This article is a combination of transcription and summation of Canadian philosopher Manly P. Hall’s Seminars on the life and ideas of Albert Pike in 1958 tracing the origins of the Wisdom Tradition, which often takes on a form of mythmaking in Masonic lore. A more in-depth factual biography of Albert Pike’s life, views and legacy are provided in the new article The Conflicted Albert Pike, and a Wounded Union: Early Years (1830s to 1880s). Pike’s D.C. statue was not erected as “a confederate statue,” and is not a confederate statue. Pike’s scholarly contributions and revolutionary ideas became his legacy. His story is reintegrated into the Union, as he returned to his roots. In his magnum opus, Pike outlines his vision of historical and revolutionary Republicanism explaining the motto of the Revolution — Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.
I have sifted the facts from the myths and any false history from the article and added them at the end.
REVISED DEC 24, 2025
Albert Pike (1809–1891) was an exemplary individual and American with an expression of thought needed in our day. Pike was a genial, humorous, profoundly learned, self-made giant of American intellectual and Masonic history whose achievements outweighed the controversies of his era. In fact, we could say, that Pike was one of the most outstanding and diversified men of the nineteenth-century, combining profound theoretical scholarship with wide personal experience in many fields. Pike came from an old American family, related to explorer Zebulon Pike who arrived in America in the seventeenth-century. His father had humble means, but as a young man, Pike showed a remarkably natural scholarship, passing all entrance examinations for Harvard. It was 1825, when 15-year-old Pike passed the entrance exams for Harvard’s freshman class and eventually qualified for the junior class. However, the faculty demanded he pay two years of back tuition for the classes he had successfully tested out of. Unable to afford this, Pike left and pursued a path of rigorous self-education.
Decades later, Pike was officially awarded an honorary Master of Arts (A.M.) degree from Harvard University in 1859.
Due to poverty, Pike “went West” like many young men of his time. He traveled (some say partly on foot) through Missouri and New Mexico, spent time in Taos, worked as a trapper, and had early contacts with Native Americans that gave him deep understanding and appreciation of their values, which influenced his later life.
Then, he eventually settled in Arkansas, where he became a respected “good Arkansas gentleman,” supporting himself initially by school teaching; then studied law and became an outstanding lawyer involved in nearly one-third of all litigation in the area. During the Civil War, he was commissioned a brigadier general in the Confederate Army (the source of his “General” title) and commanded a large group of Native American troops, which was one of the most difficult assignments. He handled Confederate relations with the Indians and advocated for Native Americans legal rights as a lawyer for some time. Like other Confederate officers, he temporarily lost U.S. citizenship after the war, but President Andrew Johnson personally restored it and relieved him of penalties.
Pike’s home library was so impressive that Union soldiers, upon surrounding it, placed an honor guard around the house and protected it from harm after seeing the evidence of extraordinary scholarship. In 1857 he was made an honorary 33° Mason (Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction). He became active in 1858, and at the time there were fewer than 1,000 Scottish Rite Masons in the entire U.S. It is said that Pike “found Freemasonry in a log cabin and left it in a temple.”
Later, he became Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite (Southern Jurisdiction) and devoted the rest of his life almost entirely to Masonic research and writing, and eventually centering his work in Washington, D.C. Albert Pike completely rewrote the rituals of the Scottish Rite from the 4th to the 32nd degrees (his “magnum opus,” not public), infused the rituals with profound philosophical and symbolic depth that largely defines modern Scottish Rite ritual.
We learn that Pike as a pioneering American scholar in the early field of Comparative Religion and ancient languages mastered Hebrew and translated large parts of the Zohar and Talmud; translated Roman law from Latin; mastered Zend and translated Persian classics (especially the Zend-Avesta); learned Sanskrit and translated the Vedas and other Indian classics. Much of this is left in manuscript at the House of the Temple in Washington, D.C.
Despite constant restricted means and heavy responsibilities, he produced lectures and volumes of writings and manuscripts. In his time of reflection, it was said that he loved sitting by his window in Washington smoking a very long pipe and watching his canary birds.
Pike lived long enough to be photographed by Civil War photographer Mathew Brady. He appeared as a very large, picturesque man over six feet tall with long white hair in ringlets, full beard, and black frock coat.
Judging from this, Pike had a delightful sense of humor and very human genial and pleasant personality, and no heaviness despite his scholarship. His scholarship was internationally recognized in his lifetime, perhaps rivaled only by Max Müller. These writings extend far beyond Freemasonry into universalist philosophy, universalist vision of historical and revolutionary republicanism, and comparative religion deserving study outside Masonic circles. Hall presents Pike to us as a genial, humorous, profoundly learned, self-made giant of American intellectual and Masonic history whose achievements far outweigh formal education and the controversies of his era.
