Chapter 112. Morals and Dogma II: Kabbalah, Lucifer, the Templars and the Secret of the High Degrees

A handful of passages in Morals and Dogma are quoted more often than the rest of its 800-odd pages together. They are the Lucifer sentence of the 19th degree, the Satan-as-Force passage of the 3rd, the admission that Masonry “uses false explanations”, the statement that the Blue Degrees are “but the outer court”, and the Kabbalistic and Johannite doctrine of the Knight Kadosh. This chapter gives each passage in full, as it stands in the Supreme Council’s text, and identifies its sources where the library allows. It then follows the passages into Léo Taxil’s Palladian hoax and into the anti-Masonic literature that grew from it. Critics and defenders are both reported with the texts they rely on.

The Lucifer passage of the Grand Pontiff (19°)

The 19th degree, “Grand Pontiff”, is a commentary on the Apocalypse. It comes straight after an exhortation to the candidate: “Soldier of the Cross! Sworn Knight of Justice, Truth, and Toleration! Good Knight and True! be patient and work!” Then:

“The Apocalypse, that sublime Kabalistic and prophetic Summary of all the occult figures, divides its images into three Septenaries … The Apocalypse is, to those who receive the nineteenth Degree, the Apotheosis of that Sublime Faith which aspires to God alone, and despises all the pomps and works of Lucifer. LUCIFER, the Light-bearer! Strange and mysterious name to give to the Spirit of Darkness! Lucifer, the Son of the Morning! Is it he who bears the Light, and with its splendors intolerable blinds feeble, sensual, or selfish Souls? Doubt it not! for traditions are full of Divine Revelations and Inspirations: and Inspiration is not of one Age nor of one Creed. Plato and Philo, also, were inspired. The Apocalypse, indeed, is a book as obscure as the Sohar” [Pike, Morals and Dogma, #378717, Degree XIX; index: “Lucifer, the Lightbearer, Son of the Morning, Spirit of Darkness, 321”].

The same degree states: “The Word, Λογος, is the Source of Logic. Jesus is the Word Incarnate” [same, Degree XIX]. Pike’s own index gives the second meaning of the name: “Lucifer, the Evil Force or Devil represented by the false, 102” [same, index]. In context, the 19th degree “despises all the pomps and works of Lucifer”. The question “Is it he who bears the Light …?” is answered “Doubt it not!”, and the sentence goes on into a claim that inspiration is universal. How it is quoted varies. Cathy Burns gives “LUCIFER, the Light-Bearer!… Lucifer, the Son of the Morning!” and attributes it to “Eliphas Levi and Albert Pike” [Burns, Masonic and Occult Symbols Illustrated, #62278]. The text the library catalogues under David Icke ends the quotation at “Doubt it not!” [Icke, The Hidden Gears of Freemasonry, #38025].

Satan as a Force: the Pan and Phosphor passage (3°)

The page that index entry points to (102) is in the Master’s degree:

“The true name of Satan, the Kabalists say, is that of Yahveh reversed; for Satan is not a black god, but the negation of God. The Devil is the personification of Atheism or Idolatry. For the Initiates, this is not a Person, but a Force, created for good, but which may serve for evil. It is the instrument of Liberty or Free Will. They represent this Force, which presides over the physical generation, under the mythologic and horned form of the God PAN; thence came the he-goat of the Sabbat, brother of the Ancient Serpent, and the Light-bearer or Phosphor, of which the poets have made the false Lucifer of the legend. Gold, to the eyes of the Initiates, is Light condensed” [Pike, #378717, Degree III].

This vocabulary is Eliphas Levi’s. In Le Grand Arcane (Romanian translation in the library) Levi calls the astral fluid “the light-bearer, or Lucifer” (purtătorul de lumină sau Lucifer), “because it is the distributing agent and specialist of the astral light”. He calls it also “the angel of darkness”, and notes the Jewish doctrine of a white and a black Samael. In the same book he holds that “a corporeal God necessarily projects a shadow, and this shadow is Satan” [Levi, Marele Arcan sau Ocultismul Revelat, #87970]. Pike, then, gives Levi’s distinction between the Devil as personified negation and Lucifer as a natural light-force. Levi’s wider rehabilitation of Lucifer and Baphomet is treated in Chapter 119.

The doctrine of concealment (3°, 17°, 30°)

Three passages state that Masonry hides its meaning. In the Master’s degree:

“Masonry, like all the Religions, all the Mysteries, Hermeticism and Alchemy, conceals its secrets from all except the Adepts and Sages, or the Elect, and uses false explanations and misinterpretations of its symbols to mislead those who deserve only to be misled; to conceal the Truth, which it calls Light, from them, and to draw them away from it. Truth is not for those who are unworthy or unable to receive it, or would pervert it … Every age has had a religion suited to its capacity” [Pike, #378717, Degree III].

