The New Mythology of John Cowper Powys

not yet capable of formulating or understanding with their intellects. We are apt to think that we have grown up beyond the need for myths. Nowadays, as Robert Graves points out, the English word myth has taken the meaning of ‘incredible’-—that which is beyond belief. But many people have recently taken mythology more seriously. Robert Graves says ‘Myths are seldom simple and never irresponsible’, and C. G. Jung maintained that myths usually contain meanings that we either fear to or cannot convey conceptually.

In the title of this lecture I have used the word ‘mythology’ to mean not that which is untrue or childish, but that which we see intuitively and are unable to express in idea. Our inability to do so may be because there are truths beyond intellectual comprehension. There is the whole realm of mystery. Man’s reaction to mystery, to the beginning of life, to death, to his destiny, to the earth’s future, was usually one of fear and superstition. Because he could not know and because he found it hard to suspend judgment on these things which were beyond his comprehension he usually attributed them to supernatural causes. Even the most rational of persons, and sometimes particularly they, find themselves involved in superstition. But Powys is not superstitious, because he makes no artificial effort to be rational. He does indeed consider the control of thought to be most important and thinks Man would be in a sorry plight were he dependant for his knowledge on the ‘wayward unaccountable chances of mystical illumination’.® But he fully accepts the irrationality in the universe, and since we must in our thinking cope with this he suggests that we make the poetical our substitute for superstition and the supernatural. He uses imagination as a human faculty with the same conscious deliberateness as the rationalists use their reason.

It is Powys’s powerful use of the imagination and his sense of poetry to which I refer in the title. It is not only that he invented a particular new mythology, though his whole notion of the creation of self is such a mythology, but that he used mythology in a new way. With his strong imaginative powers he adapted and used already existent myths for his own purposes—as in the story I have just recounted of Sam—and gave them his own particular imaginative twist; sometimes, too, he related ideas around a par-