The film opens with a black screen and a single line in white type, attributed in plain capitals beneath it: That which does not kill us makes us stronger. Friedrich Nietzsche. John Milius wanted the audience to know exactly whose ground they were standing on before the first frame of footage. The line is the eighth maxim from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, written in 1888 and published in January 1889. Nietzsche’s German is singular (“Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker”), the literal sense being “what does not kill me makes me stronger”; the film card paraphrases the singular into the more universal first-person plural that the line has worn in English ever since. Nietzsche placed the maxim under the heading Aus der Kriegsschule des Lebens, “from the war-school of life.” Months later, on January 3, 1889, he collapsed in the street in Turin, embracing a horse, and never recovered his sanity.
This is the kind of detail the film is built from. John Milius did not pick a phrase that sounded heroic. He picked the phrase. He wanted the audience to understand, before a single image of Spain or a single note of Basil Poledouris’s score, that the next two hours would be a Nietzschean parable wearing a fur loincloth.
The Cimmerians on screen are a real people. The god the boy prays to has a real Irish name. The cult he eventually destroys was modeled on a Texas-born preacher who poisoned 909 of his followers in a Guyanese jungle on November 18, 1978. The mountain fortress is the fortress of Hassan-i-Sabbah. The man who invented the world the film draws from shot himself in the front seat of his car at the age of thirty.
Conan the Barbarian, released on May 14, 1982, with a $20 million budget, is one of the densest pieces of unacknowledged mythology and history ever put on screen. This is the world behind it.
The Cimmerians Were a Real People
Before Robert E. Howard wrote a word about Conan, the Cimmerians had been ridden into the historical record by Assyrian scribes.
The Neo-Assyrian cuneiform letters of Sargon II, around 714 BCE, name them as the Gimirrāia, a steppe people pressing in from the north. The intelligence reaching Sargon came from his crown prince Sennacherib, who would inherit the throne and continue the file. Esarhaddon defeated their king Teushpa around 679 BCE and recorded the victory in his royal inscriptions. Their next king, Dugdammê, also called Lygdamis in Greek sources, sacked the Phrygian capital Gordion around 675 BCE and the Lydian capital of Sardis around 644 BCE before dying in 640. His son Sandakšatru held the line for another decade. The Sardis campaign is corroborated by Herodotus in Histories book 1, paragraph 15. None of this is folklore. It is administrative record.
Herodotus tells the longer story. The Cimmerians, he says, lived on the Pontic-Caspian steppe, north of the Black Sea, until the Scythians pushed them south. They fled across the Caucasus and into Anatolia, where they ended up burning Greek cities and panicking the local kingdoms before they were absorbed and disappeared. Histories 4, paragraphs 11 and 12.
Then there is Homer, Odyssey book 11, lines 13 to 19. Odysseus sails to the entrance of the underworld and finds the Kimmerioi there, “wrapped in mist and cloud,” a people the sun never reaches. Whether Homer’s Cimmerians are the historical people the Assyrians knew, or a borrowed name for a mythic shadow-people at the world’s edge, has been argued for two thousand years. The standard scholarly monograph, Askold Ivantchik’s Les Cimmériens au Proche-Orient from 1993, treats Homer’s usage as poetic license layered over real geographic memory.
Howard, writing in West Texas in the early 1930s with a small library and a habit of soaking up everything he could find on ancient peoples, knew this material. He gave Conan the Cimmerian people Homer half-remembered and the Assyrians fought. In his essay “The Hyborian Age,” written around 1932 and serialized across three issues of the fan magazine The Phantagraph in 1936 (with the first complete book edition appearing in 1938), Howard wrote that the survivors of the Cimmerians, fleeing the cataclysms of his fictional pre-history, became the Gaels, the ancestors of the Irish and the Highland Scots. It is a pseudo-history, but it is a pseudo-history built on a real ethnonym. The film keeps the bones of it. Conan’s village in the snow, Crom on the mountain, the iron and the cold. Almería was standing in for the Pontic steppe.
