Powys Society Newsletter 88

This sounds very much like modern Pagan theology, in which the ‘spark of the divine’,
which is to be found within all living beings, connects with certain sacred, and/or
mystical, places where the Earth Goddess’s influence is strongest — Glastonbury
being one of the foremost examples.
In chapter three, John Crow, on his way from Norfolk to Glastonbury, is given a lift
by the antiquary Owen Evans, who takes him on a guided tour of Stonehenge. This
passage does nothing whatsoever to advance the storyline, but it does serve to reinforce
the sacredness of place which is so central to the novel’s ethos, and was probably inspired
by Hardy’s scene in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which Powys so much admired. It also
establishes a fundamental flaw in the character of John Crow; the religious sceptic is
greatly impressed with the monument, declaring ‘This is still alive. This is no dead Ruin
like Glastonbury’, thus making a favourable comparison between pagan Stonehenge
and the ruined Christian heritage of Glastonbury Abbey, and St Michael’s church on the
Tor (82). He embraces the hele stone, saying ‘Stone of England, guard Mary Crow and
make her happy’. Much to the annoyance of the pagan-inclined, if otherwise outwardly
conventional Evans, the agnostic John Crow appears to experience a religious ecstasy
at Stonehenge. Powys’s masterful use of irony is to the fore here; Evans’s own religious
ecstasy comes later when he nearly dies, tied to the cross, impersonating Christ at Geard’s
religious pageant.
Just as the sacredness of place is often described in terms of liminality — ‘where the
veil between the worlds is thin’ — to Powys, prayers offered to the First Cause (as in
Crow’s supplication to Helios at Stonehenge) are most likely to be propitious at liminal
times of the day:
The best time for any human being to pray to the First Cause if he wants his prayers to
have a prosperous issue is one or other of the Two Twilights; either the twilight preceding
the dawn or the twilight following the sunset. Human prayers that are offered up at noon
are often intercepted by the Sun — for all creative powers are jealous of one another
— and those that are offered up at midnight are liable to be waylaid by the Moon in
her seasons or by the spirit of some thwarting planet. It is a natural fact that those Two
Twilights are propitious to psychic intercourse with the First Cause while other hours are
malignant and baleful (61).
The way in which the connection between the etheric First Cause and human individuals
in the novel is manifest is most clearly illustrated in the case of Owen Evans, who is
perhaps the most explicitly pagan of the characters in the novel:
He could feel the path to the horror, shivering with deadly phosphorescent sweetness.
He could feel the path to the renunciation filling his nostrils with acrid dust, parching
his naked feet, withering every human sensation till it was hollow as the shard of a
dead beetle! The nature of his temptation was such that it had nothing to redeem it.
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