This article
originally appeared in REHUPA #161
"Far to the east, the Lemurians, leveled almost to a bestial plane themselves by the brutishness of their
slavery, have risen and destroyed their masters. They are savages
stalking among the ruins of a strange civilization. The survivors of
that civilization, who have escaped the fury of their slaves, have
come westward. They fall upon that mysterious pre-human kingdom of
the south and overthrow it, substituting their own culture, modified
by contact with the older one. The newer kingdom is called Stygia,
and remnants of the older nation seemed to have survived, and even
worshipped, after the race as a whole had been destroyed".
-
Excerpted from THE HYBORIAN AGE, by Robert
E. Howard -
In that one brief paragraph, Robert E. Howard
disposes of a mysterious civilization that had existed since before
the Great Cataclysm and the fall of the Thurian Age. Who was this
mysterious pre-human race? The Howard essay THE HYBORIAN AGE
doesn't provide any information other than that such a race existed
in the first place. We must look elsewhere for our answers.
One of the greatest mysteries of the Hyborian Age
for me is the assumption that the pre-human civilization mentioned
in the essay was an enclave of Snake-men. It is not mentioned in any
of the Kull/Conan stories as a fact. As far as I can determine, this
assumption is based on nothing more than an inference that the
worship of a deity the snake-men call the Great Serpent is identical
to the Stygian worship of the demonic snake-god Set.
While a good case can be made that the two
deities are the same fundamentally, a question arises as to whether
the snake-men were the only race to worship the Great Serpent during
the Thurian Age. Thulsa Doom, the great Thurian necromancer, was a
human satellite of the Great Serpent. And even after Kull destroyed
the Serpent-men and broke the power of their god, men still
worshiped the Great Serpent at its temple in Kull's capital of
Valusia. So it seems the snake-men were not the only worshipers
under the sway of the Great Serpent.
Another problem arises that Kull swore to "hunt
the serpent-men from land to land, from sea to sea, giving no rest
until all be slain, that good triumph and the power of Hell be
broken." It is stated in later stories that he made good on
his promise and broke the power of the Great Serpent. So it seems
odd to me that he would allow a nation of them to abide several
hundred miles south of Valusia on the edge of the Thurian continent.
While it is possible that this serpent-man nation wasn't founded
until after Kull's death, this is merely conjecture. We should look
for answers elsewhere.
If one looks hard enough through the Conan
stories there appear small threads of information that when woven
together presents a visible tapestry regarding the pre-human race
that lived in Elder Stygia. They are not a race of serpent-men,
although they do worship Set.
Our first bit of information comes from the
Howard yarn, THE GOD IN THE BOWL. The story takes a look at
Stygia's prehistory in the following quote: "Kallian Publico
believed that it contained the diadem of the giant-kings, of the
people who dwelt in that dark land before the ancestors of the
Stygians came there. He showed me a design carved on the lid, which
he swore was the shape of the diadem that legends tell us the
monster-kings wore." Now this is interesting! The pre-human
race that existed before the Stygians arrived were giants, taller
than the average human. Did a race of giants exist during the
Thurian Age? The answer is yes!
In the Howard yarn THE ALTAR AND THE SCORPION
a member of the "Old Race" that existed before mankind
makes an appearance. His name is Thuron and he is the high priest of
the Black Shadow, an Elder god. His appearance is that of a "a
tall, gaunt man, a cadaverous giant. His eyes glimmered like fiery
pools under his heavy brows, and his thin gash of a mouth gaped in a
silent laugh". He is also described as being
incredibly strong and his stride is sinuous, like the glide of a
crawling snake. Of all the Elder races described, his is the only
one to fit the description of the pre-Stygians as giant-kings.
And there is more. In THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON
there is a wealth of evidence about the pre-human, pre-Stygian race.
