And I think she wrote aboutboth of those things in that book.
Not that you need more.
Those are actually
you don't even need any wordsso much already.
So what's her deal?
(16:28):
And then there's my.
Okay, this is the last of the first three.
And Michael, I'm obsessed with this woman.
This is. And I will use her.
She originally was named RégineMargarita Thol,
but her name that she adopted was Fleur.
And a doner gro,
or phyllo dough, which I don't love.
That nickname.I'm going to call her Fleur.
And, because this is the name she used,she hardly had any pseudonyms.
(16:52):
This is the name she used on her books.
I believe she actually adopted that namebefore becoming, like, fully
immersed, even in, in the Castaneda world.
So her background is fascinating.
I found conflicting reports,but I believe the accurate
one is that she was born in Germany.
Okay.
Her familyimmigrated to Venezuela in 1946.
(17:15):
And when I hear about German
people emigrating to Venezuela in 1946,you know, I need to look that stuff up.
So I was trying to find anything I could
to give context to this, because we knowshe's like this blond white woman.
And Ilooked up the background of her name.
There are very traditional.
(17:35):
Her parentsnames are very traditional German names,
and she was born in this towncalled Amberg.
And Hamburg has a fascinating historybecause they had a Jewish population
beginning pretty earlyafter their community was founded.
And like the first and second century,however, there were hundreds of years
of oppression and persecutiontowards the Jews of this community.
(17:55):
And so they cameand went kind of over the years.
And eventually, when it became WorldWar Two, there were hardly any left.
There were like 12 Jewishpeople left in this community.
And so after the war,
this community was part of the area
that was under I wrote a whole thing downso I wouldn't mess it up.
(18:19):
Okay.
So, it became a center for housing,mostly Jewish Jewish refugees,
and it was a part of Bavariathat was in the American sector.
It also had a large army base on it.
So it went from being a place
that had pretty much gotten ridof its entire Jewish population,
to a place that all of a suddenhad like a lot of Jewish people
and American soldiers living in it. Right.
(18:41):
And so that led to themleaving the her family.
In theory, that's when they left as 1946.
It would have been a year or twoafter all that happened.
And they lived in Caracas.
And so I was like, well,
where were all these German immigrantsliving in Venezuela?
And let me tell you,that's a fascinating one as well.
(19:02):
So I don't know for sure that she livedin this particular settlement.
But there was this one settlement in themountains in Venezuela outside Caracas.
Did you read about this, Michael?
Not for this story, butI think I know what you're talking about.
But it's like they're recreatingGermany in this, like, little town, right?
Is that what you're. Yeah, yeah.
And if you Google it,
(19:22):
I didn't write down what it's called,so I'll look it up in a second.
But it looks like Germany.
Like it looks like Bavaria.
It has all the same Bavarian architecture.
They it was a very small community.
They were controllingwho was allowed to live there.
So they were assimilating to the partsof, of Venezuelan culture
and South American culturethat they liked.
But also very muchbringing their own German bubble there.
(19:44):
Yeah.
So aside from being,
an enclave, it also has all these,like, tones of racial purity,
which I feel like comes upa lot throughout this story.
And that'swhy I'm so curious about these roots here.
Like me, she was maybe potentially raisedin a similar, if not the same community.
(20:04):
And so that's her background.
And then as she grew up, she was actually,
but really,really fascinating in her own right.
So she when she met Carla,she was doing karate with her bf Marianne.
And they were both, like,excelling in anthropology.
And, Florinda spoke like 3 or 4 languages.
(20:25):
And she was really cultured and,and I'm sure people there loved her.
And I'm sure she had, like, a confidencethat was just very compelling.
All the things I read about herwas that she was basically like the other
the other compelling force in the house
besides Carlos.
I've been waiting to share that partfirst.
(20:46):
I'm so excited.
I'm so glad that's over.
I can't believe I didn't write downthe name of the town, though.
I'll look it up. Yeah.
So one of the things I noticed,
so she wrote she wrotea book called Charbonneau A visit
to a Remote and Magical worldin the South American Rainforest.
That's the whole title.
Wow. It's so long.
And, yeah, it's a rabbit hole.
(21:07):
I could really go down far with that one.
But the synopsis or the CliffsNotes,I should say,
is that very similarto what Carlos had done with his writing?
