TAISHA ABELAR WAS THE FIRST WITCH OF CARLOS CASTANEDA

Taisha Abelar was one of Carlos Castaneda's main disciples and lovers, and here I will put the information I find about her.

HER LIFE

Taisha was born on August 25, 1945, in a refugee camp in Weidenberg, Germany. She later emigrated to the United States.

She met Castaneda in Los Angeles in 1964 when she was 19 and he was 39. At this time, they were both studying at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

From that day forward, she was his devoted disciple until Castaneda died in 1998. Then Taisha, along with some of his other devoted disciples, decided to commit suicide.

For more details about her life, read:

•        His biography (I'll add it later)

HER DIFFERENT NAMES

Castaneda asked his disciples to change their names, and Taisha did so as well.

Her birth name is Maryann Simko.

She later changed her name to Annamarie Carter, but was also known as Sheila Waters, Ricky, Alphonsina, Anna Maria Cordova, Annie, Madeline Rigo.

And her most famous name is Taisha Abelar .

HER STATUS IN CASTANEDA GROUP

Castaneda stated that, besides himself, three other women (known as "the witches") had also known and been disciples of the nahual Don Juan, and Taisha was one of them. He added that he had become their new guide. But most likely that all these assertions were lies and in reality Taisha was part of Castaneda's inner harem.

HER BOOK

In 1992 Taisha published a book entitled "Where the Sorcerers Cross" in which she recounted her alleged encounter, training and initiation by the group of sorcerers of Don Juan.

PHOTOS

Taisha imitated Castaneda's habit of remaining very secretive, but over time some photos of her have been found.

This photo shows Taisha when she was young:

The following photos were published in the November 1974 issue of Samurai Magazine where Taisha appears practicing karate with Florinda Donner (another of the witches):

TAISHA DESCRIBED BY RICHARD JENNINGS

Richard Jennings was a student of Castaneda during his later years; he knew Taisha well, and about her he commented the following:

« Taisha Abelar, was, if not the first of Castaneda’s lovers/cult members (that was probably Joanie Barker), certainly the one who served in that role the longest.

After meeting him when she was only 19, she somehow found a way to live with him throughout his entire self invented, philandering, megalomaniacal life. She was also arguably the most accomplished of his many lovers and cult members. 

Taisha came from a close knit family that had survived the destruction and displacement of WWII, and her siblings all went on to academic distinction and professional careers.

She herself not only published articles on a variety of subjects in her early years, but also legitimately gained her masters and Ph.D at UCLA, unlike Florinda who plagiarized her attempted thesis and was expelled from UCLA’s Ph.D program.

Although taken over and groomed by Castaneda from a young age, she was very practical and worldly in her own way, and Castaneda came to depend on her for those qualities. And she procured for him Florinda, among others, as a lover and disciple, receiving her as a lifelong housemate in return.

My impressions of her

For me, when I got involved with the group in early 1995, Taisha was the most magical of Castaneda’s circle. Her lectures vividly made us experience her imagined stalking lives as various characters, and their intense, often miserable, but invariably extreme experiences.

During the course of the same evening’s remarks, she would make us laugh out loud and sob with uncontrollable tears. Her matter-of-fact telling of the most outlandish tales (e.g., flying for miles through the air in a treehouse), made those stories feel all the more real. She truly seemed to transport us somewhere––to move our assemblage points, in Castaneda’s vernacular—to something outside ordinary reality.

Although I had many more encounters with Florinda, who was the most gregarious of the inner circle, as well as Kylie and Talia, whom I was able to help with many practical tasks, it was Taisha—whom I mainly saw only at the workshops and Sunday sessions, and then a few times for tea in Castaneda’s compound where she lived on one side with Florinda—for whom I had the most respect and admiration.

As Amy Wallace, my closest friend and confidant in Castaneda’s world, shared with me, in real time, her experiences with Taisha in those final days before Castaneda’s death, I gained a different view of what Taisha had become. The first and most lasting disciple had given in to Castaneda’s imagination with her whole heart and her own active imagination, ultimately coming to believe both his tales and teachings, as well as her own “dreamed” or “actively imagined” stories about Castaneda’s imaginary teachers. 

