by Colin Wilson
Nevertheless, Hasan’s dreams began to collapse within a few years of his greatest triumphs. In 1094, the Fatimid Caliph – spiritual head of the Ismailis – died in Cairo. Nizar – Hasan’s patron – should have replaced him. Instead, the Vizier, Al-Afdal, put Nizar’s younger brother on the throne. There was a war, and Nizar was killed. Hasan remained faithful to Nizar (in fact, his sect called themselves the Nizam); he refused to acknowledge the new Sultan. So he was now isolated from his own co-religionists. After Berkyaruq turned against him, it was all the Assassins could do to hold on to their territories. At eighty-seven, he was getting tired; he could not afford to defy the whole Arab world forever. But before the Caliph and the Old Man of the Mountain could make peace, the new Vizier discovered a plot by the Assassins to murder the Caliph. In all probability, there was never such a plot. Nizar and his children were dead; Hasan had no motive for wanting to kill the man who was now offering him peace and cooperation. But the Vizier was a Twelver (not an Ismaili); he had good reason for wanting to prevent the reconciliation. And Hasan’s reputation was such that any mud would stick. The Caliph took the “plot” so seriously that he ordered that all the citizens of Cairo should be registered, and that all strangers should be carefully watched. Many “agents of Hasan” were arrested and executed, including the tutor of the Caliph’s children.
And so the last hope vanished. And in May 1144, Hasan bin Sabbah, one of the most remarkable religious leaders of all time, died in his castle of Alamut, at the age of ninety. He appointed one of his generals to succeed him, demonstrating thereby that he had learned from Mahomet’s chief mistake.
This was by no means the end of the Assassins. After initial difficulties, the Syrian branch took root, and it was the stories of the Syrian mission, carried back to Europe by Crusaders, that introduced the word “assassin” into the European languages. The event that caused this notoriety was the murder of the Christian Knight Conrad of Montferrat in 1192; Conrad was stabbed by two Assassins – agents of the Syrian Old Man of the Mountain, Sinan – who were disguised as monks. (King Richard the Lion Heart of England is supposed to have been behind the murder; one of his protéges quickly married the widow, and became “King of Jerusalem” in his place.) After this, Assassins began to figure in every chronicle of the Third Crusade, and the legend captured the imagination of Europe. They were masters of disguise, adepts in treachery and murder. Their Old Man was a magician who surveyed the world from his castle like some evil spider, watching for victims. They were without religion and without morality (one early chronicler says they ate pork – against the Moslem law – and practised incest with their mothers and sisters). They were so fanatically devoted to their master that he often demonstrated their obedience to visitors by making them leap out of high windows. Their arts of persuasion were so subtle that no ruler could be sure of the loyalty of his own servants . . . A typical story illustrates this. Saladin – the Sultan of Egypt and the great enemy of the Crusaders – sent a threatening message to Sinan, the Syrian Old Man. The Assassin chief sent back a messenger, whose mission was to deliver a message in private. Aware of the danger, Saladin had him thoroughly searched, then dismissed the assembly, all except for two guards. The messenger turned to the guards and asked: “If I were to order you, in the name of my Master, to kill the Sultan, would you do it?” They nodded and drew their swords. Whereupon the messenger, having made his point, bowed and took his leave – taking the two guards with him. Saladin decided to establish friendly relations with the Assassins.
But by the time Marco Polo saw the castle of Alamut in 1273, the power of the Assassins was at an end. In Persia they had been slaughtered by the Mongols; in Syria, ruthlessly suppressed by Baybars, Sultan of Egypt. Some of the survivors remained in the area of Alamut – where they may be found to this day. Others scattered to distant countries, induding India . . .
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In 1975 three of the islands in the Comoro group, which lies between Africa and Madagascar, declared their independence from France. Soon afterwards a man named Ah Soilih declared himself dictator of the tiny state with the military help of a French mercenary, Bob Denard. Soilih proved to be a despot: he raised death squads, kidnapped and raped women and organized the destruction of all machinery on the islands.
Two years into his reign, Soilih consulted a witch-doctor in order to know what the future held for himself and his descendants. The witch-doctor was encouraging: Soilih could only be killed by a man who owned a dog. Upon hearing this, Soilih acted as any dictator would and had his death squads kill all the dogs on the island.
Nevertheless, a year later he was dead, “shot while trying to escape” by the forces of his old comrade Bob Denard. The French mercenary had received a new contract, this time from one of Soilih’s many enemies. And the witch-doctor had been right: among Denard’s troops was his ever-present mascot, a large Alsatian dog.
Sunday Times
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The Thugs
By AD 1300, the Assassins had ceased to exist in the Middle East, at least as a political force. In 1825, the English traveller I. B. Fraser remarked that although the Ismailis no longer committed murder, they were still fanatically devoted to their chief. Fraser also commented that there were Ismailis in India too. This raises a fascinating question: whether the Assassins of the Middle East formed a liaison with their Indian counterparts, the Thugs. When William Sleeman was investigating the Thugs in the nineteenth century, he was puzzled why, although they were Moslems, they worshipped the Hindu goddess Kali. One captured Thug explained that Kali was identical with Fatima, the murdered daughter of the Prophet . . .