She basically appropriated other people'swork and research and experiences
and then frame them as
if they were her own,including a true life account of a woman
(21:29):
who actually spent her life in captivitywith the indigenous peoples.
That this book was supposedly about.
So I say that because rude Florinda,
very wrong to steal this woman's lifeand make it your own, very, very rude.
Florinda, if you're listening,and I feel like she is, we'll get to that.
Of course she might. Yeah, I don't know.
(21:51):
Very rude.
She wrote a couple other books, including,
The Witch's Dream, which I got a copy ofand started reading a little bit.
She was
described as intellectual and rebellious,
and she has this quote that is from,
Amy Wallace, who has one of the only Perspeople who's written
a firsthand account of her experienceswhile living in this environment.
(22:14):
And she says if Lorena told her oncethat one of her dreams
as a child was to own a farm
where she controlled everybody,including the lives,
not just the livestockbut also the people, and that she would be
breeding the people and choosingwhich people would breed with others.
So when you hear that in the context
(22:35):
of her background,
it's a lot.
It's a lot.
And I feel like if I were going to labelanyone else in the story besides Carlos
a narcissist,it would definitely be Florinda.
Yeah, I don't know.
I'm not a doctor, but that is some wildand deeply rooted worldview.
Yeah, shaping,
(22:57):
stuff.
And yeah,
she was only photographeda couple times ever.
Which kills me.
As with all of these.
So that's Florinda.
I'm obsessed with Florinda.
Nice, nice.
I don't know why I'm saying nice, but I.
You know, it's exciting.
(23:17):
It's it is nice
to be able to have someone elsethat will indulge this obsession
to this degree,because usually I have to get people
a little drunk and corner them.
So the rest of my theory is about this.
All right.
So moving on.
The, next the next witchthat would eventually disappear.
(23:38):
You've heard her name is Kylie Lindahl,
but she was born as Deanne Albers,
aka Kylie Lund, aka Kylie
Lundgren, aka Astrid.
And I think some of these,like Astrid, are.
They're like cute little householdpet names.
So her background is quite fraught.
As with some of,the other women, but hers in particular.
(24:01):
She, lost her mother early.
She was kind of raised by her sister.
She had two kids really early,like high school.
She dropped out of high schoolto have her two children.
And becauseshe didn't have, a partner in her life
and she didn't have her education,she struggled a lot.
She ended up getting to some petty crime,and some other troubles.
(24:22):
She had a lot of housing insecurity.
So when she ended up joining Carlos,unlike some of these other women, like,
she was really comingfrom a place of having known.
Yeah, real, real struggle.
Yeah.
And I feel likehad such a fierce motivation
to create a life for herselfbased on that.
Having so much struggle,so little control that being able to be
(24:44):
more self-possessed, at least that way,it seems like she probably perceived it.
And she's the woman that you see,if anyone Googles any of this,
she's the woman that probably is likethe face of this more than anyone else,
because she's the image that comes upand the research tensegrity. Yes.
Yeah, she's the first.
She's the first one I ever researchedafter you and I started talking about it,
because there's a great piecein the Alta Journal
(25:06):
about her that leads into the storyof Carlos Castaneda.
And she's also the main personleading the exercises
that you dosee in the videos of tensegrity.
Which again, we'll comewe'll come to that a little bit later on.
But yeah, you're definitely right.
I see her more than anybody else.
That's for sure. For sure.
And I realize I just, I understand now
(25:27):
that I don't have to get through all ofmy information all at once.
It's all right.
Okay.
And finally, we have the womanwhose skeleton was found in the desert,
Patricia Lee Parton, aka Nouri
Alexander, aka Claude, aka
Patricia Scylla Fant, aka
(25:51):
The Blue Scout.
Yeah.
Which of all of the women.
I think she has the most mythologyfrom her time living in the Castaneda
household?
She was brought into the homewhen she was 19.
I'm sorry.
And she was introduced to Carloswhen she was 19.
(26:12):
And she was a waitress.
She had actually justgotten married to this guy.
And this guy had been studying
with Carlos for a whileand brought her to a meeting.
And the way that worked outis like a couple weeks
after they got married,
she was like, I'm divorcing youbecause this guy is way more compelling.
So that'swhere the Scylla Fant came from is
(26:33):
she was marriedto a man with that last name and got it.