The exact spot where the film’s Cimmerian village burns is in the forest of Valsaín, south of Segovia in central Spain. The Tree of Woe, where Conan is crucified, stood among the sand dunes of Cabo de Gata Natural Park in southeastern Almería; the tree itself was a styrofoam-and-plaster prop on a wood-and-steel skeleton, mounted on a turntable, and dismantled after filming. The Temple of Set, the most expensive set in the production at $350,000, was built about twelve kilometers west of Almería city.
The Hyborian Map: A World That Is Real and Not
Cimmeria is one country on a much larger map. In the same essay where he traced the Cimmerians forward to the Gaels, Howard sketched a complete supercontinent of pre-Atlantean nations. Sixteen typed pages, geography and ethnology and migrations, all of it set roughly twelve thousand years before the present. The film keeps almost none of it on screen, but the world Conan walks through is built on it.
The trick of the Hyborian Age is what Howard did not do. He did not invent his cultures from scratch. He took real ethnonyms and real cultural silhouettes and dropped them onto a single Pangaea, lightly disguised.
Aquilonia, the dominant western kingdom, is medieval France with a Roman skeleton. Its capital is Tarantia, its kings wear sun-shaped crowns, its knights are Charlemagne’s by another name. Stygia, south of Aquilonia, is Egypt with the names rearranged. Pyramids, a snake-priesthood, a great river, dark-robed sorcerers worshipping Set. Vanaheim and Asgard, north of Cimmeria, are the Vanir and the Æsir of Norse cosmology, blond raiders coming down through the snow. Hyperborea, in the northeast, lifts the name directly from Greek myth, where Pindar’s Olympian 3 placed the people “beyond the north wind.”
The Picts, west of Cimmeria, keep the real ethnonym Roman writers used for the painted Iron-Age peoples of north Britain. Shem, south of Aquilonia, is the land of Semitic city-states, and Howard borrowed his Shemite city names (Asgalun, Pelishtia) from biblical Hebrew. Zamora, east of Aquilonia, is a thieves-and-sorcerers kingdom with Romani and Persian colouring. Vendhya is India. Khitai, even further east, is China, named from the Khitan people, the same root that gave Marco Polo his “Cathay.” Iranistan is Persia under almost its real name. Kush, south of Stygia, is named directly for the historical African kingdom of Kush, attested in Egyptian and biblical sources from the second millennium BCE.
Hyrkania, east of the inland sea, is the Mongol-Scythian steppe. Subotai is Hyrkanian. The name itself comes from real Hyrcania, the Greek and Roman name for the Caspian region of northern Iran, which Howard transferred to a horse-archer culture further east.
Conan walks into a slave market or a temple and the world he passes through feels older than it has any right to. He is moving through a recombination of every culture Howard had ever read about, pushed back twelve thousand years and reshuffled. Milius understood the trick. The film never names Hyrkania or Stygia or Aquilonia on screen. It does not have to. The temple of Set is recognizably Egyptian. The slave merchants are recognizably Levantine. Subotai shoots a bow the way Mongols and Scythians shot bows. The world is real-world memory loaded into a fictional cosmology.
Crom Was a Real God
In the film, Crom is the only god Conan acknowledges, and he acknowledges him grudgingly. Conan’s father, in the opening scene, tells the boy that no one in the world can be trusted, but that Crom dwells on a great mountain and that Cimmerians know what to ask of him: courage at birth, and after that nothing. The god is not loving, not protective, not interested. Before the final battle, Conan kneels in the snow and gives the famous speech. Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that today, two stood against many. That’s what’s important. Valor pleases you, so grant me one request. Grant me revenge. And if you do not listen, then to hell with you.
The grimness is the point. Crom is the cosmology, not the comforter. So where did the name come from?
It was carved on a real Iron-Age stone in what is now County Cavan, Ireland.
The 12th-century Metrical Dindshenchas, a collection of place-name poems compiled from older oral material, contains the lay of Magh Slécht, “the Plain of Prostrations.” It describes a stone idol called Crom Cruach, plated in gold, surrounded by twelve smaller stones. The Irish, the poem says, sacrificed the firstborn of every family there to win milk and grain. The 9th-century Tripartite Life of Saint Patrick tells how Patrick toppled the idol with his crozier when he Christianized Ireland. The Killycluggin Stone, a carved Iron-Age boulder now preserved in the Cavan County Museum at Ballyjamesduff with a replica beside the original site, is traditionally identified with Crom Cruach. The identification is plausible rather than certain.
