Conan the Barbarian, Robert E. Howards Hyborean Age and Theosophy - pontos fathom podcast ep 12

Conan the Barbarian, Robert E. Howards Hyborean Age and Theosophy 

- pontos fathom podcast ep 12

Welcome to our twelfth episode of the pontos fathom podcast -Conan the Barbarian, Robert E. Howards Hyborean Age and Theosophy - pontos fathom podcast EP12. In this episode we explore the relation between Howards Hyborean Age of Conan to Blavatsky's Theosophy. If this merely world build ala Herbert and Lovecraft, or was PKD onto something.  Topics include Atlantis, Lemuria, Mystery Schools, Sufism, the Knights Templar and Gnosticism. Thanks for watching and let me know your thoughts in the comments below! 

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welcome back everyone to pontos fathom press this is our episode 12 of the pontos fathom podcast this week we're going to talk about robert e howard's conan his hyborian age which is sort of the backstory world building of the world of conan and some resonances with

blavatsky's theosophy so i think there's a lot of interesting things here to discuss both from the idea of writing and uh fantasy writing in general but also just the connectivity between the imagination and things like i don't know remote viewing or something like that so um as you guys know we came off of last month uh or or this month earlier this last few last four weeks we've been doing the exegesis of philip k dick which is kind of also talking about these similar resonances the idea that history isn't quite what we thought it was a dick's of exegesis moment and his sort of meltdown in the face of bl forcing himself to blur the lines between his own creations and how they resonate with history and some bigger themes that led him to gnosticism and it led him to thinking about the maybe even the illusory nature of some of reality you know we've all seen that philip k dick press conference we talked about we're living in a simulation something like this but i think that the gnostic idea maybe it's a little richer than just a simulation simulation seems like such a uh a modern analogy right you know what we often get into these modern analogies that work as a you know like all models models kind of represent aspects of something but then as you look deeper the analogy falls apart so you know let's take the analogy at face value and at sort of a certain level just to get us in the ballpark of the thinking and i think that's why the exegesis is a great piece of work to show the author's creativity and how it links to sort of the world space i mean i maybe i'll maybe i'll before i get into the conan thing i will transition to us with this one chapter from dick and we can kind of go from the dick podcasts to this conan podcast but right here i've got this page uh noted out here where he says i'm building a terrific system here and i believe he when he says terrific i i feel like there's the word terrifying in there a bit right so with binary computer micro brain ultra thought and frames through which we move and he says uh reality physical reality as knowledge in the form axes the inner universe of the immortals the supermen who are transspatial and trans-temporal dwelling in the inner universe and hence outside the clock time bee who emerges in the exterior universe repeatedly and undetected by other people and or versus ariman being the on off of the binary computer so the operator is the demiurge satan taking control of the forces of creation uh yes so here we go and then he talks about beauty and tragic right so here we go the idea is very manikin right he talks about the manikin on off is the binary so you're either on the light side or the dark side so there's a light force and a dark force so there's a manichaeanism here and man is somehow man when i say man i'm in humanity uh is thrown into that space right so so when we go from the dick meltdown into the back let's go let's go back yubic style to a simpler time right robert e howard writing the sword and sorcery swashbuckling tales of conan how can this have anything to do with philip k dick or theosophy you ask well it's going to get interesting it's very interesting i want to start out with just a bit of

talking about conan talking about the backstory of conan which comes from a piece of writing by howard called the hyborian age and some misconceptions about conan so conan as portrayed you know in the on the schwarzenegger movies or the jason momoa movies is bereft of some of his

intelligence right i think in some ways if you look at

conan this is gonna enrage people probably but if you think of game of thrones right if you think of game of thrones a lot of people know game of thrones right and if you look at house stark there's a kind of vibe to the north in game of thrones where it's it's a unified place there's a an ethos to the north and there's this wall you know past the gift there's this wall that they're keeping the white walkers out in the wild things out something like this and if we kind of switch back to conan right the the character of conan is very much as a sumerian right here we go the coming of conan the sumerian he he worships an absent god named krom who's the king of the mountain crom is uh inaccessible and the sumerians know the cruelty of the north let's call it and conan has a couple of characteristics that are often glossed over or not really even present at all in the his uh film represent representations one thing is he's quite a uh he's quite a thoughtful character and he has some real clear lines he does not like magic and yet he fights magical enemies so he sort of has this groundedness in uh

