Secret Master (Scottish Rite)

Secret Master is the fourth degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite and the first conferred beyond the three Craft degrees, opening the Rite's Lodge of Perfection. The Scottish Rite numbers its degrees four through thirty two, plus an honorary thirty third, continuing directly from the Master Mason degree a candidate already holds rather than repeating the Craft sequence in a different form.

The Rite organizes its twenty nine numbered degrees, four through thirty two, into four bodies conferred in sequence: the Lodge of Perfection, which Secret Master opens; the Chapter of Rose Croix; the Council of Kadosh; and the Consistory, which closes with the thirty second degree before the separate, honorary thirty third. This four body structure is the organizational backbone of the entire Rite, and Secret Master's place as the very first degree beyond the Craft gives it a threshold role comparable to Entered Apprentice's place at the start of the basic Lodge sequence.

The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite itself took its settled modern form, including this degree numbering, over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, developing out of an earlier and less standardized landscape of high degree Freemasonry in France and its colonies before the Rite's organization into fixed jurisdictions consolidated the sequence into the form still worked today.

Secret Master opens the Lodge of Perfection, the first of the Scottish Rite's four bodies, a span of fourteen degrees, the fourth through the seventeenth, whose general thematic content, moral and philosophical instruction built around the historical figure of Solomon and the building of the Temple, is described at length in general reference works on the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite.

Published Scottish Rite literature consistently frames the Lodge of Perfection as an extension of the Craft's own Temple-building symbolism into a much longer sequence than the three Craft degrees allow, Secret Master's opening position giving it the same threshold role within this fourteen degree span that Entered Apprentice holds at the start of the Craft system itself.

As with every Masonic degree, the publicly available material covers the Lodge of Perfection's general thematic content and structural position, not the specific ceremonial detail the Scottish Rite transmits only to its own members during conferral.

General Scottish Rite literature describes the fourteen degree Lodge of Perfection as, by a wide margin, the longest of the Rite's four bodies, a structural fact that situates Secret Master's opening position at the head of the single largest block of degrees a candidate works through.