BWS, Thoth Amon, The high priest of perspective illusion
In their dens of esoteric mumbo-jumbo, the acolytes of sorcerers strive
to overwhelm our physical reality with perspective illusions. This is the “Idol
of the Den” as prefigured in The New Atlantis (Drama1) which Howard’s sorcerous tales
also seem to foreshadow in reptilian colours.
Some things are actually quite simple. If you investigate human
metabolism you tend to get swamped in chemicals – ketones, amino-acids, bipolar
lipids. Nevertheless, the way molecules work is by shape-recognition; like a
jigsaw they fit together. (What is shape? Symmetry, proportion).
In other words, something very complicated also needs simplicity or it
wouldn’t function. Another example is a record player. The grooves contain all
the information but, until you spin the disc that’s all it is. The simple act
of spinning at 33 1/3 rpm acts to decipher the grooves.
Planet Earth is spinning, and that simple act deciphers the vast
complexity of the universe. Acolytes of sorcerers in their dens of iniquity do
not actually care for sun and moon and stars above. Proportionate physical
reality is of no interest to them. What they want is the overwhelming of that
physical reality, and its simplicity, by one of perspective illusion (see
Traylor “Pets” Hyborian Bridge 56)
This fact seems to have fooled quite a few people since, without a
physical reality there can be no figurative interpretation – just facts.
So, the simple fact that the Earth spins against the cosmos is physical
reality. All heroic fantasies from Homer onward have this physical reality as
their sine qua non. It implies a strength and simplicity of verse or, in
Howard, poetic prose.
In the modern world, simplicity is supposed to be primitive and just “wrong”.
In fact, it just means that things are physical and of the body and not of the
head. Howard foreshadows the “Den of the Head” in his serpentine denizens of
hidden crypts, staring at illusions of the