THE DRUZES:
A HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
When we originally wrote this, all we had were very dated accounts. We have more accounts available to us now, and will eventually add them to what is included below. What follows is a transcription, mainly, from the original hand-written manuscript. Have patience, if some of this material is in need of correction, and feel free to mail us those corrections!
In the 22°, the side lectures point to the sect known as the Druzes. Let us quote the particular lecture in question:
"The Tsidunai or Phoenicians were ever ready to aid the Israelites in their holy enterprises. The tie between them was the mysteries, into which the principal persons of both nations were initiated; Moses having necessarily received them in Egypt, before he could marry the daughter of a priest of On. These mysteries, modified by Solomon, or perhaps at an earlier day by Joshua or even Moses, to suit the genius and manners of the Jewish people, became Masonry, such as it was practiced at the building of the Temple, and such as it has in part come down to us. Khñrñm, King of Tsñr in Phoenicia, and Khñrñm Abai, also a Phoenician and not a Jew, were likewise initiates; and hence the intimate connection between them and Solomon, as Masons. The people of Tsidñn, a city of Phoenicia, were employed by Noah to cut cedars on Mount Libanus, of which to build the ark, under the superintendence of Japhet. His descendants repeopled Tsidñn and Phoenicia, and at a later day his posterity, under Adon Khñrñm, cut in the same forests cedars for King Solomon: and at a time still later, they felled timber on the same mountain to construct the second Temple.
"Upon the same mountain it is said that they established Colleges or Associations of Artificers, like those of Etruria and afterward of Rome. Of this we can only say that it is possible, because associations of workers have been common in all ages.
"It is supposed that there were Colleges of Artificers in Etruria, as there certainly were at Rome; and Phoenicians, who voyaged far and traded everywhere, and who honored the skill of the Architect and Artisan, no doubt had similar colleges.
"Wherever such associations existed, they necessarily had modes of recognition of each other; and they were honored everywhere. Solomon himself, whose wisdom gave him a true idea of the dignity of labor, built a palace on the mountain, to which he often repaired to inspect the progress of the work. The names of the Patriarchs who were the superintendents of the workmen on the mountain at different periods were preserved in our pass-words. The institution of Colleges upon Mount Libanus was perpetuated by the Druses, from whom the Crusaders obtained a knowledge of this or a similar Degree."
-- Pike, Liturgy for the 22°.
It is said that the colleges on Mount Lebanon allude to the Druzes, and this in reference to the Middle-Eastern influence upon the Crusaders. Since we have devoted this section to the subject of the secret sects of Syria, and the Near East in general, and have labored to find out which sect or sects was responsible for the conferral, in 1118 (or approximate) of the Johannite succession upon the founders of the Order of the Temple, as well as the Successors of the Johannite Gnostic Tradition, we shall now investigate the Druzes and see what we can learn about them.
The Encyclopaedia tells us that the Druzes are "the adherents of an Esoteric religion founded in the 11th Century after Christ by the Fatimid Caliph of Egypt, Al-Hakim bi'amrillahi, the son of a Russian mother, who proclaimed himself an incarnation of God, established a reign of terror at Cairo and finally disappeared mysteriously (A.D. 1021). They take their name from his missionary, Ismail Ad-darazi, who preached the cult of Al-hakim among the Syrians." (EB 7: 683d.) [14th Edition, remember!]
Racially, the article claims they are a mixture of Turkoman or Kurdish, and an obvious North Syrian (Armenoid) infusion among some of the Druzes in the Lebanon. Their traditions claim a derivation from Arab colonists. Burckhardt's Travels in Syria and the Holy Land gives a lot of information on them. They were originally in the Hauran, he learned, and there were numbers of them in the Hauran when he travelled there. Richard Francis Burton also discusses them in Unknown Syria. Mackey's Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry informs us that they settled in the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon "about the tenth century" and are said to be a mixture of CUTHITES or KURDS, MARDI Arabs, and possibly Crusaders. Remembering the Legenda for the 25°:
"The Druses are supposed to be the descendants of those Hivites among whom the Hebrews dwelt in the time of Joshua; and afterward, upon Mount Lebanon.... According to their own traditions, the Druses believe that their ancestors originally dwelt upon that range of mountains which is situated between Laodicea and the extensive plains of the Amuk, now exclusively inhabited by fierce and little known Ansyrii tribes." -- p. 28, original edition.
