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Morals and Dogma
Albert Pike
We often profit more by our enemies than by our friends. "We
support ourselves only on that which resists," and owe our success to
opposition. The best friends of Masonry in America were the Anti-Masons of 1826,
and at the same time they were its worst enemies. Men are but the automata of
Providence, and it uses the demagogue, the fanatic, and the knave, a common
trinity in Republics, as its tools and instruments to effect that of which they
do not dream, and which they imagine themselves commissioned to prevent.
The Anti-Masons, traitors and perjurors some, and some mere
political knaves, purified Masonry by persecution, and so proved to be its
benefactors; for that which is persecuted, grows. To them its present popularity
is due, the cheapening of its Degrees, the invasion of its Lodges, that are no
longer Sanctuaries, by the multitude; its pomp and pageantry and overdone
display.
An hundred years ago it had become known that the קדש were the
Templars under a veil, and therefore the Degree was pro-scribed, and, ceasing to
be worked, became a mere brief and formal ceremony, under another name. Now,
from the tomb in which after his murders he rotted, Clement the Fifth howls
against the successors of his victims, in the Allocution of Pio Nono against the
Free-Masons. The ghosts of the dead Templars
haunt the Vatican and disturb the slumbers of the paralyzed Papacy,
which, dreading the dead, shrieks out its excommunications and impotent
anathemas against the living. It is a declaration of war, and was needed to
arouse apathy and inertness to action.
An enemy of the Templars shall tell us the secret of this Papal
hostility against an Order that has existed for centuries in despite of its
anathemas, and has its Sanctuaries and Asyla even in Rome.
It will be easy, as we read, to separate the false from the
true, the audacious conjectures from the simple facts.
"A power that ruled without antagonism and without concurrence,
and consequently without control, proved fatal to the Sacerdotal Royalties;
while the Republics, on the other hand, had perished by the conflict of
liberties and franchises, which, in the absence of all duty hierarchically
sanctioned and enforced, had soon become mere tyrannies, rivals one of the
other. To find a stable medium between these two abysses, the idea of the
Christian Hierophants was to create a society devoted to abnegation by solemn
vows, protected by severe regulations; which should be recruited by initiation,
and which, sole depositary of the great religious and social secrets, should
make Kings and Pontiffs, without exposing it to the corruptions of Power. In
that was the secret of that kingdom of Jesus Christ, which, without being of
this world, would govern all its grandeurs.
"This idea presided at the foundation of the great religious
orders, so often at war with the secular authorities, ecclesiastical or civil.
Its realization was also the dream of the dissident sects of Gnostics or
Illuminati who pretended to connect their faith with the primitive tradition of
the Christianity of Saint John. It at length became a menace for the Church and
Society, when a rich and dissolute Order, initiated in the mysterious doctrines
of the Kabalah, seemed disposed to turn against legitimate authority the
conservative principle of Hierarchy, and threatened the entire world with an
immense revolution.
"The Templars, whose history is so imperfectly known, were those
terrible conspirators. In 1118, nine Knights Crusaders in the East, among whom
were Geoffroi de Saint-Omer and Hugues de Payens, consecrated themselves to
religion, and took an oath between the hands of the Patriarch of Constantinople,
a See always secretly or openly hostile to that of Rome from the time of Photius.
The avowed object of the Templars was to protect
the Christians who came to visit the Holy Places: their secret object
was the re-building of the Temple of Solomon on the model prophesied by Ezekiel.
"This re-building, formally predicted by the Judaïzing Mystics
of the earlier ages, had become the secret dream of the Patriarchs of the
Orient. The Temple of Solomon, re-built and consecrated to the Catholic worship
would become, in effect, the Metropolis of the Universe; the East would prevail
over the West, and the Patriarchs of Constantinople would possess themselves of
the Papal power.
