Spirit and Society

(INDEPENDENT ESSAY)

1.

The sense of power eradicated from the human being moves us to an interesting analogous apperception: What if we took away the souls of civilizations?

            The answer to this apperceptive question is given to us symbolically in the fantasy film Conan the Destroyer. Without a soul, a civilization becomes dystopian. Not because it has exhausted the potentials of its progress but because it will kill the driver of historical changes that embody progress. This is a sublime form of the answer: What really knocks underneath the cold depths of water to be seen and freed from the cloudy cover of ice?

            Before I begin, I must inform you that I felt a special pleasure in interpreting this film. Unfortunately, the viewers of the film did not recognize the wonderful symbolism contained within. They experienced it as a piquant allegory, as a hypnagogic and mysteriously successful flight of someone else’s imagination and, in the most favorable circumstances, as a stage show that leaves a deep symbolic impression but has no symbolic value. I am flattered to embark on such a hermeneutic adventure. I feel the approving gesture of the powerful cogito. I believe that I have found the archetypal key that introduces us to the secrets of the film. By unlocking them, I will dispel the allegorical fog. More precisely, I will transform the hollow mirage into an oasis of beautiful meanings. Meaning will “deify” the self-identical appearance of the drama. Postmodern reflexes often awaken in me. In the borderline and simply popular products of culture, I recognize quick and clear springs of mysterious meaning. Often, reflex is a crucial function of systemic operation but is belittled because, viewed from the perspective of the magnificent goals that the system sets for itself, it is an ephemeral sequence.

2.

         Conan is a powerful barbarian, super-experienced and invincible adventurer. He needs to take a precious stone from a sorcerer who lives in a crystal palace in the middle of a cursed lake. If he succeeds, he will need to place the precious stone in a perfectly decorated horn. It is not difficult to decipher the symbolic correlates of the precious stone and the decorated horn if we know the fundamental ethnological facts. The gem symbolizes wisdom; or society if it is a field where the epistemological skills of science are practiced. The latter is true if we reduce the symbolism of the gem to the systemic structures of cognition and connect it with the technogenic nature of the state. The perfectly decorated horn is the most trivial associative symbol. Its symbolic meaning is revealed by the adjectives characteristic of its appearance and by its “deep form”. The horn symbolizes abundance, that is, powerful financial and economic conditions. Symbolic objects merge into one super-object to show the magnificent essence of the unity of knowledge and abundance. Knowledge and abundance are the pillars of civilization. Their synthesis reflects the civilizational sustainability and the ability of civilization to live in itself, for itself and outside itself. The synthesized super-object should be placed at the head of Dagoth, the sleeping god. This “local necessity” proves how important knowledge and abundance are to civilization. This task and potential action simultaneously reveals to us that Dagoth is a symbol of civilization in genere, and civilization is the disguised essence of Dagoth.

            Why does the sleeping god Dagoth symbolize an uncertain civilization? I cannot give the answer in a sublime manner.

            Dagoth is a sculpture in the form of a young divine man. If we judge him by his terrifying and morbid sonority, his name does not match his beautiful appearance. This sound-visual ambivalence reminds us of the cacophonous syntax that interweaves the context of every civilization and brings it to life in an obscure way. Civilizations do not want an immortality that miraculously emerges from the natural state of things, but one that does not have to be real and must be achieved in a technocentric way. It is enough for immortality to be fabricated and self-simulated as if it were happening here and now, while in essence and in practice, neither it nor the medium for which it is intended exists.

