Margaret Castaneda, author's ex-wife, dies

They were an unlikely couple, the Latin American immigrant and the West Virginia divorcee whose paths crossed in mid-1950s Los Angeles.

But, by Margaret Runyan Castaneda's account, she and Carlos Castaneda were kindred spirits whose time together helped turn him into a countercultural phenomenon.

Carlos wrote "The Teachings of Don Juan," a 1968 bestseller that told of his peyote-fueled adventures with Don Juan Matus, a Mexican shaman who purportedly guided him to an alternate realm inhabited by giant insects, witches and flying humans.

Presented as an anthropological work, the book resounded with a generation of youthful rebels who turned the 1970s into a rollicking era of social and pharmacological experimentation.

Decades after their marriage ended, Margaret wrote her own book, which punctured some of the mystery surrounding the man who came to be viewed as either a godfather of New Age or one of its greatest charlatans.

"Much of the Castaneda mystique is based on the fact that even his closest friends aren't sure who he is," Margaret wrote in her 1996 book, "A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda."

Margaret, who has died at 90, said she believed that Don Juan was an extravagant fiction drawn from many sources, including conversations and activities she shared with Carlos during their long, tangled relationship. She went so far as to describe her ex-husband's books, which include "A Separate Reality" (1971) and seven other bestsellers, as "our biography."

Her death Dec. 24 in Glendale, Ariz., of a heart attack was confirmed by her only survivor, son C.J. Castaneda, also known as Adrian Vashon. His birth certificate lists Carlos as his father even though his biological father was a different man.

Many puzzles surround Carlos Castaneda's legacy, including whether his marriage to and divorce from Margaret were ever official.

"She was a very engaging person, who was interested in the things that Carlos was interested in at that time," said Douglass R. Price-Williams, who was an anthropology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, when Carlos was a graduate student there in the early 1970s.

"She saw through some of his mythmaking, but not all of it," the professor said. "She was sort of confused herself. Anyone who knew him any length of time was confused about the man. . . . It didn't surprise me at all that comes across in her book."