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The Western Way: A Practical Guide to the Western Mystery Tradition -The Native Tradition
Within this book are practical exercises relating traditional wisdom to everyday life. It suggests ways to put you in touch with your native roots, to help you discover your personal totem, to take the journey to the otherworld and to experience for yourself the ancient earth mysteries.
179 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1985
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91 people want to read
About the author
Caitlín Matthews
146 books192 followersCaitlín Matthews is a writer, singer and teacher whose ground-breaking work has introduced many to the riches of our western spiritual heritage.
She is acknowledged as a world authority on Celtic Wisdom, the Western Mysteries and the ancestral traditions of Britain and Europe. She is the author of over 50 books including Sophia: Goddess of Wisdom, a study of Divine Feminine in Gnostic, Jewish and Christian thought and King Arthur’s Raid on the Underworld, a new translation and study of the Welsh poet Taliesin’s extraordinary poem, itself a major cross-roads of British mythology.
Caitlín was trained in the esoteric mystery traditions through the schools founded by Dion Fortune, Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki and Gareth Knight. Her shamanic vocation emerged early in her ability to sing between the worlds and to embody spirits. She has worked in many of the western traditions with companions upon the path including R.J.Stewart. Like him, she teaches the many strands of the ancestral European traditions. She specializes in teaching traditional European spirit-consultation oracles where the diviner draws directly upon the spirits of nature for answers and in the use of the voice to sound the unseen. Caitlín has been instrumental in revealing the ancestral heritage of the Western traditions through practical exploration of the mysteries as well as through scholarly research. Her teachings are couched in a firm historical and linguistic framework, with respect to the original context of the teachings, but never loses sight of the living traditions of these teachings which can be explored through direct application to their spiritual sources.
Trained as an actress, Caitlín is in demand as a storyteller and singer. She appears frequently on international radio and television, and was the song-writer and Pictish language originator for the Jerry Bruckheimer film King Arthur. With John Matthews, her partner, who was historical consultant on the film, she shared in the 2004 BAFTA award given to Film Education for the best educational CD Rom: this project introduced school-children to the life and times of King Arthur. She and John are both concerned with the oral nature of storytelling and its ability to communicate the myth at a much deeper level than of the commercial booktrade. This is apparent in their forthcoming project, The Story Box. For Caitlín, her books are merely the tip of a much bigger oral iceberg which is her teaching.
With her partner, John Matthews, and with Felicity Wombwell , she is co-founder of The Foundation for Inspirational and Oracular Studies, which is dedicated to the sacred arts that are not written down. Their FíOS shamanic training programme teaches students the healing arts as well as hosting masterclasses with exemplars of living sacred traditions. Caitlín has a shamanic practice in Oxford dedicated to addressing soul sickness and ancestral fragmentation, as well as helping clients find vocational and spiritual direction. Her soul-singing and embodiment uniquely bring the ancient healing traditions to everyday life.
Caitlín’s other books include Singing the Soul Back Home, Mabon and the Guardians of Celtic Britain, The Psychic Protection Handbook, and Celtic Devotional. She is co-author, with John Matthews, of the Encyclopedia of Celtic Wisdom and Encyclopaedia of Celtic Myth and Legend. Her books have been translated into more than nineteen languages from Brazil to Japan.
The author lives in Oxford with her husband and son in a kind of book-cave or library, whichever you will. They share their home with a white cat and a black cat.
She is acknowledged as a world authority on Celtic Wisdom, the Western Mysteries and the ancestral traditions of Britain and Europe. She is the author of over 50 books including Sophia: Goddess of Wisdom, a study of Divine Feminine in Gnostic, Jewish and Christian thought and King Arthur’s Raid on the Underworld, a new translation and study of the Welsh poet Taliesin’s extraordinary poem, itself a major cross-roads of British mythology.
