Excerpts from an Interview with Amy Wallace

Castaneda Casualties: An Interview with Amy Wallace (Magical Blend Magazine, © MB Media 2004) by Michael Peter Langevin (page 1)

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When visionary author Carlos Castaneda died, as he almost certainly did of liver cancer in 1998, several female members of his inner circle disappeared, amidst much sinister speculation. Had they all "burned from within," as Carlos described a sorcerer's departure from this earth? Or was this another outrageous hoax from a man whose credibility had come to be questioned by just about everyone other than those still held in thrall by his personal magnetism and incomparable storytelling? Taisha Abelar and Florinda Donner-Grau-two of the three "witches" said to be master apprentices of Castaneda's Yaqui sorcerer mentor Don Juan-were among the missing. Nury Alexander, also known as The Blue Scout and described by Castaneda as an energetic entity rescued from the realm of inorganics (and later legally adopted by him), was gone as well, along with Kylie Lundahl and Talia Bey, two more of the annointed inner circle. Their phone numbers were all disconnected on the same day. All had been regular recipients of large sums of the money generated by the royalties from Casteneda's perpetually bestselling books and his community's well-attended workshops. Was this vanishing act-perhaps even Carlos' death itself-the result of a suicide pact? Or was this mystery further evidence of the nonordinary reality that Castaneda wrote about, evoked incessantly, and seemed largely to live in?

If anyone would be in a position to know, it would be Amy Wallace. Having been introduced to Castaneda when she was 16 by her author father, Irving Wallace, she reunited with Carlos in the early 1990s when he called to tell her he had spoken to her dead father in the dreaming realm. They fell in love, or something like it. Amy Wallace had the king's ear, as it were, and ostensibly, his heart. But, as she tells in her new book, Sorcerer's Apprentice (North Atlantic, 2003), being at the center of the psychic storm that Castaneda alternately calmed and created was a painful, confusing place to be. Sorcerer's Apprentice is a powerful yet deeply troubling book. It reveals Castaneda as cruel and manipulative yet charismatic and childlike in his relationships, mostly with women. It's a story told by a sadder but wiser and very honest woman whose self-image is still not quite sure what hit it. She recently told us some of what she knows:

[anything in italics is the interviewer’s]

What happened to the witches when Carlos died, and why didn't Carol Tiggs, whom some saw as the most powerful of the witches and who claimed to be The Blue Scout's mother, go with them? There's lot I can't tell you. But I was told that when I can speak, I should call Magical Blend. It turns out that the witches, including the Blue Scout, disappeared. I was told by a very drunken Taisha Ablelar that she was going to kill herself. Then I was told by Carol Tiggs that she had just arrived at the site of a suicide attempt by the Blue Scout. I believe she didn't succeed then, but it could be possible that she has since then. And one of the things that made me break with the group was that Carol was actually moving into my house, and she was just about insane--as anyone would be. On Tuesday she would say "They're dead! They're all dead" and then on Wednesday, she would say "They're all alive," and she'd get on the cell phone and say to someone, "Oh, I just talked to them," or "No, I haven't heard from them yet." And it was just too much for me. It was like a "suicide missing-in-action."

But then they settled on a party line, and this I can tell you: Debbie Drooz [Castaneda's lawyer and the executor of his estate-Ed.] is in charge of disbursing extremely large sums of money to these women. And she has not disbursed a single check since the day they left. And I understand that while they were making up their wills, she asked them, "Now, you're not going to do anything stupid, are you?" Now, that's a very odd question, isn't it?

Do you think the other four committed suicide? Yes. Taisha said to me, "Since I'm going to commit suicide, it doesn't matter anymore if I'm a drunk, right?" And Kylie said, "We both know what we're going to do, and there's no other way." She never used the word suicide, but I was worried. She'd gotten bottles of pills and given them to Carlos. She said if ever she couldn't make it, she would take them, and she knew what to do. She was hellbent--she's always talked about suicide. She said, "I know that you've reached that point, too, and that you're to do it." And she was blissed out (this is not in the book; Carol said it). But Talia said "I've never seen anyone look so scared."