    After Conan and his remaining companions will stuck the horn into the shiney marble forehead of Dagoth, the divine youth will come to life and will supposedly provide society with an eternal well-being. Dagoth will plant his divine dream (which is mute and unknown to the world) in social reality in order to unite them in a living and homogeneous synthesis. He will transform the dream into a paradisiacal life by adding it to the imperfect circumstances of the world in order to perfect them. In turn, he will transform life into an uninterrupted ecstatic dream by integrating his immortal ideals into a decaying existence. Dagoth, unlike Prometheus, will not singularize progress. He will establish the utopian kingdom, the imperial utopia, almost in advance. Everything that is characteristic of the highest stages of development will suddenly be embodied and will suddenly function. It seems that civilization itself has exhausted its internal possibilities. She expects a higher being to perpetuate and repair her overpowering primordial organization damaged by the rulers and their destructive habits of domination. The question of the relationship between development and technology within civilization is not raised, because, at least it seems that singularization and completed progress are one and the same, a permanently accomplished cycle. But the instructive conclusion of the film is that civilization can never truly know and evaluate its possibilities. At first glance, faith in the exhausted possibilities of civilization has set the final condition necessary for Dagoth to awaken from the unknown dream in a beautiful divine form and to introduce a state of affairs superior to the realized teleological positions. But there is another, most significant sub-condition. The truly final condition for the god to awaken as a positive eschatological being is the following. Princess Jenna must die ritually, she must be sacrificed to the god, before the god finally awakens. Jenna symbolizes the soul of civilization. If Jenna does not die in due time, Dagoth will awaken in the form of a monster who will bring doom to the world.

Before I begin to explain why Jenna symbolizes the soul of civilization and what the symbolic evidence is for this, I will leave an indirect indication of why Dagoth will turn from a savior of society into a destroyer of the world.

The soul, in the most universal sense of the word, corrects the final assessments of the instinct for progress. Whenever the instinct assesses that civilization is reaching or has reached its peak, the soul steps forward with its “creative initiatives” and extends the lifespan of civilization.

            Dagoth should awaken as a divine youth and savior without wishing death to the girl, to the soul, precisely because his civilization has not yet realized itself. In truth, Dagoth embodies the wrong assessment of the progressive instinct. He will certainly arise and exist, regardless of whether the soul dies and regardless of how much development the civilization has achieved. No matter how polarized his appearance, his body will reflect the fanatical view that there is no higher civilizational development than the one currently established. For him, there is no more suitable temporary state of development than the one awaiting his arrival so that he, Dagoth, can transform it into a perfect world order. His softly arrogant and eerily narcissistic silence, reinforced through the sculptural form, is a reflection of the proud self-consciousness that does not want to see reality. If Jenna survives, she will reveal his ugly fanatical face. Thus, the soul always rediscovers, exposes and wounds the delusion that the current historical order reflects the highest civilizational development. It suits Dagoth that Jenna dies before she wakes up. In doing so, the god will stifle the truth that the teleology he cunningly offers is only a fog in which the imperfect dystopia is hidden.

            Civilization is achieved when: singularization has initiated progress, and progress has fully realized itself. In such an atmosphere, the soul is discarded as surplus, both from the perspective of subjectivity and from the perspective of society.

            The fact that Jenna will not die during the ritual awakening of the Dagoth is quintessentially instructive. The surviving Soul foreshadows two outcomes of the ritual that are equally disastrous for society. If the Dagoth had enthroned himself as a “good god,” he would have perpetuated the delusion that his era had reached the peak of progress and would have destroyed the initiatives of the singularity at their roots. One of the phases of development whose degree of progressiveness cannot be assessed would have become a permanent reality. The imperfect utopia would have put on the mask of an ideal order. The unexpected transformation of the Dagoth into a terrible monster overturned this possibility and presented a consequence that is equal in harm to the opposite outcome. He reduced the perfect utopia and the ideal order to a horrible supernatural tyranny. Having transformed himself into a monster, he set off to roam furiously from place to place, destroying the foundations of the world with his chaotic and cataclysmic being. Such is the fate of every tyrannical social delusion. If the authorities had ritually killed the “soul of civilization,” they would have established a bizarre order; a utopia blindly confident in itself and its teleological historical role. The Soul of Civilization survived. This, symbolically speaking, was an obvious sign that the terrifying kingdom and its organization were not the pinnacle of progress, nor did they meet the ultimate expectations of singularization. The phallic transformation of the Dagoth into a more animalistic monster and his obscene awakening reinforce this impression. In this form, the Dagoth is semi-conscious of his power and uses it wildly and inarticulately. His predatory nature reflects the bad faith in totality and threatens society, the world, development and progress symbolically and indirectly. Every tyrant becomes more animalistic and from a master of power and wisdom turns into a monster, the moment he understands that historical development does not end with him and through him. His personal condition symbolizes the civilization consumed by angry impotence while the “soul of civilization” saves the historical development and devalues the current phase.