When Castaneda came to his end and wasn’t capable of helping her and the others who had been with him so long to “burn with the fire from within,” she was absolutely and understandably devastated. She had given her life, her soul, her total commitment to Castaneda’s philosophy and worldview. Genuinely there was no life for her outside the one she had spent as Castaneda’s “colleague“ and indefatigable supporter. One senses she didn’t want to die, but really had no option but to attempt to join her beloved, her lifelong guru, in death. And she committed to this suicide pact as fervently and stoically as every other task she had had to complete in service to her personal savior.

So Taisha’s chronology was particularly painful for me to put together, and once done, I wrestled with making it public. When her brother and sister-in-law, who ultimately shared with and confirmed for me essential family history after I tracked them down, asked me to keep it unpublished, it wasn’t hard for me to agree.

By contrast, my deep anger at Carol‘s ongoing deceptions, and her cruel and callous treatment of Amy and others in the group, made it easy for me to share through the private Sustained Action mailing list, and ultimately this site, what I had learned about her real story, which totally debunked the oft repeated canard that she had “bodily disappeared” from this world for 10 years. For the highly intelligent, talented, true believer Taisha, on the other hand, I felt, and still feel, only deep pity, sadness and regret at her inevitable decision to take her own life.

But the time has finally come, a quarter of a century on, to complete the real story, the truth of the destructive cult that Castaneda—a philosophical inspiration to so many—created to amuse and occupy himself, especially in his last decade. I didn’t come on the scene until the last three years of his life, but those 40 months or so were intense and all consuming for me. I can just barely imagine, then, how deeply stuck and dependent someone like Taisha had become, having been seduced and controlled by Castaneda from her late teens on, for over three rollercoaster decades. »

CONCLUSION

Taisha was initially just another victim of Carlos Castaneda, but she grew accustomed to lying, living very well, and being admired by beguiling others. She ended up participating in and believing the fantasies Castaneda had invented for her. But when her mentor and lover died, she preferred to take her own life rather than face the collapse of the fantasy where she had been placed on a pedestal.

NURY ALEXANDER WAS THE ADOPTED DAUGHTER OF CARLOS CASTANEDA

Nury Alexander was the daughter, lover, and protégé of Carlos Castaneda, and here I will share the information I find about her.

HER LIFE

Nury was born on September 4, 1957, in Los Angeles, California. She met Castaneda in this city when she was 19 and he was 50.

Castaneda made her his favorite lover and also a very valuable and powerful figure within his group, transforming her into the second most important person after him.

For two decades Nury lived in a fantasy world behaving like a haughty, petulant and contemptuous child, until Castaneda died in 1998.

Desperate, Nury traveled to the Death Valley desert where years later remains of her skeleton were found.

For more details about his life, read:

•        Her biography (I'll add it later)

HER DIFFERENT NAMES

Castaneda asked his disciples to change their names, and Nury did so as well.

Her birth name is Patricia Lee Partin, she was affectionately called Patty.

After meeting Castaneda, she changed her name to Nury Alexander. Nury (with a y) appears on her original name change application, but Nuri (with an i) appears on other legal documents.

She was also known as Claude.

HER STATUS IN CASTANEDA GROUP

Castaneda declared that the Blue Explorer was "an entity of consciousness" that he described as a luminous, elongated being of brilliant blue color that inhabits the world of inorganic beings. It is considered an explorer because it has the ability to cross over into the reality of human beings.

And according to Castaneda, the Blue Explorer crossed over and transformed into Nury, but that is false because Nury was not a superhuman entity but a simple ordinary person.

MORE LIES

Castaneda also claimed that Nury was the daughter he had with Carol Tiggs (the nagual woman), but this assertion is also false because historical data shows that Nury's parents were others.

At the workshop held from July 23 to 25, 1993 at the Rim Institute in Arizona, the witch Florinda Donner announced that the Blue Scout was the daughter of Carol Tiggs.

The audience then asked her how she avoided having energy holes since Castaneda stated in his books that having children creates holes in the luminous egg.

