The illuminatus! trilogy (110 page)

Finally, it should be noted that of all the people Hagbard employed as resonance for the vibes used against the Saure family in Ingolstadt, only Lady Velkor, Danny Pricefixer, and George Dorn were not Virgos. Hagbard evidently believed that the Illuminati magical links work when Illuminati activities are occurring in a given area—and, hence, virtually all of “his” people at the festival were Virgos and thereby linked with the
Grummet/Huan-59/Trump 6 chain of astrological associations. On the other hand, the presence of three non-Virgos shows Hagbard’s pragmatic approach and his refusal to be ruled even by so exact a science as astrology
.
*

In this connection, when George Dorn and his mother went to Radio City Music Hall to see
The Lotus Position
, the last movie made by the American Medical Association before their tragic deaths, they happened to meet a tall Italian and a very beautiful black woman whom he introduced as his wife. Mrs. Dorn didn’t catch the Italian’s name, but it was obvious that George had a very great admiration for him. On the bus back to Nutley, she decided to straighten the boy out.

“A man who respects himself and his own race,” she began, “would never think of marrying into
the colored.”

“Shut up, Ma,” George said politely.

“That’s no way to talk to your mother,” the fine lady said, going ahead blithely. “Now, your father had some radical ideas, and he tried to get the unions to accept
the colored
, but he never thought of marrying into them, George. He had too much self-respect. Are you listening, George?”

“How did you like the AMA?” he asked.

“Such wonderful young boys. So clean-cut. And that darling sister of theirs! At least they didn’t think there was
anything attractive about long hair on men. Do you know what long hair makes men look like?”

“Like girls, Ma. Is that right?”

“It makes them look worse than girls, George. It makes them look like they’re not really men, if you know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t know what you mean, Ma.” George was profoundly bored.

“Well, I mean a
little
bit on the lavender side.” She tittered.

“Oh,” he said, “you mean cocksuckers. Some of my best friends are cocksuckers, Ma.”

At this Simple piece of factual information, the remarkable lady turned red and then purple, and then twisted in her chair to look out the window in angry silence for the rest of the trip. The curious thing is that, before George could get the courage to shut the old battleaxe up that way, he first had to try to shoot a cop and then try to shoot himself and finally take hashish with Hagbard Celine, and yet she was a Virgo and he was a Capricorn.

When the Prophet died in 4632 A.M.,
*
the true faith was almost immediately shattered by conflict between the Shiite and Sunnite parties. More than a century of religious and civil warfare followed, and by 4760 A.M. the Shiites themselves had split and given birth to a subsect known as the Ismailis, or Ishmaelians. It was out of this group that Hassan i Sabbah formed the Order of the Assassins in 5090 A.M.

Ishmaelian religion had already at that date become a nine-level affair in the manner typical of mystical secret societies. Those of the lowest grade, for instance, were merely informed that
Al Koran
contained an allegorical meaning in addition to its surface teachings, and that their salvation lay in following orders. As a neophyte progressed through
the various grades, more and more of the allegories would be explained, and a doctrine would gradually emerge which is, in essence, that taught by all the mystics of East and West—Buddhists, Taoists, Vedantists, Rosicrucians, etc. The doctrine is, in important aspects, unspeakable (which is why the trainee required an
imam
—the Ishmaelian equivalent of a
guru
—to guide him in the nonverbal aspects); the ninth and highest grade, however, had no parallel except in very strict Theravada Buddhism. In this ninth grade, which Hassan attained shortly before founding the Hashishim, it was taught that even the personal mystical experience of the seeker (his own encounter with the Absolute, or the Void, or the Hodge-Podge, or God, or Goddess, or whatever one chooses to call it) should be subject to the most merciless analysis and criticism, and that there is no guide superior to reason. The Ishmaelian adept, in short, was one who had achieved supreme mystical awareness but refused to make even that into an idol; he was a total atheist-anarchist subject to no authority but his own independent mind.

“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 an 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.

