The demand made by Islam upon its adherents for 'self-surrender' and submission to the will of Allah, was carried to its greatest extremes in the fanatical sect known as the Assassins. Theologically they were of the Shi'ite branch of Islam, but their external policies were marked, like the Jewish Zealots, by utter ruthlessness in removing from their path any person who disagreed with their ideas. This they achieved by raising within their group a band of young fanatics called the Fida'is, the 'devoted ones.' They were known generally as 'Assassins' because their complete subservience to the will of their religious masters, without regard for personal danger, was the result of their taking a drug known as khasish, our 'Hashish.' \r\n\r\nThe sect was formed as a secret society around 1090 when they won control, by stratagem, of the mountain fortress of Alamut in Persia. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries they and their successors spread terror throughout Persia and Syria, and were finally only put down after some 12,000 of them had been massacred. For some time small bodies of Assassins lingered on in the mountains of Syria, and some think the cult is not entirely dead even now. \r\n\r\nThe herb which gave them their name, khashish, 'Hashish', means in Arabic no more than 'dried herbage.' If used of a particular drug, it properly requires some qualification, like 'Red Hashish', meaning Belladonna, Deadly Nightshade. The word Hashish alone has become attached to one particular form Cannabis sativa, or Hemp, and the enervating drug made from its resin. But it is difficult to believe that the 'pot'-smokers of today, the weary dotards who wander listlessly round our cities and universities, are the spiritual successors of those drug-crazed enthusiasts who, regardless of their safety, stormed castles and stole as assassins into the strongholds of their enemies. If their 'Hashish' correctly interprets Cannabis then the latter must represent some more potent drug. \r\n\r\nThe Greek word Kannabis may now be traced to the Sumerian element GAN, 'mushroom top', followed by the word which we saw earlier was part of the name of the New Testament Barnabas, and mean 'red, speckled with white', denoting, in other words, the colour of the Amanita muscaria. As well as the transfer of its name to the less powerful 'Hashish', it underwent a jumbling of its form to produce the Greek Panakes, a mysterious plant also called Asclepion (elsewhere used of the mushroom), which required atonement to the earth of various cereals when pulled up. It seems therefore probable that the original Cannabis was the sacred fungus, and that the drug which stimulated the medieval Assassins to self-immolation was the same that brought the Zealots to their awful end on Masada a millennium earlier. Indeed, we may now seriously consider the possibility that the Assassin movement was but a resurgence of a cultic practice that was part of Islam from the beginning, and had its real origin thousands of years before that. It seems to be a pattern of religious movements based on the sacred fungus that long periods of relative calm and stagnation are interspersed with flashes of violent extremism which die away again after persecution, only to re-emerge in much later generations. In this, history is reflecting the action of the drug itself on its partakers. After hectic bouts of uncontrolled activity, the fungus-eater will collapse in a stupor from which only a resurgence of the stimulatory poison in his brain will arouse him.

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Few parts of the Lord's Prayer have given more trouble to the praying Christian and more scope for the exegete than the verse: \r\n\r\n>And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil (Matt 6:13) \r\n\r\nThe Greek word for 'temptation', peirasmos, came in for special attention at the time of the decipherment of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was realized correctly by scholars that behind this New Testament phrase lay the Semitic word for a place for 'testing' metals, that is, the refiner's crucible. The Essenes in the Scrolls talk of the 'time of testing that is coming' using the technical word. So, here, in the Prayer, the word-jugglers have taken its Aramaic equivalent, kur bukhana', 'crucible of testing', out of LI-KUR-BA (LA)G-ANTA, the mushroom name. The resultant phrase is particularly interesting because it is almost exactly the Aramaic name of the fungus as it has come down in literature, khurbakhna' or khurbekhana' (Arabic kharbaq), attached, like so many mushroom words, to the plant Hellebore. \r\n\r\nTaking the sacred fungus, or, in New Testament parlance, 'eating the body' of the Christ, must have been a very real peirasmos, 'trial', of the body and spirit. It would have seemed no accident to the cultic celebrant that the name of the mushroom and the phrase for 'fiery furnace of testing' appeared the same. The customary translations of the powerful concept as 'temptation' is almost ridiculous, recalling youthful experiences in the jam-cupboard or behind the woodshed with the girl next door. Well might the writer of Corinthians issue the warning: \r\n\r\n>Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without critically treating his body, eats and drinks a 'crisis' upon himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died... (1 Cor 11:27-30). \r\n\r\nThe Amanita muscaria is, after all, a poisonous fungus. Whist not the most dangerous, its drugs have a serious affect on the nervous system, and taken regularly over a long period would in the end kill the addict. Among its drugs so far isolated are Muscarine, Atropine, and Bufotenin. The first causes vomiting and diarrhoea, and stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system so that the partaker is capable of great feats of muscular exertion and endurance. The stories which came down of the fantastic strength exhibited by cultic heroes, however mythical the events described, have probably that element of real fact. So, too, the idea that the Maenads in their wild raving through the conifer forests were capable of tearing animals limb from limb, was not entirely devoid of truth. \r\n\r\nAtropine first stimulates the nervous system and then paralyzes it. It is this poison that is primarily responsible for the hallucinatory effects of the sacred fungus, but also for the muscular convulsions that must have seemed to bystanders like the demons within, wresting with the newly imbibed power of the god. \r\n\r\nBufotenin, a secretion otherwise found in the sweat glands of the African toad, lowers the pulse rate and temperature. As a result, the mushroom eater has the strange sensation of feeling his skin hot and cold simultaneously: hot in some places, cold in others. He finds himself hypersensitive to touch, light, and sound. The day following his 'trip' he will find all smells seem foul and a bad taste persists in his mouth. He feels an urgent need to urinate but is unable to do so.

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