Florinda explained that a sorceress could simply cause one of her eggs to begin dividing “by an act of will,” but that normally no warrior would want that because it would cause a huge “energy hole.” But in the case of the explorers, she stated that they had their own energy, but no body, so they could be conceived and born without sex and without causing energy holes in the mother.

This explanation is also false since there are no "explorers" mentioned by Castaneda.

And when Carol was later asked about this matter, she didn't address Florinda's story about parthenogenesis, but simply twirled around the edge of the platform, like a model on a fashion runway, asking, "Do you see any holes?"

At the workshop held from May 26-29, 1995 at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, tensegrity instructor  Nyei Murez also stated that: "The Blue Scout is the daughter of Carol Tiggs. Carol Tiggs gave birth to her."

And Nyei also stated that the Blue Scout had been "missing for about ten years, from seven to seventeen chronological years old," returning approximately one year before Tiggs.

But if you read Nury's and Carol's biographies, you'll see that all of this assertions are lies. 

PHOTOS

Nury imitated Castaneda's habit of remaining very secretive, but over time some photos of her have been found.

The following photo was taken from her school yearbook when she was a teenager:

These photos were taken from a video filmed in 1997 when Nury was 40 years old.

VIDEO

You can see this short video that was taken of Nury in 1997 starting at 0:35.

 

NURY DESCRIBED BY JACOBO GRIMBERG

Jacobo Grinberg was a famous Mexican scientist who became interested in shamanism; in 1991 he spent a week with Carlos Castaneda and his witches, and regarding Nury he mentioned the following:

« Castaneda invited the men of the group to accompany him and together we went to find his daughter Nuri, a thin and extraordinarily sensitive girl, dressed as a man, who surprised me with her understanding of the Synteric theory.

She asked me about my occupation and I told her about my work at the University and the research on the synteric theory hypothesis.

Her understanding was direct and complete, as if my explanation had been perfectly engraved in her mind.

. . .

Castaneda and his nagual wife had had a daughter, and she was the thin girl we had met on the first day.

Nuri was intelligent and perceptive, like a blade of steel. However, there was something about her that was still undefined; something that still needed to mature. »

(In reality, Castaneda had adopted Nury, who was not a child since in 1991 she was already 34 years old but behaved as if she were a child.)

NURY DESCRIBED BY AMY WALLACE

The writer Amy Wallace was part of Carlos Castaneda's inner circle and also one of his lovers, and regarding Nury she commented the following:

« One woman in particular held a special place in Castaneda's group; she was known as Nury Alexander or the Blue Explorer. Supposedly, she was the most important being on this planet apart from the Nahual Castaneda, since she was the one who would lead us all to infinity.

But in reality she was Patty Partin, a 19-year-old waitress whom Castaneda had seduced somewhere in Southern California and who had been completely brainwashed, and whose bones were discovered in Death Valley in 2003.

Castaneda had taken the strange step of adopting Patty as his daughter in the 1990s, and he was also sexually active with her, which made her adoption as his daughter take on a completely strange atmosphere. Do you know what he told me once? He said, "You have the same vagina as my daughter, that's why I love her so much."

For almost twenty years, Nury lived with Castaneda, and despite her gray hair, she behaved like a child, claiming she had been trapped in another dimension since she was seven. She played with dolls and spoke like a little girl.

Castaneda told me: "Nury was seven years old when she first got into my bed, she climbed on top of me and thump, thump, thump! She wanted to do it at seven years old ... and we did! What could I do? I couldn't resist... she sexually assaulted me while I was asleep! »

NURY DESCRIBED BY RICHARD JENNINGS

Richard Jennings was a student of Castaneda during his later years; he knew Nury well, and about her he commented the following:

« What if everything about you was a lie? If your origin and whole life story was the fantastic, grandiose concoction of a famous and powerful man who came into your life in your late teens and then dictated how and where you would live, supporting you all the while, for the next 20 years? Who would you be and how could you carry on after that man died?

Nury Alexander found she could not continue under those circumstances. When her inventor/creator ceased being around to maintain her on the absurdly high pedestal he had erected for her, she inevitably fell to earth and died. Welcome to the Blue Scout Chronology.