There is a parallel folkloric figure called Crom Dubh, “Black Crom,” tied to the harvest festival of Lughnasadh and surviving in pilgrimages and folk customs into the modern era. The standard treatment is Máire MacNeill’s 1962 study The Festival of Lughnasa.
Howard’s Crom shares almost nothing with the Irish material except the name and a certain grimness. Conan’s Crom dwells on a mountain. He is indifferent to human prayer. He gives only one gift, courage at birth, and after that you are on your own. No serious source treats them as the same deity. Howard borrowed a name that carried weight in his Celtic-revival reading and built a different god underneath it. Milius then took Howard’s god and pushed him further toward Norse and Germanic models, particularly the Wagner-influenced version of fate that runs through the Bayreuth productions of the Ring. The cultural historian David Huckvale has noted that the Tree of Woe and the costuming of certain ritual scenes echo the 1876 Bayreuth Ring stagings almost line for line.
So when Conan delivers the famous prayer before the final battle, the speech is Milius’s. The god is Howard’s. The name belongs to a stone Saint Patrick is said to have cracked with a stick.
The Production: A Drug-Fever Script Becomes a Sermon
The first script for Conan the Barbarian was written by Oliver Stone. It was set in a post-apocalyptic future. Conan led an army against ten thousand mutants. There were two rival queens, cloning, DNA manipulation, and a villain named Thoth-Amon. Stone, who has spoken openly about his cocaine and depressant use during this period, was producing roughly four hours of unfilmable script. Producer Dino De Laurentiis estimated it would cost $40 million to shoot. The studio could not commit.
Milius was brought in. He kept the crucifixion sequence and a few set pieces from Stone’s draft and threw out almost everything else. He built a new structure based on, in his own description, Wagner, Nietzsche, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, Mongol history, and the Norse sagas. He had wanted for years to make a Viking film. Conan became the vehicle.
His version sits closer to a samurai film than to a Tolkien adaptation. Critics have noted Milius’s deliberate distance from the Christian moral framework of The Lord of the Rings. Milius famously called himself a “Zen fascist.” He liked the term. The film’s worldview is closer to the Iliad than to Beowulf. Achilles, not Aragorn.
Schwarzenegger had already been cast when Milius arrived. He trained for eighteen months. He worked five months with the Japanese swordmaster Kiyoshi Yamazaki, two hours a day, three days a week, swinging an eleven-pound broadsword. Yamazaki appears on screen as the Eastern teacher who instructs Conan after he is bought by the slave merchant. Schwarzenegger trimmed from 240 pounds to 210, which contradicts the legend that he bulked up for the role. He did almost all of his own stunts.
The wolf-attack scene at the burial mound nearly killed him. The animals were German shepherds with wolf bloodlines. On the first take the trainer released them too early. They tore the loincloth off him, dragged him from the rock, and he fell about ten feet onto sharp stones. He needed about forty stitches in his back, the figure most often given.
The whole film was shot in Spain, beginning January 1981. The Cimmerian village in the forest of Valsaín. The desert sequences in Almería. The dramatic rock formations in the interior, around Cuenca, doubled for several mountain passes. The Wheel of Pain on a windswept plain. Production designer Ron Cobb, who had just finished the interiors of Alien, designed both swords. The blades themselves were forged by the Burbank, California swordsmith Jody Samson. Cobb’s hand-drawn sketches for the Atlantean sword survive and have been auctioned through Propstore. The runes on the blade are his invention, intended to read as ancient Atlantean rather than as any specific real script.
Basil Poledouris recorded the Conan score in Rome in late November 1981 with the Orchestra and Chorus of Santa Cecilia plus the Rome Radio Symphony, around ninety players and a twenty-four-voice choir, in three weeks of sessions. The opening track, “Anvil of Crom,” uses twenty-four French horns over pounding drums and an actual struck anvil. The complete score runs about two hours and is one of the longest written for a film up to that date.
Thulsa Doom and the Snake Cult
The villain has a long pulp pedigree before he ever reaches the screen.