"The Templars, or Poor Fellow-Soldiery of the Holy House of
the Temple intended to be re-built, took as their models, in the Bible, the
Warrior-Masons of Zorobabel, who worked, holding the sword in one hand and the
trowel in the other. Therefore it was that the Sword and the Trowel were the
insignia of the Templars, who subsequently, as will be seen, concealed
themselves under the name of Brethren Masons. [This name, Frères
Masons in the French, adopted by way of secret reference to the Builders of
the Second Temple, was corrupted in English into Free-Masons, as
Pythagore de Crotone was into Peter Gower of Groton in
England. Khairūm or Khūr-ūm, (a name mis-rendered into Hiram)
from an artificer in brass and other metals, became the Chief Builder of the
Haikal Kadosh, the Holy House, of the Temple, the Ἱερος Δομος; and the words
Bonai and Banaim yet appear in the Masonic Degrees, meaning
Builder and Builders.]
"The trowel of the Templars is quadruple, and the triangular
plates of it are arranged in the form of a cross, making the Kabalistic pantacle
known by the name of the Cross of the East. The Knight of the East, and the
Knight of the East and West, have in their titles secret allusions to the
Templars of whom they were at first the successors.
"The secret thought of Hugues de Payens, in founding his Order,
was not exactly to serve the ambition of the Patriarchs of Constantinople. There
existed at that period in the East a Sect of Johannite Christians, who claimed
to be the only true Initiates into the real mysteries of the religion of the
Saviour. They pretended to know the real history of YESUS the ANOINTED, and,
adopting in part the Jewish traditions and the tales of the Talmud, they held
that the facts recounted in the Evangels are but allegories, the key of which
Saint John gives, in saying that the
world might be filled with the books that could be written upon the
words and deeds of Jesus Christ; words which, they thought, would be only a
ridiculous exaggeration, if he were not speaking of an allegory and a legend,
that might be varied and prolonged to infinity.
"The Johannites ascribed to Saint John the foundation of their
Secret Church, and the Grand Pontiffs of the Sect assumed the title of
Christos, Anointed, or Consecrated, and claimed to have
succeeded one another from Saint John by an uninterrupted succession of
pontifical powers. He who, at the period of the foundation of the Order of the
Temple, claimed these imaginary prerogatives, was named THEOCLET; he knew HUGUES
DE PAYENS, he initiated him into the Mysteries and hopes of his pretended
church, he seduced him by the notions of Sovereign Priesthood and Supreme
royalty, and finally designated him as his successor.
"Thus the Order of Knights of the Temple was at its very origin
devoted to the cause of opposition to the tiara of Rome and the crowns of Kings,
and the Apostolate of Kabalistic Gnosticism was vested in its chiefs. For Saint
John himself was the Father of the Gnostics, and the current translation of his
polemic against the heretical of his Sect and the pagans who denied that Christ
was the Word, is throughout a misrepresentation, or misunderstanding at least,
of the whole Spirit of that Evangel.
"The tendencies and tenets of the Order were enveloped in
profound mystery, and it externally professed the most perfect orthodoxy. The
Chiefs alone knew the aim of the Order: the Subalterns followed them without
distrust.
"To acquire influence and wealth, then to intrigue, and at need
to fight, to establish the Johannite or Gnostic and Kabalistic dogma, were the
object and means proposed to the initiated Brethren. The Papacy and the rival
monarchies, they said to them, are sold and bought in these days, become
corrupt, and to-morrow, perhaps, will destroy each other. All that will become
the heritage of the Temple: the World will soon come to us for its Sovereigns
and Pontiffs. We shall constitute the equilibrium of the Universe, and be rulers
over the Masters of the World.
"The Templars, like all other Secret Orders and Associations,
had two doctrines, one concealed and reserved for the Masters, which was
Johannism; the other public, which was the Roman Catholic. Thus they
deceived the adversaries whom they sought
to supplant. Hence Free-Masonry, vulgarly imagined to have begun with
the Dionysian Architects or the German Stone-workers, adopted Saint John the
Evangelist as one of its patrons, associating with him, in order not to arouse
the suspicions of Rome, Saint John the Baptist, and thus covertly proclaiming
itself the child of the Kabalah and Essenism together."
[For the Johannism of the Adepts was the Kabalah of the earlier
Gnostics, degenerating afterward into those heretical forms which Gnosticism
developed, so that even Manes had his followers among them. Many adopted his
doctrines of the two Principles, the recollection of which is perpetuated by the
handle of the dagger and the tesserated pavement or floor of the Lodge, stupidly
called "the Indented Tessel," and represented by great hanging tassels,
when it really means a tesserated floor (from the Latin tessera)
of white and black lozenges, with a necessarily denticulated or indented border
or edging. And wherever, in the higher Degrees, the two colors white and black,
are in juxtaposition, the two Principles of Zoroaster and Manes are alluded to.
