Powys Society Newsletter 88

present at megaliths — had he read Alfred Watkins’s The Old Straight Track
(1921), from which the idea of ‘ley-lines’ was first derived? — and compares (albeit
subliminally) the architecture of Stonehenge and Glastonbury Abbey decades
before John Michell and his ilk were shedding ‘new light’ on the subject, while
his portrayal of an exciting, if gloriously eccentric, mystically-charged melange of
Christian/pagan/anarchistic thought at the heart of this small Somerset town rings
true to the experience of every visitor that has encountered the place in the last
fifty years.
After Glastonbury, Powys’s subsequent novels, Weymouth Sands and Maiden
Castle, were more conventional, though only by comparison to the earlier novel’s
extraordinariness. His next major works were historical fiction, although calling
Owen Glendower (1940) and Porius (1951) historical novels is a bit like calling
Moby Dick a fisherman’s tale. Porius particularly is a masterpiece. At times it
reads like an extended study of what Powys called ‘the three incomprehensibles’:
sex, religion, and nature. At other times it reads like a magical mystery adventure.
In one chapter an owl metamorphoses into a bird-maiden; in another the hero,
Prince Porius, makes love with an aboriginal giantess while her father is busy
plucking corpses from a battlefield with cannibalistic intent; in another the bard
Taliessin (here, Powys’s mouthpiece) chants verses such as ‘The ending forever of
the Guilt-sense and God-sense, The ending forever of the Sin-sense and Shamesense’.
He continued to challenge his readership with unorthodox philosophical
and polemical treatises, and outrageously fantastical writing almost until he died,
at the age of ninety.
To mangle a now very hackneyed phrase, if John Cowper Powys had never
existed, it would almost have been necessary for the modern Pagan revivalist
movement to have invented him. His Glastonbury novel stands as both a milestone
in English literature and an avatar of the ‘New Age’ movement, which all too
few of its current proponents are aware of, though most will recognise his name
from the late Colin Wilson’s endorsement of both the man and his writing in his
bestselling work The Occult (1971), which quotes G. Wilson Knight’s comments
about Powys’s own feeling that he may himself have been a magician:
Those who have incurred his anger have so invariably suffered misfortune that he
has, as it were, been forced into a life of almost neurotic benevolence … Powys’s
early ambition to become a magician was no idle dream (Knight 1964, 62).
Unfortunately, Colin Wilson appears not to ‘get’ (in modern parlance) Glastonbury,
as the following quote from the same book makes plain: ‘A Glastonbury Romance is
probably unique in being the only novel written from a “God’s-eye” point of view’.
Actually this is far from the case — the author as narrator (or ‘Watcher’) nowhere
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