in the world he's so much of the world and at the same time here he is fighting against these extra

extra-worldly forces in the form of sorcerers and undead that come to uh bring maybe like the dick was calling out that the arimonic into the world right so uh so in that side conan is very much has an ethics it's an ethics against sort of the cheating side of magic and it's not the kind of ethics of of mundane ethics you know he's been a thief he's a reaver he's a slayer of a slayer of uh of men as they call him and uh he is a pillager right he has no that kind of ethics but he does have a sort of ethic he he always fights for an underdog he seems to def he defends his partners he ends up defeating evil most of the time so he he definitely is a character that is a little richer than he might be portrayed in the films the other part of conan that's kind of glossed over is his placement in that hiborian age right so as a character in hiborian age howard has really given conan a number of qualities that kind of link him to the hiborian age right and maybe we'll go into that hiborian age right now so so yeah we have conan who's a very thoughtful character he does not ask god for god for help from the gods and yet he fights these extra extra magical creatures with only his wits right so there's definitely something i want to say driven by like a soul or spirit right he's got this spirit that's able to counteract the magics often and although it's always in that tropes of sword and sorcery there is something very interesting in that in that howard as a just as a writer right as a writer he's just tuning into this as virtue virtue wins right when i say virtue here i mean the virtue of the knight right he and conan is very much like a knight in a lot of ways i mean he's a he's an amoral knight let's say and he's a chaotic knight in a lot of ways but he is definitely at some point a force

for humanity versus a force for the magic which is far worse than just being slain in a sword battle these forces of evil that conan fights are very interesting so let's place him in his age so we have um the hyborian age which is the backstory that howard created

that fits in

conan's world and we have the hiborian age it says nothing in this article is to be considered as an attempt to advance any theory in opposition to accepted history howard calls out so i'm not here to rewrite history it is simply a fictional background for a series of fiction stories when i began writing the conan stories a few years ago i prepared the history of his age and the people of that age in order to lend him in his sagas a greater aspect of realism

and i found that by adhering to facts and spirit of that history in writing the stories it was easier to visualize and therefore to present him as a full flesh and blood character rather than a ready-made product in writing about him and his adventures in the various kingdoms of his age i have never violated the facts or spirit of the history set down here but have followed the lines of that history as closely as a writer of actual historical affection follows the lines of actual history i have used this history the hybrian age as a guide to the stories of the series that i've written now this is interesting because even that last paragraph we read from from dick where he says i'm creating something terrific here he's creating something in which

he's talking about the forces of manic manichaean forces right the light versus the dark okay so let's hold on to that the next part is very interesting there's a cataclysm in conan's history of that epoch known as the nemedian chroniclers known to the cr median chroniclers as the pre cataclystic age little is known except the latter part that it is veiled in the midst of legendary known history begins with the waning of the pre-cataclystic civilization dominated by the kingdoms of camellia villusia verulia grandar thula and comoria oh he calls out this thule thula right the fool society the fool society another island right an island of alternate history kind of thinking the barbarians of that age were the pits who lived on the islands far out of the western ocean the atlanteans who dwelt on a small continent between the pictish islands and the main or the thurian continent and the lemurians who inhabited a large chain of islands in the eastern hemisphere okay let's just stop right here so he claims these are just products of my imagination

i'm not rewriting history i'm just making a fictional world fair enough it's world building it's just the act of the imagination right and yet here we have a an imagination that aligns to some key points in the blavatsky so uh maybe i'll just pull pause here with conan and i'll just pick up on the blavatsky side so again what is what do we find from madame blavatsky well in her theosophy blavatsky sort of was uh you know in her inner isis unveiled isis the goddess isis uh she has two volumes one of which is uh science the second is theology so uh in a way blavatsky's theosophy