Caitlín was trained in the esoteric mystery traditions through the schools founded by Dion Fortune, Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki and Gareth Knight. Her shamanic vocation emerged early in her ability to sing between the worlds and to embody spirits. She has worked in many of the western traditions with companions upon the path including R.J.Stewart. Like him, she teaches the many strands of the ancestral European traditions. She specializes in teaching traditional European spirit-consultation oracles where the diviner draws directly upon the spirits of nature for answers and in the use of the voice to sound the unseen. Caitlín has been instrumental in revealing the ancestral heritage of the Western traditions through practical exploration of the mysteries as well as through scholarly research. Her teachings are couched in a firm historical and linguistic framework, with respect to the original context of the teachings, but never loses sight of the living traditions of these teachings which can be explored through direct application to their spiritual sources.
Trained as an actress, Caitlín is in demand as a storyteller and singer. She appears frequently on international radio and television, and was the song-writer and Pictish language originator for the Jerry Bruckheimer film King Arthur. With John Matthews, her partner, who was historical consultant on the film, she shared in the 2004 BAFTA award given to Film Education for the best educational CD Rom: this project introduced school-children to the life and times of King Arthur. She and John are both concerned with the oral nature of storytelling and its ability to communicate the myth at a much deeper level than of the commercial booktrade. This is apparent in their forthcoming project, The Story Box. For Caitlín, her books are merely the tip of a much bigger oral iceberg which is her teaching.
With her partner, John Matthews, and with Felicity Wombwell , she is co-founder of The Foundation for Inspirational and Oracular Studies, which is dedicated to the sacred arts that are not written down. Their FíOS shamanic training programme teaches students the healing arts as well as hosting masterclasses with exemplars of living sacred traditions. Caitlín has a shamanic practice in Oxford dedicated to addressing soul sickness and ancestral fragmentation, as well as helping clients find vocational and spiritual direction. Her soul-singing and embodiment uniquely bring the ancient healing traditions to everyday life.
Caitlín’s other books include Singing the Soul Back Home, Mabon and the Guardians of Celtic Britain, The Psychic Protection Handbook, and Celtic Devotional. She is co-author, with John Matthews, of the Encyclopedia of Celtic Wisdom and Encyclopaedia of Celtic Myth and Legend. Her books have been translated into more than nineteen languages from Brazil to Japan.
The author lives in Oxford with her husband and son in a kind of book-cave or library, whichever you will. They share their home with a white cat and a black cat.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 6, 2013
Despite the fact that this books deals with racial memory, exploration of lands beyond our waking world, and the gods of our ancestral tribes, it is not an artsy-fartsy diatribe. Rather, it is a handbook, as much a nuts-and-bolts approach to western mysticism as an engineer's instructions on how to assemble a steam engine. The ability to sink into the ancestral landscape and enter the realms of the Otherworld is honed through a series of exercises involving meditation, visualization, imagination and psychology; interspersed throughout the exercises are essays on the western way, the old gods of Europe, the numinous landscape in which our ancestors trod ley-lines and erected megalithic centers. This book is aimed at the solitary seeker after self-wisdom who wants much more than is offered by eastern regimens of endless navel staring, middle eastern futility or native primitivism. This book will help those of European descent recapture much of what has been lost, to revitalize an ancestral history long neglected, and to once again perceive the faerie realms that were once so close to the material world.
December 28, 2025
The book I needed to read at this time
April 26, 2013
An okay book that is a bit elementary. It's a good starting book for the curious Occultist, and it does mix a more western hermetic practice with a Pagan "shamanism" quite well.
I've come to expect a bit more depth in the works of John and Caitlin Matthews, however being that this an early book of theirs I won't hold 'The Western Way' to the same standard of more recent works by the pair.
I've come to expect a bit more depth in the works of John and Caitlin Matthews, however being that this an early book of theirs I won't hold 'The Western Way' to the same standard of more recent works by the pair.
October 13, 2011
I have to reread this.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews