Include Almāt and the Assassin organization in the plan

The decision to place Alamut and the Assassins inside the Plan is a turning point in Casaubon and Belbo’s conspiracy-making. After reconsidering the supposed Jerusalemite connection, Casaubon identifies the fortress of Alamut as the refuge of the missing sixth group and constructs an Eastern history for the Plan from accounts of Templar contact with the Assassins. The new explanation does not dismantle their scheme; it gives the scheme another branch, another origin story, and another way to make current events seem legible through a hidden design.

From the Jerusalemites to Alamut

The revision begins when Casaubon recalls that Salon’s remarks about the Assassins connect with material in his own thesis. The Templars had been accused of collusion with the Assassins, and Casaubon recognizes that he and Belbo had failed to use that connection. He returns to his card files, works through the problem, and arrives at an alternative to their existing account: the Jews, he argues, could not have been the Templars’ partners in the Plan. His reasoning rests on the social and religious hierarchy he attributes to the Crusader period: the Templars were a European military order, while Jewish communities in Palestine and Europe were treated as vulnerable minorities and distrusted outsiders. In his account, an alliance between the Templars and the Jews is therefore implausible; the Assassins offer a more convincing partner within the logic of the story they are constructing.

Belbo identifies the immediate consequence of that correction. Their earlier reading of the rendezvous at the rock had pointed to the Rock in the Mosque of Omar, but Casaubon now insists that there are other rocks: the sixth group, he proposes, is waiting at Alamut. The change is presented as an interpretive reversal, not as newly discovered proof of an actual conspiracy. The same fragment that had been fitted to one location is reassigned to another, and the Plan survives by absorbing the correction.

Building an Eastern genealogy

Casaubon supports the revised theory with historical accounts, beginning with sources associated with early Templar history, including Gerard of Strasbourg and Joinville. He describes the Templars’ relations with the Assassins as alternating between conflict and mysterious alliance. That account gives the two groups a history of contact that can be turned into the imagined transmission of secret knowledge.

The explanation broadens into an account of Shiite religious history and esoteric traditions. Casaubon connects the Assassins to a doctrine centered on the Imam as divine manifestation, then imagines that this branch of Islam absorbed currents from Manicheanism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, and Iranian mysticism. The point of this extended account is not merely to add historical color: it supplies a route by which the Plan’s supposed knowledge could have travelled between the Mediterranean and the West. The narrator emphasizes the difficulty of following the account, with its long Arabic names and dense textual history, even as Casaubon continues to make the connections persuasive within the group’s speculative framework.

In the resulting narrative, the Assassins become the source of the Templars’ occult knowledge. Casaubon claims that the men of Alamut taught the Templars about subterranean currents, that the two groups met at Provins, and that together they established the conspiracy of the Thirty-six Invisibles. He then extends the chain outward: Christian Rosencreutz’s journey to the East, Guillaume Postel’s Eastern interests, Renaissance magic’s supposed Egyptian inheritance, and the Jesuits’ study of hieroglyphics and other Eastern languages are all recast as traces of the same transmission. Each link depends on analogy and association, but the accumulating links make the revised Plan appear more comprehensive.

A theory that keeps changing

The Alamut theory also revises the group’s account of later history. Casaubon argues that after the Battle of Lepanto the region was politically depressed and the Assassins’ trail had gone cold; only later, amid renewed Islamic irredentism, could they reappear in the Plan. He connects this return to contemporary events in the Persian Gulf and proposes that the Tres, Templi Resurgentes Equites Synarchici might seek to heal the division between spiritual knighthoods of different faiths—or exploit the conflict between them. Belbo adds the possibility that the Pendulum might ultimately locate the Umbilicus Mundi at Alamut, but Casaubon leaves that suggestion unresolved. Even at the moment of expansion, the narration preserves a small boundary against taking the theory to its most extreme conclusion.

This revision follows the Plan’s characteristic logic: a gap in the story becomes evidence that a further connection has been overlooked. The group had treated the Jews as the missing link, then rejects that explanation and installs the Assassins in its place. Their material about secret societies and political plots already includes claims that apparently opposed groups are connected; now the revised history offers another way to make those oppositions part of a single hidden design. The resulting coherence is manufactured through selection and analogy, not demonstrated by independent evidence.

The method and its consequences

The novel places this episode within a broader account of how the Plan takes hold. Casaubon later recognizes that the three men had begun by making associations they regarded as jokes, but repeated the process so often that connecting everything became habitual. He describes the difference between pretending to believe and believing as something that can erode through repetition. The Alamut reconstruction embodies that movement: its elaborate chain of historical and religious correspondences is presented as the group’s invention, yet its accumulation gives the invention the feel of discovery.

The Plan’s invented status does not keep it harmless or merely private. Casaubon’s later reflection is that people who encounter the nonexistent Plan can recognize fragments of their own muddled mythologies in it and persuade themselves they have belonged to it all along. Once they act in its name, the invention has real effects. The Alamut episode thus serves both as a new chapter in the conspiracy and as an illustration of its self-renewing mechanism: contradictions prompt revisions, revisions produce fresh connections, and the expanding web can be mistaken for proof that the web was there from the beginning. The more the Plan explains, the less its makers can distinguish a metaphorical resemblance from a real historical link.