In relation to Pike’s works on The Sacred Tradition of the Arayas, our focus is turned towards Albert Pike’s chapter in Morals and Dogma dealing with the ancient “Arayas” (Aryas or Aryans) and the sacred tradition that originated in northwestern Asia and spread southward and westward. As stated, Pike possessed extraordinary literary ability, and he could write profound philosophical prose with almost poetic beauty, yet he was also capable of very simple, moving personal letters. As an example, Pike’s final Masonic letter (written shortly before his death in 1891) to his close Scottish Rite colleague Thomas H. Caswell upon the death of Caswell’s wife reveals a short, tender note expressing shared grief that exemplifies Pike’s deep humanity.
Pike had an intense, lifelong interest in Native American (American Indian) cultures and languages also, and he saw profound parallels between their ancient traditions and those of the Old World in connection to the ancient WISDOM TRADITION.
According to Pike, and similar to the setting place of the birth of THEOSOPHY, the original homeland of the sacred tradition was a high plateau region in central or northwestern Asia (roughly modern Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and the Pamir region), a fertile, well-watered area in remote antiquity that later became arid.
In the position of Albert Pike, from this center migrated the great culture-bearing peoples referred to as the Aryas (who went south into India and west into Persia and Europe). They were the ancestors of the later Medes and Persians, and branches that carried the same tradition into China and eventually across Beringia into the Americas. The migrating Aryas were a tall, fair-haired, light-eyed people (Northern Europeoids) who revered purity, nobility, and spiritual priesthood, according to Pike in his Lectures on the Aryas and Irano-Aryans. While these theories have been debunked, Pike indeed characterized the “Aryas” as a superior ancestral race that served as the “physical, linguistic and philosophical ancestors” of modern Western civilization, following the Nordicist anthropological theories common in the 19th century. The word “Araya” (or Arya) means “the noble ones” or “the pure ones.” He emphasized that the “Irano-Aryans” were the “spiritual ancestors” of the West, with a culture deeply rooted in the monotheistic teachings of the Zend-Avesta and the Rig-Veda.
These people brought with them the concept of a protean supreme, ineffable DEITY who manifests through a trinity of primary powers (usually personified later as Brahma–Vishnu–Shiva, Ahura Mazda with his emanations, etc.). Central to their worship was FIRE as the purest visible symbol of divinity. Hence, not fire itself as the ultimate divine principle, but the living flame as the closest earthly representation of the divine essence. The tradition emphasized the eternal sacred fire kept burning on altars by a hereditary priesthood. This same custom appears in Zoroastrianism, in the Vedic rites of India, in the Roman Vestal flame, and in many other cultures derived from the same source.
Hall had stressed that the migration was not merely racial, but above all a migration of ideas, a sacred WISDOM-RELIGION preserved orally by initiates and priests long before it was written down. This case is very similar to the history of oral traditions in Africa.
Pike, as an American sought to learn from this past, through his own Christian lens. This is the context and limitation of Pike’s views, that must be considered, in that he did not stray from Christianity despite these studies. It deeply and profoundly informed and enhanced his perspective, hence his fascination with tracing the secret wisdom of Magism.
The original teaching was, according to Pike monotheistic at its core, but became polytheistic as it spread; and was adapted by different peoples who personified natural forces. The priesthood originally served selflessly, but over time degenerated in many places into hereditary privilege, lastly eventually into exploitation. This degeneration is a recurring theme, which Pike laments in his writings. The same symbolic system (fire altars, trinitarian doctrine, solar worship, reverence for light and purity) can be traced from India through Persia, Chaldea, Egypt, Greece, and even into pre-Columbian Mexico and Peru, proving a common ancient source. Hall noted that modern scholarship in 1958 was only beginning to accept the vast antiquity and wide diffusion of this Aryan tradition, which Pike had understood decades earlier through his own comparative studies.
The psychological purpose of the tradition was to lift human consciousness from mere animal survival to contemplation of eternal principles: using fire, light, the sun, and the heavens as visible symbols of invisible spiritual realities. Hall’s lecture closes on the thought of connecting these ideas to the Master Mason degree, where the candidate is symbolically brought from darkness to light. This drama of initiation re-enacts humanity’s ancient emergence from ignorance into the sacred tradition of illumination preserved through the MYSTERIES.
Pike here is revealed as a scholar who recognized the unity of the ancient wisdom tradition long before academic archaeology and anthropology confirmed many of his insights, and who saw Freemasonry as the modern heir and guardian of that same “Sacred Tradition of the Arayas.” Pike goes more into the mysteries in treatment of the 19th-degree chapter in Morals and Dogma dealing with ancient Brahmanism and the secret (esoteric) doctrine that underlies the public forms of Hinduism.
