‘To remove the statue forthwith’

     
It seems the Scottish Rite has joined the growing consensus advocating the removal from public space in Washington of the Albert Pike statue at Judiciary Square, if the reporting of the Washington Post is to be believed—not something I recommend typically.

Nevertheless, a story published Monday quotes Ronald Seale writing in agreement on removing the 116-year-old giant bronze and marble rendering of his historic predecessor. The Post also claims Seale was party to an aborted scheme to “whisk away the statue at midnight,” meaning he almost linked himself to the ilk that recently damaged statues of Christopher Columbus, Theodore Roosevelt, and other figures historically essential to American society in the name of constant revolution. Fortunately, reason prevailed after it was realized how federal authority is required to move the monument lawfully.

The story never quotes Seale directly, but cites a letter he allegedly sent in August to a DC councilman saying the Scottish Rite Southern Jurisdiction “will support an action by the District of Columbia to remove the statue forthwith so that it should not serve as a source of contention or strife for the residents of our community.”

Sounds good to me, as I said in the previous Magpie post on this subject, if the statue can be relocated to a Masonic property where, presumably, private property still can be kept safe from mobocracy. However, “contention or strife” are among the principal nutrients for a certain segment of American society that is insatiable for perpetual insurrection, replete with violence against people and property, so they will be back.

It is asked often, including in this Post story, why a Confederate Army general is memorialized in the capital city of the United States. Of course it is a fact that this statue of Pike celebrates Albert Pike the Freemason, and has nothing to do with his brief and undistinguished tenure as a CSA military officer, but perhaps Abraham Lincoln broaches this subject in his second inaugural address, delivered only weeks before he was murdered:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
     

‘Throwback Thursday: A new Morals and Dogma’

     
When Brent Morris assigns you a book to review, you review the book. This Throwback Thursday edition of The Magpie Mason reaches back five years, when The Scottish Rite Journal published my take on the then newly revised Morals and Dogma produced by Arturo de Hoyos. This was published in the September-October 2012 issue, and my submission was trimmed by about 400 words in my recollection.


Morals And Dogma

In his Prestonian Lecture of 1997, Bro. R. A. Gilbert mentions how since the 1720s more than 10,000 books, journals, articles, periodicals, papers, pamphlets, and other output devoted to Freemasonry have been published, and although this reviewer has made barely a scratch into that tonnage of material, he cannot name another book that has been so passionately embraced and widely neglected; as studied and scrutinized, yet frequently misunderstood; and hailed as both epochal accomplishment and anti-Masonic favorite than Morals and Dogma of the Ancient & Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry by Albert Pike. Making it even more remarkable is that it was published in 1871 and was intended for the education of a small minority of Freemasons, those of the A&ASR, Southern Jurisdiction.

There simply are no other books on Freemasonry from 140 years ago—even Pike’s other works—that are as widely known today, let alone deserving of a brand new edition, revised and annotated by Ill. Arturo de Hoyos, 33°, GC, one of the most knowledgeable and prolific scholars in Freemasonry in the United States. The work assigned to this laborer is to rate de Hoyos’s success in conveying Pike’s largest legacy to “the other” Scottish Rite Masons in America—those of us within the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction.

First, it is necessary to explain what Morals and Dogma is and is not. Written in the late 1860s, it perhaps is the inevitable product of the fraternity that made brothers out of men from myriad diverse backgrounds in that grim time shaped by industrialization and urbanization, and by Civil War and Reconstruction. Simultaneously the country also underwent a period of religious revolution marked by the birth of Reform Judaism, Christian Science, Pentecostalism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Salvation Army, and other movements. Elsewhere in the world, Masonry had begun admitting men of the major Eastern religious faiths, as empires emanating from the British Isles and Europe created lodges across Asia, Africa, and the Holy Land.

Fittingly, if not exactly intentionally, Pike responded, authoring a work of comparative religion in Masonry’s name, one that not only traverses the world’s borders and cultural barriers, but also reaches back through time to codify for the Scottish Rite Freemason mankind’s numerous efforts to find communion with deity. Despite how its title sounds to the modern ear, the book never was the sectarian bible authored for a supposed Masonic religion by its purported father, as is alleged even today by certain Christian fundamentalist anti-Masons.

