Sunday, September 20, 2020

‘To Seek Below the Aspect of Illusion’

A Coin from Acheron: Chapter 10 of Robert E. Howard’s The Hour of the Dragon

Reading from pages 155-163 of the DelRey edition

The thematic illustration depicts Conan holding Albiona close in the midst of a  crystal globe held in the undead hands of a grinning skeletal figure hung with a cowled robe.

Conan, barbarian usurper of the crux kingdom of his age, finds himself in refuge among the heretical cult of Asura, whose master further enlightens him as to the nature and extent of the awesome forces arrayed in the shadows of the world against him, and, like some real estate tycoon from New York shocked to discover that many evil-handed cults of power vie against him from below intricately woven lies, he starts in denial at the implication that he battles mere puppets upon cosmic strings and that he must lose if he does not embrace the dark and unseen trails of power that thread the civilized world.
Interestingly, he has only been saved from the forces of orthodoxy by the devotees of heresy due to his enforcement of his very barbaric notion of freedom of religion, which was not a significant current in popular thought in Howard’s time. Indeed, Howard clearly realized that the real legacy of Western Civilization was not one of liberty and freedom but one of shackled wills born under the ages of layered orthodoxy that had removed Western Man’s soul, one collectivist notion at a time, from his identity. The author does a superb job of expressing the gnostic ideals coming to light during his lifetime as various crackpot ideologies grounded in Atlantean fantasies and conflated myth come to life in the philosophy of Hadrathus convincing, who, unlike the evil Xaltotun, has the patience to reconfigure his knowledge into a form understandable to a fighting man:

“Age follows age in the history of the world, and now we enter an age of horror and slavery as it was long ago.”

Seven pages in to Conan’s dialogue with the serene occultist, he finally is given the gift of perspective in his own case, able to finally envision himself as he is in the eyes of the gods, the puppet born without strings in the playground of towering evil that is the world, a doomed creature who might only prevail if he rides the crests of the mighty powers striving for ultimate domination and then only so much as a man might life, which is a mere breath in the reckoning of that which he fights.

In A Coin from Acheron Conan suffers the mind-blasting fate of H. P. Lovecraft’s many doomed protagonists, who are faced with “the correlation of the contents of their consciousness,” but instead of a suffering a psychological implosion, the barbarian simply grows focused with the prospect of bloody work, enjoying the super sanity of the physical quest, a journey beyond the ken of the intellectual.

The closing two pages of the chapter illustrate the horrific plight of the mundane conspirators who raised a 3,000 year old fiend from the dead to bring down a savage king, only to realize that the former is gathering godlike powers to enslave them and the latter is loose from the shackles of kingship to stalk them like some hungry beast.

Mister Gianni’s illustration depicts Valerius, wary king of the moment, with four sinister yellow men from the far edge of the world who have sworn an arcane oath to hunt down Conan.  Howard soon found that placing the savage hero in a novel length story was going to require a legion of frightening fiends just to keep to pace with the fact that his protagonist, was in fact, the monster of his own imaginary age.


Diction of Note
-Laved
-Fain


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