In perhaps the best
and most spine-tingling Kull tale, The Shadow Kingdom, there are many
mentions of the labyrinthine ways of old. The archaic nature of Kull’s palace
is inlaid with “inscrutable wisdom” and “inhuman powers.”
Almost akin to
CL Moore’s Black God’s Kiss, the cold-blooded reptile urge underlies all
human strivings, and the archaism is unnerving.
For as he
watched, Tu’s face became strangely dim and unreal; the features mingled and
merged in a seemingly impossible manner. Then, like fading mask of fog, the face suddenly
vanished and in its stead gaped and leered a monstrous serpent’s head! (King Kull, page 34)
The serpent is
sinuous, supple and sexual in a degenerate way. Mention is even made that the
original expelling of the serpent-men led them to mate with snakes in the
bush so that their race would eventually become extinct.
Throughout the
story, the uneasy sense of time-lost illusion haunts Kull. When Brule repeats
the phrase, Ka nama kaa lajerama, Kull cannot remember having heard the
phrase. But, says Brule, it is in “the soul mind that never dies.”
The serpent is a
strong predecessor who haunts Man’s memories and, when Kull sees that his own
form has been taken by one of the arcane priests, he babbles,
“Am I a
figment of thought?”
Brule brutally
wrenches him back to reality with the pragmatic, “Slay him!” All
figments vanish when the blood flies. Quite a similar scene occurs at the end
of Milius’s Conan (1982), where Thulsa Doom’s hypnotic utterances sap
Conan’s will to fight. He is saved when he glances at his sword which serves to
slay his enemies, regardless of the state of his head.
The serpents are
real in our own race memories, and those are the “inhuman powers of archaism”.
Our modern reality seeks to do without archaic powers of the sinuous kind by
placing us in an inductive mirror of illusions.
This resolvable
space generates compulsive behaviour of the head – numerical, algorithmic. But
even here the serpent cannot be ignored since it is like ignoring the symmetries
and rhythms of the human physique.
The serpent is
our primordial ancestor, and within the mirror a profane version is manifested.
It is not so much the serpent-men of The Shadow Kingdom with men’s
bodies as it is the man-serpent from the Conan tale The God in the Bowl
(Conan #7)
CH4
The head in this
case is classically ideal, somewhat like a PR poster! But flailing along
powerfully is the inhuman reptile urge of primeval rhythm.
The compulsions
of the modern head in the mirror of illusions (electromagnetism) cannot deny
the primal origins. It is the primal fertility that takes profane form when it
is subject to the sterile illusion (see “clean meat” P130)
The modern scene
affects a sterility that cannot exist, and that is a product of the mirror of
illusions. By welcoming fertility in all its decadence and morbidity, the
convincing illusions of the modern system are effectively banished.
Banished by the
fields, by honest dirt that symbolises a fertility that is physically pure and
clean (quote at end of A Boy and his Dog, “I want to get dirty so I can
feel clean again”). The cycles of life and death are self-evidently there in
areas that have the symmetry of fertility (such as planet Earth).
I was reading a piece by Ian Botham – ex test-cricketer all-rounder turned professional hunter – on the enemies of grouse shoots on the Scottish moors. All he is saying is that nature by-and-large should be left alone, with gamekeepers allowed to control predators in moderation. The fact that “green” spokespeople quarrel with this indicates what a fictional land they inhabit!
© BWS