CASTANEDA, Carlos. L’Herbe du Diable et La Petite Fumee: Une voie Yaqui de la connaissance.

(Paris): Union Générale d’Éditions, 1979.  Reprint.  Softcover. 18cm by 10.9cm. 316 pages. Issued in the influential 10/18 series devoted to major contemporary thought, this translation by Marcel Kahn and Nicole Ménant (with the collaboration of Henri Sylvester) brought Castaneda’s work to a wide Francophone readership and became a touchstone of 1970s countercultural literature.  THe volume was originally published as The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (University of California Press, 1968), Castaneda’s celebrated—and controversial—account of his apprenticeship under the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan Matus. Blending fieldwork, hallucinogenic experimentation and mystical speculation, it describes the ritual use of l’herbe du diable (Datura) and la petite fumée (Psilocybe) as vehicles for expanded perception and “non-ordinary reality.” Although published and initially received as serious anthropological research, the book’s authenticity was soon disputed: numerous scholars and former colleagues at UCLA questioned the existence of Don Juan and the veracity of Castaneda’s field notes. The debate made the work a touchstone of both psychedelic literature and the blurred boundary between ethnography and fiction.  A very good copy in printed wrappers.