When they met, she was an attractive 19-year-old high school dropout, whose grades in school had been poor at best. Raised in a small, rural town, she was emotionally scarred by the crippling accident her doting father had suffered when she was only 11. The tragic accident caused her really to lose both parents, because not only did her severely brain damaged father have to go into nursing homes, her mother’s grief made her totally self absorbed, with no time or attention for her pre-teen daughter.

As a result, Patty grew up deeply narcissistically wounded and emotionally immature. Her friends of that time report that she escaped not only into drinking and drugs, but also fantasies of finding Hollywood stardom. When she met the man who had the financial and creative resources to give her that stardom and sense of specialness she sought, that she could never have attained on her own, she was totally ensnared. In return she gave him the one thing she had going for her: strong sexual energy and a sense of abandon.

In Castaneda world, the former Denny’s waitress with little education became an other worldly, cosmically advanced figure whose supposed creativity and narcissistic whims were indulged to the hilt.

Castaneda eventually adopted her as his daughter, so their intense sexual relationship also took on an incestuous edge. And she used her position as the pinnacle and arbiter of the Castaneda cult’s social hierarchy to attract young female lovers, who desperately competed for her favors and attention.

And all her bills and luxuries were fully paid for by her creator/lover/father. Given her arrested development and unchecked narcissism, her main activities when not having sex with her father or young female lovers were those of a child: playing with dolls and going to amusement parks. 

So this was the person Castaneda held up not only to his inner circle but also to those of us in the Sunday group and much larger contingent of Tensegrity workshop goers as the most evolved and cosmically attuned being–the one who was not only “ready to go” into the wonder of the infinite, but also to lead Castaneda’s group on its ultimate journey. Castaneda and his fellow supposed disciples of don Juan built her up to us before we ever met her, and Castaneda then oversaw and carefully scripted her handful of public speeches.

In reality, of course, she was only a special, cosmically wondrous creature in Castaneda’s eyes and storytelling. No wonder she couldn’t see a way to continue when her creator died. Failing to join the other four women closest to Castaneda on their well-planned suicide pact trip, she took off to Death Valley on her own, abandoning her red Ford Escort–its plates stripped, empty of luggage or anything else–to walk into the burning desert to her death at age 40. »

CONCLUSION

Nury was a young woman who fell for Carlos Castaneda's deceptions. He built her a fantasy world where she was the princess, but after Castaneda died, Nury couldn't return to the real world and ended up dying prematurely at the age of forty. She was yet another victim of this writer.

CAROL TIGGS WAS THE NAHUAL WOMAN OF CARLOS CASTANEDA

Carol Tiggs was one of Carlos Castaneda's main disciples, and here I will put the information I find about her.

HER LIFE

Carol was born on November 24, 1947, in Los Angeles, California. She met Castaneda in this city when she was around 23 years old. Two years later, in 1973, she distanced herself from Castaneda for ten years and returned to him in 1983.

When Castaneda died in 1998, shortly afterwards five of his closest disciples disappeared (it is suspected that they committed suicide), the only witch who did not disappear was Carol who took over the leadership of Cleargreen, the company that Castaneda founded to market his teachings.

But Carol has remained very hidden, appearing at a tensegrity workshop held in 2015 in Sochi, Russia; and she probably won't appear in public again because she is already very old.

For more details about her, read:

·        H

(Later I put it)

HER DIFFERENT NAMES

Castaneda asked his disciples to change their names, and Carol changed her names on several occasions.

Her birth name is Kathleen Adair Pohlman, but she later changed her name to: Elizabeth Austin, Muni Alexander, Carol Aranha, Muni Tiggs Alexander, although the most famous is Carol Tiggs.

In his later years he decided to call Muni Aranha.

Aranha is Castaneda's original paternal surname, whose full birth name is Carlos César Salvador Arana Castañeda.

HER STATUS IN CASTANEDA GROUP

Carol was part of the "chacmools" (the  warriors), which is what Castaneda called his personal disciples who made up his inner circle.

The three main ones (who supposedly had also met Don Juan) were known as the "witches" and Carol was one of them; the other two witches were Taisha Abelar and Florinda Donner.

