Caitlín Matthews (born 1952) was born in
Portsmouth,
England, of British and
Irish parents, and from an early age was aware of a spiritual dimension to life. She was initiated into the
Fellowship of Isis in 1977 and was subsequently ordained as priestess in 1988. She continues as arch-priestess in the Arch Priesthood Union, as one of the custodians of the Fellowship of Isis. Following the publication of
The Western Way she has written over sixty books including several works on the divine feminine, and the worlds of
early Welsh and
Irish literature. Her work reflects both the older academic sources and the newer Celtic mystical ones, but leaves out, according to Ronald Hutton, "the scholarly publications of the 1980s, many of which have radically altered existing views of the sources for our knowledge of the ancient Celts." Matthews has led workshops in Britain and elsewhere, including the
Temenos Academy, London;
Regent's Park College, Oxford; the
University of Jyväskylä in Finland, the
University of Lisbon in Portugal, and at Studium Generale of the
Arnhem Institute for the Arts in Netherlands.
Criticism Hutton, commenting on Caitlín Matthews' works, states that she "falls below the standards required of a professional historian. She makes no attempt to distinguish between the relative value of sources, so those from the seventh century and from the seventeenth are put together with no sense of context." He also states that she conditions her work to the needs of her audience and that she has incorrectly suggested parallels between Celtic lore and Native American religion. == Bibliography ==