SOURCE: "John Cowper Powys' A Glastonbury Romance; A Modern Mystery Play," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. XIII, No. 3, Summer, 1972, pp. 341-60.

The psychic history of a place like Glastonbury is not an easy thing to write down in set terms, for not only does chance play an enormous part in it, but there are many forces at work for which human language has at present no fit terms.

John Cowper Powys' first important work, Wolf Solent (1929), is a novel which follows a fairly simple course of narrative development through the experience of a single center of consciousness to a predictable conclusion. It is like a swollen brook running through the plains of Dorsetshire without variation or divergence to the sea. A Glastonbury Romance (1932), Powys' second major novel, is like that vast and chaotic sea itself—a book whose centers are myriad and multiform and whose circumference is an awesome authorial omniscience aspiring toward the cosmic consciousness of God. That the novel has a localized setting at all is an accident of form. Its true setting is the cosmos itself, upon whose vertical axis Glastonbury is but a single if important coordinate; and it is the vertical axis which matters here ultimately. For all the panoramic sweep of Powys' descriptions, evoking not merely Somersetshire but Wessex and England, for all his intricate patterning of spatial and temporal relationships, helping to make the book the longest undivided novel in our language, it is a reality transcending these which provides the motive force of A Glastonbury Romance—that is, the Holy Grail (for, Christian or pagan, it is preeminently holy in Powys), "that fragment of Beyond-Time fallen through a crack in the world-ceiling upon the Time-Floor" (p. 789). The function of each entity trapped upon the Time-Floor in the vicinity of Glastonbury is to come to terms with this sacred object, and so the novel has no plot in a conventional sense. Rather, significant action occurs on a spiritual plane.

On the level of character this response involves a choice between the pagan and the Christian Grail (which manifests itself in terms of Arthurian legend as a choice between Merlin and Arthur, and in terms of the Nietzschean dichotomy which is everpresent to Powys as a choice between Christ Dionysus and Christ Apollo); for the Isle of Glastonbury is above all a center of spiritual warfare where the exiled heathen deities of the Tor (rising from the Somerset plane like "the phallus of an unknown god") battle fiercely with the Christian divinity of the Abbey for ascendancy over the soul of Wessex. Which grail our characters choose to follow and the intensity with which they pursue it determines the nature and degree of psychic integration that they will be permitted to achieve in the course of the novel; but personal salvation is conceived to depend in part upon an agency beyond the self and its volitions. It is as if, having stabilized self in Wolf Solent, Powys now seeks to attune it with some eternal principle or godhead which promises cosmic as well as psychological wholeness.

In this and other respects A Glastonbury Romance resembles the novels of Powys' acknowledged master Dostoevsky. Indeed, what Marc Slonim has called Dostoevsky's "psychological clairvoyance and ideological profundity" are qualities which pervade A Glastonbury Romance, and so too are Dostoevsky's crudities of construction and style. The formal eclecticism of The Brothers Karamazov as characterized by Slonim, for instance, exactly parallels that of Powys' novel: "Straight exposition … is followed by dramatic scenes or long dialogue; dynamic narrative full of suspense and action is interrupted by forensic speeches quoted in extenso; flashes of violence follow disquisitions on Christianity; sarcastic hints and humorous character sketches alternate with descriptions of death and hallucination." Furthermore, the critical charges leveled against both books have been precisely the same—"lengthy dialogue, distracting sub-plots, the melodramatic piling up of incidents and coincidences, the high-pitched tone of the narrative, which often jars and exhausts the reader." Yet it is a testament to the genius of both artists that their immense spiritual vitality has enabled them to triumph absolutely over absurdities of plot and clumsiness of narrative technique, creating novels whose strength and unity of vision render their technical flaws irrelevant. The visions are ultimately dissimilar, it is true; and Powys may have failed to grasp the overriding importance of Dostoevsky's Christian orthodoxy and political conservatism, so antithetical to all orthodoxies were his own views; but his numerous studies of Dostoevsky reveal that Powys felt his way into the great Russian's soul as few men have done before or since. The affinity between the two is one of temperament rather than intellect, for both were great undisciplined mystics who understood intimately and instinctively, as Powys wrote of his mentor in 1916, "the depravity of the spirit, as well as of the flesh, and the amazing wantonness, whereby the human will does not always seek its own realization and well-being, but quite as often its own laceration and destruction." But unlike Dostoevsky Powys seeks redemption upon a larger scale than the merely human, and his conception of salvation extends to the earth itself. As one character in A Glastonbury Romance puts it: "Matter must be redeemed: and only Christ can redeem it. Christ, I say; not Jesus. Verbum caro factum est…. It's the Thing Outside breaking into our closed circle. And every atom of Matter feels it. Matter is no longer separate from Spirit. It has become the living flesh of Spirit" (p. 265). This is why G. Wilson Knight can write with a kind of absolute justification, "A Glastonbury Romance is less a book than a Bible." It is a novel too, however, and while it may be the sacred text of the Powys canon, A Glastonbury Romance shares certain thematic concerns with its more secular fellows.

