« As the following chronology establishes, Florinda Donner-Grau (originally Regine Margarete Thal) told numerous contradictory–and, in many cases demonstrably false–stories about her supposed apprenticeship to “don Juan.”
In fact, Florinda Donner was married and living with her husband in Manhattan Beach (just south of Los Angeles) until March 1972, so it is nearly impossible to fit the few trips and long sequences with don Juan and the women of his party described in Florinda’s book Being-in-Dreaming into Florinda’s real-life chronology for the period of mid-1972 to 1973 (the year don Juan’s party supposedly departed from the world), especially considering she was then attending UCLA full time.
Conveniently, however, Florinda never once referred to her husband of five-and-a-half years in anything she wrote or said publicly. (Conveniently too, her ex-, Edward M. Steiner, died in early 1974 only a little more than a year after their divorce, at the age of 44.)
The fact is, Florinda did not hold herself out as a “disciple of don Juan” until late 1992. Even in a February 1992 Dimensions article, after her 1991 book Being-in-Dreaming purported to describe her introduction to don Juan’s party and experiences up to and immediately after don Juan’s party “left,” Florinda explained:
“Actually I’m not an apprentice of Don Juan. I was an apprentice of Castaneda who was an apprentice of Don Juan. And I am one of the ‘sisters’ who were actually of the women of Florinda [Matus], and she gave me her name.”
This not-so-subtle change in Florinda’s apprentice status takes on greater significance when one looks at all the stories Florinda related at workshops between 1993 and 1998. In those workshops, Florinda described major experiences she supposedly had with don Juan that are strangely omitted from her 1991 book, or which directly contradict statements made there (e.g., whereas at the workshops she described being instructed on passes by don Juan in sessions that included Carol and Taisha, and claimed to have gone out to dinner simultaneously with Carol, Taisha and don Juan, in her book she complained about not having met the other women “who had been entrusted to” Castaneda by don Juan prior to don Juan’s departure).
Some of the stories later told at workshops that are in no way mentioned in Being-in-Dreaming (despite the fact that that book seemed aimed at detailing all of Florinda’s relatively few encounters with don Juan during the period covered by that book) include:
1. Twice being taken up into the hills by don Juan (with Taisha on hand for at least one of these times) to disrobe and experience the “wind”.
2. Don Juan’s request that Florinda “find out about intent for him,” and her returning months later after exhaustively researching the subject, only to have him ask her, “Why do you want to be a stupid cunt all your life?”.
3. Being told by don Juan not to use other people for help with her research in the Amazon (when she had earlier claimed in The Witch’s Dream that this instruction was given to her by Old Florinda long after don Juan was gone).
4. Don Juan showing her his penis after instructing Old Florinda to “show me her pussy”.
5. Don Juan telling her she should never wear panties, and that female “discharges” are only the result of “the womb [being] ill because of not using its second function”.
6. Don Juan giving her the “not-doings” of not wearing clothes, wearing different shoes on each foot, and adorning her naked body with insects or vegetables.
7. Don Juan telling her to cut her long beautiful hair (although she had earlier claimed at a different workshop that the short length was the result of having lice and getting totally shaved following her trip to the Amazon, long after don Juan was gone).
8. Asking don Juan about the female entity that grabbed Castaneda’s VW van when she was driving it (with Taisha as passenger) in L.A.
9. And “Going out socially with don Juan,” including once explaining peevishly to don Juan why she had turned down going out for dinner with don Juan, Castaneda, Taisha, Carol and Old Florinda.
Meanwhile, Shabono, Florinda’s 1982 account of living for a year (in 1976? 1977?) with Yanoámo Indians in the Amazon, not only filches details, terminology and whole scenes from a real account of a white woman’s experience of living with those Indians that was published in 1971, but is also impossible to fit within Florinda’s known and documented presence in Los Angeles during the mid-seventies.
So much so that her former doctoral committee published a letter in 1983 stating they were “puzzled” how a graduate student, who did not leave UCLA until the fall of 1977, would never have mentioned to any of her advisors such harrowing and exciting anthropological experiences, which she variously indicated to interviewers took place in 1975-1976 or 1976-1977.
And the account in her 1985 book The Witch‘s Dream of many months–immediately before the year in the Amazon–supposedly spent with traditional curers in Venezuela is similarly contradictory of the known facts of Florinda’s life in Los Angeles during that period.
More lies
Florinda’s credibility further suffers from the many other claims she made during the course of workshops that can readily be proven false.
1) For example, she claimed “Tycho Thal,” the so-called “Orange Scout” was her natural daughter (from a liason with “a huge, fat Indian from Oaxaca,” through a process “very much directed by don Juan”). In reality, the younger “Ms. Thal” is actually the former Premajyoti Galvez y Fuentes, who only got involved with Castaneda and company in the early ’90s, and who filed to change her name to Tycho Thal in September 1993.