The Thugs (pronounced “tug”) came to the attention of Europe after the British annexation of India in the late eighteenth century. At first, the conquerors noted simply that the roads of India seemed to be infested with bands of robbers who strangled their victims. In 1816, a doctor named Robert Sherwood, stationed in Madras, induced some of these robbers to talk to him about their religion. His article “On the Murderers Called Phansigars” appeared in Asiatic Researches in 1820, and caused some excitement. Sherwood alleged that the phansigars or Thugs (phansi means a noose; thug means cheat) committed murders as a religious duty, and that their aim was the actual killing, rather than the robbery that accompanied it.
The bizarre story caught the imagination of the English, and the word “thug” soon passed into the language. The Thugs, according to Sherwood, lived quietly in their native villages for most of the year, fulfilling their duties as citizens and fathers in a manner that aroused no suspicion. But in the month of pilgrimage (usually November-December) they took to the roads and slaughtered travellers – always taking care to be at least a hundred miles from home.
The method was always the same. The advance guard would locate a band of travellers, then one or two of the Thugs would approach the group and ask if they might travel with it – for protection. A few days later, a few more Thugs would make the same request. This would continue until there were more Thugs than travellers. The killing usually took place in the evening, when the travellers were seated around the fire. At a given signal, three Thugs would take their place behind each victim. One of them would pass the strangling cloth (or ruhmal) around the victim’s neck; another would grab his legs and lift them clear of the ground; the third would seize his hands or kneel on his back. Usually, it was all over within seconds. The bodies of the victims were then hacked and mutilated to prevent recognition, and to make them decompose more quickly. The legs were cut off; if there was time, the whole body might be dismembered. Then it was buried. It was now time for the most important part of the ritual – the ceremony known as Tuponee. A tent was usually erected – to shield the Thugs from the sight of travellers. The kussee, the consecrated pickaxe (their equivalent of the Christian cross), was placed near the grave: the Thugs sat around in a group. The leader prayed to Kali for wealth and success. A symbolic strangling was enacted, and then all who had taken an active part in t
he murder ate the “communion sugar” (goor), while the chief poured consecrated water on the grave. One of the captured Thugs told Sleeman: “Let any man once taste of that goor and he will be a Thug, though he know all the trades and have all the wealth of the world.”
William Sleeman was a captain in the British army; born in St Tudy, Cornwall, he had served in India since 1809. He was fascinated by Sherwood’s paper, and in the early 1820s, he began to study the Thugs in the Nerbudda valley. The revelations he made in 1829 caused a sensation throughout India. Sleeman revealed that Thuggee was not a local religious sect, but a nationwide phenomenon that claimed the lives of thousands of travellers every year. Sleeman became the acknowledged authority on the subject, and in 1830, Lord William Bentinck appointed him to suppress the Thugs.
Fortunately for Sleeman, the organization had already become corrupt and degenerate. In its earlier days, the members of the sect had been strict in their observance of the rules. It was forbidden to kill women, because Kali was a woman; it was also forbidden to kill religious mendicants, carpenters, metal workers, blind men, pariahs, lepers, mutilated men, and men driving a goat or cow. Greed had caused a gradual relaxation of the rules (it must have been infuriating to let a rich caravan escape because it contained a carpenter or blind man); and it was to this disobedience that the Thugs attributed their decline in fortunes. In a sense, this was true. Haste and greed meant that bodies were sometimes left unburied, so a search could be instituted more quickly. And in some cases, lack of preparation meant that the killing was bungled – Sleeman mentions a case in which the Thugs were pursued back to their own village, and saved from arrest only by the intervention of the villagers (who had been well bribed). When Sleeman’s researches were published, travellers became suspicious of “holy men” or poor Moslems who asked for protection. Better roads (built by the British) meant that Thugs could be pursued more easily. Many of them became informers (or “approvers”) to save their own lives. Within a few years, thousands of Thugs had been arrested and brought to trial.
Sleeman was the first to understand the fundamentally religious nature of Thuggee: that the murders were sacrifices offered to the dark mother, Kali (also known as Durgha and Bhowani). Because he was deeply religious, the Thug was usually scrupulous, honest, kindly and trustworthy; Sleeman’s assistant described one Thug chief as “the best man I have ever known”. Many Thugs were rich men who held responsible positions; part of their spoils went to local rajahs or officials, who had no obiection to Thugs provided they committed their murders elsewhere. Colonel James Sleeman, grandson of Sir William, described Feringheea as “the Beau Nash of Thuggee”. Like the Assassins, most convicted Thugs met their deaths with remarkable bravery, which impressed their British executioners. It is this Jekyll and Hyde character that makes the Thugs so baffling. One old Thug was the nurse of a family of British children, and obviously regarded his charges with great tenderness; for precisely one month of every year he obtained leave to visit his “sick mother”; the family found it unbelievable when he was arrested as a Thug. For the Thugs were capable of murdering children as casually as adults. A Thug leader described how his gang decoyed a group of twenty-seven – induding five women and two children – away from a larger group of travellers (arguing that they could travel more cheaply). At midnight they stopped to rest in a grove – already chosen in advance as the murder place. There the Thugs strangled the adults; the children – two three-year-old boys – were given to two Thugs; but one of them kept crying for his mother, whom he had just seen murdered. The Thug picked him up by his feet and dashed out his brains against a rock. This was one of the few occasions when retribution followed. The adults were buried, but the Thugs overlooked the boy’s body. It was discovered the next morning by the local landowner, who set out to hunt the Thugs with armed men. After a chase, the Thugs were located; when the armed men opened fire, they scattered, leaving behind much of their booty. Four Thugs were arrested, and kept in captivity for a few years. (Sleeman points out that the landowner’s motive was not a sense of justice, but to seize the spoils.) The other boy was brought up as a Thug.
