Picnic and Powys

Some grail things

Apr 16, 2026

[Picnic and Powys is a series dedicated to the ideas and works of John Cowper Powys. Quotations are by Powys and sources listed deep down in the cellar below.]

The Holy Grail and Heathen Grail. This object, or objects, leaves my imagination whirling. But it is best not to get caught up in it or have it be too holy or heathen. The object is less important than what it can do. And, for me, the grail being a stir stick of the imagination is enough.

It is a curious thing to say, but I have a shrewd idea that such a girl would understand far better than any man—except perhaps a village idiot if he could speak—what a mysterious Grail, though I suppose I must say a heathen grail, her unequalled form was, as it rested for a moment in her dancing and suffered my soul to swirl and eddy about it, like the sea-tide about a marble column.

The girl, in question, is a chorus-girl in a burlesque that Powys was watching. Like Dickens, he gives the lowly eccentric a lot of dignity. And he does not do this to be compassionate or kind but he really believed they were the ones with genuine insight. Academics he distrusted. Same with the successful.

Here he meets a madwoman or beggar in Washington Square:

Whenever we met, however, she fixed me with her eye as if she looked at me through her disguise.
I gathered that she really could give me a “key” from her mystic tray which would unlock—for a nice-spoken discreet gentleman—enclosed gardens that were much better left closed.

He didn’t believe she was mad at all. As any grail knight knows you must take every unsightly lady seriously. Every ounce of attention and care must be aimed toward these ladies when they appear. An important test is being administered and knights fail it every day.

But this test is passed or failed a long time prior to it being administered. It is not just some paper and pencil thing. It is a test of your true nature. And like the grail arrives out of nowhere, this ability arrives, too.

Sympathy can be learned but the Great Sympathy is the grail itself that lives in you always, even before the time you were born. It can heal barren kingdoms and antagonize you. It wants you to understand that sometimes the ugly is secretly beautiful.

Here is a story I wrote (section from the novel I am writing) and was freshly published by Apocalypse Confidential in their special concerning the GRAAL:

THE AWEN OF MERLIN