During her time there,
she adopted a child
like persona for the vastmajority of her time,
where there's backstorythat maybe we'll get into.
But basically,
she was a supernatural being to Carlos,and he really nurtured that in her.
(26:56):
And so she operated in this placewhere she was both studying
anthropology at UCLA, giving lectures,teaching tensegrity,
and also, thoughat home, playing with dolls,
being tended to,
being petulant, to her housemates.
And then on top of all of this,Carlos would eventually adopt her.
(27:18):
He had called her his daughterfor a long time.
He did eventually adopt her legally.
And so heshe also was having sex with him.
So we'll get into the sex stuff later.
But I think it's important to her, too,just with her to just note
she was infantilized for her entireexperience that we're going to talk about
and was both treated like a childand like a full blown sexual partner.
(27:42):
Partner is not the right word.
But that's how she was treated by.
Yeah.
And I think it's important to also mentionwhen she was adopted by Carlos.
She's an adult.
And yet they still went throughthis process of formally adopting her.
And I would say just to put itin the back of everybody in to tease
as we will get into theoriesat the end of this whole story
about what could have happened to Patricia
(28:02):
and what could have happenedto the other missing, which is
and Patricia obviously has slightly uniquebecause they have found her body.
But one of the theories is that,the other witches did not like her,
and I'll just sort of
leave it at that because she isshe is unique in this group of people.
She also went on to be one of the drivingforces of the magazine
(28:23):
that their organization put out, calledWarriors Way, and she wrote poetry for it,
which is extremely dark,so I'll save that for later.
But I have some of it written down.
Oh you do.
Oh, that's great with it. Yeah.
So that is everybody, right?
I'm not forgetting anybody.
Yes, those are all of the key women.
But I will say just for a little bitmore use, I am referencing
(28:44):
Amy Wallace quite regularly,so I do want to point her out.
She was not in the group of womenwho went missing.
She was, not kind of in the same.
She didn't have the same storyas the other women did.
She joined the household.
And I don't even knowshe ever really lived in the household,
but she joined the cult.
So let's just say, later in life,even though she had met Carlos
(29:05):
for at a very young age,she didn't become pursued by their
by their groupand by him until later in life.
And she is the one person who wrote a booklength account of her time there.
And so when I mentioned Amy Wallaceand she has since passed away,
but that's what I'm mentioning.
And she, in her own right, was anaccomplished writer and had a whole life.
(29:27):
So she's worth mentioning.
And then there are these two randomladies,
that we won't get into,that are still alive.
And then Margaret Runnion the wife.
The wife?
Yeah.The ex-wife and sort of mother. Right.
So, if it's not clear, everybody,this is a cult we're talking about.
You can.
I did mentioned something earlierin the beginning here. And,
(29:50):
you can tell the the way
we're talking about a householdin, in writings and different names.
This is a cult.
This is the backgroundof this whole thing.
And tensegrityis one of the names for the cult,
because that is a thing that they teachand train, by the way.
It still exist.
It is still goingon. People, learn about it.
I think you can get certifiedto teach about can
(30:13):
and people aren't awarethat it's associated with a cult.
And it's really funnybecause when I started researching this
and you, you get led to places like Redditor you get led to YouTube videos,
or you get led to articles and you'll seein the comments of people being like, oh,
this changed my life and blah, blah, blah.
This is so great.
And and people are justa little unaware of
some of the darker elementsthat's behind this.
(30:37):
And like other cults, Castaneda,the the father of this cult column,
he preached about
suicidein these different realms of things,
which we'll probably get into a little bitmore, I'm sure.
And by most accounts, people theorizethat because his inner circle,
the witches are missing,that one of the things
that could have happenedis they all committed mass suicide.
(30:58):
But only Patricia Partonhas been found alone.
So some have tried to searchthat surrounding area near where
her body was found,because maybe the other women
are out there somewhere,but yet they have not found anybody.
And that's only one theory.
We'll get to more theoriesas we keep going through this story.
So I would assume the next step in this.
Maria, correct me if I'm wrong or add
(31:18):
anything you want to add first,but I think we got to rewind now.
You believe we rewind sound
to Carlos Castaneda and learn about himand where this all started.