3.

            The symbolic figure of Jenna, which is key to all crucial events that will follow, is not exhausted by what has been said above. Her archetypal value will permeate all the pores of the metaphorical development of the adventure. If this is clear, we continue to explain further.

Because Jenna symbolizes the soul of civilization, she is the only one who can: 1) bring Conan to the shores of the cursed lake and the crystal castle; and 2) only she can touch the precious stone, the philosopher’s stone, and not die.

          It is commonly known that in Jung’s archetypology the soul is ambiguous by nature. It reveals truths and things and thereby conceals other truths and other things that are indirectly and directly related to their source, that is, to what has already been discovered. As such, the soul is a fundamental enigma, a benign and at the same time obscene Sphinx whose attitudes and hints must not be taken “for granted”. In the film, these enlightening powers of Jenna are always positive and have nothing in common with the perfidious character of the oneiric or suggestive soul. The two gigantomorphic abilities of the princess unfold in the spirit of the soul and come into close correlation with its one-sided nature.

            Jenna leads Conan to the gates of the crystal palace and brings him before the dark waters of the cursed lake. Likewise, the soul leads reason, the brute intellectual force, to the gates of knowledge which, taken in itself, is a far-fetched morsel even for reason and its solipsistic ambitions. But Fletcher, the film’s producer, comes to a small, at first glance imperceptible, but very interesting and important conclusion. Jenna suggests to Conan that they go in a direction that she will determine. Conan refuses and tells her that they should go another way. In the end, it turns out that Conan has chosen the right path. Does Fletcher discredit the soul’s guiding skills by doing this? Of course not. In addition to representing the unrefined powers of being, Conan has the potential to acquire semi-divine characteristics and abilities. The two potentials merge with each other and together provide Conan with a local victory. One form of unrefined power that co-constitutes the ontogenesis of the barbarian is instinct. And even the barbarian as a socio-historical type represents the semi-enlightened subject, one who is too rude to become a true aristocrat, but also educated enough not to be called a “savage” in the wrong, pejorative sense of the word. So, instinct is the most ancient mode of the soul, it is its prototypical manifestation. It does not essentially correct the decision of the soul and its general coordinating acts, but rather complements its decisive function. Conan is helpless without the soul’s comprehensive coordination and its exceptional operational privileges.

4.

            The following interpretation shows even more convincingly that Princess Jenna symbolizes the soul in a psychological, and not only in a civilizational sense.

Conan will fight the sorcerer Tot-Amon who will set him a bizarre trap. Tot-Amon will transform into an ape-like monster and attack Conan in a room covered with mirrors on all sides. The transformation of the sorcerer in such circumstances deduces, modifies and miniaturely repeats the phallic awakening of Dagoth. The sorcerer is cautious and well-read. Therefore, he consciously transforms into a monster and acts consciously, despite the fact that he cannot soften the impulses of wild behavior. He gives in to savage urges, but at the same time fills them with unusual human qualities. The mirrors reveal to us how obsessed with himself is, the one who believes to be infinitely powerful and that he rules the environment he has intended for himself. The instinct that bowed to the soul and rejected false teleological projections wins. A proud civilization, localized in epistemological mysteries, loses catastrophically. Conan’s victory foreshadows the victory of Jenna. The soul is greater than instinct, just as epistemological mysteries are tiny compared to the master of the total civilizational development. Because Dagoth is greedy godly being he can not resist to embrace and use self-unawarelly the most destructive forces of nature. That’s why Conan, as a representative of the instinct, will face him.

