The New Mythology of John Cowper Powys

water bird flapping its way home, and the smell of tar reached his nostrils from the old barge tied up to an ancient post which he found he was grasping with his hands.

It seemed to him now ‘that the soul of the inanimate, the indwelling breath of life in all these ancient lifeless things’? was moving towards him.

What was the secret of matter itself? Sam now imagined that this soul had a definite shape, and into his mind came the words ‘Ichthus, the World-Fish’.2 Solid matter seemed to become ‘porous’ to him and the mystery of matter lay in this watery life essence. What happened now was that in the depth of Sam’s being he felt as if he heard all the cries of pain which at that moment were rising up all over the world. Powys writes “There must be a limit to pity or the stream of life would stop... and “Ichthus, the World-Fish” would float dead upon its back’.* ‘Life should strangle pity lest pity should strangle life in the ultimate contest’.

The conclusion that Powys draws out of this strange scene which ends with Sam’s vision of the lost Grail with Ichthus, the World-Fish, within it is ‘that the first motive of every living creature must be to realise his own identity and to fight the cruelty of life’.6 ‘Is there’ he asks, ‘a fish of healing, one chance against all chances, at the bottom of the World-Tank? Is cruelty always triumphant, or is there a hope beyond hope, a something somewhere, able to break in from outside and smash to atoms this torturing chain of Cause and Effect?’?

Powys has answered this great question himself.

In this lecture, from the abundance of his ideas I am able only to choose a few. I am not going to refer on every occasion to the particular book from which I am quoting, but these quotations come chiefly from: Visions and Revisions, published in 1915, The Meaning of Culture 1929, In Defence of Sensuality 1930, The Philosophy of Solitude 1933, and In Spite Of 1953. I am going to quote liberally from Powys and also to use his actual words in much of my own comment on his thoughts.

The word myth is usually equated with fantasy. The essence of a myth is taken to be that it is not actually true but a convenient way for our childlike ancestors to express ideas which they were

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