THE ANSAIDEEH on NI:Telma OF SYRIA. * THE rocky backbone of

Syria is composed of three principal sec- tions—the Mount Cassius to the North, Lebanon to the South, and between these the Ansairee mountains, considerably lower than either, their height being from 3000 to 4000 feet. On the East, they run in a straight line, with almost precipitous sides, along the valley of the Orontes ; on the West, they sweep in circles round the large plains of Ladikeeh and Tartoos, throwing out spurs, which, at the castle of Merkab, reach the sea, and skirt it for some distance. Let us hasten to say of these mountains— for it is almost the only good thing that can be told of them at this day—that in them is grown the choice tobacco which glorifies the otherwise ignoble name of Ladikeeh, the Laodicea of Seleucus Nicator. The Southern _portion of the Ansairee mountains was the seat of the Syrian branch of the famous Ismaelee or Assassins, and there a small remnant of their descendants is still found ; but the chief possessors of the whole range are the people from whom it takes its modern name, and who are universally dreaded as the worst robbers and cut-throats in all Syria. To their antisocial vices they add the sin of heresy, unpardonable in the eyes of or- thodox Mussulmans ; and for both reasons their history has re- mained obscure, and the nature of their secret religion involved in fables, which their enemies have invented, and European tra- vellers have too credulously accepted. Everybody who skirts the mountains in journeying by land, or views them from the deck of one of the steamers which ply along the coast, is sure to be told that licentiousness, obscenity, and incest, are permitted by the religion of the Ansaireeh, and that in a reputed feast of theirs, called Buk- beyshee, they engage promiscuously in these practices. " The story," says Mr. Lyde, "is familiar to the Ansaireeh, and, as they neither know of the feast, nor are acquainted with such a mode of celebration of it, it is to them a subject of much merriment; for they are aware that their character is looked on as the blackest, and they are not a little amused at the false conjectures of their neighbours, without being much concerned about a few handfuls of mud, more or less, being thrown at them." Similar charges are made against the Drnses and other sects ; but, whatever os- tensible grounds there may have existed for them in former times, there is no reason to believe that there is any truth in them at the present day. The learned De Saoy, in his exhaustive trea- tise on the religion of the Druses, speaks of the immorality which appears in their sacred writings, but will not take upon himself to deny that the Druses of our day are innocent of the infamous licentiousness which report imputes to them. It is possible that, as in other well known instances, these reports have arisen partly from a misinterpretation of the allegorical language used by the • The Asian Mystery ; illustrated in the History, -Religion, and present state of the Ansaireeh or Nusairis of Syria. By the Reverend Samuel Lyde, M.A., Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge: Author of " The Ansyreeh and Ismaeleeh." Pub- lished by Longman and Co. founders of the Druse religion ; but, however this may be, Mr. Lyde declares it to be certain that " as to theoretical opinions, no appearance, even the slightest, of immorality or obscenity is to be traced in the Ansairee books which have become known in our day ; wl-ile as to practice, the charges made against the An- saireeh of the present time, of unclean practices, are utterly with- out foundation."

Mr. Lyde speaks with authority, as the only European who has lived among the Ansaireeh in their mountains, where alone they are unmixed with other tribes. His connexion with them ex- tended over many years, and he was prompted by missionary zeal as well as by a scholar's curiosity to make himself intimately ac- quainted with their belief and customs. Combining his own re- searches with those of preceding writers, he appears to have fairly fulfilled the purpose of his present work, which was to accom- plish for the sect of the Ansaireeh what De Sacy had already effected for that of the Druses. Both have sprung out of the great schism which, soon after the deathof Mahammed, divided his followers into two hostile parties—the. Sonnites, who recognize the first three caliphs as lawful successors of the prophet, and the Salutes, who curse Abu-Beer, Omar, and Othman, as impious usurpers of the rights of Ali. After the murder of Ali, A.D. 661, the caliphate, of which he had been the fourth possessor, passed out of his family, but it retained the imamate or spiritual supre- macy. A disputed succession to this office on the death of the sixth Imam, Djaafar, A.D. 762-3, caused a schism among the Sohiites, just as a similar dispute about the first caliphate had divided them from the Sonnites. One party recognized the claims of Moose, the second son of Djaafar ; another held that the ima- mate rightly devolved on one of the children of his eldest son, Ismaeel, who had died before his father. To this party belong the Tsmaeleh or Assassins of Persia and Syria, and also the Fatimite caliphs of Egypt, who traced their lineage to Ismaeel. The Druses are the followers of one of these Fatimite caliphs, Hakem-biamr- ilah, whom they worship as the chief manifestation of the Deity under a human form. They also regard Ismaeel as the seventh and last Imam, and this is now the general opinion in Persia ; but there are Imameeh, that is, acknowledgers of twelve imams, and to this class belong the Ansaireeh. Mohammed, the twelfth and last imam, suddenly disappeared in the thirteenth year of his age. The Sonnites say that he was drowned in the Tigris, but the Ansaireeh and other Imameeh deny his death, and assert that he retired to a cave, whence he will issue at the end of all things to cause the followers of Ali to triumph, and to punish his ene- mies. He is the " director," who since the suppression of the re- bellion in India, is said by the Mussulmans of Lahore and else- where to have already made his appearance, and to be about to restore the dominion to them.