       The mortally wounded sorcerer Tot-Amon, the undisputed guardian of the gem, will touch the precious stone. We assume that he will do so either out of love for it, as a sign of farewell, or to check whether the rumors about its deadly effect are true, or because he believes that touching it will cure him. In any case, he knows that he will die at any moment. Having nothing to lose, he will expose himself to a risk that is more than dangerous in other circumstances.

The sorcerer touched the gem. His body exploded into countless beams of light. The beams tore apart his body, moved away from him, and pierced him at the same time. Jenna, on the other hand, joyfully ook the gem in her hands and carried it like a newborn child. Why did she succeed and he did not?

Tot-Amon is blind with one eye. His archetypal figure is the opposite of the archetypal figure of the soul. He represents a perspective that the soul fatally lacks. Instinct and intuition complement the soul, and help it to express itself. The sorcerer symbolizes an absolute lack, synthesizing in himself all the qualities that the soul cannot have in principle. He has gathered in his mind the impossible secrets of the world. Such a personal configuration will accelerate his, already obvious, fall. In other words, Tot-Amon represents the archetype of the fallen sage. The sages consult their own prophetic reflection. They are aware that the riddle they share will play a fateful role. The riddle will play such a role precisely because ignorance of its secrets will lead to a turn in changing circumstances. No one knows what the unsolvable part of the riddle means, although perhaps the riddle itself provides consistent information. Therefore, they bypass it with sacred trepidation. The relationship of Tot-Amon to the gem is the same as the relationship of prophetic reflection to the spoken prophecy. Tot-Amon is convinced that touching the gem leads to death. But at the same time, he hesitates, because he has not verified what he claims. He feels that the properties of the gem are as he assumes, but he does not have the courage to verify the truth. The ambiguous appearance of the gem challenges him, but he does not dare to check, no matter how clever he is. He does not try to decipher the testimony wrapped in mysterious allusions, he does not intend to discover the code that will reveal to him an aspect of the future that gives him an advantage, or blinds him so he will pursue self-destructively his ever-escaping self-sustenance. He hesitates which empirical assumption to choose. The riddle forces us to make assumptions about the associated unknown. Truth encourages us to choose from the given possibilities. Unlike the fallen sage, the soul has complete control over the hidden truth, believes in its own knowledge, despite the fact that it itself creates the distorted and dangerous expression of truth. The soul creates a distorted representation of the truth, but this does not mean that it becomes a victim of the distorted expression, confuses itself and betrays its own implicite knowledge.

The soul loves to play this mysterious game. Intuition helps the soul to penetrate the heart of the intriguing and blurry half-testimony, to adjust the distorted expression and align it with the hidden meanings. Sometimes, intuition is so carried away that it announces to the subject that the soul knows the meaning of the riddle, but does not want to say it in order to torture or test the challenged. It is a messenger who abuses its role, or says what it must not say as if it’s drunk. Its revelations are empty, more difficult to decipher even than the riddle itself. And yet, intuition has revealed what insidious “discretions” the soul is capable of. Dream, the soul’s nocturnal companion, alludes to the soul being the owner of the truth; that the soul proclaims the distorted testimony and wants to show that it produces its enigmatic form. In dreams, the symbolic figures of the soul rule over the deceptive faces of truth. They break the code, change it and disseminate it in various manifestations. Prophetic reflection, on the other hand, communicates and keeps the riddle secret until the time comes for it to be communicated. In doing so, it does not know the truth as such. It artificially copies the skills of the soul. For the sake of truth, it does not even try to bluff and give the impression that it knows the hidden truth, but deliberately does not tell it. It does not hide behind the mechanisms of fate and the need to maintain them, when it is asked to show what it really knows. Instinct is a powerful and atavistic “little brother” of the soul. In contrast to it, prophetic reflection is a formal voice of the soul that communicates what it does not know, or if it does know, it does not believe that it is assuming its discovered meaning correctly. It does not trust the premonitions, even though it reveals their messages. The soul does not consider itself to believe in premonitions, it is embracing theme no matter how obviously fantastic the note in the message is.

