17th° Degree – Knight of the East and West

The Knight of the East and West marks a turning point in the Scottish Rite. The degrees before it are built around the Temple of Solomon and the return from Babylon; this one leaves the Temple behind and draws its imagery from the Book of Revelation. Albert Pike called it the first of the “philosophical” degrees, and it opens a long enquiry into what the great religions and philosophies of the ancient world held in common.

The degree at a glance

• Number and title: 17th degree, Knight of the East and West. The title is used unchanged in the Southern Jurisdiction (S.J.), the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction (N.M.J.) and most other Supreme Councils.
• Body: the Chapter of Rose Croix. In the S.J. the Chapter works the 15th to 18th degrees; in the N.M.J. it works only the 17th and 18th, which are known there as the “philosophical” or “doctrinal” degrees.
• Setting: the world of John the Baptist and the Essenes by the Dead Sea, with scenes and language taken from the Revelation to St John.
• Place in the Rite: it prepares the ground for the 18th degree, Knight Rose Croix, which it immediately precedes.

The degree is older than the Scottish Rite itself. According to Mackey, the earliest rituals tied it to the Crusades: they told of knights returning from the Holy Land who took their vows in 1118, an obvious echo of the Knights Templar. A second legend explained the name. The Knights of the East were the Masons who stayed in the East after the first Temple was built, while the Knights of the East and West were those who travelled west, spread the Craft across Europe and came back during the Crusades to rejoin their brethren. Mackey took these stories as a sign that the degree grew out of the Templar-flavoured high degrees of eighteenth-century France. What has survived every revision is its apocalyptic character. The Scottish Rite N.M.J. notes that the first Chapter of Rose Croix in North America was formed in New York City in 1797, four years before the first Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite was opened at Charleston in 1801.

The lesson

Hutchens points out that, while most Scottish Rite ceremonies borrow from Scripture, the events and much of the language of this degree come directly from the Book of Revelation. Its central idea is the final victory of good over evil, of light over darkness and truth over error.

In the Southern Jurisdiction’s version, which follows Pike, the presiding officer represents John the Baptist, and the candidate is cast as a weary traveller who has crossed the desert and wanders by the shore of the Dead Sea looking for light. The traveller stands for the human soul, tired of empty speculation, and the Dead Sea for the philosophies of Egypt and Greece that offered little hope of eternal life. As in the initiations believed to have been practised by the Essenes, the candidate is symbolically purified by water and by fire, and then becomes a soldier against fanaticism, intolerance and bigotry.

The great book sealed with seven seals stays closed throughout. The opening of the seals and the sounding of the trumpets are presented in abbreviated form, and the degree gives them a Masonic reading: the locusts that plague the earth are ignorance, fanaticism and superstition, and the four destroying demons are bigotry, intolerance, ambition and selfishness. Truth, the Kingdom of God, is what remains when they are gone.

Hutchens takes care to explain why a degree so full of Christian imagery belongs in a Rite open to men of every faith. The symbols are borrowed to teach Masonic lessons, not to replace or reinterpret anyone’s religion, and each member is expected to keep and live the teachings of his own faith. In the N.M.J., which uses its own ritual, the degree follows a wanderer in search of truth and teaches through “the Book of Life” that loyalty to God is a man’s first allegiance and that the mistakes of the past must be learned from rather than repeated.

Duties of the degree

According to A Bridge to Light, a Knight of the East and West is charged:

• to work, to reflect and to pray;
• to hope, to trust and to believe;
• to teach the truths that are hidden in allegories and concealed by the symbols of Freemasonry.

The lesson Hutchens attaches to these duties is a sober one: a whole army of martyrs has given up their lives to prove their faith or to benefit humanity, and a Knight should be ready to lay his own life on the altar of God, friendship, country or humanity.

Symbols and regalia

The apron is yellow silk, lined and edged with crimson, the colours of the dawn. Its triangular shape stands for the Deity in His first three emanations, and in the centre is a gold Tetractys, ten Hebrew letters arranged in a triangle, representing the ten Sephiroth, or manifestations of God, on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

The cordons are two broad watered ribbons, as the pictures above show: a white one worn from right to left, crossed by a black one of the same width worn from left to right, from which the jewel hangs. White and black stand for the two principles of good and evil found in the dualist teachings of Zoroaster and Mani.

The jewel is a seven-sided medal, half gold and half silver or mother-of-pearl, for the sun and the moon. One side carries a star at each angle and, in the centre, a lamb lying on a book with seven seals. The other shows two crossed swords, points upward, resting on an even balance, with the Greek initials of the Seven Churches of Asia from Revelation 2 and 3 in the corners. Red gloves complete the regalia.

The chamber of the degree is seven-sided, and its seven columns are coloured red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Hutchens reads these as the rainbow around the angel’s head in Revelation 10, as the spectrum hidden in white light, and as the seven liberal arts and sciences of the Fellowcraft degree, since light is the classic symbol of knowledge. Other important symbols he lists are the East and the West, John the Baptist, the number seven and the vacant chair.

Reflections

Pike opens his long lecture for this degree with a passage that sets the tone for all the philosophical degrees that follow:

“In all time, truth has been hidden under symbols, and often under a succession of allegories: where veil after veil had to be penetrated before the true Light was reached, and the essential truth stood revealed.”

Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma, 17° Knight of the East and West

The lecture surveys the Zend-Avesta, the Vedas, Plato, Pythagoras and the scriptures of the Hebrews, and draws from them a few simple convictions: that God is one, just and good, and that light will in the end overcome darkness. Rex Hutchens adds a reminder about how the degree’s Christian symbols should be read:

“Such symbols are to be seen as analogies and not equivalencies.”

Rex R. Hutchens, A Bridge to Light

He leaves two questions for reflection. Can Masonry teach religion without being a religion? And what is the meaning of the vacant chair?

Please view the video on the left, for a more detailed explanation of the 17th° Degree.