Master of the Royal Secret (Scottish Rite)

Master of the Royal Secret, called Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret in the Rite's Northern Masonic Jurisdiction in the United States, is the thirty second degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite and the highest degree ordinarily conferred by petition, closing the Consistory body. It follows the thirtieth degree, Knight Kadosh, and represents the completion of the Rite's twenty nine numbered degrees that a Mason works through in the ordinary course of Scottish Rite membership.

Only the honorary thirty third degree, Inspector General Honorary, sits above it, and unlike every degree beneath it, that thirty third degree is not conferred by petition at all. This makes Master of the Royal Secret the practical ceiling of Scottish Rite advancement for the overwhelming majority of members, since the thirty third is reserved and limited rather than available to anyone who completes the sequence.

The jurisdictional naming difference, Master of the Royal Secret in the Southern Jurisdiction's usage against Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret in the Northern, reflects the broader pattern of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite's organization in the United States into two separate governing bodies, Northern and Southern Masonic Jurisdictions, each administering its own version of the degree sequence with minor variations in title and working even where the underlying numbered structure, four through thirty two plus the honorary thirty third, is shared.

Master of the Royal Secret and Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret name the same thirty second degree under the Scottish Rite's two American governing bodies, the Southern and Northern Masonic Jurisdictions respectively, a naming difference documented openly in general reference works on the Rite's organizational history rather than treated as obscure or specialist knowledge.

Published Scottish Rite literature describes the degree as the practical summit of the Rite's petitioned sequence, closing the Consistory body and completing all twenty nine numbered degrees, four through thirty two, that a member works through by petition. This structural fact, that nothing above it is petitioned at all, is itself among the most consistently published details about the degree.

General accounts of the Scottish Rite's American organizational split into Northern and Southern Jurisdictions, a nineteenth century division that produced these parallel titles for the thirty second degree, situate Master of the Royal Secret within that broader, publicly documented history of how the Rite came to be governed by two separate bodies in the United States.

That two governing bodies confer what is, in substance, the same culminating petitioned degree under two different names is itself the kind of structural detail general Scottish Rite reference works present prominently, since it explains a naming inconsistency a reader might otherwise take for two distinct degrees.