Hasan-i-Sabah

Assassin Master

James Wasserman

• Publisher: Ibis Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780892546879
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Oriente Medio

This publication includes the first English translation of the1310 biography of Hasan-i-Sabah by Rashid al-Din: The Biography of Our Master ( Sar-Guzasht-i-Sayyidna )

Hasan-i-Sabah was born in northern Persia around 1050 and died in 1124. He was an Ismaili missionary (or dai ) who founded the Nizari Ismailis after the usurpation of the Fatimid Imamate by the military dictator of Egypt. It may be said that Hasan founded and operated the world's most successful mystical secret society, while building a political territory in which to maintain his independence. The small empire he created would be home to him, his followers, and their descendants for 166 years.

Today, under the leadership of the Aga Khan, the Nizari Ismailis are one of the preeminent Muslim sects in the world, numbering some twenty million members in twenty-five countries.

The medieval Nizaris were also known as Assassins or Hashishim. They became embedded in European consciousness because of their contact with the Knights Templar, and other Crusaders and visitors to the Near East. Several Europeans reported back with strange (and largely false) tales of the Assassins. In the fourteenth century, they were widely popularized by the famed Venetian traveler and writer Marco Polo in The Travels of Marco Polo. He added a whole new level of myth in his account of the sect (included in this volume along with extensive commentary).

Of greatest interest is the idea that the Assassins were the spiritual initiators of the Knights Templar. If this is true, Hasan-i-Sabah would be in part responsible for the European Renaissance that would reclaim the spiritual centrality of the Hermetic writings and the Gnostic/Esoteric trends that continue to this day.

Essential reading for an understanding of modern esoteric secret societies and today's headlines coming from the Middle East. Includes 9 maps.

PART ONE

Historical Background

CHAPTER ONE

A Brief History of Mesopotamia

God is He having the head of the Hawk. The same is the first, incorruptible eternal, unbegotten, indivisible, dissimilar: the dispenser of all good; indestructible; the best of the good, the Wisest of the wise; he is the Father of Equity and Justice, self-taught, physical, perfect, and wise—He who inspires the Sacred Philosophy.—The Chaldean Oracles of Zoroaster¹

IN ORDER to contextualize the environment into which Hasan-i-Sabah was born and flourished, it will be helpful to review the history of Mesopotamia and Persia. Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) has long shared a most indefinite border with Persia (modern Iran) and northern Syria, and, as we will see, these regional powers were intimately involved with each other's histories for millennia—as they are to this day. While Hasan's family roots lay in southern Arabia, we will soon follow his wide-ranging travels in support of his missionary efforts throughout Mesopotamia and the land of his birth, the exotic realm of Persia.

Let's look first at the Near East (or Middle East) and the legacy of the world's cradle of civilization. (For clarity, “Near East” will here refer to the lands between the eastern Mediterranean and central Iran, and from the Black Sea to the Red Sea, excluding Egypt.)² By necessity, this survey will be quite limited, touching only on some of the main points of the millennia of history of the region, and only some of the cultures, city-states, kingdoms, and empires that shaped our common history. All dates in this chapter are BC unless otherwise noted.

Humankind emerged long before the keeping of written records. “Modern humans became established in the Near East by the Late Pleistocene, around 55,000 to 35,000 years ago.”¹ “But, a continuous and persistent society was late in coming. It came into being first in the Near East, and thus the historical tradition of Babylon and Egypt became the fountainhead of our historical memory.”² The uninterrupted roots of Near Eastern settlements and communities extend as far back as the year 10,000, with the final melting of the glaciers after the last Ice Age—the beginning of the current Holocene Epoch—and the evolution from the hunter-gatherer social organization to that of the herdsmen and farmers who cultivated and raised wheat, barley, goats, cattle, and sheep; and the urban dwellers who offered markets and facilitated trade and commerce in such items.

Mesopotamia (Greek for “between two rivers”—the land between the Tigris and Euphrates) is the birthplace of Western civilization. It was host to several empires and innumerable cultures. It is part of the region known as the Fertile Crescent, whose lands were periodically inundated by the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile Rivers. Rising waters brought silt to nourish the soil, or were capable of being productively utilized, as is the case with the Jordan River. People learned to harness the powers of irrigation, levees, reservoirs, and dams so that the development of agricultural civilizations throughout the region commenced.