Hivites, Cuthites, Kurds, we have spoken of earlier. In our section dealing with the Ophites, Hargrave Jennings wrote upon the Serpent Tribe, as including Hivites and Cuthites among their numbers, and Cuthites are not only Kurds, but the Serpent Tribe migrated from Ethiopia (Cuth, Kuth, Cush or Kush). Moreover, the Yezidis are Kurds.
Their three chief strongholds are 1) the districts of Shuf and Metn in the Lebanon; 2) The Western slopes of Mount Hermon; and 3) the mountains which separate the cornlands of the Hauran from the Syrian desert. There are Druze villages on Mount Carmel, in Northern Syria; and in the Anti-Lebanon. In the Hauran, of course, is Jabal ad-Druz, mountain of the Druzes.
As to the History of the Druzes, we shall quote at length from E. G. von Grunebaum's Classical Islam, a History (pp. 147-9), from Nesta Webster's Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (pp. 43-4), from Mackey's Revised History of Freemasonry (I:247-251) and from C. W. King's The Gnostics and their Remains, p. 415.
A. von Grunebaum, Classical Islam, a History, pp. 147-9
Indisputably the Fatimids were imperialists and saw their final goal in the expulsion of the Sunnite Caliphate; the political situation restricted them however to the usual 'defence barriers' in Syria (which they sometimes extended beyond Aleppo into Mesopotamian towns like Harran and Raqqa), and to protecting the security of the trade with India through their influence in the Yemen (a stronghold in the Indus basin with Multan as its centre was lost to the Ghaznavids). This trend is inherent in the nature of the Egyptian economy; it outlived the dynasty and has even made itself felt today. Mecca and Medina, which were dependant on Egyptian grain deliveries, acquiesced without opposition in the profitable suzerainty of the Shi-ite ruler. The documents found in the Genizah, the 'archives' of a Jewish synagogue in Cairo, mainly of the ninth to twelfth century and the most extensive collection of their kind from Medieval Islam, give an impressive picture of the economic activity of the time; they throw a light too on the situation in the Jewish community, whose position under the Fatimids was more favorable than at any time in the first thousand years of Muslim history. Their treatment went far beyond mere tolerance and probably arose in part from the indifference of the inner circle of the Isma'ilis towards the externals of religions, an attitude which facilitated their foreign propaganda in non-Muslim circles and created a suitable psychological climate for the peace concluded in 1040 with Byzantium. But after the third Caliph Al-Hakim Bi-Amr Allah (996-1021) had proceeded for a time against the Sunnites he turned suddenly against the Christians and Jews and destroyed numerous temples, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. This persecution, active between 1008 and 1015, may well have been induced by Sunnite counterpressure as much as by the changed religious sympathies of the Caliph. At all events a few years later the ruler felt himself to be the incarnation of the Divine Reason, or at least had himself worshipped as such. An outbreak of anger among the populace was coldly and cruelly put down. The Caliph also interfered strongly in the private lives of his subjects, for not very comprehensible religious reasons; soon after his accession he forbade women to go out of the house at any time on pain of death, and men to go out at night. Finally he disappeared in 1021 in a manner as yet unexplained, during a walk at night through the streets.
His successor eliminated the extremists who had deified Al-Hakim; they found an echo in the Lebanon however, and the Druze who are still to be found there at the present day, their zeal undiminished, owe their foundation to this expulsion. They are named after their champion Ad-Darazi (probably died 1019). This strange development has to some extent a parallel with the Nusairi who formed somewhat earlier in more or less the same region; both groups seized upon a number of motifs thrown off by Islam and wove them together with the help of Islamic symbols.