People ask me, "Did you ever see magic?" And the answer is no.

No? I've seen it in my life. I believe in it. I know it exists, but I didn't see it there. That really blew my mind because I'm a professional researcher and writer, and I've written about the paranormal and spontaneous human combustion. It happens, believe me. I've written 13 books. And I've seen magic. I mean, I've talked to cops who were there and witnessed it! But not from Carlos, or any of the others.

So as far as you're concerned, you're basically going on record as saying that Carlos was a good author, a good performer, a good storyteller, but not a magic worker at any point. No. He had one of the most charismatic personalities I've ever seen in my life. I believe we're all psychic, and I believe that he could tune in, at a very high level, to your needs and the right timing. He was very astute, and although that's a form of psychism, it's not the same. He was honed in that way. For example, he once said he was going to bring a 200-pound pigeon from a different dimension. Well, that never happened. None of those things ever happened.

Once a year, I would tell him a dream, and because I was so reticent, he was respectful and would answer. One time I said I had a dream in which we were levitating into another dimension while we were making love. I asked him, "So what was that?" And he said, "That's how it's going to be, chica--that's how it's going to happen." So I think what he did was take people, and confirm their fantasies. He would say your dreams or your waking fantasies are actually dreaming awake so therefore all that stuff happened. So some people believed they were living double lives that they were only aware of in a dream context. In other words, only he could tell them, "This really happened."

You seem comfortable with the idea that there was a pre-European altered reality that he brought forward though. Oh yes, and I think if people could take that, and use it, and refrain from dropping off cliffs into other dimensions...If people would keep their power... I'm very moved by people's reactions to my book. I've been getting letters saying they're saved.

You're setting people free; what a great service. Yeah, it's kind of hard to take in. It's like, it didn't turn into this big bestseller because I parted ways with Simon and Schuster, so it's hard to pay the mortgage, but...There are a lot of books that come to life late, and my publisher's terrific because they keep books in print. I'm better off where I am, going through the hard times. The sense of service is so deep, when I get these letters. I sometimes cry, because to have literally saved a life. That's amazing.

What better purpose to live for? I know, I mean, it's the most beautiful thing. Or to have saved a marriage, or a family...

On a sexual level in the book you portray Castaneda as almost superhuman. Well, you know--because he had diabetes, he wasn't able to get a full erection--that's a sign of having diabetes, and sometimes of age. But he had an ability to have frequent, very frequent, orgasms. And I thought this was impossible, but I did some research and found out it was. Because I know a friend of my father's, just turned 90 and had twins. And Norman Lear, in his 70s, has little children. So obviously they're having sexual activity with their wives. Carlos and I had great chemistry; he and I just really clicked in a lot of ways, sexually. And I think that because of that, he put more into it.

And yet, in the inner circle, he had sex with 10,20, 30 women. I found out, and it was really hard to get answers, that some women he would only have sex with once every year, or once every six months or something, whereas we were having a lot more sex than the others, like, once a week.

So he wasn't quite Wilt Chamberlain. No, the numbers may have been great, but could he do it with frequency with everybody? No. And could he do it with a genuine... I mean, Florinda and I talked about this, if you can believe it or not, about his not having a full erection and stuff like that. And that's something I didn't want to talk about in the book. I don't mind you're using it; I just don't want it to sound distasteful.

He had this orgasmic capacity, but he wasn't really performing the way you would normally make love that many times in a row. So he had capacity to have repeated orgasms. But his urge to have sex with as many people as possible was so strong, it meant so much to him... I know this sounds silly, but he was so obsessed with his height, that I wouldn't be surprised if it stemmed from that.

Sure. Napoleon conquered all of Europe. There you go, and he and I were exactly the same size. When I came into the group, Florinda said, "At last someone his size" in front of all the other women, and they looked at me like they were gonna kill me. And although he was very amorous with some of the taller women, I think there were a handful of us...like his adopted daughter--he was completely infatuated with her sexually, so I think he must have been having as much sex with her as he was with me, or more. But, with other women, it wasn't that way. I knew one woman in the book whose name I changed--she was in the group for years before he even approached her sexually. Whereas, he approached me sexually before I was in the group. So, whether it was a judgment call of how to get someone in the group, or whether it was attraction, or whether it was because my father was famous and there was some competition there, I don't know. You know that they really, really liked each other but he also wanted to show that he could have his.... I have a friend who he wanted to have the daughter of, and... I don't know.

