Carlos Castaneda sold millions of books in the nineteen sixties detailing his supposed anthropological field work and mystical training under a powerful Yaqui Indian sorcerer named Don Juan Matus.

A closer look

Carlos Castaneda sold millions of books in the nineteen sixties detailing his supposed anthropological field work and mystical training under a powerful Yaqui Indian sorcerer named Don Juan Matus. His deeply profound accounts of spirit journeys, peyote trips, and desert wisdom became the foundational texts of the New Age movement, right up until researchers realized he had completely plagiarized and fabricated the entire thing. Castaneda was essentially sitting in the UCLA library lifting passages from obscure academic journals while convincing a generation of hippies that he was turning into a crow in the Mexican desert. The man managed to parlay a completely fraudulent doctoral dissertation into a massive cult of personality and a highly lucrative publishing empire. It is a brilliant reminder that you do not need to hike into the wilderness to find mystical enlightenment, you just need a vivid imagination and terrible academic oversight