Eight years before the fall of the Fatimid dynasty Mohammed the Grand Prior of the Assassins died, and Hassan II assumed power. As we have seen, Hassan began his career during his father’s life, by winning partisans and spreading the belief that he was the promised Imam. In his youth he had spent many years in acquiring a thorough knowledge of philosophy and history, and in receiving instruction regarding the mysteries of the Order. Unprincipled and profligate he now determined not only to indulge without limit in every vice but to favor a like indulgence in others. To cast aside all concealment and give the secrets of the Ismailians to the world. To announce the same license to the leaders of the Order and favor impunity of vice not merely by example but by preaching from the pulpit that crime is permissible and innocent. In Ramadan of the 559th year of the Hegira—1163—the inhabitants of Rudbar were assembled at Alamut by his command. A pulpit was placed at the foot of the castle and looking toward Mecca to which all professors of Islam turn when praying. Hassan ascended the pulpit and made known to his hearers the maxims of a renewed and strengthened religion. He announced to them that they were freed from all obligations of the law, for they had come to an era in which they were to know God by intuition; they were released from the burden of every command and brought to the day of Resurrection, that is to the manifestation of the Imam before whom they were now standing. They were no longer to pray five times each day, or observe other rites of religion. Then, after he had explained that an allegorical sense should be given to the dogmas of Resurrection, Hell, and Paradise, he descended from the pulpit and the people held a great banquet, yielding themselves to pleasures of all kinds, to dancing, to music, to wine and to sport in celebration of the day of Resurrection, the day when the Imam was made manifest. From that hour when all things were lawful according to Hassan the name Molahids, or the Lost Ones, which previously had been given to the Karmathites and other great criminal disturbers, was given not only to the disciples of Hassan but to all the Ismailians. Through their Grand Prior the Order after concealing its true doctrine from mankind for years had revealed it on a sudden and exposed to the world a society founded on atheism, assassination and immorality. Thenceforth the Order was doomed to rapid internal destruction. The Ismailians had adopted the view that the universe had never begun and would never end. The end in their eyes meant merely a phase, the close of an epoch in existence which would be followed by another whose length would depend upon the movements and position of the heavenly bodies. By Resurrection was meant the presence of men before God at the close of an epoch, and when that term came every practice of religion was included, since man’s one concern is the estimate of his actions.