But Carol obtained an even higher status since Castaneda stated that she was "the nahual woman", that is, his partner and female equivalent.

The other two witches did not agree with this statement because Carol arrived after them, but they did not dare to contradict Castaneda.

HER LITERARY WORK

Carol, at  the workshop held at the Rim Institute in Arizona from July 23 to 25, 1993, she stated that her book "Tales of Energy," where she would recount her shamanic experiences, would be published soon, but this book never appeared.

And in fact Carol didn't write any books, and people who knew her say that was because she is lazy.

PHOTOS

Carol imitated Castaneda's habit of remaining very secretive, but over time some photos of her have been found.

The following photos were taken when she was a teenager:

 

The following photo is from the 1967 UC Berkeley student yearbook, when Carol was 20 years old:

The following photos were taken when she was a young woman:

 

This photo was taken in 1997, when Carol was 50 years old:

The following photo is a group photo of students from Heather Lyle's Vocal Yoga class, from which Carol received her instructor certification on August 15, 2015.  Teacher Heather Douglas Lyle is the woman in the middle wearing an orange shirt, and Carol is the woman in the back row wearing a black shirt.

CAROL DESCRIBED BY JACOBO GRIMBERG

Jacobo Grinberg was a famous Mexican scientist who became interested in shamanism. In 1991, he spent a week with Carlos Castaneda and his witches, and regarding Carol Tiggs, he mentioned the following:

« Castaneda's closest circle was made up entirely of women. They were all thin and masculine-looking. Some I met were Carol, the Nahual woman; Nuri, his daughter; Florinda Donner; and Ana [Taisha Abelar].

They all had something in common that set them apart from the rest of the women I had met, except for some from Tepoztlán: a yearning for freedom and an energy devoid of worldly feelings.

(Cid's note: To others they appeared to be warriors working hard to merge into the infinite, but in reality they still had worldly tastes, since two people spied on them and discovered that Castaneda bought them luxurious gifts and designer clothes.)  

Ana was the best known for these qualities. Florinda was strong and direct, and the one who most resembled the Nahual, Carol, seemed otherworldly, distant and ethereal.

When we were in Tula, Castaneda told us that the the Death Defier had merged with the Nahual woman and Carol contained them both in one.  Everyone turned to look at Carol and she nodded.

And Castaneda added: “With this woman I have traveled where no one else can travel.”

We turned once more to look at Carol and she nodded again, saying "yes". »

(Cid's note: Castaneda is inventing fantastical stories here, and Carol was supporting him in his lies.) 

CAROL AS DESCRIBED BY TONY KARAM

Marco Antonio Karam, better known as Lama Tony, is a promoter of Tibetan Buddhism. In 1989 he founded the organization Casa Tibet México and has directed it ever since.

Castaneda met Tony around 1982 and decided that Karam would be his successor; and regarding Carol Tiggs, Tony commented the following:

« Carol's arrival changed the group's dynamic. When Castañeda named her his spiritual counterpart, that is, the female nahual, there were negative reactions from the other witches who argued that Carol didn't have the shamanic training or the time they had spent with Castañeda to be their leader. She lacked authority. They didn't believe in Carol.

As part of my initiation into the inner circle, Castaneda ordered me to have sexual relations with Carol (whom Castaneda had also married).

Castaneda presented this to me as a worthy honor for his designated successor.

I stayed at a hotel with Carol during her trips to Mexico City. We were just two disciples following our master's orders.

Castañeda told us that having sex was a ritualistic exercise that united energies and sought to align the spiritual genes of his group.

It wasn't something passionate, it was something mechanical that simply had to be done to achieve this supposed harmony.

Carol remained indifferent and impassive to this order; she was simply told that she had to do it and she did it .

After Carlos Castaneda's death, everything fell apart. Without a capable leader to replace him, the burden fell on Carol, but she wasn't suited for be the new lider. »

CAROL DESCRIBED BY RICHARD JENNINGS

Richard Jennings was a student of Castaneda during his later years; he knew the witches well, and about Carol he commented the following:

« Many years after Carlos Castaneda’s death, Carol Tiggs continues to maintain the absurd story that Castaneda “burned with the fire from within,” and that the missing women who committed suicide following his death were “traveling”–is consistent not only with narcissistic personality disorder, just like Castaneda, but is also that of a sociopath.

