Why are you/they called Freemasons?, page 5

Gadfly's already had his green tea and ginseng and is starting back the other way, not having found anything, he is looking to create it...

Also, just in case someone hasn't read it yet, here is what Wr. Br. Pike has to say about the Knight of Kadosh. Oh, and in case you want to read it online, it is available at: www.freemasons-freemasonry.com...

From Morals and Dogma, pp 814 - 824, by Albert Pike
www.freemasons-freemasonry.com...
XXX KNIGHT KADOSH.

We often profit more by our enemies than by our friends. " We support
ourselves only on that which resists," and owe our success to opposition.
The best friends of Masonry in America were the Anti-Masons of 1826,
and at the same time they were its worst enemies. Men are but the
automata of Providence, and it uses the demagogue, the fanatic, and the
knave, a common trinity in Republics, as its tools and instruments to effect
that of which they do not dream, and which they imagine themselves
commissioned to prevent.
The Anti-Masons, traitors and perjurors some, and some mere political
knaves, purified Masonry by persecution, and so proved to be its
benefactors; for that which is persecuted, grows. To them its present
popularity is due, the cheapening of its Degrees, the invasion of its
Lodges, that are no longer Sanctuaries, by the multitude; its pomp and
pageantry and overdone display.
An hundred years ago it had become known that the were the
Templars under a veil, and therefore the Degree was proscribed, and,
ceasing to be worked, became a mere brief and formal ceremony, under
another name. Now, from the tomb in which after his murders he rotted,
Clement the Fifth howls against the successors of his victims, in the
Allocution of Pio Nono against the Free-Masons. The ghosts of the dead
Templars
haunt the Vatican and disturb the slumbers of the paralyzed Papacy,
which, dreading the dead, shrieks out its excommunications and impotent
anathemas against the living. It is a declaration of war, and was needed to
arouse apathy and inertness to action.
An enemy of the Templars shall tell us the secret of this Papal hostility
against an Order that has existed for centuries in despite of its anathemas,
and has its Sanctuaries and Asyla even in Rome.
It will be easy, as we read, to separate the false from the true, the
audacious conjectures from the simple facts.
"A power that ruled without antagonism and without concurrence, and
consequently without control, proved fatal to the Sacerdotal Royalties;
while the Republics, on the other hand, had perished by the conflict of
liberties and franchises, which, in the absence of all duty hierarchically
sanctioned and enforced, had soon become mere tyrannies, rivals one of
the other. To find a stable medium between these two abysses, the idea of
the Christian Hierophants was to create a society devoted to abnegation
by solemn vows, protected by severe regulations; which should be
recruited by initiation, and which, sole depositary of the great religious and
social secrets, should make Kings and Pontiffs, without exposing it to the
corruptions of Power. In that was the secret of that kingdom of Jesus
Christ, which, without being of this world, would govern all its grandeurs.
"This idea presided at the foundation of the great religious orders, so often
at war with the secular authorities, ecclesiastical or civil. Its realization was
also the dream of the dissident sects of Gnostics or Illuminati who
pretended to connect their faith with the primitive tradition of the
Christianity of Saint John. It at length became a menace for the Church
and Society, when a rich and dissolute Order, initiated in the mysterious
doctrines of the Kabalah, seemed disposed to turn against legitimate
authority the conservative principle of Hierarchy, and threatened the entire
world with an immense revolution.
The Templars, whose history is so imperfectly known, were those terrible
conspirators. In 1118, nine Knights Crusaders in the East, among whom
were Geoffroi de Saint-Omer and Hugues de Payens, consecrated
themselves to religion, and took an oath between the hands of the
Patriarch of Constantinople, a See always secretly or openly hostile to that
of Rome from the time of Photius. The avowed object of the Templars was
to protect
the Christians who came to visit the Holy Places: their secret object was
the re-building of the Temple of Solomon on the model prophesied by
Ezekiel.
"This re-building, formally predicted by the Judaizing Mystics of the earlier
ages, had become the secret dream of the Patriarchs of the Orient. The
Temple of Solomon, re-built and consecrated to the Catholic worship
would become, in effect, the Metropolis of the Universe; the East would
prevail over the West, and the Patriarchs of Constantinople would possess
themselves of the Papal power.
