Here is a book that answers a great need of our times—and it answers it very well.
That need is for a rational and informed description of how to apprehend the forces that form the structure of the “inner worlds,” those hidden forces that underpin and mold the outer world, which we know through our physical senses, for a realization of the need to come to terms with these other dimensions of reality is fast coming upon Western man.
Those who have not yet understood this need are at times dismayed by what they see as a flight from reason. However, we ought to realize this flight for what it is. It is not a mindless rout of the irresponsible but the winging pinions of an informed intuition no longer content with an intellectual preoccupation with surface appearances.
Others decry what they choose to describe as “dabbling in the occult,” which they consider either idly foolish or perversely misguided. While we, too, would not wish to encourage the occult dilettante, those of us who have spent more years in this research than we care to remember feel, with all due humility, that we have gained rather than lost in wisdom and human fulfillment.
There is no shortage among us of able, responsible citizens—even if those less well informed may sometimes gasp incredulously when confronted with our view of truth. We who know understand it to be no facile escapism, but a hard and testing—though infinitely rewarding—struggle toward the truth of what we ourselves are, what our place in the universe is, and what our duties are before God and the rest of creation.
Stock political, scientific, and religious answers to these questions today leave many people unsatisfied. Seeking within for the deeper issues may be one way out of a nuclear or ecological crisis—although ultimately it is more profound even than that! Crises pass, or come to pass. Man’s relationship to eternity lasts forever.
John and Caitlín Matthews bring to the subject not only erudition, balance, and common sense, but also a wide practical experience. I have shared in some areas of that experience, and so I confidently recommend that individuals place themselves in the guiding hands of the writers of this book. They will not be led astray.
Furthermore, the authors have a breadth of knowledge and wisdom that puts many more strident occult pundits to shame. They are as much at home at the angelic heights of Christian mysticism as with the “lordly ones” in the depths of the hollow hills. And theirs is a living experience, not mere “book knowledge,” though, as readers will soon gather, their literary resources are profound.
This is an instruction book for the present and the future. The old-time occult groups, with their body of doctrine and rigid esoteric structure, are fast becoming a thing of the past. Their good has been done. Their weighty volumes of doctrine remain as monuments and milestones along the way. They may still help us now, but the esoteric students of the present and the future will be ones who take what they can find, in eclectic freedom, for the immediate purpose at hand. Their training will be no less rigorous for being more open and unstructured, their working groups no less powerful despite their relatively transitory, even ad hoc, nature.
John and Caitlín’s Walkers Between the Worlds provides an Ariadne’s thread to help a new generation of seekers find their way through the labyrinth, and goes some way toward enlightening less adventurous souls as to what the maze we call this world is all about.
—GARETH KNIGHT, AUTHOR OF
A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO QABALISTIC SYMBOLISM