With others the doctrine became a mystic Pantheism, descended from that of the
Brahmins, and even pushed to an idolatry of Nature and hatred of every revealed
dogma.
[To all this the absurd reading of the established Church,
taking literally the figurative, allegorical, and mythical language of a
collection of Oriental books of different ages, directly and inevitably led. The
same result long after followed the folly of regarding the Hebrew books as if
they had been written by the unimaginative, hard, practical intellect of the
England of James the First and the bigoted stolidity of Scottish
Presbyterianism.]
"The better to succeed and win partisans, the Templars
sympathized with regrets for dethroned creeds and encouraged the hopes of new
worships, promising to all liberty of conscience and a new orthodoxy that should
be the synthesis of all the persecuted creeds."
[It is absurd to suppose that men of intellect adored a
monstrous idol called Baphomet, or recognized Mahomet as an inspired prophet.
Their symbolism, invented ages before, to conceal what it was dangerous to avow,
was of course misunderstood by those who were not adepts, and to their enemies
seemed to be pantheistic. The calf of gold, made by Aaron for the Israelites,
was but one of the oxen under the laver of bronze, and the Karobim on the
Propitiatory, misunderstood. The symbols of the wise always become
the idols of the ignorant multitude. What the Chiefs of the Order
really believed and taught, is indicated to the Adepts by the hints contained in
the high Degrees of Free-Masonry, and by the symbols which only the Adepts
understand.
[The Blue Degrees are but the outer court or portico of the
Temple. Part of the symbols are displayed there to the Initiate, but he is
intentionally misled by false interpretations. It is not intended that he shall
understand them; but it is intended that he shall imagine he understands them.
Their true explication is reserved for the Adepts, the Princes of Masonry. The
whole body of the Royal and Sacerdotal Art was hidden so carefully, centuries
since, in the High Degrees, as that it is even yet impossible to solve many of
the enigmas which they contain. It is well enough for the mass of those called
Masons, to imagine that all is contained in the Blue Degrees; and whoso attempts
to undeceive them will labor in vain, and without any true reward violate his
obligations as an Adept. Masonry is the veritable Sphinx, buried to the head in
the sands heaped round it by the ages.]
"The seeds of decay were sown in the Order of the Temple at its
origin. Hypocrisy is a mortal disease. It had conceived a great work which it
was incapable of executing, because it knew neither humility nor personal
abnegation, because Rome was then invincible, and because the later Chiefs of
the Order did not comprehend its mission. Moreover, the Templars were in general
uneducated, and capable only of wielding the sword, with no qualifications for
governing, and at need enchaining, that queen of the world called Opinion." [The
doctrines of the Chiefs would, if expounded to the masses, have seemed to them
the babblings of folly. The symbols of the wise are the idols of the vulgar, or
else as meaningless as the hieroglyphics of Egypt to the nomadic Arabs. There
must always be a common-place interpretation for the mass of Initiates, of the
symbols that are eloquent to the Adepts.]
"Hughes de Payens himself had not that keen and far-sighted
intellect nor that grandeur of purpose which afterward distinguished the
military founder of another soldiery that became formidable to kings. The
Templars were unintelligent and therefore unsuccessful Jesuits.
"Their watchword was, to become wealthy, in order to buy the
world. They became so, and in 1312 they possessed in Europe
alone more than nine thousand seignories. Riches were the shoal on
which they were wrecked. They became insolent, and unwisely showed their
contempt for the religious and social institutions which they aimed to
overthrow. Their ambition was fatal to them. Their projects were divined and
prevented. [Rome, more intolerant of heresy than of vice and crime, came to fear
the Order, and fear is always cruel. It has always deemed philosophical truth
the most dangerous of heresies, and has never been at a loss for a false
accusation, by means of which to crush free thought.] Pope Clement V. and King
Philip le Bel gave the signal to Europe, and the Templars, taken as it were in
an immense net, were arrested, disarmed, and cast into prison. Never was a
Coup d’Etat accomplished with a more formidable concert of action. The whole
world was struck with stupor, and eagerly waited for the strange revelations of
a process that was to echo through so many ages.