A few pages earlier Pike quotes Synesius, “a great Kabalist, but of doubtful orthodoxy”: “Fictions are necessary to the people, and the Truth becomes deadly to those who are not strong enough to contemplate it” [same, Degree III]. In the 17th degree he speaks of “the present mutilated condition of the symbolic Degrees”, where the ancient ideas “are disguised and overlaid with fiction and absurdity” [same, Degree XVII]. The fullest statement, set in square brackets in the Kadosh lecture, is:

“[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 … It is well enough for the mass of those called Masons, to imagine that all is contained in the Blue Degrees; and whose 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.]” [same, Degree XXX].

Critics read this as proof of an inner, hidden religion. Pound reads Pike as “the apostle of liberty of interpretation”, who “insisted … that no infallible authority … could bind the individual Mason to this or that interpretation” [Pound, Lectures on the Philosophy of Freemasonry, #87767, ch. IV].

The Kabbalah as source (28°)

Pike names the hidden doctrine:

“All truly dogmatic religions have issued from the Kabalah and return to it: everything scientific and grand in the religious dreams of all the illuminati, Jacob Bœhme, Swedenborg, Saint-Martin, and others, is borrowed from the Kabalah; all the Masonic associations owe to it their Secrets and their Symbols. The Kabalah alone consecrates the alliance of the Universal Reason and the Divine Word” [Pike, #378717, Degree XXVIII].

His index lists further theses: “Kabalistic doctrine, like Masonry, tends toward spiritual perfection” (625), “the religion of the Sage and Savant” (625), “lost by the Pharisees at the advent of Christ” (727), “the dogma of the Magi and Hermes” (841) [same, index]. Bivolaru quotes the Masonic-associations sentence as Levi’s own words from Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854) [Bivolaru, Francmasoneria, #14138]. That makes it a second sign of Pike’s dependence on Levi.

The Knight Kadosh: Templars, Johannites and Baphomet (30°)

The Kadosh lecture opens with the Templars’ revenge in history: “The ghosts of the dead Templars haunt the Vatican and disturb the slumbers of the paralyzed Papacy” [Pike, #378717, Degree XXX]. Its core is a long passage in quotation marks, so presented as taken from another writer. In it, a sect of “Johannite Christians” held that the Gospel facts “are but allegories”. Their pontiff Theoclet initiated Hugues de Payens, so that the Temple was “at its very origin devoted to the cause of opposition to the tiara of Rome and the crowns of Kings”. “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”. The aim, in the quoted text, was that “We shall constitute the equilibrium of the Universe, and be rulers over the Masters of the World” [same, Degree XXX]. Pike’s own comment rejects the charge of idolatry: “It is absurd to suppose that men of intellect adored a monstrous idol called Baphomet, or recognized Mahomet as an inspired prophet … The symbols of the wise always become the idols of the ignorant multitude” (index: “Baphomet adored as an idol by the Templars is an absurdity, 818”) [same, Degree XXX and index].

Taxil, the Palladium and the forged “Instructions”

According to Greer, Léo Taxil (Gabriel Jogand-Pagès), “a French hack writer and Freemason” who had written anti-Catholic and pornographic literature, announced his reconciliation with the Church shortly after Leo XIII’s encyclical against Freemasonry (1884). Within months he began exposing the “Free and Regenerated Palladium”. This was a supposed Satanist inner circle of Masonry “headed by Albert Pike, ‘Sovereign Pontiff of Universal Freemasonry,’ who ruled the world in secret from his headquarters in Charleston, South Carolina”. Bishops rallied to him, and “in 1887 he received the honor of a private audience with the pope”. Diana Vaughan, “descended from English alchemist Thomas Vaughan and a female demon”, was added in the early 1890s. In 1897 Taxil took the stage of a Paris hall in her place. He declared that the Palladium was his invention and that Vaughan was a typist, and he left “just in time to avoid the ensuing riot” [Greer, The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies, #64911, “Palladian Order”]. Greer adds that the press furor brought the word “Satanist” into English, and that Taxil’s invented split between “Luciferians” and “Satanists” passed into later Satanism [same].

There is a dating problem in Greer. His “Pike, Albert” entry places the hoax in “the late 1870s and early 1880s” [Greer, #64911, “Pike, Albert”], but his own Palladian entry begins it after 1884. The reference shelf supports the later dating. Humanum genus is dated 20 April 1884. Taxil’s conversion is given as “circa 1884” in one article and 1885 in another. Le Diable au XIXe siècle (1892, as “Dr. Bataille”) made Pike the Palladists’ head and Mazzini their founder. The confession came on 19 April 1897 at the Société de Géographie and was printed in Le Frondeur on 25 April. Before the confession, A. E. Waite’s Devil-Worship in France (1896) had already exposed the story [Wikipedia: Taxil hoax; Wikipedia: Léo Taxil].

