Amy Wallace - Sorcerers Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda

Amy Wallace has gone through the looking glass of Castanedas magic and come back out the other side with her wits, and wit, intact. And shes remembered it all with a novelists eye and ear. The result is a harrowing and vivid look at life inside a charismatic circlethe petty tyrannies, the abusive cruelties, the sometimes unintended silliness. This remarkable book is evidence that what enabled her to survive Castaneda and his cult is her lucid, generous, often funny intelligence that spares no oneleast of all herself.

Joe Kanon, author of Los Alamos

Carlos Castaneda told astonishing truths, with an empowering Gnostic brilliance. He also told astonishing lies, spinning out like wild silk from a crazy spiders ass. Sorcerers Apprentice tells the horrifying, heartbreaking tale of the lives entangled in his web. And it hurts like a son of a bitch.

With far greater personal honesty than Castaneda ever managed, Amy Wallace drags usfirst happily, then screaminglydeep into the Cult of Carlos: boldly capturing both the staggering beauty and the utter steaming nonsense of his world. Its an ass-kicking, soul-grinding book, beautifully written and breathtakingly acute. I suggest that you read it, and test your faith.

John Skipp, filmmaker and author of The Long Last Call, Conscience, and Stupography

To learn the art of magic is to court madness and self-destruction. A sorcerers tricks revealed cannot be unlearned. A mystery is by its nature duplicitous and if love is the most deeply cherished mystery of all, what price its secret? Amy Wallaces valuable memoir is as compulsively fascinating as a celebrity car accident and grips like a bad dream, the kind that keeps recurring whether you like it or not. Its never easy to learn the truth about your parents, heroes, and role models, to see a magician robbed of his tricks, the wizard dragged from behind his screen, and what I read shook me to the core. Nothing brings tears like magic lost forever and innocence betrayed yet those tears are more useful to us than joy for the salt they enclose is the element of wisdom

Richard Stanley, filmmaker and anthropologist

I read Sorcerers Apprentice with absolute fascination. Like millions of others, I had always wondered what was behind the Castaneda myth. My own life once gave me the choice of going down the guru path, a choice I rejected because, to me, its morally wrong for one person to claim closer knowledge of deity than any other. Its always a lie. The fearsome consequences of that lie in the life of the unfortunate creature who takes the guru path, as well as his followers, is exposed here with breathtaking candor.

Sorcerers Apprentice is an extremely powerful book. It is fair warning both to those who would presume to claim special favor in the spirit, as well as followers drawn by their own needs to such people. Amy Wallace warns us with her honesty and her careful attention to crucial emotional details, that guru-worship is a disease.

For those who have wondered whether or not Castanedas various guides were real in some objective sense, reading this book will clear up the mysteries. Yet her story is also a triumph of heart that Amy has written with a compassion and honesty of the highest order.

Whitley Strieber, author of Communion

Carlos Castaneda was one of the shapers of human consciousness during the period between the Beatles and the end of the twentieth century. After his death he remains a major spiritual and intellectual force. Yet he cast a schizophrenic shadow over our civilization. On the one hand, he taught us that we are here for a brief time in a beautiful, wondrous manifestation, and we must throw off the shackles of materialism, academic reductionism, and commercial distraction to realize our destiny, to experience the vast, untapped potential of our body-minds; on the other hand, he made the task so daunting and ultimately (if one reads him literally) terrifying and hopeless that he paralyzed many of his devotees and readers into inaction, submission, addictions, and denial. Amy Wallace has finally come along to liberate us from the spell. She says I will show you Carlos as he was. Follow the authentic spirit guide in him, but reject the manipulations of a tragically flawed and jealous guru. You are free to meet the Eagle on your own terms.

Richard Grossinger, author of Planet Medicine

Other books by Amy Wallace

The Psychic Healing Book, co-authored with Bill Henkin

The Two, co-authored with Irving Wallace

The Book of Lists 1, authored with Irving Wallace and David Wallechinsky

The Book of Lists 2, authored with Irving Wallace, Sylvia Wallace, and David Wallechinsky

The Book of Lists 3, authored with Irving Wallace and David Wallechinsky

The Official Punk Rock Book of Lists, co-authored with Handsome Dick Manitoba

Significa, authored with Irving Wallace and David Wallechinsky

The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People, authored with Irving Wallace, Sylvia Wallace, and David Wallechinsky

The Book of Predictions, with Irving Wallace and David Wallechinsky

The Book of Lists: The 905 Edition, co-authored with David Wallechinsky

The Prodigy: A Biography of William James Sidis, by Amy Wallace

Desire: A Novel, by Amy Wallace

Copyright 2003, 2007 by Amy Wallace. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by North Atlantic Books
P.O. Box 12327
Berkeley, California 94712

Cover design by Paul Buckley
Cover photographs: (Carlos Castaneda) furnished by TimePix;
(Sand) furnished by MandM, Inc.

Copyright acknowledgments begin on .

Sorcerers Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and cross-cultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.

North Atlantic Books publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Wallace, Amy.
Sorcerers apprentice : my life with Carlos Castaneda / By Amy Wallace.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58394-809-5
1. Castaneda, Carlos, 19251998 2. Wallace, Amy. 3. Anthropologists
United StatesBiography. 4. CultsUnited States. I. Title.
F1221.Y3C3776 2003
306.092dc21

2003004679

v3.1

To my mother who believed I could truly be a writer;

to the memory of my father who,

like his dear friend Carlos, believed that dreams come true;

and to Scott Bradley, who gave this book life.

All mans honors to man are small beside the greatest prize to which he may and must aspirethe finding of his soul, his spirit, his divine strength and worththe knowledge that he can and must live in freedom and dignitythe final realization that life is not a daily dying, not a pointless end, not an ashes-to-ashes and dust-to-dust, but a soaring and blinding gift snatched from eternity