SOURCE: "Mystery Man's Death Can't End the Mystery," in New York Times, August 19, 1998, pp. El, E3.

[In the following obituary, Applebome discusses the legal conflicts resulting from Castaneda's unpublicized death.]

Once he began publishing his best-selling accounts of his purported adventures with a Mexican shaman 30 years ago, Carlos Castaneda's life and work played out in a wispy blur of sly illusion and artful deceit.

Now, four months after he died and two months after the death was made public, a probate court in Los Angeles is sifting through competing claims on the estate of the author whose works helped define the 1960's and usher in the New Age movement.

His followers say he left the earth with the same elegant, willful mystery that characterized his life. The man he used to call his son says Castaneda died while a virtual prisoner of cultlike followers who controlled his last...