The New Mythology of John Cowper Powys

bloom, the fragrance, the flickering expression on the surface of life itself.’34

About the power behind nature and the whole Universe Powys does not speculate as though he had any illusions that he could get to the truth of the matter, and he has no use for beliefs about the unknown, urging us to be sceptical about all human hypotheses. Sometimes he refers to It as the First Cause, sometimes he refers to God or the gods, elsewhere he declaims violently at the notion of a universe and affirms that there is as much evidence for our world being a multiverse as a universe, because our actual experience is of many forces in conflict with one another rather than of a single harmonious whole, and of change rather than permanence. The important thing is not what It ultimately and ‘really’ is, but how we experience It and the attitude we take to It.

Powys sees us individuals as half a part of nature and half beyond nature. The nature part he calls ‘ichthyosaurus’ and the part beyond he calls ‘half-god.’ And as selves with inner freedom he calls us egos. In this ichthyosaurus part of our ego he imagines that we can reach down or back into the memories of the earth itself. That we are formed physically from the same chemical elements makes this possible. The moisture of the earth is our moisture, the cells of our body the same earth cells, our frame is composed of the same animal muscle and bone as all warm-blooded mammals; even the plants and minerals are somehow, somewhere in us and part of our ancestry.

Powys also has a premonition of a future state “when men shall have become as gods.’#? He seems to be echoing Nietzsche when he refers to levels of consciousness that belong to the future and the surpassing of the human animal and the change of humanity into something different from humanity. ‘In every human being,’ he writes, ‘who dares to indulge himself in the fathomless loneliness that is the birthright of us all, there are both these elements of feeling—those that are superhuman and those that are sub-human. Man is a link in a long spiral ascent, not a finality.’**

How do such ichthyosaurus halfgod egos regard the First Cause? Partly with fear and loathing and anger for all the cruelty and suffering there is in the world, in nature and in our own experience; partly with gratitude because without the First Cause

Il