The Fedais or “entered apprentice” grade furnished the rank and file of the fanatical executants of the paramount will, and these Fedais, who were customarily mentally and physically pathic, never rose above this step in the mysteries. The Society of the Assassins was nominally suppressed by Halaga, the Mogul invader of the middle of the thirteenth century, but the knowledge, the secrets, and the traditions endured and still endure to this day. The organization was undoubtedly an evil one; it also had nothing to do with Masonry, but it is an interesting example of an occult society whose powers affected the course of history, and methods of working were essentially based upon mechanical rather than spiritual methods of producing a certain state of mind. The effect of hashish is a very difficult thing to define. Essentially a hypnotic--an annihilator of time and space and a stimulant of hallucinations--it is also a drug largely dependent on the idiosyncracy of the individual. The same does not necessarily produce equivalent results in individuals of differing temperament, and for all practical purposes the psychic value of the dose varies inversely with the standard of intelligence of the recipient. Also, when dealing with subjects of dual or multiple personality, it tends to liberate the more violent and uncontrolled of the individualities. Hashish is absorbed rapidly. Cases have been known where a little of the extract used as an anodyne in corn plasters has been absorbed and produced hallucinatory state. As a smoke, veiled by incense or mixed with tobacco, rapid intoxication results from its inhalation. This was one of the keys--perhaps the greatest of the keys--to the storehouse of those treasures of the mind which are the time Elixir, the True Gold of the Magi. In actual practice there is a preliminary state of suggestibility under the influence of hashish when the operator can exercise his will upon that of the subject. This stage is soon passed over and in the later dream states suggestion is inoperative. The modern pharmacist has lost the secret of the herb whose therapeutic function is to control the action of the cannabis indica, so that the subject remained in the suggestible state and did not pass on to the later stages of hallucinatory visions. We may take it that so far as the old world is concerned, the half of the secret has been recovered, but the balancing or deterrent herb is still unrecognized by the pharmacopœia and known only to a specialist few among experimental occultists. Just as hashish itself is missing from the recipient, the Ebers papyri, so is the balancing coefficient.[36]