Albert Pike

Friday night, after watching Mystery Train, a truly insipid Jim Jarmusch movie  I had previously recorded a week ago, I flipped over to one of the cable news outlets just in time to see a riotous Washington, DC mob topple and destroy the statute of Confederate General Albert Pike, the only such outdoor monument erected in the nations’ Capital. It is highly doubtful that the willfully ignorant mob knew much more about the Boston born Pike than his status during the War for Southern Independence, where he was a senior officer of the Confederate States Army who commanded the District of Indian Territory in the Trans-Mississippi Theater, recruiting members of the Five Civilized Tribes to serve in the cause of the Confederacy. It is indeed doubtful that they knew he was in fact, an American author, poet, orator, jurist and one of the most prominent members of the Freemasons in the world. In 1859 he was elected Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite’s Southern Jurisdiction. He remained Sovereign Grand Commander for the remainder of his life (a total of thirty-two years), devoting a large amount of his time to developing the rituals of the order. Notably, he published a book called Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in 1871, of which there were many subsequent editions. For decades this volume was presented to each initiated Freemason upon completion of the first three degrees. Pike has become a key figure for conspiracy theorists. Some people claim that stories about Pike, including his “forecast” of three world wars, are bogus and derive from the Taxil hoax.

Although I abhor mob violence and the initiation of force in such destructive actions, as a Roman Catholic I well knew the Church first prohibited Catholics from membership in Masonic organizations and other secret societies in 1738. Since then, at least eleven popes have made pronouncements about the incompatibility of Catholic doctrines and Freemasonry. So I believed Pike’s image was getting his deserts, whether just or unjust was a matter of interpretative degree, perhaps 33 degrees.

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