All Gods in Conan Lore Part 1 Introduction and The Popular Gods

You're saying our beloved Jhebbal Sag is a demonic God? Nonsense! Is the wolf evil because it hunts elk for food? The crocodile evil because it rolls it's prey to shreds? The rat evil because it spreads sickness and disease?

Of course not, these things are either in their nature or a byproduct of it entirely. Jhebbal was once the God of men and animals because men were once no better than animals, they were savages and as such spoke the language of the animals.

Savagery, survival, bloodlust, the hunt - these are necessary things to keep the wilderness from killing you. Lycanthropy is a gift, a bridge between man and beast. Fixing what was lost.

All praise our beloved Scorpion-Eagle-Kitty

“You have your Derketo,
…and I have MINE!”

-Gofrey the Horny

Im a big HPL fan,
But have always turned away from Conan for some reason.
Last week i was thinking about how much Lovecraft's mythos needed a true hero,
Then i remembered that Conan was basically part of that mythos.
Now im stuck trying to consume as many Conan audiobooks that i can get my hands on.
I honestly feel dumb for not getting into Howard sooner.

"Cooler than Loki" Well you're not wrong.

Not sure how sex is supposed to be evil. Derketo seems like a fine lass to me.

The original sky father and earth mother were from the Proto Indo Europeans.

This would be Uranus and Gaia in Greco/Roman belief. Their gods Zeus came after the older gods even in their stories. Zeus was son of Chronos who was son of Uranus. If Mitra is supposed to be a prehistory sky father he’d be comparable to Uranus not Zeus.

In their minds the sky father seeded (rain) the earth mother who produced life.

And as far as bears. These dudes are supposed to be descendants of mammoth hunters. They respected bears, but these dudes were some fucking beast.

Flesh is stronger than steel, boy.

Your videos really itch that intellectual critical-thinking part of my brain, they are all so cool

I love the bear gush part bears are great

Wereheini fuck yeah

Hey, please stop bringing in Marvel. Also Im a Norse Pagan/Heathen from sweden with grest interest in Norse mythology since I was a child and I grew up with Stories of Idin, Thor and Loki etc.. Conan was based on these myths together with many others, Marvel however is just a bad universe with really bastardised stories that frankly is just insulting. So Im not demanding, just politely letting you know and respectfully request that Marvel isnt brought up in talking about Norse mythology.
Love your videos man! Youre doing a great job!

Crom would not be an 'agricultural' God. Of his 'type', and in the regions where that 'type' proliferated, they were a God of the Herdsman, a bane to predators, a husband of the flock, with the hardiness and endurance to weather living with his flock in mountainous regions, that, btw, were not that great for planting crops. A look into the Urartrean 'YHWH', a war god of a mountian peoples, migrating with Abraham and his flock out of Ur.

I think the Adeptus Mechanicus took Crom's Riddle of Steel a little too literally.

I have another question about Set. Set hates humanity, and wants to bring about the destruction of humanity while elevating the serpent men back to the dominant race. I can see why serpent men would worship Set. And I can see why certain unscrupulous and power-mad humans would venerate him. But why would human nations worship Set? These videos have given me a fascination with the Conan lore, and I'm just trying to puzzle some of this out.

Watching this again, I have to comment on Set. Looking at this from my background with Lovecraft, then Call of Cthulhu, I think the idea that Set is Nyarlathotep makes zero sense. Nyarlathotep more or less wants to spread madness to humanity and beyond...not death and destruction. He also doesn't 'hate' or target humanity in particular, and certainly has no known affinity with any race, let alone serpents or serpent people. Sot Set would be a different entity.

Why do people think Nyarlathotep is Set? Is it just because of the 'Black Pharaoh' form?

Derketo is Innana/Ishtar/Astarte she is the daughter of Anu and Ki( Gaea) and Thor's OLDER half-sister...Set is her uncle.

Where was Valka, Dagda, Zeus, Odin, Jade Emporer, and Vishnu during the Hyborean age?

I just looove the passion you're talking about bears brother. Keep on going, love the content

Brilliant work

I'm playing conan exiles. assuming the exiled lands are a part of the real conan lore, the giant-kings there worshiped set. but they helped the humans survive. they made slaves of some of them, but they also gave shelter and food.

How do you look at the valley of the worm short story? I wasn't clear when it was set other than pre-kull, but it touches on a few things. Most noticeable a mini-boss giant snake that is said to be the basis of Set I believe. Is that the opinion of the narrator interpreting his past life or is it legit pov in the howard-verse?

Somehow this video helps me fall asleep I’ve listened to it a dozen times already

Derketo being difficult to put into positive light? Well look at it this way a cthonic god whose rituals involve orgies and consumption and production of luxury goods isnt that just Dionisis though? And honestly to the slave populations of Stygia and Shem she would be a much more useful goddess than a god of wine one of the 1st rituals you get for Derketo in the conan exiles game is transmute vines , basicly weed to bread which is free, kind of useful when your taskmaster maybe remembers to give you food once a week. And her cthonic and knowledge aspect would be something from the past but also like something for her believers to aspire, something they can use to set themselves free from their initial condition. So basically I think Derketo is a goddess popular with those that often find themselves starved and mistritted as a means of both survival , finding some joy in life but also liberation through well revelry and indulgence from the emotional side as affirmation of personal will and individuality and necromancy to give them the actual power to gain freedom as keeping a necromancer working a quarry or weaving ropes or being used in some other demeaning manner against their will is probably not very healthy for anyone who tries and leads to icy and death and very painful and agonising servitude to your former slave as an undead.

