The New Mythology of John Cowper Powys

we would not be here to enjoy life as we do. But above all our attitude should be one of heroic defiance. We are all alone facing the ‘not-self” with an abysmal gulf between us. The First Cause is all-powerful, but we, though transitory, are self-conscious, and thus more significant.

The mediation of religion he rejects except as a conscious deliberate mythology. We may indeed use it for our own personal satisfaction but not to believe in it. But we may, he says, use in our anger “The sublime help of the daring Christ-mythology, that supreme act of autosalvation of the troubled human race, which condones the cruelty of existence in a much subtler way. For what, when one puts it in plain terms, is the concept behind the Incarnation? Nothing less than man’s determination to reconcile himself to this original sin, or blunder, of the First Cause, by which so much cruelty entered the world, by this Great Spirit’s own terrific suffering.’?4

Thus we may indeed bless or curse the First Cause or feel anger or gratitude towards it, but the last thing for us to do is to worship it or to think we owe it reverence. God is not dead, but we have stopped being superstitious about him, realising that we are the God-makers and that ‘out of the human heart sprang all the gods and all the paradises as well as all the devils and all the hells, and back into the human heart, when their loan of time and their lease of space is exhausted, they will return !’85

Nor is Powys going to give up the tyranny of religious superstition to fall for the theories of scientists or the dictatorship of specialists for ‘after all,’ he says, ‘we are men, and life for us is the same as it is for these specialising know-alls.’** And the ’mystery of “life” doesn’t depend on theology at all, or upon science at all or upon art at all.’*” He is not going to allow himself to get unduly worried about the purpose of life in general. What he wants is a purpose in our own secret, private, individual life. And his ultimate expression of that purpose is to ‘enjoy’. We should force ourselves to enjoy life, ‘not to love, not to hate, not to understand, not to worship, not to interpret, not to explain, simply and solely to enjoy.’*® This, according to Powys, is the secret of secrets.

In his earlier writings he spoke about happiness as the meaning and purpose of life, but in his book In Spite Of, towards the very

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