March of 1932. Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales, asked Robert E. Howard to “revise and resubmit” the first Conan story, “The Phoenix on the Sword,” which was itself a revision of the rejected Kull story, “By This Axe I Rule.” Howard’s subsequent revisions were a success for the story was published in December of that year. Although Howard had previously worked out the conventions of sword and sorcery in his earlier Solomon Kane and Kull tales, the publication of “The Phoenix on the Sword” marks an important event in the history of the genre: Conan, the most famous sword and sorcery barbarian, had arrived.

1932, the year of Conan, was a sad year. The outrageous kidnapping and tragic murder of the 20-month-old Charles Lindbergh, Jr. enthralled and stirred the Western world. Hoovervilles were ubiquitous, even in Washington D.C., where the Bonus Army squatted to demand economic relief. In July the Dow Jones reached its lowest recorded level during the Depression years. In spite of all this and more, some tried to arrest what seemed to be accelerating entropy.

Just prior to that “revise and resubmit” letter, in February of 1932, the member-states of the League of Nations convened for The Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments. Representatives sought to limit what was seen as dangerous military buildup. The entire globe waited, hopeful, as the conference failed and states began plotting for war. Even in the relative outskirts of rural Texas, Howard followed the conference closely. Writing to H.P. Lovecraft on March 2nd, 1932, he provided this prescient commentary:

“I expect the disarmament conference to come to nothing, and am in favor of that result, if the alternative means shearing more claws from our already depleted national defense. The outlawry of war is proven to have been an empty thought. I believe that the next few generations will see a continual series of wars, and the best thing to do, is to be prepared.”

Considering the tenor of 1932, can we blame Howard’s grim prediction? Some might be inclined to call Howard cynical here; alas, knowledge of the later events of the decade makes labeling Howard a “realist” more appropriate. The gruesome story of what happened next is common knowledge. Following this failed disarmament conference, the guns that quieted in 1918 flamed to life again. Howard suicided in June of 1936, a month before the start of the Spanish Civil War (July 1936), and then the bloodletting and chaos began in earnest: the invasion of Poland (1939), the destruction of Pearl Harbor (1941), the Siege of Stalingrad (1942), the Holocaust (1941-1945), the Atomic Bomb (1945), the Korean War (1950), and more. That bang in Cross Plains on June 11th, 1936 was the first shot of many more to come. As the 30s and 40s proceeded, spectacles of mechanized and sublime violence came one after the other, like so many dark hills of Cimmeria repeating themselves into a misty horizon.

Howard threshed Conan, the avatar of sword and sorcery, into being at a historical moment of unfathomable social tension, a dark quiet pregnant with anticipation: the whole world was poised to erupt in violence, and it did. When readers first met Conan he was in a shadowy council chamber, discussing threats to his reign; if we squint, this scene of skullduggery over political maps resembles the failed disarmament conference of 1932. Speaking of his homeland, Conan could have been describing the Interwar West: “They have no hope here or hereafter. [...] Their gods are Crom and his dark race, who rule over a sunless place of everlasting mist, which is the world of the dead.”

Curiously, “The Phoenix on the Sword” story features another conference, although peace is not the agenda: four conspirators plot to assassinate Conan, the conquering King of Aquilonia. Although Conan’s reign is vulnerable and flimsy, the conspirators nevertheless fail and are massacred by Conan. Blood-soaked and wounded, standing in bloody triumph—not unlike the soldiers at the Armistice of Compiègne—Conan has learned that the twitching corpses at his feet were not his true enemies. The ancient sorcerer, Thoth-Amon, has returned to power. A wise spirit of the past, Epemitreus, had informed Conan of this truth in a dream:

“As a pebble cast into a dark lake sends ripples to the further shores, happenings in the Unseen world have broken like waves on my slumber. I have marked you well, Conan of Cimmeria, and the stamp of mighty happenings and great deeds is upon you. [...] There are dark worlds barely guessed by man, wherein formless monsters stalk—fiends which may be drawn from the Outer Voids to take material shape and rend and devour at the bidding of evil magicians.”