Like Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance opens with the return of a native to his homeland after long absence. John Crow, our "human norm" in the novel's animistic universe, arrives in East Anglia from a fifteen-year sojourn in Paris to attend the funeral of his wealthy grandfather, the Canon William Crow of Norfolk. There he meets for the first time since childhood his anima-like cousin Mary Crow and immediately recognizes his destiny to merge with her spiritually and physically (p. 19), exclusive, however, of sexual intercourse. To even suggest such a union in a modern context is remarkable enough; to actually depict it without embarrassment or absurdity is next to impossible. Yet Powys does exactly this in the second chapter of the novel where John and Mary come together in a finely realized act of symbolic intercourse in a rowboat on the Wissey River:

The prolonged struggle of these two with the boat and with the water became in a very intimate sense their marriage day upon earth. By his saltasting sweat and by her wrought-up passion of guiding, these two "run-down adventurers" plighted their troth for the rest of their days…. They clung to each other with a grim, vicious, indignant resolve to enjoy a sensuality of oneness; a sensuality of unity snatched out of the drifting flood of space and time. It was not directed to anything beyond itself, this desire of theirs. It was innocent of any idea of offspring. It was an absolute, fortified and consecrated by the furious efforts they were making, by the diamond-bright sparkles upon the broken water, by the sullen clicking of the rowlocks.

John had begun to count now. "I'll stop after twenty more strokes," he thought. But when the last of the twenty came, and he found in the beating pulse of his exhaustion an undreamed-of nerve of renewal, he did not stop. The dazzling spouts of water drops which followed his oars, each time he drew them from the water, mingled now with a renewed counting. "Ten … eleven … twelve … thirteen … fourteen … fifteen …" Those rhythmic, up-flung splashes of dancing crystal, stirred and subsiding amid the long emerald-green weeds, became the thudding reverberation of his own unconquerable heartbeats. (pp. 64-65)

John's coalescence with this feminine projection of his very soul secures for him a degree of ontological stability unparalleled by his counterparts in Powys' other novels. For this reason he becomes less a participant in the great spiritual drama to be enacted at Glastonbury than a spectator to it, and his role as central figure is usurped by other characters as the novel unfolds. More significant, perhaps, he has certain congenital limitations which preclude full response to the "aura" of this ancient island fastness.

Powys will repeatedly make the point that the Norfolk-born Crows—even the most sensitive among them, like John and Mary—are descendants of the conqueror race which rode roughshod over the sacred mythologies of Celtic Britain during the Invasion and, as such, are aliens to Glastonbury and its awful burden of Mystery. It is not that they are immune to the influence of the Grail (for no one is) but rather that the blood of their forthright and pragmatic Norman ancestors prejudices them against the Unseen in favor of the palpably material and causes them to hold the legend-steeped Glastonbury in contempt as an evasive, feminine, and irrational presence—all of which it is. Thus, John and Mary will live and work in Glastonbury for the duration of their relationship, but "rooted in fen-mud and vicious heathenism," they remain temperamentally indisposed to its atmosphere.

Even after John has been granted a vision of Excalibur on Pomparlès Bridge, he will persist in his skeptical attitude to-ward the Glastonbury mythos. Indeed, the intense spirituality of the place discomfits these "healthy-minded" Crows to such an extent that, however benevolent their resolve, they all end by becoming its enemies.

John's cousin Philip possesses this racial attribute in its most extreme form. A grasping industrial magnate who bears unmistakable kinship with Lawrence's Gerald Crich, and the foremost entrepreneur in Glastonbury, Philip Crow has come to Norfolk hoping to inherit the better part of his grandfather's estate in order to electrify and mechanize his tin mine at Wookey Hole, Somerset, formerly a sacred cave of the Druids. Though Philip is included in Powys' comprehensive "Tolstoyan sympathy," he is easily the least humane character in the novel, hating Glastonbury and all it represents, and admitting at one point: "It would be a good thing if the Glastonbury people would simply die off…. How these Christs and Buddhas … ever reached the point of feeling that it was worth their while to save the human race is more than I can understand…. If I could cut off the heads of all the poor of Glastonbury and fill their houses with a picked set of men and women who could really work I'd do it tomorrow" (pp. 776-77). Driven by an insatiable desire to subdue both man and nature to the will of the machine. Philip Crow is the great antagonist of the Grail and all that is holy in the human spirit and the world. But myth and religion are formidable opponents for a mere capitalist, and Philip soon learns that his grandfather's money has been bequeathed to a professional exponent of the Unseen, Johnny Geard, nonconformist preacher cum Powysian mystic and the strangest defender the Grail has ever found.

