Where would you put a library of 200, 000 books?
T What about Hassan i Sabbah, the Assassins ? ... These were sexual techniques ?
. . . Yesterday a thousand years ago, Hassan i Sabbah, a Persian by birth and school-chum of Omar Khayyam, walked by accident (as if there were any accidents) into the studios of Radio Cairo to find all the cats bombed. He realized like a flash that he could SEND, TOO. He took the mike to an unheated penthouse called Alamut near the Caspian . . . his original station nearly a thousand years ago could broadcast from Alamut to Paris with Charlemagne on the house phone and as far as Xanadu East. Today the same lines have been proliferating machine-wise and a stray wire into the room I am in . . . Well, you figure it out . . . (BG, Minutes to Go)
B Uh ... presumably .. . ummmm I've written a piece which has gotten lost; I've sold it to a collector instead of getting it published . . . it wasn't a very good piece, it was funny . . . essentially not a very funny subject . . . but, uh, I made a pilgrimage to Alamout, the castle of the Assassins . . . uh, in the summer of 1973-and I know less than when I started . . . that's it . . . I know less than when I started . . . I know a lot more than any book that I've read about it . . . there are maybe better books, and I understand that Professor Corbin is bringing out new material which he got through the Aga Khan, who is said to be a descendant-in fact the Aga Khan's vast wealth and spiritual authority depends on being a descendant of a captive and then eventually reigning Old Man of the Mountain, and a Fatimid, descended from the Prophet's own daughter Fatima, who was chosen by the British to be a great leader who was not a territorial prince-the British in 1885 realized that they were having such terrible trouble with the Indian princes who were territorially based, that they had a sort of competition which was judged in British fashion by a British court in Bombay, in which they put to trial the Sufis as represented by the great-grandfather, or certainly the forebears of Idries Shah, and his rather kind of sloppy commercialized Sufism that he's trying to push in England right now . . .
And, uh, they lost and the Aga Khan won, and the Aga Khan, curiously enough, was a descendant of the last Old Man of the Mountain . . . and the Ismaelis had papers and documents which have recently been handed to, or been given for study by French authorities such as Corbin . . . and I'm sure he knows a great deal more about the Old Man of the Mountain than I do . . . although I think he's not been to the Castle, which is a very extraordinary experience, it's only one of a great series of castles in the mountains to the south of the Caspian Sea . . . and, uh, one learns a great deal from actually visiting such a place, as I suggested you might visit Genet's castle of Fontevrault that he wrote The Miracle of the Rose about, and would learn a great deal from just being at base itself . . .
Uh, some of the conclusions were practical-like, uh, it must be fucking cold up there in the wintertime, and this area is so small where would you put a library of 200,000 books; there isn't enough room to put away 200 packages of vitamin B-1 .. . uh, very tiny, very small, very dangerous, cold and uncomfortable sort o5-spot . . . which I guess Hassan i Sabbah dug a lot, and he must've been very hard to live with is all I can think of . . . (laughing) end of that-push the button . . .
(tape stops)
The salacious stories, what did they involve?
T "Nothing is true . . . "
B (laughing) "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" . . . not everything is permitted in the village, it's not true . . . alas .. . it's not really Hassan i Sabbah's village, but another .
I went to Hassan i Sabbah's Alamout, as you know, I wrote a rather poor piece about it that nobody even bothered to turn down, it just sort of came back to me some way without any proper refusal from whoever I sent it-oh, Rolling Stone, I think .. . must've been quite shocked by it . . . The story of going to Alamout with a very charming and witty, rather campy American friend, and, uh, that may've been too much for them, I don't know . . .
T It was just that that was too much for them?
B Well, maybe they just didn't . . . no, it wasn't their sort of thing at all, in fact they, they're not publishing things like that, they're into politics . . . Watergate-type, CIA . . .
T Fear and loathing at Alamout . . .
B (laughing) Yes, fear and loathing . . . hmmm . . .
T It must've been quite an experience to be there?
B Overwhelming. Very difficult physically and psychically. I had asthma, mountain sickness, and sheer funk . . . uh, wearing town shoes, climbing up to those really extremely inaccessible spots . . . where there are traces of the fortifications and, uh, whether they date from the time of the Old Man himself one doesn't know, but the castle was utterly destroyed by the Mongols . . . one can judge that it must've been an absolutely impregnable place, but really very small, too small to hold a library such as he was said to have possessed ... the Mongol conqueror was accompanied by a historian who claims that he actually saw such a library, that it was destroyed or utterly dispersed at that time . . . uh, recently French scholars have claimed to have come up with original manuscripts which are in the hands of Ismaeli followers of the Aga Khan, who had settled in Bombay several centuries ago, and Corbin has recently published some material here in France; but I haven't had the official version of that, because he was scooped by a journalist who runs a pseudo-psychic magazine and managed to get hold of Corbin's papers and produced a rather ludicrous account of what was supposed to be in them . . . I think we're going to have to wait for the documents to be properly published, but there may still be written information that we don't know about with regard to the organization of the Assassins . . .