Did he ever use herbs? Yeah, he gave me rosemary, which he cut himself from the side of the house, and I was told this was from a cutting by don Juan. He would send them via the witches or hand them to me in big bags, and I was supposed to bathe in them, and never immerse myself in water, although I took baths anyway and no one ever knew the difference. We used to swim in my pool, the witches and I--no one ever knew the difference. And he wanted me to fill the pool in with dirt, and I couldn't afford it, so we promised never to use it but we (Carol, Taisha, and I) used it every day. So, he couldn't see, you know, psychically that way. And the herbs were supposed to be used on a footstool with a little douche bag, and they were to take away the ugly sperm of anyone else I'd ever had sex with. I did this religiously forever, and its actually a very healthy herb for the genitals for the woman; it helps prevent against infections, and what-have-you. It wasn't really dangerous, just a general cleansing. But then Taisha said I could buy it at the store, and I told her I couldn't--it was Don Juan's. And she went, "Oh, oops." And then she said, "You know, we cut down all the rosemary." And I asked her why, and she said, "Well, we had to change everything magically." And it was just kind of to piss everybody off. I don't think it was Don Juan's cutting, it was a beautiful plant that grows everywhere in Southern California, but they made it into something that was larger than it really was.

Where do you think he went wrong? Do you think there was ever a moment he could have become something greater, something more noble? I like to think that, because when you love someone you kind of love them forever. I still love him, and maybe there is a part of me that does believe that. I think that having all these women went to his head, and unfortunately I'm starting to learn that it started very early, before the books. He left his pregnant fiancée in Peru, and was fooling around, and he was the roommate of this guy named Alan Cummings, that had come to the readings, while he was writing the first book, and before the first book. And that's how he met Joanie and Lenore, and he was bringing women all the time. So something happened in that family--maybe the story he told about his grandfather saying "You're short and unattractive and you have a handsome cousin, but you have to get women this other way," maybe that really happened. And maybe that scarred him so much that from the moment he could start seduction he did, and then the books helped so much, that I think that probably was an irresistible pull.

I think that, if he had realized that he was basically a sexaholic because of reasons of severe insecurity and had sought help or had done something about it, or written about that, I think he could've saved himself. But I think this all started long before he left... and what's sad, or good, is that he really did have knowledge.

One of the things I noticed is this: People said of him, "Did he ever stop acting like a guru?" And I said, "When he would fall asleep." And he stopped dreaming in some lucid dreaming, and those moments, he would just say, "Oh sweetie." He would act like an absolutely normal person in the most normal, normal, normal, sweet way that a lover could act at that moment. And then, when he would wake up, if it was a nap, and he would start telling me some bizarre tale about how he murdered people--he was really into telling me about how me murdered people. That was one of his favorite stories.

I've had kind of a break. I just was so....I became accident prone, I fell down some stairs, I started losing things. People kept saying, "I'm worried about you, I'm worried about you, I don't understand why. Wasn't it a catharsis?" I said, "Yeah, it was a catharsis, but it's not over. People's bodies are found, and there are people who want to kill me, and it's really tough. It was a lot of years, you know. I mean, it's so great to hear you understand that. I'm so tired of explaining to people why I'm not all better now.

What do you feel Carlos's most important accomplishment was? I think the first three books.

Yeah, I agree. And after that, I think, everything was downhill.

How do you think people should remember him? I think people should remember him as a writer, a fiction writer, who compiled parables, and used some real truths of ancient practices in his work. And they should not believe in the cult's whole group myth. That's very important.

[https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/ttzlibrary/castaneda-casualties-an-interview-with-amy-wallace-t568.html] from the wayback machine

From the book they wrote together about the Siamese Twins Cheng and Eng

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