Don Juan Matus

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Don Juan Matus is a major character in the series of books by Carlos Castaneda. He is described as a Yaqui Indian to whom Castaneda was introduced somewhere around the U.S.-Mexico border beginning in the early 1960's. The actual existence of don Juan has long been disputed.^[1] In response to their review of Castaneda's third book Journey to Ixtlan, Joyce Carol Oates wrote a letter to the New York Times Book Review expressing her bewilderment at their review for what she saw as an obvious fiction.^[2]

"Don" is a common, polite, term of deference for males in Spanish. The traditional usage of the honorific is Don for the Royals, Grandees of Spain and his relatives, and don as a courtesy respectful treatment for everyone else of some position. Castaneda consistently referred to don Juan using the lower case form.

As a character in Castaneda's books, don Juan tells Castaneda that he is a brujo (Spanish for sorcerer or witch), which is a sort of healer, sorcerer or shaman, who had inherited (through a lineage of teachers) an ancient Central American practice for refining one's awareness of the universe. Don Juan was an expert in the cultivation and use of various psychotropic plants (specifically, psychedelic mushrooms, Datura, and Peyote) that can be found in the Mexican deserts, which are used as aids to reach states of non-ordinary reality in the philosophy he conveyed to Castaneda.

In the books don Juan is unmarried, and presented as an old man of indigenous ancestry, with great strength and agility, who spoke excellent Spanish, but had never been to college, and lived his entire life in poor conditions. Don Juan's philosophy, might be summed up in a passage from Castaneda's first book, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge:

For me there is only the traveling on the paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge for me is to traverse its full length. And there I travel—looking, looking, breathlessly.

Taisha Abelar and Florinda Donner-Grau also wrote about the same don Juan Matus, although he went by different pseudonyms in their books such as Mariano Aureliano. In all of these books don Juan Matus was a nagual who was leader of a group of practitioners of tradition of perceptual enhancement.