Powys Society Newsletter 88

ooks begin with an approach to Glastonbury via Stonehenge, and end with an
apocalyptic flood. Moreover, she relies heavily on Powys’s invented association
of the Grail with Merlin, even referring to ‘the wonderful holy well of St. Joseph,
Merlin and the Graal’. She also makes much of the town’s pagan versus Christian
divide, and mentions ‘watchers beside the Tor’, a reference that Powys also uses
several times, ‘watcher’ in this sense being a kind of Gnostic spectator on the
ethereal plane. Frederick Bligh-Bond in Gates of Remembrance (1918) records
that one of his ‘automatic writing scripts’ (which ultimately got him fired by the
Church of England from his job as architectural historian at Glastonbury Abbey)
was signed ‘We who are the Watchers’.
As Geoffrey Ashe notes, Fortune and Bond were just two of the major players
in Glastonbury’s emergence as a ‘New Age’ centre between the wars, others being
Katherine Maltwood, who discovered/invented the Glastonbury Zodiac, and Alice
Buckton, whose drama group at times collaborated with Rutland Boughton, the
composer whose ‘Glastonbury Festival of Music and Mystic Drama’ was staged
intermittently from 1914 to 1926. Powys’s frequent allusion to the Age of Aquarius
in his philosophical works, and the occult nature of much of his fictional writing
place him firmly within this camp. As Keith remarks:
JCP’s Glastonbury looks not only backwards towards ancient legends, but forwards to
new and challenging attitudes and beliefs. So far as I know, there is no evidence that JCP
was acquainted with any of the proponents of New Age Glastonbury. He never mentions
Maltwood or Fortune, but the allusions to Bond in A Glastonbury Romance, though
never actually referring to him by name, imply more than a perfunctory awareness of
his reputation, while the references to ‘the Watchers’ suggest that he might know more
about Bond’s Glastonbury circle than he is prepared to reveal (Keith 2010, 76).
The great set-piece at the centre of the novel is Geard’s Glastonbury Pageant. Such
pageants had actually been staged in or near the town in 1905 and 1906, and Powys,
who had not yet left for America at that time, would surely have been aware of
them. Geard’s pageant is chronologically eccentric, starting with Arthurian scenes, a
passion play in the centre, and ending with a prehistoric finale at Stonehenge (which,
fate/Powys decreed, was never to be performed). The event brings together almost
all of the characters in the book, with their complex interrelationships depicted in
one impressive passage. The pageant is realistically portrayed, though not without a
good deal of humour:
John’s fury, directing itself blindly towards the Middlezoy King Arthur and towards
the equally frightened pages who were to drag out the thrones, was now confronted
by the soft protests of the prostrate Crummie, who, lying upon a lathe-and-plaster [sic]
stretcher, roughly bulwarked to represent a barge, was attended by two lusty youths
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