Here Epemitreus articulates a pessimistic vision of history-as-conspiracy that influences sword and sorcery even today: instead of a progressive march toward utopia, history is driven towards a dystopic dying earth by violence. The fighting that drives history will never end for a diabolical agency drags humanity into the terrible future. Indeed, Epemitreus’s vision of history echoes the philosopher, mystic, and historical cynic, Walter Benjamin, whose famous allegory, the “Angel of History,” refutes the very notion of “progress”:

“His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

Where the Victorian Sages of the 19th century conceived of industrialization, science, and engineering as humane forces, conceived of history as a steady but sure liberation of humanity from the necessities of economic contingency, Benjamin—who suicided in 1940 to escape the Gestapo—saw modern progress as a series of catastrophes, a veritable trash heap of sorrows growing ever higher and higher. Both Howard and Benjamin share more than just death by suicide; they also share an acutely pessimistic understanding of so-called “progress.”

Howard published a poem just before “The Phoenix on the Sword” that evokes some of the same paranoid sense of expectation that no doubt electrified the very air in 1932. The poem, published in the September issue of Weird Tales, was titled, “An Open Window,” and consists of these four short lines:

“Behind the Veil what gulfs of Time and Space?
What blinking mowing Shapes to blast the sight?
I shrink before a vague colossal Face
Born in the mad immensities of Night.”

Unlike Benjamin, who frames history as non-intelligent entropy, Howard artfully imagines a vague supernatural intelligence lashing humanity forward, manipulating the species toward catastrophe and destruction. Because Howard published “The Phoenix on the Sword” two months after this poem, can we speculate about the nature of this alien agency? What is the sword and sorcery version of the general who pushes a button and murders? A bureaucrat who approves death sentences with the clacking of typewriter keys? A chemist who creates weaponized gases? In the context of Howard’s “Phoenix on the Sword,” understood as allegory, this supernatural intelligence appears to be something like the sorcerer Thoth-Amon.

In the sword and sorcery context, the sorcerer trope almost always allegorizes a dehumanized elite with totalitarian tendencies who treats humans as slaves, as thralls, as sexual lucre to be harvested or sacrificed on dark altars. Indeed, the sorcerer figure is a grotesque amalgamation of several kinds of modern technicians allegorically dehumanized through initiation into the quasi-occult lore of science, engineering, technology, economics, theory, and more; sorcerers are dead-eyed administrators, intellectuals, engineers, scientists, surgeons, and demagogues compressed into a single villainous trope; therefore, the sword and sorcery hero symbolizes the all-too-human with all his or her flaws, vices, melancholies, and mirths. The sorcerer, however—barely human, anti-life, mantled in mystery—defies humanity and human understanding. To look with hackles raised upon a sorcerer is to be an animal subject contemplating the intentions of a laboratory scientist. Although most of their intentions are opaque to humans, they seem to desire one thing above all: power, and specifically, power over the human race they have left behind. Their diabolical art, sword and sorcery warns, is dangerous because it implies and requires the transformation of living human beings into lifeless thralls, a logic captured incisively by Clark Ashton Smith’s dark allegory of totalitarianism as a dystopia of the dead ruled by necromancers. “The Empire of the Necromancers,” published in the very same issue of Weird Tales that includes Howard’s “An Open Window,” features two necromancers who establish a “baleful despotism” in the lifeless desert, that, if we squint, resembles the joyless totalitarian regimes of real dystopias—Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia—and the fictional one of Orwell’s Oceania:

“Tribute was borne to [the Necromancers] by fleshless porters from outlying realms; and plague-eaten corpses, and tall mummies scented with mortuary balsams, went to and fro upon their errands in Yethlyreom, or heaped before their greedy eyes, from inexhaustible vaults, the cobweb-blackened gold and dusty gems of antique time.”

