Along its upper ridge you could just make out what seemed a row of flint swords that shot upward for hundreds of meters. The most accessible side was a treacherous slope of gravel, which archeologists even today are unable to scale. The fortress was reached by a secret stairway bitten out of the rock, like the spiral peel of a stone apple, and a single archer could defend it. Dizzying, a world elsewhere. Alamut could be reached only astride eagles.
Here Sabbāḥ ruled, and his successors after him, each to be known as the Old Man of the Mountain. First of them was the sulfurous Sinān.
Sabbāḥ had invented a method of dominion over his men, and to his adversaries he declared that if they did not submit to him, they would die. There was no escaping the Assassins.
Nizām al-Mulk, prime minister of the sultan when the Crusaders were still exerting themselves to conquer Jerusalem, was stabbed to death, as he was being carried on his litter to the quarters of his women. The killer had approached him disguised as a dervish. And the atabeg of Hims, guarded by a squad of men armed to the teeth, as he came down from his castle to go to Friday prayers, was slain by the Old Man’s killers.
Sinān decided to murder the Marquis Corrado di Montefeltro, a Christian, and readied two of his men, who introduced themselves among the infidels able to mimic their customs and language after much preparation. They had disguised themselves as monks and, while the bishop of Tyre was entertaining the hapless marquis at a banquet, leaped upon the victim and stabbed him. One Assassin was immediately killed by the bodyguards; the other took refuge in a church, waited until the wounded man was brought there, attacked him again, finishing him off, then died blissfully.
Blissfully because, as the Arab historiographers of the Sunni line and then the Christian chroniclers from Oderic of Pordenone to Marco Polo wrote, the Old Man had discovered a way to make his knights faithful even to the supreme sacrifice, to make them invincible, horrible war machines. He took them as youths, asleep, to the summit of the mountain, where he stupefied them with pleasures—wine, women, flowers, delectable banquets, and hashish—which gave the sect its name.
When they could no longer do without the perverse delights of that invented paradise, he dragged them out of their sleep and set before them a choice: Go, kill, and if you succeed, this paradise you leave will again be yours, and forever; but if you fail, you will plunge back into the Gehenna of the everyday.
Dazed by the drug, helpless before his demands, they sacrificed themselves in sacrificing others; they were killers destined to be killed, victims condemned to make victims.
How they were feared! What tales the Crusaders told about them on moonless nights as the simoom howled over the desert! How the Templars admired, envied those splendid animals; how awed they were by the clear will to martyrdom! The Templars agreed to pay their tolls, asking, in exchange, formal tributes, in a game of reciprocal concessions, complicity, brotherhood of arms, disemboweling one another in the open field but embracing one another in secret, exchanging murmured words of mystical visions, magic formulas, alchemic subtleties….
From the Assassins, the Templars learned occult rites. It was cowardice and ignorance that kept King Philip’s inquisitors from seeing that the spitting on the cross, the kiss on the anus, the black cat, and the worship of Baphomet were simply a repetition of other ceremonies, ceremonies performed under the influence of the first secret the Templars learned in the Orient: the use of hashish.
So it was obvious that the Plan was born—had to be born—there. From the men of Alamut, the Templars learned of the subterranean currents. They met the men of Alamut in Provins and established the secret plot of the Thirty-six Invisibles, and that is why Christian Rosencreutz journeyed to Fez and other places in the Orient, and that is why it was to the Orient that Postel turned, and why it was from Egypt, home of the Fatimid Ismailis, that the mages of the Renaissance imported the eponymous divinity of the Plan, Hermes, Hermes-Teuth or Toth, and why Egyptian figures were used by the mountebank Cagliostro for his rituals.
And the Jesuits, less narrow than we had thought, with the good Father Kircher, lost no time in throwing themselves into hieroglyphics, Coptic, and the other Oriental languages, and Hebrew was only a cover, a nod to the fashion of the period.
These texts are not addressed to common mortals…. Gnostic perception is a path reserved for an elite…. For, in the words of the Bible: Do not cast your pearls before swine.