was blavatsky's attempt

to look at uh you know magic uh uh science would look like magic right that arthur c clarke i believe is the quote guys correct me in the comments below oh by the way if you guys want to leave a comment really appreciate that like and subscribe we're trying to grow this channel so uh helped me get into the algorithm and i would like to turn this into a live stream and the more more people that can start to comment but please leave your comment below um especially this this day and age where things are disappearing off the web let's put our good forward here and keep free thought alive i also have a web page and a number of links you can check below and uh comments support me sharing liking ringing the bell support me and also there's patreon below and you can also check out potus fathom press purchase one of our books we're not funded by anything so i'd really like to keep giving you guys this content and would like to hear your voices so please join in below so let's get back to it theosophy and blavatsky she was really looking at um you know science could be seen as magic and the idea of

if we look at what all the world religions are moving toward or pointing at right all the world religions and also scientific uh knowledge moving forward she wanted to sort of look at these two together and created this a theosophical or she created this theosophical movement that sort of sort of explores this and some of her knowledge came from mystery school channels let's call it and let's say that she also was tracking a history that differs from our history you know we have our you know fertile crescent history we have our lucy darwin history sort of the standard history well blavatsky also had a pre-cataclystic history which includes atlantis and lemuria and for her there was a and similar in a way even to the gnostic

gnostic poi

we see that there's logos and spirit and as it descends down into matter the elements are created you know you have this if you have the divine spark kind of goes down to air and fire and earth and then finally water something like this right or finally earth so matter kind of falls out of spirit and i think in that kind of sense uh the great ages the the lemurian age the atlantean age they're characteristic in blavatsky of having

some

sensitivity to spirit energy and as we descend through history each subsequent uh you know when we as we go from the lemurians to the atlanteans and to like say the humans of today our density makes us less active to the magical forces the spiritual forces so when we talk about the falling of atlantis uh they were maybe they were more ethereal beings or the lemurians maybe they didn't have bodies or something like this right there's some ideas like this so for for blavatsky you know let's and we'll talk about things like uh atlantis sinking led to migrations the atlanteans spread out into the world just like in a conan's hiborian age and let's kind of go into this a little bit more so well maybe i'll read before i go back to the hibernate i'll just read this page i had marked here from blavatsky where she says uh to sum up a few words magic is spiritual wisdom nature the material ally pupil and servant of the magician one common vital principle pervades all things and this is controllable by the perfected human will the adept can simulate the movements of the natural forces in plants and animals in a prenat in a preternatural degree such elements are not obstructions of nature but quickenings the conditions of intenser vital actions are given okay so here's a little bit of insight into

the adept in magic and of course magic you know in the form of dark wizards happen in conan's world but also in conan's world we see that conan has a sort of

immunity to magic by will so again you see this word will comes up the controlled by the perfected human will and so here is interesting thing so you have the human will and that can also be seen sort of like the kathar qatar perfecti right the idea in the manichaean is in the manichaean heresy is that there's good and evil and dick brought it up you've got ariman and the forces of light and the forces of darkness and the perfecti just looked to god and they sort of acknowledge the the maya of the world and in doing so they uh move toward a you know devotion to god and that that kathar influence will come back to later so let's just kind of talk about that so anyway we're talking about the seer ship and he says there's two kinds of searship now i'm going to go when we read this let's think of robert e howard okay let's think of conan's creator rowdy howard who who in all honesty just like lovecraft lovecraft says it's only dreams right and howard says it's only fiction i'm not trying to rewrite history and i i found this quote here in in dick you know the great all these great deniers of their remote viewing he says dick says uh well a case could be made from my tachyon theory i guess i haven't had thought of it until now let us say i'm inspired by a creative inte entity outside of my conscious personality to write what i write i had imagined it to be my subconscious but this only begs the question what is the subconscious i think he means the unconscious but that's fine there is no doubt that quite frankly i do not in any real sense write my novels they do come from some non-eye part of me often they contain dreams i've had this was true of lovecraft i've heard if tachyon bombardment was inspiring my novels then it would stand to reason that the world it is really all the same world which my books depict has been pointed out in critical essays many times it would stand to reason that in the past use my book so to speak come true okay so here he says we got a lovecraft connection a lot two months ago with our lovecraft month dick kind of points out by this tachyon craziness that i'm not writing my novels they're coming from something that's not me they come like lovecraftian dreams and they beg the question what is the unconscious he says subconscious but i believe that's a common mistake to make he meant unconscious uh