"The Templars, or Poor Fellow-Soldiery of the Holy House of the Temple
intended to be re-built, took as their models, in the Bible, the Warrior-
Masons of Zorobabel, who worked, holding the sword in one hand and the
trowel in the other. Therefore it was that the Sword and the Trowel were
the insignia of the Templars, who subsequently, as will be seen,
concealed themselves under the name of Brethren Masons. [This name,
Fr�res Ma�ons in the French, adopted by way of secret reference to the
Builders of the Second Temple, was corrupted in English into Free-
Masons, as Pythagore de Crotone was into Peter Gower of Groton in
England. Khair�m or Kh�r-�m, (a name mis-rendered into Hiram) from an
artificer in brass and other metals, became the Chief Builder of the Haikal
Kadosh, the Holy House, of the Temple, the ; and the words
Bonai and Banaim yet appear in the Masonic Degrees, meaning Builder
and Builders.]
"The trowel of the Templars is quadruple, and the triangular plates of it are
arranged in the form of a cross, making the Kabalistic pantacle known by
the name of the Cross of the East. The Knight of the East, and the Knight
of the East and West, have in their titles secret allusions to the Templars
of whom they were at first the successors.
"The secret thought of Hugues de Payens, in founding his Order, was not
exactly to serve the ambition of the Patriarchs of Constantinople. There
existed at that period in the East a Sect of Johannite Christians, who
claimed to be the only true Initiates into the real mysteries of the religion of
the Saviour. They pretended to know the real history of Yesus the
ANOINTED, and, adopting in part the Jewish traditions and the tales of the
Talmud, they held that the facts recounted in the Evangels are but
allegories, the key of which Saint John gives, in saying that the
world might be filled with the books that could be written upon the words
and deeds of Jesus Christ; words which, they thought, would be only a
ridiculous exaggeration, if he were not speaking of an allegory and a
legend, that might be varied and prolonged to infinity.
"The Johannites ascribed to Saint John the foundation of their Secret
Church, and the Grand Pontiffs of the Sect assumed the title of Christos,
Anointed, or Consecrated, and claimed to have succeeded one another
from Saint John by an uninterrupted succession of pontifical powers. He
who, at the period of the foundation of the Order of the Temple, claimed
these imaginary prerogatives, was named THEOCLET; he knew HUGUES
DE PAYENS, he initiated him into the Mysteries and hopes of his
pretended church, he seduced him by the notions of Sovereign Priesthood
and Supreme royalty, and finally designated him as his successor
"Thus the Order of Knights of the Temple was at its very origin devoted to
the cause of opposition to the tiara of Rome and the crowns of Kings, and
the Apostolate of Kabalistic Gnosticism was vested in its chiefs. For Saint
John himself was the Father of the Gnostics, and the current translation of
his polemic against the heretical of his Sect and the pagans who denied
that Christ was the Word, is throughout a misrepresentation, or
misunderstanding at least, of the whole Spirit of that Evangel.
"The tendencies and tenets of the Order were enveloped in profound
mystery, and it externally professed the most perfect orthodoxy. The
Chiefs alone knew the aim of the Order: the Subalterns followed them
without distrust.
"To acquire influence and wealth, then to intrigue, and at need to fight, to
establish the Johannite or Gnostic and Kabalistic dogma, were the object
and means proposed to the initiated Brethren. The Papacy and the rival
monarchies, they said to them, are sold and bought in these days,
become corrupt, and to-morrow, perhaps, will destroy each other. All that
will become the heritage of the Temple: the World will soon come to us for
its Sovereigns and Pontiffs. We shall constitute the equilibrium of the
Universe, and be rulers over the Masters of the World.
"The Templars, like all other Secret Orders and Associations had two
doctrines, one concealed and reserved for the Masters, which was
Johannism; the other public, which was the Roman Catholic. Thus they
deceived the adversaries whom they sought
to supplant. Hence Free-Masonry, vulgarly imagined to have begun with
the Dionysian Architects or the German Stone-workers, adopted Saint
John the Evangelist as one of its patrons, associating with him, in order
not to arouse the suspicions of Rome, Saint John the Baptist, and thus
covertly proclaiming itself the child of the Kabalah and Essenism
together."
