Caitlín Matthews
MT: Well first of all, Caitlín, it is such a pleasure to meet you. I was so delighted when you agreed to this interview. Having been aware of your amazing work for many years, I can’t wait to hear your thoughts, opinions, and wisdom on the subject we are about to discuss.
CM: You’re very welcome, Mark.
MT: But before we do get onto the theme of Jesus, perhaps I might just ask you a question with regard to your spiritual tradition. You refer to yourself as an animist, but also a “shamanic servant of all traditions when necessary.” Can you say any more about that now, or should we make a note to come back to it later on?
CM: Let’s see if it comes up naturally.
MT: OK, that’s fine. So, was Jesus part of your upbringing as a child?
CM: Jesus was not taught, depicted, nor portrayed with any vigour, though he did seem to have the biggest club or gang which it was obviously shameful not to be part of, or so it seemed when I was growing up in the fifties. From a nominally Anglican family, I discovered that the divine primarily showed itself to me through feminine forms since I was a child. Religious Education lessons presented a picture of the divine that was largely masculine. So I just kept quiet about what I understood and perceived until I was of an age to leave school and home and seek others of my ilk.
The stained glass and plaster Jesus of Brownie church parades—virtually the only time I was ever in a church as child—did not appeal to me, being designed along the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” line. Divinity for me was rather more raw and passionate than these depictions, and the occasional Lady Chapel didn’t inspire me either. Neither of these images resonated in any way.
Our RE teachers in the fifties generally taught from the New Testament once we were past eight years old, and the teachers made poor work of it. I yearned after the delights of Babylon and Sumeria, which were both historically described and most attractively depicted in our Old Testament workbooks. The testy divinity of the Israelites didn’t appeal to me anything like as much as those inveighed against by the prophet Jeremiah. Still, you can’t have everything!
MT: And does the figure of Jesus hold any significance to you today?
CM: So much of our ancestral traditions, culture, and civilization are shaped by Christianity, it has been essential for me to understand Jesus’s teachings intelligently from both within and outside of the context of the church that formed around him.
Every spirituality has at its heart a figure in whom love is manifest. If we walk through the world with this knowledge in our souls, then we can be welcome everywhere we go. The priests, priestesses, and congregants of any spirituality are, to my mind, most faithful to the Beloved (whoever he, she, or it may be for them) when they give the Beloved’s unconditional welcome to visitors. How often have we found this lacking? How many circles, meditation groups, churches, or congregations have you visited where you felt immediately not only unwelcome but perhaps a little less shiny, prayerful, or spiritual than anyone else already ensconced? Spiritual hospitality is the queen of virtues.
When someone comes to my shamanic practice for healing, I try to discover where love is already seated in their lives—this might be in their fervent religious belief, a vague but hopeful adherence to some spirituality, a love of nature, or whatever. I cannot work without the spirit of that love: that is what will dispense the healing they seek, not me, be it ancestral or divine in nature. I work completely across all traditions and so I must have proper access to spiritual sources of love in order to be of service.
MT: Ah, so going back to my first question, this is precisely what you mean by a “shamanic servant of all traditions when necessary”?
CM: Exactly. Shamanism and ancestral understanding of the earth is the undercarpeting of nearly all religious traditions. It remains the bedrock upon which all traditions or lack of them can be understood and accepted because we all derive from our ancestors and they from theirs, back on down.
When people come for shamanic help, I try to discover what has set the wheel of their life turning, rather than trying to fit my own wheel to their cart or to invent a new one. If someone is enthusiastically Jewish, we have Jewish prayers before I work; if someone is Catholic, we might pray the rosary and put some holy water about. Hell, if someone is turned on to the love that lights their life through Elvis, I would sing an Elvis number for them when I pray for help and healing, if it would help! Some people don’t have a faith, though, and my work is primarily with them, which is when I have to return to that shamanic bedrock for inspiration.
I was taught a fine lesson about this many years ago when I went to Cornwall to bring a ritual of reconsecration to some women who had been raped or abused. I turned up with my nice ritual and explained that it needed some spiritual leverage for me to customize it for them: what was important for them? One by one, the women began to tell me that they didn’t have beliefs at all, absolutely none. I probed deeper: when they were in deep trouble, what then did they turn to for support and consolation? Each of them spoke of some place in the land that gave them strength.
Accordingly, I spoke prayers and words of consolation in the name of a cliff-walk one woman took, or in the name of an oak tree that offered wisdom to another, and invoked the spirit of Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture garden in St. Ives for another woman. The power of that ritual remains forever with me. When everything else fails, it is love that matters. What brings us consolation, support, and blessing is what we love: it also loves us. That is the basis for all spiritual relationships.
MT: Beautiful. So Jesus was a historical person for you?
CM: Jesus lives in time as well as eternity, being—as I understand it—an embodiment of divine wisdom. Since the church is supposed to be the body of Christ, his followers are (or should be) his mediators, because that was the spirit in which he taught. It’s a lovely, ancestral-style kinship, but, like many families, it has its own hidden loyalties and exclusions. I’ve found Jesus’s same wisdom and respect for others in animist and ancestral traditions, but then I would respond to it wherever it showed itself, in whatever place, having long been accused of “spiritual promiscuity.”
MT: What feelings or thoughts does the Christmas story conjure up in you?
CM: Stories of hope must always be told at Midwinter, and this is one that reminds us, as the Neo-Platonist Macrobius’s Dream of Scipio tells us, that this is the proper midwinter gateway through which incarnating saviours always show up: Mithras, Dionysus, etc. The ancient Welsh converts to Christianity saw Jesus as “the Maiden’s Mabon”—a concept that the Anglo-Welsh poet David Jones explored in his long poem Anathemata.