As de Hoyos reveals in his preface to the text, Grand Commander Ronald A. Seale, 33°, had charged him with the huge job of revising this book, which went out of print in 1969. “We either need to republish Morals and Dogma or stop talking about Albert Pike,” Seale told de Hoyos. The result: A new Morals and Dogma consisting of Pike’s original writings in their entirety, augmented with de Hoyos’s notes and commentary.

Morals and Dogma was tailored for the comprehension of Freemasons who had received the new A&ASR degrees that had been penned by Pike. The previous rituals of the Rite were deficient due to problems varying from absent passages of text to confounding messages and more. Pike converted a pastiche of inadequately defined European ceremonies into a single cohesive Masonic rite consisting of degrees in a progressive structure for gradual enlightenment. Morals and Dogma contains the lectures for those degrees. The Southern Jurisdiction works variations of the Pike degrees to this day, while its sister jurisdiction in the northeast of the United States works hard not to modernize Pike rituals, but to replace them with melodramas that are not rituals of any kind, and that are bereft of any form of symbolism. It is here where the new Morals and Dogma can connect Masons to the transformational teachings of traditional Scottish Rite Masonry, “the College of Freemasonry.”

In the NMJ, 30°, Knight Kadosh, was eliminated in 2004, resulting in 31°, Grand Inspector Inquisitor Commander, becoming the new 30°, and 32°, Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret, being divided into two degrees, 31° and 32°. To conserve that which had been lost, the reader of Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma, Annotated Edition may look inside this Templar degree to see its virtues, albeit anachronistic, laid bare and contextualized by 60 footnotes. Other rituals eliminated by the NMJ in recent years include: 4°, Secret Master; 12°, Master Architect; 19°, Grand Pontiff; 28°, Knight of the Sun; and more. (It also is true that the brethren of the NMJ are free to exemplify these now defunct rituals, but rituals rendered defunct tend not to get the attention paid to official degrees, where the labor and talent is expected to go first.) These degrees’ lectures, too, are available in the pages of this weighty text, communicating their meanings in textured prose made clearer by de Hoyos’s notes and commentaries.

There is no substitute for receiving meaningful degrees laden with lessons and symbols as conferred by knowing ritualists, but where that is unavailable, this resource text can fill in the blanks and keep concerned Masons in touch with their heritage and history. And this need not be confined to the United States, as brethren in the Ancient and Accepted Rite of England and Wales, where rituals are hardly worked at all and degrees are conferred largely in name only, can profit from this book as well.

Absent from the new book is the “Digest of Morals and Dogma,” the 218-page concordance compiled by Ill. Trevanion W. Hugo, 33°, that was added in 1909. In its stead are five appendices: “Textual Corrections” rectifies and standardizes the various errors in spelling and usage in the original (e.g. Cabala, Kabala, and Kabalah correctly become Kabbalah.) “A Glossary to Morals and Dogma” by Ill. Rex R. Hutchens, 33°, GC, is 82 pages of A-to-Z definitions of mostly difficult terms. The bibliography lists the several hundred published source materials that made de Hoyos’s work possible. “The Point Within a Circle: More Than Just an Allusion?” by Bro. William “Steve” Burkle, 32°, shows how that important symbol from the Entered Apprentice Degree also offers an apt method for inscribing a right angle within a circle. That leads nicely into Appendix 5: “The Hidden Secrets of a Master Mason: A Speculation on Unrecognized Operative Secrets in Modern Masonic Ritual” by Ill. S. Brent Morris, 33°, GC—and editor of this periodical—that brings Morals and Dogma, Annotated Edition full circle by showing how operative builders lay out foundations using the Pythagorean Theorem, the very same geometrical device Pike cites to conclude his 32°, Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret, chapter, explaining how the Triangle of Perfection symbolizes the ideal equilibrium by bringing into harmony the spiritual and the material.

This text is a gift to all thinking Masons, but especially to those in the NMJ where there are no educational publications or programs to reflect the Light of Scottish Rite Masonry, which probably is what leads to the elimination of our traditional rituals. Until this can be rectified, de Hoyos’s amazing feat is a handy tool to assist us in our daily labors at self-improvement.