so let's go to this now within that pocket right let's go into the searships dick kind of calls it out lovecraft poopood theosophy right he didn't he said it's just dreams and in his correspondence you can you can see he's got a kind of a reluctance to go into this topic that i'm going into and howard is also going on the record i'm not here to rewrite chris history i just imagined this stuff for a backstory for conan okay so conan's got a backstory lovecraft says they're just dreams and yet here we find their resonances like dicted you know in the meltdown of the exegesis so back to theosophy there are two kinds of seerships that of the soul and that of the spirit the seership of the ancient pythonists or the modern mesmerge subject very but in artificial modes adopted to induce the state of clairvoyance but as the visions of both depend upon the greater or less acuteness of the senses of the astral body they differ very widely from the perfect omniscient spiritual state for at best the subject can get but glimpses of truth through the veil which physical nature interposes the astral principle or mind called by the hindu yogin fab atma is the sentient soul inseparable from our physical brain which holds its subjection

uh and is in turn equally trembled by it this is the ego the intellectual life principle of man his conscious entity while it is yet within the material body the clearness and correctness of the spiritual vision depend on more or less intimate relations with the higher principle that state is known in indians as samadhi the highest condition of spiritual possible on earth the hindu terms

are all relate to psychological states and are shown to be in this grand sanskrit adapted to the clear elucidation of the phenomena that are encountered by those who study this branch of psychological science than the tongues of modern people who experiences have not yet necessitated the invention of such descriptive terms okay so she's basically saying that there's a seership that's happening that makes the sentient soul get a clearness of the spiritual vision and sometimes it's just a glimpse so could we maybe see something of that in conan's hiborian age so howard claims i'm not doing this and yet here we go we have the therian civilization was crumbling and their armies were composed largely of barbaric mercenaries so after the fall of atlantis

uh there was a migration even in in howard's age and he says here they apparently came from shadowy nameless continent lying somewhere east of the lemurian islands so east of the lamorian islands coming out of the east this catechism this the cataclysm rocked the world atlantis and lemuria sank and the pictish islands were heaved up to form the mountain peaks of a new continent volcanoes broke forth and terrific earthquakes shook down whole nations were blotted out so here he's seeing this vision of um atlantis and lemuria sinking right and and the blavatsky will call them out also the barbarians fared a little better feared little better than the civilized races the continent kingdom of atlantis escaped the common ruin okay so here we have the atlantean sinking

and the rise of savages he starts talking about these savages kind of came out of atlantis the continental kingdom of atlantis from sunken areas swarmed among beasts and savages ape men and apes for forced to battle continually for their lives and yet managed to retain vestiges of their former state of the highly advanced barbarism ah so here's conan the highly advanced state of the barbarism was held in

uh the knowledge they had none of the atlanteans artistic nature they were a ruder more practical more prolific race they left no pictures painted on ivory but they left remarkably efficient with flint weapons in plenty so we've got the atlanteans now have been sort of reduced to these barbarian tribes and they're traveling about and the picture the advantages of numbers and unity where the atlanteans had fallen to loosely knit clans that was the west of that day now we're in the west in the distant east cut off from the west of the world by the heaving up of gigantic mountains the lemurians are toiling as slaves of their ancient masters so somehow the lemurians have become enslaved right so this is very interesting so this is this is leading us and let's kind of maybe take a quick look in blavatsky i just want to maybe just call out uh this quote from blavatsky because here we go we have howard talking about the age of conan it's not a rewrite of history it's simply his backstory in the novel and i think listen as world building let's just put it in the sense if you're if you're a writer and you want to do world building this is a great way to go you know you can there's a lot of history out there you can use this to world build but i think you'll have to think about what you're actually doing at some point so at some point you will maybe stumble upon these same things so i just wanted to call out this atlantis in the

