Albert Pike Quotes

“A free people, forgetting that it has a soul to be cared for, devotes all its energies to its material advancement. If it makes war, it is to subserve its commercial interests.

The citizens copy after the State, and regard wealth, pomp, and luxury as the great goods of life. Such a nation creates wealth rapidly, and distributes it badly.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Because wisdom, strength and beauty are the perfection of everything, and nothing can last without them.

For, the York Rite says, there must be Wisdom to conceive, Strength to endure, and Beauty to adorn all great and important undertakings.”

“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.”

“Constitutions and Laws, without Genius and Intellect to govern, will not prevent decay. In that case they have the dry-rot and the life dies out of them by degrees.”

“Force attracts force, life attracts life, health attracts health. It is a law of nature. If two children live together, and still more sleep together, and one is feeble and the other strong, the strong will absorb the feeble, and the later will perish.

In schools, some pupil absorbs the intellect of the others, and in every circle of men some one individual is soon found, who possesses himself the wills of the others. Enthrallments by currents is very common; and one is carried away by the crowd, in morals as in physics.

The human will has an almost absolute power in determining one's acts; and every external demonstration of a will has an influence on external things.”

“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.”

“If his country should be robbed of her liberties, he should still not despair. The protest of the Right against the Fact persists forever.”

“If you would understand the true secrets of Alchemy, you must study the works of the Masters with patience and assiduity. Every word is often an enigma; and to him who reads in haste, the whole will seem absurd.

Even when they seem to teach that the Great Work is the purification of the Soul, and so deal only with morals, they most conceal their meaning, and deceive all but the Initiates.”

“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.”

“It was the remembrance of this scientific and religious Absolute, of this doctrine that is summed up in a word, of this Word, in fine, alternately lost and found again, that was transmitted to the Elect of all the Ancient Initiations: it was this same remembrance, preserved, or perhaps profaned in the celebrated Rose-Croix, of the Illuminati, and of the Hermetic Freemasons, the reason of their strange rites, of their signs more or less conventional, and, above all, of their mutual devotedness and of their power.”

“Less glory is more liberty. When the drum is silent, reason sometimes speaks.”

“Man's real genius and knowledge remains preserved in books.”

“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.”

“Masonry, like all the Religions, all the Mysteries, Hermeticism and Alchemy, conceals its secrets from all except the Adepts and Sages, or the Elect, and uses false explanations and misinterpretations of its symbols to mislead those who deserve only to be misled; to conceal the Truth, which it calls Light from them and to draw them away from it.”

“She must, above all things, be just, not truckling to the strong and warring on or plundering the weak; she must act on the square with all nations, and the feeblest tribes; always keeping her faith, honest in her legislation, upright in all her dealings. Whenever such a Republic exists, it will be immortal: for rashness, injustice, intemperance and luxury in prosperity, and despair and disorder in adversity, are the causes of the decay and dilapidation of nations.”

“Synesius traces the plan of a treatise on dreams, which was subsequently to be commented on by Cardan, and composes hymns which might serve for liturgy of the Church of Swedenborg, if a church of illuminati could have a liturgy.”

“That which we do for ourselves dies with us. That which we do for others lives forever.”

“The absolute in reason and will is the greatest power which is given to men to attain; and it is by means of this power that what the multitude admires under the name of miracles, are effected.”

“The Apocalypse is, to those who receive the nineteenth Degree, the Apotheosis of that Sublime Faith which aspires to God alone, and despises all the pomps and works of Lucifer.

Lucifer, the Light-bearer! Strange and mysterious name to give to the Spirit of Darkness! Lucifer, Son of the Morning! Is it he who bears the Light, and with its splendors intolerable blinds feeble, sensual, or selfish Souls?

Doubt it not! For traditions are full of Divine Revelations and Inspirations: and Inspirations is not of one Age or of one Creed.”

“The Blue Degrees are but the outer court or portico of the Temple. Part of the symbols are displayed there to the Initiate, but he is intentionally misled by false interpretations. It is not intended that he shall understand them; but it is intended that he shall imagine he understands them.

Their true explication is reserved for Adepts, the Princes of Masonry. The whole body of the Royal and Sacerdotal Art was hidden so carefully, centuries since, in the High Degrees, as that it is even yet impossible to solve many of the enigmas they contain.

It is well enough for the mass of those called Masons, to imagine that all is contained in the Blue Degrees; and whose attempts to undeceive them will labor in vain, and without any true reward violate his obligations as an Adept. Masonry is the veritable Sphinx, buried to the head in the sands heaped round it by ages.”

“The divine in human nature disappears and interest, greed and selfishness takes it place. When a Republic begins to plunder its neighbors the words of doom are already written upon its walls.”

“The freest people, like the freest man, is always in danger of re-lapsing into servitude. Wars are almost always fatal to Republics. They create tyrants, and consolidate their power. They spring, for the most part, from evil counsels.

When the small and the base are intrusted with power, legislation and administration become but two parallel series of errors and blunders, ending in war, calamity, and the necessity for a tyrant. When the nation feels its feet sliding backward, as if it walked on the ice, the time has come for a supreme effort.

The magnificent tyrants of the past are but the types of those of the future. Men and nations will always sell themselves into slavery, to gratify their passions and obtain revenge. The tyrant's plea, necessity, is always available; and the tyrant once in power, the necessity of providing for his safety makes him savage.

Religion is a power, and he must control that. Independent, its sanctuaries might rebel. Then it becomes unlawful for the people to worship God in their own way, and the old spiritual despotisms revive.”

“The Gnostics caused the Gnosis to be proscribed by the Christians, and the official Sanctuary was closed against high initiation. Thus the Hierarchy of Knowledge was compromitted by the violences of usurping ignorance, and the disorders of the Sanctuary are reproduced in the State.

For always, willingly or unwillingly, the King is sustained by the Priest, and it is from the eternal Sanctuary of the Divine instruction that the Powers of the Earth, to insure themselves durability, must receive their consecration and their force.”

“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 law of our being is Love of Life, and its interests and adornments; love of the world in which our lot is cast, engrossment with the interests and affections of earth.

Not a low or sensual love; not love of wealth, of fame, of ease, of power, of splendor. Not low worldliness; but the love of Earth as the garden on which the Creator has lavished such miracles of beauty; as the habitation of humanity, the arena of its conflicts, the scene of its illimitable progress, the dwelling-place of the wise, the good, the active, the loving, and the dear; the place of opportunity for the development by means of sin and suffering and sorrow, of the noblest passions, the loftiest virtues, and the tenderest sympathies.”

“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.”

“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 Teachers, even of Christianity, are in general, the most ignorant of the true meaning of that which they teach. There is no book of which so little is known as the Bible. To most who read it, it is as incomprehensible as the Sohar.”