This remarkable personage is one of Powys' greatest creations. Known to the townspeople of Glastonbury as "Bloody Johnny" (owing to his frequent invocation of the Blood of Christ), Geard is the very type of thaumaturgic field preacher—half-charlatan, half-Dionysian Messiah—which Powys conceived himself to be in his American lecture tours. Bloody Johnny has reached the conclusion that the Western world stands upon the brink of a great spiritual renaissance whose center, with a little intelligent promotion, will be Glastonbury itself. He seems truly to believe that, with Jerusalem, Mecca, and Rome, Glastonbury is one of the few "reservoirs of world-magic on the whole surface of the globe" (p. 291), and he hopes ultimately to establish the site of Chalice Well near the Tor as a nonsectarian shrine on the order of Lourdes, fully sanctified by miracles which he will himself perform. For the present, however, his purpose holds to inaugurate a Midsummer Religious Festival at Glastonbury climaxed by a spectacular Passion play which will attract international attention to the place. During his tenure as curate to Canon Crow, Geard has apparently inspired this orthodox clergyman with the same fantastic notion; and the old priest leaves Bloody Johnny a small fortune with which to prosecute the unlikely scheme. The Canon's erstwhile legatees are outraged that this unctuous, brandy-swilling son of the lower middle classes should thus inherit the family wealth, but the will is airtight; and the Crows grudgingly remove themselves to Glastonbury where for one reason or another they all temporarily reside.

In Glastonbury we are introduced to a large new cast of characters (the author claims forty-eight principle figures in all), most of whom, as Roland Mathias has remarked, "are not products of society, but foci of intellectual, genealogical, geological, and vegetable processes." By far the most important of these figures are Owen Evans and Sam Dekker, who represent respectively the two aspects of Apollonian Christianity that Powys finds most dangerous to the human spirit and yet most fascinating to the creative mind—guilt and renunciation. Mr. Evans is an itinerant Welsh scholar and crypto-sadist engaged in writing a definitive biography of Merlin (in which he hopes to explicate the sorcerer's Nirvanic translation to the mysterious "Esplumeoir") when he is not grappling strenuously with his monstrous fantasies of cruelty and the agonizing guilt they engender. Indeed, he martyrs himself daily to this cerebral perversion, which he believes to be the "Unpardonable Sin," and, like the ghastly, tortured Christ of Calvary, assumes the bloodguilt of the race in the process (p. 95). His remorse is so great in fact that Evans allows himself to be literally crucified in the Glastonbury Passion Play and almost dies of asphyxia. Yet it is less a physical yearning for mayhem that afflicts Owen Evans than a Dostoevskian mal d'esprit. He believes in evil as a constitutive force generated exclusively by man—"man the cruel, man the bloodfiend, man the voluptuous tormentor, man the rejoicer in pain, man the inventor of pain, man the pain-be-getter, the pain-eater, the pain-drinker, the pain-devil" (p. 642)—but his own victims are all phantoms, so that neither his crimes nor his guilt are subject to material restraints:

His mind seemed … absolutely balanced on a taut and twanging wire between two terrible eternities, an eternity of wilful horror, and an eternity of bleached, arid futility, devoid of all life-sap. He could feel the path to the horror, shivering with deadly phosphorescent sweetness. He could feel the path to the renunciation filling his nostrils with acrid dust, parching his naked feet, withering every human sensation till it was hollow as the shard of a dead beetle! The nature of his temptation was such that it had nothing to redeem it….

… And his imagination … settled itself like a dung-wasp upon the nature of his conscious life if he did yield to it. He saw his soul in the form of an unspeakable worm, writhing in pursuit of new, and ever new mental victims, drinking new, and ever new innocent blood. (pp. 254-55)

The ultimate horror in the Powysian universe is not sadism but solipsism run wild; and Mr. Evans more than any other character in Powys' novels bears its stigmata.

If Evans is a Stavroghin manqué, Sam Dekker stands some-where between Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov. He is the awkward but well-intentioned son of the Reverend Matt Dekker, Vicar of Glastonbury; he has for some time conducted an affair with the beautiful (and married) Nell Zoyland, whom he loves dearly. But Sam also loves the lean and ascetic Christ of Glastonbury Abbey, who requires awful sacrifice of his worshippers; and after a spiritual struggle of some magnitude, he renounces his near perfect relationship with Nell to become "Holy Sam," saintlike hermit of the Glastonbury water meadows whose Imitatio Christi makes him the laughingstock of the town. Though the religious quests of Evans and Sam come to completely different ends, both are initially grounded in the joyless (and, for Powys, wrong-headed) assumption that man's sinfulness can only be redeemed through pain and self-denial. Theirs is the tragic, suffering Christ of the Crucifixion who dies for a race which, as Sam tells Evans, is "all scales, scurf, scab, on the same twisting, cresting dragon of the slime" (p. 856).

