Serpent Men

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Mayan interpretation of a serpent-man shedding his skin.

Serpent Men are a fictional race created by Robert E. Howard for his King Kull tales. They first appeared in "The Shadow Kingdom," published in Weird Tales in August of 1929.

They were later adapted for the Marvel Comics Conan comics by Roy Thomas and Marie Severin. Their first Marvel Universe appearance was in Kull the Conqueror vol.1 #2 (September, 1971). They were also used in the 1992 Conan the Adventurer animated series. They were also adapted into H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos by writers like Lin Carter and Clark Ashton Smith.

Origin and society

Aeons-old "Serpent" figures unearthed in Iraq

In Robert E. Howard's King Kull stories, the serpent people worship a god known as the Great Serpent. Later writers would identify the Great Serpent with the Great Old One Yig and with the Stygian serpent god Set from Howard's Conan stories.

The Serpent Men were created untold aeons ago by the Great Serpent. At some point the Serpent Men group split, with one group becoming the Man-Serpents- these creatures, unlike their kin and predecessors, have the bodies of giant serpents and the heads of human beings, with smaller snakes for hair like Medusa. A Man-Serpent is the titular being in the Conan story "The God in the Bowl". Man-Serpents have hypnotic gazes and lethally venomous bites, as well as terrible crushing strength.

The seat of the First Empire of the serpent people, during the Paleozoic era, was Valusia. Valusia is a fictional country in the Kull stories of Robert E. Howard, located on the west coast of the main continent of Thuria. The empire was based on sorcery and alchemy, but collapsed with the rise of the dinosaurs about 225 million years ago during the Triassic era. The Serpent Men originally ruled over humans in Valusia but were defeated and almost wiped out in humanity's battle for survival against the "elder things" that predated them. Over time, humans dominated Valusia and the Serpent Men became a legend. The Serpent Men, one of the few surviving "elder things", infiltrated human society and ruled from behind the scenes for a time but were again discovered, defeated and cast out in a secret war. However, they later repeated this tactic but added the front of a Snake Cult religion, which gained power and influence within Valusia while they also used their abilities of disguise to murder and replace each reigning monarch. Their power is eventually broken by King Kull, formerly an Atlantean barbarian who had recently conquered Valusia, and the Pict Brule the Spear-Slayer, whose society was aware of the Serpent Men's infiltration.

After the destruction of Valusia, the serpent men escaped to Yoth, a cavern beneath K'n-yan in North America (ironically, the Pictish Isles of the Kull stories). They built subterranean cities, of which only ruins remain in the modern age. Explorers from K'n-yan visited Yoth frequently to learn more of the serpent men's scientific lore. Their next downfall came when they brought idols of Tsathoggua from N'kai and abandoned their patron deity Yig to worship their new god. As retribution Yig placed his curse upon them, forcing his few remaining worshipers to flee to caverns beneath Mount Voormithadreth.

Cursed by Yig, some serpent men degenerated into more and more bestial forms, eventually becoming mere giant snakes. Some sources claim that the worms of the earth were degenerate serpent men, while other stories describe the "worms" as descended from humans.

Appearance and abilities

Serpent Men are humanoids with scaled skin and snake-like heads. They possess magical abilities, the most common of which is the use of illusion to disguise themselves as a human. In some stories, the ghost of someone killed by a Serpent Man becomes the Serpent Man's slave. Due to the shape of their mouths, Serpent Men cannot utter the phrase "Ka nama kaa lajerama." Howard's character Kull uses the phrase as a shibboleth in the story The Shadow Kingdom.

Earlier Serpent Men

Robert E. Howard was not the first to write about prehistoric serpent people. Another pulp writer, Abraham Merritt, created a similar pre-human serpentine race surviving from the Mesozoic era in his story "The Face in the Abyss" which first appeared in a 1923 issue of Argosy magazine. A sequel, "The Snake Mother," also appeared in Argosy in 1930 and both were collected in a book-length version in 1931. In this story line, the last surviving Serpent-Woman is an ally of the human protagonists.

