The Order of the Amaranth is a fraternal and charitable order for Master Masons and the women of their families, who meet together as equals. Its local bodies are called Courts, and it takes its name and much of its pageantry from a short-lived order of knights and ladies founded by Queen Christina of Sweden in the seventeenth century. Few branches of the Masonic family bring husbands and wives together as fully: in many Courts married couples serve side by side in office, attend together and share in the Order’s charitable work.
The Order is directed by the Supreme Council, Order of the Amaranth Inc., based in the United States. It also works in Canada, England, Scotland, the Philippines and Australia.
Origins: a Swedish queen’s order
On 6 January 1653 Queen Christina of Sweden founded the Order of Amarante (the Amaranth) for the ladies and knights of her court. Mackey’s Encyclopedia of Freemasonry describes it as a small chivalric order of thirty-one members: fifteen knights, fifteen ladies and the Queen herself as Grand Mistress. Its badge was two interlaced letters A, one of them inverted, within a crown of laurel, with the Italian motto Dolce nella memoria (“sweet in memory”), and it held its annual festival at Epiphany. The Order’s own tradition builds its story around Lady Amarantha, a beautiful, virtuous and gifted lady of Christina’s court. The royal order did not outlive its founder’s reign; it faded after Christina gave up the throne in 1654, and it had no connection with Freemasonry. (A separate Swedish society called the Grand Order of the Amaranth was formed in 1760 and still exists, but it too is unrelated to Masonry.)
How the Masonic Order was formed
The modern Order began in 1860, when James B. Taylor, a prominent Mason of Newark, New Jersey, took Queen Christina’s order as his model and reshaped its ceremonies and language for a Masonic setting. Taylor’s work was taken up by Robert Macoy of New York. Born in Ireland in 1816, Macoy was a printer and Masonic publisher who served as Deputy Grand Master of New York and had already organised Rob Morris’s Order of the Eastern Star into a working body in 1868. On 14 June 1873 a Supreme Council of the Amaranth was organised in New York City with Macoy as Supreme Patron and Morris as Supreme Recorder. (Mackey’s encyclopedia gives the year as 1883, but 1873 is the date the Order itself uses.)
Macoy planned the Amaranth as the top tier of a wider “Rite of Adoption”, a system of three degrees under one governing body:
- the Eastern Star degree;
- the Queen of the South degree;
- the Amaranth degree, the third and highest.
For decades a candidate had to belong to the Eastern Star before being admitted to the Amaranth. The ceremonies were rewritten in 1915, and in 1921 the Order voted to drop the Eastern Star requirement, so that the two became fully independent. Membership has since been drawn directly from Master Masons and their female relatives. Taylor’s ceremonies, revised over the years, remain the basis of the work used today.
Who may join?
Members must be at least 18 and believe in God; the Order is not a religious body, and many faiths are represented in it. Men must be Master Masons, a description that includes Royal Arch Masons. Women qualify through a Masonic relationship: wives, widows, mothers, grandmothers, daughters, step-daughters, legally adopted daughters, granddaughters, great-granddaughters, sisters, half-sisters, aunts and nieces of Master Masons are all eligible. So are young women who have served actively in the Order of the Rainbow for Girls or Job’s Daughters, usually for more than three years. A woman without any of these links may be sponsored by two Master Masons in good standing.
Inside the Court women members are addressed as “Honored Lady” and men as “Sir Knight”, a reminder of the Order’s courtly origins.
How the Order is organised
The Order works at three levels. A local Court, properly a Subordinate Court, is presided over by a woman elected as Royal Matron, advised and escorted by an elected Royal Patron. With them serve an Associate Matron and Associate Patron, a Secretary, a Treasurer, a Conductress and Associate Conductress, a Prelate, a Historian, two Marshals, a Musician, a Standard Bearer, a Warder and Sentinel at the doors, a board of Trustees and four “Ladies of the Square” named Truth, Faith, Wisdom and Charity. Each Court has its own rules and by-laws and meets monthly, and its officers are elected or appointed every year; trustees serve three-year terms.
