"You must conceal all the crimes of your brother Masons... and should you be summoned as a
witness against a brother Mason be always sure to shield him... It may be perjury to do this,
it is true, but you're keeping your obligations."
- Ronayne, "Handbook of Masonry," p. 183
* * *
"The Blue Degrees are but the 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 that he understands
them... their true explication is reserved for the Adepts, the Princes of Masonry."
- Albert Pike, "Morals and Dogma," 30th Degree, p. 819
* * *
"Secrecy is indispensable in a Mason of whatever degree."
- Albert Pike, "Morals and Dogma," 4th Degree, p. 109
* * *
"The secrecy of this institution is another and most important landmark... If divested of its
secret character, it would lose its identity, and would cease to be Freemasonry... death of
the Order would follow its legalized exposure. Freemasonry, as a secret association, has lived
unchanged for centuries; as an open society it would not last for as many years."
- Albert Mackey, "Textbook of Masonic Jurisprudence," 23rd Landmark, "Secrecy"
* * *
"It is one of the most beautiful, but at the same time one of the most abstruse doctrines of
the science of Masonic symbolism that the Mason is ever in search of truth, but is never to
find it."
- Albert Mackey, "Manual of the Lodge," p. 93; Daniel Sickles, "Ahiman Rezon or Freemason's Guide," p. 169
* * *
"It (the Legend of Hiram Abiff) is thoroughly Egyptian, and is closely allied to the Supreme
Rite of the Isianic Mysteries."
- Albert Mackey, "Lexicon of Freemasonry," p. 195
* * *
"Masonry makes no profession of Christianity... but looks forward to the time when the
labor of our ancient brethren shall be symbolized by the erection of a spiritual temple...
in which there shall be but one altar and one worship; one common altar of Masonry on which
the Veda, Shastra, Sade, Zend-Avesta, Koran, and Holy Bible shall lie... and at whose shrine
the Hindoo, the Persian, the Assyrian, the Chaldean, the Egyptian, the Chinese, the Mohammedan,
the Jew and the Christian may kneel..."
- "The Kentucky Monitor," Fellowcraft Degree, p. 95
* * *
"All truly dogmatic religions have issued from the Kabalah and return to it; everything
scientific and grand in the religious dreams of the Illuminati, Jacob Boeheme, Swedenborg,
Saint Martin, and others is borrowed from the Kabalah; all Masonic associations owe to it
their secrets and their symbols."
- Albert Pike, "Morals and Dogma," 28th Degree, p. 744
* * *
"Lucifer, the Light Bearer! Strange and mysterious name to give to the Spirit of Darkness!
Lucifer, the Son of the Morning! It is he who bears the Light, and with all its splendors
intolerable blinds feeble, sensual, or selfish Souls? Doubt it not!"
- Albert Pike, "Morals and Dogma," 19th Degree, p. 324
* * *
"It has been found that every act in the drama of the life of Jesus, and every quality
assigned to Christ, is to be found in the life of Krishna."
- J.D. Buck, "Mystic Masonry" P. 119, 138
* * *
"...the literal meaning (of the bible) is for the vulgar only."
- Albert Pike, "Digest of Morals and Dogma," p. 166
* * *
"To all this (error of stupidity) the absurd reading of the established Church, taking literally
the figurative, allegorical, and mythical language of a collection of Oriental books of different
ages, directly and inevitably led."
- Albert Pike, "Morals and Dogma," 30th Degree, p. 818
* * *
The nations are not bodies-politic alone, but also souls-politic; and woe to that people which, seeking the material only, forgets that it has a soul.
Then we have a race, petrified in dogma, which presupposes the absence of a soul and the presence only of memory and instinct, or demoralized by lucre.
Such a nature can never lead civilization. Genuflexion before the idol or the dollar atrophies the muscle which walks and the will which moves. Hieratic or mecantile
absorbtion diminishes the radiance of a people, lowers its horizon by lowering its level, and deprives it of that understanding of the universal aim, at the same time
human and divine, which makes the missionary nations. A free people, forgetting that it has a sould 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. Thence the two extremes, of monstrous opulence and monstrous misery; all the enjoyment to a few, all the
privations to the rest, that is to say, to the people; Privilede, Exception, Monopoly, Feudality, springing up from Labor itself: a false and dangerous situation, which,
making Labor a blinded and chained Cyclops, in the mine, at the forge, in the workshop, at the loom, in the field, over poisonous fumes, in miasmatic cells, in
unventilated factories, founds public power upon private misery, and plants greatness of the State in the suffering of the individual. It is a greatness ill constituted,
in which all the material elements are combined, and into which no moral element enters. If a people, like a star, has the right of eclipse, the light ought to return.
The eclipse should not degenerate into night.
- Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma, (1871) pg 12
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