The religious ideology had, in the course of time, acquired its philosophical and juridical support and elaboration; it bestowed upon the Fatimids a rare homogeneity and the dynamism for their intra-Islamic conquests; but it was bound to incur irreconciliable hostility for the dynasty from the 'orthodox' and, what was really more dangerous, from partisans who because of personal differences became so to speak sectarians within the sect. By attaching themselves to a certain Imam these latter found the means of giving organizational support to their dogmatic deviations. The death of the Caliph al-Mustansir, under whose long reign (1036-1094) the disintegration of Fatimid power had been exposed, had divided those loyal to him into NIZARI, the followers of his son NIZAR whom he had designated his successor, and MUST'ALI, the supporters of his second son, whom the army set upon the throne, whereupon NIZAR and his son met a violent death in prison. Driven out of Egypt the NIZARI took over the leadership of the 'foreign' Isma'iliyya, who congregated partly in Syria, but under the leadership of the famous Hasan-i-Sabbah (d. 1124) chiefly in the mountains of Persia.
These fanatical groups, especially the Persian, because of their terrorist practices and the aura of secrecy surrounding them, exercised from their inaccessible strongholds an influence out of all proportion to their size. On August 8, 1164, the Persian Nizariyya from their seat of Alamut, the 'Eagles Nest', proclaimed the 'Great Resurrection', the Paradise on Earth which no longer recognizes any law. This (according to the plausible suggestion of Massignon), seems to be the source of a much cited legend about the 'Assassins'; the leaders secured the loyalty of their followers by intoxicating them with hashish so that they experienced the joys of paradise as described in the Koran. Translated back into the every-day world they awaited with the greatest impatience the death which would take them once more to the bliss which they had had a foretaste.
The Mongols alone were able to subdue the Nizari, once they had destroyed their castles in 1256; but the sect survived, chiefly in India, divested of its apocalyptic political aims, and both here and in East Africa under the leadership of the famous Aha Khan it has accomplished the transition to modernism in a quite surprising manner without giving up any of its fundamental dogmas.
The Musta'il Caliphs in Egypt seem only to have possessed to a small degree the gift of arousing religious enthusiasm. With the murder of Musta'il's son in 1130 the Fatimid dynasty did not lose the throne, but the last four rulers of the house were no longer considered as Imams but simply as representatives of the promised 'Lord of Time', scion of the family of Musta'il's grandson, who had been abducted as a child, and who would appear from concealment at the end of time.
B. NESTA WEBSTER, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, pp. 43-4
Nesta Webster, in her typical emotional tone, does give us some Initiation into the Mysteries of the Peril!:
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 today 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 Maymun, 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,' which 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.'
It is, however, as a secret society that the Druses enter into the scope of this book, for their organization presents several analogies with that which we now know as 'masonic.' Instead of the NINE degrees instituted by the Lodge of Cairo, the Druses are divided into only three -- Profanes, Aspirants, and Wise -- to whom their doctrines are gradually unfolded under seal of the strictest secrecy, to ensure which signs and passwords are employed after the manner of Freemasonry. A certain degree of duplicity appears to enter into their scheme, much resembling that enjoined to the Ismaili DAIS when enlisting proselytes belonging to other religions: thus in talking to Mohammedans, the Druses profess to be the followers of the Prophet; with Christians, they pretend to hold the doctrines of Christianity, an attitude they defend on the score that it is unlawful to reveal the secret dogmas of their creed to a 'black' or unbeliever.
The Druses are in the habit of holding meetings where, as in the Dar ul Hikmat, both men and women assemble and religious and political questions are discussed; the uninitiated, however, are allowed to exercise no influence on decisions, which are reached by the inner circle, to which only the 'Wise' are admitted. The resemblance between this organization and that of Grand Orient Freemasonry is clearly apparent. The Druses also have modes of recognition which are common to Freemasonry, and M. Achille Laurent has observed: 'The formula or catechism of the Druses resembles that of the Freemasons; one can learn it only from the Akals (or Akels = Intelligent, a small group of higher initiates), who only reveal its mysteries after having subjected one to tests and made one take terrible oaths.