Far different is Johnny Geard's Messiah who, if He has an orthodox equivalent at all, must be said to be the Christ of the Incarnation and the Resurrection. For Geard, Christ's Blood is not the substance shed on Calvary but an ichorous fluid which streams in the firmament at sunset and dawn, the sap which rises daily in every living thing to produce new life, and the great tidal billow of the sea. Redemption comes not through fastidious renunciation but unqualified acceptance of everything in the cosmos from excrement to ether. The heretical Easter Mass that Geard celebrates for his Saviour in his wife's garden is wholly characteristic:

He sank down on his knees in the presence of a little square patch of grass, a few privet bushes, and a tiny round bed with three dead hyacinths in it, and in this position began, with a sort of ravenous greed, tearing open the loaf and gobbling great lumps of crumb from the centre of it. These mouthfuls he washed down with repeated gulps of port wine….

"Christ is risen! Christ is risen!" muttered Bloody Johnny, with his mouth full of the inside of his loaf. "Christ our Passover," he went on, "is sacrificed for us; let us therefore keep the Feast!" (pp. 422-23)

The image he evoked in his imagination did not resemble in the least degree the tortured Figure of Pain worshipped by Sam Dekker…. (p. 456)

Later, Sam himself will note the extreme contrast between his god and Geard's:

How different was Sam's Christ from Mr. Geard's! Mr. Geard's Christ was a Power to be exploited. In his weird gnostic dialogues with his Master, [Geard] addressed Him like a friend, almost like an equal. He was [his] great magician, his super-Merlin, by whose strength and support he became strong. Never once had it crossed the threshold of Mr. Geard's consciousness that it was his duty to live a life of self-sacrifice. (pp. 950-51)

Geard's Christ, then, is a benevolent Anarch, much closer to the chthonian deities of the Tor than to the hieratic divinities of the Abbey; and through the medium of Bloody Johnny He becomes a living presence in Glastonbury, succoring the same downtrodden contingent of humanity—the sick, abnormal, and disenfranchised—that Powys himself championed during his American lecture tours.

Like Powys, Geard is a spiritual communist who believes that all life is holy and, as his influence in Glastonbury grows, he becomes a material communist as well. When he manages to have himself elected mayor of the town by an unlikely coalition of Liberals, Laborites, and Bolsheviks, Geard sets about at once to reorganize Glastonbury as a socialist commune in order to implement his religious revival. His constant refrain in the early days of his crusade has been that he will restore the town and its historic ruins (held in trust by the state) to "the People." The Normans, he contends, "Brought the Devil with 'em … and the Devil's gentlemen" (p. 287) and still hold the rightful property of Saxon and Celt alike in thrall. Now, from his new position of authority, Geard convinces the town council to municipalize Glastonbury's industry, largely the property of Philip Crow, and distribute the shares among the populace (exactly how remains unclear—and unimportant: critics who carp at the novel's political improbabilities forget the most emphatic word of its title). In thus forcing Crow out of business and dividing his wealth among his natural enemies, Geard is only fulfilling the manifest destiny of the Glastonbury people to cast out the Invader and usurp the centuries of illegitimate authority which has attempted to rule them since the Battle of Hastings; and Powys leaves no doubt as to the people's ultimate allegiance:

They were lean and lanky men, descendants by centuries of inbreeding of those heathen aboriginals of the Isle of Glastonbury who resisted St. Joseph, St. David, St. Indractus, St. Gildas, St. Patrick, St. Dunstan, St. Benignus and St. Bridget, in their attempts to spiritualise them, who were forever revolting against both church and state, who seemed inspired in their rebellions by the old chthonian divinities of Tor Hill,… and whom nobody but Bloody Johnny seemed able to manage. (pp. 966-67)

On a symbolic level this rebellion is figured in the return not of Arthur but his Celtic prototypes, Uther Pendragon or Urien, and a whole succession of vanquished Fisher Kings:

The sturdy northeastern invaders—the ancestors of Philip and John—beat back more than Mr. Evans' people when they swept the Celts into South Wales. They beat back with them their thaumaturgic demigods, the Living Corpse, for instance, of Uther Pendragon, the mysterious Urien, King of yr Echwyd, the Land of Glamour and Illusion, the Land whose vapours are always livid blue, that mystic colour named by the bards gorlassar, and Arawn, King of Annwn, they beat back, together with those weird protectors of the heathen Grail, the Fisher King Petchere and the Maimed King Pelles…. And along with Mr. Evans' people, and their dark chthonian gods, these healthy-minded invaders had driven back the very dreams of these Cymric and Brythonic tribes. (p. 788)

Geard's "new religion" is based precisely on the restoration of this exiled mythology, for like Jung he believes that man has become spiritually impoverished through the loss of his unconscious symbols, or archetypes (p. 1124). Indeed. Owen Evans believes that Geard has recovered yr Echwyd in Glastonbury itself:

Few Glastonbury people realise that they are actually living in yr Echwyd, the land of Annwn, the land of twilight and death, where the shores are of Mortuorum Mare, the Sea of the Departed. This place has always been set apart … from the earliest times … Urien the Mysterious, Avallach the Unknown, were Fisher Kings here … and for what did they fish?…

… What they sought … what the Fisher Kings of my people sought, and no other priests of no other race on earth have ever sought it … was not only the Cauldron and the Spear … not only the sheath and the knife, not only the Mwys of Gwyddno and the Sword of Arthur, but that which exists in the moment of timeless time when these two are one! (pp. 771-72)

It is the heathen Grail, then, which the Merlinesque Geard through the medium of his weird evangelical mysticism will offer Glastonbury; but other citizens of the town are less confident of its miraculous properties than the jittery, guilt-ridden Mr. Evans.

