The New Mythology of John Cowper Powys

Because Powys does not regard the human soul as an existent entity beyond our own experience, which has somehow or other been landed on us by God without any willing on our part, but believes that we ourselves take a part in creating it, he is not scornful, like so many shallow scientists, of such practices as ‘wishful thinking’. He is well aware as were the wise men of all ages, that the only means of getting what you want is by intensely imagining it. And he is not upset like so many pedestrian realists at the notion that each of us has a life illusion nor does he think it is something we should get rid of. By life-illusion he means ‘that secret dramatic way of regarding himself which makes a man feel to himself a remarkable, singular, unusual, exciting individual’. ‘Everyone,’ he says, ‘has a life-illusion’ and ‘it is not wholly untrue.’2? “But it is not a shadow of your objective self:—that dressed-up popinjay or scarecrow that your neighbours catch sight of before you open your mouth—it is the shadow of your subjective self.’28

After this it will not surprise us to find Powys rejecting the notion that certain virtuous practical activities are the main purpose of conscious life. In a poem published in 1899 he writes: ‘Better to grow like grass than to pretend . .. That action is man’s proper sphere and end’.*4 ‘There is only one purpose of all conscious life,’ he affirms, ‘and that is to grow calmly, steadily more conscious! It is in loneliness alone that the human soul can achieve this inner growth’.?®

Powys believes that the strongest force in the world today is imagination, and he goes so far as to affirm that the reality of natural life consists wholly and entirely of imagination. ‘For us,’ he says, ‘imagination is reality, and reality is imagination. And we hold that everybody, every man, woman, and child, of every section of the community, possesses this reality-creating god-like gift.’2® “We have the power of recreating the universe from the depth of ourselves. In so doing we share the creative force that started the whole process!’?”

It may seem at this stage that Powys is letting his own imagination run away with him, but remember! he is talking about the inner conscious life of the individual; he is not claiming creative