Assassin (chapter from a book on English words)

A brief history of the English word assassin, including its legendary connections with cannabis and writers
 
Assassination is “one of the oldest tools of power politics.” It’s been around for thousands of years. In the year 336 B.C. the King of Macedonia, and father of Alexander the Great, was assassinated by one of his own bodyguards.

Around 650 years earlier, Absalom, a Judaic prince and son of King David, was assassinated by one of his own cousins. And the perhaps most famous assassin in the history of Ancient Rome is Brutus, one of three men who killed Julius Caesar on the 15th of March 44 B.C.  
 
All these regicides (killings of a king) happened long before the assassins existed. The Asāsiyyūn, as they called themselves in their own language, were an islamic religious order between the 11th and 13th centuries. They lived in the mountains of Persia and Syria, and that’s where they crossed paths with the crusaders from Europe.
 
In 1271 the young Marco Polo, son of a Venetian merchant, set off to travel along the Silk Road together with his father and uncle. On their way to China and Mongolia they had to pass areas threatened by the 'Asāsiyyūn.'
 
The Arabic name asāsī (that’s the singular of asāsiyyūn) means literally “someone who is faithful to the foundation of the faith.” For many religious orders 'faithfulness' included killing people who were threatening their faith. In their home territories Asāsiyyūn were both feared and often hired for those skills.
 
In a book about his travels, Marco Polo later mixed up the name asāsiyyūn with hashīshiyyīn, meaning 'hashish eaters.' Hashish is the Arabic word for cannabis.
 
Maybe Marco misunderstood the Arabic word. Or the people in Syria had given the fearsome religious warriors the nickname 'Hashish-eaters.' It is also possible that the asāsiyyūn drugged themselves with hashish before they went on a murder mission.  
 
In any case, the word 'hashīshīn' entered English etymological dictionaries as the “word origin of assassin.” Today, the word 'assassin' is used in English, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish in the sense of “a person who murders an important person for political or religious reasons.” (In Arabic the meaning of 'asāsiyyūn' hasn't changed, it still refers to the members of that old religious sect.)  
 
Nearly 570 years after the lethal asāsiyyūn died out, a new group of 'hashishin' was born in Paris. In 1844 the French doctor Jacques Joseph Moreau founded the “Club des Hachichin” to experiment with the effects of the drug on themselves. Several famous authors joined the club, among them Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier and Honoré de Balzac.  
 
These 'hashish-eaters' were not motivated by illegal activities, and they didn’t develop any murderous tendencies. The hashish-eaters of Paris consumed a drug called 'dawamesk.' It is described as “a greenish paste made from cannabis resin mixed with fat, honey, and pistachios.” (The name and the pistachios suggest that it might have come from Damascus).
 
Dr. Jacques Joseph Moreau was interested in the social effects on people who regularly consumed cannabis. The Parisian writers were curious to find out whether the exotic paste would open new doors of perception in their minds, and perhaps promote their writing.
 
The club lasted five years. A book, “Club des Hachichins” by Théophile Gautier, was published in 1846. “After a dozen experiments, we gave up forever this intoxicating drug,” he wrote. He noticed that the effect of the cannabis interfered with his creative work more than enhancing it. “Not that it hurt us physically,” he added, “but the true writer needs only his natural dreams, and he does not like his thought to be influenced by any agent.”