Devil-Worship in France | Page 9

affirmed. For a period
exceeding sixty years we hear little of the legendary Palladium; but in
1801 the Israelite Isaac Long is said to have carried the original
Baphomet and the skull of the Templar Grand Master Jacques de
Molay from Paris to Charleston in the United States, and was
afterwards concerned in the reconstruction of the Scotch Rite of
Perfection and of Herodom under the name of the Ancient and
Accepted Scotch Rite, which subsequently became widely diffused,
and it is stated that the lodge of the thirty-third degree of the Supreme
Council of Charleston has been the parent of all others, and is therefore,
in this rite, the first supreme council of the entire globe.
Eight years later, on the 29th of December 1809, a man of great
importance to the history of Freemasonry was born in the city of
Boston. Albert Pike came of parents in a humble position, who,
however, struggled with their difficulties and sent him to Harvard

College, where he duly graduated, taking his degree as M.A. in the year
1829. He began his career as a schoolmaster, but subsequently led a
romantic and wandering life, his love of untrodden ground leading him
to explore the Rocky Mountains, then very imperfectly known. In 1833
he settled in Arkansas, and, drifting into journalism, founded the
Arkansas Advocate, wherein his contributions, both prose and verse,
but the latter especially, obtained him a reputation in literature. The
admission of Arkansas into the confederation of the United States was
in part his work, and from this period he began to figure in politics,
becoming also the recorder of the Supreme Court in that state. One year
after the civil war, in which he took active part, Pike removed to
Memphis in Tennessee, where he again followed law and literature,
establishing the Memphis Appeal, which he sold in 1868, and migrated
to Washington. His subsequent history is exclusively concerned with
unwearying Masonic labours.
Now, it was at Little Rock in Arkansas that Albert Pike was first
initiated, and ten years later, that is, in 1859, he was elected Sovereign
Commander Grand Master of the Supreme Council of Charleston.
Having extraordinary powers of organisation, he became a person of
wide influence in the Ancient and Accepted Scotch Rite, and a high
authority also on the ritual, antiquities, history, and literature of
Masonry. Under his guidance, the Scotch Rite extended and became
dominant. Hence, when the Italian patriot Mazzini is said to have
projected the centralization of high grade Masonry, he could find no
person in the whole fraternity more suited by his position and influence
to collaborate with him. Out of this secret partnership there was
begotten on September 20, 1870--that is to say, on the very day when
the Italian troops entered the Eternal City--a Supreme Rite and Central
Organisation of Universal High Grade Masonry, the act of creation
being signed by the American Grand Master and the Italian liberator,
the two founders also sharing the power between them. A Supreme
Dogmatic Directory was created at Charleston, with Pike at its head,
under the title of Sovereign Pontiff of Universal Freemasonry. Mazzini
took over the Supreme Executive, having Rome as its centre, under the
title of Sovereign Chief of Political Action.

If we now recur to the statements that the genuine Templar Baphomet
and the skull of Jacques de Molay had been deposited at Charleston for
the space of seventy years, and that Albert Pike was Grand Master of
the Supreme Council of the Ancient and Accepted Scotch Rite in that
city, we shall understand why it was that the new institution was
termed the New Reformed Palladian Rite, or the Reformed Palladium.
Subsequently, five Central Grand Directories were established--at
Washington for North America, Monte Video for South America,
Naples for Europe, Calcutta for the Eastern World, and Port Louis in
Mauritius for Africa. A Sovereign Universal Administrative Directory
was fixed at Berlin subsequently to the death of Mazzini. As a result of
this astute organisation, Albert Pike is said to have held all Masonry in
the hollow of his hand, by means of a twofold apparatus--the Palladium
and the Scotch Rite. During all his remaining days, and he lived to a
great age, he laboured indefatigably in both causes, and the world at the
present moment is filled with the organisation that he administered.
Four persons are cited as having been coadjutors in his own
country--his old friend Gallatin Mackey, in honourable memory among
Masons; a Scotchman named Longfellow, whom some French writers
have ludicrously confused with the poet; one Holbrook, about whom
there are few particulars; and, finally, Phileas Walder, a native of
Switzerland, originally a Lutheran Minister, afterwards said to have
been a Mormon, but, in any case, at the period in question, a
well-known spiritualist, an earnest