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The Nusa’iri are an ostensibly Shi’a Muslim society living in the eponymous Al’Ansariyah mountain range along the Mediterranean coast in northwestern Assyria. Presently, Nusa’iri reside in all cities of Syria, estimated to account for twenty-percent of the Syrian populace, about three million. Expeditionary travelers and historians have mistaken the Nusa’iri for the Isma’ili and Druze; both sects have fought with the neighboring Nusa’iri for over a thousand years. The Druze are an esoteric monotheistic religious community living in Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan, emerging during the 11th century from Nizari Ismailism and incorporated ritual elements of Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism and Shamanistic drug usage. The Druze call themselves Ahl al’Tawhid; “those who affirm the unity of God,” or al’Muwa??idun “Unitarians.”
We must note, that like all mystic sects including the Nizari Isma’ili Hashashiyya {Order of the Hashish takers, or Assassins}, the Nusa’iri are notorious not for their actual verifiable history, but more for the information given by their accusers and political enemies {Druzes}. Frater Randolph in this manner likely encountered information, realizing the Nusa’iri were the subject of extensive persecution under Shi’a, Druze, and Christian Crusaders. Randolph undoubtedly encountered their priesthood in his Arabian travels, setting their sexual rites of antiquity aside from Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism of the Druze, Zoroastrians, Yezidi, and Mandaeans.
Western society first learned of these ostensive Muslims through the logs of explorers Carsten Niebuhr and C.F. Volney from 1783-1785. Volney was an anthropologist who discussed the Nusa’iri at length in his published work Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie (1787). A contemporary of Voltaire’s philosophy, Comte de Volney had a dystopian opinion of the human condition, and believed the bizarre tales he had heard of Nusa’iri ritual erotica as probable while Niebuhr, a more utilitarian perceiver, believed no group could be so depraved.
In his Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie, Volney reports a variety of belief in Nusa’iri practice, such as metempsychosis, some refuting the soul’s perceivability or theosis, sacred prostitution, and veneration of the sex organs {qadmousié}, a theme which reappears in the tracts of Nusa’iri’s enemies and in later Islamic, and historical literature. The Qadmousié were believed to assemble for nocturnal rites, consecrate participants with myrrh and rose oils and various bodily fluids, ingest hashish, and engage in indiscriminate sex, as Volney claimed “like ancient Gnostics” yet he admitted never attending any Nusa’iri ritual saturnalia, restricted to Nusa’iri initiates alone.
The next tract on the Nusa’iri, Exposé de la Religion des Druses (1838), written by Orientalist Baron Antoine-Sylvestre de Sacy reports a diatribe from the Druze sect, and their prophet, Hamza ibn’Ali ibn A?mad. Hamza’s vehemence toward the Nusa’iri is well established by scholars and we can more than speculate that his reports stem from political and religious diatribes against the Nusa’iri. Hamza does state he ‘discovered’ a tome received from a Nusa’iri that was so obscene he had to refute it. The tomes of the Druze and Nusa’iri were so theologically syncretic because sexual imagery was used by both sects rather than metaphoric interpretation, leading to the confusion were various charges of moral depravity. Hamza stated that according to the Nusa’iri, metempsychosis was enabled only through secret sex ceremonies. De Sacy likened the sex magic of the Nusa’iri to the Hashashin ritual usage of hashish to artificially create the paradise of the “Old Man of the Mountain,” Hassan ibn Sabbah.
Next in the sequence of Nusa’iri historians who provide second-hand accounts of their assemblage, is French poet Gérard de Nerval theorizing that the Nusa’iri and Druze were responsible for the occult revival of the nineteenth century. Nerval theorized that the Nusa’iri influenced the Knights Templar, as told to him by the son of an English attaché in Tripoli who allegedly wedded a Nusa’iri woman and learned much of their nocturnal assemblies. Nerval reports second-handedly from his source that Nusa’iri priests prostrated themselves before a nude sacred prostitute on an altar and before every female, they encountered in daily activity, also at the rising of Venus each year the Nusa’iri initiates congregated into a domed chapel, extinguished the lights and engaged in indiscriminate orgy.
Shi’a Muslim controversy in the twelfth century theorized perhaps in an act of intentional deception to rival Druze, or Sunni sects, associated Nusa’iri with ‘nasrani,’ vestiges of an ethno-religious group from Kerala, India, adhering to the church of the Saint Thomas Christian tradition. They are also known as Syrian-Malabar Christians, Suriyani Christiaanikal, Mar Thoma Nasrani, or more popularly as Syrian Christians in view that they use Syriac liturgy. The Nusa’iri’s themselves considered this name derogatory and prefer the name, Alawi to the latter recognizing their association with ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, rather than Abu Shu’ayb Muhammad Ibn Nusayr. {Abd ‘Allah, Umar F., Islamic Struggle in Syria, Berkeley: Mizan Press, c1983, p.43-48}
Rosicrucian Adept, and Randolph’s successor, R. Swinburne Clymer in his print journal, Initiates and the People Part 2, May 1929 to June 1930 refers to the Nusa’iri as the ancient Ansari, the converts of Prophet Muhammad during the Flight to Medina. In the 19th and 20th centuries, however, an Alawite named Sulaiman al’Adni converted to Christianity and compiled a book called Al’Bakurah as’Suliamaniya fi Kashf Asrar ad’Diyanah an’Nusairiyah {The First Fruits of Sulaiman in Revealing the Secrets of the Nusairi Religion} in 1863. Orientalist Louis Massignon gained access to a number of Nusairi manuscripts and provided a less biased and ill-informed account than Nerval and de Sacy.
