There are many characters in our society we are familiar with whether from books and comic books or television and movies. One of the characters we know from a variety of media is Conan the Barbarian but little is known about how he came into being.  Conan is a character from the sword and sorcery genre created by a writer from Texas named Robert E. Howard in 1932. Howard’s Conan stories began as a series of articles submitted to the fantasy magazine Weird Tales. Howard’s influences ranged from the Greek writer Plutarch to the mythology works of Thomas Bulfinch.  Howard wrote many more Conan stories over the next 4 year completing 21 stories.

Robert E. Howard committed suicide in 1936 after a combination of depression and the unrecoverable coma his mother entered (she died the day after Howard committed suicide).  In the years after Howard’s death the Conan copyright changed hands several times and eventually wound up in the hands of L. Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter. They revised the Howard stories and sometimes rewrote them.

Conan books have been written and published by various different authors over the last 50 years, many of them trying to imitate the style of Robert E. Howard. The original Conan stories written by Howard were allowed to go out of print and were unavailable in their original form. In 2003 the original Howard stories were collected and printed by British Publisher Wandering Star and were republished in the U.S. by Ballantine. These volumes included Howard’s original stories but expanded on them by offering his notes and letters on the setting and for the world of Conan which provided a more complete look at the history of Howard’s ideas and the genesis of the character. Regardless of the history of the character the books, comic books, and the movies of the 80s have kept the Conan character alive and well in the imagination of society since he was first put into print in the 1930s by Robert E. Howard.

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Of the dozens of texts held sacred by the school of Judaic mysticism known as Kabbalah, perhaps the most important is the Sefer Hazohar, (literally the Book of Splendor. Indeed, students of this collection of several lengthy Kabbalistic commentaries on the Torah — most commonly known in the West as the Holy Zohar – often assign it the same stature as Judaism’s two most holy books, the Torah and the Talmud.

Written in an arcane form of Aramaic, the Zohar purports to have been authored by second century rabbi and prominent critic of the Roman government in years following the destruction of the Second Temple, Shimon bar Yochai. Yochai claimed to have received the text from God himself, though most modern day scholars, however, attribute the work to Moses de Leon — a Spanish Kabbalist who lived some eleven hundred years later. Historians do concede, however, that, much like the books of the Bible, the disparate pieces of the Zohar were not all set down at one time. Rather, de Leon merely was the first to recorded several different tracts of the Oral Torah that passed been down from father to son, teacher to student over the course of many generations and that Yochai could have been an initial contributor.

The Kabbalah’s own inborn tradition details its spread. As the Jewish Diaspora spread throughout Europe and Eurasia after the fall of the Temple and, later, the crumbling of the Roman Empire, adepts of the “secret chain of mysteries” that is the Kabbalah brought the sacred knowledge with them, but shared it only with a select few. It would have been in this fashion that the original text of the Zohar was secreted out of the Holy Land and into one of Spain’s many Jewish communities.

And there was good reason for Jewish scholars to keep to the Zohar away from public scrutiny. The book maintains that the Torah and, by extension, all of reality exists on two distinct levels: the exoteric and the esoteric. It further posits that there is no one true interpretation of the Old Testament and that every soul is given – and, more importantly, encouraged — to make its own unique reading of scripture.

This statement alone – which happens to share a fair amount of philosophical overlap with the similarly persecuted Gnostics — would have been viewed as heresy by the religions by Spain’s then Judeo-friendly Catholic Church and citizens.

Consider then the anti-Semitism that swelled throughout the country in the years after Leon’s death. In 1492, all Spanish Jews were forcibly expelled; those that chose to convert in order to remain found themselves facing integration the hands of the Inquisition. And so, formal Kabbalic study was largely eradicated from the Iberian Peninsula – but not before the Zohar had managed become a key text of yet another secretive, albeit quasi-secular, sect: the European alchemists.

