In looking for a closing argument, voiced out of the past, that might link the ancient traditions of men with our current disillusive circumstance I looked to one of the most insightful of emasculated men, Edgar Alan Poe, the drunken poet and horror writer who could not even handle the onset of Modernity, and, unlike Melville, sought escape in the bowels of the beast rather than at its extremities. Of Lions and Men has been an attempt to survey ancient masculine traditions in their intertwined tribal State, and then relate these to our current society, where manhood is increasingly regarded as the enemy of society and the vestiges of tribalism tend to be caricatures of, or the hijacked corpses of, organic family-based tribal traditions.
In The Power of Words, one of his more obscure works, Poe explores divinity and the question of Man’s agency through a brief dialogue between two angels, Oinos and Agathos. Ironically enough, considering my focus on the Conan character created by Robert E. Howard as a masculine construct for clearly seeing the world as it is, Agathos puts forth the theory that God is very much a kin to Howard’s mythic Crom, the deity who merely breaths fierce life into Man, and then declines to meddle womanlike in the life of his child:
Agathos: “I mean to say that the Deity does not create.”
Oinos: “Among men, my Agathos, this idea would be considered heretical in the extreme.”
Agathos: “Among angels, my Oinos, it is seen to be simply true.”
Agathos had made the case that Man has been set on a possibly world altering path, to fend for himself without the intervention of a higher power. To this his fellow angel objects:
Oinos: “Are not the starry worlds that, from the abyss of nonentity, burst hourly forth into the heavens—are not these stars, Agathos, the immediate handiwork of the King?”
Agathos: “…as no thought can perish, so no act is without infinite result…This wild star—it is now three centuries since, with clasped hands, and with streaming eyes, at the feet of my beloved—I spoke it—with a few passionate sentences—into birth. Its brilliant flowers are the dearest of all unfulfilled dreams, and in its raging volcanoes are the passions of the most turbulent and unhallowed hearts.”
In the hands of Poe what modern libertarians call “the law of unintended consequences,” lurk as the inevitable echoes of Creation, the whispers of a thousand generations of kings and killers, of Lions among Men, whose every regeneration pour forth from God-given human nature to rise again in beauty and rage despite the laws and customs that lesser—though cunning—souls have placed in the path of their resurrection.
