“How do you know these things?”
“I told you, I think, that my poor father worked for the Okhrana. Well, I remember in those days how the tsarist police were concerned about the Assassins. Rachkovsky got wind of it first…. But they gave up that trail, because if the Assassins were involved, then the Jews couldn’t be, and the Jews were the danger. As always. The Jews went back to Palestine and made those others leave their caves. But the whole thing is complicated, confused. Let’s leave it at that.”
He seemed to regret having said so much, and hastily took his leave. Then another thing happened. I’m now sure I didn’t dream it, but that day I thought it was a hallucination: as I watched Salon walk away from the bar, I saw him meet a man at the corner, an Oriental.
In any case, Salon had said enough to start my imagination working again. The Old Man of the Mountain and the Assassins were no strangers to me: I had mentioned them in my thesis. The Templars were accused of being in collusion with them. How could we have overlooked this?
So I began exercising my mind again, and my fingertips, going through old card files, and an idea came to me, an idea so spectacular that I couldn’t restrain myself.
The next morning I burst into Belbo’s office. “They got it all wrong. We got it all wrong.”
“Take it easy, Casaubon. What are you talking about? Oh, my God, the Plan.” Then he hesitated. “You probably don’t know. There’s bad news about Diotallevi. He won’t speak. I called the hospital, but they refuse to give me the particulars because I’m not a relative.
The man doesn’t have any relatives, so who is there to act on his behalf? I don’t like this reticence. A benign growth, they say, but the therapy wasn’t enough. He should go back into the hospital for a month or so, and minor surgery may be indicated…. In other words, those people aren’t telling me the whole story, and I like this situation less and less.”
I didn’t know what to say. Embarrassed by my triumphal entry, I started leafing through papers. But Belbo couldn’t resist. He was like a gambler who’s been shown a pack of cards. “What the hell,” he said. “Life goes on, unfortunately. What did you find?”
“Well, Hitler goes to all that trouble with the Jews, but he accomplishes nothing. Occultists throughout the world, for centuries, have studied Hebrew, rummaged in Hebrew texts, and at most they can draw a horoscope. Why?”
“H’m … Because the Jerusalemites’ fragment of the message is still hidden somewhere. Though the Paulicians’ fragment never turned up either, as far as we know….”
“That’s an answer worthy of Agliè, not of us. I have a better one. The Jews have nothing to do with it.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Jews have nothing to do with the Plan. They can’t. Picture the situation of the Templars, first in Jerusalem, then in their commanderies in Europe. The French knights meet the Germans, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Italians, the English: they all have contacts with the Byzantine area, and in particular they combat the Turk, an adversary with whom they fight but also maintain a gentlemanly relationship, a relationship of equals. Who were the Jews at that time, in Palestine?
A religious and racial minority tolerated by the condescending Arabs but treated very badly by the Christians. We must remember that in the course of the various Crusades the ghettos were sacked as a matter of course and there were massacres all around. Is it conceivable that the Templars, snobs that they were, would exchange mystical information with the Jews? Never.
And in the European commanderies, the Jews were considered usurers, were despised, people to be exploited, not trusted. We’re talking about an alliance of knights, about a spiritual knighthood: would the Templars of Provins allow second-class citizens to join that? Out of the question.”
“But what about all that Renaissance magic, and the study of cabala…?”
“That was only natural. By then we’re close to the third meeting; they’re champing at the bit, looking for shortcuts; Hebrew is a sacred and mysterious language; the cabalists have been busy on their own and to other ends. The Thirty-six scattered around the world get the idea that a mysterious language might conceal God knows what secrets. It was Pico della Mirandola who said that nulla nomina, ut significativa et in quantum nomina sunt, in magico opere virtutem habere non possunt, nisi sint Hebraica. Pico della Mirandola was a cretin.”
“Bravo! Now you’re talking!”
