American soldier, author, occultist and Freemason, 1809–91. Born in Massachusetts to a working-class family, Pike showed intellectual promise from an early age and mastered Latin, Greek, and Hebrew before the age of 18. Although he was accepted at Harvard, his family was unable to afford his tuition, and so he headed west instead. Pike wound up in Fort Smith, Arkansas, where he taught for a time, edited the local newspaper, and studied law, qualifying for the Bar in 1834. In the same year he married Anne Hamilton, a wealthy local widow, and with her money went into politics in the Arkansas branch of the Know-Nothings, an anti-Catholic organization that was part secret society and part political party. Pike became the leader of the Know-Nothings in Arkansas and took an active role in the national party as well. See Know-Nothing Party.
Pike’s military career began in 1846 during the Texan war for independence; he organized and led a regiment of volunteers against the Mexican army at the battle of Buena Vista in 1847. After the war he became involved in land disputes between settlers and local Native American peoples and took the native side in several court cases, defending the tribes against the federal government. When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, he sided with the Confederacy and was appointed commissioner of Indian affairs by Confederate president Jefferson Davis. This position placed Pike in the middle of conflicts between Indian treaty rights and the military requirements of the Confederacy, a situation that worsened when Pike was given the rank of brigadier general and put in command of Indian regiments in the western theatre of the war. In July 1862 he resigned his commission and publicly criticized the Confederate government for violating its own treaties with the Native Americans. He was thrown into jail, and then released in the autumn of 1862 as the Confederacy’s western defenses collapsed. Bankrupt and with his marriage in ruins, he fled to a cabin in the Ozark hills and remained there until 1868, pursuing a project that would become his life’s work.
Pike had become a Freemason during his Arkansas years, and in 1853 was initiated into the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, then one of the smallest Masonic bodies in the United States, with fewer than a thousand members. Shortly after his initiation the Supreme Council appointed him to a five-man committee charged with revising the rituals. The committee never met, but Pike took on the massive task himself. In 1859, he was elected Sovereign Grand Commander of the Rite’s southern jurisdiction. In his self-imposed seclusion in the Ozarks, Pike finished his revision of the rituals, including in them a wealth of material from nearly every aspect of western occult tradition. He also began the writing of his massive book Morals and Dogma, which was published in 1871. See Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite (AASR).
In 1868 he moved to Washington DC, where he received a congressional pardon for his wartime activities and resumed a legal career. His duties as head of the Scottish Rite took up ever more of his time as the Rite grew, however, and after a few years he abandoned his law practice and devoted the rest of his life to his Masonic involvements, which were not limited to the Scottish Rite. When the Royal Order of Scotland established a Provincial Grand Lodge for the United States in 1878, for example, Pike accepted the office of Provincial Grand Master and held it until his death. See Royal Order of Scotland.
In the last two decades of his life Pike was far and away the most prominent Freemason in America, and this position made him a target for conspiracy theories during and after his time. Léo Taxil’s brilliant Palladian Order hoax of the late 1870s and early 1880s elevated Pike to the non-existent office of “Sovereign Pontiff of Universal Freemasonry” and head of the Palladian Order, a supposed inner circle of Satanist sex fiends inside Masonry; the title and some of the writings Taxil forged and attributed to Pike are still circulated among opponents of Freemasonry, especially fundamentalist Christians. Another inaccuracy, debunked by historians but much repeated in antimasonic circles, is the claim that Pike was a high officer in the Ku Klux Klan immediately after the Civil War. In point of fact, after his troubles with the Confederate government Pike took no further role in politics and had nothing to do with the Klan. See Antimasonry; fundamentalism; Ku Klux Klan; Palladian Order.
SOURCE:
The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies : the ultimate a-z of ancient mysteries, lost civilizations and forgotten wisdom written by John Michael Greer – © John Michael Greer 2006