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Albert Pike
submitted by Bro Percy Aga

ALBERT Pike was born at Boston, Massachusetts, December 29, 1809. He was elected Grand Commander of the Supreme Council of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction, U.S. A., in 1859, when the great administrative work of his life began. He died April 2, 1891.

If ever a man got his wish, Albert Pike got his; for it was his one frequently expressed desire that his only monument should be in the hearts and memories of his brethren. As long as men talk and write of the history of Masonry on this continent they will talk and write of Albert Pike - the man who raised the Scottish Rite from a position of comparative obscurity to its present world-wide importance as a High-Grade system of Masonry.

And yet, in spite of all this, in spite of the undoubted results he achieved, Albert Pike's record as a Masonic writer, scholar and organizer has not quite successfully withstood the test of criticism in the years since his death. But, opinions are divided. Not all his critics see the faults in what he wrote and did.

It may be interesting, therefore, if we give three pen pictures of the man - two by contemporaries and one by a writer of today who never met him.

A Washington correspondent of the London, England, "Graphic," writing in 1875, thus described him:
"Albert Pike is a man history has stepped over. There is no man in the world of so many sides to his character, and so plain withal. He was born at Newburyport, Massachusetts, the son of a shoemaker. A wilful, poetical spirit took him to Mexico, and he returned in a pack train as a mule driver, from Chihuahua to Fort Smith. Settling down in a printing office at Little Rock, he became an editor, lawyer, and chief of the Whig party, which he led with unflinching consistency through perpetual minority down to the civil war, and doing the government business of the Cherokees. He became rich and celebrated.

"Quarrelling with Jefferson Davis soon after the rebellion began, he withdrew from the contest, and at the close was poor. He removed to Washington City about, the year 1867, and opened a law office with Robert Johnson, ex-Senator, the nephew of Vice-President Johnson. His home is at Alexandria, that formerly busy seaport, where a large house with garden, stable, and every comfortable appurtenance of gas, water and police may be had for about $50 a month, whereas the tyranny of fashion makes that same style of residence cost in Washington $200 a month. There, with an unusually vivacious daughter, Pike spends his time in. a large library, containing perhaps 5,000 volumes, elegantly rebound - the collections of a lifetime. His taste for books extends to their covering, and he has a passion for elegant printing in common and colored ink, all his own volumes on Masonry and Hindoo Philosophy being produced in this way by his amateur disciples. Fine swords, duelling pistols, which he has used on the field, a collection of elaborate pipes, which he smokes pretty much all the time, and strange things of "virtu" are parts of his surroundings. His poems have been collected and reissued within the past two years, and he has written a series of books on Masonry, which, queerly enough, have carried him from his apparently trivial theme back to Mediaeval, Jewish, and finally Sanscrit Masonry, as he believes. He is a Sanscrit scholar, and has composed some abstruse treatise, now undergoing publication in London, which is spoken of with expectancy by his friends."

Arthur McArthur, of Wisconsin, Judge of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, wrote of him:

"I had heard of Albert Pike as being an Indian Or Texan Ranger, or some thing.

"He came to our Court, and stood up there like Moses, or some of the able-bodied patriarchs. His long, gray hair, in ringlets, fell down his back and shoulders. He stood between six and seven feet high, and stout in proportion, weighing, I should think, three hundred to four hundred pounds. A look of the frontiersman, the poet and the lawyer seemed mixed in his face, with a type of something heathen and antique.

"He had a big bandanna handkerchief in his fist, clenched into a little ball. Ever and anon he drew this across his nose, and then seized it in his fist again.

"And then this queer old wonder rolled off law and learning, solemn and rapid, right on the line of his argument, as practical as could be, but his illustrations and quotations were rare and unusual. I was astonished."

Coming down to modern times, we quote from A. E. Waite, the well known English writer, as follows:

"As a critical scholar of Masonry, a historian and a writer on the ethical and philosophical side of the subject, Albert Pike is not to be taken as a guide. No man had a greater opportunity and no one a freer hand when he undertook to revise the Rituals of the Scottish Rite, and he scored only failure. It would be hard and unnecessary to say that he never improved the originals: the case against him is that he reconstructed and did not change. The Rite of Perfection could have been made a perfect Rite, and Ecossais Masonry might have issued from the alembic as a Masonry of the living God; but he lacked the spirit and the fire, the informing fire and the shaping spirit: the result is therefore that he has bequeathed us Pike's revision. There is also his "Morals and Dogma," an undigested compilation from a great number of sources, in which of his own will and intent he has made it impossible to distinguish between that which is his therein and that which has been "lifted" from the work of others by literal translation and so forth. It comes about in this manner - to cite but one instance that the brilliant, if shallow, "philosophia occulta" of Eliphas Levi is foisted on the unwary reader as if it were his own, and it occupies scores of pages, scattered there and here. Did he justify himself, I wonder, in his own opinion, when he said in his preface that he had gathered from many sources? It may be so, but the verdict of posterity is against him."

This last criticism may be amply justified by fact; still, whatever Albert Pike's shortcomings, one great achievement stands clearly to his credit - the present impregnable position of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite. While someone else might have undertaken the work he did, and done it better, it was, nevertheless, Albert Pike who did that work. And, after all, results count.

- The Square, Vancouver, March 19222