Doctrine of Set

The Doctrine of Set is the religious creed of the Cult of Set, a death-worshipping sect that spreads its influence across the lands of the Hyborian Age through the hypnotic leadership of the sorcerer Thulsa Doom. Unlike the distant and indifferent gods of the northern peoples, the doctrine offers its followers a promise of eternal life and bliss unutterable in the embrace of the Wise Serpent, yet demands in return a total renunciation of the world, of family, and of life itself. It is a faith that worships Death as the ultimate benefactor, and its teachings invert the natural order of human bonds, commanding the faithful to murder their own parents as a boon, to forsake husbands, sweethearts, and family, and to find joy in the act of killing. The doctrine is the central ideological antagonist of the narrative, standing in direct opposition to the Cimmerian values of steel, self-reliance, and the hard-won strength of the individual, and its spread across the cities of Zamora and beyond sets the stage for Conan's vendetta against Thulsa Doom.

Origins and Nature of the Cult

The Cult of Set presents itself through public processions that are at once seductive and sinister. In the streets of Shadizar, the cult's followers march in a trance-like state, led by girls and young women draped in soiled white garments with garlands of wilted flowers crowning their unbound hair, dancing and chanting to the rhythm of tambourines. Behind them come ranks of youths beating drums and making discordant music with cymbals, lyres, and plaintive flutes, their eyes glazed and unaware of the scene about them, like dreamers walking in their sleep. Robed men with shaven pates stalk among them, bearing brazen pots of smouldering incense that fill the air with a seductive sweetness, a sickly-sweet perfume that repulses Conan's keen barbarian senses and alerts him to the presence of a nameless evil. The procession winds its way toward a slender dark tower that pierces the sky, a grim pinnacle draped in shadows despite the brilliance of the day, and as the marchers prepare to enter its gaping doorway, a chant arises that floats back above the noises of the street: "Doom... Doom... Doom..." The young men who bring up the rear stagger along with faces blank and drained of colour, lashing their naked flesh with whips made of the hides of serpents and barbed with snakes' fangs, so that with each stroke their flesh is beaded with blood, and yet they seem unaware of pain, chanting as they go, "Doom... Doom... Thulsa Doom... Thulsa Doom..."

The cult's methods are those of deception and seduction, as a merchant warns Conan when a priestess approaches him with the whispered promise, "Paradise awaits you, warrior. You need but follow me." The merchant steps forward to caution the Cimmerian: "Stranger, beware. The servants of Set are deceivers. They worship Death." Conan is shocked, for to him Death is ever the enemy, and the merchant elaborates that the cultists "would murder their own parents, thinking to confer a boon by relieving them of the burden of life." Subotai, the Hyrkanian thief who becomes Conan's companion, spits on the pavement and denounces them as "Fools and madmen, snake-lovers, death-worshippers!" explaining that everywhere in these lands they rear those dark towers, the citadels of Set, and that "Always it is the same: they lure the young and innocent into their toils—innocents who forsake husbands, sweethearts, and family to make love with serpents and mad priests, in orgies of foulness."

The Catechism of Doom

The core of the doctrine is articulated by Thulsa Doom himself in the grand hall of his temple, where he stands before his entranced followers with his hypnotic gaze holding each one in thrall. His catechism is a series of questions that demand absolute obedience and the severing of all human ties. "Who amongst you fears the warm embrace of death?" he asks. "When I, your father, ask it, will you take life for me? Will you strike true to the infidel heart, whether it be the heart of friend, or lover, or loved one in your former life?" The followers moan in response, swaying in rhythm to the beat of his utterances, chanting "Doom! Doom!" The questions continue: "Will you slip the silken noose over the heads of Set's enemies? In the wide world, will you stay true, ignoring the blandishments of the leaders, judges, and parents who have taught you falsely? Will you clutch the hilts of your daggers and spill the heart's blood of the infidels, to give them the infinite benison of eternal peace?"

When the questions cease, the litany begins, and Doom promises his followers that they "will feel naught but joy when you perform your duty to your god and lord, when you strike for Set and Doom, when the infidel bows before the blade, the cord, or the bowstring, accepting the inevitable." He tells them they "will grow in love of the Dark Master, the Wise Serpent, in the embrace of whose coils lies eternal life and bliss unutterable; for the day of Doom is at hand, the day of the Great Cleansing." The doctrine thus reframes murder as a sacred act of mercy, a gift of eternal peace to the unbeliever, and reframes the cultist's own death as a desirable union with the serpent god. Doom's rhetoric is one of systematic deception, as he tells his followers, "Your parents deceived you; your teachers deceived you. Fool others as they seek to fool you!" — a doctrine that replaces all prior authority with his own absolute command.

