This post will focus on the analysis of Thulsa Doom and his role in “Conan the Barbarian”.
Thulsa as coward
Thulsa is a very cowardly character. He avoids battle and flees from battle, preferring to let others do his fighting for him.
In every instance a fight occurs near him Thulsa either stays in the background until the fighting is over or flees when it’s down to only him. He is forced to rely on Rexor and Thorgrim to lead his troops through the battles.
The fact that Thulsa is such a lousy fighter might be the very reason he wanted steel weapons. Perhaps he thought that steel weapons might compensate for his lack of personal skill. Unlike Conan Thulsa never takes opponents one on one, at least not in a warrior way . Maybe he should have gone to a gladiatorial school to learn how to fight instead of relying on psychological tricks.
At some point in his life Thulsa must have come to the realisation that his approach to acquiring wealth and power through robbery isn’t working and decided to reinvent himself and his band of thieving murderers as a religious cult.
Thulsa as cult leader
Despite being an awful warrior Thulsa is a very skilled cult leader. His ability to hypnotize people works almost as well on a larger scale as it does against an individual person. Interestingly the ability to hypnotize prey is often considered to be a snake-like ability. This could be seen as another evidence of Thulsa’s inhuman origin. Apparently, Thulsa never hypnotised kings and lords. It is my belief that they have too much will-power to fall for his tricks. King Osric couldn’t be brainwashed but his daughter and thousands of vulnerable followers could be. Thulsa knows how to pick his targets.
Thulsa might be an excellent manipulator, but he doesn’t care about his followers in the slightest. When Conan gets captured Thulsa complains the most about his snake getting killed, not the guards in the Tower.
Then as a cruel demonstration of his power over his followers he makes one of them jump to their death. 
Notice how he called her “my child”. I doubt many parents would make their child jump to their death.
Thulsa has no compassion for his human followers. Just before he complains about the dead snake in the Tower he speak directly to a snake and says:
It is almost as if he is identyfing more with the snake than with people.
Thulsa as Id
It is my personal theory that Thulsa Doom represents a personification of the human Id. Id is sometimes compared to the concept of the “reptilian brain”, a part of every man where his most primal instincts reside. Thulsa himself is a half human, half snake being, an interesting parallel.
Thulsa’s lust for wealth, women, followers and power can be seen as representative of our own deeper and darker urges. Conan’s victory over Thulsa/Id is a necessary step that every young man must undertake before he can become a fully functioning adult. Only when we overcome those darker aspects of ourselves can we truly become spiritually mature.
Race of Thulsa
There have been some accusations of Conan the Barbarian being a “racist” movie because the villain is a black guy that gets his head chopped off by a white hero. In my opinion, this is a load of nonsense. Yes, James Earl Jones was probably hired because he of different race than the main hero, but he wasn’t meant to be playing a black/African character. He plays a semi-human character that wishes to manipulate and control people regardless of their race, sex, socio-economic position etc. The race of the actor is not that important if he is not even playing a human being. He is of different appearance to everybody else because he symbolises ugly, inhuman urges not because of “racism”.
Next post will about the popularity of Conan.
THE OTHER SCENE 
Actually, Thulsa Doom killed two people in the Movie. Conan’s Mother and Valeria – the latter at a distance with the Snake Arrow.
And as I said before, I find the Cult of Set to be a Cult of Personality. That is, it began, and ended, with Thulsa Doom.
As for Doom? I agree that Power, Wealth, Women, and Followers he sought relentlessly, though I believe that Power most of all was what he wanted. And was prepared to resort to any measure to obtain it.
I recall that John Milius stated that he wanted Thulsa Doom (as portrayed by James Earl Jones) to have Stark Blue Eyes and Long Straight Hair, to indicate the fact that he was from a long-lost race, perhaps the last of his kind.
In fact, if we go by the novelisation (based on an earlier script), then he wasn’t human at all, but one of the last (if not THE last) of the Serpent-Men, hence the Snake-Head in a Headdress, which in turn would go some way to explaining his inhumanity and obsession with Power.
While Conan too, wished for Power, Money, and Women, he was tempered by his hard years. To know there was a Right Way, and a Wrong Way, to obtain them. To know that there was a price to be had for it.
That, I see, as one of the fundamental differences between Conan, and Thulsa Doom.
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You are correct, he did kill two people. Interestingly, both of them were women. In the first case he used his snake-like powers to hypnotise the victim and the second one he shot with a snake (phallic symbol) arrow. Both of those killings have something unnatural about them.
You are also correct about this being more of a Cult of Personality, if the cult followers were so into Set they wouldn’t have abonded their faith the second Thulsa died. Also, I doubt that a casual viewer of the movie woul remember that Thulsa’s cult was actually Cult of Set. I believe the director deliberately didn’t emphasise the Set aspect as he was trying to warn the audience about the dangers of mindlessly following someone, regardless of their ideology.
Conan’s way of gaining Power, Wealth and Woman always seemed to me to be more individual than Thulsa’s. Conan doesn’t need an army of mindless followers to achieve his goals, at most he only needs a few companions. One of the differences between Thulsa and Conan is that Conan has personal honour, something Thulsa lacks. He only has a thirst for Power, that is to say the ability to control other beings.
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