C. Robert Ingham Clegg, Mackey's Revised History of Freemasonry, I: 247-251
Clegg, in Mackey's Revised History, presents the same basic historical data as the other sources. We shall bring up more of this work in the next segment, on the Doctrines. For now, just a short quote:
The Templars may have had relations of some sort with the Druses. Of that is some evidence, both traditional and historic. But what influence that communication had upon either Templarism or Freemasonry is a problem that admits only of a doubtful solution. -- p. 247.
D. King, Gnostics and their Remains, p. 413
C. W. King, in his The Gnostics and Their Remains, Second Edition, gives us one of those passages which the Masonic orthodoxy has enjoyed debunking:
The Druses are only the modern representatives of the suppressed Assassins. Like them, they are Ishmaelites, their ostensible founder being Hakim, a Fatemite Caliph of Cairo, who professed himself the new incarnation of the Godhead. Their notion that the present seat of their ever absent Grand Master is Europe, tallies curiously enough with Von Hammer's theory about the close relationship that existed between the Templars and the actual progenitors of the Druses. These same Druses may also possibly represent the 'polytheists and Samaritans' who flourished so vigorously in the Lebanon as late as the times of Justinian, to whose persecuting zeal Procopius ascribes the extermination of a million inhabitants in that district alone. Of their present creed, preserved in unviolated secrecy, nothing authentic has ever come to light; popular belief amongst their neighbours makes them adorers of an idol in the form of a calf, and to celebrate their nocturnal assemblies, orgies like those laid to the charge of the Ophites in Roman, Templars in Medieval, and of the Freemasons (Continental) in modern times. Their notion of their Head residing in Scotland has an odd resemblance to the German appellation of 'Scottish Brethren', given to our Masons.
As to the connection between the rites of the Druzes with those of the Ophites, Templars, and Continental Freemasons, Clegg says:
This statement has been supported by other writers. [Op. Cit., p. 250.]
All in all, Clegg dismisses King's work as bogus. Yet, as we have found, it is not so bogus as all the safe brothers would have us believe. At the time of Justinian, the sects of polytheists and Samaritans in the Lebanon would not have been Druzes: they would have been the people who became the Ansyreh, Nusairi, Yezidis.
E. The Druze Faith, by Sami Nasib Makarem
"The New Era.
"On the first day (1 Muharram) of A. H. 408 [beginning at sunset on Thursday, 30 May 1017], al-Hakim bi-Amrillah announced the beginning of the new era. He issued a decree stating:
"'Remove ye the causes of fear and estrangement from yourselves. Do away with the corruption of delusion and conformity. Be ye certain that the Prince of Believers hath given unto you free will, and hath spared you the trouble of disguising and concealing your true beliefs, so that when ye work ye may keep your deeds pure for God. He hath done thus so that when ye relinquish your previous beliefs and doctrines ye shall not indeed lean on such causes of impediments and pretensions. By conveying to you the reality of his intention, the Prince of Believers hath spared you any excuse for doing so. He hath urged you to declare your belief openly. Ye are now safe from any hand which may bringeth harm unto you. Ye now may find rest in his assurance ye shall not be wronged.
"'Let those who are present convey this message unto the absent, so that it may be known by both the distinguished and the common people. It shall thus become a rule to mankind; and divine wisdom shall prevail for all the days to come.' [Note says Epistle 42.]
"It was a real revolution. Conformity with both the traditional ritualistic society and the cabalistic and allegorical mentality only deluded and corrupted. Al-Hakim called upon the people who adhered to his teachings not to feel alienated nor to be afraid of doing away with such delusion and corruption. He called upon the people to be free, not to feel they were forced to remain entangled with such trivialities. He bade them to be free to express themselves, and to be liberated so that they might have the courage to distinguish between truth and falsehood. As soon as they were in such a state, they would be in compliance with God's Will, the real law of nature that governs the universe.
"At sunset on Thursday, Hamza ibn 'Ali was proclaimed the Imam of this movement. He was then about thirty-three years old, young in age and in spirit; a man worthy to start upon such a revolutionary reform." -- 16-17.
Now we turn to what we have on their Doctrines and Ceremonial...