Yes, I want to share one quick fantasy,which is just that if the sky
were the limit and time and bordersand money were no object,
I would like to say thatwe would give the listeners, a deeply more
(31:41):
experiential, journey where we would goand get certified in tensegrity,
100% documented meticulously,and that I'm so sorry we can't do that.
But what a thing to imagine. Absolutely.
So if anybody out there wants to fundthat, I am happy to take on that project.
I'm sure Maria would loveto be part of it.
Let's do it.
We're open for business.
Send me an email,a study of stranger gmail.com,
(32:02):
and we'll figure out the financial detailsto make that happen.
It would be incredible.
And Netflix, if you're listening,I know you want that series.
So come on, someone put your moneywhere your heart is and us.
So Carlos Castaneda,
he was born in Peruon Christmas Day in 1925.
(32:24):
Although I will say there'sthere's some arguments against that.
But in my best research, he was bornin Peru on Christmas Day in 1925.
He came to the United States in 1955.
I don't know the exact motivationbehind this move,
but I will say in the 60she started lying about his age.
He was older than he was telling peoplehe was.
(32:47):
He was 5 or 6 years younger.
He was 5 or 6 yearsolder than what he was telling people.
Excuse me.
He became a naturalized citizen in 1957,and in 1958
he enrolled in UC at UCLA in anthropology.
And in 1960 he married Margaret Runyon,who you mentioned,
and he adopted her son,C.J., who's also known as Adrian Vachon.
(33:10):
I think currently I should also mentionhe wanted to be an artist.
Right. Maria like that was his original.
His backstory is a lot like Hitler's.
Hitler's? Yeah.
And he claimed that he studied overseasfor art, but it turns out he never did.
Yeah, that was definitely a lie. Yeah.
And so you're starting listeners, dearlisteners, you're starting to pick up.
There are a lot of lies that come outwith, Carlos Castaneda story
(33:31):
The Age and also where he's from becomesa big lie because he's lies to people
about where he's actually from, thathe studied art overseas all of it a lie.
So just follow those breadcrumbs as we goalong.
Put it this way, if this were a podcastabout the true parts of Carlos
Costa in his life, we wouldn'thave to make it a double episode.
(33:52):
That's right.
A minute long episode. Exactly.
And not nearly as interesting.
So fortunately for us podcasters,it is very interesting.
So from what I could tell,and please correct me if I'm wrong here,
he wasn't necessarily like a bad husbandor father to KHJ,
like I couldn't find many storiesthat he was a bad husband.
(34:15):
He definitely wasn't great,
but that's very.
I'm comfortable calling him a bad husband.
But okay,so you're saying I don't think there's
any real history of or knowledge of him,like beating her eating up.
Exactly.
So I guess if that's what metric.
He was a great husband by that metric.
He was great.
But he did leave.
He did leave to go study in Mexico.
(34:37):
So essentially he specialized
in Native American shamanism as he wasstudying anthropology and shamans.
I'm sure people are also familiarwith them in general,
sort of speaking very generic generically.
They're healers, right?
They make medicines and things like that.
I know it's a fairly mundane wayto describe shamans,
but I think most people have a feelfor what they are.
(34:57):
And what made Carlosstand out to his teachers
and peers at UCLAwas that he was from South America,
and although a lot of his white peersjust thought he was Mexican,
so it made sense that he was studyingMexican, shamanism.
And he did tell peoplethat he was also from Brazil at one point.
I don't know whyor why he started lying about that. And
(35:21):
in May of
1960, he left to go study in Mexico.
He wanted to learn about shamanismfirsthand on the ground.
So he went to the state of Sonora,and he wanted to meet
the Yaqui people, the indigenous peoplesof the area and parts of southwest U.
US and the Yankeesbelieved that the universe.
This is just a very generalized statement,just so people understand
(35:43):
the basis of this.
But Yankees believe that the universehas multiple dimensions, different planes
of being that we as humans,we can't access all those planes of being.
And this includes the dream world.
And Carlos thought all of thiswould be great for his thesis.
This is a wonderful topic.
I'm going to dive into this
and sit here in Mexico and studyall of this and write a thesis about it.
(36:06):
And he wanted to find shamans and healers,and people kept telling him,
according to his his own words,people kept telling him to meet someone
named DonJuan Matisse or Mateus, Mateus Mateus.