The male children of Thugs were automatically initiated into the sect. They were first placed in the care of a Thug tutor, who insisted upon absolute obedience, and acted as their religious instructor. (It must be emphasized that the killing was only a part of the ritual of the Thugs, as Communion is of Christians.) At the age of nine or ten, the boys were allowed to act as scouts, and later to watch the killing. At eighteen they were allowed to take part in the killing and eat the goor.
By the year 1850, Thuggee had virtually ceased to exist in India. Over 4,000 Thugs had been brought to trial; some were hanged, others sentenced to transportation or life imprisonment. Sleeman came to know many of them – even to establish a kind of friendship; for example, he was instrumental in getting the notorious Feringheea a pardon (in the face of some opposition, for when the Thug leader was caught, he admitted that he had just returned from an expedition in which 105 men and women had died).
The mystery of the origin of Thuggee is still unsolved. Feringheea told Sleeman that all the Thug rituals were portrayed in the eighth-century carvings in the caves of Ellora. (Ellora is a village in north-east Bombay province, and its Hindu, Buddhist and Jain temples extend for over a mile, with some of India’s greatest sculptural treasures, whose dates range from the third to the thirteenth century.) If this is true, then the Thugs predated the Assassins by three hundred years. In his book The Assassins, Bernard Lewis suggests that the Thugs may have been connected with the stranglers of Iraq – the heretical sect that sprang up after the death of the Prophet. But these stranglers flourished in the first half of the eighth century, and four more centuries were to elapse before the Moslems made deep inroads into India. (The greatest of the early Moslem invaders of India, Mahmud of Ghazni – Khayyam’s “mighty Mahmud” – confined himself to the Punjab, in north-western India: Delhi fell to Mohammed of Ghur in 1192.) So it is altogether more likely that Ismailis, fleeing from persecution after the fall of Alamut, discovered that India already possessed its own Order of Assassins, and formed an alliance with the Thugs. Other Ismailis formed their own sects in India, and continued to regard the Persian Imam as their head. In 1811, the French consul Rousseau observed that Ismailis flourished in India, and that they regarded their Imam almost as a god. In 1850, a sect of Ismailis known as the Khojas decided to settle a religious dispute by their old methods, and four dissenting brethren were assassinated in broad daylight. The four killers were hanged. The quarrel centred around the question of whether the Khojas of Bombay province still owed allegiance to the Persian Imam. This Imam was known as the Aga Khan; and a few years later, he was forced to flee to India – after an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Shah of Persia – and became the spiritual head of the Ismailis – not only in India, but also in Persia, Syria and central Asia. And so the homeland of the Thugs became eventually the homeland of the descendants of the Assassins.
To find a parallel to the fanaticism of the Assassins and the Thugs, we have to turn to some of the bizarre sects of Old Russia.
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The Median prophet Zoroaster who founded the ancient fire-worshipping religion of Persia, ate only cheese for thirty years of his life.
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The Khlysty and the Skoptzy
In the section on Rasputin (see here), I have deliberately said nothing about the strange religious cult to which he belonged, for it would have led to a long digression. In fact, when the young Rasputin visited the monastery of Verkhoture with a novice called Mileti Saborevsky, he learned that it was also a kind of prison, a place of detention for certain members of heretical sects, the chief of which were the Khlysty, or Flagellants, and the Skoptzy, or Mutilators. During his four months in the monastery, Rasputin enjoyed speaking with these heretics, and he learned that the Khlysty believed that the Kingdom of God can only be attained on this earth by the Elect. They, of course, were the Elect
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He also learned that one of the reasons the Khlysty were so disliked by the Orthodox Church was that their ceremonies were regarded as scandalous and immoral. Since Rasputin was young and highly sexed, he probably felt that this was something that deserved looking into. At all events, he became a member of the Khlysty, and his enemies later declared that he had carried his beliefs back to his home in Pokrovskoe, and made them the excuse to seduce half the women in the village. There is undoubtedly an element of truth in this accusation.
But in order to understand the Khlysty, and their even stranger offshoot, the Skoptzy, we need to know a little about the great religious controversy that split Russia into two warring camps at about the same time that Sabbatai Zevi was causing so much ferment in the Middle East.