From sasrmd@unx.sas.comMon Mar 25 18:52:47 1996
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 1996 18:04:48 -0500 (EST)
From: Bob Dixon 
To: freemasonry list 
Subject: Intro to Albert Pike (long)

  In addition to all the other stuff I do, I'm also a member of a local
Toastmaster's club, which teaches public speaking skills.

  Since I had to do a researched speech, I decided to do one on Albert
Pike.  Partially because I'm interested in the subject, and partially
because I wanted to introduce him to a new audience.

  I don't claim this is great scholarship.  It's distilled from two or
three issues of the "Scottish Rite Journal", a book review in "The
Philalethes", some stuff from "A Bridge to Light", and last but not
least, a quote or two from a document entitled "The Meaning of Masonry"
I ftp'd from Roger Ingersoll awhile back.  I'm not a Scottish Rite
mason, BTW, but the process of writing this speech helped convince me to
become one, once I can scrape together the money and the time.

  There are doubtless formatting errors, because it started out on a
Mac, was converted to a PC, and uploaded to a Unix system.

  All apologies aside, I kinda like it, and somebody from the audience
asked me for more information about freemasonry, so it must not be too
bad.


  Hopefully this will whet somebody else's appetite for Albert Pike and
the Scottish Rite.


=======================================================================

        ALBERT PIKE: SCOTTISH RITE FREEMASON

  Mr. Toastmaster, fellow toastmasters, and guests. History is full of
interesting people with interesting stories, and this afternoon Id like
to introduce you to one of them. Albert Pike was a man of many talents.
He was a lawyer, a Confederate general, a philosopher, a mystic, and a
very prolific writer. The thing for which he is most remembered, though,
is for being a Scottish Rite freemason. Even though he died over a
hundred years ago, Scottish Rite freemasonry today is still for the most
part what Albert Pike made it. Let's take a few minutes today to get to
know Albert Pike.

  First, a short introduction to the Scottish Rite. 

  Freemasonry is best described as a system of morality, veiled in
allegory, and illustrated by symbols. It's a fraternal organization with
over 2.5 million members in the United States and over 60,000 members in
North Carolina.  Its purpose is to allow men of all religious
persuasions to meet together in an atmosphere of friendship, in order to
improve themselves and their communities.

  No one really knows how old it is, because it began as a secret
organization, but there are written records of masonic lodges going back
to at least the 1600s. Scottish Rite freemasonry is a branch founded in
France sometime in the 1750s. Where craft masonry stresses moral
teachings through symbolism, Scottish Rite masonry highlights the
importance of not only moral teachings but the pursuit of knowledge and
the practice of tolerance for othersU viewpoints. There are around
half a million members of the Scottish Rite in the United States.

  It's difficult to describe a man like Albert Pike from one viewpoint,
so I won't. What I'd like to do is to build a historical framework, and
then I'll relate a few stories that paint a fuller picture.

  Albert Pike was born in Boston Massachussetts in 1809. He went to
public schools there and finished one term at Harvard before leaving
when he ran out of money. He was a teacher until leaving Boston in 1831.
He worked his way west to Missouri, and finally ended up in Arkansas.

  While teaching school in Fort Smith, Arkansas, he wrote political
articles for a newspaper known as the Arkansas Advocate, and was hired
as the junior editor in 1833. His writings became well known and
resulted in his being appointed to the staff of the Senate of the
Arkansas Territorial Legislature. He was certified to practice law in
1834 and spent much of his time riding the judicial circuit, following
the judges as they tried cases in the various counties. He moved his law
practice to New Orleans in 1853, and he moved to Washington, D. C. in
1859.

  Though a New Englander by birth, he was a strong supporter of states'
rights, and he served as a brigadier General in the Confederacy in 1862,
resigning his commission at the end of the year. He resumed his law
practice, and in 1864 he was appointed to a seat on the Arkansas Supreme
Court. He practiced law from the end of the Civil War until 1879, when
he decided to devote himself entirely to freemasonry and to writing. He
died in 1891 at the age of 81.

  Such is the dry stuff of history. 

  Now that you know his history, I'd like to describe him a little
better.