"It was impossible to unfold to the people the conspiracy of the
Templars against the Thrones and the Tiara. It was impossible to expose to them
the doctrines of the Chiefs of the Order. [This would have been to initiate the
multitude into the secrets of the Masters, and to have uplifted the veil of
Isis. Recourse was therefore had to the charge of magic, and denouncers and
false witnesses were easily found. When the temporal and spiritual tyrannies
unite to crush a victim they never want for serviceable instruments.] The
Templars were gravely accused of spitting upon Christ and denying God at their
receptions, of gross obscenities, conversations with female devils, and the
worship of a monstrous idol.
"The end of the drama is well known, and how Jacques de Molai
and his fellows perished in the flames. But before his execution, the Chief of
the doomed Order organized and instituted what afterward came to be called the
Occult, Hermetic, or Scottish Masonry. In the gloom of his prison, the Grand
Master created four Metropolitan Lodges, at Naples for the East, at Edinburg for
the West, at Stockholm for the North, and at Paris for the South." [The initials
of his name, J∴ B∴ M∴ found in the same order in the first three Degrees, are
but one of the many internal and cogent proofs that such was the origin of
modern Free-Masonry. The legend of Osiris was revived and adopted, to symbolize
the destruction of the Order, and the resurrection of
Khūrūm, slain in the body of the Temple, of KHŪRŪM ABAI, the Master, as
the martyr of fidelity to obligation, of Truth and Conscience, prophesied the
restoration to life of the buried association.]
"The Pope and the King soon after perished in a strange and
sudden manner. Squin de Florian, the chief denouncer of the Order, died
assassinated. In breaking the sword of the Templars, they made of it a poniard;
and their proscribed trowels thence-forward built only tombs."
[The Order disappeared at once. Its estates and wealth were
confiscated, and it seemed to have ceased to exist. Nevertheless it lived, under
other names and governed by unknown Chiefs, revealing itself only to those who,
in passing through a series of Degrees, had proven themselves worthy to be
entrusted with the dangerous Secret. The modern Orders that style themselves
Templars have assumed a name to which they have not the shadow of a title.]
"The Successors of the Ancient Adepts Rose-Croix, abandoning by
degrees the austere and hierarchial Science of their Ancestors in initiation,
became a Mystic Sect, united with many of the Templars, the dogmas of the two
intermingling, and believed themselves to be the sole depositaries of the
secrets of the Gospel of St. John, seeing in its recitals an allegorical series
of rites proper to complete the initiation.
"The Initiates, in fact, thought in the eighteenth century that
their time had arrived, some to found a new Hierarchy, others to overturn all
authority, and to press down all the summits of the Social Order under the level
of Equality."
The mystical meanings of the Rose as a Symbol are to be looked
for in the Kabalistic Commentaries on the Canticles.
The Rose was for the Initiates the living and blooming symbol of
the revelation of the harmonies of being. It was the emblem of beauty, life,
love, and pleasure. Flamel, or the Book of the Jew Abraham, made it the
hieroglyphical sign of the accomplishment of the great Work. Such is the key of
the Roman de la Rose. The Conquest of the Rose was the problem propounded to
Science by Initiation, while Religion was laboring to prepare and establish the
universal triumph, exclusive and definitive, of the Cross.
To unite the Rose to the Cross, was the problem proposed by the
High Initiation; and in fact the Occult philosophy being the Universal
Synthesis, ought to explain all the phenomena of Being. Religion, considered
solely as a physiological fact, is the revelation and satisfaction of a
necessity of souls. Its existence is a scientific fact; to deny it, would be to
deny humanity itself.
The Rose-Croix Adepts respected the dominant, hierarchical, and
revealed religion. Consequently they could no more be the enemies of the Papacy
than of legitimate Monarchy; and if they conspired against the Popes and Kings,
it was because they considered them personally as apostates from duty and
supreme favorers of anarchy.
What, in fact, is a despot, spiritual or temporal, but a crowned
anarchist?
One of the magnificent pantacles that express the esoteric and
unutterable part of Science, is a Rose of Light, in the centre of which a human
form extends its arms in the form of a cross.