The professional classes of Glastonbury continue to regard Geard as a degenerate fraud even after his Midsummer Pageant brings the prosperity and renown he has forecast for the town. Philip, of course, would like to see him hanged; and even John, who now works for Geard in a public relations capacity and harbors a certain grudging admiration for him, is frequently revolted by the Mayor's "new Revelation" ("What the devil am I doing in this muggy hole, selling my soul and swallowing all this tosh?" [p. 707]). Various other middle-class characters are alternately affronted and appalled by Geard's ability to converse with congenital imbeciles, heal the incurably ill, and resolve complicated crises with Joycean gibberish while apparently drunk on port or brandy. Indeed, a straightforward account of Geard's exploits would tax the faith of the most credulous reader. Yet Powys describes them, like so much else in the novel, with such energetic brilliance, such sustained and vibrant intensity, that we readily overlook the absurdity of the particular situation. Witness, for example, the Glastonbury Miracle, Geard's exorcism (for it cannot be called a cure in any known medical sense) of Tittie Petherton's breast cancer at Chalice Well:

Straining every nerve of his nature, body and soul together, he forced himself to envisage that cancer as something towards which he was directing arrow after arrow of blighting, withering, deadly force. "The great thing is to see it," he said to himself, while his black eyes now alight with their most burning fury, stripped the poor woman of every stitch of clothing.

His arrows of thought now became a spear—the Bleeding Lance of the oldest legends of Carbonek—and with an actual tremor of his up-raised, naked arms, he felt himself to be plunging this formidable weapon into that worst enemy of all women! "I've done it," he repeated, for the second time, as he saw Tittie's eyes begin slowly to close.

And then Mr. Geard shivered and his teeth began to chatter.

Perhaps he wouldn't have succeeded after all if there hadn't come into his head at that moment an actual vision of one tiny living tendril of that murderous octopus under the sleeping woman's flesh. With one terrific upheaval of the whole of his massive frame, its gastric, its pulmonary, its spinal, its phallic force, and even lifting himself up on tiptoe from the gravel at the bottom of the fount, he plunged that Bleeding Lance of his mind into the half-dead cancer.

Then he bowed himself forward, like the trunk of a tree in a great storm, till his forehead touched the surface of the water. From that surface he proceeded to gulp down, in long, panting, gurgling gasps, enough water to satisfy the thirst of the Questing Beast. "Blood of Christ!" he spluttered; and it was the first time during this great struggle that his favourite expression had crossed his lips. (pp. 739-40)

In passages like this one Powys does not ask us to suspend our disbelief; he forces us to suspend it through the sheer inundative power of his prose.

Geard, however, continues to encounter opposition at every level of society. Local Bolshevik leader Red Robinson, for instance—less a character than a diagrammatic representation of virulent class "atred"—despises the Mayor officially for his tempering the Revolution with religion and, more accurately, for his simple good fortune. But Geard has the temporary fealty of the proud and rebellious townspeople and, more important strategically, the patronage of his old friend Henry Zoyland, tenth Marquis of P., who collects the land rents on most of Glastonbury and its environs. It is in fact on a visit to the Marquis' hunting lodge at Mark's Court, by local tradition the site of Merlin's last earthly appearance, that Geard consolidates his vision of the heathen Grail.

After a terrifying but victorious midnight struggle with the spirit of the sorceress Nineue, the fatal anima-sprite who imprisoned great Merlin forever in her crystal cave, the Mayor of Glastonbury is confirmed in his tao:

For a thousand years the Grail has been attracting thought to itself, because of the magnetism of Christ's Blood. The Grail is now an organic nucleus of creation and destruction. Christ's Blood cries aloud from it by day and by night…. I know now what the Grail is. It is the desire of the generations mingling like water with the Blood of Christ, and caught in a fragment of Substance that is beyond Matter! It is a little nucleus of Eternity, dropped somehow from the outer spaces upon one particular spot! (p. 473)

Geard (and Powys) believes that in its descent this sacred fragment of Beyond-Matter has left a corridorlike rift in the fabric of time through which the spirit of all Matter must pass for its redemption. Matter is not evil in itself, as Mr. Evans claims (p. 264); rather, it becomes so by imprisoning something which struggles to escape into the shaft of atemporality created by the Grail. This is the "secret of the Inanimate" so crucial in Powys, that matter, like man himself, contains a soul which labors toward release—a simple enough concept for cosmic seers like Geard and Merlin, or Sylvanus Cobbold in the later Weymouth Sands (1934), but one that is lost upon the anthropocentric consciousness of humanity at large. The Powysian Grail vision, then, requires for its fulfillment a recognition of the Christ in matter as well as in man; and this is precisely what Sam Dekker achieves when he finally surrenders the oppressive burden of human misery he has chosen to bear and turns from the crucified Man-God of his father's theology to a more animistic image of redemption not far removed from Geard's.