The most widely quoted text attributed to Pike comes from this circle. It purports to be “Instructions to the 23 Supreme Councils of the World, July 14, 1889”: “The Masonic Religion should be, by all of us initiates of the high degrees, maintained in the purity of the Luciferian Doctrine … Yes, Lucifer is God, and unfortunately Adonay is also god” [Icke, #38025, citing A. C. De La Rive, La Femme et l’Enfant dans la Franc-Maçonnerie Universelle, p. 588]. The reference shelf records that the passage “was published by Abel Clarin de la Rive”. It “does not appear in Taxil’s writings proper, though it is sourced in a footnote to Diana Vaughan, Taxil’s creation”, and de la Rive was Taxil’s partner in La France chrétienne anti-maçonnique [Wikipedia: Taxil hoax; Wikipedia: Léo Taxil]. Greer states that “the title and some of the writings Taxil forged and attributed to Pike are still circulated among opponents of Freemasonry, especially fundamentalist Christians” [Greer, #64911, “Pike, Albert”].

What the anti-Masonic texts rest on

• Icke (#38025) sets the 1889 “Instructions” next to the genuine Degree XIX passage, which it cites as “Morals and Dogma page 321”, and treats them as one doctrine.
• Texe Marrs quotes the same “Luciferian doctrine” sentence as something Pike “once declared” [Marrs, Mysterious Monuments, #66353].
• Cathy Burns relies on the genuine Degree XIX text, cut down with an ellipsis, and on Pike’s “generative principle” [Burns, #62278].
• Grigorian Bivolaru (1995) does not cite Pike by name in the text examined. His frame is the “24 protocols” of a supposed Masonic congress at Basel in 1897, which he calls “a monument of Satanic action”. He also uses Levi’s Kabbalah sentence and the Palladists (“Paladiștilor (a francmasonilor luciferieni)”), whose doctrine he describes as a Manichaean system of a double divinity. He quotes, without sources, degree speeches in which the Great Architect “is not God, it is the Angel of Luciferian Light” [Bivolaru, #14138].
• Finney’s reprint (Sign of Satan) attacks the Royal Arch oath on civic grounds and does not draw on Pike [Finney, #70244].

Three Lucifers

Pike’s Lucifer, read in his own text, has two senses. In the 19th degree it is the name for whatever “blinds feeble, sensual, or selfish Souls”. In the 3rd degree it is Phosphor, “the false Lucifer of the legend”, a misreading of the light-force of generation. Burns quotes Blavatsky going further: “Lucifer is divine and terrestrial Light, ‘the Holy Ghost’ and ‘Satan’ at one and the same time” [Burns, #62278, quoting Blavatsky]. Rudolf Steiner pairs Lucifer with Ahriman, the Persian name, as two opposed tempters: “while Lucifer reveals all that is unrevealed, Ahriman has a mission …” (În timp ce Lucifer dezvăluie tot nedezvăluitul, Ahriman are o misiune…), as the Romanian edition quotes him [Steiner, Păzitorul Pragului, vol. 3, #48649]. A lecture in Disease, Karma and Healing likewise separates Ahriman’s influence from Lucifer’s [Steiner, Disease, Karma and Healing, #69269, “Ahriman’s Influence and Distinction from Lucifer”]. All three authors take the Zoroastrian Ahriman and the biblical Light-bearer of Isaiah 14 as material for a new esoteric theology. Part 12 follows how later Satanists and Luciferians used it (Chapters 116–122).

Key points

• The Degree XIX Lucifer sentence sits between “Soldier of the Cross!” and a claim that inspiration is universal. In context the degree “despises all the pomps and works of Lucifer”. Critics usually quote it cut short.
• The Degree III passage defines Satan as “Yahveh reversed”, a “Force” pictured as Pan, and calls Phosphor “the false Lucifer of the legend”. Its vocabulary of astral light comes from Eliphas Levi.
• Pike states plainly that Masonry “uses false explanations” and that the Blue Degrees’ initiate “is intentionally misled”. Critics read this as deception and Pound as liberty of interpretation.
• Pike makes the Kabbalah the source of “all the Masonic associations”; Bivolaru gives the same sentence as Levi’s (1854).
• The Kadosh degree presents the Templars as Johannite Gnostics with a secret doctrine opposed to “the tiara of Rome and the crowns of Kings”, and calls Baphomet-worship “absurd”.
• Taxil’s Palladium (1884/85-1897) made Pike “Sovereign Pontiff of Universal Freemasonry”. The “Luciferian doctrine” Instructions of 14 July 1889 came out of de la Rive’s work in Taxil’s circle and are still quoted by Icke and Marrs.
• Greer’s dating of the hoax in his “Pike” entry (“late 1870s and early 1880s”) conflicts with his own Palladian entry and with the reference shelf.