Thulsa Doom was created by Howard around 1928 for a Kull story alternately titled “Delcardes’ Cat” and “The Cat and the Skull.” The story was rejected in Howard’s lifetime and the character only reached print posthumously, first in the 1967 Lancer Books collection King Kull. Howard’s Doom is a skull-faced necromancer of unknown origin, an ancient enemy of the Atlantean kingdoms. He is not, in Howard, a snake-cult priest. The serpent-cult identity is Milius’s, fused with Howard’s Stygian worship of Set from later Conan stories like “The God in the Bowl” and “The Phoenix on the Sword.”
Milius has been explicit, on the 2000 DVD commentary and in interviews around the film’s release, that the cult was modeled on Charles Manson’s Family and on Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple. The Jonestown mass death of November 18, 1978, in which 909 people died after Jones ordered them to drink cyanide-laced grape Flavor Aid, was four years old when the film was being shot. American audiences did not need it explained. The mother who walks her daughter into Doom’s compound, smiling and serene, was a recent and recognizable image. The flower-children followers, the charismatic leader who can compel suicide with a word, the pilgrimage of the broken and the longing, all of it is built from late-1970s American memory.
The cult’s mountain fortress is the Mountain of Power. Milius, in interviews, has linked it to Alamut, the fortress of Hassan-i-Sabbah’s Nizari Ismaili sect, captured in 1090 and held until the Mongols destroyed it in 1256. The Syrian sister-fortress at Masyaf held out for another decade and only fell in 1267. Hassan’s followers were called hashishin, the source of the European word assassin. The medieval European chronicles claimed Hassan controlled them through hashish, sex, and a simulated paradise garden behind his fortress. Modern scholarship, beginning with Bernard Lewis’s 1967 The Assassins, has shown the drug-and-paradise story is largely European fabrication, but the political reality of a small religious sect using devoted assassins to topple sultans is real. Marco Polo recorded the legend a generation after Alamut fell, and it has been part of Western imagination ever since.
The serpent itself draws on a deep, broad layer of cultural memory. Egyptian Set, the storm-god whose later iconography fuses with the destructive serpent Apep. The Mesopotamian and biblical serpent traditions. Howard mixed these freely. Milius pushed the visual further toward generic ophidian terror, giant snakes coiling around pillars, a giant snake-faced statue, devotees handing themselves over to be embraced.
None of the source material gives Milius the riddle of steel; that is his own contribution.
The Riddle of Steel
It is the central spiritual proposition of the film and it is not in Howard.
The boy’s father, before the village burns, tells him that no one in the world can be trusted. Not gods. Not men. Not even women. Only steel. The riddle is what makes steel strong. Doom answers the same question, decades later, by demonstrating that flesh is stronger than steel. He raises a hand and a young woman throws herself off a cliff because he said so. The will that wields the steel, he tells Conan, is stronger than the steel itself. This is why he can take the boy’s mother’s head with one stroke and feel nothing. The flesh he cares about is his own will to act on other flesh.
Conan has to invert the answer to win. The flesh that is stronger than steel is not the flesh of the will that compels others. It is the flesh that endures. The slave who learned the blade and refused to die on the Tree of Woe. Doom’s answer is the cult-leader’s answer. Conan’s answer is the survivor’s answer. They are both Nietzschean. Only one of them gets to walk away.
This is why the Nietzsche epigraph is not decoration. The whole film is a working-out of the maxim. The wheel grinds the boy. The cold strips him. The slave-pits sharpen him. He is sold and bought and starved and crucified, and at no point does the script offer redemption from outside. There is no Christ-figure intervention and no benevolent god. Crom does not answer prayers. The cosmology of the film is the war-school of life that Nietzsche named in his epigraph.
Milius has said, in his commentary, that he wanted Conan framed as a Nietzschean figure and the film as a study in the will to power taught by suffering. Whether or not he ever wrote down a specific answer to the riddle, the film answers it for him. Steel breaks. Will endures.
