Guardians of the Secrets: Irans Assassins

➡ Long before modern religions, a great flood destroyed an ancient civilization known as Atlantis. The survivors spread their sacred knowledge worldwide, influencing many spiritual traditions. One of these survivors, Hasani Saba, created a secret society called the School of Hashishi, or Assassins, in a mountain fortress. He used a unique initiation ritual involving a beautiful garden and mind-altering substances to secure absolute loyalty from his followers.

Long before the rise of the Great Surface Religions, a cataclysmic flood, remembered in every ancient culture as the Deluge, destroyed the First High Civilization, the one Plato called Atlantis, and the Vedas described as the original Aryan homeland. The survivors, the ancient Aryan adepts, carried the sacred sciences across the world. They became the hidden teachers behind the esoteric cores of every later tradition. The Vedic Rishis, who encoded it into Upanashads, the ancient Magi and the Chaldean and Mesopotamian priest class of the Zoroastrian faith, who maintained their own hidden mystery schools of initiation and esoteric secrets unknown to mainstream Zoroastrian historians, all forming part of the ancient Aryan spiritual alchemical tradition passed down since antiquity.

The Taoist immortals, who refined it into the alchemical arts of China, the Buddhist masters who transmitted it through the Tantras, the Hermetic priests of Egypt, the Gnostic circles of the early Christian era, the Greek mystery schools, the Sufi orders that flowered within Islam, and the nightly and fraternal orders of medieval and modern Europe. Hasani Saba, born into this unbroken chain, revived and weaponized the same primordial wisdom at Alamut. The old man, Hassan Saba, also known as Lord of the Mountain, formed an elite secret society called the School of Hashishi, or Assassins. A popular theory links the word hashish, which is a term for cannabis, to the word hashishim, implying that they were named after the hash that they allegedly consumed.

Unlike alcohol, Islam did not prohibit cannabis by name. Another hypothesis traces the name back to the ancient Arabic term asassim, which means guardians, specifically the guardians of the secrets. This idea, kept alive through the oral and written traditions of the Naziri Ismaili sect, reveals the true esoteric essence of the order. It is a living continuation of the ancient mystery schools that have protected humanity’s hidden knowledge ever since the fall of the anti-diluvian world. In ancient Persia, or modern Iran, from the highest recesses, over 2100 meters above sea level, of the thousand year old impenetrable mountain fortress of Alamut, meaning eagle’s nest, Saba, the Lord of the Mountain, directed a covert brotherhood of fearless warriors who were completely dedicated to his undisclosed cause, willing to carry out his every order, and if necessary, die for him willingly and without hesitation.

Born in the Persian city of Qom in the 11th century, Hasani Saba was raised by a family that belonged to the Shia sect known as the Twelvers. He later converted to Ismaili Shiaism before establishing the Nazari Ismaili state at Alamut. They kept their core esoteric beliefs and practices secret from outsiders and non-initiated Muslims. Within his mountain fortress of Alamut, Lord Saba built the legendary Garden of Earthly Delights, which would play an important role in the initiation rites of the Assassins. The garden lay peacefully secluded in a beautiful valley nestled between two high mountains. Here he had imported exotic plants, birds few had ever seen before, and unusual animals from all over the world.

Luxurious palaces of marble and gold decorated with beautiful paintings and fine silk, furniture surrounding the lush gardens, and streams of milk, wine, and honey allegedly flowed throughout this earthly paradise, while fountains gushed with wine or pure spring water. Lord Saba allegedly gave his initiates spiked food and drink, and after the powerful potion of opium and hashish knocked them out, they would be carried into the sacred garden while in a deep sleep. And when the initiate woke from his slumber, a host of young, beautiful virgins would greet him singing and dancing and playing lovely flutes with other instruments for him.

And they fed him exotic imported paradise fruit, far sweeter and stranger than the local fruit he had known before, and they showed him animals of paradise imported from as far away as Japan in some cases, creatures far more remarkable than those ordinarily seen in their local region. The initiate would be covertly fed more hashish and opium during the experience to ensure the maximum effect on his psyche. After this opium was introduced and began to flow into the bloodstream, the young candidate would sleep again. They would then be moved from the garden of delights and returned to the banquet hall of Lord Hassan.

There, they awoke, and after pledging their devotion, became one of the illuminated. This technique proved very effective. Sabah could demand absolute loyalty from his followers, with no questions asked. Another version of this story comes to us from Marco Polo, from his visit to Alamo in 1273, and he says, In it were erected pavilions and palaces, the most elegant that can be imagined, all covered with gilding and exquisite painting, and numbers of the most beautiful damsels in the world, who could play all manner of instruments, and sung most sweetly, and danced in a manner that it was charming to behold.

For the old man desired to make his people believe that this was actually paradise. So he had fashioned it after the description that Muhammad gave of his paradise, that it should be a beautiful garden, running with conduits of wine and milk and honey and water, and full of lovely women for the delight of all its inmates. He kept at his court a number of the youths of the country, from twelve to twenty years of age, such as had a taste for soldiering, and to these he used to tell tales about paradise, just as Muhammad had done, and they believed in him, just as the Arabs believed in Muhammad.

