As he lays dying the Old Man, master of the secret way, dissembles his final transmission in his dying words. Wrapped up and encoded, secreted in his enemies' camps they pass down the time-line courtesy of the chroniclers of the Crusades. No-one suspects the virus in their midst.

This has been the way of the oppressed throughout time. Utilise words, disguise, encode, indicate with hints: an oral tradition to be decoded through action. Action speaks louder. As William Burroughs has said, words restrict. They limit and distort consciousness at the moment of conception.

Nothing is True - Everything is Permitted. Phonically, the adjustment is almost nothing at all. Split the word.

Nothing = No-Thing.
Permitted = Permuted

In the semitic languages of the mystics there are no vowels. Meaning depends on HOW you say the word, not how it is written. This is the root of the division of occult and mystical schools. Truth resolved on the sound of the word. Hassan i Sabbah knew this.

Brion Gysin, at the close of The Process, recalls the words (written) of Kashf Ul-Haqa'iq from the 13th century:
Of one hundred thousand men there may be one who knows and, of a hundred thousand things he knows, there may be one he should utter. Of the one hundred thousand things he utters there may be one he should write. If my own opinion had been set down in this book, both friend and foe might learn of it...

`In other days, the initiate confided their secrets only to those they considered competent, swearing them to the secret... The initiate ... have obtained their knowledge... through personal association with those who knew. Therefore, he who seeks the mysteries and the realities, must seek out someone who knows for, from the book alone, nothing emerges.'

`Nothing is True. Everything is Permitted' -
the last words of Hassan i Sabbah.

I have suggested that in his actions Brion Gysin revealed the secrets of Hassan i Sabbah's last words. Similarly, that William Burroughs has indicated their value as a direct link to answers through dream. My experience is that he is correct. During the preparation of the following texts I experimented with the decoded variant `No-Thing is True. Everything is Permuted'. My dream that night took me a city of refuge, a place of dead roads where dreams meet with reality and an Old Man presides. He showed me the history of his exile drawn upon a frieze in his citadel. He showed the figure of Tamerlaine whose name I mistook for that of a Christian Saint but who on examination turned out to be a descendent of the Mongul Warrior Genghis Khan, and as feared and ruthless as his forebear.

If I read the story correctly, he was telling of the tragedy of barbarism his Assassins fought to stem, of the need to believe in the transmission of a survival plan, the need to be silent in the night and invisible in the day. To exist unknown to those who would thwart his way, his progress through and beyond the constraints of Time.

The word writes and re-writes itself. It is no coincidence that the means of magic is the `spell' and that it is found in the words we use.

`And God said “Let there be Light”. And there was Light.'
Creation as an act of speech.
Abracadabra: translated literally this means `I will create as I speak'.
On letters and words the Sefer Yetzirah instructs us to `permute'.
Brion Gysin proclaimed `Rub Out the Word' ; and permuted.

`Nothing is True. Everything is Permitted' produces 360 distinct formulations, completing each degree of the circle. The beginning is in the end, and the end is in the beginning.

The word as virus.

So he says as he dies, `Nothing is True,' and in so saying directs us to look beyond the outer form of the words. He begins by telling us that what he is saying is NOT what he means, because if nothing is true, then neither is this final message. Perhaps the confusion between `permitted' and `permuted' is the result of mistranslation or transcription, but perhaps not. We will never know, for the archives of Alamut were destroyed and no accurate record survives. But I choose to believe that it matters not whether it was a deliberate obfuscation or merely erroneous. Those who know will know. And those who don't will not.

But re-formulating the phrase gets us out of the mire of nihilism, and by design or by chance, the virus set loose on May 23 1124 re-emerged through the words and actions of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs.

In their collaborative book, The Third Mind, it is written:
Permutations for 5 things, any 5, from... “I am that I am” to 5 pistol shots at a distance of 1 meter, 2 meters, 3 meters, 4 meters, 5 meters. Permutate them, and you have my “Pistol Poem”, the most percussive of our time.

The permutational poems in the later pages of this book represent my own formulation of the 5-fold Pistol Poem, structurally produced according to the scheme of the 12th century qabalists and based on the ancient Book of Creation. Some are re-produced from the words of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, some are not. The longer permutation of `Nothing is True Everything is Permitted' is tentatively titled `The Sawn-off Shotgun Poem' indicating a truncated 6-fold permutation and its violent origins. The repeated forms produced by the repetition of the `is' were deleted for reasons of space.

The grids for all these permutations were generated manually. Observe the pattern of the last 3 words in any sequence. The basic scheme is:
1234 1243 1342 1324 1423 1432

The next line begins: 2341, and so forth. Everything acts as its own mirror. We are turning circles in Time. Type in a grid on any WP and use the search and replace keys to generate new formulations at will.

A 5-fold permutation produces 120 variant forms, 6-fold gives 720, and 7-fold 5040 distinct units.

Reading the variations out loud, like a rap, discloses their inherent rhythmic forms and meanings.

No-Thing is True. Everything is Permuted.
Last Words of Hassan i Sabbah.

Paul Cecil
Brighton 23.01.94

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