Pike's style is not the most easily accessible but the beauty and power of his prose is up there with Nabokov,Rushdie and Keats for me. These columns were imitations, by Khu-ru-m, the Tyrian artist, of the great columns consecrated to the Winds and Fire, at the entrance to the famous Temple of Malkarth, in the city of Tyre. An upgraded official reprint was released in 2011, with annotations by Arturo de Hoyos, the Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction's Grand Archivist and Grand Historian.

So a people willingly submits to despotism, and its workmen submit to be despised, and its soldiers to be whipped; therefore it is that battles lost by a nation are often progress attained. Thus the ancient symbol has been denaturalized by incongruous additions, like that of Isis weeping over the broken column containing the remains of Osiris at Byblos.Given Pike’s presence in Arkansas in the mid-1860s, it is possible that portions of Morals and Dogma were penned either at his residence and library in Little Rock (Pulaski County), or at a primitive Ouachita Mountain cabin, where Pike spent the final two years of the Civil War.

In the Mithraic ceremonies, the candidate went through seven stages of initiation, passing through many fearful trials and of these the high ladder with seven rounds or steps was the symbol. The laws of God are not obligatory on us because they are the enactments of His POWER, or the expression of His WILL; but because they express His infinite WISDOM. If you're really on a journey to find certain realms of magik, magick, power, control, or God and Satan to experience. Make a breach in either, and the great steam-hammer, with its swift and ponderous blows, crushes all the machinery to atoms, and, at last, wrenching itself away, lies inert and dead amid the ruin it has wrought.It must suffice to say, that it is the Creative Energy of the Deity, is represented as a point, and that point in the centre of the Circle of immensity. But it is also the duty of Masonry to assist in elevating the moral and intellectual level of society; in coining knowledge, bringing ideas into circulation, and causing the mind of youth to grow; and in putting, gradually, by the teachings of axioms and the promulgation of positive laws, the human race in harmony with its destinies. YO-D is, in the Kabalah, the symbol of Unity, of the Supreme Deity, the first letter of the Holy Name; and also a symbol of the Great Kabalistic Triads.

Pike presents the solar declination cycle as an embodiment of the struggle between good and evil, with the decrease of light connoting the nefarious and the increase of light connoting the righteous. We learn this from Celsus, in Origen, who says that the symbolic image of this passage among the stars, used in the Mithraic Mysteries, was a ladder reaching from earth to Heaven, divided into seven steps or stages, to each of which was a gate, and at the summit an eighth one, that of the fixed stars.The Holy Scriptures are an entirely modern addition to the symbol, like the terrestrial and celestial globes on the columns of the portico. An emphasis on religious and cultural tolerance is shown throughout the work, emphasizing that the root of all religions is the same (according with the Prisca Theologia doctrine).