594 595. so here's here she's going to talk about lemuria

594 okay here

sure so souls can should come to souls and in part to then conceptions of future things occasionally by letters or by mere touch says ammonias tells us moreover lampreus and others held the unembodied spirits could descend on earth and become guardians of mortal men for the sun does not shine only when it passes among the clouds we may rather conclude that is possessed of these powers during its union with the body although in lesser perfection the sun is always radiant and has only appeared dim and obscured by vapors the soul does not receive the power of looking into futurity when it passes from the bottom as a cloud but has possessed it always so the soul possesses the history always right so i think this is very interesting

uh and then again we have the idea of

um

nine one

uh this one five nine one

i just want to call out this other quote

okay so here again going to

um

so about atlantis here because how could the name atlanta itself or originate with plato at all atlante is not a greek name its construction is nothing greek at all

they are not greek but in the nagual or the toltec language we find immediately the radical atl as a sense of water war the top of the head such as atlan the city named atlan so here we have atlantis atlan toltec water right atlan and axolotl may be close to that right atlan and then we have just calling out a few of these points

the atlanteans here the ruins that now cover americas are found on many west indian islands and are all attributed to

atlantis as well as hero fans of the old world in which the days of atlantis uh were connected with the new one by land the magicians of the now submerged country had a network of subterranean passages running in all directions

in connection with those mysterious catacombs we now give a curious story told us to about peruvian long since dead who's traveling together in his country there must be the truth to it as afterward confirmed to us by an italian gentleman who had seen the same the information of the italian old had been divulged a secret by a peruvian we may add however that the priest told the story under the mesmeric effect of the traveler

the peruvian attested to the well-known murder of pizarro

unfortunately the queen begged for delay and went to consult the oracles during the sacrifice the chief priest showed her the consecrated black mirror this is the um stone of

uh the black stone that actually dr john d used for his scrying mirror right it's a obsidian polished obsidian the unavoidable murder of her husband when she delivered the treasure of the crown to bizzaro uh and now the peruvians uh several years later after hearing the story it was corroborated by an italian gentleman and uh that same precious rock came down through pizarro right so this is perhaps how dr john d got his connection okay so let's bring this all back so we've got the lemurians we've got the atlanteans we've got blavatsky calling out the idea that sometimes the imagination is well not the imagination sometimes the seer ship just gets a glimpse and here we have howard denying that he's doing anything but world building right i'm just a world builder i'm not i'm a fiction writer i'm not a theosophist i am just a world builder and here he comes up with something about the sumerians which maybe have some connection back some natural immunity some connection back to the atlanteans right and if we go to his section on the sumerians he says between

between acallonia and the pictish wilderness lie the bossonian marches peopled by descendants of an aboriginal conquered by their tribe of hyborians early in the first ages of the hyborian drift the bostonians are of medium height

they live by agriculture they're part of the aquilonian kingdom they're stubborn fighters against both the sumerians and the picts and then it talks about corinthia and they is north of aquilonia the westernmost hyborian kingdom are the sumerians ferocious savages untamed by the invaders but advancing rapidly when contacted with them right so now we come to the time of the sumerians the sumerians fought the picts and the bossians and several times raided the aquilonians so here we have conan's sumorian sumerians uh

both the menace to aquilonia and also as sort of heirs to some of this

uh some of this characterization so uh so let's let's talk about a bit about finally let's kind of ground this in one two things we'll bring it back let's bring it back to conan's spirit but i want to take it in a strange direction because when we talk about okay howard's hiborian age

bolovatsky's atlantean and lemurian history the idea of what are the religions really about in seership the seers are able to sort of sometimes just catch a glimpse of the real history only so much comes through um and i'm going to totally bring it in this strange tangent but it'll it'll work before i talked about the qatar right and i want to talk about the knights templar for a second because we we have a long tradition

uh especially in the ancient world of knowledge migrating right so for example we have pythagoras right pythagoras

you know the pythagoras and his numbers uh the one

to have another you need a two and he had this whole mystery school around number and a lot of this was influenced from potentially from the east right so if we see some vedic vedic themes and even in greek culture we see we see vedic themes in uh buddhism trans plato trans christianity so there's a there's a sort of migration of philosophical ideas just like there's atlantean migration right there's a there's a lemurian migration some of these lemurian ideas are still available to us when we think to the ether right science for a long time still believed in the ether and you know with blavatsky's philosophy there's definitely an idea of how do the world religions interrelate it's an exploration let's look at how the world religions are interrelating let's look at how science is evolving and some of these ideas that that overlap you know if we look at the layers and again when we talk about layers with dick dick was seeing that there was a layering going on you know the history had some eternal recurrence there was some layering so let's kind of go into some layering in the one hand we have the imagination of a writer dick lovecraft howard build world building even frank herbert the world building using the imagination and then we have this blavatsky concept of the seer getting glimpses getting glimpses into the let's quote quote it here with the real history there's the lemurian history there's this atlantean history there's the potential of lost history right let's go into the the story of the templars because while most of those historical migrations of traditional history go from the east to the west you know so we have india leads to uh the east and then pythagoras brings it to greece christianity brings it to europe right and then then christianity moves to america right they go west they keep going west okay so here we have the templars going east right they go on the crusades and what do they come in contact with but islam right another religion islam and there