Sam had earlier agreed with Evans as to the essential baseness of matter, telling him at one point: "I feel that the whole Creation is on the wrong track…. What Christ has to do is to deny the whole thing, root and branch" (p. 857). But as he stands alone one evening on the banks of the Brue with the whole of mystical Glastonbury stretched before him, Sam gazes upon an aged post embedded in the river mud and is plunged into ecstatic communion with the created matter which surrounds him: "He began to realise that the soul of the inanimate, the indwelling breath of life in all these ancient lifeless things, whereof the town was so full, was really moving towards him" (p. 978). Solid matter suddenly becomes porous, and Sam, caught out of himself, realizes its "life-essence" as a vibrantly animated World-Fish "passing through the primeval watery element that existed in all things" (p. 980). Then, without a second's warning the earth, water, and darkness crack, and Sam is brutally ravished by the great Dionysian godhead which has brooded over Glastonbury for centuries awaiting its moment of annunciation:

It was as if the whole of Sam's consciousness became the hidden darkness of his inmost organism; and when this darkness was split, and the whole atmosphere split, and the earth and the air split, what he felt to be a gigantic spear was struck into his bowels and struck from below….

… He had become a bleeding mass of darkness. His consciousness was a dark surface of water; and up through this water, tearing it, rending it, dividing it, turning it into blood, shivered this crashing stroke, this stroke that was delivered from abysses of the earth, far deeper than the bottom of the Brue. (pp. 981-82)

The pain subsides, and Sam is granted his vision of the heathen Grail: "He saw a globular chalice that had two circular handles. The substance it was made of was clearer than crystal; and within it there was dark water streaked with blood, and within the water was a shining fish" (p. 982).

The following morning, still dazed, Sam attempts to evaluate his incredible experience and realizes, with Johnny Geard, that a new revelation has been made at Glastonbury: "Christ is in the Stones and in the Water; it is Jesus who is dead and buried. There's something in Nature that has turned against Nature and is escaping from Nature. There's a Christ in matter that is nearer the Grail than the Christ of the Church" (pp. 986-87). But the true identity of this new Messiah remains obscure to Sam until later in the day when he is giving a constipated octogenarian an enema and the significance of his recent vision breaks full upon him:

As he struggled with his task, bending over the old gentleman's rear, the tension of his spirit brought back with a rush the miraculous power of the vision he had seen. The two extremes of his experience, the anus of an aged man and the wavering shaft of an Absolute, piercing his own earthly body, mingled and fused together in his consciousness. Holy Sam felt, as he went on with the business, a strange second sight, an inkling, as to some incredible secret, whereby the whole massed weight of the world's tormented flesh was labouring towards some release. (p. 991)

In this quintessentially Powysian moment Sam recognizes that "his living tortured Christ was now changed to something else" (p. 991)—specifically, the all-accepting, wholly irrational, and ecstatic Christ of Johnny Geard. Like Wolf Solent's similar discovery of the transfiguring mantle of romance behind a foul-smelling pigsty, Sam Dekker's excremental realization of an indwelling spirit in all that is brings with it a supreme moment of integration, unifying a heretofore divided self:

"I have seen it! I have seen it!" the heart within him cried; and in a vague, delicious, dreamy reverie he became aware of an important psychic change in his inmost self-consciousness. This change was nothing less than a coming together of his body and soul. Although his soul still felt independent of his body, and free of his body, it no longer felt contemptuous of his body. It had ceased to utter its mandates in the tone of a slave-driver. Its mere presence within his body at this moment seemed to make Sam's flesh feel porous and transparent, as if large, cool, undulating waves were sweeping through it. (p. 998)

Sam's, however, is an extraordinary case. He has been singled out for spiritual greatness from the earliest chapters of the novel, and his true vision of the Grail is all but inevitable. Other upshots of the new tide of mysticism sweeping Glastonbury are less beneficent.