I like my TOS, I do too.
That's the way I've heard.I've heard it both ways.
But I like Mateus better,so I'm going with that.
And Maria, do you know the storythat he shared about how he met Don Juan?
(36:29):
Did you ever learn that the oneabout being at the bus station?
Yeah. Yeah.
So he was he was trying to find Don Juan,apparently was really hard to find him.
And he ran into him at a bus station,I think in Arizona or New Mexico.
I can't remember exactly now.
And he approached him and he startedtelling him, hey, I'm writing this thesis.
(36:49):
I'm studying shamans.
Talk with me, work with me, let's do it.
And Don Juan wouldn'tspeak, didn't say a word.
And then the guy's bus showed up and downone of the bus and left.
And it's during this meetingthat Carlos claims that he felt something,
something very life changing, this amazingenergy that he couldn't quite describe.
So he got in his carand he, like, chased the bus.
And when the bus stopped,he was right there to meet Don Juan again.
(37:13):
And he approached him again and he said he
that he felt this energyand he had to learn from it firsthand.
So because of this, I guess this
very direct and aggressive approach.
Don water Don one said, yeah.
All right. I'll help you. I'll teach you.
I'm jumping around a little bit here,but Don Juan had said something
(37:35):
about plants, and that plantshave these different spirits,
and one of the very special plantsthat has a different spirit is peyote.
And if you eat peyote, the ancient spiritwould speak and communicate with you.
But sometimes this was a dark, scaryvision and Carlos had to try it himself.
And allegedly when he had beenterrified of drugs his whole life.
(37:58):
But he ended up trying peyote because DonJuan told him to and he had a vision.
He sick.
Carlos said that he had a memoryof his life.
Flash basically through his mindin an instant, and then it was all gone
before he saw a large black dogturn into a blinding light.
And Carlosspoke to Don Juan about this vision.
And Don Juan was very impressedthat he had this vision.
(38:20):
And he told Carlos that, all right,you can learn everything from me.
I will teach you everything, my sonor I don't think he said that, but
there you go.
Here.
I'm going to read it real quick.
I want to read a quote just because Ithought this is a great way to explain it.
This is from Tensegrity Wikividi.com,a great source of information, actually.
(38:42):
Here's the quote.
Castaneda wrotethat he was identified by Don Juan Meadows
as having in the energetic con
configuration of a Negro
who, if the spirit chose, could becomea leader of a party of warriors.
He also used the term negroto signify that part of the perception
which is in the realm of the unknown,
yet still reachable by man,implying that for his party of seers
(39:04):
Don Juan was in some waya connection to that unknown Castaneda.
Often Richard referred to the unknownrealm as non ordinary reality,
which indicated that this realm was indeeda reality, but radically different
from the ordinary realityexperienced by human beings.
So yeah, I just thoughtthat was a very interesting there.
(39:26):
Do you know how long he studied withDon Juan?
I think it was book.
Well,I think it was supposedly 4 or 5 years.
Yeah. And it was he'd go back and forth.
That's that's what I heard, too.
And I heard that he, like, talked to
his wife and was like, hey,I gotta go study in Mexico.
And that the way he tells it,she was like, yeah, do it.
That sounds great for you. But I'm sure,
(39:47):
as families
do, I'm sure it's not that easyjust to have the, the but the husband
and father in the household be like,I'm going to go to Mexico for a while.
I don't know when I'm back
and, and disappear, but,yeah, he studied for 4 or 5 years.
And my favorite part of this story,
because I don't know how college
worked back then, but he returned to UCLAafter all this time and had
(40:08):
written a manuscript and was like, hereyou go, here's my thesis.
And I'm like,
I think it's fair to say thatthe UCLA anthropology department during
this era was probably not holdingthe standard
for academic regularity.
What on earth would make you say that?
It's almost like he's
studying a certain topic around peoplethat studied anthropology at the time
(40:31):
at UCLA.
Yeah, yeah,it's really it's really interesting.
But that is what he did.
He returned to UCLA with this manuscript,and I'm just going to assume
he dropped it on his professor's deskand was like, here you are my thesis.
Thank you. I'll take an A. And he did.I think he got an A.
And he did graduate,with a degree in anthropology.
And the the thesis was titledThe Teachings of Don
(40:55):
Juan a Yaki Way of Knowledge.