5.

The various consequences of touching the gem, strikingly expresses the powers of the soul and the prophetic reflection.

            Princess Jenna will confidently take the precious stone and will not suffer in any way. Death awaits Tot-Amon, just as the prophetic reflection faces the possible solution (the deciphered content), the truth (the realized testimony) and the riddle (the multi-valued code), coldly and uncompromisingly. Moreover, the half-blind wizard lives in a crystal palace. The transparent and luminous texture of the palace represents the spirit of knowledge. In this case, the wizard’s miraculous powers are a kind of primordial intellectual experience; they compete with instinct on the same level. The vertical architectural order of the castle symbolizes the teleologized content of knowledge. The palace stands menacingly and mysteriously upright in the middle of the cursed lake. Dark lake symbolizes the subconscious. In the black and dirty underwater territory, horrors are hidden that even the most sadistic mind cannot imagine. Black waters splash the castle and penetrate it through the tunnels at its base. Thus, unconscious fantasies connect with consciousness through the pure subconscious. The castle, for its part, is a transparent tall building that here and there shimmers menacingly, and cunningly, resembling a morbid prophet who penetrates everything as much as he penetrates himself. The castle objectifies the being of the wizard Tot-Amon. The castle also symbolizes the mind and its transparent and articulated structures. Before Jenna took it, the precious stone was hidden deep in the heart of the castle. Conan came to it so that, while fighting Tot-Amon, he accidentally broke one of the mirrors that surrounded them. He inflicted a mortal wound on the zoomorphic wizard. After that, Conan broke the remaining mirrors until he filled the wizard’s body with wounds that would kill him forever. Symbolically speaking, the alien, brave and relatively violent instinct exposes the faces of the self-loving tyrannical character one by one and destroys his proud self-consciousness, in order to penetrate the secret of his power. The secret of his power is the wisdom embodied in the gem. Conan found the precious stone behind one of the mirrors that led to a small, suffocating room.

            The brain that held wisdom, the unconscious, and the products of the mind together has disappeared. A controversial figure has passed from existence. The fact that Tot-Amon had only one eye is not in the least accidental. The eye cavity is like the content of the riddle that is hidden from those who want to know it. The living eye, on the other hand, is the riddle itself, which reveals future events in the form of coded testimony, as a half-testimony. Tot-Amon compromises the prophetic role. He stingily keeps in his possession the secrets of the world, on which, in fact, the development of the singular trajectory depends. He hides the riddles in himself and for himself and holds the world in unnatural isolation and strange hostage. Tot-Amon does not mediate between the one who wants to acquire fateful knowledge and the testimony that announces itself as a prediction. The prediction is not just the announcement of a probable possibility, but an inevitable state of affairs that resembles a conjecture. He fences himself off with magical traps to save the hypochondriac mind from curious strangers. The magic stone is embedded in the structure of the castle just as true knowledge (wisdom) is hidden in pure apperception. The suffocating room is evidence of how much the sorcerer has abused the function and object that allows him to be powerful in the given sense. The black lake surrounds the castle and oppresses it just as the room suffocates and shadows the stone of wisdom. Thus, the possibilities of knowledge are oppressed by a double gradation. The sinister expanse of the unconscious and the self-loving heart that enjoys its knowledge alone do everything to prevent wisdom from penetrating the world. In addition, the lake is cursed because it travesties itself into the infamous unconscious. The horrors of deep imagination run rampant in the transcendent territory of the unconscious. The horrors adapt to the fears of the individual soul, outgrow them, and intensify them. From the castle’s perspective, knowledge is not mysteriously wrapped in the communicated code as in the case of prophetic reflection. It is objectified in the castle, to then be gathered in the precious stone and its ability to make individuals wise. Existentially, the precious stone transcends the lake and is housed in the room. The castle towers over the lake like a proud statue. It does not euphemize the impressions left by the lake, but absorbs them to make itself more terrifying than if we imagined or saw it on its own. The fact that the waves splash it is not terrible. On the contrary, it only shows how resistant it is to the horrors that lurk within it. And more than that: it feeds on them at the foot, cultivates them and transforms them into elements of knowledge that give it supremacy. The sorcerer exalts the distorted intellectual-practical supremacy called wisdom with his corrupt behavior. The stone cannot use all its magical potential. All its strength is focused on the ecometric objects, that is, on the representatives of the cognitive-energetic states of the soul, to sustain them.