Much of the Nusa’iri, or Alawi, and Druze genealogies was inconclusive guesswork under a myriad guise of mythos and phallic symbolism. Worship of the generative energies connects with a mystic mythology of the ancients. Occultists and historians have fascinated themselves with mystic theologies of Arabia and the Fertile Crescent, where secret brotherhoods such as the Hashashin, Druze, and Nusa’iri who they believed retained centuries-old secrets of elixirs and sex magic. According to scholar, Massignon, Alawis have integrated doctrines from other esoteric Islamic societies, in particular from Isma’ilis, Bardesanian, and Valentinian Gnosticism. It is theorized that “as a small, historically beleaguered ethnic group", the Alawi ‘absorbed elements’ from the different religions that influenced their area from Hellenistic times onward, while maintaining their own beliefs, and pretended to adhere to the dominant religion of the age.” {Abd-Allah, Umar F., Islamic Struggle in Syria, Berkeley: Mizan Press, c1983, p.43-48}
Abd-Allah theorizes that the Alawis and Isma’ilis believed Islamic Shari’a had esoteric, allegorical, Batini meaning and an exoteric, literal, zahiri meaning and that only the hidden meaning is intended. Alawis believe the esoteric meaning is known only to their Imams. A volume on the Nusa’iri that has withstood the test of scholarship since Randolph’s publishing of the Ansairetic Mysteries is a summary that appeared in the Journal of American Oriental Society in 1866. The volume is a purported confession of a Nusa’iri exile from their community translated by Christian missionaries in Beirut, Lebanon.
The Alawi secrets are only revealed in initiatic progression to adult members of the community. Alawis believed in a triune manifestation or schema in the divine,`Ain-Mim-Sin, which represents `Ali, Muhammad, the divine Communicator, and Salman al’Farsi, the Persian Companion of the expressed deity, Muhammad. Alawi initiates were taught that the soul originated as emanations of sentient light down through vast hierarchies of orders and angels to humans. Human beings were fundamentally particles of light, originally wandering stars yet now trapped in physical human incarnations. The particles of light fell in their belief that they were equal to `Ali, falling into particles of matter in space-time continuums and then into human sexual differentiation.
Alawi initiates aspired to release their souls from cyclic aeonic successions of transfiguration, by recognizing `Ali. Muhammad manifested his incarnation, known as 'ism', or “name,” `Ali as bab, or ‘door,’ and Salman al’Farsi as ma’na, or ‘meaning,’ the esoteric lineage of Nusa’iri origination. Muhammad and `Ali were believed to be emanations of Salman al’Farsi. According to Abd-Allah, each of these three is said to have been an incarnation of Al’lah. To Alawi initiates, `Ali, constitutes the most important part of the triune. The Alawi testimony of faith is: “I have borne witness
that there is no God but He, the most High, the object of worship al `Ali al’Ma’bud and that there is no concealing veil (hijab) except the lord Muhammad, the object of praise, (as ’Sayyid Muhammad al-Mahmud), and there is not Bab except the lord Salman al’Farisi`.”
Frater Randolph thrust himself into this labyrinth when announcing his intention to publish the secret of the Ansaireh priesthood in The New Mola (1873). In Eulis, he writes of his encounter with a Nusa’iri maiden: “One night - it was in far-off Jerusalem or Bethlehem, I really forget which - I made love to, and was loved by, a dusky maiden of Arabic blood. I of her, and that experience, learned - not directly, but by suggestion - fundamental principle of the White Magic of Love; subsequently I became affiliated with some dervishes and fakirs of whom, by suggestion, still, I found the road to other knowledges; and of these devout practicers of a simple, but sublime and holy magic, I obtained additional clues - little threads of suggestion, which, persistently followed, led my soul into labyrinths of knowledge themselves did not even suspect the existence of. I became practically, what I was naturally - a mystic, and in time chief of the lofty brethren; taking the clues left by the masters, and pursuing them farther than they had ever been before; actually discovering the ELIXIR OF LIFE; the universal Solvent, or celestial Alkahest; the water of beauty and perpetual youth, and the philosopher’s stone.”
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"Our desert hath no bound, our hearts and souls have no rest." ~ Jalāluddīn Rumi
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