And this would go on to become a book.
It was published as a book.
And he wrote, I believe, 12 bookstotal over his life after this first one.
And they became all of them, especially
this first one, the teachings of DonJuan became a huge hit.
It was selling 16,000 copies a weekwhen he started it.
(41:18):
It started off making a lot of moneypretty quickly.
And in those early years,the first few books
he wrote,just to give you a sense of these, in 1971
he wrote a separate realityFurther Conversations with Don Juan.
In 1972, he wrote journey to X-Line,
and then in 1974, tales of Power.
(41:39):
And all of them are about this man, Don.
One matters, all right.
Anything I'm forgetting is in there.
No, but I do wantI think there's it's important
to provide some context to that eraand what was going on,
because I keep seeing in different places,people will say that he was
the godfather of the New Age movement,and I think that's extremely reductive.
He was one piece of thismassive mass situation that was happening,
(42:02):
that gave rise to an enormous amountof potential
for capitalist gain in waysthat had not really been explored before.
So like in the 1950s, it was like,
oh, teenagers are our way to make moneyoff of off of the working class.
And then it became, oh, betterment.
And so we're kind of seeing it againnow, which I think is fascinating.
Yeah, we know a lot of the thingsthat are going on in this story,
(42:24):
I think are coming up againnow, but it was just this massive thing
where there wereso many different ways to,
be in this field.
And it also was taking place at a timewhen psychedelic medicine
and plant medicinewas being used in psychotherapy,
or had been being used in psychotherapyfor quite a while,
and then had eventually become lessaccessible
(42:45):
because the government was like,no more fun for you.
And so, like when you imagine this weirdomaking a ton of money
and being this huge, huge bestseller,it didn't happen.
He wasn't like a phenom wherethis all of a sudden came out of nowhere.
There was very much likea fertile environment for him
(43:05):
to grow and thrivein that he did not make.
He entered, he enter.
And that's a
I'm really gladyou made that point, actually,
because I think that's really importantto think about.
And it does showthat everything's connected,
like these thingsdon't come out of nowhere.
There is this movement,you know, obviously everybody knows about,
like the hippie movement,the free love movement.
But you can see that evolving as the 70scome about and into this world.
(43:29):
And also these are published,I think, these first handful of books,
they're all published by Simon Schuster.
If I'm not incorrect,which is a huge publisher.
So someone over there found thismanuscript and was like, you know
what, guys?
This could be a big hitand started publishing it.
So you're right,it is a very capitalistic kind of thing,
and he's just hitting it at the right timewhere he's able to.
(43:50):
Yeah, absolutely.
I also heard I'm
glad you mentioned the governmentsort of talking about psychedelics,
but I did read that, CarlosCastaneda is one of the many, many points.
But he was a big influenceon the government cracking down on that
and making it peyote illegaland other psychedelics illegal.
Because of the power of this,the New Age movement
(44:11):
was driving a lot of peopleto get involved and try psychedelics.
And so, yeah, and then they came around,it started shutting that down,
which may lead to tensegrity, which ismore of this like physical movement
instead of taking drugs,getting into this kind of thing.
Right. I'm.
Yeah, I'm glad you said that.
Because just as a quick side note,anyone who's looking this guy up like you
(44:34):
maybe hear about an institute,which is, was a center in in Big Sur.
It still exists now.
And it was a place where people could go.
And it is a, a retreat center
that's built on sacredindigenous lands of the Aislinn tribe.
And a bunch of white guys co-opted
that in the 50sthrough the 70s to the present.
(44:55):
That's a separate thing.
So I won't get fully into that.
But I went there last spring,for a Tropic breathwork retreat.
And I just want to say,because it's similarly to to tensegrity,
the idea with hollow Tropic Breathwork wasthere
were these people who had been taking LSDand doing psychotherapeutic work,
and then the LSD became illegal,and they were like,
how do we replicate this usingwithout using drugs?
(45:18):
And so they they came up with this ideawhere you would basically manipulate
your body with oxygen
to create an induced stateof realization and visions and whatnot.
And so I went, I did that for a week.
It was wild.
But one of the things that was kind
of a moment of clarity for meand for my friend that I went with was
we were kind of led on to believethat we would be having
(45:39):
these really intense, intense visionslike that.