  Albert Pike had a wide range of interests and was largely
self-educated. He prepared himself for admission to Harvard so well that
he passed the final examinations for the first two years before being
admitted! He left Harvard because they required him to pay the tuition
for the two years he tested out of, and he refused.

  Although he was a wealthy man, he was also a social reformer. He felt
we all have a responsibility to lift up the poor and downtrodden. He
felt that employers had a responsibility to fairly treat their
employees, and that employees owed their employers an honest days' work.
Though he was a slaveowner and fought for the Confederacy, Pike saw
slavery as a disease originating from greed and cruelty. He believed
that women should be recognized as the equals of men, an enlightened
viewpoint for his time.

  He felt that Native Americans were badly mistreated.  He represented
them in their dealings with the United States Government and led a force
of them in the Civil War. His law practice included a large amount of
Native American claim work. During the Civil War he was Commissioner of
Indian Affairs for the Confederacy and negotiated treaties with the
Native American tribes. He received no pay for this, and paid for his
own expenses as well as those of his staff.

  He wrote romantic poetry, prose, satire, and about everything. He
wrote about history, patriotism, farm animals, farm equipment, lawyers,
Congress, and Arkansas. He wrote about nature and about war. He wrote
about history, philosophy, Oriental religions, and classical themes. He
wrote about his Western travels and about his love for tobacco. He wrote
about his feelings on tolerance, bigotry, and education. Most of all he
wrote and wrote and wrote. One of his writings was 2162 pages, another
3340 pages, and another 6939 pages. The book for which he is best known
is a book on Scottish Rite freemasonry that is 861 pages long. One
bibliography of his writings extends to over 70 pages.

  He was an outdoorsman as well as a philosopher, as comfortable living
off the land as dining in the finest restaurants in Washington, D.
C..

  Though he was a devout Christian, an Episcopalian, he was fascinated
by the Oriental religions and by Hebrew mysticism.

  He mastered Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Chaldean,
German, and Sanskrit, together with many Native American dialects.

  He fought a duel once, the last duel in Arkansas. Both men loaded and
fired twice, missing both times, so they considered that honor and duty
had been satisfied.

  He attended his own wake. In 1858 a local Washington, D. C. paper
reported that he had been killed on an expedition to the West. When he
returned to the the capital he discovered his friends were putting on a
wake for him, so he joined the party!

  He once made a trip to Taos, New Mexico, through blizzards and desert,
and sixty years later he was able to describe his route accurately
enough that others were able to follow his trail and identify the
landmarks he used.

  In order to practice law in Louisiana he had to be admitted to the
bar, which required an oral examination by the presiding judge. Law in
Louisiana is based on Roman law and the Napoleonic Code, where law in
the rest of the United States is based on English common law. When asked
what works he had read on Roman law, Pike replied that he had read the
Pandects, fifty digests of Roman civil law, and translated a French
version of the first one into English. He had also read, in French, well
over thirty volumes by respected French legal scholars. The judge was
satisfied.

  This afternoon I've given you a number of facts about Albert Pike, and
I've tried to weave the individual threads into a tapestry that more
fully describes his life. More than anything, though, Albert Pike was a
writer quite capable of expressing himself, so we should let him. I've
selected a few passages from his writings that show his thoughts on a
variety of areas. His prose reflects the age in which he lived. His
sentences are a little long and his imagery intense, which makes him a
little difficult to follow sometimes, but it's worth the effort.

Quotes:

The nature of war:

  Who can sum up the horrors and woes accumulated in a single war?
Masonry is not dazzled with all its pomp and circumstance, all its
glitter and glory. War comes with its bloody hand into our very
dwellings. It takes from ten thousand homes those who lived there in
peace and comfort, held by the tender ties of family and kindred. It
drags them away, to die untended, of fever or exposure, in infectious
climes; or to be hacked, torn, and mangled in the fierce fight; to fall
on the gory field, to rise no more, to be borne away, in awful agony, to
noisome and horrid hospitals. The groans of the battle held are echoed
in sighs of bereavement from thousands of desolated hearths. There is a
skeleton in every house, a vacant chair at every table....Treasures are
expended, that would suffice to build ten thousand churches, hospitals,
and universities, or rib and tie together a continent with rails of
iron. If that treasure were sunk in the sea, it would be calamity
enough; but it is put to worse use; for it is expended in cutting into
the veins and arteries of human life, until the earth is deluged with a
sea of blood.

