we have "pieces" of a map to don Juan's world, just as in the latest Star Wars.
But we can't put the map together, because the starting point is missing.
We're tryijg to figure that out, but in the meantime Techno found this quote from the books:
>I don't think that Ortiz can be the only location of a house that don Juan used. Since it is only 30 miles or so (50 km) to the ocean when traveling south from Ortiz, Mexico:
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"I drove up to don Juan's house on Thursday, August 31, 1961 and before I even had a chance to greet him, he stuck his head through the window of my car, smiled at me, and said, "We must drive quite a distance to a place of power and it's almost noon." He opened the door of my car, sat down next to me in the front seat, and directed me to drive south for about seventy miles. We then turned east on to a dirt road and followed it until we had reached the slopes of the mountains. I parked my car off the road in a depression don Juan picked because it was deep enough to hide the car from view. From there we went directly to the top of the low hills by crossing a vast flat desolate area."
***
Also, it starts by saying that he drove UP to his house (where was he exactly before this...)
(that passage is from Journey to Ixtlan) chapter 11)
continues...
***
"The next day we ate frugally and continued our journey in an easterly direction. The vegetation was no longer desert shrubbery, but thick green mountain bushes and trees. Around mid-afternoon, we climbed to the top of a gigantic bluff of conglomerate rock which looked like a wall. Don Juan sat down and signaled me to sit down also. "This is a place of power," he said after a moment's pause. "This is the place where warriors were buried a long time ago.""
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Ortiz is still a highly likely location for the Mexican town that don Juan lived outside of.
At least part of the time.
I was being too literal with the due south direction.
(both of those red lines intersect at Ortiz, in the north)
Carlos could have had business (sorcery business etc.) in another city south of Ortiz, such as Guaymas etc., then he could have driven UP to don Juan's house, before they took their trip down to highway 15 south from Ortiz, which goes thru Vicam, and reaching their destination east of the city of Esperanza (!).
Bahia de Lobos, by the coast, looks to be an extensive agricultural area. Too much human development.
The area of interest, where some of the old seers are buried, could also be north of Vicam. There are mountains there too, and the distance of close enough road-wise (if not as the crow flies, in a straightt line)
Buried seers = direct link to the Olmec old seers.
The kind of direct link the lineages typically gave out via sperm.
Yuck...
I'd rather have 4 toothless shrively wrinkled old seer ghouls trying to scare me to death using their 12 Allies, than get mixed up in "sex magic".
Unless it's like a 1950s porn with Betty Page.
Did anyone ever notice, for all the complaining about old seers our lineage seems a bit too involved in "rescuing" them?
You had the old seers who turned into fruit trees, living at Zuleica's house.
Something we might try to look for via paid for satellite images.
And you had "Manfred", who as I recall, one of the witches didn't like?
And the death defier.
And they knew the location of at least 2 groups of buried old seers.
"Methinks thou dost protest too much..."
On a practical level, buried old seers means all you have to do is get silent around them, and they're a portal to where they were living when they buried themselves.
Literally.
Just do that once, and you can go home and do it anytime.
And on the location of don Juan's house:
"I found myself in a Mexican town built around a railroad station, a town located about a mile and a half east of where don Juan lived. Don Juan and I were in the middle of the street by the government bank."
Ortiz is along one of the old (abandoned) railway routes, going from Tucson in the north to Guaymas in the south (a coastal city).
The area in the segment that the blue arrow points to, is the GENERAL area where the house should be located per the description above.
And there are indeed hills!
That image is looking west, towards a large expanse of desert chaparral. A perfect and isolated/sparsely populated area, in which to instruct a sorcery apprentice! (see image in the reply below)
:::
"We began walking up the small hill in front of don Juan's house. Both of them flanked me with don Juan to my right and don Genaro to my left. They were perhaps six or seven feet ahead of me, and always within my full field of vision.
"Let's examine the car," don Genaro said again. Don Juan moved his hands as if he were spinning an invisible thread; don Genaro did likewise and repeated, "Let's examine the car."
They walked with a sort of bounce. Their steps were longer than usual, and their hands moved as though they were whipping, or batting some invisible objects in front of them. I had never seen don Juan clowning like that, and I felt almost embarrassed to look at him. We reached the hilltop, and I looked down to the area at the foot of the hill some fifty yards away where I had parked my car"
:::
Those hills, on the Google Earth satellite scans, are due west of Ortiz, and smack dab in the middle of the range at which he wrote don Juan's house was from town,
Don Juan's sorcery playground (?); delineated by the blue line. It's about 60 miles (95 km) from north to south.
From chat:
Jadey:
In taisha’s book they drive to novojoa then drive 1 hour east on a dirt road or something like that
danl999:
Novojoa didn't come up. Maybe Navojoa?
It's in the ballpark.
But 1 dent on the coast down. Which could be the "drive to navojoa" part.
Should be noted that Dan remembered a bit of information, most likely something that Carlos said in private classes, that the town that don Juan's house in Sonora was located in, was where the treaty was signed at the end of the Yaqui wars.
A simple internet speech then gave Ortiz, Mexico (which is also entered as Oritz, Mexico (in the state of Sonora) in some Google product views, thus possibly giving bad results at times.