We'd be feeling like we were rebirthingourselves, being strangled by octopus.
They really built it upinto being this amazing thing.
And halfway through the week,I realized and said to my friend, well,
but they were taking LSD for ten yearsbefore they started doing this breathwork.
Yeah, and LSD doesn't just leaveyour system, and explains so much.
(46:02):
So I also think a lot ofwhat was happening in the 70s
was all these peoplewho'd been experimenting with psychedelics
for years suddenly had theirat least easy access cut off,
which generates so much, stuff like this.
What do we do with all thisenergy and progress?
What do we do with all this excitementnow that our goodies have been taken away?
(46:23):
Yeah, absolutely.
At that. Got it. Yeah.
That's a fascinating sort of rabbit holeto go down for sure.
And I will say two, obviously
Carlos is talking about in his bookpsychedelics.
That's a big part of of DonJuan's teachings
and incorporating that within the culturethat Carlos is writing about.
(46:45):
However,
as these books are coming outand he's starting to get very famous and
and his books are becoming morewell known, he is on the cover of time
magazine at one point, and peopleare paying more attention to his books.
And there are some questions
about this Don Juan gentlemanand that come up pretty much right away
as they get very popularand some inconsistencies with the stories.
(47:07):
One that I have not read the books,I've read bits of them,
but in the first book, Don one is verymysterious, is a very mysterious
fellow teaching thingskind of like Yoda or something.
And then then the second book, he'skind of like funny and jovial
and whatever, like the characterizationsort of changes of Don one.
And this really stood out to a gentlemannamed Richard de Mille,
(47:29):
and he immediatelywanted to know more about Don Juan.
He wanted to go to the source.
He wanted to see
field notes from the studiesas because this is an anthropology
student, he'sgoing to be taking field notes
and wanted more informationbecause he was very curious about it,
even though he was seeingthese inconsistencies.
And apparently when he contactedor someone else had contacted it,
(47:49):
contacted Carlos Castanedaand asked for field notes, Castaneda said,
oh, they're they're gone.
They were lost in a flood in Westwood.
And, there's they're not there anymore.
So that was weird.
And De Mille was actually pretty goodat spotting some fakery and things.
It's a very interesting guy.
He's the nephew of Cecil Be de Millethat I didn't even know until last night.
Super fascinating.
Dude has a very interesting story himself,but at one point he worked with L
(48:13):
Ron Hubbard from Scientology.
And so he has this this experience with,I don't know, chicanery.
And it's like the best wordI can think of right now.
And something about something about DonJuan was rubbing him the right way.
And there's a good reason for that.
And that is because DonJuan Matus does not exist.
Don Juan is not real.
He never existed.
(48:34):
He wasn't real at all.There's no better way to say it.
It was made up.
Carlos made him up.
And one of the things that kind of.
There's a lot of reasons why that peoplestarted to think that this was fake.
One of them is the psychedelics.
That'swhy you made me think of this right now.
And apparently the Yaqui culture,they do not do psychedelics.
The peyote is not part of it.
(48:54):
And yet Carlos was like,yeah, it's oh, this is all part of it.
And also, I think Richard de Milleand some other people noticed that
some of the stories that Carlos is writingabout were literally plagiarized
from other books, including some booksfrom like the early 1900s.
So they were finding parts that werecompletely copied from other works.
Yeah.
Somewhere you can go and look at them too.
(49:16):
I think they compiled a list of quotesright from the books,
and then source themto wherever they originally came from.
So if you're curious,I think that exists somewhere.
Which leads me to wonder,like Carlos, my man,
why did you choose this?
These people and peyote.
Like, why did you not like youhad all this research, that real research
(49:38):
with real information and still choseto combine these two things
that he knew or should have at leastknown, didn't go together.
Absolutely.
And it just kind of boggles, man.
It does make me think.
I wonder at first if he was just like,oh, I'm going to go have fun.
I'm going to go sleep
with a lot of women in Mexico or whatever,which is part of that's part of Carlos.
(50:01):
That's part of his whole thing.
Right?
And like, I'm just going to partyand I'll make something up for the thesis
like they think I'm studying.
They think I'm Mexican anyway.
Like, I'll just,you know, create a thing for a thesis.
I don't think he initially wrote itthinking, this is going to be a hit book.
