claimed that the Old Man of the Mountains gave his young followers drugs which put them to sleep for three days. When they woke up they found themselves in a beautiful garden they were told was paradise. They were surrounded by beautiful girls who played them music and gave them anything they wanted. After three days the young men were sent back to sleep. When they awoke, they were brought again before Hassan, convinced that the Old Man had the power to send them back to Paradise on a whim. So when Hassan wanted someone killed, his assassins would do it willingly, knowing that Paradise would be their certain reward.
In reality Hassan banned all intoxicants, even executing one of his own sons for being drunk. He banned music, too. Among his own people he was renowned as a holy man and alchemist, an adept who was able to control events all over the world by supernatural means. This was despite the fact that once he arrived and set up his court there, he only ever left his room at Alamut twice.
In the twentieth century the archetype of the man who appears mad, but really controls the whole world from his cell appeared as Dr Mabuse, in the deeply esoteric films of Fritz Lang.
HAROUN AL RASCHID WAS ANOTHER OF the extraordinary, compelling characters of this era. He became Caliph in his early twenties and quickly made Baghdad the most splendid city in the world, building a palace of unparalleled splendour served by hundreds of courtiers and slaves and a harem. It was a place of glittering materiality, where a man might experience every pleasure the world has to offer, grow bored with them all and long for novelty.
The turbaned oriental potentate of all our imaginations and Caliph of the
In one of the most famous tales a fisherman on the Red Sea catches a large iron pot in his nets. When he has hauled it on board he sees that the metal cover is engraved with the interlocked triangles of Solomon’s Seal. Naturally curious, the fisherman opens the pot and at once a black vapour rises out of it and spreads itself all over the sky, so that all he can see is darkness. Then the vapour condenses again into the monstrous form of a Jinn, who tells the fisherman he was imprisoned in the pot by Solomon. He says that after two hundred years he swore he would make rich anyone who set him free. After five hundred years he swore he would reward his liberator with power. But after a thousand years of captivity he swore he would kill whoever set him free. So the Jinn tells the fisherman to prepare to die. But the fisherman says he can’t believe the Jinn was really inside the pot, and so the spirit, to prove it, turns himself back into vapour and sinks with a slow, spiralling motion back inside — at which point, of course, the fisherman claps the lid back on.
This might seem just a silly story for children, but for occultists it is packed with esoteric lore. But the word ‘Jinn’ means ‘to hide’, and a detailed theory and practice of dealing with these entities, said to live in ruined houses, in wells and under bridges, was actively cultivated among Arab peoples. Moreover, the imprisoning of spirits and demons in amulets, rings and stones using magical sigils such as the Seal of Solomon was well known. By the Middle Ages such lore, largely Arabic in origin and concerned particularly with the empowering of talismans by astrological means, would be collected in many famous grimoires. The greatest of these, called the
RUMI GREW UP TO BECOME the great poet at court. He was a disconcerting presence even as a small child. At the age of six he began the habit of fasting, and began, too, to see visions. There is a story that one day he was playing with a group of children who were chasing a cat from rooftop to rooftop. Rumi protested that humans should be more ambitious than animals — and then vanished. When the others cried out in fright, he suddenly reappeared behind them. He had a strange look in his eyes, and said spirits in green cloaks had carried him away to other worlds. The green cloaks may have been shadows of El Khidir, the Green One, a powerful being able to materialize and dematerialize at will. The Green One is said by the Sufis to come to the aid of those on a special mission.
At thirty-seven years old, now a young university professor, Rumi was adored by his students. One day he was riding his horse, followed by his students, when he was accosted by a dervish. Shamsi Tabriz had made a name for himself, insulting sheiks and holy men, because he would be guided by nothing but God — which made him unpredictable and sometimes an overwhelming, even shattering presence.
The two men embraced and went to live in a cell together, where they meditated for three months. Each saw what he had been searching for in the eyes of the other.
But Rumi’s students grew so jealous that one day they ambushed Shamsi and stabbed him to death.
Devastated, Rumi wept and wailed and grew thin. He was desolate. Then one day he was walking down the street, past a goldsmith’s shop, where he heard the rhythmic beat of a hammer upon gold. Rumi began repeating the name of Allah and then suddenly began to whirl in ecstasy.
This is how the Mellevi, or whirling dervish order of Sufis, was born.
The magnificent civilization of the Arabs both fascinated and horrified medieval Europe. Travellers returned with tales of life at court, of hundreds of lions on leashes, of a lake of mercury on which lay a leather bed, inflated with air and fastened by silk bands to four silver columns at the corners. The most common report was of a miraculous mechanical garden made out of precious metals and containing mechanical birds that flew and sang. In the middle of it stood a great golden tree bearing fruit made out of astonishingly large precious stones and representing the planets.
To many these prodigies seemed necromantic. They existed on the border between magic and science. A partial explanation at least may lie in the discovery made in Baghdad in 1936. A German archaeologist called William Koenig was excavating palace drains when he discovered what he identified immediately as a primitive electric battery. It dated back as least as far as the early Middle Ages. When a colleague created a replica, she found she was able to generate an electric current with it that coated a silver figurine with gold in under half an hour.
IN 802 HAROUN AL RASCHID SENT THE Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, a gift of silks, brass candelabras, perfume and ivory chessmen. He sent, too, an elephant and a water clock that marked the hours by dropping bronze balls into a bowl and little mechanical knights that emerged from little doors. It was a gift intended to impress upon Charlemagne the superiority of Arabian science — and the reach of its empire.
If it hadn’t been for three generations of Frankish kings, Charles Martel, Pepin and Charlemagne, Islam might have wiped Christianity off the face of the earth.
Born in 742, Charlemagne inherited the spear of Longinus, used to pierce the side of Jesus Christ on the cross. Charlemagne lived and slept with the spear, believing it gave him powers to foresee the future and forge his own destiny. In the first decade of the ninth century he won victories against the Muslims. He wielded his sacred sword Joyeuse to keep them from invading northern Spain and to protect, too, the route of the pilgrimage to St James of Compostela.
Charlemagne had an imposing physical presence. Some seven foot tall with blazing blue eyes, he was a man of simple, moderate habits, yet he managed to impose his will on the course of history. Not only did his vision of Fortress Europe maintain a Christian sense of identity in the face of Islamic invasion, but he also moved to protect his people against corrupt and tyrannical nobles.
It is from the writings of one of the great magi of the Renaissance, Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, that we learn the strange story of the Holy Vehm, or Secret Tribunal of Free Judges, founded by Charlemagne in 770 with secret ciphers and signs to exclude the uninitiated. Sometimes known as the Secret Soldiers of Light, masked men
