Ruins and Racists

Had history unfolded differently, Hasbro’s fiftieth anniversary celebration of Dungeons & Dragons in 2024 could have instead been devoted to something called Empire of the Petal Throne, often named as the second published role-playing game. In 1975, EPT won the award for best new game at the largest tabletop game convention; it was even selling better than D&D. This success was a bit surprising given the convoluted setting: EPT was set in Tékumel, an imagined fantasy world inspired by not only pulp science fiction and fantasy stories of the mid-twentieth century but by ancient Egypt, the Aztecs, the Hellenic age, Mughal India, and Meso-America. Its creator was Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman Barker (1929-2012), of whom, as The Strategic Review raved, “J. R. R. Tolkien would have been envious!” It is a popular comparison. In 2009, Der Spiegel called Barker “der vergessene Tolkien”—the forgotten Tolkien. And none other than E. Gary Gygax (1938–2008), D&D’s co-creator, gushed in 1975: “I must ask the reader [of EPT] to view the world of Tékumel in comparison with J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth.”

Tékumel was, Barker liked to boast, not your standard fare. “The inhabitants of [my] world are purely my own,” he suggested in 1974. Tékumel was, in Barker’s 1983 estimation, even “alien to modern thinking.” Barker, decades before D&D, opened the Tabletop Role-Playing Game (TRPG) world to non-European influences in ways that challenged standard Eurocentric tropes and images that shaped Tolkienesque fantasy worlds and games. In Tékumel, plate mail-attired gallant knights and fair maidens were absent. White skin? Exotic. Blue eyes? A curse. Rather, non-European human ethnic groups and cultures with olive skin and black hair clad in kilts and headdresses made up a complex, hierarchical society. Empire of the Petal Throne maintained a cult fan base until it all but fell into the abyss following the shocking March 2022 news that Barker had written a neo-Nazi novel called Serpent’s Walk. Not only that: Barker had served on the Editorial Advisory Committee of The Journal of Historical Review, the primary organ for a Holocaust-denying organization.

The stain on Barker’s legacy came shortly after D&D, regarded as the pinnacle of geek culture, assumed its highest visibility in American popular culture. D&D, The Guardian reported in 2016, “is making its influence felt everywhere.” It was not simply on kitchen tables, but on TV (Stephen Colbert has been an outspoken enthusiast), in movies, and in video games. D&D saturates American culture. Not since the moral panic over its supposed links to Satanism has D&D been so scrutinized as a result, this time for bias and prejudice. Likely in response to Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, D&D designers replaced the concept of race—foundational to the TRPG—with that of “species,” the latter denoting the idea of variable origins and thereby aiming to subvert the view of race as a timeless essence with core attributes and linked patterns of behavior; in previous editions, for example, a Half-Orc would naturally be stronger, hardier, and more menacing than humans, elves, dwarves, and so on. Inclusivity is a path that TRPGs long resisted. Could it be possible to imagine a world where questions of difference and identity might be played out among adolescents constructing their inner worlds instead of consigned to the cacophonous echo chambers of 4chan? Or are even the most forward-looking fantasy worlds and games, inspired by esoteric traditions, bound to be propelled by sinister ideas and currents?

For those accustomed to Tolkienesque fantasy worlds, Tékumel was new ground: Barker pretty much overturned the clichés of fantasy literature. Rather than dwarves and elves, the setting was populated—that is, before “explorers from Humanspace” arrived—by other intelligent nonhuman races. And instead of Der Ring des Nibelungen, Barker seemed to be cribbing from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom, as much as noncanonical fantasy and sci-fi tales. During his childhood, Barker had conceived of his world as set tens of thousands of years after a nuclear confrontation in the twenty-first century. Survivors were non-European: Arabic, Mayan, and Tamil peoples. Post-apocalypse humanity, Barker fantasized, settled the stars, including Tékumel, an alien planet of poisonous vegetation and wildlife that they terraformed with colossal technological creations. There, humanity flourished until a cosmic cataclysm teleported the planet to an isolated “pocket dimension.” The stars went dark, society descended into chaos, and sophisticated technology vanished. In the following millennia, Tékumel rebuilt itself into a feudal society with almost five hundred clans, rife with political and religious intrigue, vying for resources and the Petal Throne.

