‘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

Lockhart's Top LaFonds Volume 122

Hey everyone, hope you are well, hahaha just kidding, everything is crazy!

Very interesting combat psychology, from a combatant anthropologist.  Please read if you admire Kenosha Kyle (as I do) and especially if you have any plans of emulating him in any way. 

All good things...

The archive is a treasure trove and you should all be grateful.

I love the significance of weapons and armor in this section.  And why not also spend some time describing the treasures?

Don't miss the comments on this.  I sometimes despair of the Plantation America work.  It seems an insurmountable obstacle to explain to the masses that slavery doesn't mean what they think it means.  But the truth is worth pursuing. 

Reading Seneca gives you the chance to learn something true.  Reading newspapers is simply reading lies.

Perspectives to help us understand the Second American Civil War.

A much better alternative to sportsball.

If you are a paleface man, you need to think about your personal boundaries and consider that the legal system is boxing you into a suicide stand if your life, property or loved ones are threatened.

Buy this book, written by a friend of the LaFondiverse.  Another author to look into.  And look for these tales in The Filthy Few, coming some time in 2020 or 2021.

I have grown to hate the police so much I can't see straight.

Everyone should be collecting responses to being called a racist.  Mine is "Fuck you, racism isn't real," but I really like Dr. Dread's, too.

A rundown of masculine fiction for your consideration.

Analysis of one of many Portland incidents.  There is some video that suggests this guy took a water bottle to the head before he got out of the car.

The Irish must return to tradition!

Wagies must read this.

Noticing the level of ability that art requires is fascist!  One word about the West Coast: earthquakes.  Most of the missions built by the Spanish crumbled long ago, as would anything built by ancients.  Look at Japan, also frequently shaken, where the custom is to use lumber rather than stone, and regularly tear down and rebuild important structures to exact specifications.  

The decline of Portland has been truly astonishing and worthy of deep study and discussion.

Mr. Barrett gives us an update on his reading and self-discovery.

I wish more women would understand.

John Lewis was given paltry honors compared to those accorded John McCain, and both will be simply dwarfed by the galactic-scale mourning that will soon be upon us.

The framing of the flaws of humanity as well as the promise of their solutions, the idea that endless improvement of life on earth is possible and desirable, these are the requirements for an ideology, an alternative to reality.  (By the way, nuclear waste ain't no thing, it comes from the earth just like everything else.  Just look at the Chernobyl containment zone.)

Lockhart's Top LaFonds Volume 121

Hey everyone!

If you are on twitter dot com you may have noticed I haven't been posting much there, and I am generally behind on emails and crackpot work.  This is due to the start of the school year and other stuff keeping me busier than usual.  Hope you are all well!

We are trained by scholars to spurn our ancestors.

I think Kenosha Kyle is going to be alright but I do hope that the "Back the Blue" crew would give some big thinks to why they should make themselves responsible to do the work the blues refuse to do.  This account of events is incorrect.  Kyle had already smoked a dude before the confrontation with this group, and kept his cool while he killed and disabled two more enemies.  He was not a coward, but trained as a soldier to sacrifice for the system, not a warrior for himself or his family.  He was ill-used by the police, yes, and will add to the FBI's case for "white domestic terrorists" being the primary domestic threat facing the nation.

We call this the "Baltimore Frogger."

We are in a culture of guilt by association and denouncing one another to the authorities.

I want to know more about the engine.

The prophet reveals his methods.  There is an incredible tension within the system of control as to the progress of the unrest and it's eventual resolution.  

Everyone needs to train, including women, and women need to train together with their children.

Baltimore has been relatively quiet, but not untouched, by the BLM Reformation.

The Christian conception of good is justice and righteousness, not the progressive values of prosperity and absence of discomfort.

Doctor Dread is the Baltimore Batman.

Marcus tells us about Churchill, part 1 and part 2.

We live in prison to soothe the superstitions of atheists.

Child trafficking enforcement has increased under Trump, whatever else you can say about him.

The Mucker, a rare one from Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Dear Fellow Americans: You live in a war zone and you need to start acting like it.

An architectural analysis of decline, the parallels are too numerous to ignore.

So many restaurants are failing, but the old fashioned inn is a time tested business and has the potential to stay under the radar. 

Please, we need more contributions from these anonymous police officere!!!

James bears the heavy burden of accurately prophesying so many current events and having the rabble demand his comments and updates!