Secret societies and subversive movementsWebster, Nesta Helen
History
Secret societies and subversive movements
Webster, Nesta Helen
Secret societies
To believe nothing and to dare all was, in two words, the sum of
this system, which annihilated every principle of religion and
morality, and had no other object than to execute ambitious designs
with suitable ministers, who, daring all and knowing nothing, since
they consider everything a cheat and nothing forbidden, are the
best tools of an infernal policy. A system which, with no other aim
than the gratification of an insatiable lust for domination,
instead of seeking the highest of human objects, precipitates
itself into the abyss, and mangling itself, is buried amidst the
ruins of thrones and altars, the wreck of national happiness, and
the universal execration of mankind.[131]
The Druses
The terrible Grand Lodge of Cairo before long became the centre of a new
and extraordinary cult. Hakim sixth Fatimite Khalifa and founder of the
Dar ul Hikmat--a monster of tyranny and crime whose reign can only be
compared to that of Caligula or Nero--was now raised to the place of a
divinity by one Ismail Darazi, a Turk who in 1016 announced in a mosque
in Cairo that the Khalifa should be made an object of worship. Hakim,
who "believed that divine reason was incarnate in him," four years later
proclaimed himself a deity, and the cult was finally established by one
of his viziers, the Persian mystic Hamza ibn Ali. Hakim's cruelties,
however, had so outraged the people of Egypt that a year later he was
murdered by a band of malcontents, led, it is said, by his sister, who
afterwards concealed his body--a circumstance which gave his followers
the opportunity to declare that the divinity had merely vanished in
order to test the faith of believers, but would reappear in time and
punish apostates. This belief became the doctrine of the Druses of
Lebanon, whom Darazi had won over to the worship of Hakim.
It is unnecessary to enter into the details of this strange religion,
which still persists to-day in the range of Lebanon; suffice it to say
that, although the outcome of the Ismailis, the Druses do not appear to
have embraced the materialism of Abdullah ibn Maymūn, but to have
grafted on a primitive form of Nature-worship and of Sabeism the avowed
belief of the Ismailis in the dynasty of Ali and his successors, and
beyond this an abstruse, esoteric creed concerning the nature of the
Supreme Deity. God they declare to be "Universal Reason," who manifests
Himself by a series of "avatars." Hakim was the last of the divine
embodiments, and "when evil and misery have increased to the predestined
height he will again appear, to conquer the world and to make his
religion supreme."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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