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On October 27, 1871, the infamous Boss Tweed was arrested in New York on corruption charges. For many, the arrest was long overdue as he had a disturbing stronghold on the New York political system for many years. When we think of corrupt public servants and political scandals, the first name that comes to mind for any historian is William Marcy Tweed.

Born in 1823, Tweed came from a humble background on New York’s lowest east side. His community was founded by immigrants and represented a lower class in society. Tweed kept this to himself so as not to ruin his chance at political achievement. He was a carpenter, accountant, fireman and then in 1851 his vocational experience and membership in the democratic party got him elected as an alderman.

After alderman, Tweed held a number of offices and began to grease the palms of those who could help him further his career and fiscal hopes. Work contracts, land purchases, wages and materials were all susceptible to bribery, kickbacks and favors. Tweed’s world was wealth and influence and Tammany Hall was his head quarters.

Tweed found favor among newly arrived immigrant populations who were coming into New York at the rate of hundreds per week. Uneducated in the ways of American politics, immigrants were easy targets for Boss tweed. They often swapped board and employment for votes. A semi transient community was perfect for Tweed and his fellow thieves.

The growing population of New York created a need for large construction projects, municipal improvements and contract workers. It was a fertile ground for manipulative individuals to make a few extra bucks on the side. Boss Tweed was a member of The Society of Saint Tammany a charitable organization that became a filter for money jobs and votes from the immigrant community.

All was going well until an accountant felt slighted by Tweed’s small kickback and decided to tell his story to the papers. He placed incriminating papers in the hands of the New York Times and it was all downhill from there. It didn’t take journalists and legal prosecutors very long to trace the paper trail back to Tweed.

In all, Tweed and his crew used their political offices and professional connections to skim almost 200 million dollars off the top of the New York City municipal budget. After his arrest and initial sentence of 12 years, Boss Tweed served one year, released, sued by the city of New York, sent back to jail, escaped, fled to Cuba, was found and rearrested. He spent the rest of his life in a New York jail cell where he died in 1878. Tweed was nothing if not a character and a great example of how not to run a city.

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Though oracles were commonplace throughout ancient Greece and Rome, the most famous dwelled at Delphi, a limestone temple on the western face of Mount Parnassus. Built in the 6th century BC, the complex was presided over by a chaste and elderly priestess called the Ptyhia who channeled the “breath” of the sun god Apollo into prophecy.

According to legend, Apollo claimed Delphi as his own after slaying its original inhabitant, Python — a dragon born of the earth goddess Gaia – in a battle between the gods of the earth and sky. He then took the seas to conscript sailors into his first order of priests, though he would require a female virgin to serve as earthly mouthpiece.

Supplicants to Delphi would be first required to bathe themselves in the waters of the temple’s Castalian spring — later a popular inspirational spot for Roman poets — to purify themselves before entering the Oracle’s sacred presence. Only after paying a fee would they then be permitted to ask their questions of the presiding Pythia. She would then retire to her personal her chamber and enter shamanic trance. Accounts differ as to the method by which this was achieved, though the drinking blood, the chewing of laurel leaves, the inhalation of smoke or the breathing of hallucinogenic vapors emitted by the temple’s cavernous rock –a phenomenon recently confirmed by modern day geologists – have all been suggested. The Pythia would then speak in a cryptic tongue, which would be converted into hexameter verse by the temple’s priests.

Those seeking divination at Delphi came from all social strata. From criminals to kings, many sought advice from the Oracle, though how they interpreted her predictions differed wildly. Legend holds that King Croesus of Lydia went to war over the Oracle’s prediction that if he battled the Persians a great army would fall. Unfortunately for him, the army in question turned out to be his own.

Tales of the Oracle’s supposed prescience became so ingrained in Grecian culture that she appears as a character in the three most well known pieces of Greek literature, Virgil’s Aeneid, Homer’s Odyssey, and Sophocles’ Oedipus saga, along with dozens of others. Despite her role in these quasi-mythical epics, the Oracle’s existence as an authentic historical figure is confirmed by the more than five hundred recorded prophesies of the Pythia that survive to this day.

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