The Wizard of the Mounds: Bringing the Dead Back
The film’s strangest sequence is the resurrection. Conan is crucified on the Tree of Woe by Doom and left to die. Subotai cuts him down. He carries the body to the wizard called in the script the Wizard of the Mounds, played by the Japanese actor Mako Iwamatsu. The wizard agrees to call back Conan’s spirit, but he warns that the price will be paid later. They paint Conan’s body with marks, light a ring of torches, and the wizard begins to chant. As the night goes on, spirits gather. Subotai and Valeria fight them off with bare blades. By dawn Conan is alive again.
The crucifixion itself is older than the film. Howard wrote it in 1934 in “A Witch Shall Be Born,” published in Weird Tales in December that year, where Conan is nailed to a desert tree by a Shemite captain and survives through his own animal endurance. The resurrection ritual is Milius’s addition. It maps almost step by step onto a tradition the anthropologist Mircea Eliade documented in his 1951 study Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, the standard work on the subject.
Eliade’s argument, drawn from Siberian, Mongol, Tungusic, Inuit, and North American sources, is that shamanic soul-retrieval everywhere follows the same shape. The shaman enters trance, travels to the spirit world, locates the soul that has been lost or stolen, negotiates its return, and brings it back into the body before sunrise. Body painting is part of the preparation in Yakut, Buryat, and Tungus practice. A circle of fire marks the boundary against intrusive spirits in Buryat séances. Chanting and drumming carry the trance. The soul is never returned for free; the spirits demand payment, often blood, often an animal substitute, sometimes a piece of the shaman’s own life-force. Eliade is explicit on this in chapters five and six.
Every element of the screen ritual maps to a documented practice: the body marks, the torch circle, the chant, the price the spirits demand. Milius compresses the phases into a single dramatic night, but the structure is faithful.
The film also keeps the part of the tradition that does not appear in Eliade’s central material. While the wizard is in trance, the body is vulnerable. Spirits and demons may try to seize it. In Eliade’s Siberian sources the shaman handles this himself. In the Slavic East, the work of guarding the corpse falls to armed defenders. The folklorist Felix Oinas, writing in the Slavic and East European Journal in 1978, documented the East Slavic practice of armed wake-keepers standing over a body during the first nights, especially when revenance was feared. Gogol’s 1835 story “Viy” is the literary distillation: the seminarian Khoma reads psalms inside a chalk circle while demons attack the church for three nights. Subotai and Valeria with their swords are doing what Khoma does with his prayers. They are holding the boundary while the work happens.
The Tree of Woe pulls in another tradition that Milius did not name in interviews but that the visual cannot help carrying. In Hávamál stanzas 138 to 145, the longest of the wisdom poems in the Poetic Edda, Odin describes how he hung on a windswept tree for nine nights, wounded with a spear, given to himself, and learned the runes from the dead. The Tree of Woe is not Yggdrasil exactly, and not the Christian cross exactly, but it is the structure both share: a man suspended on a tree, dying, and bringing something back from the other side.
The price the wizard warned about is paid in the next film. Conan the Destroyer opens with Akiro under threat from spirits collecting the debt. Most viewers do not know it is owed.
Robert E. Howard, Cross Plains, Texas
The man who invented this world died in the front seat of his Chevrolet sedan on June 11, 1936, in the driveway of his parents’ house in Cross Plains, Texas. He was thirty years old. His mother, Hester Jane Ervin Howard, had been ill for years with tuberculosis. That morning she fell into a coma from which the family doctor said she would not wake. Howard walked out to the car, sat down in the driver’s seat, and shot himself in the head with a .380 Colt Automatic he had borrowed from a friend, Lindsey Tyson. He died about eight hours later, before his mother. She died the next day.
He had written most of the Conan stories in the previous five years. Weird Tales, the Chicago pulp magazine that paid him by the word, had been publishing them since “The Phoenix on the Sword” in December 1932. He had also written Solomon Kane stories, Bran Mak Morn stories, the Kull stories that would later supply Thulsa Doom, hundreds of poems, westerns, boxing stories, and a long correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft, who fondly called him “Two-Gun Bob” in letters to mutual friends. The two of them exchanged around 130 letters between 1930 and 1936. The collected correspondence, edited by S.T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and Rusty Burke as A Means to Freedom, runs to two thick volumes (Hippocampus Press, 2009). Howard liked to argue with Lovecraft about civilization versus barbarism. Howard preferred barbarism. Lovecraft, who saw himself as the last gentleman of an extinct New England, did not.
