For readers of Robert E. Howard, particularly of his ultra-driven, seemingly possessed, characters, Dark Agnes and Esau Cairn, the article below is a scholarly treatment of something that Howard intuitively seemed to believe in his poet’s heart, that there welled up within him the memories of his ancestors, most prominently the Celtic ones.

It remains my ambition to review in detail everything Howard has written, which I suspect will require another four books the size of Dark Art of an Аrуаn Mystic. My work toward this end has focused on hyper-masculinity, blood-memory, [which the fascinating article linked below addresses], racial identity/interplay, and materialism as evil/economics as sorcery. These elements come together to inform and form the heroic persona, never so potently as in Howard’s young hands. Let us not forget his extreme youth as writers go.

Might Howard himself, be his best argument for a collective unconscious?

Did he see himself, in his final hours, as a descendent material being committing the most profound act of a quitter—who declines any longer to serve the master organism—or as an ascendant spiritual being , embracing a deeper past than the meaty shallows of life which he abandoned via the dissolution of his body?

Did Robert E. Howard know something that we did not?

And if he did, was it real, or a living figment of his stupendous imagination?

The link below might offer us some insights into that question.

As I go about composing the next volume in this exploration of Howard's work—and of him through it—the material will all be pre-published on this site under the Dark Art of an Аrуаn Mystic tag and under A Thousand Years in His Soul. Dark Art of an Аrуаn Mystic grew from A Thousand Years in His Soul, which is an exploration of Howard and eight of his contemporary Caucasian writers. When it comes time to put together the next volume in the Howard series in November 2016, I will draw from both projects, rewriting any material posted before 2016.