            Tot-Amon does not want to be the patron of knowledge, wisdom and science. He fences off from the world the need of the world to know and progress. He is so self-sufficient that he does not want to build alliances with the forces of civilization. Tot-Amon preserves the purity of the calling to be a guardian. But he uses his archetypal position transgressingly and makes it inadmissible; he usurps his deepest essence. He neglects the active prophetic role in order to enjoy the untouchable and inaccessible superiority of his domain. His closed and secretive life reflects the unnatural position, the passive prophetic nature and the betrayed calling. According to him, Jena should never have found the precious stone to protect his own original privilege. We do not know if he knows that Jena symbolizes the soul; the soul that is not afraid to take upon itself and within itself the secrets that burn even the master’s mind. But he feels her dangerous presence. The precious stone does not arouse lucrative feelings in him. He worships the ideal position of the symbolic object, he knows that its museum setting ensures the supremacy of his kingdom. By the very fact that Princess Jenna takes the gem, she will gain power far greater than his. She will intuitively touch the undiscovered secrets, as the feeling of warmth touches the texture of light. That is why Dagoth is looking for her head. By the very fact that Jenna already possesses the object, she is more powerful than all the antagonists combined. In this sense, every sophisticated automated object, no matter how filled with content and trained to adapt and exceed human potentials, falls apart before the pure revelations of the soul. Jenna displaces the ideally placed object just as the soul can play with cognition and break its predetermined boundaries. In doing so, she will change the spirit of the kingdom, whatever it may be, intellectual or existential. The possibility of knowing contents that break the framework of the established structure threatens the magical realm. It imagines the content as inarticulately and fragmentedly as possible; it disarticulates it beyond recognition, yet anticipates its unity and thus saves it. Tot-Amon abolishes this modus vivendi of the soul. On the other hand, the soul transforms the content into a difficult-to-decipher symbol of what will happen or is to be discovered. It depicts mysteriously literal events of the future. The credible staged representation does not clarify the position of the witness in it, but this does not mean that the event loses its consistency. The soul animates prophetic reflection. The sorcerer applies a modified strategy. He does not allow the soul to toy with that which becomes the tool of the player. However, Tot-Amon reserves the right to manipulate those who invade or sneak brazenly, illegally and uninvited into his home. Accordingly, he abuses her modus vivendi. Fortunately, as we have said, Jenna is an extremely positive soul. She saves her creativity for when it is truly needed, unlike the magician, who, as a representative of the mind, does everything to maintain his self-sufficient supremacy.

            The soul unites the intuitively symbolic expression and the truth that is distorted, anticipated or partially depicted in it. Tot-Amon is unusually self-empowering when he passivizes the prophetic role. Thus, he hides the original knowledge that the soul receives, gives birth to and tastes; he hides it between the orders of consciousness and the contents of the unconscious. He simply must not allow people to anticipate that they can know new things. This is one of the reasons why society wants to awaken the Dagoth. The stagnation is too unbearable. The passive prophetic role corrupts the mind of the magician. The betrayed calling and stunted prophetic role corrupts the sorcerer’s mind. Even if he wants to change things, it is already too late. Leading a solipsistic life has dulled any sense of the true meaning of role. The prophetic function turns into a barren substrate for soul activities. His soul dries up, and the prophetic function is a forgotten echo of the right commitments.

5.

