Pike, and the Hoax That Made the Rite Infamous

Albert Pike is the reason the Scottish Rite looks the way it does. As Grand Commander of the Southern Jurisdiction from 1859 until his death in 1891, he rewrote the degrees, drawing heavily on comparative religion and on the material available to a nineteenth century autodidact, and published his commentary as Morals and Dogma in 1871. It was given to every member of the Southern Jurisdiction for over a century, which means an enormous number of people owned a book that very few finished.

Two jurisdictions divide the United States, Southern from Charleston and Northern from 1813, and they use different degree names and rituals above a certain point. The thirty-third degree is honorary and conferred by invitation. None of this outranks a craft lodge, a point the Rite itself makes repeatedly and which the numbering defeats every time.

The Rite's worst reputation comes from a fabrication. In the 1890s Leo Taxil published an elaborate account of a Masonic inner cult called the Palladium, with satanic rites and a letter in which Pike declared Lucifer to be the god of Masonry. In 1897 Taxil called a press conference and announced that he had invented all of it to embarrass the Catholic anti-Masonic campaign that had been quoting him. The confession is on the record. The Pike letter is still quoted today as though it were genuine.