If we look at the HYBORIAN AGE essay and add up the years it
covers we discover that approximately 6,500 years have passed
between the Great Cataclysm and the Age of Conan. Yet in THE HOUR
OF THE DRAGON Conan encounters an undead vampire named Akivasha
and recognizes her: "The name of that ancient, evil,
beautiful princess still lived the world over in song and legend,
though ten thousand years had rolled their cycles since the daughter
of Tuthamon had reveled in purple feasts amid the black halls of
ancient Luxor". She confirms her age when she states: "Ten
thousand years ago I died to live forever!" So in other
words, she became a vampire 3,500 years before the Thurian Age was
destroyed in the Great Cataclysm! We also learn that the city of
Luxor existed during the Thurian Age. Akivasha is described as: "Her
ivory skin showed her to be Stygian of some ancient noble family,
and like all such women she was tall, lithe, voluptuously figured,
her hair a great pile of black foam, among which gleamed a sparkling
ruby". Conan believes her to be a Stygian, since there are
still white-skinned Stygian nobles existing during his lifetime.
That she is not is inferred by the date that shows her to have been
alive several millennia prior to the founding of Stygia. Also notice
that she is tall, as is all the women of her race. An
additional bit of information adds weight to the theory that she is
of the "Old Race": "Once when he (Conan)
spoke to her, she turned her head toward him and he was startled to
see her eyes glowing like golden fire in the dark". She has
the same glowing light in her eyes that Thuron is described as
having.
We know the people of the east that founded
Stygia were not white-skinned because Howard tells us as much. In
describing a colossal pyramid, Howard states: "No man could
approach of those somber piles of black stone without apprehension.
The very name was a symbol of repellent horror among the northern
nations, and legends hinted that the Stygians did not build them;
they were in the land at what immeasurably ancient date the dark-skinned
people came into the land of the great river".
Another piece of the puzzle is added when it is
understood that Acheron was not founded by the Stygians, but by the
"Giant-kings". In THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON, upon
seeing Xaltotun restored to life, Valerius declares: "He
(Xaltotun)
was not a Stygian. That part at least was true." Lying in
his sarcophagus, Xaltotun is described as: "a tall, lusty
man, naked, white of skin, and dark of hair and beard". He
is not a dusky Stygian; his appearance is the very description of a
member of the Elder race. He has the same glowing eyes: "slowly
intelligence grew in his dark eyes and made them deep and strange
and luminous. It was as if long-sunken witch-lights floated slowly
up through midnight pools of darkness" and "the
lambent lights of hell flickered in his eyes". When
Xaltotun appears after the Battle of Valka, Conan recognizes his
approach as being like that of a serpent. And as a final bit of
proof, we have the fallen priest, Orastes, observation: "we
have loosed a demon upon the earth, a fiend inexplicable to common
humanity. I have plumbed deep into evil, but there is a limit to
which I, or any man of my race and age, can go. My ancestors were
clean men, without any demoniacal taint; it is only I who have sunk
into the pits, and can sin only to the extent of my personal
individuality. Out behind Xaltotun lie a thousand centuries (100,000
years) of black magic and diabolism, an ancient tradition of
evil. He is beyond our conception not only because he is a wizard
himself, but also because he is the son of a race of wizards."
Even considered as a bit of hyperbole, 100,000 years takes the race
far back into the mists of pre-history.
The pre-human civilization that ruled the land of
the great river did not consist of serpent-men. Howard's own
writings suggest that they were the Giant-Kings, an Elder race of
tall, white-skinned wizards with glowing eyes and a demoniacal taint
in their blood. They wielded incredible magical power due to
consorting with the ancient Elder Gods of earth's infancy. They
founded the Nightmare Empire of Acheron after the Great Cataclysm.
The dusky-skinned refugees of the East destroyed them in Stygia. And
they were destroyed in Acheron by the Hyborian migrations. The
remnants of Elder Stygia and the refugees from fallen Acheron
settled in Stygia, their ancestors becoming the white-skinned
Stygian nobles of Conan's era. They brought Set worship to Stygia
and their ruins yielded magic and mystery and terror to the people
who succeeded them. Their influence extended across the breadth of
the Hyborian Age and beyond.
REHupa Home Page