Cthulhu Mythos

Lin Carter and Clark Ashton Smith adapted the race for inclusion in the Cthulhu Mythos, inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's short story "The Nameless City", which refers to an Arabian city built by a pre-human reptilian race. Lovecraft's story "The Haunter of the Dark" explicitly mentions the "serpent men of Valusia" as being one-time possessors of the Shining Trapezohedron. However, the Cthulhu Mythos were already connected to the works of Robert E. Howard (a contemporary and correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft as well as a direct contributor to the Mythos itself). In this case, the Serpent Men were created for the very first Kull story, the character of Kull later made an appearance in a Bran Mak Morn story, Kings of the Night, while in another such story, Worms of the Earth, Bran Mak Morn explicitly refers to Cthulhu and R'lyeh. Many Conan stories by Howard are also part of the Mythos.


Delta Green

In the Delta Green RPG setting and in UFOlogy, Serpent Folk might be associated with "Reptilian Aliens".


Conan

The fictional settings of King Kull and Robert E. Howard's other creation, Conan the Barbarian, are linked through Howards essay The Hyborian Age. This states that Valusia, and its Thurian Age, existed in some time before Conan's Hyborian Age (the land was reshaped in between the story cycles by an undefined cataclysm). The Serpent Men did not, however, appear in any Conan story written by Robert E. Howard himself.

In 1971, the Serpent Men appeared in a comic book adaptation of the King Kull stories, published by Marvel Comics. Since then they have been imported into the Conan comics, as well as other adaptations and Conan pastiches. The Serpent Men were the main antagonists, personified by the wizard "Wrath-Amon", in the animated series Conan the Adventurer. This retained the Serpent Men's ability to infiltrate human society in disguise (in the cartoon, this disguise failed in the presence of meteoric "star metal", contact with which also sent a Serpent Man back to "the Abyss").

He-Man's Snake Men

Persistent but unverified claims suggest that the He-Man franchise was originally intended as a Conan toy line. If this is true, the equivalent to the Serpent Men in that franchise would be the Snake Men.

As with Howard's work, the Snake Men come from the distant past and fought against the character He-Ro/Lord Grayskull (who would be equivalent to Howard's character Kull). As with the Conan the Adventurer animated series, the Snake Men were banished to another dimension in the past and were attempting to return to power in the present.

The Spider

In the Spider short story "Fear Itself" (published in The Spider Chronicles by Moonstone in 2007) by Joel Frieman and C.J. Henderson, an occult expert named Guicet enlists the Spider's aid in defeating a group of Serpent Men who acquire a duplicate of the Cobra Crown from Conan the Buccaneer. In The Phantom Chronicles, worshippers of Set appear, but no Serpent Men.

Reptilians

TO DO - the "reptilians" of UFO mythology; apparently these can trace their storytelling ancestry back through Richard Sharpe Shaver to Robert E. Howard's serpent men.....

Sleestaks and Altrusians

TO DO - the slow-moving lizard people from the Land of the Lost (1974 franchise), which were apparently inspired by Robert E. Howard (the Altrusians are a reptilian advanced civilization living in an alternate timeline of what at first seems like a "Hollow Earth" but later proves to be a small, artificial "pocket universe"; through their super-science, the Altrusians foresee their downfall and de-evolution into savage Sleestaks, and are working to avert this disaster; over time, the Altrusians find evidence that the Sleestaks may be a precursor race that will evolve into Altrusians, confusing their efforts; the truth seems to be that the Sleestaks may represent both the savage past and the degenerate future of the Altrusian civilization at the same time.... Compare that both to R.E. Howard's serpent people of Valusia, and to his various Frazetta Man savage precursors to and degenerate inheritors of pre-historic advanced human civilizations in Hyperborea, such as the Atlanteans....


See also

Appearances

Fiction

Reference works

Role-playing games

External links

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