[For the Johannism of the Adepts was the Kabalah of the earlier Gnostics,
degenerating afterward into those heretical forms which Gnosticism
developed, so that even Manes had his followers among them. Many
adopted his doctrines of the two Principles, the recollection of which is
perpetuated by the handle of the dagger and the tesselated pavement or
floor of the Lodge, stupidly called " the Indented Tessel," and represented
by great hanging tassels, when it really means a tesserated floor (from the
Latin tessera) of white and black lozenges, with a necessarily denticulated
or indented border or edging. And wherever, in the higher Degrees, the
two colors white and black, are in juxtaposition, the two Principles of
Zoroaster and Manes are alluded to. With others the doctrine became a
mystic Pantheism, descended from that of the Brahmins, and even
pushed to an idolatry of Nature and hatred of every revealed dogma.
[To all this 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. The same result long
after followed the folly of regarding the Hebrew books as if they had been
written by the unimaginative, hard, practical intellect of the England of
James the First and the bigoted stolidity of Scottish Presbyterianism.]
"The better to succeed and win partisans, the Templars sympathized with
regrets for dethroned creeds and encouraged the hopes of new worships,
promising to all liberty of conscience and a new orthodoxy that should be
the synthesis of all the persecuted creeds."
[It is absurd to suppose that men of intellect adored a monstrous idol
called Baphomet, or recognized Mahomet as an inspired prophet. Their
symbolism, invented ages before, to conceal what it was dangerous to
avow, was of course misunderstood by those who were not adepts, and to
their enemies seemed to be pantheistic. The calf of gold, made by Aaron
for the Israelites, was but one of the oxen under the layer of bronze, and
the Karobim on the Propitiatory, misunderstood. The symbols of the wise
always become
the idols of the ignorant multitude. What the Chiefs of the Order really
believed and taught, is indicated to the Adepts by the hints contained in
the high Degrees of Free-Masonry, and by the symbols which only the
Adepts understand.
[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 the 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 which they contain. It is well enough for the
mass of those called Masons, to imagine that all is contained in the Blue
Degrees; and whoso 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 the
ages.]
"The seeds of decay were sown in the Order of the Temple at its origin.
Hypocrisy is a mortal disease. It had conceived a great work which it was
incapable of executing, because it knew neither humility nor personal
abnegation, because Rome was then invincible, and because the later
Chiefs of the Order did not comprehend its mission. Moreover, the
Templars were in general uneducated, and capable only of wielding the
sword, with no qualifications for governing, and at need enchaining, that
queen of the world called Opinion." [The doctrines of the Chiefs would, if
expounded to the masses, have seemed to them the babblings of folly.
The symbols of the wise are the idols of the vulgar, or else as
meaningless as the hieroglyphics of Egypt to the nomadic Arabs. There
must always be a common-place interpretation for the mass of Initiates, of
the symbols that are eloquent to the Adepts.]
"Hugues de Payens himself had not that keen and far-sighted intellect nor
that grandeur of purpose which afterward distinguished the military
founder of another soldiery that became formidable to kings. The
Templars were unintelligent and therefore unsuccessful Jesuits.
"Their watchword was, to become wealthy, in order to buy the world. They
became so, and in 1312 they possessed in Europe
alone more than nine thousand seignories. Riches were the shoal on
which they were wrecked. They became insolent, and unwisely showed
their contempt for the religious and social institutions which they aimed to
overthrow. Their ambition was fatal to them. Their projects were divined
and prevented. [Rome, more intolerant of heresy than of vice and crime,
came to fear the Order, and fear is always cruel. It has always deemed
philosophical truth the most dangerous of heresies, and has never been at
a loss for a false accusation, by means of which to crush free thought.]
