magazine_interviews/fate_feb_1975
Fate: True Stories of the Strange and Unknown – February 1975 – Pages 70-81
My Husband CARLOS CASTANEDA
None of the intrepid fact finders who probed the past of this new guru of the Western world learned that he had been married.
By Margaret Runyan Castaneda as told to Wanda Sue Parrott
MY FIRST meeting with Carlos Aranha Castaneda, the man who became my husband, seemed casual enough — but even then, 18 years before our strange marriage was dissolved, I sensed the mystique that surrounds him today.
Carlos was with my friend Laura Maddox when she came to my Los Angeles apartment in December 1955 with two cocktail dresses her mother Anne had made for me. She tersely introduced him as her "friend from South America."
Carlos is an unusual-looking man and I was attracted to him immediately. He stands five feet, five inches tall and looks chubby because of his well-muscled torso. From his waist to the top of his thick curly black hair his body is that of a man six feet tall. His thighs and legs are disproportionately short. Under that mass of blue-black hair Carlos' face is broad, his dark eyes pixieish, bright with ill-concealed mirth.
The next time I went to the dressmaker I took with me a copy of Neville Goddard's The Search * and asked Laura to give it to Carlos. On the flyleaf I had written my name, address and phone number, an open invitation for him to contact me. Six months went by before he called.
- Neville Goddard, lecturer and author on metaphysical subjects, came to Margaret Runyan Castaneda’s attention in 1953 when she first heard him speak at the Science of Mind Church in Los Angeles. Among his books (all now out of print) are Prayer: The Secret Art of Believing, Feeling is the Secret, Freedom for All, Out of This World, and Resurrection, published by the G & J Publishing Company, 330 S. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, Calif. 90036.
I had met Carlos in December. He called me in June. In his book The Teachings of Don Juan he says he met Don Juan in June, waited six months, then went back to see him in December. This is an interesting coincidence.
I gave Carlos The Search because I think Neville was the greatest mystic of our time and his teachings have influenced my own philosophy. In my opinion, many of Don Juan's teachings parallel Neville's. For example:
Don Juan talks of the head becoming a "luminous egg.” Neville calls this quality "awakened imagination and ... it places the one so awakened head and shoulders above the average man, giving him the appearance of a beacon light in a world of darkness."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR MARGARET RUNYAN CASTANEDA was born in Charleston, W. Va., on November 14, 1921, the eldest of six children.
After graduation from South Charleston High School in 1940 she attended the Charleston School of Commerce, majoring in business, then worked for the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Company from November 1940 to July 1943. Thereafter she worked as a chemical analyst for Union Carbide, leaving this position in 1947 to move to California. She was employed by the Pacific Telephone Company in 1947 and held the position of Assistant Chief Operator until 1965 when she retired.
While working full time she attended Los Angeles City College and accumulated two years of credits, majoring in psychology. Her minor was Russian. She also took courses at UCLA in audiovisual education.
Eight years after returning to her home in West Virginia in 1966 (see text) she decided to settle in the west. She now lives with her son Adie near Phoenix, Ariz.
Neville also says, “The I AM in man is the nameless presence, that he is neither rich nor poor, strong nor weak, neither Greek nor Jew, bond nor free, male nor female, for all these conceptions limit man."
Don Juan says that one should not have any personal history because “if you have no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or disillusioned with your acts. And above all, no one pins you down with their thoughts."
Carlos was elusive before he learned this from Don Juan but today he has so successfully woven a veil of mystery around himself that the numerous reporters and teams of intrepid fact finders who wrote front-page stories about the man who gave the world the quest for the Yaqui way of life never discovered he had a wife.
Not only does Carlos miraculously elude photographers, he also seems to avoid disclosing his true place of birth and his age. His lighthearted evasion of probes into his past have given rise to many questions. Is there really a Don Juan? Or is Castaneda simply on an ego trip of his own, leading a generation of young people down a drug
path?
One woman, Jane Rush, who knew Castaneda at UCLA a decade ago, declares emphatically, "I believe Carlos Castaneda is the greatest psychic fraud of the 20th Century.”
Others who have made Castaneda's three best sellers their bibles liken him to Jesus Christ. And Carlos, who wrote The Teachings of Don Juan as his doctoral dissertation in anthropology at UCLA in the mid 1960's, claims December 25 is his birthday!
The Don Juan book, followed by A Separate Reality and Journey to Ixtlan, introduced readers to the teachings of a supposedly enlightened man of the American desert who guided Castaneda, through the use of drugs, to a state of consciousness in which God power replaces mortal limitations. Castaneda claims he has learned to turn himself into a crow, a feat others also can accomplish by following the Yaqui disciplines.