There has been much controversy about the origin of the name Ansaireeh, but Mr. Lyde has placed it beyond dispute that the name is derived from that of Nasair, whose son Abu-Shuaib was the first founder of the sect, and received his doctrine immediately from Hassan it Askeree, the father of the last imam. Though the Ansaireeh acknowledge the name by which they are commonly known, that which they generally adopt among themselves is "Khaseebeeh," from the surname of their great apostle, Hosein- ibn-Hamdan it Khasebee, who spread the Ansairee religion " in all countries." The sect arose simultaneously with that of Kar- mat, about A.D. 891, and Mr. Lyde suspects that in the outset they preached pretty nearly the same doctrines, but that the An- saireeh trusted rather to secret propagandism than to open vio- lence, or that they were " that Syrian branch which, being de- feated in A.D. 901 with the loss of its leaders, may have subse- quently subsided into repose ; while the Eastern branch, whose seat was in Bahreyn, and whose exploits made famous, or rather infamous, the name of Karmatians, may have gradually diverged from the original tenets of the sect."

The religion of the Ansaireeh is a strange compound of Moham- medanism interpreted allegorically, Magianism, Buddhism, and Christianity This heterogeneous character is common to all the heretical offshoots from the Schiite faith, and for obvious reasons. It was by the sword that the faith of Islam was forced upon the Persians, and this summary conversion must have left the real

tenets of great majority of the nation unaltered, and ready to reassert their old authority when once the bonds of conformity had been broken through. De Sacy traces to the ancient system of the Parsees the Schiite dogma of the union of the divinity to Ali and the imams of his race. It also corresponds exactly to the notion which the Tibetians form of their Grand Lama, and the Burmese of their Bodhisatwas ; and this is equally, true of the transmigration of souls, and of many other tenets of the Schiite heretics.

"The Ansaireeh believe in one God, self-existent and eternal. This God manifested himself in the world seven times in human form, from Abel to Ali, son of Abu-Taleb,. which last manifestation was the most perfect ; that to which the others pointed, and in which the mystery of the divine appear- ances found their chief end and completion. " At each of these manifestations, the Deity made use of two other Persons; the first created out of the light of his essence, and by himself, and the second created by the first. These, with the Deity, form an inseparable Trinity, called MAANA, Ism, Bail. " The first, the Means, meaning, is the designation of the Deity as the meaning, sense, or reality of all things. "The second, the Ism, name, is also called the Hedjah or veil, because under it the Maana conceals its glory, while by it it reveals itself to men. " The third, the Bab, door, is so called because through it is the entrance to the knowledge of the two former.

"In the time of Adam, when Abel was the Manna, Adam was the Ism, and Gabriel the Bab. In the time of Mohammed, when All was the Means,

Mohammed the prophet was the Ism, and Salmin-il-Farisee, or the Persian, a companion of Mohammed, was the Bab"