“Furthermore, as an Italian, he was excluded from the Plan. What did he know? So much the worse for Agrippa, Reuchlin, and their pals, who fell for that red herring. I’m reconstructing the story of a red herring, a false trail: is that clear? We let ourselves be influenced by Diotallevi, who was always cabalizing. He cabalized, so we put the Jews in the Plan. If he had been a scholar of Chinese culture, would we have put the Chinese in the Plan?”
“Maybe we would have.”
“Anyway, let’s not rend our garments; we were led astray by everyone. They all, from Postel on, probably, made this mistake. Two hundred years after Provins, they were convinced that the sixth group was the Jerusalemites. It wasn’t.”
“Look, Casaubon, we were the ones who revised Ardenti’s theory, we were the ones who said that the appointment at the rock didn’t mean Stonehenge but the Rock in the Mosque of Omar.”
“And we were wrong. There are other rocks. We should have thought of a place founded on rock, on a mountain, a stone, a spur, a cliff…. The sixth group waits in the fortress of Alamut.”
And Kairos appeared, holding in his hand a scepter that signified royalty, and he gave it to the first created God, and he took it and said: “Your secret name shall have 36 letters.”
—Hasan as-Sabbāḥ, Sargozasht is-Sayyidna
A bravura performance, but now explanations were in order. I provided them in the days that followed: long explanations, detailed, documented. On a table at Pilade’s I showed Belbo proof after proof, which he followed with increasingly glazed eyes while he chain-smoked and every five minutes held out his empty glass, the ghost of an ice cube at the bottom, and Pilade would hasten to refill it, without waiting to be told.
My first sources were the same ones in which the earliest accounts of the Templars appeared, from Gerard of Strasbourg to Joinville. The Templars had come into contact—into conflict, sometimes, but more often into mysterious alliance—with the Assassins of the Old Man of the Mountain.
The story was complicated and began after the death of Mahomet, with the schism between the followers of the ordinary law, the Sunnis, and the supporters of Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, Fatima’s husband, who saw the succession taken from him.
It was the enthusiasts of Ali, the group of adepts called the Shiites, who created the heretic branch of Islam, the Shī’ah. An occult doctrine, which saw the continuity of the Revelation not in traditional meditation upon the words of the Prophet but in the very person of the Imam, lord, leader, epiphany of the divine, theophanic reality, King of the World.
Now, what happened to this heretic Islamic branch, which was gradually infiltrated by all the esoteric doctrines of the Mediterranean basin, from Manicheanism to gnosticism, from Neoplatonism to Iranian mysticism, by all those impulses whose shifts and development in the West we had followed for years?
It was a long story, impossible to unravel, partly because the various Arab authors and protagonists had extremely long names, the texts were transcribed with a forest of diacritical marks, and as the evening wore on we could no longer distinguish between Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad ibn ‘Alī ibn Razzām al-Ṭā’ī al-Kūfī, Abū Muḥammad ‘Ubayd Allāh, and Abū Mu‘īnī ‘Abd Dīn Nāṣir ibn Khusraw Marvāzī Qubādiyānī. But an Arab, I imagine, would have the same difficulty with Aristoteles, Aristoxenus, Aristarchus, Aristides, Aristagoras, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anacreon, and Anacharsis.
But one thing was certain: Shiism in turn split into two branches, one called the Twelvers, who await a lost and future imam, and the other, the Ismailis, born in the realm of the Fatimids, in Cairo, who subsequently gave rise to reformed Ismailism in Persia through a fascinating figure, the mystical and ferocious Ḥasan as-Sabbāḥ. Sabbāḥ set up his headquarters to the southwest of the Caspian, in the impregnable fortress of Alamut, the Nest of the Raptor.
There Sabbāḥ surrounded himself with his devotees, the fidā’īyīn or fedayeen, those faithful unto death; and he used them to carry out his political assassinations, to be instruments of the jihād hafī, the secret holy war. The fedayeen later gained an unfortunate reputation under the name Assassins—not a lovely word now, but for them it was splendid, the emblem of a race of warrior monks who greatly resembled the Templars; a spiritual knighthood.
The fortress or castle of Alamut: the Rock. Built on an airy crest four hundred meters long and in places only a few meters wide, thirty
