The reader who could, like me, lira this book almost 40
years ago, and which reads again it today is a privileged
person. In 1968 Western estudiantine youth sailed at sight
on vaguenesses of structuralism, the ethnology and
anthropology re-examined by Levi-Strauss, and derived on
the experiment obliged from the hallucinatory trip. This
book was chamanic bible for a number among us, and satanic
missel for the right-thinking person of then. That it is
sold and read still today can appear astonishing, because
it is not contextual any more of the contemporary, where
the aspiration with a spiritual initiation long, painful,
difficult, driven by the inébranlable effort to arrive at
knowledge, whatever it is, seems to raise of the Utopia.
And yet this work is always with reading. As of its
publication, a double reading was already proposed by it:
The grass of the devil and small smoke could be traversed
like an initiatory advance thoroughly detailed, founded on
the precise observation of an ethnological study (reversed,
since the ethnologist, indianized by his guide chamane,
becomes his own object of study), or as the allegorical
tale of the relation ambiguity between the Master, Juan,
respectfully called Don Juan, representing a company known
as primitive, persecuted until the génocide by that,
conquering, imperialist, and scorning "the beliefs of the
savages", personified by the Castaneda disciple.
Beautiful
inversion of the stereotypes of the History... Thus this
work is always with reading, for its elements ethnographic
(in spite of the sometimes tiresome character of the
description of the preparations of each new voyage, and the
chapter become tedious of the structural analysis), and for
the allegory which one can build always there. But today
it is also read, removed from the context of the "search of
Katmandou" and philosophies hippies, like a tale of
fantasy, or as an assembly esoteric (Castaneda challenged
this adjective), or like one amusing fum... istery. But
finally, that devil, this work is read, quite simply, with
the pleasure of the exoticism which these smoky and
sulfurous words evoke: Yerba LED diablo, Humito, Datura
inoxia, Mescalito, Psillocybe mexicana, Lophophora
williamsii. Let us go, Castaneda can be still smoked...
Patryck Froissart, April 9, 2006