Ali with the Ansaireeh is God, and takes the place of the Allah of the Mussulmans. This belief accords with the Bahian doctrine that there is a descent of the whole Deity into human persons, and a partial descent, or a descent of a portion of the divine essence. The fulness of the Deity was manifested in Ali, and in him alone. He is also spoken of as veiling himself in light, and as appearing from the eye of the sun—another instance of the affinity between the ancient religion of Persia and that of the Ansaireeh. The mystery of the faith of the Unitarians, the secret of secrets, and chief article of the true believers, is described in the Ansairee cate- chism as being " the veiling of our Lord in light, and his mani- festation in his servant Abd-in-Noor," i. e.•the Servant of Light, which means wine. The mystery is celebrated in the Kuddis or mass, with bread and consecrated wine which are received by true believers, the initiated, in the sacrament which the Ansai- reek have taken from Christianity. This rite is performed with

the greatest secrecy, and only men are allowed to be communi- cants. In common with all the secret sects of the East, the An- saireeh are believers in metempsychosis ; the ultimate history of a devout soul after its passage through many bodies is to become a star in heaven ; whilst the godless and polytheists will have all torments to suffer in all ages—

"'With respect to their opinion about women, there is a great dif- ference between the Druses and the Ansaireeh. With the former some women are initiated into the highest secrets, while the majority of men are excluded ; but with the latter, women are entirely excluded from any participation in religious ceremonies and prayers, and from all re-

ligious teaching ; and that, not only because females are considered, as else- where, inclined to reveal a secret, but because they are considered by the Ansaireeh as something unclean. Many stories are told of their original

wickedness, and of the faithlessness of those of the present day, by men who

do not reflect that it is their own treatment and contempt of women which leave them such as they are. However, as the Ansaireeh believe that the

soul of a brute may have in a former state animated a wicked man, so they suppose that a man may be punished for his sins in a previous generation by being born in a woman s form in the succeeding one; so that, commonly, if a woman fulfils all the duties of which she is capable, well and virtuously, there is hope of her again coming into the world as a man, and becoming one of the illuminati and possessors of the secret. And as no one can re-

main without some form of religion, and women are naturally more religi- ously inclined than men, the Ansairee women are more fearful perhaps even than the men of bringing on themselves the ill-will of those whom they most fear,—the holy men of former times, who have tombs and visiting- places in every part of the mountains."

Our author is one of those who would not have the devil painted blacker than he is ; but though he defends the Ansaireeh against their unjust maligners, he thinks it impossible to exagge- rate their evil qualities, and the only good ones he can ascribe to them are readiness to protect a guest, which becomes a vice when exercised, as it usually is, in unworthy cases, and love for their

progeny, which in them is a strong but blind instinct. The state of society amongst them, he says, is " a perfect hell upon earth,"

and he plainly implies that the same statement might be extended

to the whole province of Ladikeeh, without exception of any race or creed. Its frightful anarchy and ruin, he ascribes mainly to the incurable vices of the Turkish Government; and in the follow- ing passage and others, written shortly before his death, he has not indistinctly foreboded such scenes of havoc as the Lebanon and Damascus witnessed three months afterwards.

"Such a thing as a just uniform system of government is a thing un- known in the outlying provinces of Turkey. As it was in the days of Maun- drell, more than a hundred and fifty years ago, so is it now. The Ottomans only retain Syria by setting tribe against tribe, making use of one to weaken and subdue the other, thus fostering desolating feuds among neighbours, which the forces at the command of government are utterly unable to check,

even when desirous of doing so. Every man in the country districts has to go armed, and to defend his life and property for himself. Were I to allow myself to dwell on this subject I might say much of the fearful state, not only of the province of Ladikeeh but of other parts of Syria, and that not on doubtful testimony. I might speak of the utter want of security in some

parts, and the systematic perversion of justice in others. For this our Go- vernment is responsible, in so far as it has deemed it necessary to strengthen an empire which cannot protect its subjects from murder, robbery, and

wrong ; and whose only proof of sovereignty lies in spasmodic efforts to col- lect tribute and recruits. Doubtless our rulers hope for the inauguration of a better state of things, and are always ready to insist upon it; but mean- while they have ordered their consuls to look calmly on, while the people of W

the provinces are passing through a dreadful ordeal. When I was at Ladi- keeh, at the close of last year (1859), the Government was engaged in burn-

ing villages belonging to the Djenneeh; and murders had been committed

with the connivance of the Government officials, nay, traced to one of the chief of them ; while the poor sufferers, Christiana and others, had nowhere to turn for redress. Thus desolation was daily becoming tenfold more de- solate, till it seemed as if the land would be left without inhabitants. As it is, the population must decrease instead of increasing."