Most scholars believe the Hashashin’s love for their namesake substance is an exaggeration, if not an outright fabrication.
When the Italian merchant Marco Polo traveled through the Middle East on his way to China, he was told a story about a group of assassins known as the Hashashin, who lived in a hilltop fortress ruled by the mysterious “Old Man of the Mountain.”
The story, which Polo later recorded in his great travel book Il Milione, went that in the courtyard of his fortress was a “beautiful garden” that clashed with the desert landscape that surrounded it, filled with “lovely women” and fountains spraying wine, honey, and milk.
Basawan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
As part of the order’s initiation ritual, the Old Man would drug his assassins before taking them into this garden, so that – when they rose from their intoxicated slumber – they’d think they died and arrived in Paradise, where they could drink as much as they wished, and the “damsels dallied with them to their hearts’ content.”
Then, the Old Man would drug them again and take them out of the garden. When the assassins came to their senses this time, they were so eager to be let back into Paradise that they would do anything – and kill anyone – to make it happen. Then, and only then, would they be sent off on their first assassination mission.
The group Polo heard about really existed. They really were assassins. They really lived inside a hilltop fortress, and they really answered to a person known as the Old Man of the Mountain. But did they ritualistically drug one another? And if they did, what kind of substance did they use?
Nowadays, most people will tell you it’s weed. Specifically, hashish, a cannabis concentrate that came …
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Author: Tim Brinkhof / High Times