Tékumel’s inhabitants were descended from space-faring Earthlings trapped when the planet was dropped into its pocket dimension. Each of the five human empires were isolated by terrain features: dense forests, deserts, mountains, and swamps. The world was also populated by indigenous people like the Ssú, four-legged, two-armed creatures with oval heads and vaguely human faces. The Ssú and the insectoid Hlýss bitterly hated humans for terraforming Tékumel, destroying the planet’s original form and ecosystem. An analogy can be drawn with European colonists’ forced displacement of indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands in the Americas, terraforming the “New World,” as they established settlements, claimed land, and transformed native societies.

In Empire of the Petal Throne, Barker wanted game mechanics to be secondary. While to a degree a D&D variant, EPT was more about “role”-playing than roll-playing. Players had to think rather than simply roll dice to see what happened. Players also had to come to grips with the fact that humans on Tékumel were not at the top of the heap. The planet was out to get them. One needed to understand how to navigate social etiquette as much as what might make your warrior, priest, or magic user into a tasty snack. Players whose characters were able to survive and immerse themselves in Tékumel were liable to ask questions about its real-world beginnings: Wasn’t the condition of the Ssú, forced onto “reservations,” reminiscent of indigenous peoples’ situation in the Americas? Did not the actions of Tékumelani humans invoke the conquests of flesh and blood conquistadors?

Every universe—even a hidden one—has a creation myth. This one began in the Gem State. Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman Barker was born Phillip Barker on November 2, 1929, in Spokane, Washington, and grew up bookish, shy, and of ill health in pastoral Idaho. Foreign languages cast a spell over him. “We lived near a Basque family,” he told Der Spiegel, and “their children could speak with one another in a language that no one else could understand. I suppose that made me envious.” Barker also loved “esoteric” cultures, a love perhaps inspired by his parents’ stories at the dinner table about their foreign neighbors—Japanese, Koreans, Russians, Swedes, and others—when living in Ketchikan, Alaska. (Barker’s father had been a drifter, having worked a number of low-paying jobs before, in 1930, becoming a school principal in Moscow, Idaho and then, in 1940, the superintendent of the small school district in St. Maries, Idaho.)

More proximately, as Barker explained in a 1984 interview in The Space Gamer, Tékumel originated as a “response to [the] science fiction/fantasy” that he knew from the old pulps of the 1940s, like Burroughs and Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories. “I have always had some sort of fantasy world,” Barker explained, “but my temperament led me to organize this, codify it, and try to write stories about it. I drew upon my interests in ancient Egypt . . . the Mayans, and ancient/medieval Europe and Asia. Mix these with science fiction/fantasy, boil well, and out came Tékumel.” Barker’s letters with future sci-fi author Lin Carter in 1949 reveal that Tékumel was fully formed in his mind, including the basis of Tsolyáni, the first fictional language ever published for specifically for an TRPG.

But perhaps the biggest harbinger of Tékumel’s future were Barker’s studies in anthropology and South Asian languages at the University of Washington. In 1951, as a senior, Barker received a Fulbright to India; after a year at the University of Lucknow, he conducted field research in isolated regions of rural India and the Himalayas. He later recounted how, unlike Americans’ glorification of science and technology, the “very intelligent, sophisticated people” he met in India exhibited little curiosity regarding modern technology or science. “The tribal people I lived with . . . saw the airplane from Calcutta to Delhi fly overhead every day; they shrugged.” Such indifference, for Barker, did not reflect a lack. It denoted a different philosophy of life.

