Master Mason (Freemasonry)

Master Mason is the third and highest of the three Craft degrees of Freemasonry, conferred after Entered Apprentice and Fellow Craft. Holding it is the standard entry requirement for the appendant bodies that confer further degrees, including the York Rite's Chapter, Council and Commandery, and the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite's Lodge of Perfection, Chapter of Rose Croix, Council of Kadosh and Consistory. In that sense Master Mason functions as a gateway degree for the whole further landscape of organized Freemasonry rather than only as the top of the basic Lodge sequence.

Freemasonry's own literature is emphatic that this structural role does not make anything beyond Master Mason a higher rank in Masonic standing. Everything conferred by the York Rite, the Scottish Rite or any other appendant body is described as an addition to Craft membership, not a promotion past it; a thirty third degree Scottish Rite Mason remains, in Craft terms, a Master Mason who has also received further degrees elsewhere.

The historical scholarship on early organized Freemasonry, tracing from the 1717 founding of the Grand Lodge of England, situates the settled three degree Craft system, with Master Mason as its capstone, as a development of the first half of the eighteenth century, arrived at gradually rather than fixed from the outset, alongside the broader eighteenth century politics that shaped how organized Freemasonry took its modern form.

Master Mason is publicly associated, across virtually every general account of Freemasonry, with a legend concerning Hiram Abiff, the master builder of Solomon's Temple in the Craft's own symbolic history. This narrative, its broad outline and its central themes of fidelity and loss, is discussed openly in encyclopedic and scholarly treatments of Masonic symbolism, distinct from the specific words and staging a Lodge uses to confer the degree itself.

The trowel is the working tool most consistently associated with Master Mason in published Masonic reference literature, following the pattern of the twenty four inch gauge and common gavel for Entered Apprentice and the level, plumb and square for Fellow Craft: a real tool from the operative stonemason's trade, given a moral reading as part of the degree's publicly taught symbolism.

Because Master Mason is the degree every higher Masonic body requires as a prerequisite, its symbolism, the Hiram narrative above all, is the most widely reproduced in general literature about Freemasonry, appearing in popular histories and encyclopedias far more often than the comparatively narrower symbolism of any single appendant degree built on top of it.