Pope Clement V. and King Philip le Bel gave the signal to Europe, and the
Templars, taken as it were in an immense net, were arrested, disarmed,
and cast into prison. Never was a Coup d' Etat accomplished with a more
formidable concert of action. The whole world was struck with stupor, and
eagerly waited for the strange revelations of a process that was to echo
through so many ages.
"It was impossible to unfold to the people the conspiracy of the Templars
against the Thrones and the Tiara. It was impossible to expose to them
the doctrines of the Chiefs of the Order. [This would have been to initiate
the multitude into the secrets of the Masters, and to have uplifted the veil
of Isis. Recourse was therefore had to the charge of magic, and
denouncers and false witnesses were easily found. When the temporal
and spiritual tyrannies unite to crush a victim they never want for
serviceable instruments.] The Templars were gravely accused of spitting
upon Christ and denying God at their receptions, of gross obscenities,
conversations with female devils, and the worship of a monstrous idol.
"The end of the drama is well known, and how Jacques de Molai and his
fellows perished in the flames. But before his execution, the Chief of the
doomed Order organized and instituted what afterward came to be called
the Occult, Hermetic, or Scottish Masonry. In the gloom of his prison, the
Grand Master created four Metropolitan Lodges, at Naples for the East, at
Edinburg for the West, at Stockholm for the North, and at Paris for the
South." [The initials of his name, J\ B\ M\ found in the same order in
the first three Degrees, are but one of the many internal and cogent proofs
that such was the origin of modern FreeMasonry. The legend of Osiris
was revived and adopted, to symbolize the destruction of the Order, and
the resurrection of
Kh�r�m, slain in the body of the Temple, of KH�R�M ABAI, the Master, as
the martyr of fidelity to obligation, of Truth and Conscience, prophesied the
restoration to life of the buried association.]
"The Pope and the King soon after perished in a strange and sudden manner.
Squin de Florian, the chief denouncer of the Order, died assassinated. In
breaking the sword of the Templars, they made of it a poniard; and their
proscribed trowels thenceforward built only tombs."
[The Order disappeared at once. Its estates and wealth were confiscated, and
it seemed to have ceased to exist. Nevertheless it lived, under other names
and governed by unknown Chiefs, revealing itself only to those who, in
passing through a series of Degrees, had proven themselves worthy to be
entrusted with the dangerous Secret. The modern Orders that style
themselves Templars have assumed a name to which they have not the
shadow of a title.]
"The Successors of the Ancient Adepts Rose-Croix, abandoning by degrees
the austere and hierarchial Science of their Ancestors in initiation, became a
Mystic Sect, united with many of the Templars, the dogmas of the two
intermingling, and believed themselves to be the sole depositaries of the
secrets of the Gospel of St. John, seeing in its recitals an allegorical series of
rites proper to complete the initiation.
"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 mystical meanings of the Rose as a Symbol are to be looked for in the
Kabalistic Commentaries on the Canticles.
The Rose was for the Initiates the living and blooming symbol of the
revelation of the harmonies of being. It was the emblem of beauty, life, love,
and pleasure. Flamel, or the Book of the Jew Abraham, made it the
hieroglyphical sign of the accomplishment of the great Work. Such is the key
of the Roman de la Rose. The Conquest of the Rose was the problem
propounded to Science by Initiation, while Religion was laboring to prepare
and establish the universal triumph, exclusive and definitive, of the Cross.
To unite the Rose to the Cross, was the problem proposed by the High
Initiation and in fact the Occult philosophy being the
Universal Synthesis, ought to explain all the phenomena of Being.
Religion, considered solely as a physiological fact, is the revelation and
satisfaction of a necessity of souls. Its existence is a scientific fact; to deny
it, would be to deny humanity itself.
The Rose-Croix Adepts respected the dominant, hierarchical, and
revealed religion. Consequently they could no more be the enemies of the
Papacy than of legitimate Monarchy; and if they conspired against the
Popes and Kings, it was because they considered them personally as
apostates from duty and supreme favorers of anarchy.
What, in fact, is a despot, spiritual or temporal, but a crowned anarchist ?
One of the magnificent pantacles that express the esoteric and
unutterable part of Science, is a Rose of Light, in the centre of which a
human form extends its arms in the form of a cross.