            A second piece of evidence that Jenna is an anthropomorphic correlate of the soul is the way Conan and his party complete their next task. Conan must forcibly take the ornate horn from the priests of Dagoth. The horn is placed in the most sacred part of the pagan sanctuary to be worshipped as a “fossil” belonging to the unawakened god. This sacred object too has shield on it. It can not be held by every member of the adventuring party. The cliché that those who are superficially educated usually become rich is relatively true. The same principle does not imply for the context of cornucopia not being dangerous to hold. The horn of plenty is sacred, as was the gem. The horn is not available to everyone and threatens to destroy the life of lower beings to the core. While Conan and his friends fight the high priest’s soldiers for the horn, Jenna retreats to the side. The soul is alien to the crude nature of instinct, no matter how flexible both can be. Her unwavering defensive stance illuminates the negative side of the soul’s nature, as well as confirming Jenna’s soul-like role. Jenna had not previously fought alongside Conan, yet she bravely approached the gem after the fight and took it. Finally, Conan, Jenna and the fellowship return to the capital to complete the task.

            So much for that part. From what has been said so far, it is more than clear why the Soul threatens utopian ambitions. It helps the mind to change cognition and hides the truth until the time comes for it to be embodied in the new order of things. The Soul still has something to say about existence and its future. In its presence, Dagoth, the god of the achieved singularity, is unnecessary. In its absence, the paradise he will establish will lead to catastrophic consequences. He, no matter how powerful he is, will fall from power again as before. One major flaw in the film is that it does not tell us how the soul would be reborn, after the good god Dagoth betrays his calling just like Tot-Amon. However, the impression is left that Jenna is superior in any situation because she knows how to position herself and act. But the very fact that she is ready to die shows how naive she is. After all, in order to embrace the revelation and create it, she must approach it blindly trusting it. In this situation, she follows the same instinct, which could have a wrong and deadly outcome for her. By living the positive, she unknowingly becomes a victim of her negative nature. She falls into the trap of its machinations and is not interested in her own good. And all for the best! She manipulates herself to reach a turning point that will change things. Her self-deception is a key action that will allow for a general victory over the apocalyptic forces. If she had not moved sleepwalking towards the statue of the hedonistically stretched god Dagoth, the desired symbolic denouement would not have occurred. Jenna’s life is a riddle in itself. She went on an adventure, later learned that she must die and accepted without a word to be sacrificed. That is the familiar part of the puzzle. But fortunately, the outcome will be the opposite. Conan will save her at the right time. Doesn’t the same thing happen to every soul? Does not the soul survive the products of the mind, does it not rise again after the mind has deadened its prophetic presence through its conception? The riddle of its being always prepares the best outcome.

            In each performance of the collective task, Conan mediates with Jenna. This is logical, because Conan, as a symbol of instinct that senses possibilities. He intervenes in situations after assessing the possibilities because he believes in the primordial accuracy of his own feeling. The feeling of accurate, swift and unwavering action is a proxy status that allows the soul, instinct and intuition to embrace things with their immanent fields and encompass them with their moves. Dag and Jenna, fight ideally, because the achieved flourishing and the necessity to abolish its cursed circle always, each in its turn, observe the singularization and its outcomes. Dagoth wants to perpetuate the achieved singularization, and Jenna wants to endlessly create different outcomes. The opposing aspirations of the two fantastic figures clash unconsciously. Dagoth does not know the singularization, because he wants to declare the relative social order as the last utopia. Jenna will survive and thus put an end to the ill-calculated eschatological dreams, which, precisely because of her resistance to death, will turn into a cataclysmic offensive. But she, too, has no idea what singularization is. If she knew, she wouldn’t have sacrificed herself so cheaply.

            Until Dagoth awakens as a monstrous beast and disfigures his beautifully smooth body, his goals coincide with Jenna’s goals. But since Jenna survived, her unconditional value was suddenly revealed. At the same time, the situation as such exposed Dagoth’s aspiration which peeks “spiritfully” through his silent marble head. The moment Dagoth awakens in his unwanted form, a singular twist occurs: the deified utopia immediately turns into a nightmare that must be replaced by another order. Dagoth’s final utopia is immanent. It represents all social orders that strive to perpetuate their being. And Jenna represents all individual souls from which the particular singular configurations spring.