During this period, Barker wasn’t shy in publicly declaring his evolving multicultural views. Consider his rebuttal, in the March 1951 issue of Startling Stories, of Edwin Sigler’s racist claims, published in a previous issue, that civil society was the province of the white man and democratic cornerstones like trial by jury weren’t appreciated by “the darker races.” In his letter, Barker, citing Franz Boas’s cultural relativism and Alfred Kroeber’s anthropology program at UC Berkeley, argued that differences between races are not inherent and that perceptions of the “stupidity” and “laziness” of black people “is not due to race but is due to the low class he is kept in.”

While a Fulbrighter, Barker also underwent a religious conversion. As scholar Amina Inloes has observed, he left his “family of origin”—his father was “an outspoken atheist” and his mother an agnostic—for Sunni Islam. It was at this juncture that Barker changed his first name to Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman, married Ambereen, a Muslim of Pakistani descent, co-founded the Islamic Centre of Montreal, aired radio shows on the Qur’an, and even met the Shah of Iran. Following his graduation, he enrolled in a PhD program in Native American languages and cultures at UC Berkeley, where his dissertation on the Klamath tribes, a Native American people of northeastern California and Oregon, served as the basis for a thorough audio library of the Klamath language and its texts and grammar. By 1957, he was publishing the results of his fieldwork as a young professor at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal.

In 1972, Barker’s career took another fateful turn when he became chair of the department of South Asian Studies at the University of Minnesota. He soon published textbooks on Urdu and South Asian languages. Barker likely felt comfortable at U of M, and not least because the university had the country’s first and most prestigious American Indian Studies department. It also just so happened that the Twin Cities was one of the key sites of tabletop wargaming’s transformation into tabletop role-playing games. In 1971, UMinn undergraduate Dave Arneson introduced Gary Gygax’s miniatures wargame Chainmail, designed in Lake Geneva, to the Midwest Military Simulation Association, a group of wargamers and military figurine collectors. Arneson expanded Gygax’s game to focus on individual characters and cooperative play. Shortly thereafter, Arneson, Gygax, and Donald Kaye founded Tactical Studies Rules (TSR, Inc.), and, in 1974, published Gygax and Arneson’s original D&D game.

Still reliant on Eurocentric tropes, D&D’s first guidebooks were transparently influenced by Tolkien (Gygax would, likely for legal reasons, repeatedly claim otherwise), Robert E. Howard’s and Fritz Leiber’s sword-and-sorcery tales, and European mythologies. The template was all very Old World, masculine, and beardy. Moreover, Gygax wanted players to invent their own settings. TSR had yet to provide players with pre-made fleshed out fantasy worlds, and even when the company eventually did, its new default background, The World of Greyhawk, which arrived on store shelves in August 1980, was a straightforward analogue of medieval and early Renaissance European society; even the map looks like an inverted Europe drawn from the perspective of a mirror.

Sensing an opening, Professor Barker believed Tékumel could supply the culture and social structure that D&D sorely lacked. And so, in August 1974, he unveiled a complete “package” to a mesmerized Arneson: “Phil was in awe of Dave, and Dave in awe of Phil,” Jeff Berry, a player in Barker’s Thursday night gaming group, remembers. Not only did Barker reveal to Arneson his impressive Tékumel maps, which he also transposed onto a “blank globe,” but one thousand non-player characters and color-coded three-by-five index cards for each inhabitant of the multi-level underground Tékumelani city of Jakálla that he had created in a frenetic six weeks. Berry recounted: “Nobody in gaming at that time had seen anything like [the map of the Jakálla Underworld], and when he rolled it out onto the table your mouth just dropped open. . . You could spend literally years down there and never get through it all.” Tékumel’s depth of background was manifest; it was published in 1975 as the setting for Empire of the Petal Throne, D&D’s first detailed fantasy world.

