Voyages with the Celtic Saints

by John Matthews

About the Author: John Matthews is an independent scholar based in Oxford. Since publishing his first book in 1980, he has authored more than 150 titles on myth, folklore, and ancient traditions. His recent works include Realms of the Round Table, The Great Book of King Arthur & His Knights of the Round Table, The Prophecies of Merlin, The Songs and Poems of Taliesin, The John Dee Oracle, and The Camelot Oracle.

The Celtic Saints: those remarkable men and women who sought to better understand the world in which they lived, first of all by turning inward and considering the soul’s journey, then by turning outward to study the movement of the tides and the circling of the stars, finding therethe natural rhythms of life and death reflected, undertaking journeys in the physical realm thatmatched their inward contemplation. We are all engaged on such a journey - however we choose to interpret it. It may be the journey from morning to evening, from birth to death, from war to peace; or it may be the journey that is our search for meaning, truth, or validity. It is this journey which permeates our whole life, and which often promotes within us a sense of longing and discontent, whether for the place we came from or the place to which we are headed. Such fellow-journeyers are the men and women who saw divinity in everything and who under took the journey with a sense of purpose.

Natural wisdom was their cauldron and they drew deep draughts from it. They sought to express the purpose and purity of all life in their own journeys. They had two names for themselves: Celli Dé ‘The Children of God’ and Peregrini,‘Voyagers’ or ‘Wanderers, terms which perfectly describe the twin poles of their lives: their belief in the family of the created universe, and their desire to traverse its every part, whether in the spirit or the flesh. The stories of these people have something to tell us. Something both about ourselves -about our own soul’s journey - and about the environment in which we live. They can help us mend some of the broken fragments of the past and the present. From the loam of their examples comes a new growth, a rich heritage upon which we can draw. Their journeys tell us about our own world, about the spiritual voyage on which we have already embarked. Their voices come to us strongly, echoing down the years, relaying their passionate regard for nature, their sense of timelessness, their knowledge of other worlds. A whole genre of stories - Immrama, literally ‘rowings about’ - treat of these voyages, outlining them in images as clear as the water that bubbles out of the ground at a hundred sacred well-heads scattered throughout the Celtic landscape.

Through these we can follow the adventures of St Brendan ‘the Navigator’, who sought a secret country, and whose voyage took him to a series of islands representing stages on the soul’s journey. Their world was a strange and wonderful place, where fire could be carried in the bare hands without fear of burning, spirits and angels conferred with, wild animals tamed with a word. But the most wonderful and profound mystery which the Celts have to teach us is about our uniquely intimate relationship with the natural world. We are all wonderful beings and we inhabit a remarkable universe, though nowadays we seldom recognise this. By cutting our selves off from nature, by telling ourselves that we are separate, unique, powerful in our own right, weare doing the equivalent of cutting off our limbs. No one would call themselves whole without hands or feet; yet we repeatedly sever our contact with the rest of creation, shutting ourselves up in over-heated rooms with the ever-present TV screen and the artificiality of a world created in our own image.

The Celts were the opposite of this. They followed a path of complete involvement with the world about them - not only in the physical world, but through their spirituality, which was itself an outward expression of inner things. Through identifying with the natural world, they were able to place their personal experiences in context. We can do the same. The highly sensitised covering of the soul, which can react so strongly when it feels slighted or attacked in any way, reaches a new point of strength when it is no longer placed at the center of everything. Shifting the center to another place, we become new beings and are able to recognise our own inner journey in the context of a larger whole.

Continue reading in Spring 2026 / Issue 85 of Watkins Mind Body Spirit to discover how the Celtic saints held together nature, pilgrimage, older traditions, and the soul’s inward and outward voyage.

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