Albert Pike was a student of world religions, world civilizations, and philosophies. He had a voracious mind that constantly sought new knowledge. His personal library, preserved today in the Scottish Rite's House of the Temple in Washington, DC. was enormous in its scope. Morals and Dogma is literally a text book in comparative religious studies. In it, he explains what ancient and foreign cultures have believed and how it affected their religion.
Buried in the book is a sentence that has been quoted time and time again as proof that Albert Pike was a Satanist and that he wrote secret Satan worship into the degrees of the Scottish Rite. It says, "Lucifer, the Son of the Morning! Is it he who bears the Light, and with its splendors intolerable blinds feeble, sensual, or selfish souls? Doubt it not!"
Go ahead, say it. A-ha! There is is! Satan worship, just as plain as day! Because everybody knows that Lucifer is Satan. There is, however a problem flogging Pike over talking about Lucifer, and it got lost in translation.
Lucifer shows up in the old testament in Isaiah 14:12: "How are thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!" Thats the only reference to Lucifer in the King James bible, and it is a Latin name, not a Hebrew one.
The poetic King James Version of the holy bible was translated and published in 1611. It was translated into English not from the original Hebrew text but from the Catholic Vulgate Latin texts that had been authorized by St. Jerome in the fourth century. Unfortunately, not starting with the original Hebrew texts created a few translation problems.
According to biblical scholars, the original text of the 14th chapter of Isaiah is not about a fallen angel, but about a fallen Babylonian king who had persecuted the Israelites. Satan is never mentioned in the chapter, by name or by inference about him. In, fact if you read all of Isaiah 14, and not just the one selected sentence, you'll see that he clearly refers to the subject of his wittings as an evil king, and most defiantly a man. The Hebrew texts referred to the king by his ceremonial title, Helal, son of Shahar, which is translated to mean, "Day Star, son of the Dawn."
In Latin, Lucifer is the name given by Roman astronomers to the Morning Star, the bright planet seen in the dawn sky. We know it as Venus. Lucifer actually comes from the Latin term lucem ferre, meaning "the bearer of light," sun. The symbolism was that the star called Lucifer was the herald that announced the arrival of the sun in the morning.
Unfortunately, St. Jerome mistranslated the king's flowery title "Day Star, son of the Dawn," into the Roman word Lucifer. Lucifer the morning star was translated by the error in translation by careless readers into a disobedient angel, cast out of heaven to rule eternally in hell. Jerome misunderstood that the term was actually describing the king's position as a Day Star, and that he had fallen from it. instead, it remained and appears to be a name, not a state of being.
We have John Milton's 1667 book of paradise Lost to thank for bringing Lucifer in the Western mind as a proper name for Satan. Theologians, writers, poets, and the occasional mystic have compounded the error far beyond anything in the single reference in Isaiah, and Lucifer has become just another moniker for Satan, the devil, and paradoxically, the prince of Darkness.
Just as a side not, the New English Bible translates Isaiah 14:12 as: "How you have fallen from heaven, bright morning star..." Lucifer is nowhere to be found. And to get really obscure, the original Latin Vulgate texts used the term Lucifer many times to describe the Morning Star, or the "bearer of light."No matter what your Sunday-school teacher told you, no matter what they told you at a vacation bible school, no matter what Milton wrote in paradise Lost, the Lucifer referred to in Isaiah 14 - the only reference to Lucifer in the King James Bible - is not Satan.
Okay, so this Lucifer stuff is so obscure, why did Pike put it in his book, knowing full well that most Christians believe that Lucifer is Satan anyway? As Pike's passage goes on, he is plainly saying how odd it is that the Prince of Darkness is called by that name that means "bearer of light". Again Morals and Dogma is a massive book that is very concerned with tracing where cultural and religious ideas came from. Pike was trying to tell a rough, and not especially well-educated, population to search for the origins of customs and rituals, because he truly felt that a deeper understanding of what came before made a man more religious and contemplative.
And honestly there was a certain amount of intellectual showing off going on too. If there wasn't, his book would be about one-third of its length and weight.
Just so you know, the terms Lucifer, and Luciferian do not appear in any recognized ritual or lecture of Freemasonry, including the Scottish Rite rituals written by Albert Pike. He was a devout Christian, and his own beliefs would certainly classify him today in the born-again category of Christianity - the very people who frequently accuse him of being a Satan worshiper.