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The Rose Croix...A Mystic Sect

 
 
      Greetings and welcome back as we continue with chapter 30 of Morals and Dogma as we study the teachings therein.
 
  We are about 2 chapters away from finishing Morals and Dogma. Those of you who might have been joining me from the start know it has been a long road through personal trials and illnesses that we have been this far in the last 3 years, and I am only touching upon my own life. 
I am sure many of you have been through much yourselves.
 
 This time, we will study Pike’s words regarding the beginning of the Rose Croix, or Rose Cross.
 
  We will examine the ancient symbolism of the rose and hopefully, we can bring the meanings of this mystery into our own lives.
 
  Now, LET’S READ PIKE!
 
   

"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

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[paragraph continues]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.

 

In these paragraphs we learn of the begiinings of the Rose Croix as a mystical order faced with a sleight problem of introducing its symbolismof the rose in the same way as the cross, which was introduced as the symbol of universal triumph. 

We also face this in modern times where many in christianity hope to claim exclusive rights of the individual by claiming how one “cannot be a Mason and a Christian”, when truth be known, esoteric freemasonry stands to only ENHANCE the spiritual path of its initiates, never replace that path. 

Two symbols certainly can and do act to enhance the other in many instances.

Next

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.

Throughout “Morals and Dogma” Pike warns us of despots and despotism, and this is also the case in this paragraph. 

Be aware of those who attempt to control your thoughts and actions and threaten you if those thoughts or actions do not square with their own.

This is not to say that, when moral and inclusive for all, that we should not obey the laws of our societies, rather we should only be aware that it is often too easy for the despot to arrive and seek to change the moral laws to laws that are exclusive to those only who mimic their own beliefs and lifestyles, while trouncing upon those who believe differently.

It is the duty of a mason to be aware of these actions and to act against them. 

This paragraph also reminds us of two powerful symbols coexisting and enhancing the other.

Next

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 Ghibellin 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.

As Masons, we are initiated in darkness as to be cognizent of darkness, to learn to overcome the fear of the darkness and to conquer darkness as means to take command of the darkness and use the darkness as a ladder to climb into the light, just as Pike writes in these paragraphs. 

We learn to reject the darkness of dogmatic thinking as to become firm in our appoach to MORE light.

We learn to reject the darkness of authoritarianism as to embrace the knowledge and ideas from all who possess it or have possessed it. 

We learn to reject the darkness of hate and exclusivity as to welcome all with love.

Darkness and light or ignorance and enlightenment are the cornerstones upon which masonic ideals are built, and Pike reminds us of this in these paragraphs as well as reminding us again of the symbolism of the Rose Croix.

Next

For the first time, because Guillaume de Lorris, who died in 1260, five years before the birth of Alighieri, had not completed

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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 re-building 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-Condé, and the Duc de Cossé-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

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[paragraph continues]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.

And, in closing the 30th chapter, Pike gives us examples of the use of the rose and the cross in masonic symbolism throughout the ages. 

The point of these paragraphs, as well as covering the history of the important Rose Croix, in my estimation is also to remind the mason that we can and we SHOULD exist on the same plane as the symbolism of our individual chosen spiritual path. 

We can be and we are Christian and Mason, we can be and we are Muslim and Maosn, we can be and we are Catholic and Mason, we can be and we are Gnostics and Masons, we can be and we are Wiccans and Masons.

We are individuals seeking MORE light with masonry enhancing our journeys.

 

Thank you for joining me this time, next week we will begin Chapter 31!

I hope you will read along.

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