Was Carlos Santana in a cult?
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“I got slapped with reality,” a 32-year-old Carlos Santana told Rolling Stone in 1980. Ironically, he wasn’t referring to the moment he broke ties with the controversial Indian spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy; that would come a year later. Instead, the ever-mystical guitar god was recalling where his head was back in the early 1970s, at the height of his success, and why he turned to Chinmoy in the first place.
“All of us in the first band were fried,” Santana said. “Plenty of albums in my house, drugs, food, flesh, and all of those kinds of things, but I felt such an emptiness.”
Initially inspired by the spiritual journey John Coltrane had undertaken at a similar point in his career, Santana was ultimately sidetracked into a very specific sect of mysticism—one man’s interpretation, in fact.
Sri Chinmoy, whose high-profile followers in the mid-1970s also included the jazz musician John McLaughlin (who formed the Mahavishnu Orchestra during his period as an acolyte), R&B singer Roberta Flack, and E Street Band saxman Clarence Clemons, had an enormous impact not just on Santana’s spiritual outlook, but on his music, as well.
Santana began using the name Chinmoy had bestowed upon him, “Devadip,” as part of his public identity, and he split up his time between recording more traditionally palatable rock with his band and decidedly more experimental jazz-fusion on solo records like Caravanserai and Borboletta. He wasn’t hesitant to admit which projects mattered more to him either. “Santana is my nose,” he said. “Devadip is my heart.”
Santana and his then-wife Deborah were part of Chinmoy’s community for roughly a decade, regarding him as their guru and feeling seemingly unfazed by growing criticisms from the outside world, some of which accused the internationally influential Chinmoy of running a cult.
When Carlos finally opted to walk away from Chinmoy in the early 1980s, it wasn’t necessarily because of any serious offences by the guru himself, but more of a disenchantment with some of the leader’s more unusual points of emphasis in his teachings.
Content retrieved from: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/was-carlos-santana-in-a-cult/.