2) Florinda also claimed that “Blue Scout” was Carol’s daughter.
3) That Florinda had first met Kylie in Norway (where Kylie was supposedly from), when Kylie was actually from the midwest.
4) And in introductions of the “non-group” group on a couple of occasions in 1997, that Reni was “finishing her law degree,” Zaia “had” her Ph.D., and that “Dr. Miles Reid” was a “surgeon.”
(Note: While those who discount these various fabrications as mere “stalking” are certainly free to do so, please note how many of these false statements seem intended to aggrandize the people referred to, seemingly in an effort to heighten their importance and credibility as people having real “sorceric” teachings to impart.)
5) As the following chronology further details, Florinda failed at every opportunity to be honest with journalists as to the fact she had never received a PhD from UCLA.
6) Along with Taisha, she permitted photos of herself both to be taken and published in martial arts magazines in 1974 and 1975, despite Castaneda and company’s repeated claim that don Juan instructed his apprentices not to allow their pictures to be taken.
7) Also, she and Taisha likewise posed for photos at Florinda’s brother’s wedding in Caracas in 1975.
8) She responded to a 1997 question about the whereabouts of Josefina and the other Little Sisters by claiming they had “left” in 1985, whereas on a few occasions at workshops in 1993, Florinda had described at length the then-current occupations of the Genaros and Little Sisters, whom she claimed they still interacted with.
9) Finally, there is the story of Old Florinda and don Genaro trashing Florinda’s brand new sports car by sending it down a hill into a ravine, which Florinda told at four different workshops from 1996 to 1997.
That story usually ended with the claim Florinda no longer drove (except to back the car out of the driveway, or around the block) because of Old Florinda’s injunction against her driving (purportedly both because her fast driving was endangering her life, and distracting her from her sorceric tasks).
In reality, in the years before Florinda claimed to be a “disciple of don Juan,” she admitted in a 1983 interview with the Los Angeles Times that she no longer drove because she had “accumulated too many tickets and forfeited her license.”
Research documented in the chronologies also shows that her four-year-old sports car was identified as her separate property when Florinda’s divorce became final in November 1972.
The chronology–an ordering of the key events of Florinda’s life, as discernable from public records, her books, statements made in interviews and at workshops, and interviews with her parents and brother, as well as others who knew her at various times in her life–further identifies documents linking Florinda with Castaneda that have been unearthed to date, including her aborted petition to change her name to “Cristina Casablanca” (a name that Castaneda later urged another girlfriend to take) in the fall of 1972, and her being one of the incorporators of Hermeneutics Unlimited, along with Castaneda, Taisha, Beverly Evans and Joanie Barker, on September 5, 1974.
Florinda’s marriage to Castaneda in 1993 (under their respective legal names) is also documented, along with her marriage the following year (apparently without the benefit of an intervening divorce) to Castaneda’s agent and one-time Tensegrity “Element” Tracy Kramer.
The chronology concludes with Florinda’s departure, along with Castaneda’s other four closest women associates, and presumed suicide upon his death in April 1998, and Cleargreen’s subsequent repeated invocation of her name as one of the three “supervising” the current workshops, along with their purported, but highly unlikely, stories about instructors’ prior encounters with Florinda related to their teaching of Tensegrity.
Additional explanation about Florinda
I was much too easy on Florinda in my 1999 introduction to her chronology. I do identify, in that original introduction below, the huge barrage of lies and contradictions that made up Florinda’s three books and later sorcery apprenticeship stories she told at workshops.
In retrospect, though, I let my great affection and admiration for Florinda cloud my judgment when it came to fully comprehending her consistently pathological behavior.
This is someone who not only reveled in lying on a constant basis, and doing so for the sheer joy of it, but who also employed those lies in the pursuit of her other great joy and passion– the manipulation and control of others. And then there’s all that pimping she did for Castaneda that Amy describes in some detail, and that is borne out by stories I’ve heard from other women.
Castaneda’s supposed philosophy of warriorship, and his milieu of secrecy and “suspended judgment,” gave Florinda a rich environment to be able to live out her fantasies. As she revealed to Amy Wallace, as a child growing up in Caracas, she loved playing with and having total control over her toy farm creatures.
She dreamed of being able to control a similar menagerie of individuals in real life. When she met up with Carlos, she truly encountered a like spirit. Here was someone who not only enjoyed lying and making up stories as much as she did, but who also had the wealth, fame and charisma to be in a position to do exactly what Florinda dreamed of–manipulate and control a devoted group of individuals.
The fact they did so artfully does not disguise the fact that they employed classic guru techniques. Florinda basically functioned as the gatekeeper to Castaneda world. This gave her immense power, and she spent decades using her charm and prodigious people skills to manipulate and control the inhabitants of that world.