Some have suggested that Hassan, who was known to have traveled much in his youth, might have brought opium back from the East and mixed it with hashish. The scholarly Dr. Joel Fort goes further and argues, in
The Pleasure Seekers
, that Hassan’s supercharger was wine-and-opium, with no marijuana products at all. Dr. John Allegro, in
The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross
, argues that both Hassan and the first Christians actually achieved the paradisical vision with the aid of
amanita muscaria
, the “fly agaric” mushroom, which is poisonous in high doses but psychedelic (or at least deleriant) in small quantities.

The present book’s suggestion—Alamout black, an almost pure hashish with a few pinches of belladonna and stramonium—is based on:

(1) the strong etymological evidence that the Hashishim were
somehow
involved with hashish;

(2) the unlikelihood that wine, opium, mushrooms, or any combination thereof could account for the etymological and historical association of Hassan with hashish;

(3) the reasons previously given for doubting that hashish
alone
is the answer;

(4) the capacity of stramonium and belladonna (in small doses) to create intensely brilliant visual imagery, beyond that of even the best grades of hashish;

(5) the fact that these latter drugs were used in both the
Elusinian Mysteries and in the European witch cult contemporary with Hassan (see R.E.L. Masters,
Eros and Evil)
.

Since it is not the intent of this book to confuse fact with fancy, it should be pointed out that these arguments are strong but not compelling. Many other alternatives can be suggested, such as hashish-belladonna-mandragora, hashish-stramonium-opium, hashish-opium-belladonna, hashish-opium-bufotinin,
*
etc., etc. All that can be said with certainty is that Hagbard Celine insists the correct formula is hashish-belladonna-stramonium (in ratio 20:1:1), and we believe Hagbard—most of the time.

The exact link between the Assassins and the European Illuminati remains unclear. We have seen (but no longer own) a John Birch Society publication arguing that the alliance between the Hashishim and the Knights Templar was consummated and that European masonry has been more or less under Hashishim influence ever since. More likely is the theory of Daraul
(op. cit.)
that after the Hashishim regrouped as the nonviolent Ishmaelian sect of today, the Roshinaya (Illuminated Ones) copied their old tactics and were in turn copied by the Allumbrados of Spain and, finally, by the Bavarian Illuminati.

The nine stages of Hashishim training, the thirteen stages in Weishaupt’s Iluminati, the thirty-two degrees of masonry, etc., are, of course, arbitrary. The Theravada Buddhists have a system of forty meditations, each leading to a definite stage of growth. Some schools of Hinduism recognize only two stages:
Dhyana
, conquest of the personal ego, and
Samadhi
, unity with the Whole. One can equally well posit five stages or a hundred and five. The essential that is common to all these systems is that the trainee, at some point or other, is nearly scared to death.
*

The difference between these systems is that some aim to liberate every candidate and some, like Sabbah’s and Weishaupt’s, deliberately encourage the majority to remain in ignorance, whereby they may with profit be endlessly exploited by their superiors in the cult. The same general game of an illuminated minority misusing a superstitious majority was characteristic of Tibet until the Chinese Communist invasion broke the power of the high lamas. A sympathetic account of the Tibetan system, which goes far toward justifying it, can be found in Alexandra David-Neel’s
The Hidden Teachings of Tibetan Buddhism;
an unsympathetic account by a skeptical fellow mystic is available in
The Confessions of Aleister Crowley
.

Another word about Alamout black: It is not for the inexperienced psychedelic voyager. For instance, the first time Simon Moon tried it, in early 1968, he had occasion to use the men’s room in the Biograph Theatre (where he had gone to see
Yellow Submarine
while under the influence). After his bowel movement he reached for the toilet paper and saw with consternation that the first sheet hanging down off the roll was neatly stamped

On ordinary marijuana or hashish, such illusions occur, of course—but they are not true hallucinations. They go away if you look at them hard enough. No matter how hard Simon looked at the toilet paper, it still said

Simon went back to his seat in the theater badly shaken. For weeks afterward he wondered if the Illuminati had some sinister reason for infiltrating the toilet-paper industry, or if the whole experience were a genuine hallucination and the first sign, as he put it, “that this fucking dope is ruining my fucking head.” He never solved this mystery, but eventually he stopped worrying about it.