The Assassin's Creed franchise's core narrative and lore have become more and more complex with each subsequent release. Despite outwardly seeming only concerned with historical periods and the figures who lived within them, some of the most important lore in the franchise is purely supernatural and even beyond the concepts of space and time.
One of the more interesting elements of the narrative of Assassin's Creed concerns Sages, who are directly linked to the aforementioned aspects of the series' lore. While Sages may outwardly appear as normal humans, they are intrinsically linked to past civilizations and gods that play a very important role within the most pivotal parts of Assassin's Creed as a whole.
Sages in Assassin's Creed
In Assassin's Creed, a Sage is a human who possesses stored memories of an ancient humanoid race known as the Isu, which gradually becomes revealed to a Sage over the course of their life. The Isu are a massively powerful race within the Assassin's Creed franchise, existing millennia before the first humans and essentially being Gods with unfathomably advanced technology. As well as creating ancient artifacts such as the Apples of Eden which have been at the very core of many AC narratives, the Isu are credited with the creation of the human race itself, giving context to the existence of Sages and how ancient memories can be stored within human DNA.
Throughout the majority of Sage appearances in Assassin's Creed, the memories possessed by them are that of an Isu named Aita, a highly intelligent Isu scientist and husband to Juno, one of the most important figures within Isu history. During his life, Aita controversially conducted experimentation upon human DNA that saw him banished from his high-ranking Isu caste. When faced with the Great Catastrophe, a prophesied event that marked the end of the Isu race, Juno and Odin used an Isu artifact called the Mead of Poetry to imbue Aita's genetic code into the human gene pool, so that Aita could live beyond the extinction event among humans.
These humans were periodically born throughout different eras of human history, sometimes looking strikingly similar to Aita himself, where memories of the Isu God would be slowly remembered over the course of their early lives. Sages of course live a separate human life before these memories become revealed to them and are often faced with a dilemma in which they must often renounce their human life in order to fully embrace their Isu identity.
Aita's Sages often shared the same ill-view of humanity that the Isu God did during his life, believing that the Isu should once again reign over the human race, which should return to its subservient slave-like role. This saw many Aita Sages fall in line with the Templar Order, who share this view of complete order and control over humanity. As well as this, Aita Sages are usually driven by a desire to re-unite with Juno, often striving to manifest the ancient God in human form so that they can be together once more.
Sages first entered the Assassin's Creed lore in 2013's Black Flag, with the real-life pirate figure Bartholomew Roberts being depicted in the game as a Sage searching for an ancient Isu observatory on the island of Jamaica. Another high-profile Sage appeared in the franchise within Assassin's Creed Unity, Jacques de Molay, who rose to become the Grand Master of the Templar Order.
Assassin's Creed Mirage and the Norse Isu
One of the most in-depth representations of Sages is going to come in the recently confirmed Assassin's Creed Mirage. AC Mirage is set to tell the story of Basim Ibn Ishaq prior to his appearance in Assassin's Creed Valhalla, in which it was revealed that Basim was actually a Sage for the Isu God Loki. It is widely believed that Mirage will tell the tale of Basim's realization of his true genetic ancestry, and his resultant grappling between the tenets of the Assassin Brotherhood and his desire for revenge against Odin, of which AC Valhalla's protagonist Eivor is a Sage.
This also speaks to the wider Sage lore surrounding the Norse Isu, who themselves were thrust into the human gene pool during the Great Catastrophe. With their DNA being supplanted into human fetuses, nine of the most important Norse Isu, such as Odin and Freyja, had their genetic code laying dormant within the human race which could then be activated at some time. Using an Isu supercomputer named Yggdrasil to do this, the Asgardian Sages were largely born in the same region and time, aside from Loki (who stole his way into Yggdrasil), and were all identifiable by the black marks on their necks.
While becoming well aware of their genetic history, the human Sages of these Asgardian Isu were also left to either embrace or abandon their remembered identities, with Eivor opting for the latter, adding another layer of depth and intrigue to the Sages of Assassin's Creed.