Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum by eco foucault (ebook smartphone .txt) 📕

ones who saidthat the appointment at the rock didn't mean Stonehenge but theRock in the Mosque of Omar."

"And we were wrong.There are other rocks. We should have thought of a place founded onrock, on a mountain, a stone, a spur, a cliff...The sixth groupwaits in the fortress of Ala-mut."

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And Kairos appeared,holding in his hand a scepter that signified royalty, and he gaveit to the first created God, and he took it and said: "Your secretname shall have 36 letters."

¡XHasan as-Sabbah,Sargozasht is-Sayyidna

A bravura performance,but now explanations were in order. I provided them in the daysthat followed: long explanations, detailed, documented. On a tableat Pilade's I showed Belbo proof after proof, which he followedwith increasingly glazed eyes while he chain-smoked and every fiveminutes held out his empty glass, the ghost of an ice cube at thebottom, and Pilade would hasten to refill it, without waiting to betold.

My first sources werethe same ones in which the earliest accounts of the Templarsappeared, from Gerard of Strasbourg to Joinville. The Templars hadcome into contact¡Xinto conflict, sometimes, but more often intomysterious alliance¡Xwith the Assassins of the Old Man of theMountain.

The story wascomplicated and began after the death of Mahomet, with the schismbetween the followers of the ordinary law, the Sunnis, and thesupporters of Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law, Fatima's husband, whosaw the succession taken from him. It was the enthusiasts of Ali,the group of adepts called the Shiites, who created the hereticbranch of Islam, the Shi'ah. An occult doctrine, which saw thecontinuity of the Revelation not in traditional meditation upon thewords of the Prophet but in the very person of the Imam, lord,leader, epiphany of the divine, theophanic reality, King of theWorld.

Now, what happened tothis heretic Islamic branch, which was gradually infiltrated by allthe esoteric doctrines of the Mediterranean basin, fromManicheanism to gnosticism, from Neopla-tonism to Iranianmysticism, by all those impulses whose shifts and development inthe West we had followed for years? It was a long story, impossibleto unravel, partly because the various Arab authors andprotagonists had extremely long names, the texts were transcribedwith a forest of diacritical marks, and as the evening wore on wecould no longer distinguish between Abu ¡¥Abd Allah Muhammad ibn¡¥AH ibn Razzam al-Ta I al-Kufi, Abu Muhammad ¡¥Ubayd Allah, andAbu Mu'inl ¡¥Abd Din Na-sir ibn Khusraw MarvazI Qubadiyanl. But anArab, I imagine, would have the same difficulty with Aristoteles,Aristoxenus, Aristarchus, Aristides, Aristagoras, Anaximander,Anaximenes, Anacreon, and Anacharsis.

But one thing wascertain: Shiism in turn split into two branches, one called theTwelvers, who await a lost and future imam, and the other, theIsmailis, born in the realm of the Fa-timids, in Cairo, whosubsequently gave rise to reformed Is-mailism in Persia through afascinating figure, the mystical and ferocious Hasan as-Sabbah.Sabbaty set up his headquarters to the southwest of the Caspian, inthe impregnable fortress of Ala-mut, the Nest of theRaptor.

There Sabbah surroundedhimself with his devotees, the fidalyln or fedayeen, those faithfulunto death; and he used them to carry out his politicalassassinations, to be instruments of the jihad hafi, the secretholy war. The fedayeen later gained an unfortunate reputation underthe name Assassins¡Xnot a lovely word now, but for them it wassplendid, the emblem of a race of warrior monks who greatlyresembled the Templars; a spiritual knighthood.

The fortress or castleof Alamut: the Rock. Built on an airy crest four hundred meterslong and in places only a few meters wide, thirty at most. From thedistance, ¡¥o one arriving along the Azerbaijan road, it lookedlike a natural wall, dazzling white in the sun, bluish in thepurple dusk, bloody at dawn; on some days it blended with theclouds or flashed with lightning. Along its upper ridge you couldjust make out what seemed a row of flint swords that shot upwardfor hundreds of meters. The most accessible side was a treacherousslope of gravel, which arche-ologists even today are unable toscale. The fortress was reached by a secret stairway bitten out ofthe rock, like the spiral peel of a stone apple, and a singlearcher could defend it. Dizzying, a world elsewhere. Alamut couldbe reached only astride eagles.

Here Sabbah ruled, andhis successors after him, each to be known as the Old Man of theMountain. First of them was the sulfurous Sinan.

Sabbah had invented amethod of dominion over his men, and to his adversaries he declaredthat if they did not submit to him, they would die. There was noescaping the Assassins. Nizam al-Mulk, prime minister of the sultanwhen the Crusaders were still exerting themselves to conquerJerusalem, was stabbed to death, as he was being carried on hislitter to the quarters of his women. The killer had approached himdisguised as a dervish. And the atabeg of Hims, guarded by a squadof men armed to the teeth, as he came down from his castle to go toFriday prayers, was slain by the Old Man's killers.

Sinan decided to murderthe Marquis Corrado di Montefeltro, a Christian, and readied two ofhis men, who introduced themselves among the infidels able to mimictheir customs and language after much preparation. They haddisguised themselves as monks and, while the bishop of Tyre wasentertaining the hapless marquis at a banquet, leaped upon thevictim and stabbed him. One Assassin was immediately killed by thebodyguards; the other took refuge in a church, waited until thewounded man was brought there, attacked him again, finishing himoff, then died blissfully.

Blissfully because, asthe Arab historiographers of the Sunni line and then the Christianchroniclers from Oderic of Porde-none to Marco Polo wrote, the OldMan had discovered a way to make his knights faithful even to thesupreme 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¡Xwine, women, flowers,delectable banquets, and hashish¡Xwhich gave the sect its name.When they could no longer do without the perverse delights of thatinvented paradise, he dragged them out of their sleep and setbefore them a choice: Go, kill, and if you succeed, this paradiseyou leave will again be yours, and forever; but if you fail, youwill plunge back into the Gehenna of the everyday.

Dazed by the drug,helpless before his demands, they sacrificed themselves insacrificing others;