Chapter 111. The Scottish Rite and Albert Pike: Morals and Dogma on Religions, Zoroaster and Mithra

The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite is the system of thirty-three degrees built on top of the three Craft degrees, and Albert Pike (1809-1891) is the figure who shaped it. His Morals and Dogma (1871) is a lecture-book for the degrees from the first to the thirty-second. It is also a long comparative history of religions in which Zoroaster, Ormuzd and Ahriman, and Mithras appear at almost every stage. This chapter introduces the Rite and its leader, then examines how Pike presents the Persian material that opened this study (Parts 1-2). His version is set beside the specialist scholarship used there.

The Rite: from the Order of the Royal Secret to Charleston

The reference shelf traces the Rite’s prehistory through “Scots Master” lodges (from 1733) and the French trader Estienne Morin. Morin compiled a rite of twenty-five degrees, the “Order of the Royal Secret”. On 31 May 1801 John Mitchell and Frederick Dalcho opened “the Supreme Council of the Thirty-third Degree for the United States of America” at Shepheard’s Tavern in Charleston. A Northern Jurisdiction followed in 1813 [Wikipedia: Scottish Rite]. Greer dates the foundation to 1802; the founders’ printed “Manifesto” is dated 4 December 1802 [Wikipedia: Scottish Rite]. He says the Rite of Perfection “claimed descent from the medieval Knights Templar but actually had their roots in the Jacobite Masonry of the mid-eighteenth century”, and that for decades the Scottish Rite “ranked as one of the minor rites” [Greer, The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies, #64911, “Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite”].

The front matter of Morals and Dogma shows the book’s authority. It was “prepared for the Supreme Council of the Thirty-third Degree for the Southern Jurisdiction … and published by its authority” at “Charleston A.’. M.’. 5632”. It was entered by Pike in 1871 and by the Supreme Council in 1906, and the library’s copy was reprinted in February 1944. The degree list runs from 1° Apprentice to 32° Master of the Royal Secret. It passes through the Royal Arch of Solomon (13°), Knight of the East (15°), Prince of Jerusalem (16°), Knight Rose Croix (18°), Pontiff (19°), Prince of Mercy (26°), Knight of the Sun or Prince Adept (28°) and Knight Kadosh (30°). The text is grouped under the headings “Lodge of Perfection”, “Chapter of Rose Croix” (15°-18°), “Council of Kadosh” (19°-30°) and “Consistory” (31°-32°) [Pike, Morals and Dogma, #378717, front matter]. The 33rd degree is conferred by the Supreme Council itself [Wikipedia: Scottish Rite].

Albert Pike: two accounts

Greer’s entry and the Wikipedia article agree on the outline but differ in detail, as the table shows.

Greer’s leadership claim about the Know-Nothings is his own; Wikipedia gives a smaller role. Greer also says Pike, secluded in the Ozarks until 1868, revised the rituals and included “a wealth of material from nearly every aspect of western occult tradition” [Greer, #64911, “Pike, Albert”]. Wikipedia dates his first ritual revision, the “Magnum Opus”, to 1857 and its completion to 1884 [Wikipedia: Scottish Rite]. Greer adds that after Pike’s death the Southern Jurisdiction adopted “a more active political stance”: anti-Catholic propaganda, lobbying against parochial schools and, in the mid-1920s, “a tacit alliance with the revived Ku Klux Klan” [Greer, #64911, “Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite”]. Pike died on 2 April 1891 at the Supreme Council’s temple in Washington [Wikipedia: Albert Pike].

“About equally Author and Compiler”

Pike’s preface describes how the book was made:

“In preparing this work, the Grand Commander has been about equally Author and Compiler; since he has extracted quite half its contents from the works of the best writers and most philosophic or eloquent thinkers … It not being intended for the world at large, he has felt at liberty to make, from all accessible sources, a Compendium … He claims, therefore, little of the merit of authorship, and has not cared to distinguish his own from that which he has taken from other sources” [Pike, Morals and Dogma, #378717, Preface].

