MORALS and DOGMA
by: Albert Pike
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p. 814
XXX.
KNIGHT
KADOSH
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
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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
p. 816
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
p. 817
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
p. 818
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
p. 819
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
p. 820
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
p. 821
[paragraph continues]
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
p. 822
[paragraph continues] 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
p. 823
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
p. 824
[paragraph continues] 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.
Next: XXI. Grand Inspector
Inquisitor Commander