The welcoming of the Child of Light is so easy for people everywhere because it is infused with ancestral as well as more recent midwinter rituals for welcoming the returning light.
MT: And same with Easter?
CM: The Easter Triduum of Holy Week packs all the punch of an ancient mystery religion. Anyone who wants to know about what these were like and what the word anamnesis really means should attend. The death on the cross, the harrowing of hell, and the resurrection are three mighty things. The dying and rising gods of the Mysteries—Dionysus, Tammuz, Adonis, and Osiris—received similar rites at the same time of year. The hermetic tradition of Isis looking for the lost parts of Osiris is but a mystery story of how things fall apart and are gathered back together again. This mystery is enacted again at Easter: “they have taken away my Lord and I know not where they have laid him” still echoes down the centuries, whether you think of Isis or Mary Magdalene.
MT: If you have one, what is your favourite story, parable, teaching, or symbol of Jesus?
CM: The new commandment of “Love one another” is pretty impressive and hard to live up to still. The Beatitudes speak to the soul in all its conditions. Those who keep the keys of the kingdom should indeed go in more often and allow others to do so, as commanded. I love the everyday metaphors and parables that help make the understanding of esoteric and spiritual mysteries that much easier—I use this way of speaking myself. His parable of the yeast in bread is a great Sophianic emblem for the spirit working invisibly within us. I love the way Jesus goes apart to pray—I couldn’t live without this regular communion with silence either.
MT: So was Jesus a simple Jewish teacher, a divine prophet, a valid deity of the Christian pantheon, a miracle worker, a magician, or what?
CM: He was all of those, as well as Gnostic Saviour, King of the Mysteries, Jewish prophet, fulfiller of prophecy, healer of harmatian fractures. Harmatian or “missing the mark” is more descriptively accurate than “sin.” I’ve never been a fan of St. Augustine and original sin, and wrote my retelling of Genesis, The Blessing Seed, against it to back up our wonderful native heretic, Pelagius, and to promote a more Sophianic view of the Fall, as a myth in which the stealing of wisdom is the result of a foreseen human curiosity.
MT: What lesson do you feel the modern-day church needs to hear from the person or teaching of Jesus?
CM: Jesus welcomed everyone unconditionally. He also spoke clearly about what his disciples were to do if they themselves were not welcomed when they went through villages healing: “Shake the dust from the soles of your feet.” Tribal-style Christianity often wishes to inflict itself on the world whether we want it or not. Proselytizing evangelism is, for me, on the level of an advert that demands that we eat a product whether we have a taste for it or not. Jesus’s remarks on salt come to mind: “Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out and trodden under foot of men.” (Matthew 5:13 English Revised Version) If the message doesn’t have any savour, we can’t hear it!
Mature or gnostic (with a small g) Christian wisdom, on the other hand, is available to anyone who is receptive and who finds welcome in Jesus’s company. Accepting people for what they are in their souls, as opposed to categorizing or judging them for their appearance, rank, occupation, or gender, seems to me to be the only way to go. The Church could try respecting the spirit of Jesus’s wisdom, not just the letter.
MT: This is a controversial question, even among Pagans, but is it possible to be both Christian and Pagan?
CM: Yes. The Russians have a lovely, untranslatable word, dvoverie or “double-belonging,” for those who espouse both. Most people I know (including Christians) travel under that sign, for ancestral traditions are always part of us and grow through the revealed traditions we accept later in life. So it is quite possible to be a church warden and a morris dancer, for example, or a priestess of the sacred earth and a communicant. “Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds—it is an ever fixéd-mark,” to quote one of my favourite dramatists. Christianity rather set the tone for this kind of thing in its earlier centuries by borrowing Pagan sacred sites and taking over Pagan festivals and divinities—what were we not supposed to like? As part of our ancestral tradition, Christianity has grown up through the deeper soil of Paganism—we can’t really pick and choose our ancestry, can we? It’s always part of us.
MT: What, if anything, can modern-day Pagans learn from the message or person of Jesus?
CM: Service, unconditionality, care of others not of our tribe, nonviolence, non-competitiveness, and generous sharing might be some areas for improvement, as could a lot more self-clarification. Much of what we regard as Paganism today was actually preserved within the church, and Pagans could well learn a little about that, such as beating the bounds rituals, for example, and the physicality of spiritual practices like fasting, prayer, and vigil—all of which were used in ancient times but which most Pagan people think was exclusively Christian, for some unfathomable reason.
MT: And what, if anything, can Christians learn from modern-day
Paganism?
CM: Respect for all species of life, not just humans; acceptance and equal respect for the spiritual viability of other faiths; and the living priesthood of all human beings. More flexibility in the rituals offered, especially as modern life develops into some areas not previously covered by existent services. Less transcendence and more embodiment would be ideal, though I would hate to see a further impoverishment of the mystery—the vernacular and chummy vicar sets a jarring tone, when what is needed is beauty, dignity, and the spiritual hospitality of welcome.
MT: Well this has been an amazing discussion. You’ve brought up so many ideas and possibilities for further study that it’s going to be difficult to keep me out of the library. Caitlín I can’t thank you enough for your willingness, wisdom, and hospitality.
CM: Mark, you’re very welcome.
About the Author
Caitlín Matthews is the author of over sixty books including Singing the Soul Back Home, King Arthur’s Raid on the Underworld, and Sophia, Goddess of Wisdom. She teaches shamanism, spirituality, and ancestral traditions spanning many faiths, both Christian and Pagan, across the world, and has a shamanic practice in Oxford. She is co-founder of FíOS, the Foundation for Inspirational and Oracular Studies, which promotes the restoration of the sacred arts. www.hallowquest.org.uk