There is a conspiracy theory that the world is ruled by reptilian shapeshifters who appear to be human. David Icke promoted the idea in his books, such as The Biggest Secret (1999) and Children of the Matrix (2001) which claimed they are the descendants of interdimensional beings called Archons who arrived on Earth thousands of years ago. It has supporters among QAnon conspiracy theorists. Alleged reptilians or lizard people include Queen Elizabeth, George W. Bush, Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, as well as Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears and Katy Perry. Admittedly, that could explain a lot. However, the idea of reptilian shapeshifters who appear to be human has apparently been “borrowed” from the “Serpent Men” of Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian and King Kull.
I first came across the “Serpent Men” in Marvel Comics’ Conan the Barbarian, No. 89, in 1978. Conan is separated from his companions Belit and Zula. He appears to find them but they attack him. Conan kills them and their coprses revert to Serpent Men. The real Belit and Zula arrive and Conan makes them say, “Ka Nama Kaa Lajerama”, which he learned from Red Sonja, because Serpent Men cannot say it.
Similarly, in the 1982 movie Conan the Barbarian, Conan’s enemy Thulsa Doom, played by James Earl Jones, was the leader of the Temple of Set, the Serpent God, and could transform himself into a giant snake.
In Robert E. Howard’s orginal stories, Thulsa Doom and the Serpent Men were the enemies of Kull who was something of a first draft of Conan. Kull lived thousands of years before Conan. Like Conan, he was a barbarian who seized the throne.
In the short story “The Shadow Kingdom”, publshed in Weird Tales, August 1929, Kull from Atlantis has become king of Valusia and he learns about the conspiracy of the serpent men or snake men, an ancient pre-human race with human bodies and serpent heads who can appear to be human. It turns out they all around him. They are planning to assassinate him and replace him with a serpent man as they have done with other rulers of Valusia. Shapeshifting reptilian beings who are conspiring to take over and we won’t even know – this is clearly the origin of the conspiracy theory. Kull addresses the leadership challenge like any barbarian-turned-king would and kills them all with his big sword.
Many people are now taking Howard’s idea of a conspiracy of apparently human rulers who are really ancient reptilian shapeshifters as truth. It looks like Marvel’s portrayal of the Serpent Men and David Icke’s reptilians were both green.
I do not know if David Icke was reading Conan the Barbarian comics in the 1970s. I have consulted several of his books and I could not find any mention of Robert E. Howard or his characters.
However, David Icke does quote from The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean (David Icke, Children of the Matrix, Bridge of Love Publications, Ryde, 2001, pp. 134-135, 143-144, Davis Icke, The David Icke Guide to the Global Conspiracy(and how to end it), David Icke Books, Ryde, 2007, pp. 98-101, 111). This purports to be a 36,000 year old poem written by Thoth, a priest-king of Atlantis who built the Great Pyramid, which was translated by Maurice Doreal (Claude Doggins) and published in 1939. In fact, Doreal appears to have written it. The poem warns of “serpent-headed” men from the “kingdom of shadows’ who could appear as humans and replaced human rulers (Children of the Matrix, p 140). It sounds like Doreal had been reading “The Shadow Kingdom”.
As Jason Colavito explains in “The Emerald Tablets of Thoth”: A Lovecraftian Plagiarism, Doreal plagiarised parts of his poem from the writings of another pulp writer. H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft and Howard used to swap ideas in their stories.
Nevertheless, David Icke apparently thinks The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean are authentic and are evidence for his reptilian shapeshifter conspiracy, “That is a wonderful summary of what happened and is still happening.” (Children of the Matrix, p 140)
In A Culture of Conspiracy, Michael Barkun writes,
“Although Doreal and the others spoke of the serpent race as a confirmable historical reality, the idea almost certainly came from pulp fiction … In all likelihood, the notion of a shape-changing serpent race first came from the imagination of an obscure pulp fiction author, Robert E. Howard (1906-1936). Howard was a fantasy writer of the sword-and-sorcery variety, best known for his character Conan the Barbarian. In August 1929, he published a story in Weird Tales magazine called “The Shadow KIngdom” in which the evil power was the snake-men whose adversary, Kull, came from Atlantis. These creatures had the bodies of men, but the heads of serpents, just as Doreal was later to assert, and like his Serpent Race, they had the capacity to change shape, appearing human when they wished. In Howard’s story, they were thought to have been dsstroyed, but they returned insidiuosly, insinuating themselves into positions of power.” (Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003, p 120, 121)
So, the links in the chain are Howard-Doreal-Icke. In 1929 Robert E. Howard invented the conspiracy of shapeshifting Serepnt Men in ‘The Shadow Kingdom”. In 1939 Maurice Doreal incorporated Howard’s ideas into The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, which David Icke used as a source for his shapeshifting reptilian conspiracy, which has spread among some QAnon supporters.
Malcolm Nicholson 