74 THE ORIGINS OF FREEMASONRY FROM ANCIENT TIMES TO THE MIDDLE AGES
spreading these elements through an esoteric method of initiation based
on reason, tolerance, and equality, the Karmates facilitated ties among
all races and castes.*
A conversion to Ismailism is the basis for the creation of the broth-
erhood of the Assassins: the conversion of its founder and first grand
master, Hassan Sabah, a highly educated man who was a minister of the
Sultan of Isfahan. He reformed Ismailism with a less flexible adminis-
tration that provided him with a military organization.
The word assassin as applied to the brotherhood does not mean, as
some have maintained, "eater of hashish." In reality, assassin is the plu-
ral form of the Arab word for guardian, assas. The Assassins or
"Guardian Brothers were so named because the purpose of their order
was the protection of the Holy Land, whose central orientation, the
axis of the Spiritual World, was the mystic Mountain, which explains
the title held by the grand master, the Sheik el Djebel," interpreted by
the Europeans to mean the Old Man of the Mountain. (Sheik means
"master," "teacher," or "head of a brotherhood" and "old man" as in
a person worthy of respect.)^28
The higher adepts within the Assassins devoted their time to the
study of philosophy in the fortress of Alamut, which was located in a
Persian domain. When the Mongols of Kubla Khan defeated the
Assassins in the twelfth century, the victors found an immense library
and an astronomical observatory there.
Outside of the Holy Land, there was another region where Chris-
tians had contact with Arab civilization and Ismailian sects in particu-
lar: Spain. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, an Ismaili group
similar to the Assassins, the Brothers of Purity, lived on the Iberian
peninsula. We possess fifty-one treatises left by these brothers and
know that their initiation consisted of four grades. The objective they
pursued was the propagation of a philosophy inspired by that of
Aristotle with Neoplatonic interpretations.
There is no need anymore to provide proof of the influence exer-
cised by the Arab civilization over the Western world. We have already
* It should be noted that the Middle East, cradle of the Christian world, had long been
disposed to the synthesis of religions and philosophies.