Conan: Consciousness Rising Redux

I wrote another post about Conan The Barbarian (1982) a while ago. This one fleshes out more details.

The story draws on the seasonal, solar year myth that's at the heart of just about every movie or TV series. A recent example is Iron Fist on Netflix.

Conan represents the Sun man. In his first incarnation, he's spinning the Wheel of Pain. He wears that necklace through much of the movie. The wheel is the solar wheel--the 4 principle points of the solar journey--the equinoxes and the solstice, and the mid points.

The solar journey is a metaphor for the life of a man--the physical life and the more important spiritual life, when a man mentally ejects from the body and becomes a whole being, even as the body starts to crumble.

Thulsa Doom, the snake man (Seth in the Egyptian mythology) is time, limitation. The band of thieves--Conan, Subotai, and Valeria, seeks to overcome him, and only does so after Conan's crucifixion, side piercing, and resurrection.

Getting stabbed in the side is a common trope. Jesus on the cross, stabbed by the spear, Jon Snow stabbed and Conan sports similar wound on the tree of woe. I suppose this is along the same lines as the sun being bit by scorpio in November (Achilles heel)--stabbed in the side is some other constellation shooting the constellation Orion.

Anyway--Conan, like Iron Fist or other fictional depictions of the esoteric religion is a display of the perennial religion. It's shown again and again and again--really countless times. It seems sort of like a cult with severe OCD produces these stories. Maybe people don't tune into the significance of the imagery and themes unless they stumble into a good resource that explains it because, well, frankly it's not that significant.

It's a metaphorical language--the old science.

Man's a paradox--the animal that doesn't think he's an animal. The esoteric religion is maybe an immersion into a right brain world where symbols and numbers fall away and truth is felt.