Love your Conan stuff!

Maaaaan, fuck Derketo! All my tribe hates Derketo!

Varnae makes me think about hanuman in conan exiles its very similar. Whereas in exiles you have to sacrifice human hearts to get items from hanuman the ape god its interesting that its so similar.

id say the grAT BEAR COES FROM wELSH aINU CULTURE

SnakePope 2024
Choose Evil

I return to this video after sitting in the mountains and reflecting on the Set-Nyarlethotep question. I present my head canon based on what i know of the Mad Pharoah.
Nyarlethotep is a trickster kind of God that has many faces. So Set and Nyarlethotep are not the same, but the Mad Pharoah is willing to use the form of the serpent to manipulate his followers to the Outer God's own ends.
But that's just what i think.

"Punishes Oath Breakers by turning them into tormented spirits that haunt the Mountains." Why does that sound familiar? And why does a Dwarf and an Elf seem to be involved?

Hindu mythos his name is Jaamwatt king of bears

Fellow Baldemort enjoyer. How about that! Loving the conan lore. You are an amazing narrarator for this material.

here's how i justify my derketo worship

derketo: hey buddy

me: yes

derketo: wanna have a bountiful crop and calfing this year?

me: yes please

derketo: good. have an orgy that lasts a week, throw in some dead cheeks and maybe some animal cheeks, and i'll grant your wish

me: DEAL

Cavemen are a Hollywood fiction. Sure they used caves for religious, a form of massage board. Neanderthal are humans, just another subspecies, they had bigger brains, were larger. Some theories that they were gentle

Where did you get the "Mitra is the oldest god" and that he is Ibis and was first found in Hyperborean from? Everything I know of Mitra is that he is the youngest religion

A problem I see with using non Howard sources for lore is that a lot of things have suffered from gamification. The first result of this is we often see hard classifications and distinctions where none existed in the original material. The second is that the nature of the subject can be drastically altered in order to make it support a preconceived game mechanic.

That said people can include whatever they want in their head canon or personal games.

"Snake Pope" that is funny on several levels.

My clan is goin to start working on a pantheon shrine, gotta sit down and do the math, it’s gonna be huge but we need to protect our zeal lol

These videos are really well done and you also seem quietly based. Will sub.

Hugely entertaining. Thank you.

I mean crom doesnt mean only that you do self improvment it also means beaing a great warior And doing stuff like honor And sacrafice

Hey, I know it was a passing comment during the Zath segment, but you said something about the Yamatai Spider people. I would love a video delving into that, as most of the resources I've seen from places such as C.L.A. don't even mention anything close

I feel like Xotli dont really care how you use his power, hes just like "blow stuff up i dont care if its for good or bad, i just wanna see some explosions"

Do make some time for fun. - Baldermort, our faithful servant.

can we have a list of the other channels you recommend?

The movie 28 Days Later could be thought of an outbreak of a Primal Language disease.

I was pondering your thoughts regarding ethics and Derketo worship, which were particularly interesting to me as I generally prefer Derketo as my characters religion in Conan Exiles (the other religion anesthetics seem boring by comparison, frankly, and I appreciate the blatant nods to the exotic occultism of the 1920s in the design...I feel like Aleister Crowley would be lurking around the shrines. But I digress...).

While the goddess and her worshippers are generally portrayed as evil in the main Conan stories, I think it makes for interesting role play when you consider her as simply a fertility/death goddess (we have deities in real life Is that tackle this concept, but they often have an air of sinister danger around them when viewed through a Christian influenced lens that the original worshipers of said deities did not see). Fertility and death tend to go hand in hand in ancient religions, and the religions in Conan tend to have a 'localized' feel influenced primarily by culture and indiviudal interpretstions (unless state controlled), so I think it's reasonable for a character to have this more nuanced view of this goddess (discounting the actual influence or push of the goddess to engage in debauchery, though it seems these are more decisions made by her worshippers rather than her spelling it out).

The flip side of that is that a character could be absolutely vile and play her worship to its grossest excesses, but still be 'ethical.' It is certainly not moral to take slaves and sacrifice people to demons, but in Stygia and Acheron, it was culturally normal and lauded. Thus, it would be 'ethical' to do these things under those strictures, which can make for interesting story conflict if a character espouses 'ethics' that are not only contradictory, but completely antithetical to other players views (and allow for the possibility of a 'villain all along moment' for high drama).

The flip side of THAT flip side is seeing how other ethical systems could be merged with Derketo worship, and how both would influence each other. Would Derketo worship in Aquilonia or Turan downplay the perversions of other Derketo cults, or is it something that is inevitable? I would think in Howard's own philosophy, decadence would always lead to decay, and so this 'evil sex cult' aspect is inevitable in his world...but also weirdly necessary? It seems appropriate that a goddess built on the duality of lustful excess and necrotic decay would be an engine for civilizations to reach both their greatest potential and inevitable ruin.