T In terms of the cut-up technique, being in direct line from-
B Ah well, Hassan's private story . . . was that he went to school in, uh-y'got any more squeaky tape here, or you running out?-he went to school near Meshad, in eastern Iran, at the University of Nishapur a century or so after the Turk invasion of that part of the world, and he found that he had to share a room with two other boys; one of them was Omar Khayyam, who became the great mathematician, astronomer and poet, whose Rubaiyat everybody knows in the Fitzgerald translation, and the other boy ...
He was the victim of a cut-up . . .
... became the prime minister of that whole vast empire . . . and they took a schoolboy oath that they would always help each other in later life . . .
And after they left school Hassan i Sabbah went back to his native town, which doesn't exist anymore; it was south of where Tehran is today, and, uh, the oldest of the three became prime minister and gave the job of court astronomer, which was a lifetime sinecure, to Omar Khayyam . . . and Hassan i Sabbah then presented himself at court and asked for an equivalent position and was given the direction of the finances . . . And he found when he came to deliver his speech on the exchequer that his manuscripts had been cut in such a way that he didn't at first realize that they had been sliced right down the middle and repasted-books were individual folios that were pasted into bindings at that time, or else one great big roll out of which one read . . . All of his material had been cut up by some unknown enemy and his speech from the Woolsack was greeted with howls of laughter and utter disgrace and he was thrown out of the administration . . . So he was the victim of a cut-up, and that was the reference that you remembered, in fact . . .
T And you suddenly found yourself in line from that . . . you produced cut-ups and it tied you in even more so than you had been-
B Huh. I don't know that I really wanna be tied into anything . . .
T Whether you wanted to or not . . .
B I found it very disturbing when I was at Alamout, to imagine .. . uh, find myself under strong psychic attack - whereas the friend with whom I was traveling went scampering around the precipices like a goat, I suddenly was attacked with vertigo, which I hadn't ever experienced before in my life, and altitude fever - it's very high, it's about 10,000 feet, perhaps more . . . so that there was some physical reason for that . . . But I also felt psychically attached to the place as I have never felt before in any other spot in my travels . . .
T These effects perhaps could give some indication as to what actually was the state of mind of those adepts there, rather than hashish-
B I felt that I was somebody that'd been pushed over the precipice, and I wasn't certain that I wanted to be a victim to such an old scene . . .
T (pointing finger at him)
B Yeah, long pointed (laughing) William on top of the tower pointing a long bony finger-and there was I tumbling into the precipice - no, that's not the way I wrote this at all . . . I refuse this version . . .
T Brion, what I was thinking of before, orgasm to produce events - could that be a finger or a penis-
B Oh, I haven't followed you on that one at all! Whaddyamean?
T The techniques taught or used there . . . it was an all-male community. . . ?
B Yes, yeah . . . although other people have now said that it wasn't, but it must have been; physicad possibilities are such that it must have been a monastery-fortress-as there were many others in Islam, it was not a new invention. A Ribat, or Rabat, such is the name of the capital of Morocco, originally means a monastery where warrior-monks were gathered, who were pushing Islam . . .
T I was just trying to tie in the-
B The exact methods-we don't know enough, there aren't enough documents.
T But we can assume that-
Ordinary Male-Female sexuality reinforces human time...
B Oh, a writer can assume, a fictioneer can assume . . . but as I said, there probably are going to be more and more documents available within the very short future . . .
T We've said that ordinary Male-Female sexuality reinforces human time . . .
B Mmmm. . .
T The question is what alternatives actually do.
B One would have to go and ask the Assassins . . . I can't answer that . . . It was a subject that I offered to William: I met a woman who'd written an extremely interesting book about it, in 1958, some time like that, and then I started talking about it to William, who took it up with enormous enthusiasm and who came, over the years, to dcvclop a point of view on the subject, but that's not based on any new research . . .
. . . each one of us, naturally, has his or her own move to make in the game. I abhor the word and hate having to use it to refer in any way to our activities, but Mya, being a woman has to be "played with," of course . . . Mya's ambitions are, like Mya herself, potentially limitless. It would not be good for her or for anybody else if she became what she wants to be: the Ace of Space!
. . . my own next move can be accomplished only in silence-utter and absolute silence. I mean this quite literally . . . I have little more to say beyond what I feel I owe to you as a fellow-male who has been drawn abruptly into this tale of ours. Mektoub: it is written! The rest is up to you. Be as cautious as you can, of course, for you know that as soon as you have anything like a kingdom, enchanters and conjurers will always drop in from all over Creation to take it away from you, naturally enough ... (Thay Himmer, in The Process)
(excerpts)
Brion Gysin and Terry Wilson. Here to Go - Planet R 101, p. 64-65; 96 - 97; 98 - 99; 100.
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