Tuesday 5 July 2016

Glastonbury Romance 2003: the Daemonic Genius of John Cowper Powys Video





Here is a 40 min lecture I gave to the Powys Society Conference in August 2010, not long after Avalonian Aeon was published.

Thanks to Raymond Cox of the Powys Society for permission to reproduce.

Why did it take me over ten years to write Avalonian Aeon?  There are good answers here. I always knew that the book would feature John Cowper Powys in a big way as I wanted to convey the extent of his influence and inspiration upon me. It seemed likely that I would need to re-read his thousand-page epic novel A Glastonbury Romance again. I actually ended up reading it 3 times in a 12 month period. This seems absurd but quite remarkable events occurred during that time which seem inseparable from my readings of the novel. These events were powerful and disturbing. I make my case for the artist as magician and Powys as one of the great magi of Glastonbury in that he communicated something vital about the place that none of the other luminaries of his time, Dion Fortune and Frederick Bligh Bond for example, managed to do.

So here is a complementary telling of my story of Abraxas in the Abbey also told in my Crowley and Jung lecture and the story of a terrible murder.

The contents of this lecture have since been published in my Glastonbury Psychogeography.