From Publishers Weekly
Abelar's mesmerizing account of her training in paranormal perception by a group of sorcerers led by Yaqui Indian Don Juan Matus. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Abelar presents a fascinating personal account of her initiation into the world of sorcery. Although sorcery has negative connotations, her activities involve spiritual growth and personal empowerment rather than black magic. The author receives training in Mexico by a group of teachers connected with Don Juan Matus, the mentor of Carlos Castaneda. Under their guidance she learns various breathing, movement, and contemplative techniques. Her goal is enhanced perception and ultimately a shift in awareness from the concrete to the abstract. The author's struggle to overcome inner resistance and her efforts to understand abstract concepts are miraculously detailed. The book holds one's interest throughout and should be a useful addition to library collections on personal growth and women's spirituality . Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/92.- Elizabeth Salt, Otterbein Coll. Lib., Westerville, OhioCopyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
An intriguing if incredible-sounding account of anthropologist Abelar's training by the same mysterious family of sorcerers that allegedly spawned Carlos Castaneda. In the late 60's, while she was sketching the mountains around Tucson, Abelar met Clara Grau, a charismatic Mexican woman. Somehow, Grau persuaded young Abelar to abandon her solitary and rudderless life and to visit her house in Sonora, Mexico. What followed was an extraordinary induction into a family of 16 sorcerers. In a self-consciously academic preface, Abelar describes her training as a sorceress as ``breaking the perceptual dispositions and biases that imprison us within the boundaries of the normal everyday world and prevent us from entering other perceivable worlds.'' In the telling, however, the movements and exercises that led up to the perceptual leap called ``the sorcerers' crossing'' is pure, well, Castaneda, full of walloping energies and wise teachers dispensing dramatic insights. Castaneda himself explains in a supplemental preface that Abelar was trained as a ``stalker''--as opposed to a ``dreamer'': no drugs, but an exercise called the ``recapitulation,'' in which Abelar had to liberate herself from every imprisoning memory and attachment. Why was Abelar chosen? While searching for a men's room at a California drive-in, the patriarch of the sorcerer family stumbled onto Abelar as she was seducing a pimply young kid. Then and there, he vowed to save her for a better fate. An absorbing riddle of a book. Much is made of the Abelars and the Graus, the stalkers and the dreamers, the two sides of the sorcerer family that live on right and left sides of their magical Mexican house like right and left hemispheres of the brain. This and much else here seems suspiciously symmetrical and pat. But who knows? -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

ANNOTATION

While traveling in Mexico, Abelar became involved with a group of sorcerers and began a rigorous physical and mental training process designed to enable her to breach the limits of ordinary perception. This book details that process and reveals the responsibilities and perils that face a woman sorcerer.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Taisha Abelar's mesmerizing account of her apprenticeship with a female colleague of don Juaa training which used mental and physical exercisesrather than psychoactive plants. This virtual sorcerers' manual is a pioneering work of women's spirituality.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

In Arizona in the late 1960s, the author, a jobless 20-year-old, estranged from her family and generally disillusioned with life, met Clara Grau, an enigmatic woman who invited her to her home in Sonora, Mexico. Abelar accepted, unaware that her visit would be permanent and would change her life completely. She learned she had been chosen by a group of sorcerers trained by Yaqui Indian Don Juan Matus--mentor of Carlos Castaneda--to join their search for ways to alter normal perceptions and enter other realities. The culmination of this training is the ``crossing'' of the title: the ``abstract flight'' from the concrete, physical world to its ethereal, abstract counterpart. To accomplish this requires spiritual energy built up through rigorous mental and spiritual training, including, for the author, acquiring a doctorate in anthropology. Abelar's account of her training is mesmerizing; the overall mood of events taking place in the Grau home is dreamlike. The book is a good choice for readers interested in mysticism and spiritual matters. (June)

Library Journal