Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite

The Scottish Rite is one of the two great systems of additional Masonic degrees, and its name is one of the more misleading in the fraternal world.

Not Scottish

The rite took its modern organised form with the founding of a Supreme Council at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1801, drawing on earlier French degree systems, the ecossais or Scottish degrees, whose name it inherited. It is not Scottish in origin and was assembled largely in France and the United States. It offers a graded series of ceremonies beyond the three basic degrees of the craft lodge, reaching to the thirty-third, and membership requires that a man first be a Master Mason.

Degrees as instruction

The degrees are not ranks of authority so much as a sequence of dramatised moral and philosophical instruction, drawn from many traditions and elaborated at length in the writings attached to the rite. Organised under governing Supreme Councils in different countries, it is one of the most widespread Masonic systems in the world, and the thirty-third degree, conferred by invitation, is honorary rather than a step every member takes.

Albert Pike is the reason the Scottish Rite looks the way it does. As Grand Commander of the Southern Jurisdiction from 1859 until his death in 1891, he rewrote the degrees, drawing heavily on comparative religion and on the material available to a nineteenth century autodidact, and published his commentary as Morals and Dogma in 1871. It was given to every member of the Southern Jurisdiction for over a century, which means an enormous number of people owned a book that very few finished.

Two jurisdictions divide the United States, Southern from Charleston and Northern from 1813, and they use different degree names and rituals above a certain point. The thirty-third degree is honorary and conferred by invitation. None of this outranks a craft lodge, a point the Rite itself makes repeatedly and which the numbering defeats every time.

The Rite's worst reputation comes from a fabrication. In the 1890s Leo Taxil published an elaborate account of a Masonic inner cult called the Palladium, with satanic rites and a letter in which Pike declared Lucifer to be the god of Masonry. In 1897 Taxil called a press conference and announced that he had invented all of it to embarrass the Catholic anti-Masonic campaign that had been quoting him. The confession is on the record. The Pike letter is still quoted today as though it were genuine.