The Teachings of Don Juan : A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

Don Juan was a Yaqui Indian from Sonora, Mexico, an old man in his seventies known to be a brujo - a "medicine man, curer, sorcerer." Carols Castaneda was a graduate student in anthropology at UCLA, gathering information on peyote and the medicinal herbs used by the Indians in that area. The Teachings of Don Juan is the story of the five years these two men spent together as master and pupil - years in which don Juan taught Castaneda the uses of peyote, jimson weed, and other hallucinogenic plants in opening the doors of perception, initiated him into the ways of achieving awareness and mastery of a world of "nonordinary reality" completely beyond the concepts of Western civilization, and started him on the strange and frightening spiritual journey a man must undertake in order to become "a man of knowledge."