Then he would introduce them into his garden, having first made them drink a certain potion, which cast them into a deep sleep, and then causing them to be lifted and carried in, so when they awoke they found themselves in the garden. The old man kept his court in grand and noble style, and made those simple hill folks about him believe firmly that he was a great prophet, and when he wanted one of his assassins to send on any mission, he would cause that potion, where have I spoke, to be given to one of the youths in the garden, and then had him carried into his palace.

When the young man was presented to him, the old man would ask whence he came, and he would reply that he came from paradise, and that it was exactly such as Muhammad had described it in the law. The youths, upon returning from the garden, would eagerly obey orders, believing martyrdom would return them to paradise. This was only a small part of Hassan’s system, which he had divided into levels or degrees. Sabah was a noted alchemist, so part of the curriculum for the future assassins involved mastering occult methods for reaching higher planes of consciousness. Of course, they also learned how to properly kill a man with a poison or a dagger.

Initiates learned multiple languages, as well as the dress and manners of merchants, monks, soldiers. Moreover, they learned to fake the beliefs and devotion of every major religion, and in this way the assassin could pretend to be anyone from a well-to-do merchant to a Sufi mystic, a Christian, or a common soldier. The assassins persisted for over a hundred years after Sabah’s death, but the son of Gangus Khan finally siege and conquered Alamut in 1256. But Sabah’s chief minister was ordered to write a complete history of the assassins based on records in the Alamut Library, and this is the work that supplies most of the historical data about the order during the crusades.

The assassins fought both for and against the crusaders, likely whichever suited their agenda at the time, so as a result of this contact the crusaders brought back to Europe, the assassin system which numerous secret societies in the west would adopt or mimic. The Knights Templar, Rosicrucians, various Hermetic orders, and Freemasons all owe their organizational efficiency to the old man Hassan. In fact, the Illuminati had their origins in the mystical aspect of the assassin order, and although most equate the Illuminati with the Bavarian Illuminati, it’s really a revised version of the assassin system. The assassins were not mere warriors or political operatives.

They were the initiated guardians of a more ancient, inner, esoteric reality concealed beneath the outer law. Entry into their ranks was not granted lightly. It followed a precise, graded system of initiation. A candidate first proved absolute loyalty through years of service and self-discipline. Only then was he introduced, step by step, to the seven degrees of knowledge. Each degree stripped away another layer of illusion, until the initiates stood face to face with the divine intellect, the same cosmic principle that the Taoists called the Tao, the Tantrics called Shiva Shakti, and the Hermetics called the One. These seven initiatory stages of the assassin cult were direct echo of the seven stages of the Mithraic Mysteries, themselves inherited from the Atlantean Arian current that had once flowed through the Greek mystery schools of Eleusius and Dionysus.

In the Mithraic rites, the adept progressed through seven ascending grades, each marked by symbolic trials of death, rebirth, and the mastery of inner fire, culminating in the solar gnosis of the Pater, or father. This same seven-step ladder is mirrored to a profound degree in the seven sacraments of Catholicism, both traditions preserving the outer forms of baptism and the Eucharist. It was Helena Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, who said, quote, The mysteries of the Jews were identical with those of the pagan Greeks, who took them from the Egyptians, who borrowed them in their turn from the Chaldeans, who got them from the Arians, the Atlanteans, and so on.

The scenes and the Cathars carried forward this identical inner current within early Christianity, practicing a secret alchemy of the soul that rejected the corrupt outer church in favor of a direct experiential gnosis. Even the Bektashi Sufi Order, whose esoteric techniques of breath, meditation, and sexual sublimation were later studied and revived by the Thule Society and the Vril Society of nationalist Germany, formed part of this living transmission focusing solely on the practical harnessing of the life force rather than any surface dogma. Rudolf von Sepatendorf was the founder of the Thule Society. He was a German occultist, intelligence agent, Freemason, and during his time in the Ottoman Empire, he was initiated into the Sufi Bektashi Order and even authored the book, Secret Practices of the Sufi Freemasons, the Islamic Teachings at the Heart of Alchemy.

At the center of this secret knowledge lay the supreme occult science, the harnessing and transmutation of raw carnal lust into refined spiritual energy and heightened psychic ability. The Assassins understood, exactly as the Taoist Masters of Internal Alchemy taught, that the primal life force, known in the East as qi or jing, resides in the sexual essence. In the European alchemical tradition, preserved by the Hermetic Orderists, Rosicrucians, and highest levels of Freemasonry, this same force was never about literal metals. The great work was always the esoteric transmutation of sexual energy, turning the base lead of carnal lust into the energetic gold of spiritual immortality.

The Germanic secret societies of the 19th and early 20th century called this universal energy, the name Vril, the inexhaustible life force current that the ancient Aryans had wielded before the Flood. Uncontrolled, it drains vitality and binds the soul to the wheel of rebirth. Through disciplined sexual alchemy, however, this same raw energy, whether you call it qi, jing, ohas, or vril, is drawn up along the spinal channel, refined stage by stage, and transmuted first into vital force, then into spiritual light. The result is not ascetic denial, but ecstatic mastery, the creation of an immortal spiritual body, the attainment of gnosis, and the unlocking of psychic magnetism.

My name is Robert Sepper. I’m an anthropologist. My published work is available on Amazon and through all other major book outlets. If you’d like to support my work, you can do that through Patreon.com. There should be a link in the description. You can also click on the thanks tab below the video to leave a donation as part of a comment. Please remember to subscribe, stay safe, and I hope to see you again soon. [tr:trw].