On the relationship between employer and employee:

  Masonry inculcates upon the master, care and kindness for the slave
whom God has placed in his power and under his protection. It teaches to
the employers of other men, in mines, manufactories and workshops,
consideration and humanity for those who depend upon their labour for
their bread, and to whom want of employment is starvation, and overwork
is fever, consumption and death. While it teaches the employed to be
honest, punctual and faithful, as well as respectful, and obedient to
all proper orders, it also teaches the employers that every man or woman
that desires to work, has a right to have work to do- and that these,
and those who from sickness or feebleness, old age or infancy, are not
able to work, have a right to be fed, clothed, and sheltered from the
inclement elements- that he commits an awful sin against Masonry and in
the sight of God, if he closes his workshop or factory, or ceases to
work his mine, when they do not yield him what he considers sufficient
profit, and so dismisses his workmen and workwomen to starve; or when he
reduces their wages to so low a standard that they and their families
cannot therewith be fed and clad and comfortably housed; or by over-work
must give him their blood and life in exchange for the pittance of their
wages; and that his duty as a Mason and a Brother peremptorily requires
him to continue to employ those who else will be pinched with hunger and
cold, or must resort to theft and vice and to pay them fair wages,
though it may reduce or annul his profits, or even eat into his capital;
for God has but LOANED him his wealth, and made him His almoner and
agent to invest it.

On the importance of education:

  And it should never be forgotten, that in the poorest unregarded child
that seems abandoned to ignorance and vice, may slumber virtue,
intellect and genius and that in rescuing from the mire and giving him
the means of education and development, the Lodge may confer on the
world as great a benefit as was given it by John Faust, the boy of
Mentz, who revealed to it the art of Printing.

On the eternal nature of our works:

  The true Mason labours for the benefit of those that are to come after
him, and for the advancement and improvement of his race. That is a poor
ambition which contents itself within the limits of a single life. All
men who deserve to live at all, desire to survive their own funerals,
and to live afterwards in the good that they have done mankind, rather
than in the writing which lasts even the longest upon the sands of human
memories. 

  Most men desire to leave some work behind them, that may outlive their
day and brief generation. That is an instinctive impulse, given by God,
and often found in the rudest human heart; the surest proof of the
soul's immortality, and of the radical difference between man and the
wisest brutes. To plant the trees that after we are dead shall shelter
our children is as natural as to love the shade of those our fathers
planted.

  In his influences that survive him, man becomes immortal, before the
general resurrection.

The evil of idleness:

  Idleness is the burial of a living man. For an idle person is so
useless to any purposes of God and man, that he is like one who is dead,
unconcerned in the changes and necessities of the world; and he only
lives to spend his time, and eat the fruits of the earth. Like a vermin
or a wolf, when his time comes, he dies and perishes, and in the
meantime is nought.

  We are not born for ourselves alone; and our country claims her share,
and our friends their share of us. As all that the earth produces is
created for the use of man, so men are created for the sake of men, that
they may mutually do good to one another. ...sometimes by receiving,
sometimes by giving, and sometimes to cement human society by arts, by
industry, and by our resources.

Consequences of wrongdoing:

  [Masonry] teaches this great and momentous truth: that wrong and
injustice once done cannot be undone; but are eternal in their
consequences; once committed, are numbered with the irrevocable Past;
that the wrong that is done contains its own retributive penalty as
surely and as naturally as the acorn contains the oak.

  In conclusion, Albert Pike was a very interesting and complicated man,
and very much the product of his times. He was a slaveowner who hated
slavery, an intellectual who loved the outdoors, and a devout Christian
who was fascinated by other religions. Most of all he was a freemason
who was devoted to building up Scottish Rite Freemasonry. I hope I've
helped you to learn a little more about him

===============================================================


--
Bob Dixon, MPS
Secretary, Holly Springs #115
Holly Springs NC USA
sasrmd@unx.sas.com