But I knew him long before he learned to fly - literally or figuratively — through the minds of the truth-seeking generations of the world, when he was a very real man occupying mortal space while entertaining metaphysical dreams.
I think the time has come to share my memories of the man I will always love. Possibly I can answer some of the questions a curious public is asking about Carlos Castaneda, for I knew him “way back when .…"
WHEN CARLOS first visited my apartment on June 2, 1956, the nucleus of our conversation was my concept that I am God. I believe that I am God because I create my own world, my own separate reality, in my own consciousness. As well as sharing philosophical and metaphysical ideas Carlos and I discovered we shared an interest in art. He had brought several of his own paintings to show me and I thought some of them were outstanding.
At that time Carlos was a student at Los Angeles City College and he said he was born in 1931 -- which made him 10 years younger than I. He seemed very young then and still seems as young as the first time I met him. He spoke excellent English (his native language is Portuguese) and I found his accent charming.
Learning and the love of learning were the bonds that held us together in friendship in the late 1950's. At his suggestion I went to Los Angeles City College and studied Russian for three semesters. While we were both attending college there Carlos was always doing beautiful artistic things, painting and sculpting in clay. He made for me a sculpture of a pregnant woman — which I sold, I'm sorry to say. He also wrote beautiful poems which took prizes when he entered them in poetry contests.
In those days Carlos was known as Carlos Aranha, which is sometimes spelled Aranja. He told me that his uncle, the ruler of the household, Oswaldo Aranha, ran for president in Brazil in 1960. He died the day our marriage was registered.
Of course I never met any members of Carlos' family. They were in South America. He said his mother's name was Susan, his sister's was Lucia and his father's name was Cesar. Brazil was his home but he had lived in Peru with an aunt for about five years. His mother was very young when she married his father so his aunt took him and kept him until he was about five. Carlos returned to his mother and father after his sister was born but his mother died when he was seven. Then he went to live with his grandfather and grandmother, Carlos and Margarita Castaneda, in São Paulo.
Carlos himself resembles the South American Indians but he told me his grandmother was almost six feet tall. His grandfather, an inventor, was Carlos' height and had red hair and blue eyes.
The name Aranha came from his Portuguese father's side of the family and the change from Carlos Aranha to Carlos Castaneda was my doing.
When he was about to become an American citizen in 1959 we discussed the possibility of changing his name and he asked for my views. I remembered his grandparents' name and told him I liked Castaneda better. He said he would go along with that.
He took his final citizenship papers in 1959 as Carlos Castaneda and I became Margaret Runyan Castaneda on January 27, 1960, the day we decided- on the spur of the moment—to go to Tijuana, Mexico, to be married. We divorced December 17, 1973.
We lived together only six months as man and wife but our friendship has continued through the years. I did not "fall in love" with Carlos. I simply loved him completely and spiritually from our first meeting – as I do today.
Carlos' mysterious way of disappearing and reappearing in my life kept me spellbound. I felt I knew him well but didn't know much about him. During the short period we lived as man and wife we supported ourselves separately. While Carlos was going to UCLA I know he drove a taxi sometimes and he had a number of other jobs. He worked for an exclusive ladies' apparel store in Los Angeles, keeping the accounts, I believe. For a while he worked in a liquor store and he used to bring me wonderful wines. We liked to have a glass of wine together but he never suggested that I should use drugs. He never even mentioned them.
I never knew where Carlos lived either before or after we lived together. Frequently he took small spartan apartments near Los Angeles City College and for a short time in the late 1950's he spoke of living in the "hills.”
As a couple we did not form social friendships. I had my own friends and Carlos had his. Occasionally, however, we did have a mutual friend. I remember in particular a thin, long-haired poet with whom we associated. He came into our lives just before Andrija Puharich's book, The Sacred Mushroom, introduced psychedelic consciousness to the world.
By December 1959 Carlos and I had read the Puharich book and somehow it changed us. I grew tired of living like a gypsy without roots. I wanted a place of my own, a home. Carlos on the other hand seemed withdrawn. Some persons suspected that he might have sought out - and found — the magic mushroom buttons that alter consciousness. He had been going into Mexico where he told me he was digging for bones. And suddenly I found myself going with him to Mexico to be married. My friends were surprised.
I MADE no effort to keep my I marriage to Carlos secret. My family, traditionalist Baptists, disapproved — Carlos was “different.” But they were across the continent and anyway I could do as I pleased.
It may have been important to Carlos to keep the marriage secret. A UCLA student-friend remembers running into Carlos at a movie theater in Westwood. "He was scrunched down in the front row with some very tall skinny girl much younger than himself,” she recalls. “When he saw me he said I must be sure not to tell Miss Runyan!” (Sometimes he called me "Margarita" but most of the time, even after we were married, he called me “Miss Runyan.")