Owen Evans, for example, is not so fortunate in his Grail quest as Sam. After his crucifixion in the Pageant—a magnificently rendered agony in which Powys literally attempts to recreate the subjective experience of Christ on the Cross—Evans is granted no rectification of the will but driven with ever-increasing fervor to actually witness some sadistic act. When he discovers that the crazed imbecile Finn Toller plans to murder John Crow on Glastonbury Tor by crushing his skull with an iron bar, Evans secretly arranges to watch this latter-day reenactment of the "Dolorous Blow" which Malory's Balin gave the Fisher King Pelles, bringing years of pestilence and famine upon three realms and creating the Waste Land. On the appointed day, however, Evans' wife, the ingenious Cordelia ("Cordy") née Geard, senses that her husband is about to embark upon some ruinous pursuit and provokes him into an act of oral intercourse which successfully defuses his volatile passion ("Not for nothing was this brave girl the child of Geard of Glastonbury" [p. 1083]), even as he remembers "how more than once he had dressed up that pillow of his in his own vest and shirt and had pounded it with the poker from the fender while an orgasm of terrible ecstasy dissolved his very soul" (p. 1074). In the event, moreover, Toller bludgeons by mistake Tom Barter, John's boyhood friend (and lover); and Evans, who has exhaustedly repented of his evil intention and set out to warn the party, arrives moments late upon the scene to discover the battered corpse. Viewing thus the grisly result of his insane passion for violence permanently debilitates Evans, and he spends the rest of his days in impotent seclusion without ever broaching Merlin's great secret.

Following the murder on the Tor, we sense that something has gone seriously amiss with the Glastonbury Revelation. An atmosphere of dissolution settles over the land (pp. 1080-81), suffusing those mysterious blue Somersetshire vapors with a faint odor of decomposition. The townspeople become restless; sexual perversions are rife. John and Mary Crow return to Norfolk with their old friend's body, determined to remain there, far from the "morbid-legended fields" of Glastonbury. Philip Crow believes that his adversary's power is on the wane; and Geard himself, like many another spiritual leader before him, is disturbed to find his flock riven with factionalism and petty doctrinal dispute:

In place of one great final outpouring of the Spirit, obliterating all divisions, all quarrels, all maliciousness, and setting him free, they were back again in the old wrangling human arena, Celt against Saxon, Capitalist against Communist, and every Philip against every John! Mr. Geard had come … in the mood of Elijah when he was transported to Heaven in a chariot of fire. But now he began to feel that his Lord had forsaken him and left him alone with the false prophets. (p. 1141)

It is young Paul Trent, however, the gentle philosophical anarchist come to town from the Scilly Isles to observe Geard's socialist experiment in action, who puts his finger on the source of the Glastonbury malaise: "A feeling stole over him as if all the way down its long history Glastonbury, the Feminine Person, like Mary at the feet of the Master, had been waiting for the fuss to cease, for the voices to subside, for the dust to sink down" (p. 1046).

Like the Grail itself—Cauldron of Ceridwen or vessel of Christ's Blood—Glastonbury is a feminine presence, and she is deeply mistrustful of all the bustling, goal-directed human activity which the "new Revelation" has engendered in her womb. Murder is as nothing to Glastonbury, for she has experienced a multitude of such crimes in her long history; but she does fear rational human industry and has spent all her centuries of inscrutable calm resisting the wedge of purposeful behavior which men have attempted to drive into her bowels. Since the Midsummer Festival and the miracle performed at Chalice Well, Bloody Johnny has become a figure of legendary reputation, attracting hordes of wealthy pilgrims to his shrine from all over the world; and, ironically, Geard's bid to revive Glastonbury's ancient Mystery threatens her more than Philip Crow's concerted effort to destroy it. For the Grail can never be killed, but it may be comprehended; and Glastonbury above all does not wish to be grasped, even by her most devoted admirers. Indeed, she must remain beyond what even Powys can elucidate; and so, in "a trance of mindless passivity" (p. 1046), the Feminine Emanation of Glastonbury calls down upon herself a deluge to sweep away the ordered madness of humanity and return her great mystical body to the aboriginal chaos from which it issued.

For two ominous weeks in March the flood moves inland from the sea with the slow and terrible inevitability of some ancient prophecy fulfilled, bringing memories of "far-off mysterious disasters" and awakening in the low-lying Somerset vales "feelings that had not come to the population of those places for many a long year" (p. 1118). Yet there is no suggestion of divine retribution in the Glastonbury inundation as there is in the flood which concludes The Mill on the Floss (F. R. Leavis to the contrary notwithstanding). The rising of the waters is as purely natural and volitionless as a dream of god in the mind of man, or the sleeping thoughts of Glastonbury herself, "floating on its softly upheaving sea-surface of feminine breasts" (p. 779). It is simply element calling to element across the leagues of cultivated silt that separate the island-city from the sea. The winter-wasted land itself cries out for healing inundation:

Liberated from the frost and ice of winter, a thousand unfrequented backwaters, bordered by dead, wind-swept rushes, clammy with salt-smelling marsh-lichens and thick-stalked glaucous-grey weeds, seemed actually calling out to the sea to come and cover their brackish pools. Salt amphibious growths, weeds of the terraqueous marshes, they seemed to be yearning, these neutral children of the margin, for the real salt sea to rush over them and ravish them. (p. 1115)

But the proud people of Glastonbury, preoccupied with exciting public events and their own newfound prosperity, go about their business heedless of the saltlike pungency of the air and the cries of gulls drawing ever closer. Bloody Johnny alone seems to realize the destructive magnitude of the approaching deluge and this only in the most personal sense. He has told his followers: "What matter if Arthur never does return. I am here" (p. 1142). But Geard's secret conviction is that when the flood waters pour through the streets of town, his work there will be finished and that like Glastonbury herself he must return to the element which gave him birth. Death presents itself to Geard as a completely natural function of his life, and the thought of suicide does not enter his mind. It is simply that his Master has called him to Himself and, as always. Johnny Geard obeys.

