Albert Pike Lodge No. 117 was chartered in Denver in 1903 and met in the Masonic building at 16th and Welton for more than a century before merging with Pythagoras Lodge to form Marquis de Lafayette Lodge No. 41. The lodge took its name from one of the most consequential and contested figures in American Masonic history. Pike was a poet, a lawyer, a Confederate general, a Sanskrit scholar, and the man who rewrote the Scottish Rite degrees from the ground up. He was not a simple figure, and this page does not attempt to make him one.
A New England Boyhood (1809–1825)
Albert Pike was born on December 29, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts, the fifth of six children. His father was a shoemaker of modest means. His mother, a devout Congregationalist, read to him from the Bible and from Milton by candlelight. Pike taught himself to read by age four, passed Harvard’s entrance exam at twelve, and could not afford to attend. He spent those years instead at the Boston Athenaeum, working through Homer, Virgil, and Voltaire on his own.
By fifteen, restless and ambitious in a city that offered him little room, he left home and headed west.
Frontier Lawyer and Poet (1825–1849)
The years that followed were genuinely hard. Pike traveled by trading party through Missouri, trekked to Santa Fe in 1828 with a caravan of trappers, and eventually settled in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in 1831. He taught school, edited a newspaper, studied law without a mentor, and passed the bar in 1832. He built a respected legal practice handling land disputes and Native American claims, and argued before the Arkansas Supreme Court by 1837.
He also wrote poetry. His Hymns to the Gods, published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1839, earned notice from Edgar Allan Poe. The ambition ran in two directions simultaneously, and it never entirely stopped. In the decades to come he would be known as a scholar of Sanskrit and Hebrew, a student of the Kabbalah, and a writer of Masonic ritual. The poetry was where that particular kind of mind first showed itself.
He married Mary Ann Hamilton in 1834. They raised six children in Arkansas, and Pike’s legal reputation continued to grow through the 1840s.
Entering the Craft (1850–1858)
Pike was initiated into Western Star Lodge No. 2 in Little Rock, Arkansas, on November 2, 1850, at the age of forty. He was passed on November 19 and raised Master Mason on December 6. He became Worshipful Master of Magnolia Lodge No. 60 in 1854.
In 1853, he received the Scottish Rite degrees through the 32nd in Charleston, South Carolina, under Albert G. Mackey at the Supreme Council of the Southern Jurisdiction. Mackey recognized immediately what he had. He appointed Pike Deputy Inspector General in 1857. Pike spent those years studying the ritual, tracing its symbolic language through Hermetic philosophy, Vedanta, Kabbalah, and classical mythology, building toward a revision he was already planning.
On January 2, 1859, he was elected Sovereign Grand Commander of the Southern Jurisdiction. He was forty-nine years old and would hold the office for the rest of his life.
The Civil War and Its Aftermath (1861–1869)
Pike resigned his Arkansas judgeship in 1861 and accepted a commission as Brigadier General in the Confederate Army. His assignment was unusual: he was tasked with negotiating military alliances with the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory. By August of 1861 he had secured agreements with the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations.
His troops, including Cherokee forces under his command, fought at the Battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas in March of 1862. The battle produced reports of scalping among the Native American soldiers, which drew sharp criticism from Union and Confederate officers alike. The episode became the central controversy of his military career. Pike resigned his commission in July of 1862, citing Confederate mismanagement of Indian Territory. He was briefly arrested on charges of insubordination in 1863 but was not convicted, and he spent the remainder of the war in the Ozarks.
After the war, he spent a year in Canada before returning to Arkansas. President Andrew Johnson pardoned him in 1867. He moved to Memphis, then to Washington, D.C., where he resumed his legal practice and returned his full attention to the Scottish Rite.
In later decades, Pike was accused in anti-Masonic literature of founding or leading the Ku Klux Klan. No credible historical evidence supports this claim, and it does not appear in the accounts of his contemporaries or early biographers. It has nonetheless persisted, and any honest account of Pike must acknowledge that the accusation exists and that the evidence for it does not.
Morals and Dogma and the Reformation of the Rite (1859–1891)
The work Pike had been planning since the 1850s occupied most of his Masonic life. Between 1859 and 1882, he rewrote all twenty-nine degrees of the Scottish Rite from the 4th through the 32nd, producing ritual that was philosophically coherent, symbolically layered, and in places genuinely beautiful. Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, published in 1871, ran to 861 pages. Pike drew from a wider range of sources than most Masonic writers before or since, including Sanskrit texts, Hermetic philosophy, Neoplatonism, and the Zohar. He was careful to describe the work as interpretive rather than authoritative. It was given to every candidate in the Southern Jurisdiction for decades.
Under his leadership, the Southern Jurisdiction grew from 11 Consistories and roughly 1,200 members to more than 10,000 members across every Southern state. He moved the Supreme Council to Washington, D.C., in 1872. The House of the Temple, the council’s permanent home, was completed there in 1915, twenty-four years after his death.
He continued writing and practicing law into his eighties. His personal library held more than 5,000 volumes in twelve languages. He suffered a stroke in 1884 but did not stop working. He died in Washington on April 2, 1891, at eighty-one. Two thousand Masons attended the service at the House of the Temple. His remains were eventually moved there in 1944, where a monument honors him as Scholar, Poet, Soldier, and Freemason.
Why His Name Endures in Our History
Albert Pike Lodge No. 117 was chartered in Denver in 1903, twelve years after Pike’s death, by Masons who knew his work and chose to honor it. The lodge met in this building for more than a century. When the merger with Pythagoras Lodge formed Marquis de Lafayette Lodge No. 41 in 2019, the Albert Pike
Lodge name retired, but the history it carried did not.
Pike was not a straightforward figure. His Confederate service was real and its consequences were serious. His esoteric scholarship was genuine and, for many Masons, formative. The lodge named for him made a commitment to excellence in ritual work and Masonic education that earned it a membership resurgence in the decade before the merger. That commitment lives in this lodge today.
He is worth understanding on his own terms, which is a harder thing than either dismissing him or celebrating him.
Sources: House of the Temple, Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction (scottishrite.org); Supreme Council, Scottish Rite, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction (scottishritenmj.org); Walter Lee Brown, A Life of Albert Pike (University of Arkansas Press, 1997); lodge records of Albert Pike Lodge No. 117.