Tékumel’s overt multiculturalism likely resonated in an America where a heightened cultural and political self-awareness—extending from the Black Power movement to Hispanic, Native American, and Asian people—had recently emerged. Whereas individualistic societies reigned in standard D&D, Tékumelani cultures were clan-based, approximating Native American peoples and South Asian cultures, where extended multi-generational families play an important role. Tékumelani societies treated women and sexuality in a manner informed by gay and women’s liberation. In a clear first for RPGs, EPT supplementary material presented homosexuality without moral judgement, caricature, or insult. Tékumel women assumed active social roles: male fantasy barbarian pinup clichés graced many D&D products, but, in Tékumel, Aridáni (“independent”) women could legally choose to exchange community protections for the right to practice any profession and take multiple husbands or wives. Such “alternative” gender roles probably made EPT more attractive to women gamers than D&D; by some accounts, almost half of EPT gamers were women in the 1980s. In contrast consider Gygax’s views on women players, as expressed in the fanzine Europa in 1975: “Damn right I am a sexist. It doesn’t matter to me if women get paid as much as men. . . They can jolly well stay away from wargaming in droves for all I care.”

But Tékumel’s days were numbered. Gygax consolidated his control at TSR and tightened his grip on D&D canon. In 1976, he forced co-creator Arneson out of their company and released Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D), which limited the freeform gaming style that Arneson had long championed and refined (alongside Barker) in the Twin Cities. Becoming increasingly defensive of “his” invention, Gygax, in The Dragon’s December 1977 issue, not only defended TSR’s decisions, but endorsed a small list of RPG games; EPT was not among them. “I cannot,” Gygax wrote, “resist the analogy of a lion standing over its kill. The vultures scream, and the jackals yap, when the lion drives them off without allowing them to steal bits of the meat.” The next year, The Dragon tapered off the number of published EPT articles. In May 1980, TSR sold off EPT rights. The game would bounce from publisher to publisher. By the 1990s, Barker’s world was no longer readily available as a TRPG setting and its complexity was a barrier for new players. Tékumel slipped into the pocket dimension once again.

Tékumel remained an obscurity known to only the most devout grognards until 2018. That year, Amina Inloes published her article devoted to Barker, American Muslims, and D&D. In a footnote, Inloes alluded to a pseudonymous novel by Barker that not only shared “his writing style and interests,” but was “published in the name of one of his ancestors.” It is unclear who alerted Inloes to Barker’s novel; while Inloes suggested that any discussion of Barker’s oeuvre should include it, she nevertheless left the task to the reader to excavate Serpent’s Walk. By March 2022, discussions on internet message boards and blogs of Inloes’s article exposed Barker’s secret text to the wider public. Published in 1991 under the nom-de-plume Randolph D. Calverhall by National Vanguard books—also the publisher of American neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries (1978)—Serpent’s Walk is a science fiction story set in the future that portrays Nazi war criminals post-WWII as the good guys, glorifies the rise of a new Reich, promotes an international Jewish conspiracy, denies the Holocaust, and proposes that genocide is the solution to the “Jewish Question.” The back cover of the book proclaims: “The good guys win sometimes. Not always, of course. They lost big in the Second World War. That was a victory for communists, democrats, and Jews, but everyone else lost.”

The novel’s plot centers on Alan Lessing, a mercenary for a corporation in India, who has an Indian girlfriend and does not see race as factor. Following a pandemic that eliminates millions, the murder of his girlfriend by Israeli agents, and his joining an underground SS network based in the Third World, Lessing becomes the Führer and worldwide dictator of the Fourth Reich. The novel concludes with these sentences: “At last Lessing could let go. The Thousand Year Reich had gone off the track, derailed for a space of a hundred and forty-four years, but now it was back on and chugging along strong. It looked as though this Reich would last awhile. Hopefully forever.”