—Kamal Jumblatt, Interview in Le Jour, March 31, 1967
Arcana publicata vilescunt: et gratiam prophanata amittunt. Ergo: ne margaritas obijce porcis, seu asinus substerne rosas.
—Johann Valentin Andreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz, Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, frontispiece
For that matter, where else could you find someone able to wait on the rock for six centuries, someone who had actually waited on the rock? True, Alamut eventually fell, under the pressure of the Mongols, but the Ismaili sect survived throughout the East: it mingled with non-Shiite Sufism, it generated the terrible sect of the Druzes, and it survived finally among the Indian Khojas, the followers of the Aga Khan, not far from the site of Agarttha.
But I had discovered more. Under the Fatimid dynasty, through the Academy of Heliopolis, the hermetic notions of the ancient Egyptians were rediscovered in Cairo, and a house of sciences was established there. House of sciences! Was it from this that Bacon drew the inspiration for his House of Solomon, which in turn was the model for the Conservatoire?
“That’s it, that’s it, there’s no doubt about it,” Belbo said, intoxicated. “But now how do the cabalists fit in?”
“That’s only a parallel story. The rabbis of Jerusalem sense that something happened between the Templars and the Assassins, and the rabbis of Spain, snooping around under the pretense of lending money at interest to the European commanderies, get a whiff of something. They have been excluded and, spurred by national pride, they decide to figure it out on their own.
What?! We, the Chosen People, are kept in the dark about the Secret of Secrets? And, bang, the cabalistic tradition begins: a heroic attempt of the dispersed, the outsiders, to show up the masters, the ones in power, by claiming to know all.”
“But, doing that, they give the Christians the impression that they really do know all.”
“And at a certain point somebody makes the supreme goof, confusing Ismail with Israel.”
“For God’s sake, don’t tell me that Barruel and the Protocols and all the rest were simply the result of a misspelling. Casaubon, we’re reducing a tragic chapter in history to a mistake of Pico della Mirandola.”
“No, maybe there’s another reason. The Chosen People had taken on the duty of interpreting the Book. People are afraid of those who make them look squarely at the Law. But the Assassins? Why didn’t they turn up sooner?”
“Belbo! Think what a depressed area that was after the battle of Lepanto. Sebottendorf knows that there is something to be learned from the Turk dervishes, but Alamut is no more; those Turks are holed up God knows where. They wait. And finally their moment comes; on the tide of Islamic irredentism they stick their heads out again. Putting Hitler in the Plan, we found a good reason for the Second World War.
Now, putting in the Assassins of Alamut, we explain what has been happening for years in the Persian Gulf. And this is where we find a place for our Tres, Templi Resurgentes Equites Synarchici. A society whose aim is to heal the rift, at last, between the spiritual knighthoods of different faiths.”
“Or else to stimulate conflict and take advantage of the confusion. Once again we’ve done our job and set History straight. Can it be that at the supreme moment the Pendulum will reveal that the Umbilicus Mundi is at Alamut?”
“Let’s not go too far. I’d leave that last point hanging.”
“Like the Pendulum.”
“If you like. We can’t just say whatever enters our heads.”
“No, no. Strict scholarship, above all.”
That evening I congratulated myself on having invented a great tale. I was an aesthete who used the flesh and blood of the world to make Beauty. But Belbo by now was an adept, and, like other adepts, not through enlightenment, but faute de mieux.
Claudicat ingenium, delirat lingua, labat mens.
—Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, iii, 453
It must have been about then that Belbo tried to take stock of what was happening to him. But the most severe self-analysis could not free him now from the sickness to which he had grown accustomed.
FILENAME: And what if it’s true?
To invent a Plan. The Plan justifies you to such a degree that you can no longer be held accountable, not even for the Plan itself. Just throw the stone and hide your hand. If there really were a Plan, there would be no failure.
You never had Cecilia because the Archons made Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo unskilled even with the friendliest of the brass instruments. You fled the Canal gang because the Decans wanted to spare you for another holocaust. And the man with
