all his days he had been murmering". Cybele The "Divine Famine" is important in A Glastonbury Romance. The novel begins with reference to the "earth-mother", and ends "with a two-page celebration" of the Phrygian "Goddess of Earth" Cybele. Keith notes that though other references to the earth-mother are sparse, they "occur at fairly regular intervals", and Christine Bilodeau draws to attention to how Powys emphasizes the moon's symbolic relationship with the Feminine. Furthermore, it is "unusual spring tides" that causes the flooding. In his Autobiography Powys refers to the "'Cybele to whom I have always prayed'", and, in his 1929 diary, he says that his "deepest Religious ritual is for the Mothersb- Cybele and Gaia and Demeter and Our Lady and Ceridwen the Welsh Demeter." W. j. Keith notes similarities "between the story of the Fisher King and various death-and-resurrections myths" that relate to Earth Goddesses, like Cybele, and their sons/lovers/consort. Attis is Cybele's consort, whose self-mutilation, death, and resurrection represents the fruits of the earth, which die in winter only to rise again in the spring. Geard drowns above " 'the spot where the ancient Lake Villagers had their temple to the ancient goddess of fertility'[Romance, 1955]". Jeremy Hooker suggests that Geard "returns himself to the waters of the primeval mother of all things". Reception One of Powys's major novels, it was praised on publication by J. D. Beresford as "one of the greatest novels in the world". While Glen Cavaliero describes it "as Powys's most enthralling novel" despite "all its many and glaring faults". In a review of the 1955 reprint, Roland Mathias describes Powys "as a strangely limited writer, fecund but narrow in his fecundity". He suggests that Powys "may not be a novelist at all, or less one than historian, philosopher and image-maker". Mathias finds Powys's characters unsatisfying: "It is, unfortunately, the plot that moves, not the characters. With few exceptions they do not develop". But, he notes, It is not given to one writer in a generation to enjoy so embracing an imagination and to simulate life and beyond-life, to gather in preposterous and tender, and to go on being so interesting in himself that his fictions hardly matter. However, though Jeremy Hooker sees all the major characters, as "reflections of a dominant psychological bias in the author", he argues that "Powys is, supremely, a master of personalities–of massive,self-consistent personalities. ... Evans is his creator's