Damage control ensued; nonetheless, it soon emerged that beginning in 1989, Barker served on the editorial advisory committee of The Journal of Historical Review, a journal founded in 1980, published by the well-known Holocaust denial group The Institute for Historical Review. A 1999 issue included articles titled “How the Simon Wiesenthal Center Falsifies History” and “Holocaust as Political Industry.” Barker’s editorial role at the JHR only ceased when it ceased publication in 2002. Reactions from “Petal Heads” ranged from horror to disbelief. Some pulped their Tékumel books. Following Barker’s own advice in published game materials about how one should play in Tékumel, James Maliszewski concluded: “Tékumel is ours now.” Others, in denial, claimed that Serpent’s Walk might be a satire. In shock, Jeff Berry related that Barker once told him about how, as an undergraduate, “he’d gone into the rare books section of the library, removed a blank page out of a 15th-century manuscript, and then created a Tékumel document on that page with inks proper for the age of the blank page. He then replaced the page into the book he’d gotten it out of.” Still others recalled Barker’s bitterness over Tékumel’s fading from the TRPG limelight. During the summer, unsubstantiated stories on online message boards multiplied, including claims that Barker’s father had been a member of the Bund and associated with the nationalist, fascist Silver Shirts and that Barker’s collection of Nazi paraphernalia had been (along with his huge collection of Indo-Persian and western arms) auctioned online after his death on March 16, 2012. The damage was done: Stu Horvath outright excluded Empire of the Petal Throne from his 2023 near-encyclopedic guidebook to TRPGs.

It has been difficult for players to square Barker’s explicit expressions of multiculturalism in Tékumel with his hitherto-hidden turn to Nazi ideology. However, there are hints as to what might have happened. Inloes noted a clear indication in his work that Barker was “an ardent armchair occultist” and harbored a predilection for the dark side of fantasies. The Frankfurt School has highlighted the antisemitic subtexts or underground links between “esotericism” and “fascism” in general. For Theodor Adorno, occultism was the “metaphysics of dunces” and the inclination towards occultism a regression in consciousness, as individuals often conflate the absolute and the conditional. Dangerous consequences ensue when a conditional idea—say a conspiracy theory—is taken for universal truth. While Barker’s immersion in hermetic practices stretched back decades, his methodology—or at least his way of describing it—of how he accessed this hidden knowledge to construct Tékumel appears to have shifted over time. In the above-cited 1984 The Space Gamer interview, Barker maintained that Tékumel did not emerge from “dreams or mystic visions.” But two decades later, while introducing the Tékumel supplement The Tongue of Those Who Journey Beyond: Sunúz, he emphasized the category of scrying:

EPT was set in Tékumel, an imagined fantasy world inspired by not only pulp science fiction and fantasy stories of the mid-twentieth century, but by ancient Egypt, the Aztecs, the Hellenic age, Mughal India, and Meso-America.

For Barker, it would seem, scrying, a divination practice gleaned from occult texts, had become the tool he used to “see” multicultural Tékumel. But perhaps scrying was also how he “saw” Serpent’s Walk, a science fiction creation of a tendency of esotericism to toxically mix traditionalism, modern paganism, and antisemitic conspiracies theories.

Barker never became a household name like Tolkien, nor a magnet for media adaptations like George R. R. Martin, and Tékumel never became the cultural juggernaut of Middle-earth; Barker’s world no longer has a robust fanbase, let alone an entire intellectual property complex. But his creation, for its time, offered TRPG communities an inclusive multicultural world unavailable elsewhere, long before, say, Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment or Martha Wells’s The Books of the Raksura series. Many EPT players speak to Barker’s creation as being their first exposure to imagined cultures based on non-Abrahamic peoples. Hasbro, the toy and entertainment giant and, since 1997, parent company of D&D, has only recently made efforts to better represent minorities and marginalized communities within the game’s lore and mechanics. Barker had them beat; he was, for decades, in a different branch of the multiverse. Yet Barker’s legacy is contaminated and his case illustrates how fantasy, escapism, or games can be as much reactionary as progressive. Can they be both? Alertness to the uses of purportedly ancient ideas is a necessity now that the occult—for instance, the conspiracy theories of QAnon—is making a comeback in America. The occult’s growing popularity, along with that of D&D, encourages us to grapple with the interplay between imagination and reality. For if Barker’s trajectory is any indication, today’s open-minded escapists might indeed end up as tomorrow’s fascist conspiracy theorists.