The Courts of a state or country form a Grand Court, led by a Grand Royal Matron and Grand Royal Patron, which meets annually to report on the year’s work and install new officers. Above them is the Supreme Council, headed by the Supreme Royal Matron and Supreme Royal Patron and governed by a Supreme Constitution that also lays down rules for the Grand and Subordinate Courts. Courts in places without a Grand Court report directly to the Supreme Council.
Teachings and symbols
The Order describes its purpose as social and philanthropic. Its teachings remind members of their duties to God, to their country and to their fellow beings, and ask them to live by the Golden Rule and by the four virtues of the Order, “Truth, Faith, Wisdom and Charity”, which are set out on the square. Mackey’s encyclopedia describes the ceremonial work as military in character, with charity as the object of its instruction. Members often call the Order a gem of the Masonic family, because it lets Masons and their families practise the principles of Freemasonry together: friendship, love of humanity, patriotism and service.
Members are recognised by the Order’s emblem: a crown and sword, symbols of royalty and power, set within a wreath of amaranth and tied with a red bow bearing the initials “O of A”. The amaranth, whose Greek name means “unfading”, keeps its colour long after it is cut, and since ancient times it has stood for immortality. The evergreen leaves of the wreath carry the same meaning for members.
Webmaster’s Note: The ‘belief in immortality’ does not mean the human body is immortal but rather the soul is immortal. Other phrases also include ‘everlasting life’ with the same meaning relative to the soul.
Charity
To its early members the Order stood for building on a foundation of truth, faith, wisdom and charity. Members today see it as a challenge to build on those foundations: offering friendship to anyone in distress and serving others. In 1979 the Supreme Council set up the Amaranth Diabetes Foundation to concentrate its giving on one cause. Working with the American Diabetes Association, which selects the researchers, the foundation has given more than US$19 million in research grants, and each year’s total is presented at the annual Supreme Council session. Grand Courts and individual Courts choose their own causes as well. In Australia these have included the Royal Flying Doctor Service, Care Flight, Cure for Life and the Heart Foundation, as well as local hospitals, and members also give their time freely wherever help is needed.
The Order in Australia
When Freemason NSW & ACT profiled the Order, it had seven Courts in New South Wales, two in Victoria and one in Tasmania, all under the Grand Court of New South Wales Inc., and three Courts in Queensland under the Grand Court of Queensland. Royal Victoria Court No. 1 in Victoria celebrated its eightieth birthday in January 2026, and Endeavour Court No. 2 at Mornington was named after the replica of Captain Cook’s Endeavour, which happened to be sailing up Port Phillip Bay when its founders met. According to that profile no regalia is required, the joining fee was $10 and annual dues were from about $20.
Interested in joining?
Contact the Grand Secretary in your jurisdiction, or visit one of the websites below:
– https://amaranth.joinshare.me/ (Order of the Amaranth in Australia)
– https://www.facebook.com/AmaranthAustralia/
– https://amaranth.org/ (Supreme Council)
– https://grandlodge.ph/supreme-council-order-amaranth
– https://www.amaranthct.org/about-the-order-of-the-amaranth
– https://glky.org/home-basic/related-organizations/order-of-the-amaranth-inc-of-kentucky/
– http://www.flamaranth.org/
Sources:
Albert G. Mackey, An Encyclopædia of Freemasonry and its Kindred Sciences, entries “Amaranth” and “Amaranth, Order of the”; revised edition, entries “Amaranth, Order of the” and “Macoy, Robert”
Supreme Council, Order of the Amaranth Inc., “About the Order”: amaranth.org
Order of the Amaranth in Australia: amaranth.joinshare.me
Wikipedia, “Order of the Amaranth”
Credit (original 2022 page): Freemason NSW & ACT, “Other Orders” (issuu)