Pike had acquired knowledge of Sanskrit literature, personally translating large portions of the Rig-Veda, the Upanishads, and other sacred texts that were hardly accessible to Western scholars in the 1870s–1880s. According to Pike in his chapter, the original Brahman teaching was strictly monotheistic: one protean supreme essence, ineffable and unknowable (not associated with the later Brahma-creator god-concept; see Spiritual Philosophy without God: Subba Row on Pragna and the God of Theology), who is beyond all name, form, image or attribute. The famous Hindu Trinity (Brahma–Vishnu–Shiva) is a later exoteric simplification, while the true esoteric doctrine recognizes these as three aspects or powers of the ONE: Creation, Preservation, Destruction (or transformation).
The sacred syllable AUM (or Om) is the audible manifestation of the unmanifest DEITY, i.e., the creative sound or WORD by which all things were brought into being. This is identical in concept to the LOGOS of the Greeks and the WORD in the Gospel of John. The Brahmans originally taught that the universe is an emanation (not a creation out of nothing) from the Divine and proceeds in vast cyclic periods (manvantaras and pralayas) of inconceivable duration. Reincarnation and karma were central doctrines from the beginning, and not later additions. These doctrines were taught as laws of absolute justice operating with mathematical precision. The caste system began as a natural division of labor based on spiritual and psychological temperament, where the Brahmans are priests (teachers); the Kshatriyas are rulers (warriors); the Vaishyas are merchants and farmers; and the Shudras are the workers. Pike states, that this later hardened into hereditary privilege, becoming a source of terrible abuse; and Pike strongly condemns this development as a degenerative change.
Pike claimed that the original Brahmans were a spiritual aristocracy chosen by merit and initiation, not birth, and the later hereditary priesthood betrayed the ancient ideal. The doctrine of maya (illusion) teaches that the phenomenal world is real as appearance but not as ultimate reality, with the goal of the initiate being to penetrate the veil of maya and realize identity with Brahman (“Tat tvam asi” or That thou art).
Pike stresses that the highest Brahman secret was identical with the secret doctrine of all ancient mystery schools: teaching that man contains within himself the divine spark. Through self-purification and knowledge, humans can become consciously one with the Universal Spirit. Manly P. Hall explains that Pike was writing decades before Blavatsky and the Theosophical Movement popularized these ideas in the West, and Pike derived them directly from his own Sanskrit studies and comparative research.
The ancient Brahmans practiced extreme asceticism and meditation to achieve liberation (moksha) while still in the body (jivan-mukta), and Pike admired their discipline, although warned against the extremes that led some to self-torture. A direct parallel is drawn to Freemasonry, because the Masonic initiate is also taught to strip off the illusions of the material world, control passions, and seek the lost WORD, the true secret sound (or name, that is not really strictly a name) of the Divine, that was known to the ancient sages.
Albert Pike saw all the great ancient religions as fragments of one primordial revelation, and he saw that Freemasonry’s role was to preserve the essence of that revelation in symbolic form for modern humanity.
This is the work of an American Western scholar who independently rediscovered the profound esoteric core of Brahmanism long before it became fashionable in the West, and who regarded the Scottish Rite degrees as a modern vehicle for the same timeless truths the ancient Brahmans guarded. For a Christian, we do not have many of such Americans of such eclectic interest, with which we are in desperate need in our times to develop American culture beyond its superficialities and “fad” interests. These teachings are not “fads” for old White male clubs or our quick Yoga sessions on a Thursday; but teachings that raise up whole civilizations, and upon which ours still depend upon for great strength and knowledge of our past, and the connected journey of our ancestors.
FOOTNOTE
The following elements from Hall’s seminars included in this article represent unsubstantiated myths, legends, or exaggerations without corroborating evidence:
- Pike’s inability to attend Harvard was described as his “first heartbreak.”
- Pike helped prepare papers for the incorporation of Little Rock. False. The city was incorporated before his arrival.
- Pike sided with Native Americans during the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” No documented involvement.
- A distinguished European philologist searched U.S. universities, found Pike, spent 6 months with him, and declared he had “found the educated American.” Unsubstantiated myth.
- There is a joke about his “wake” that Manly P. Hall provides titled in lore as “the wake of a good Arkansas gentleman.” Friends held a memorial celebration upon false news of his death. Pike had arrived unexpectedly and quietly listened from an adjoining room to all the nice things being said about him, then to their surprise he made his entrance. The story of Pike’s “wake,” where friends held a memorial on false news of his death, and he entered after listening is a myth.
- When conferring the 33°, Pike took a candidate on a buggy picnic and declared him “duly raised” on a log. Myth.
- On his deathbed, Pike traced the Hebrew letter Shin (ש) on the wall, signifying Shiloh (“peace”). Myth.
- Pike produced “hundreds” of volumes. Exaggerated; dozens is more accurate.
- The specifics of Pike declining an honorary degree from Harvard. This is disputed; some sources say he received one.
The American Minervan 
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