The preface adds that the teachings “are not sacramental” beyond morality, and that “Every one is entirely free to reject and dissent from whatsoever herein may seem to him to be untrue or unsound” [same]. Roscoe Pound quotes this preface and draws the consequence: “we must discriminate closely between what is really Pike and what is not … We may refute almost any page by any other page” [Pound, Lectures on the Philosophy of Freemasonry, #87767, ch. IV]. According to René Guénon and Chris Hodapp, as reported on the reference shelf, much of the unmarked borrowing is from Eliphas Levi’s Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie; the same article notes that Pike took even more from Orville Dewey, Theodore Parker, George Oliver, Dupuis and Jacques Matter [Wikipedia: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry]. Pike’s sentence “all the Masonic associations owe to it [the Kabbalah] their Secrets and their Symbols” (Degree XXVIII) is quoted by the Romanian compilation published under Grigorian Bivolaru’s name, which gives it as Levi’s own words from Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (Paris, 1854): “Toate Asociatiile Masonice datoreaza Cabalei secretele si simbolurile lor” [Pike, #378717, Degree XXVIII; Bivolaru, Francmasoneria, #14138, “Cabala și magia”, from Toma Petrescu, Conspirația lojilor, 1941]. Levi’s role is examined in Chapters 112 and 119.

Zoroaster and the two principles

Pike treats Zoroaster as a historical prophet and the source of a tradition. “Zoroaster, like Moses, claimed to have conversed face to face, as man with man, with the Deity; and to have received from Him a system of pure worship, to be communicated only to the virtuous” [Pike, Morals and Dogma, #378717, Degree XXIV]. He takes the Chaldean Oracles as Zoroastrian. After quoting the Oracles on the “Father-begotten Light”, he concludes: “Such was the language of Zoroaster, embodying the old Persian ideas”. He follows it with Ormuzd’s speech “to Zoroaster, in the Boundehesch: ‘I am he who holds the Star-Spangled Heaven in ethereal space; who makes this sphere, which once was buried in darkness, a flood of light'” [same, Degree XXVIII “Knight of the Sun”]. In the Master of the Symbolic Lodge he gives Zoroaster an ethical maxim: “more than three thousand years ago, ZOROASTER said: ‘Be good, be kind, be humane, and charitable; love your fellows; console the afflicted; pardon those who have done you wrong'” [same, Degree XX].

The dualism runs through the whole book. In Degree XXIV Pike follows Plutarch’s claim that the doctrine of two principles is universal. In support of it Plutarch “cites … the famous Mystic Egg of the disciples of Zoroaster and the Initiates in the Mysteries of Mithras” [same, Degree XXIV]. In the serpent-lore of the Brazen Serpent degree: “The Persians represented Ormuzd and Ahriman by two serpents, contending for the mundane egg. Mithras is represented with a lion’s head and human body, encircled by a serpent.” Aurelian’s spoils from Zenobia included “Persici Dracones”, and the Sadder rules that killing serpents while reciting the Zend-Avesta earns the merit of killing “so many devils” [same, Degree XXV]. As shown in Chapter 110, Pike carries the same pair into lodge symbolism: the Duad is “Ormuzd and Ahriman, Osiris and Typhon” (Degree II), and the black-and-white pavement alludes to “the two Principles of Zoroaster and Manes” (Degree XXX).

Mithras in Morals and Dogma

Pike’s Mithras comes from the solar mythologists of his century. Pike gives several Mithrases in different degrees:

• A deified man. “MITHRAS, a Median reformer, was deified after his death, and invested with the attributes of the Sun; the different astronomical phenomena being figuratively detailed as actual incidents of his life; in the same manner as the history of BUDDHA was invented among the Hindūs” [Pike, #378717, Degree XXVI “Prince of Mercy”].
• A solar god born in a cave. “MITHRAS was the Sun-God of the Persians; and was fabled to have been born in a grotto or cave, at the Winter Solstice … This was the great Feast of the Magian religion” [same, Degree XXVIII].
• A dying and rising god. On the authority of Julius Firmicus, “a corpse … was shown the Initiates, representing Mithras dead; and afterward his resurrection was announced”, and his birth was celebrated “under the emblem of an infant, born on the 25th of December”. This is set beside Thammuz-Adoni in Phoenicia and the death of Bakchos at the hands of the Titans [same, Degree XXIV].
• The ladder of the soul. “The Ladder by which it reascends, has, according to Marsilius Ficinus, in his Commentary on the Ennead of Plotinus, seven degrees or steps; and in the Mysteries of Mithras … the ladder, with its seven rounds, was a symbol referring to this ascent through the spheres” [same, Degree I]. Elsewhere, following Celsus as quoted by Origen, the Persians “erected in their holy caves … a high ladder, on the Seven steps of which were Seven gates” [same, Degree XIV].
• An emblem of Masonry itself. Masonry “is the Hercules, the Osiris, the Apollo, the Mithras, and the Ormuzd, at everlasting and deadly feud with the demons of ignorance, brutality … intolerance, superstition, tyranny” [same, Degree XIV].