Unlike Castaneda, however, she is not the rare “charismatic guru” type of narcissist. She lacks that type’s ability to “read” people that Castaneda possessed in spades. She also has none of his preternatural gift for storytelling, or even inventing believable and consistent lies. All she had to go on was her relative attractiveness for an individual of her age, and the grandiose but unsustainable stories he left behind that caused gullible Castaneda followers to project super powers on her, at least until she opened her mouth. Welcome to the Carol Tiggs Chronology.

From Carol’s behavior over the years, both with Castaneda in the picture and without, it is pretty clear she lacks any kind of moral compass, and will simply use people for her own ends, no matter the harm that causes.

She has been around the New Age bullshit block long enough that she’s picked up some techniques for conning the most gullible, including the basic hypnosis induction techniques Castaneda had her learn in the early ’90s from videotapes and books.

But she has no skill at telling effective stories–for example, she could not and would not ever write the book about her supposed sorceric experiences that was long claimed to be in the works–and is apparently too lazy even to put in the minimal effort needed to keep her stories straight.

She has at least been smart enough to stay out of the public eye for most of the last 25 years. Given she is a Stanford grad, she’s clearly not stupid. But she stumbled badly on her first outing at a Cleargreen workshop in 17 years as detailed below, not only making up a melodramatic and patently absurd story about her childhood, but also claiming a technique she had just learned that summer in getting certified as a vocal yoga instructor had been taught to her by don Juan in their first supposed meeting. It is highly unlikely then that she will ever make the mistake of appearing in public like that again. 

Carol’s very sad workshop “comeback” after all these years only confirmed what those of us who had watched and known her through the years had long come to realize: Carol is nothing without the svengali who scripted, staged and oversaw her appearances as one of the two most important living protagonists of his elaborate myth.

As Bruce Wagner told Amy Wallace following Castaneda’s death regarding Carol, “She is no more fit to take on the job of leader than I am to redo the plumbing in your house.” Far from being a supremely powerful “sorceress” who “rides the Death Defier,” or even “superpussy,” she is a pathetic victim of her own and Castaneda’s grandiose web of lies aimed at making a narcissist loser seem special enough to merit others’ attention and admiration.

And the supreme irony, in my mind, is that all these years after Castaneda’s death and her elevation as a supernatural being, Ms. Tiggs and the few other remaining charlatans at Cleargreen are reduced to peddling bogus “breath techniques,” exactly like the many gurus Castaneda claimed to have once visited and that he mercilessly lampooned to us in Sunday sessions.

Whereas Taisha Abelar was an intelligent and talented true believer, and Florinda Donner was a naturally charismatic serial liar and sociopath, Carol is basically just a sociopathic but inept nobody without a puppet master around to transform her into a “magical being.”

Based on the material I reviewed and people I spoke to in putting together this updated chronology, I have nothing but contempt for how Carol has operated and treated people. Her choices, actions and inaction have generated nothing but increasing suspicion and ridicule of Castaneda’s legacy. She deserves to be shunned and what’s left of the Cleargreen organization disbanded.

As we know, however, from the painful national spectacle of Donald Trump, pathological narcissists never admit their misdeeds or failures. They will blame it on others, and otherwise make up lies and excuses until their dying day.

Yes, the cult of Castaneda is a story of victims and villains. Carol was both–a victim of Castaneda’s years of abuse and manipulation–but her own misdeeds, abuses of trust and outright fraud make her the singular villain of the post Castaneda years. In honor of all the people whose trust and faith she abused and crapped on, it is time to update the ludicrous and sad chronology of one Carol Tiggs. »

CONCLUSION

Carol was initially just another victim of Carlos Castaneda, but she got used to lying, living very well, and being admired by liying others, so she ended up participating in and believing the fantasies that Castaneda had invented for her, and she continued to nurture those lies for many years after Castaneda passed away.