I actually visited that house in a "rerun".
I posted about it a year or two back.
If we track it down, it will be interesting to see how accurate my rerun was.
At the time, I was certain I went by train.
But later I found out the train system in Mexico was bankrupt and assumed that train wasn't running, so it must have been the bus which follows roughly the same route.
I'd heard somewhere it runs down to where "the Yaqui wars ended".
That would in face be something Carlos might have said, since our research now shows there was a LOT of Yaqui stuff going on with that house where Zuleica lived.
Look at this quote from Delia:
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Then Delia gave me a long and sophisticated elucidation of how during the 1820s, after the Mexican independence was achieved and the Mexican government attempted to parcel out the Yaqui lands, a resistance movement turned into a widespread uprising. It was Juan Bandera, she said, who, guided by the spirit itself, organized military units among the Yaquis. Often armed only with bows and arrows, Bandera's warriors fought the Mexican troops for nearly ten years. In 1832, Juan Bandera was defeated and executed.
Delia said that the next leader of renown was Jose Maria Leyva, better known as Cajeme - the one who doesn't drink. He was a Yaqui from Hermosillo. He was educated, and had acquired vast military skills fighting in the Mexican army. Thanks to those skills, he unified all the Yaqui towns. From his first uprising in the 1870s, Cajeme kept his army in an active state of revolt. He was defeated by the Mexican army in 1887 in Buatachive; a fortified mountain stronghold. Although Cajeme managed to escape and hide in Guaymas, he was eventually betrayed and executed. The last of the great Yaqui heroes was Juan Maldonado, also known as Tetabiate rolling stone. He reorganized the remnants of the Yaqui forces in the Bacatete Mountains from which he waged ferocious and desperate guerrilla warfare against Mexican troops for more than ten years.
"By the turn of the century," Delia wrapped up her stories, "the dictator Porfirio Diaz had inaugurated a campaign of Yaqui extermination. Indians were shot down as they worked in the fields. Thousands were rounded up and shipped to Yucatan to work in the henequen plantations, and to Oaxaca to work in the sugar cane fields."
I was impressed by her knowledge, but I still couldn't figure out why she had told me all this.
I said admiringly, "You sound like a scholar; a historian in the Yaqui way of life. Who are you really?"
For an instant she seemed to be taken aback by my question, which was purely rhetorical, then she quickly recovered and said, "I've told you who I am. I just happen to know a great deal about the Yaquis. I live around them, you know."
***
She lives around them!
More verification we're in the right spot.
And if you look up the topic you find you're constantly hearing about spots right around Ortiz. And how the Yaqui were finally imprisoned and resettled just as Delia said.
So at this point I assume Carlos is the one who said, "The bus route which runs all the way down to where the Yaqui wars ended."
How I found out they signed the peace treaty there might be in that original post, buried in here.
ChatGPT is ignorant on most things Mexican.
Cholita would claim it's racism.
Hermosillo, Guaymas (on the coast), and Vicam are all mentioned in the books and are also relatively equidistant from Ortiz.
what about the cliff from which Carlos, Pablito, Nestor, Beningo and Eligio have jumped?
My thought is that it was near Mexico city to the south.
Someone found a possible site, and I posted a picture.
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/15h78oj/wheres_that_cliff/
At the least, it's an Olmec cliff site with glyphs!
And stairs too.
Near where don Juan lived down south!
So it's near certainty he would have been interested in that cliff.
But that jumping trick was just shrinking the tonal.
Not actually as big of an accomplishment anymore, as it seemed to be back then.
In fact, since we're doing everything under our own power, a lot of the huge deals in the books, don't seem so huge anymore.
True. I can't yet shrink the tonal on demand.
But I do succeed once in a while at random.
With no help from a don Juan.
More often if Cholita's double helps out.
On don Juan's house at in Sonora:
"I had made the terrible mistake of arriving at don Juan's house in the late afternoon. The setting sun seemed astoundingly golden, and the reflections on the bare mountains to the east of don Juan's house were gold and purple. The sky didn't have a speck of a cloud. "
There are mountains 20 miles east of Ortiz:
And there would only be a view of them from the house, if it was located where the hills west of the town didn't block the view (the area in the yellow circle):
the areas with the red X would have an obstructed view (even if they are 1.5 miles/2.4 km from town)
That would coincide with what I saw in dreaming.
And u/monkeyguy999 determined that some of those hills west of town are 200 meters high; enough to make you feel that you’re in a canyon since the neighborhood is sort of nestled between them, a neighborhood that is nicknamed “las norias” (the ferris wheels).
Yes, I saw some buildings on the side of the hill and the landscape reminded me a lot of SoCal hills, with some vegetation and bare spots.
Wouldn’t las norias be waterwheels?
I defer to the native Spanish speaker (bad Google).
We Argentinians actually don’t use that word, but from the meaning of it, it looks like it is more of a water mill wheel than an amusement park Ferris wheel 🎡
And since there is sometimes mention of an irrigation canal behind Don Juan's house...
It could be that that area was much more heavily irrigated in the 1800s, thus the nickname for that neighborhood, with a few traces remaining in the 1960s.
In 2023 there doesn't appear to be much left of that. Northwestern Mexico has been impacted by climate change (encroaching desert).