The writer is a Past Most Wise Master of Northern New Jersey Chapter of Rose Croix and is the Treasurer of the four Scottish Rite bodies of Northern New Jersey. He is in the process of establishing Architects Lodge of Perfection, the first lodge of philosophical research in the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction. His blog, The Magpie Mason, is very widely read and seemingly enjoyed by Masons around the globe.
     

‘At the House of the Temple’

The altar in Supreme Council’s Temple Room room displays multiple VSLs. Made of black and gold marble, engraved into the front are the Hebrew letters that read: “God said, ‘Let there be Light’ and there was Light.”

Before another month passes, I had better resume Magpie coverage of Masonic Week 2009, but first a stop at the House of the Temple in Washington, DC. During a tour nearly two hours long, thanks to the indulgence of our guide, the Magpie Mason shot more than 100 photos. Herewith I share some of my favorites:

Bro. Jim, docent Kendall, and Grand Commander Ron.

Architect John Russell Pope’s columns.

I swear there was a dog outside
that was almost as big as this sphinx. Ask Jim!

You know they had to work 33 into the street address.

On the bicentennial of President Lincoln’s birthday, Bro. Jim Dillman of Logan Lodge in Indianapolis – a Board member of The Masonic Society, by the way – and I visited the headquarters of the Ancient & Accepted Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction. This is the home of the “Mother Supreme Council,” the governing body of Scottish Rite that was established in Charleston, South Carolina on May 31, 1801.

In preparation for the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, the House of the Temple’s Library Reading Room displayed numerous images and books highlighting the 16th president. This statue caught my eye because it is a miniature of a famous statue very near Magpie headquarters. Sculpted by Bro. Gutzon Borglum, of Mt. Rushmore fame, it stands – or maybe sits – in Newark behind the old Essex County Courthouse.

The marvelous sites within this landmark structure truly are too numerous to list. Every Freemason, whether a Scottish Rite Mason or not, who visits DC should make some time to tour the House of the Temple. The architecture, statuary, stained glass, countless museum exhibits and stunning library demand hours of your attention. Hang around long enough and you’ll bump into Sovereign Grand Commander Ronald Seale or Brent Morris, the managing editor of the Scottish Rite Journal.

The East of the smaller (not subterranean) Supreme Council meeting room.

In the Temple Room.

There are many likenesses of Albert Pike in the House of the Temple. Left: a bust overlooks the Grand Staircase. Right: a Classical interpretation.

Above the staircase bust is the inscription: “What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us: What we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.”

These are found in the Albert Pike Museum on the Ground Floor.

I'm sorry to say this photo fails to capture the effect of this beam of light entering the Grand Staircase. It was sublime.

Some of Pike’s A&ASR regalia.

A frequent chess player and occasional pipe smoker myself, I couldn’t help but notice these personal items owned by Albert Pike.

Aprons on exhibit.
Above: Master Mason.
Below: Rose Croix.

The Egyptian style statues at the foot of the Grand Staircase are representative of guards to a portal or entrance. Each is carved from a solid piece of marble quarried on the shores of Lake Champlain in New York state. Each statue carries a hieroglyphic inscription. Freely translated by the Metropolitan Museum of New York, they read: “Established to the Glory of God” and “Dedicated to the teaching of wisdom to those men working to make a strong nation.”

(Caption courtesy of House of the Temple.)

Above: A wall in the Library Reading Room.
Below: Part of Pike’s personal library collection.

This is about 25 percent of the Robert Burns collection.

Here is a collection of fountain pens once owned by Bro. Maurice Thatcher. (Yes, I sent a JPG to Cliff.) This gavel is made of pine once part of the White House, discarded during the reconstruction of the Executive Mansion after it was burned by the British during the War of 1812.

Left: stained glass. Right: Hermes appears frequently in fixtures about the building.

Under glass, a copy of Anderson’s Constitutions.

Back when America had folk music, Bro. Burl Ives was a popular voice. Ives was a friend of Manly P. Hall and was well known about the apartments of Scottish Rite Masonry in California.

The Burl Ives Collection is surprisingly large!