Hasan as-Sabbah

Hasan as-Sabbah is portrayed as a formidable Ismaili leader whose fortress at Alamut and devoted followers give the novel’s fabricated Plan an imagined point of origin. The account joins historical-sounding religious and political detail to an increasingly elaborate conspiracy: the Assassins become the Templars’ secret teachers, and Alamut becomes the place from which the Plan’s subterranean currents and transcontinental lineage supposedly begin.

Ismaili Leader at Alamut

The account places Hasan within the Ismaili branch of Shiism, which emerged after Shiism itself divided between the Twelvers, who awaited a lost future imam, and the Ismailis. The narrator identifies the Ismailis as originating in the Fatimid realm of Cairo and describes Hasan as the compelling, mystical, and ferocious figure who established their headquarters at Alamut in Persia, southwest of the Caspian Sea.

Alamut is named the Nest of the Raptor. Hasan gathers around himself the fidai, or fedayeen: followers described as faithful unto death. Their political assassinations serve what the account calls a secret holy war. The fortress and its adherents thus combine political force with religious devotion, a combination that makes them, in the narrator’s presentation, a fitting counterpart to the Templars.

From the Assassins to the Templars

The fedayeen later acquire the name Assassins, which the narrative recasts as an emblem of a warrior-monastic order rather than merely a hostile label. Their spiritual knighthood is explicitly compared with that of the Templars. In the conspiratorial history being assembled, the two groups are not simply enemies: they bargain, exchange formal honors, and maintain a covert complicity beneath their public conflicts.

The narrator further claims that the Templars learned occult rites from the Assassins. Practices later treated by inquisitors as evidence of heresy are reinterpreted within this account as repetitions of ceremonies learned in the Orient, with hashish named as the first secret transmitted. Hasan is not shown personally meeting the Templars; his significance lies in the movement and body of knowledge that the story attributes to the Ismailis at Alamut.

Alamut as the Plan’s Imagined Origin

The narrator’s explanation makes Alamut the place where the Plan had to be born. He says that the Templars learned of subterranean currents from the men of Alamut, met them at Provins, and established the supposed plot of the Thirty-six Invisibles. The claim links Hasan’s community to the novel’s invented network, converting a medieval fortress into the first station in a sweeping hidden history.

That lineage then expands across multiple traditions. The narrator connects it to Christian Rosencreutz’s journey to Fez and the Orient, Guillaume Postel’s turn eastward, and Renaissance magicians’ importation from Egypt of Hermes, also named Hermes-Teuth or Thoth, as the Plan’s divinity. Even the Jesuits’ study of hieroglyphics, Coptic, and other Eastern languages is folded into the same construction. These are assertions made within the characters’ accumulating theory, not independent confirmation of an actual historical conspiracy.

The Royal Secret and the Narrative’s Method

A saying attributed to Hasan as-Sabbah depicts Kairos presenting a scepter of kingship to the first created God, who declares that his secret name will contain thirty-six letters. Set beside the story’s recurring Thirty-six Invisibles, the saying offers a compact symbolic link between royal authority, sacred knowledge, and the Plan’s number. The text supplies no further account of Hasan’s life or the circumstances of this saying.

Hasan’s role is therefore both historical in outline and functional in the narrative’s conspiracy-making. The novel invokes Ismaili divisions, Alamut, and the fedayeen, then binds them to the Templars and to later European esoteric traditions through confident, analogical leaps. Alamut becomes a powerful origin point precisely because the characters’ Plan can make distinct histories appear to confirm one another; Hasan is the figure through whom that invented continuity first takes shape.