we get this interesting point about now islam was also working its way west as well so just like christianity was would eventually move west or did move west and eventually moved west to americas islam had been encroaching across into the turkish realms across africa up into spain so islam was moving west okay and it's interesting how all of these histories have got either an east-west concept here so we have the you know let's put it in the hiborian age you've got the migrations of it out of atlantis the migrations of aquilonia the migrations of the sumerians and in dick we have migrations right in dick we have the migrations of the layering right which layer are we existing at it's an up and down it's like a gnostic migration and even in herbert we had the scattering you know in the later frank herbert books there's a scattering which the idea of like humanity's diaspora out to space and then they're returning back so here with the templars the templars go east they encounter islam and there's a lot of theories out there about the templar interaction with the uh with islam and maybe that the templars sort of started maybe i'm just i'm making this up here but the idea is if the templars were educated and they had their christian mysticism and that they encountered islamic mysticism uh suddenly they're in a hyper position kind of like dick is they're in this position of you know it's not just one faith it's almost beni jesuit level right so uh so you have the templars encountering islam and and and this kind of thought of the templar encountering islam and earlier we talked about the qatar and their manikin ism and we'll talk about the light and dark of manichaeanism also you know in hindu philosophies there's this idea that if you spend one lifetime as an ashura you can get closer to the heavenly planets if you spend seven lifetimes as a pure devotee of of god right so this idea of just by serving the system uh you can have different rewards and this is like you know dick points out that aryamonic point so with the templars encountering islam it comes to this sufi point which fits right in with the idea in our reoccurring theme throughout these podcasts of the imagination and the sort of idea of a remote viewing some spectrum of imagination and remote feeling so in the sufi writings of eben al-arabi there's this idea of a ladder let's call it a ladder so the latter i'm going to call this ladder of ibn al-arabi it starts out with the world and at the top there's heaven okay and the way the sufi concept works and let me let's say this i'm telling you this story in the context of isis unveiled h.p levatsky's theosophy how in that quote we read from theosophy where blavatsky talks about how the seer is able to get a glimpse into the world and my my hypothesis here is even the reluctant howard saying i'm just writing a history of conan and even the reluctant h.p lovecraft who says oh i don't believe in theosophy let's just see what resonances come to us as we listen to this story sort of an aphorism analogy so the sufi story of even al-arabi the latter the bottom of the ladder you have the world at the top you have heaven so there's some things that you can do to help the world for example you can learn a skill right so let's say conan he's a thief and he can come down and he can steal and give to his friends something that or he's a warrior he can lend his sword and swashbuckling to help the world right so conan fights uh conan fights in the world defends people uh destroys evil wizards so he does all these things in the end serves the world okay but then let's go up a level let's go to the idea of the nemedian chronicles in conan this is like a robert e howard's poetic mahabharata it's the chronicles of the time it's the red book it's the lord of the rings you know it's the epic tale of the the chronicles of the black sword in michael morcock's elric right so for al-arabi on the latter there's the poet right the poet gets his imagination and creates this beautiful work of poetry or the musician creates this beautiful work of music and takes from the heaven down the ladder and like a bodhisattva of compassion gives the world uh some joy right so lovecraft takes horror writes a story and gives us the joy to read it howard gives us sword and sorcery gives us the joy to read it right so the poet the poet and the artist and the writer and the musician the painter the sculptor they take from the imagination they create and then they give it back down to the world right so it's that gnostic dissension even dick you know the logos descends and then it serves the world so unlike sword fighting and building and and farming let's say the poet's doing something a little bit different they make ideas that serve the spirit right but it serves the spirit of of humanity and music pleases the ears now ali robbie kind of says something there's something weird in this imagination thing because imagination is taking from the spirit realm and giving some indications the poet can inspire us right there's a great al ghazali quote about the soul leaving the body and he says it's something like i don't know i don't know the quote exactly but it's uh the idea of the body was a bird cage with a soul in it right so you're you are a bird cage with a soul and then after death the cage is opened and the bird is allowed to fly free right so this is a poet's way of telling a little story that gives you something to hold on to say oh oh yeah okay my soul is in my body my soul is going to go free something like this right this is what poetry does it it inspires us to think about spirit and whether or not that fits your world view or not that's not the point the point is there's something about imagination that brings spirit uh down now the latter continues with ali robbie and it goes into the space of when you switch from serving the earth and you switch to serving the spirit the logos now you're doing something different right a poem or a song has a bodhisattvic view it's about serving the mortals serving the world the poetry the music it's consumed by us here in the world the writings of conan you know it's just a history for conan to make it more fun for you to read and yet that same imagination the seership that blavatsky talks about is the mechanism by which we could point towards spiritually so the idea here is

