So she did not hear the light footfall nor
see the tall broad-shouldered man who came out of the bushes and stood above
her. She was not aware of his presence until he knelt and lifted her, wiping
her eyes with hands as gentle as a woman’s.
The little slave girl looked into a dark immobile face, with cold narrow grey eyes which just now were strangely soft.
This is the start of chapter 3 of By This Axe I Rule. Of course, the slave girl isn’t wrong as by the end of chapter 4 the savage call of blood will have turned Kull into the personification of battle.
But Howard is not one to say nature is dark and fearsome with no respite. There is always respite by the silent brooks of Valusia’s sun-dappled forests. The dainty flower – like the little slave girl – has its place and all is not stern and sombre.
In typical romantic fashion, sombreness stalks the heaths and moors, the red-wood forests, the fir-clad slopes. Nature in her frivolous gaiety cares not one wit for the doings of Man.
Nature is the carefree dancer and the golden bull of dangerous ferocity. Both – like Dionysus the half-moon horned god.
Selene, mother of Dionysus
To the Greeks of Alexander the Great, Dionysus was “the god of the orient”, and the companion to the golden Agni, the bull of Shiva. In the Rigveda, Rudra-Shiva represents the fierce, destructive storms; Shiva the placid rains that farmers yearn for.
Rudra is the red Siva. There is also Shiva Atalas (or Atlantis) of the destroyed, submerged continent.
ATLANTIS MAGNA
Now I’ll hold my horses! You think I’ve gone all far-right/esoteric on you, I can hear it in your thoughts. It’s like this..
I did some reading online and see there is material on all the above – plus a lot more. This is not a route I’m taking, and the reason is..
Parvulesco is a writer and inventor of myth; Howard is a fantasist myth-maker. Both write compellingly and with fantastic conviction. To me, that is what counts: the force and blood-minded determination of the writer, and his creations.
Scholarship alone can lead to weakness; a verbal trap. World myths may be connected, but the complexity is such it’s for others to say. What I know is that myths tell essential truths that Modern Man seems to no longer be aware of.
The reason for that seems to be that the head becomes a tool of physical boredom; the numerical and the sexual become one (see prev.)
Whether you agree with that or not, our physical condition in the modern state is worrying. We exist in the material world, whereas ancient philosophy consists of Brahma (creator), Vishnu (preserver), Shiva (destroyer).
The Greeks were somewhat similar, with the reckless, bull-like Dionysus (Rudra-Shiva) and Apollo (light-bearer/creator). See Hyborian Bridge 62/2 Euripides’ The Bacchae.
Myths are stories that Man tells of nature. Where you have creation (sun/Brahman) there must also be destruction (Dionysus, Rudra). Destruction is a form of decay, and it brings with it new-shoots. The cycle continues.
This cycle is an Earth-myth, the red-brown earth which fertilizes all living things. Whereas we live almost in the eternal present of Alphaville, where most things are new and futurist, the Earth-myth is left to develop as it will.
In nature this often takes the shape of symbiosis, whereby fungi grow on trees and rotten trunks, vines on branches. Something which is left alone, like an old country house or cabin in the woods, develops a rustic patina which is the visible presence of decay. Things grow on walls, wood develops red, rusty shades; musty ochres of uncertain lineage.
This is Howard’s world of ancient elder-places; but it’s also an abandoned Southern estate or an old Texan ranch with musty stone walls and dark ochre stockade.
Mordecai House, North Carolina
There is a lot missing in the modern world that is in this presence of destruction that is simply the patina of decay that things develop over time. Destruction is the red bull of Agni; the uncertain donkey of Dionysus.
The presence of shambles in amongst the order that tells you this is a living presence that has strength over time, that is not simply carbon fibre alloy.
The red bull of Agni and the donkey of Dionysus are what is missing in a material order where the head is merely a tool of physical boredom, existing in numerical smart-houses (head) and sexuality (physique).
The nothingness of this existence is that it is neither creation nor destruction, but simply a material order run by the likes of Dyson (cleaning), Musk (travelling), Bezos (buying). You might say you have to clean, travel and buy? Yes, but you have to live and die rather than merely exist to do these things. Creation, preservation, destruction.
These so-called esoteric themes are no stranger to Kull, of Atlantis.
“I Thought You a Human Tiger!”.
A cool wind whispered through the green woodlands. A silver thread of a brook wound among great tree boles, whence hung large vines and gayly festooned creepers. A bird sang and the soft late summer sunlight was sifted through the interlocking branches to fall in gold and black velvet patterns of shade and light on the grass-covered earth.
No stranger to the hunter, the trapper, men of the wild places. Of places of power; of dirt and cleanliness. To adventurers of the introspective “Invisible Empire”. Age, patina, myth, darkness, fertility, Daphne of the laurel (Tales of Faith 5).