The Great Cleansing and the Holy Day

The doctrine's ultimate promise is the Great Cleansing, a prophesied apocalypse that Doom announces to the gathered Faithful of Set in the great temple, where hundreds of candles throw a dim radiance over the chamber and the commingling of young voices, flutes, and brasses makes solemn music. Doom, resplendent in his reptilian armour, mounts the dais and faces his followers, his eyes dark and filled with sorcery but with no humanity in them, and intones: "The day of doom is here. The purging is at last at hand. All who stand against us in high places, all who have lied to you and tried to turn you from me—parents, teachers, judges—all shall depart in a night of blood and fire. Then shall the earth be cleansed and ready to receive the god we worship." The listeners moan in ecstasy, "Set!" and Doom continues, "You, my children, are the pure water that will cleanse the world. You shall destroy all who stand against us. In your hands you hold the eternal light that burns in the eyes of Set!" The doctrine thus casts its followers as the instruments of divine purification, and the Great Cleansing as the inevitable culmination of their faith.

The doctrine also governs the daily life of the cult, imposing a holy day set apart by Set for prayers and relaxation, on which none may bestir himself until the sun goes down. When Subotai wonders why the cult's forces are so long in coming to attack, Yasimina, the princess who has become a priestess of Set, regards him as if he were a noxious insect and rebukes him: "Fool, do you not know this is a holy day, set apart by Set for prayers and relaxation? None may bestir himself until the sun goes down." Conan's sardonic reply — "Why didn't you say so sooner? You might have had some supper" — draws her cold response: "I would not make things easier for you, barbarian, no matter what I have to do without. You are the enemy of Set." The holy day reveals the doctrine's totalitarian reach, extending even into the timing of warfare, and demonstrates how completely the cult's rituals structure the lives of its members.

The Doctrine's Demonstration of Power

The doctrine's most chilling demonstration comes in the garden of Doom's pleasure pavilion, where the cult leader seeks to impress the chained Conan with the nature of his power. Doom calls a young girl to him, his sibilant voice scarcely above a whisper: "Come to me, child." The childish face becomes suffused with joy, and she poises for a moment at the edge of the embankment before leaping from the wall and falling with a heavy thud on the tiles of the garden walk below, her doll-like body broken. Conan averts his eyes, and Doom laughs, the music of his laughter spun through with a note of triumph. "That is strength, boy—that is power!" he declares. "It is strength against which the hardness of steel or the resilience of human flesh are as naught. What is steel, compared to the hand that wields it; what is the hand, without a mind to command it? There is the secret of strength. Steel, bah!" The doctrine here reveals its deepest claim: that the power of the mind, of will and command over life and death, surpasses any material weapon, and that the willing self-destruction of a follower is the ultimate proof of that power. The girl's leap is not suicide but an act of worship, a joyful surrender to the master's will that demonstrates the doctrine's hold over even the youngest and most innocent of its devotees.

The Doctrine Against the Cimmerian Code

The Doctrine of Set stands in stark opposition to the Cimmerian code that Conan's father, Corin, teaches him on a rocky ridge swept clear of snow, in the midst of a howling storm. Corin tells the nine-year-old Conan that the mightiest of the gods is Father Crom, who rules earth and heaven and the broad and restless sea, and that the greatest of Crom's secrets is the secret of steel, a secret the gods taught not to men but jealously guarded in their inmost hearts. He teaches that "in all the world you can trust no one, neither man nor woman nor beast, neither spirit nor demon nor god. But you can trust a blade of well-forged steel," and that "The heart of a man is like a piece of unworked iron. It must be hammered by adversity and forged by suffering and the challenges flung by the thoughtless gods, nigh unto the point of breaking." Where the Doctrine of Set demands the surrender of the self to a master and the embrace of death, the Cimmerian code demands the forging of the self through suffering into an instrument of one's own will, and the trust in steel as the only reliable companion. Conan's own relationship with Crom is one of indifference — "Crom is aloof in his high heaven, indifferent to the needs and prayers of mortals," he tells Subotai, and "He cares not about the sins of puny men" — yet this indifference is itself a form of freedom, for it leaves the Cimmerian to rely on his own strength and his own blade. The doctrine's promise of eternal life in the coils of the Wise Serpent is thus the antithesis of the Cimmerian acceptance of death as the warrior's inevitable end, a truth that Conan acknowledges in the elegy he recites before Valeria's funeral pyre: "The way of the warrior is ever death." The conflict between the Doctrine of Set and the Cimmerian code is not merely a clash of armies but a clash of worldviews, between the seductive promise of transcendence through submission and the hard-won dignity of self-reliance in the face of an indifferent cosmos.