Commentaries and studies have been multiplied upon the Divine
Comedy, the work of DANTE, and yet no one, so far as we know, has pointed
out its especial character. The work of the great Ghibellin is a declaration of
war against the Papacy, by bold revelations of the Mysteries. The Epic of Dante
is Johannite and Gnostic, an audacious application, like that of the Apocalypse,
of the figures and numbers of the Kabalah to the Christian dogmas, and a secret
negation of every thing absolute in these dogmas. His journey through the
supernatural worlds is accomplished like the initiation into the Mysteries of
Eleusis and Thebes. He escapes from that gulf of Hell over the gate of which the
sentence of despair was written, by reversing the positions of his head and
feet, that is to say, by accepting the direct opposite of the Catholic dogma;
and then he reascends to the light, by using the Devil himself as a monstrous
ladder. Faust ascends to Heaven, by stepping on the head of the vanquished
Mephistopheles. Hell is impassable for those only who know not how to turn back
from it. We free ourselves from its bondage by audacity.
His Hell is but a negative Purgatory. His Heaven is composed of
a series of Kabalistic circles, divided by a cross, like the Pantacle of
Ezekiel. In the centre of this cross blooms a rose, and we see the symbol of the
Adepts of the Rose-Croix for the first time publicly expounded and almost
categorically explained.
For the first time, because Guillaume de Lorris, who died in
1260, five years before the birth of Alighieri, had not completed
his Roman de la Rose, which was continued by Chopinel, a half
century afterward. One is astonished to discover that the Roman de la Rose and
the Divina Commedia are two opposite forms of one and the same work, initiation
into independence of spirit, a satire on all contemporary institutions, and the
allegorical formula of the great Secrets of the Society of the Roses-Croix.
The important manifestations of Occultism coincide with the
period of the fall of the Templars; since Jean de Meung or Chopinel,
contemporary of the old age of Dante, flourished during the best years of his
life at the Court of Philippe le Bel. The Roman de la Rose is the Epic of old
France. It is a profound book, under the form of levity, a revelation as learned
as that of Apuleius, of the Mysteries of Occultism. The Rose of Flamel, that of
Jean de Meung, and that of Dante, grew on the same stem.
Swedenborg's system was nothing else than the Kabalah, minus the
principle of the Hierarchy. It is the Temple, without the keystone and the
foundation.
Cagliostro was the Agent of the Templars, and therefore wrote to
the Free-Masons of London that the time had come to begin the work of
re-building the Temple of the Eternal. He had introduced into Masonry a new Rite
called the Egyptian, and endeavored to resuscitate the mysterious worship
of Isis. The three letters L∴ P∴ D∴ on his seal, were the initials of the words
"Lilia pedibus destrue;" tread under foot the Lilies [of France],
and a Masonic medal of the sixteenth or seventeenth century has upon it a sword
cutting off the stalk of a lily, and the words "talem dabit ultio messem,"
such harvest revenge will give.
A Lodge inaugurated under the auspices of Rousseau, the fanatic
of Geneva, became the centre of the revolutionary movement in France, and a
Prince of the blood-royal went thither to swear the destruction of the
successors of Philippe le Bel on the tomb of Jacques de Molai. The registers of
the Order of Templars attest that the Regent, the Duc d’Orleans, was Grand
Master of that formidable Secret Society, and that his successors were the Duc
de Maine, the Prince of Bourbon-Condé, and the Duc de Cossé-Brissac.
The Templars compromitted the King; they saved him from the rage
of the People, to exasperate that rage and bring on the catastrophe prepared for
centuries; it was a scaffold that the vengeance of the Templars demanded. The
secret movers of the French Revolution had sworn to overturn the Throne and the
Altar upon the Tomb of Jacques de Molai. When Louis XVI. was executed, half the
work was done; and thenceforward the Army of the Temple was to direct all its
efforts against the Pope.
Jacques de Molai and his companions were perhaps martyrs, but
their avengers dishonored their memory. Royalty was regenerated on the scaffold
of Louis XVI., the Church triumphed in the captivity of Pius VI., carried a
prisoner to Valence, and dying of fatigue and sorrow, but the successors of the
Ancient Knights of the Temple perished, overwhelmed in their fatal victory.
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