Pages 41-45 of Man and His Symbols, 1964, Laurel

Young approaches the daunting business of interpreting dreams by reviewing his definition of the symbol:

“The sign is always less than the concept it represents, while a symbol always stands for something more than it’s obvious and immediate meaning.”

Continuing with the assertions that symbols are not invented and attempts to do so through rational, conscious processes will only result in a mere sign, Jung notes that symbols do not occur only in dreams and then takes the reader into the realm of collective symbols, which he asserts are most often religious in nature:

“The believer assumes they are divine origin—that they have been revealed to man. The skeptic says flatly that they have been invented.”

The discussion advances with a comparison of the skeptical and religious view and an advancement of his third position that man has collective dreams and primal fantasies, that “the individual is the only reality. The further we move away from the individual toward abstract ideas about Homo sapiens, the more likely we are to fall into error.”

In these passages, and particularly in the last, Jung states the importance of the hero to our collective soul. A contemporary of Howard, who probably didn’t know the Texan existed, Jung grew old and uncommonly wise in the way of myth, and wrote this summation of his life’s work at the every time when Robert e. Howard’s heroic fiction was emerging as a balm for the hollow ideology and artificial environment that had replaced the hallowed individual struggling in the teeth of the natural order and the unnatural. Such sorcery faced by a hero like Conan, represent the peril of modernity and its acidic action on the human soul. The stories that Howard wrote kept alive the duality of evil in its natural and unnatural forms and enabled the domesticated mind to wonder nakedly and with purpose as our earliest ancestors must have.

The hero of modern pulp fiction and dark fantasy is the opposite of the ideological world-mending science-fiction busybody; he is the natural, unedited man, turning his primal nature to battle the duplicitous super nature of spawned by his kind’s own meddling.