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John Matthews, The Sidhe: Wisdom from the Celtic Otherworld
Lorian Association, 2004

“We live in a liquid world, a place of constant movement, a place of song…We are able to pass through your world at every level, physically and spiritually.”

 This is a voice of a speaker for the Sidhe, the faeries of Celtic legend, “whose name in the Irish”, as Lady Gregory remarked, “ is all one with a blast of wind”. The message from the Sidhe (pronounced “Shee”) is being delivered to the brilliant and prolific Celtic scholar John Matthews. Though it has been said (by Robert Kirk, who knew a good deal on the subject) that “a fairy can only be seen between two blinks of an eye”, Matthews has found a way of opening a steadier vision and a clear flow of communication.

His passport to the Otherworld is not a silver branch, or an apple, or a magic bird: it is a spiral glyph, first seen or imagined in one of the “faery castles”, the mounded tombs or temples of Ireland. Matthews’ glyph, beautifully rendered by Valorie Fanger, is a five-ringed spiral with the vertical line running from top to bottom. It is slightly reminiscent of a Reiki symbol. And it works.

I can vouch for the fact that Matthews’ spiral key opens a gateway of perception into the Celtic Otherworld, because after reading his eloquent and riveting account of how he used the glyph over and over to reopen communication with the Sidhe with the aid of this glyph, I invited one of my advanced circles to participate in a group experiment in conscious dream travel. I showed them the spiral glyph from Matthews’ book without identifying the source or even the culture with which it was associated. I asked them to draw it for themselves and picture it, glowing in the dark, on the wall of an underground chamber. I then invited them to see whether they could journey through the symbol, or use it in some way as a key, during a shamanic drumming session. Before the group lay down on the floor in the dark to make the journey, I asked for spiritual protection for the circle and asked our participants to seek the guidance and company of their personal guardians. This seemed prudent, since in folklore interaction between humans and genuine fairies can be dodgy.

In my own journey, I found myself in an underground chamber with rune-like figures and pictographs that appeared to record ancient battles.

I experimented with the vertical line in the glyph, now seeing it as a “rod” to be worked and turned in various ways. I saw a second distinctive spiral glyph, apparently a companion image to the one we were using. I became conscious of a presence. It had an otherly, alien quality and had no interest in assuming fixed form. When a flow of telepathy began, it came in ancient Gaelic or Gaelic-sounding words that sent me running off afterwards to consult dictionaries and etymologies, where I identified one as the name of an ancient druid. Light grew in the chamber until my inner vision was filled with white light, not brilliantly clear but more like milky white quartz.

There was something intensely familiar to me in all of this. I recalled the boyhood near-death experience in which I seemed to live a whole lifetime among a pale-skinned people inside the earth. Was I “away” in the realms of Faerie?

The effect of the spiral glyph on one of the men in our group was initially – and powerfully – physical. He experienced a strong “itch” at his third eye, as if something was moving or tugging in that area, then the vivid sensation of his third eye being opened. In the chamber he found a pool where a “platform” appeared and disappeared like the vanishing islands of the mythic Celtic geography, of which he previously knew nothing.

One of our most gifted psychic dreamers found herself in contact with her Irish great-grandmother. The spiral glyph became a 3D cone, and she had the sense of raising a great Cone of Power. She saw a letter assigned to each of the coils of the spiral, and heard a musical tone associated with each.

Another of our dream voyagers announced, “It is possible to be here and there at the same time”. This resonated closely with a statement from the Sidhe speaker in John’s book:

"The Otherworld is a place where both races may journey and where they have often mingles in the past. In a sense I am in the Otherworld at this moment, though I appear to be with you. This is possible because both places occupy adjacent spaces and these two spaces overlap…The pattern of the glyph acts like a magnet, pulling the two worlds closer together so that both may be perceived."

Whether or not you choose the path of direct experience that The Sidhe offers, I recommend it highly for its core insights, which include the understanding that there is really no distance between us and the beings of other dimensions except a distance of perception or frequency. The ancient ones are very near. To enter their realm – as the speaker for the Sidhe reminds us – we need to slip beyond the constraints of the daily linear mind and “send out our thoughts in all directions”. As dreamers, we are already walkers between the worlds. The book includes a rousing invitation to awaken to the possibility of dream travel, and to seek keys beyond the one that is shared here. The dream people are waiting for us!

Available from: The Lorian Association,
PO Box 1368
Issaquah WA 98027 www.lorian.org