Did the Masonic scholar Albert Pike really say that all Masons were secret followers of Lucifer?
No. In many anti-Masonic books you’ll see what is supposed to be a quotation from Pike, saying that all Masons of the “Higher Degrees” are secret worshipers of Lucifer. The historical fact is that those words were written in 1894, three years after Pike’s death. They were written by a notorious atheist and pornographer named Gabriel Jogand-Pages who was better known by his pen name, Leo Taxil. Taxil was engaged in an elaborate hoax to discredit the Church of Rome and made up the Pike quotation out of thin air. His purpose was to show that the Church had failed to recognize the “threat” posed by Freemasonry and was, therefore, headed by fools and incompetents. Taxil publicly admitted the hoax in 1897, but it had already been published by a man named Abel Clarin de la Rive, who took Taxil’s hoax at face value. Rive’s book, La Femme et l’Enfant dans la Franc-Maconnerie Universelle (Woman and Child in Universal Freemasonry), was quoted by Edith Starr Miller in 1933 in her book Occult Theoc