Sword and sorcery is an allegorical architecture built on a haunted foundation: a very pessimistic vision of history that emerged in the interwar period, and specifically the years of anxious anticipation preceding World War II; in sword and sorcery, history is a violent, unceasing crucible accelerated by dark intelligences who have discarded their very humanity; from ziggurat to skyscraper, from cathedral to corporate campus, the tranquil peace of the common folk is always contingent, always finite, always subject to the divisive machinations of the terrible intelligences who fearfully and obsessively struggle to insulate themselves from the deforming processes of time, of becoming irrelevant, of aging, of being human.

1932, the Year of Conan, was clearly a thoughtful and artistically fertile time in Howard’s life, for he wrote another enduring poem just prior to writing his letter to Lovecraft where he expresses suspicion about the outcome of the disarmament conference in Geneva. Titled “Cimmeria,” it gives us additional insight to the dark vision of history that saturates the genre of sword and sorcery. Here is a passage:

“Vista on vista marching, hills on hills,
Slope beyond slope, each dark with sullen trees,
Our gaunt land lay. So when a man climbed up
A rugged peak and gazed, his shaded eye
Saw but the endless vista - hill on hill,
Slope beyond slope, each hooded like its brothers.”

When I read this poem, juxtaposed with Howard’s letter to Lovecraft, firmly embedded in the paranoid milieu of 1932, I cannot help but view hopeless Cimmeria as an allegory of interwar modernity, a disenchanted place of shadows, monotony, and evil conspiracy:

“It was a gloomy land that seemed to hold
All winds and clouds and dreams that shun the sun,
With bare boughs rattling in the lonesome winds,
And the dark woodlands brooding over all,
Not even lightened by the rare dim sun
Which made squat shadows out of men; they called it
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and deep Night.”

We are familiar with labeling Howard as a “Depression-era” writer, and we use that term in an economic context. Deploying “depression” with its valances of clinical psychology might also be apropos here. For the year of Conan was a dark time, a void of hope, a depressed time in more ways than one. Sensitive minds, like Howard and Benjamin, had vague and disturbing presentiments that the quiet of 1932 prefigured a dark future, a storm called “progress,” the rise of a real empire of necromancers. In Howard’s case, this vague sense of approaching crisis took more concrete form: writing to H.P. Lovecraft in December of 1932, he ended the year with this political pensée that evokes the specters of Hitler, Stalin, and even Thoth Amon:

“I honestly believe that a small group of men, guided by one brain such as Stalin’s, or Mussolini’s, could, with the aid of a comparatively small army, enslave a whole continent, regardless of the intellectual status of the people. Such an event is a very remote possibility. A dictator would doubtless approach the matter in a more subtle way than by whole-sale slaughter. But classes opposing him would be ruthlessly destroyed and the result would be the same—the old, old fundamental of kingship: one man or one small class of men ruling the rest under one or the other of the ten million high-sounding names used to dress the raw reality of slavery.”

The history of 20th century totalitarianism proved Howard (and Epemitreus) right. And although we have escaped the darkness of the interwar period, its influence continues to saturate sword and sorcery. Thus, is it a surprise that those who enthrall to sword and sorcery continue to look askance at contemporary visions of utopia? Perhaps we are wrong to be so cynical. Let us not forget that specificity of metaphor is always important. Even in the darkness before war, we must remember that there is a phoenix—an undying and ever-regenerating symbol of hope—on the sword.

Jason Ray Carney, Ph.D. is a lecturer in popular literature and creative writing at Christopher Newport University; he is the author of the academic book, Weird Tales of Modernity: The Ephemerality of the Ordinary in the Stories of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and H.P. Lovecraft (McFarland 2019) and the sword and sorcery collection, Rakefire and Other Stories (Pulp Hero Press 2020). He co-edits the academic journal, The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies and is the editor of Whetstone: Amateur Magazine of Pulp Sword and Sorcery. He is the area chair of the "Pulp Studies" section of the Popular Culture Association.