Select Master And The Council's Cryptic Degrees

Select Master is a degree of the York Rite's Council body, the Cryptic Masons, conferred after Royal Master and generally treated as the capstone of the Council sequence in most jurisdictions, though some confer an additional Super Excellent Master degree beyond it. Council membership itself follows completion of the Chapter degrees, including Royal Arch Mason, placing Select Master well into the York Rite's overall sequence rather than near its beginning.

The Council's degrees are called Cryptic because their shared narrative setting involves a hidden vault, a concealment and recovery theme that extends the Royal Arch's own preoccupation with something lost from an earlier era of the Craft's history. Select Master develops that theme further within the Council's own sequence, a structural relationship documented in general Masonic reference literature on how the York Rite's three bodies build on one another.

Jurisdictional variation is more visible at this level of the York Rite than in the basic Craft degrees: not every jurisdiction confers Select Master in the same order relative to Royal Master, and the optional Super Excellent Master degree that some Councils add beyond it has no equivalent in others, a pattern typical of the York Rite's appendant bodies once a Mason has moved past the more uniformly worked Craft degrees and into the Chapter and Council sequences.