The motifs of the steppe warrior, the harem, oriental hedonism, derives from much earlier than Robert E Howard, going back at least to the 1786 Gothic novel Vathek by William Beckford. It's characteristic of a sickly, romantic disposition, not of power or strength.

The impulse goes back to works like Montesquieu's Persian Letters. The Orient became a convenient standard against which to revitalize Western values. Hence people like Voltaire used Islam to reduce Christianity to superstition, and used Islam as an analogy to attack Christianity

Orientalism then arises as a counterfoil to intellectual hegemony in the West, of the Church, and Western Values. Enlightenment critics couldn't attack these headon. So they turned to faraway lands, like Swift did with Lilliput. The Orient was a very useful tool in this way.

This lead to the romanticization of these distant Oriental worlds, where they weren't simply analogies for the West, they were cloaked in mystery. The attack went from "see, the savages are just like us," to, "see, these savages are superior to our Enlightenment arrogance"

This lead to Mozart's Zaide, to Vathek, to the perfumed, gothic orientalism of so many 19th century tales. To Voltaire's Zadig. To Dr. Johnson's The History of Rasselas. To Byron. Orientalism is a critical standpoint toward Western Universalism that fed the sickly romantic spirit

Aleister Crowley, HP Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, Egyptology, Zarathustra, whirling dervishes, orientalist occultism, steppe warriors, perfumed gardens, terraced gardens of Babylon, silk road exotics, bountiful harems. This is all the flight of the feverish syphilitic romantic.

The Howard Conan stories demonstrate this well. Sumptuous exotic Orientalism. Designed for adolescent boys and deviants who read puerile, lurid 1930's pulp magazines and comics. These motifs appeal to the exact same kind of person then as they do now. You're likely one of them

But for Howard, the Hyborian Age represented the twilight pre-history of consciousness. Of Rationality. Of Civilization. It was a haunted era, of necromancers, serpents, evil spirits. These all being a metaphor for our own incomprehension of nature outside the standards of reason

Lovecraft and Howard are joined at the hip in this, in their depiction of ages, of aliens, of voodoo tribes, of fringe cults to Eldar Gods. All as representations of the chaotic amoralism just outside the fragile sphere of civilization, of the west, of reason, of morality.

The horror of these stories is how tenuous it all is, how cloistered we all are in this illusion of civility and society. Those who adopt the motifs, the NRx Cthulhu worshipers, the Steepe Warrior wannabees, they long for the amoralism, because then they can be powerful. Sickly.