The Illuminatus! Trilogy

"Such men are dangerous," as Caesar observed, and certainly they are dangerous to the Caesars; the Ishmaelians were being persecuted throughout the Moslem world, and strong efforts were being made to exterminate them entirely when Hassan i Sabbah became Imam of the whole movement.

It was Hassan's cynical judgment (and many Illuminated beings, such as the Lamas of Tibet, have agreed with him) that most people have no aspiration or capacity for much spiritual and intellectual independence. He thereupon reorganized the Ishmaelians in such a way as to allow and encourage those of small mind to remain in the lower grades.

The tools of this enterprise were the famous "Garden of Delights" in his castle at Alamout (a good duplication of the Paradise of Al Koran, complete with the beautiful and willing houris the Prophet had promised to the faithful)- and a certain "magick chemical." Those of the lowest grade were brought to Alamout, given the miraculous concoction, and set loose for several hours in the Garden of Delights. They came out convinced that they had truly visited heaven and that Hassan i Sabbah was the most powerful Holy Man in the world. They were assured, furthermore, that if they obeyed every order, even at the cost of their own lives, they would return to that Paradise after death.

These men became the first "sleeper agents" in the history of international politics. Where the three major contending religions of that time in the Near East (Christianity, Judaism, and orthodox Islam) insisted that it was an unforgivable sin to deny one's faith, Hassan taught that Allah would forgive such little white lies when they served a worthy purpose. Thus, his agents were able to pass themselves off as Christians, Jews, or orthodox Moslems and infiltrate any court, holy order, or army at will. Since the other religions had the above-mentioned prohibition against such deception, they were unable to infiltrate the Ishmaelians in turn.

The use of these agents as assassins is discussed passim in the novel, and Weishaupt's opinion that Hassan had discovered "the moral equivalent of war" is an interesting commentary. Hassan never had to send an army into battle, and armies sent against him were soon stopped by the sudden and unexpected deaths of their generals.

One of Hassan's successors was Sinan, who moved the headquarters of the cult from Alamout to Messiac and may (or may not) have written the letter about Richard the Lion-Hearted which George recalls in the Third Trip. Sinan, contemporaries claimed, performed miracles of healing, conversed with invisible beings, and was never seen to eat, drink, or perform the functions of urination and excretion. He was also credited with telepathy and with the ability to kill animals by looking at them. It was he (and not Hassan i Sabbah, as many popular books state) who ordered two of the lower members of the Order to commit suicide in order to impress a visiting ambassador with his power over his followers. (The two obeyed, leaping from the castle wall into the abyss below.) Sinan also made attempts to form ah alliance with the Knights Templar, to drive both orthodox Christians and orthodox Moslems out of the arena, but this evidently fell through.

The Hashishim were finally crushed, despite their powerful espionage and assassination network, when the whole Middle East was overrun by hordes of Mongols, who came from so far away that they had not been infiltrated. It took several centuries for the Hashishim to make a comeback as the nonviolent Ishmaelian movement of today, under the leadership of the Aga Khan.

Finally, it was at Hassan i Sabbah's death that he allegedly uttered the aphorism for which he is best known, and which is quoted several times in the novel: "Nothing is true. All is permissible." The orthodox Moslem historian Juvaini- who may have invented this whole episode- adds that as soon as these blasphemous words passed his lips, "Hassan's soul plunged to the depths of Hell."

Ever since Marco Polo recorded the story of the Garden of Delights, Western commentators have identified Hassan's "magick chemical" as pure hashish. Recent scholarship, however, has thrown this into doubt, and it is clear that hashish, and other marijuana preparations were well known in the Near East for thousands of years before Hassan ever lived; for instance, the plant has been found in grave mounds of late Neolithic Man in the area, dated around 5000 B.C., as Hagbard mentions in the novel. It is implausible, then, that the ingenious Sabbah would have tried to pass this drug off as something new and magical.