Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [246]
Sinan 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 Porde-none 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.
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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 asino substerne