I reallyI that's just my own personal theory.
I think he just startedas this is my thesis kind of thing, and
(50:22):
I don't have ChatGPT yet to writemy thesis, so I'll just make it up.
Yeah, I could be wrong.
I'd like to believe there's
an alternate timelinewhere Carlos wasn't like a destructive,
sociopathic manipulatorand and that he used those different,
same skills for goodand and the good that he used it for
(50:43):
was to just, like, do a complete on,on academia and anthropological studies.
Yeah.
Yeah, that would have been really funny
if he had done all thisand then eventually been like,
gotcha, idiots.
That would have been pretty fun, right?
So what happensnext is really interesting, though,
(51:06):
because as these books are coming outand people are starting to scrutinize
them, by the way, people still buy theseand totally believe and done one.
That to meis the most fascinating part of it.
I've already talked about it earlier.
When people talk about tensegrityand people like this
change is so great, it's so wonderful,
and the people still read these booksand think that one is real
and unknowingly, you know, notknowing the history of this whole thing.
(51:27):
A lot of podcasters, a lot of
well, you find out as well.
No, I didn't, but I'm not shocked
because I think podcasting,the podcasting world,
I think people can make good moneyon sort of the new age
health and wellness mental aspect things.
I think those can do quite well.
So I'm not surprised that people do it.
(51:49):
And I don't thinkpeople just do the research.
I don't think people are maliciouslysort of ignoring it
or that there's I'msure there's some bias that goes into it,
but I think people just find the book
and they're like,oh, this is a very popular book.
It's sold for years, and they read itand they get something from it
and not realizing that it's made upand not tied to anything specific.
That being said, the 70s becomesa very interesting time for Carlos
(52:10):
because even though he's got hit books,he has a career and his publishers
are not coming out publicly to say,oh yeah, it's fiction.
Like they keep calling it, you know, anew age book or health whatever.
The whateverthe category is, they don't change it.
When it comes out that this is all made upand he starts becoming more reclusive,
staying by himself, he ends up purchasing,
(52:32):
in the spring of 1973,two adjoining Spanish style bungalows
at 1672 Pandora Avenue in Westwood,
which is very close to the UCLA campus
and essentially he starts forming a cult.
And this is where the cult comes in.
And I think this is a great place to end.
(52:52):
Part one of the series of The Missing,which is before we get
into the cult stuff, any final thoughtsfor the stuff that we've covered so far?
Right.
Yeah, I do, since we're talkingabout his schooling more in this one,
there's a story that I really likeabout how his original thesis idea
(53:13):
was to studythe use of plants and indigenous.
I don't know if he had chosen specific,but he wanted to do his thesis
around plantsand the use of plant medicine.
And and his advisor didn't let him andtold him that was a work for a botanist.
And so I have two thoughts to that.
One, it's like,that's the rigidity of academia,
because that's such a Western white wayof looking at at plant, at plant medicine
(53:36):
as not connected to human beingsand their behavior.
Of course, they're inherently linkedin a lot of these cultures.
And then to the other thingthat's funny to me about that is like,
what would that have been?Not any of this probably.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Yeah.
You had the whole the whole history ofthis whole thing would be very different.
That's pretty crazy.
(53:56):
Yeah.
So in our next part, stick around foror tune in next week for our second part
where we're going to get into makinga cult, starting a cult 101, I'll call it,
and how that led to followers, includingthe witches that we've talked about
and how the five womenfirst left and disappeared,
and then the theories behindwhat could have happened to everybody,
(54:20):
which gets very, very interesting.
So stick around for that.
All right.
Thank you, Maria, I will talk to you soon.
Thank you all for listeningto a study of strange.
Make sure to subscribe to the channelso you can catch part two of Tensegrity
and The Vanishing, which is comingvery soon.
I mentioned in the previous episodethat it is the summertime right now,
(54:42):
and as suchwe will not be releasing episodes
every week, probably about two timesa month, just until the summertime ends.
If during this time you find yourselfmissing strange stories and mysteries,
check out our Substack, which you can findthrough a support tab on our website.
A study of strange.com subscribersof the Substack get access
to additional content like articlesabout strange historical mysteries
(55:06):
and some scary things,and you also get access to episodes early.
So go ahead and check that out.
And until next time,thank you and good night.
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com