The deluge comes and is absolute, devastating both Philip Crow's industrial empire and the expensively designed paraphernalia of the Mayor's new religion; but most of the townspeople are saved (a bit miraculously, as all things happen in Glastonbury) by the intervention of the civil authorities. Bloody Johnny, however, has willed to die; and this resolve is only strengthened by his casual contact with the drowned corpse of a local beauty:

No sooner had his hand encountered that ice-cold exposed bosom than he left it there, lying like a heavy horse-mushroom on the girl's breast. And with his hand resting there his face took upon itself the very expression of this dead woman. His eyes closed. His jaw fell open. His nostrils grew pinched and thin. Certain lines disappeared from his face altogether and certain completely new ones showed themselves. (pp. 1150-51)

Through that mystical sympathy with all created things which has characterized his life, Geard's death-change has already begun; and after rescuing Philip Crow from the half-submerged wing of his downed aeroplane, Bloody Johnny drowns himself rather clumsily on the site of the old Lake Village, the settlement of an early people who predated the Celts. His death agony is horrible because he has not allowed for the unnatural coldness of the water or the awful spasmic pain of suffocation; but when his body at last collapses and his grotesque struggling subsides, Geard achieves an "unbelievably delicious calm" and, dying to intenser life, sees the Grail:

In calm, inviolable peace Mr. Geard saw his life, saw his death, and saw also that nameless Object, that fragment of the Absolute, about which all his days he had been murmuring…. It was as if he had ceased to belong to our world of looking-glass pantomime wherein we are driven to worship we know not what; and had slipped down among the gods and taken his place among those who cast their own mysterious reflections in the Glastonbury of our bewilderment.

… In his dying moments, Geard of Glastonbury did actually pass, consciously and peacefully, into those natural elements that he had always treated with a certain careless and unaesthetic aplomb. (pp. 1170-71)

It is wholly appropriate that Johnny Geard should pass into the Grail (or perhaps into the mysterious "Esplumeoir") on this eminently pre-Christian and pre-Celtic spot; for as Powys has told us all along the great Mystery of Glastonbury precedes the Virgin Mary and Her Son, precedes Ceridwen and Pair Dadendi, the Cauldron of Rebirth, precedes even the Lake-dwellers themselves, reaching back beyond time to the uncreated chaos which existed immeasurably before there were ever men to dream of gods.

A Glastonbury Romance is itself a prose inundation corresponding to the torrential deluge that overwhelms the town; and just as floods do not end but subside, so the novel does not conclude with Geard's death but tapers off into a strangely beautiful epilogue invoking "the great goddess Cybele, whose forehead is crowned with the Turrets of the Impossible" (p. 1172). Though her name belongs to an earth-goddess of Asia Minor, Cybele has no specific mythological equivalent here. She is rather an incarnation of that in the cosmos which answers to the deepest spiritual yearnings of man, the "Unknown Dimension" from which the Grail proceeds; and her presence moves in darkness "from cult to cult, from shrine to shrine, from revelation to revelation," pre-existing and outlasting them all. But the end is not yet, for the "ribs of our ancient earth are riddled with desperate pieties" (p. 1173), and while man continues to aspire beyond the limits of the possible, she will sustain him in his faiths, mad and frantic though they be:

For She whom the ancients named Cybele is in reality that beautiful and terrible Force by which the Lies of great creative Nature give birth to Truth that is to be.

Out of the Timeless she came down into time. Out of the Un-named she came down into our human symbols.

Through all the stammerings of strange tongues and murmurings of obscure invocations she still upholds her cause; the cause of the unseen against the seen, of the weak against the strong, of that which is not, and yet is, against that which is, and yet is not.

Thus she abides; her Towers forever rising, forever vanishing. Never or Always. (p. 1174)

This enigmatic conclusion is perfectly consonant with the rest of the novel, for ultimately A Glastonbury Romance is a book which refuses to reduce itself to easy formulas. It does not so much defy analysis as evade it, disliking to be held; and perhaps because it is essentially a book about the wellsprings of our religious instincts whose major symbol is "older than the orbits of the stars," Powys did not intend that we should fully comprehend it. As he wrote in the "Preface" to the 1955 edition of the novel: "Its heroine is the Grail. Its hero is the Life poured into the Grail. Its message is that no one Receptacle of Life and no one Fountain of Life poured into that Receptacle can contain or explain what the world offers us."