Quotes from Albert Pike

Another jewel is necessary for you, and in certain undertakings cannot be dispensed with. It is what is termed the Kabalistic pentacle... This carries with it the power of commanding the spirits of the elements. It is necessary for you to know how to use it, and that you will learn by perseverance if you are a lover of the science of our predecessors the Sages.

It is not even in extraordinary situations, where all eyes are upon us, where all our energy is aroused, and all our vigilance is awake, that the highest efforts of virtue are usually demanded of us; but rather in silence and seclusion, amidst our occupations and our homes; in wearing sickness, that makes no complaint; in sorely-tried honesty, that asks no praise; in simple disinterestedness, hiding the hand that resigns its advantage to another.

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 Rose-Croix Adepts respected the dominant, hierarchical, and revealed religion. Consequently they could no more be enemies of the Papacy than of legitimate Monarchy; and if they conspired against Popes and Kings, it was because they considered them personally as apostates from duty and supreme favors of anarchy. What, in fact, is a despot, spiritual or temporal, but a crowned anarchist?

The Occult Science of the Ancient Magi was concealed under the shadows of the Ancient Mysteries it was imperfectly revealed or rather disfigured by the Gnostics: it is guessed at under the obscurities that cover the pretended crimes of the Templars; and it is found enveloped in enigmas that seem impenetrable, in the Rights of the Highest Masonry.

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.

Thus there is an Absolute, in the matters of Intelligence and of Faith. The Supreme Reason has not left the gleams of the human understanding to vacillate by hazard. There is an incontestable verity, there is an infallible method of knowing this verity, and by the knowledge of it, those who accept it as a rule may give their will a sovereign power that will make them masters of inferior things and of all errant spirits that is to say, will make them the Arbiters and Kings of the World.

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 Boehme, Swedenborg, Saint-Martin, and others, is borrowed from the Kabalah; all the Masonic associations owe it their Secrets and Symbols.

Masonry is a search after Light. That search leads us directly back, as you see, to the Kabalah. In that ancient and little understood medley of absurdity and philosophy, the Initiate will find the source of many doctrines; and may come to understand the Hermetic philosophers, the Alchemists, all the Anti-papal Thinkers of the Middle Ages, and Emanuel Swedenborg.

This agent, partially revealed by the blind guesses of the disciples of Mesmer, is precisely what the Adepts of the middle ages called the elementary matter of the great work. The Gnostics held that it composed the igneous body of the Holy Spirit; and it was adored in the secret rites of the Sabbat or the Temple, under the hieroglyphic figure of Baphomet or the hermaphroditic goat of Mendes.

God acts by His works: in Heaven, by angels; on earth, by men. In the heaven of human conceptions, it is humanity that creates God; and men think that God has made them in His image, because they make Him in theirs.

The human mind has never struggled harder to understand and explain to itself the process of creation, and of Divine manifestation, and at the same time to conceal its thoughts from all but the initiated, than in the Kabalah. Hence, much of it seems at first like jargon.

Wherever a heart beats with love, wherever Faith and Reason utter their oracles, there is God, as formerly in the hearts of seers and prophets. No soil on earth is so holy as the good man's heart.

Man is not to be comprehended as a starting-point, or progress as a goal, without those two great forces , Faith and Love . Prayer is sublime.

Be prudent, diligent, temperate and discreet. Remember that every human being has a claim upon your kind offices.

Every Masonic Lodge is a temple of religion; and its teachings are instruction in religion.

Masonry is not a religion. He who makes of it a religious belief, falsifies and denaturalizes it.

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.

We must pass through the darkness, to reach the light.

A dim consciousness of infinite mystery and grandeur lies beneath all the commonplace of life . There is an awfulness and a majesty around us, in all our little worldliness .

Faith begins where Reason sinks exhausted.

Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor professional men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius.

What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.

We must pass through the darkness, to reach the light.