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 Ghihellin is a declaration of war
against the Papacy, by bold revelations of the Mysteries. The Epic of
Dante is Johannite and Gnostic, an audacious application, like that of the
Apocalypse, of the figures and numbers of the Kabalah to the Christian
dogmas, and a secret negation of every thing absolute in these dogmas.
His journey through the supernatural worlds is accomplished like the
initiation into the Mysteries of Eleusis and Thebes. He escapes from that
gulf of Hell over the gate of which the sentence of despair was written, by
reversing the positions of his head and feet, that is to say, by accepting
the direct opposite of the Catholic dogma and then he reascends to the
light, by using the Devil himself as a monstrous ladder. Faust ascends to
Heaven, by stepping on the head of the vanquished Mephistopheles. Hell
is impassable for those only who know not how to turn back from it. We
free ourselves from its bondage by audacity.
His Hell is but a negative Purgatory. His Heaven is composed of a series
of Kabalistic circles, divided by a cross, like the Pantacle of Ezekiel. In the
centre of this cross blooms a rose and we see the symbol of the Adepts of
the Rose-Croix for the first time publicly expounded and almost
categorically explained.
For the first time, because Guillaume de Lorris, who died in 1260, five
years before the birth of Alighieri, had not completed
his Roman de la Rose, which was continued by Chopinel, a half century
afterward. One is astonished to discover that the Roman de la Rose and
the Divina Commedia are two opposite forms of one and the same work,
initiation into independence of spirit, a satire on all contemporary
institutions, and the allegorical formula of the great Secrets of the Society
of the Roses-Croix.
The important manifestations of Occultism coincide with the period of the
fall of the Templars; since Jean de Meung or Chopinel, contemporary of
the old age of Dante, flourished during the best years of his life at the
Court of Philippe le Bel. The Roman de la Rose is the Epic of old France.
It is a profound book, under the form of levity, a revelation as learned as
that of Apuleius, of the Mysteries of Occultism. The Rose of Flamel, that of
Jean de Meung, and that of Dante, grew on the same stem.
Swedenborg's system was nothing else than the Kabalah, minus the
principle of the Hierarchy. It is the Temple, without the keystone and the
foundation.
Cagliostro was the Agent of the Templars, and therefore wrote to the
Free-Masons of London that the time had come to begin the work of rebuilding
the Temple of the Eternal. He had introduced into Masonry a new
Rite called the Egyptian, and endeavored to resuscitate the mysterious
worship of Isis. The three letters L\ P\D\ on his seal, were the initials of
the words "Lilia pedibus destrue;" tread under foot the Lilies [of France],
and a Masonic medal of the sixteenth or seventeenth century has upon it
a sword cutting off the stalk of a lily, and the words " talem dabit ultio
messem," such harvest revenge will give.
A Lodge inaugurated under the auspices of Rousseau, the fanatic of
Geneva, became the centre of the revolutionary movement in France, and
a Prince of the blood-royal went thither to swear the destruction of the
successors of Philippe le Bel on the tomb of Jacques de Molai. The
registers of the Order of Templars attest that the Regent, the Duc d'
Orleans, was Grand Master of that formidable Secret Society, and that his
successors were the Duc de Maine, the Prince of Bourbon-Conde, and the
Duc de Cosse-Brissac.
The Templars compromitted the King; they saved him from the rage of the
People, to exasperate that rage and bring on the catastrophe prepared for
centuries; it was a scaffold that the vengeance of the Templars
demanded. The secret movers of the
French Revolution had sworn to overturn the Throne and the Altar upon
the Tomb of Jacques de Molai. When Louis XVI. was executed, half the
work was done; and thenceforward the Army of the Temple was to direct
all its efforts against the Pope.
Jacques de Molai and his companions were perhaps martyrs, but their
avengers dishonored their memory. Royalty was regenerated on the
scaffold of Louis XVI., the Church triumphed in the captivity of Pius VI.,
carried a prisoner to Valence, and dying of fatigue and sorrow, but the
successors of the Ancient Knights of the Temple perished, overwhelmed
in their fatal victory.