Talk:Recapitulation (Castaneda)

Dubious
Extremely few, if any Mesoamerican scholars would give credibility to what Castaneda maintains as supposedly derived or representative of "Toltec" beliefs. These are purely of his own, manufactured and syncretic, belief system, and are certainly not recoverable from or attestable in what some (long-gone) pre-Columbian people may have held. As can be seen from its article, the very notion of there being an actual Toltec people in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica is open to doubt and practically inseparable from later Postclassic mythologising; much less, do we have any information or specifics on what spiritual claims someone in around the 11thC would have made.

I believe even Castaneda himself did not claim his use of the word "Toltec" was meant to be the same as the Toltecs of pre-Columbian record and myth- see Toltec (Castaneda). It's therefore misleading to portray the notion of 'recapitulation' as being something an actual pre-Columbian people did or thought.

I'll propose that this article is merged into Toltec (Castaneda), don't see a need to keep them separate and having these on the same page should lessen the opportunity for confusing Castaneda's idiosyncratic use of the word 'Toltec' with the term as known to Mesoamerican ethnohistory. --cjllw ʘ  TALK 01:48, 19 February 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree. There is no demonstrable connection between recapitulation and the pre-Columbian Toltec. All the evidence suggests that the subject of recapitulation, as it is described in this article, is strictly Castaneda's. The solution then is not to merge this information into the toltec article but to rename the article Recapitulation (Castaneda) since Mmyotis (talk) 12:25, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
 * With the name change the issue appears to be moot. The merge tag has therefore been removed. Mmyotis   ^^o^^  16:51, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Article Title
A case has been made that the title of this article should not contain the word Toltec because it implys a connection with Toltec culture that does not exist. It's a valid argument and well noted.

A case has also been made that the title of this article should not contain the word Castaneda, because other author's have also used that term in their writing. I'm not sure this argument is valid.

The term recapitulation was coined by Castaneda and he applied it to the technique that he described for "redirecting energy" which is described in this article. The fact that other authors have followed his lead and used the same term to describe similar processes and goals does not seem to be sufficient reason to disconnect the term from the name of the man who coined it. I therefore changed the title of this article back to Recapitulation (Castaneda). Comments are appreciated. Mmyotis (talk) 13:42, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Recapitulation as a sorceror's task
Recapitulation as a sorceror's task actually first appears in the third portion of Tales of Power, published 1974. It comes in describing a sorceror's strategy, in prepartion for imparting the Sorceror's Explanation to his student and enabling him to "use the nagual." "He (don Juan) said that the occasion required that right there on my benefactor's place of predilection he recapitulate for me every step that he had taken in his struggle to help me clean and reorder my ... tonal. His recapitulation was meticulous and took him about five hours.  In a brilliant and clear manner he gave me a succinct account of everything he had done to me since the day we met...elucidating the points of his teachings in...an academic manner... as astounding as his wearing a suit in Mexico City.  His control of the language, his dramatic timing, and his choice of words were...extraordinary....He said that at that point a teacher had to speak to the individual warrior in exclusive terms, that the way he was talking to me and the clarity of his explanation were part of his last trick...." Castaneda makes several subsequent references to the stupendous range of don Juan's awareness implied and demonstrated in that recapitulation, a range only then being apprehended by Castaneda. Returnagual (talk) 03:15, 30 May 2008 (UTC)