            The (conditionally) evil queen embodies the very aspiration to mortify the soul in the name of the final utopia. We think that she knows what singularity is, because she wants to establish the best possible product of singularization desperately and brazenly, breaking all the fences of conscience. She achieves her goal with fanatical persistence. She even loves Dagoth erotically; she tries to de-pertify him at all costs, at the cost of killing Jenna. She has no insight into the sociotechnical scale of progress and blindly believes that she will help Dagoth achieve the progress above all progress. She is convinced that the prophecy speaks the truth and indeed, she is not wrong. But circumstances do not work out in her favor, nor in the favor of the sleeping god. Later we will see that the prophecy will “bite its tongue”, after the end of the world predicted by it does not occur. Jenna knows that if she is not ritually killed, she will bring ruin to the world. Therefore, she unquestionably agrees to die. This does not mean that Jenna deeply understands her ritual predisposition. In these contexts, the rational judgment of soulless sceptics is lacking for both her and the queen. If they had known that the prophecy metaphorically indicates the relationship between the soul and civilization, they would not have been satisfied with the prophecy. They would have rejected it after contextualizing the archetypal truth. Therefore, both of them surrendered to the fickle prophecy and forgot that the probability of an order becoming final is equal to the impossibility of saving themselves from the apocalyptic outcome. Fortunately, the prophecy will become a victim of its own fickleness.

            Jenna knows how serious the consequences of the ritual of divine awakening are. She must choose: either she will egotistically escape responsibility or she will establish the perfect kingdom of the world. Thus, the prophecy plays with her life, because she is incapable of archetypically overcoming its code. There are no more riddles. Only two certainties. Either Jenna will not die and save the world from its own end, or she will die and the perfect kingdom of Dagoth will gradually turn into a self-eroding hell. Unfortunately, Jenna does not fully know her own soul-shaped role. Her life will postpone the apocalypse and give a chance to many more orders. This is one of the curses of the soul: it strongly feels the truth but does not always touch its foundations. It is not cold, but it is limited, just like prophetic reflection.

            Therefore, Jenna places the horn on the god’s head, retreats, kneels, stands still while the god awakens and calmly waits for her neck to be cut. His form does not change while the ritual texts are read, but his head begins to move and come to life. Everyone expects the divine young man to be “hatch” from the solid material, so as to establish the promised and endless idyll. Jenna must die at that moment. It seems that Dagoth expects to encounter a world from which the soul, or the supernatural object with a special mark on itself, will be eradicated, so that he can proclaim the end of the final singularization and the beginning of immortalized progress. He looks, impatiently and angrily looms over humanity and with the very manner of awakening warns it to be careful how it acts. Before the high priest kills Jenna, he is stabbed with a spear by one of Conan’s companions. She is a woman-warrior. This film figure embodies the female character who is constantly awake and does not allow anyone to deceive her. She represents the independent and rebellious force that believes only in herself and in nothing else. She does not lack instinct, in her he becomes absolute. Therefore, Conan sends her to save Jenna from death, while he fights the queen’s general. The general is a huge warrior. He is cunning and superhumanly strong. It can be said that the dark side of instinct is transfigured in him. This gives him an unusual obscure power. The warrior woman saves Jenna. The sculpture begins to melt, weaken and deform, but at the same time, its distorted transformation reflects the wrath of the god. Dagoth has just become aware that his rule will most likely come to an end. Therefore, he prefers to immediately transform himself into an omnipotent, and from almost all perspectives, immortal monster. We do not know how much such an action is his decision, and how much is a consequence of the ineradicable trajectories of the prophecy. The archetypal nature perfectly equalizes them and turns them into facets of the same event. Every time a soul appears that will give birth to another singularity, it represents an immediate threat to the order that plans to perpetuate itself.