The Triads follow the same pattern. The Brahmins’ TRIMURTI of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva was “received” by the Persians and changed into “a principle of Life … individualized by the Sun, and a principle of Death”. It reappears among the Ethiopians as “NEPH-AMON, PHTHA, and NEITH” [same, Degree XXVI]. Pound saw this as the core of Pike’s system: “Pike starts with a triad … He finds a triad everywhere in ancient thought” [Pound, #87767, ch. IV].

Pike’s Mithras beside the scholarship

Sources: [Pike, #378717, Degrees XIV, XXIV, XXVI]; [Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, #45649, “The Ancient Mysteries and Secret Societies”]; [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011, on Mithra and Plutarch]. Moulton’s reading belongs to the scholarship presented in Chapters 19–20. The Roman mysteries, with their cave, bull-slaying and seven grades, are covered in Chapters 22–23. On the evidence of those chapters, Pike and Hall have merged the Iranian god of the contract, the Roman mystery god and the eighteenth-century solar theory of Dupuis into one figure.

“Truth for the time”: relativism and politics

Pike’s relativism is stated in the Fellow Craft lecture, not, as is sometimes said, in the Knight of the Sun. “All truths are Truths of Period, and not truths for eternity”. “The doctrines of ZOROASTER were the best which the ancient Persians were fitted to receive; those of CONFUCIUS were fitted for the Chinese; those of MOHAMMED for the idolatrous Arabs of his age. Each was Truth for the time. Each was a GOSPEL, preached by a REFORMER”. Those who remain behind “are to be pitied for it, and not persecuted” [Pike, #378717, Degree II].

The same early degrees contain his social and political doctrine. The Apprentice lecture condemns the commercial nation that “creates wealth rapidly, and distributes it badly. Thence the two extremes, of monstrous opulence and monstrous misery; all the enjoyment to a few, all the privations to the rest … Privilege, Exception, Monopoly, Feudality”. Such a nation “founds public power upon private misery” [same, Degree I]. The Fellow Craft lecture recalls that when “true Masonry … bore the banners of Freedom and Equal Rights”, its lodges were proscribed by Holland (1735), by Louis XV (1737) and by Clement XII’s bull of excommunication (1738) [same, Degree II]. The Knight of the East declares that Masonry “is engaged in her crusade,—against ignorance, intolerance, fanaticism, superstition”, unheard amid “the tumult and uproar of politics” [same, Degree XV]. The Prince of Jerusalem gives up the rebuilding of the literal Temple: “To us the whole world is God’s Temple … To establish all over the world the New Law and Reign of Love, Peace, Charity, and Toleration, is to build that Temple” [same, Degree XVI]. A Masonic introduction to Pike’s The Meaning of Masonry sums up his position. For Pike, it says, Masonry is “not a religion, but a worship in which all good men can unite”, and it quotes him: “Freemasonry is more ancient than any of the world’s living religions … its symbolism is its soul” [Pike, The Meaning of Masonry, #72192, introduction].

Key points

• The Supreme Council of the 33rd degree opened in Charleston on 31 May 1801 (Wikipedia; Greer gives 1802), building on Morin’s 25-degree Order of the Royal Secret. Pike transformed it after 1853.
• Greer and Wikipedia agree on Pike’s career but differ on the Know-Nothings, his pardon, dates and above all the Klan. Greer says Pike had “nothing to do with the Klan”; Wikipedia reports both the accusers and Brown’s denial.
• Pike’s preface says he was “about equally Author and Compiler” and that the book was “not intended for the world at large”. Guénon and Hodapp (via the reference shelf) and the Bivolaru compilation identify Levi as a major unmarked source.
• Zoroaster appears as prophet (“face to face” with God), as the voice of the Chaldean Oracles, and as the source of the Ormuzd/Ahriman dualism symbolised by the Mystic Egg and two serpents.
• Pike’s Mithras is a “Median reformer” deified, a sun-god born in a cave at the winter solstice, a dying and rising god, and the patron of the seven-stepped ladder. Moulton’s Mithra is an ethical god of compacts absent from the Gathas.
• The relativist maxim “Each was Truth for the time”, covering Zoroaster, Confucius and Mohammed, is in Degree II.
• The early degrees carry a political doctrine: against “monstrous opulence and monstrous misery”, for toleration, and opposed to the papal and royal proscriptions of the Craft.