On the other hand, Carlos often appeared on the UCLA campus with blond, blue-eyed “Adie,” my son by a previous marriage. One UCLA graduate said, "He told me the boy was his natural son and for the life of me I couldn't believe it.” If pressed, Carlos would say his "recessive genes” accounted for Adie's coloring.
His talent for dissembling is reflected in the impersonal yet romantic letters he wrote me in the 1960's. None of the letters is signed. But among the mail I received from him through the years between 1961 and 1967 is a letter in which he talked about the book he was working on for his “Cho Cho,” his affectionate name for young Adie. This book became The Teachings of Don Јuan.
Photos in my memory album are as sparse as Carlos' signatures. In the only photo I have which shows his face he is just recognizable. In another photo his body is reflected in a bedroom mirror. He was photo graphing me and the camera caught his own image in the mirror but he is faceless. The exploding flashbulb made his head a "luminous egg” as early as 1959!
I remember with happiness the many good times we had together. He used to tease me by picking me up and carrying me on his shoulder. Once I got mad and hit him on the head with my purse. And I was so jealous of him! I would follow him to see if he were going out with other women.
And the stories he told! I never knew if he was teasing or serious. He told me he came to the United States when he was 17 with only $5.00 in his pocket. He said his uncle “got mad” at him and put him on a boat. Once he told me he had traveled with a band of gypsies and had married a gypsy girl. And he said he had served in the American army in Spain in the war. What war?
WHETHER Don Juan is imaginary or real is a question I cannot answer. But whoever or whatever Don Juan is, he broke up our marriage. One day in the summer of 1960 Carlos told me he had met a man he wanted to study with and it would mean being away for days or weeks at a time. He knew that would disturb me so he said maybe we should live in separate apartments. We could both be free that way. Thus by midsummer of 1960 our marriage was coming to physical dissolution - but we are married spiritually and always will be.
After breaking with Castaneda I stayed in California for a few years and he often visited me – unannounced and unexpected — in the Los Angeles apartment we had shared. Then in 1966 I returned to my home in Charleston, W. Va. When the Runyan family began to talk of selling the Charleston property I moved to Maryland and worked at TV station WTOP in Washington, D.C. I was operating the station's switchboard at the time that my distant husband's doctoral dissertation came off the presses.
The Teachings of Don Juan initiated a psychic revolution - and I thought, “How fitting!” Carlos was always talking about starting a revolution. He wanted to help the underdogs of the world, especially the Latin countries.
I don't see Carlos anymore. I miss our conversations — and the wonderful spaghetti he can make. (He did the cooking when we lived together.) But I feel distance and time, separateness and success have not altered our spiritual closeness.
One night when he was in Mexico I was in my living room expecting a call from him. Suddenly I heard a loud crash, like a gunshot, in the kitchen. I found a crystal dish broken into a thousand pieces. It had been on a shelf between some other dishes and neither the dish on top nor the one beneath it had moved. The next day Carlos called, saying he had tried to get through to me the night before but the line was out of order. He had placed his call at the exact time my dish blew up.
On another occasion, shortly after The Teachings of Don Juan came out, my friend Linda Cox who lives in Washington, D.C., bought it and read it, then called me to say, “A black crow is in my library standing on Carlos' book. I guess Carlos came to visit.”
I believe it may have been Carlos, for I know what God power is. We all have the God power inside us because we are God. Think of it this way: “I am God but God is not me.” It is easily understood if you think: “A drop of water is the ocean but the ocean is not a drop of water.” When people understand this they learn how to make anything out of nothing.
In Carlos' mind, becoming a crow might have been a demonstration of God power: “You can turn nothing into anything you desire!” His books have led millions of young people into the quest for this way of life with the aid of mescaline and peyote.
Perhaps Don Juan is not one particular individual who lives a secretive desert life but is in fact any man, woman or child who so profoundly affects another's thinking that new understandings are born. Only about one-tenth of one percent of people affect life; all others reflect it. Carlos Castaneda is a man who affects life.
Why did he choose a conservative southern farm girl as a wife? That day in 1955 when my friend came to my apartment to bring the dresses Carlos and I engaged in the oldest life struggle, the game of the sexes. Laura Maddox said to him, “Now Carlos, be careful not to fall in love with Miss Runyan. If you do, you'll be hurt. She'll treat you just like one of those beautiful dresses she owns. She'll wear you for a while, then she'll grow tired of you and hang you in the closet."
Carlos was silent. When I turned to see his reaction to her words he was not there. He had mysteriously disappeared.