if you turn the mechanism of poetry

and music upward now you're offering to the heavens right so the idea for the sufis are that that point where you switch from serving the world to serving god or the heavens or the great source or the spirit of the world now you're now you're pointing upwards on the ladder and this is what great religions have been trying to do so the idea so in defense of great religions let's say that in defense of religions they all start out with trying to show us the way out right uh even dick he's writing in his exegesis it's like all of my writing came true right howard and lovecraft they both say oh we don't believe in theosophy i'm just writing a history and yet there's a resonance to what i like to call the remote viewing of things so the truth will out kind of and maybe that's a good place to stop here so i think i'm leaving it with the templars only because the idea is here we also have you know controversially who knows what the story is you read different accounts of it but maybe the interaction between the templar and the qatar as an early reformer of religion the qatar early reformer of the religions and conan a kind of a religious character and yet a character very much guided by that you know what blavatsky calls that will and that uh foundational spirit maybe that atlantean spark in him that ends up making conan a king actually in howard's world and uh and i think this is one of those things that's strange about you know the when film adaptations happen all of this stuff is sort of lost you know and i i think that in future podcasts i definitely want to keep exploring this idea of uh the resonances between one i have another one i'm not going to do it this week i'm i'm waiting for a copy of uh king of of uh king james's demonology and i want to do another robert e howard podcast with solomon kane uh king james bible and then king james's demonology so solomon kane is another uh howard creation and he really he very much exists as a puritan again this is kind of like the qatar also there's a puritan here and what does he get tasked with tasked with demon hunting right sort of a demon hunter he's like the he's like the john wick of uh but his enemies are demonic and and then i want to juxtapose that with what was king james on about here it is the 1600s the same guy who writes the bible he writes this witchcraft book this demonology and it's sort of really anti-witchcraft and i think that this is a very interesting uh topic maybe this will be a a topic for next month so uh hey thanks everyone if you made it this far thanks for listening i really appreciate uh your comments below let me know what you'd like to have talk about uh please join us on the patreon check out the pontas fathom press website in our bookstore i've got a lot of interesting books going on i'm going to be switching things up i mentioned i've got that solomon kane idea out there i think in october i'll probably do a king and yellow kind of a lovecraft return i'm going to do a horror theme of that one so i think the king and yellow might be uh in the works pontus fathom's got a king in yellow and yellow sign book you can go check it out in our bookstore i think next month i'm going to switch things up i've been coming off an evangelion rewatch with evangelion 3.0 plus 1.0 i i would like to do evangelion with

freudian psychonauts psychoanalysis

uh another episode with evangelion in jungian uh shadow work and jungian archetypes and jungian sort of world view with the black books and then a third one i want to do sort of rebuild of evangelion where it's anno looking back at evangelion neon genesis and sort of rebooting it and i want to talk about lacan in that one so lacan's freud project and anno's rebuild evangelion as a sort of a psychoanalysis redo of his original neon genesis i think you guys will like it uh it's kind of sort of doing a break from this but it of course you know my my channel is going to tie in so that those are some upcoming podcasts so let me know if you think those are interesting down in the comments below and anything else you'd like to hear thank you for watching and listening if you made it this far and really appreciate everyone so take care and bye bye