In the early seventh millennium, small irrigation systems appeared in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in the region of Elam (see below), as well as the marshlands of southern Babylonia.³ The need to manage water flow and crops was a great key to socializing people in a cooperative culture, to manage tasks which far exceeded the ability of a single individual. At the same time, the need to observe, calculate, and experiment was crucial to the ability to succeed. In the hunter/gatherer phase of human development, people foraged through wide areas and moved with the wildlife. If a place was “hunted out” or “foraged out,” the community would trek on to the next target area. No permanent housing was part of such a nomadic lifestyle. All this changed with the development of agriculture, herding, and water management. Agriculture is the key to settled civilizations. The varying sources of sustenance in Mesopotamia would include herding, fishing, hunting, and growing crops, and would encourage specialization of tasks over time. Add to these the urban craftspeople who provided woven fabrics, pottery, jewelry, monumental art and statuary, in addition to writing and record-keeping services, and the traders who successfully moved all such goods and services along to others.

The history of Persia and Mesopotamia is that of the interaction between Semitic and non-Semitic peoples. According to historian Will Durant, the term “Aryan” is properly applied only to the eastern branch of the Indo-European people, “the Mitannians, Hittites, Medes, Persians, and Vedic Hindus.”¹ Scholar Richard Foltz says that all languages within the Indo-European family extend to a common source located in the Eurasian steppes of the Ural Mountains and east to Siberia, at least to the fourth millennium. In time, the derivative language groups included Celtic, German, and Greek.² The Semitic languages developed in the eastern Mediterranean and Africa and included Hebrew, Arabic, Syrian, Aramaic, Assyrian, Amhamric, Tigrinya, Maltese, Phoenician, Ugaritic, and Akkadian.³ The Aryans and Semites co-existed together and both language groups were long in simultaneous use. As noted by historian Paul Kriwaczek:

The civilization that was born, flourished and died in the land between the rivers was not the achievement of any particular people, but the result of the coming together and persistence through time of a unique combination of ideas, styles, beliefs, and behaviors. The Mesopotamian story is that of a single continuous cultural tradition, even though its human bearers and propagators were different at different times.¹

Some of the accomplishments and innovations of our remarkable progenitors include the development of cities, agriculture, and irrigation; commerce and trade, including imports and exports; monotheism and monogamy; the wheel, and the use of the horse and wagon; coinage and letters of credit; crafts and industries, including the use of the potter's kiln, manufacture of fine furniture, cosmetics and jewelry, along with architecture, brick-making, and massive construction efforts; codes of law and evolving forms of government to include relative democracy, tyranny, central planning, and empire building; concepts such as private property, the divine right of kings, and the rights of the individual; myth, theology, and religion; income tax; mathematics, medicine, geometry, and astronomy; the use of weights and measures; the calendar, clock, and zodiac; writing, the alphabet, paper, ink, books, literature, libraries, and schools; indoor plumbing; music and sculpture; as well as games such as checkers, dice, and tenpins.² The concept of an intimate and personal relation with deity extends earlier in Mesopotamia than elsewhere, at least to the second or third millennium. It would reach Egypt during the Amarna period (beginning in the mid-fourteenth century) and Israel soon after, as exemplified in the Psalms of King David (ca. 1000).³

Discussing the evolution of government forms, particularly in the Mesopotamian region during the historical period, Marc Van De Mieroop summarizes:

The city-state was the primary political element from 3000 to approximately 1600, territorial states dominated the scene from that point on to the early first millennium, and empires characterized later history.¹

The first identifiable temple building project in Mesopotamia dates to the mid-sixth millennium in the city of Eridu near the Persian Gulf. Subsequent building on the same site extended to the third millennium.² Later temple construction in Uruk would have involved a huge workforce with archaeologists estimating fifteen thousand workers laboring ten hours a day for five years.³ Such figures are mirrored in Egypt in the construction of the Great Pyramid. Dr. Ogden Goelet estimates that the Great Pyramid's 2.5 million blocks, weighing 1.5 tons each, would have required fifty years of labor at ten hours per day to complete.⁴ Such numbers in both civilizations speak to a massive planning and administrative apparatus, along with the likelihood of compulsion.

In addition to being places of worship, temples served as communal centers in the practical lives of the ancient Near East. Each city was identified as the home of a particular deity, protected by that deity, and the temple understood as His or Her domicile. Food and goods, collected as offerings to the gods, were distributed to...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Tobias Churton
• Introduction
• A Bibliographic Note
• Part One: Historical Background
• Part Two: The Life of Hasan-i-Sabah
• Part Three: The Gnosis of Hasan-i-Sabah
• Appendices
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index