I Remember CASTENADA
By Wanda Sue Parrott
WHEN I answered my telephone one day in March 1957 I heard the voice of a total stranger. In a pleasant southern drawl the woman said, "I am Margaret Runyan. A friend of mine says he knows you from a party you both attended and when he told me your last name I had to find you. Yours is the same surname as my mother's. Maybe we're related.'
The friend was Carlos Aranha whom I had not met — whether or not we had attended the same party. But I liked the voice of the woman on the telephone. We arranged to meet and in checking our family trees Margaret Runyan and I discovered we are indeed distant cousins.
When Margaret later told Carlos she had “met that Wanda Sue you told me about,” Carlos looked at her and said, “Oh, Miss Runyan, how can you tell me such stories? There's no girl by that name and you know it. I just made up that name.”
How Carlos pulled my name literally out of the air is a mystery which Margaret and I simply sit back and enjoy. We have Carlos to thank for leading us into a rare and lasting friendship- for a few years a triangular friendship with Carlos in one corner.
It was interrupted briefly when I went to New York but by late 1959 I had returned to California to finish my education. At this time Margaret and I were living together in a large airy flat a couple of blocks south of Wilshire Boulevard and Carlos was at UCLA. As it had been all along he never would tell us exactly what he did. One day he said he was a liquor delivery boy, another time a cab driver. He neither drank nor smoked nor went out on the town. He was obviously intelligent and a true student. Neither Margaret nor I ever knew where Carlos was living. He came to us; we did not go to him.
In those days my impression was that he was an author in search of a publisher. Perhaps attaining a doctorate in anthropology represented the door through which he could pass to reach his goal.
I felt in fact that Castaneda put one over on the educational institution that granted his doctorate because from the day I met him I saw him as a seeker of mental adventure, a mind-spinner, a man with a marvelous childlike curiosity and an insatiable drive to taste the bizarre, be it sour, bitter, sweet or acid.
Carlos' complexion was nut brown, like an Indian's. Although his face was impish and childlike he looked about 35 years old to me. Certain lines in his forehead testified to his having lived longer than the 28 years he claimed.
He was always neatly dressed in a clean cotton shirt, open at the collar and tucked into dark belted trousers. I never have seen Carlos when he wasn't shiny clean.
In 1961 Carlos and Margaret accompanied me on a visit to my mother, father and sister in Monrovia, Calif. Carlos suddenly was not with us. We searched the neighborhood and the house but he had disappeared. My frustrated mother finally said, “We'll go on to eat without him." She served the roast beef and we all sat down to Sunday dinner. Suddenly Carlos was back. He was simply there, standing inside the front door smiling.
After that my mother said to me, "Please don't invite him here again. I like him but he makes me uncomfortable.”
I think he tried to make me uncomfortable too. Once when I was spending the night with Mr. and Mrs. Castaneda in their Los Angeles apartment Carlos pulled down the Murphy bed in the dining room for me, then knocked on the closet door beside it. Eyes twinkling, he said, "Soo-sie, do not open thees closet, because eef you do the bones ..." and his eyes grew big like round black saucers, “the bones, they weel get up and walk around all night.” He had been in Mexico with a party of archaeological students digging for bones.
We talked that night about mushrooms or cactus which if ingested created expanded consciousness. (Andrija Puharich's The Sacred Mushroom had just come out.) But I had the feeling that Carlos knew a lot about mind expansion – natural or unnatural — before he read that book. In some mysterious way he seemed to have tentacles reaching out, as if to possess.
I say this because of my final encounter with Carlos in April 1962 when I was living in Bakersfield, Calif., and Carlos was actually in Los Angeles 100 miles away. Whether the encounter was a visitation, a vision, a simple dream — or an attempt by Carlos to control my mind — I cannot say, but here is what happened:
In a dream I seemed awake. I was in a restaurant late at night, almost alone except for the waitress. I took a seat at the horseshoe-shaped counter and ordered coffee. Then I noticed on another stool a bundle wrapped in a soft pastel baby blanket.
Clearly came the thought, "This baby is abandoned. Take the child. It is for you." I lifted the heavy bundle. It was solid, warm and wriggling. Yes, it was a baby. I unfolded the blanket which covered its face and body. It was Carlos! A man's head, the familiar shiny black curls falling over the wide brow, and a baby's shrunken little nut-brown body. I stared in horror as a demonic transformation occurred. His face turned ugly and he leered devilishly. I could almost hear him say, "Now I've got you!”
I felt torn between sympathy for the baby and a terrible revulsion. Then I thought. “This is a trick," and I did something most women never do — I talked to a baby as if it were an adult.
“Carlos, you'll not pull this on me! No! I refuse to have anything to do with you.”
I laid him back on the stool, paid my bill and walked out of the restaurant, abandoning the dream figure who six years later would become the guru of the Western world.
And that is the last time I saw Carlos.
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