Mark Finn’s biography Blood and Thunder, the standard life, locates Howard inside the world he wrote out of. West Texas oil-boom towns. A father who was a country doctor. A mother who was the central love and central wound of his life. A small library of Bulfinch, Plutarch, Gibbon, Harold Lamb’s books on the Mongols, Talbot Mundy, the King James Bible, and the cumulative noise of pulp fiction. There is no positive evidence Howard read Madame Blavatsky directly, or Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World from 1882. The scholarly consensus, articulated by Jeffrey Shanks in The Dark Man in 2011, is that Howard absorbed Theosophical Atlantis material through William Scott-Elliot rather than from Blavatsky herself. Howard’s essay places the Hyborian Age “after the sinking of Atlantis and before the beginning of recorded history” without giving an absolute date; the familiar “around 10,000 BCE” placement is L. Sprague de Camp’s later editorial gloss. The shape of the speculation was simply available to him. It is Theosophy-adjacent without being Theosophy. The shape of the speculation was simply available.
Howard had been writing toward Cimmeria for years before he found Conan. The character emerged whole in the spring of 1932, as Howard later told his correspondents, while he was writing about Conan’s slightly older relative Kull. He wrote in a white heat. He paced the room as he typed, shouting his characters’ lines aloud at full volume. The neighbours, on the other side of thin Cross Plains walls, complained about it. He spent four more years writing Conan stories, and then he was dead.
Milius’s film opens with a quote from Howard before the Nietzsche line, lifted from the very first published Conan story, “The Phoenix on the Sword,” in Weird Tales, December 1932. The original begins, Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of. Howard attributed the passage in-universe to “The Nemedian Chronicles.” He had been dead forty-six years when the film used it.
What the Film Holds
There is a tendency in modern viewing to treat Conan the Barbarian as a guilty pleasure, a Reagan-era macho artifact, a film whose real legacy is bodybuilding posters and the meme of crushing your enemies and hearing the lamentations of their women. Some of that is fair. Schwarzenegger is not a great actor and the film does not always pretend otherwise. The political register Milius worked in was idiosyncratic, performatively reactionary, and not aging well in some scenes. Critics in 1982 were already divided. Roger Ebert, who liked it, gave it three stars and praised James Earl Jones’s performance, which Ebert read as inspired in equal parts by Hitler, Jim Jones, and Goldfinger. Richard Schickel, who did not, called it “psychopathic Star Wars” in Time.
The film also does something rare. It is one of the only Hollywood productions of its scale to take a pulp-fiction author seriously enough to keep his cosmology intact. Howard’s Cimmerians stay Cimmerian. Crom stays grim and remote. The names of the gods stay borrowed from real Near Eastern pantheons, Set and Mitra and Bel intact. The geographic logic of Hyboria stays roughly in place. Milius then loads on top of this the production-design seriousness of Ron Cobb, who designed the swords as if they were museum pieces, and the symphonic seriousness of Poledouris, who conducted his Roman orchestra as if he were scoring a Wagner cycle.
Underneath the spectacle is a sermon. The sermon is Nietzschean, which is to say it is uncomfortable. The world owes you nothing. The gods owe you nothing. Pain teaches. Will outlasts steel. There is no Christ in the cosmology, only a memory of how the strong should bear themselves. Doom’s cult preys on people who never accepted that. Conan, who was thrown into the wheel as a boy and ground there until he was strong, has accepted it.
You can take the sermon or leave it. Many people have left it. But it is striking how few films take any position with this much conviction.
The Cimmerians were a real people. They burned Sardis around 644 BCE. The Assyrians fought them. Homer remembered them at the edge of the world. An Irish stone called Crom stood in a plain in County Cavan and was knocked over by a saint with a stick. A man named Robert Howard shot himself in Texas in 1936. A man named John Milius cast a young Austrian bodybuilder in Almería in 1981 and turned a script Oliver Stone wrote in a fog of cocaine into a Wagner opera with a Texan pulp pedigree and a Persian fortress and a dead philosopher’s line about suffering.
That is the world behind the film. It is older than the film by about four thousand years.