Unlike Carol Tiggs, though, she didn’t envision a future for herself without Castaneda. She couldn’t see a way to continue to do what she loved–shamelessly lie and manipulate others–in his absence. As she frequently told Amy, and as I heard her say too, “There is no game without the Nagual.” She knew her position and power were totally derivative of Castaneda, so she could not see a way to continue once he was gone.
Like Taisha, Kylie and Talia, I am firmly convinced she committed suicide right after Castaneda passed. But unlike them, I don’t think she was doing it in a misguided attempt to “join Castaneda.” I think she simply figured she didn’t have anything to live for once her power and position were obliterated by his death.
The conundrum though is that of the four women who disappeared (five counting Nury, who we know died in the desert), given her having lived in other countries, being multilingual, and her demonstrated facility for interacting with diverse groups of people, she clearly had the experience and skills that would have enabled her to make a new life for herself–in a different country, with a different identity–much more successfully than the other three.
But like the other three, Castaneda’s death effectively cancelled the life she had known and loved. She fully expected Castaneda’s passing would cause the facade of his lineage to collapse, revealing the phoniness of his philosophies she had employed so skillfully to establish and maintain her authority.
Without his powerful personality and charisma, as well as his financial support, her power to manipulate and control a group of individuals was simply going to evaporate. She could no longer be the gatekeeper and master manipulator of Castaneda world without Castaneda in it. As detailed below, it also seems she may have had health issues that could have compounded her willingness to abandon her life at the relatively young age of 54.
I was on hand when I heard Florinda and Castaneda both describe Florinda‘s intent, if she could not join Castaneda in “burning with the fire from within,” to hire a plane and fly into an active volcano. I was also on hand when we were told multiple times that Talia and Kylie were looking for abandoned mines and similar places where they might disappear if they couldn’t accomplish the ultimate goal of transcending death (and also minimize the possibility of their remains being found when they did the deed).
And given that Florinda had been the only one for all those years to have remained in close contact with her parents and other family members, for her never to be in contact with them again, as the evidence shows, is impossible to comprehend had she continued on after Castaneda’s death.
More notes on her books
In reviewing my 1999 introduction, I also don’t think I was as tough on Florinda’s literary output as I should have been. Those three books are absolutely nothing but a pack of lies, and narcissistic ones at that.
Her first book, Shabono, was entirely plagiarized from one obvious source. The idea that anybody with even one foot in academia could imagine they could get away with such a fraud reveals her fundamental audacity.
Her mentor Castaneda was, by contrast, much more careful in basing his stories and philosophy on a variety of sources. And when real anthropologists and her own former faculty advisors blew the whistle on her shameless fiction, she managed to avoid suffering any real consequences for her mendacity, instead gliding right into writing and publishing another piece of “anthro-romance.”
While this one–The Witch‘s Dream–was based at least loosely on Castaneda’s philosophies, or at least in harmony with them, she took liberties with the “nagualism” by injecting more “love“ in the story than Castaneda had any use for, and a great deal more sex and exhibitionism, which appeared to be her predilection.
She moved on from those two pieces of fiction to supposedly telling the story of her own apprenticeship with don Juan and his party. In doing so, she had the benefit not only of Castaneda’s many books, but also of spending years listening to him fashion those stories, retelling them differently each time. He had given her both a rich milieu and ready-made characters from which to fashion her tale, that was in turn designed to buttress and confirm Castaneda’s long debunked claims to have been taught by a Yaqui Indian sorcerer.
But she couldn’t help but contradict even that fictional book by telling new fictions on a regular basis in the course of the workshops the group produced from 1993 until Castaneda’s death in 1998.
As detailed in my 1999 chronology intro, there were numerous glaring contradictions between what she told workshop attendees and journalists in the years following the publication of Being-in-Dreaming and the substance of that book.
And when one examines the actual life she lived as evidenced by public documents and interviews with people who knew her, there is little basis to believe any of the stories about her supposed apprenticeship with don Juan and his group. It becomes easier then to understand why she didn’t even start to claim she had had such an apprenticeship until the workshops began in earnest in 1993 and onward.
Bilan
So the ultimate picture I now have of Ms. Donner-Grau is of a sociopathic personality who was able to use her relationship with Castaneda and her innate people skills in order to realize her dream of being able to manipulate and control a group of individuals who felt they had nowhere else to go.
With his demise, that world and her position in it were going to evaporate. She didn’t want to hang around to witness that collapse. She was an action oriented person, and she decided to join her three colleagues in the one option they saw for themselves that would not only take them out of a world they no longer had any use for, but that also might serve, at least in a small way, to help sustain the myth.
The Florinda I loved and admired was a mythic creation. The fact that she was clear eyed at the end about what she was doing and why she was doing it–in contrast to Taisha, Kylie and Talia–is, I suppose, some comfort. Like her, I cannot now imagine how she would have gone on without the accomplice who enabled her to tell such bald faced lies and get away with it for as long as she did. »
