The Origins of the Scottish Rite

The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite is today the most widely practised Masonic rite in the world, yet it is one of the youngest. Its 33-degree form dates only from 1801, and its roots lie not in Scotland but in the “Scottish” high degrees of eighteenth-century France and the French Caribbean. This page traces that story, from the first Scots Master lodges of the 1730s to the founding of the first Supreme Council in Charleston, South Carolina, and the long influence of Albert Pike.

How the Scottish Rite teaches

Before turning to history, it helps to understand the Rite’s method. Its degrees are moral plays. Each one uses drama, allegory and symbol to raise a question of ethics, philosophy or religion, and leaves the member to think it through. To do this the rituals borrow freely from many traditions: the Hebrew scriptures and Christianity, but also the religions and philosophies of Persia, India, Egypt, Greece and the medieval world. That breadth can surprise a first-time reader, but it is deliberate. Freemasonry is not a religion and does not ask anyone to adopt the beliefs it describes; it uses them as teaching material, and it welcomes men of any faith who believe in a Supreme Being. As Rex Hutchens puts it in A Bridge to Light, the teachings of the Rite are “an organized and coherent system of doctrine relating to the perfectibility of human conduct”.

Why “Scottish”?

The name is something of a puzzle, because the Rite was not founded in Scotland. It comes from the French word Écossais, “Scottish”, which in the mid-eighteenth century was attached to a whole family of new degrees worked above the three degrees of the Craft lodge. Albert Mackey counted dozens of degrees with Écossais in their title and noted that most of them dealt with the same theme: how the true Word, lost at the death of Hiram, was preserved.

Why “Scottish” became the fashionable label is still debated. Nineteenth-century French writers such as Jean-Marie Ragon and Emmanuel Rebold claimed that the high degrees had been created in Edinburgh and carried to France by Jacobite exiles loyal to the Stuart kings. Modern historians regard that story as a myth, with no evidence behind it. A more modest and better-documented starting point lies in London.

Scots Masters and the high degrees

The earliest record of a “Scots Master” or “Scotch Master” degree comes from a lodge meeting at the Devil Tavern, Temple Bar, London, in 1733. Similar records follow from Bath in 1735 and from the French lodge St George de l’Observance No. 49 at Covent Garden in 1736. These appear to have been special meetings, probably held for visiting Masons, rather than the regular work of the lodges, and it is not known what ceremony was used. One secret society manuscript from the 1740s to 1760s, the so-called Copiale cipher, says frankly that “the rank of a Scottish master is an entirely new invention”.

Whatever its origin, the Scots Master idea flourished in France. During the middle decades of the century French Masonry produced a remarkable number of new degrees, many of them chivalric or mystical in tone. Some were short-lived; others were gathered into systems or “rites”. Two lodges working a degree with the same name might use very different ceremonies, and much of the process is poorly documented, which is why the early history of the high degrees remains a field of active research. Bordeaux was one of the most important centres of this activity.

Estienne Morin and the Order of the Royal Secret

The key figure in the next stage is Estienne (Stephen) Morin, a French merchant who had been involved in high-degree Masonry in Bordeaux since 1744. In 1747 he founded an Écossais lodge at Le Cap Français, on the north coast of the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. On 27 August 1761 he received a patent in Paris naming him Grand Inspector for the New World. The original patent seems to have covered only the Craft lodges, and later copies appear to have been enlarged, probably by Morin himself, to strengthen his authority over the high degrees.

Back in the Caribbean from 1762 or 1763, Morin used that patent to spread the high degrees through the West Indies and into North America. The system he propagated had twenty-five degrees, rising to the Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret. Older histories, including Mackey’s Encyclopedia, said it had been created in Paris around 1758 by a body called the Council of Emperors of the East and West and named it the “Rite of Perfection”. Current scholarship holds instead that Morin himself compiled the twenty-five degrees, and prefers the name “Order of the Royal Secret” or “Rite of the Royal Secret”, which is what the founders of the Scottish Rite called it. Morin settled in Kingston, Jamaica, where he created a Grand Chapter of his rite in 1770, and he died there in 1771.

From the Caribbean to Charleston

Morin’s most energetic assistant was Henry Andrew Francken, a Dutch-born naturalised Frenchman whom he appointed Deputy Grand Inspector General. Francken copied out the rituals in manuscript books (one dated 1771 is the oldest known) and carried the degrees north. On 26 December 1767 he chartered the Ineffable Lodge of Perfection at Albany, New York, the first time the degrees of the 4th to the 14th were worked in the British colonies. In New York he also passed the degrees to the merchant Moses Michael Hays, who in 1781 appointed several Deputy Inspectors General of his own.

One of them, Isaac Da Costa, founded a Sublime Grand Lodge of Perfection in Charleston, South Carolina, in February 1783. Other bodies followed, and in 1796 French refugees from the revolution in Saint-Domingue formed a Consistory of Princes of the Royal Secret in the city. By the end of the century Charleston was the main surviving centre of the high degrees in North America.

The first Supreme Council, 1801

On 31 May 1801, John Mitchell and Frederick Dalcho opened the Supreme Council of the Thirty-third Degree for the United States of America at Shepheard’s Tavern in Charleston. It administered thirty-three degrees: Morin’s twenty-five plus eight more taken from the continental high degrees, with the 33rd, Sovereign Grand Inspector General, at the summit. Mackey, writing in the nineteenth century, remarked that the Supreme Council’s own archives show only the twenty-five degrees being recognised until then, so the larger system seems to have appeared all at once with the new council.

The founders justified the change by appeal to the “Grand Constitutions of 1786”, said to have been ratified in Berlin under Frederick the Great. Many older books, including the Brief History of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of 1890, repeat that account as fact. Modern historians regard the Constitutions’ claimed origin as unreliable, and Frederick’s involvement is now treated as legend rather than history. The Supreme Council later honoured eleven men associated with its founding in 1801–1802 as the “Eleven Gentlemen of Charleston”, and on 4 December 1802 it announced itself to the Masonic world in a circular “throughout the two hemispheres”. The motto Ordo ab Chao, “order out of chaos”, appears for what is probably the first time in a patent of 1 February 1802 issued by the Comte de Grasse-Tilly, one of those eleven.

The Charleston council is the Supreme Council of the Southern Jurisdiction, still known as the “Mother Supreme Council of the World”. On 5 August 1813 it chartered a second council, for the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction, whose descendants govern the Rite in fifteen north-eastern and mid-western states. De Grasse-Tilly took the Rite to France, where a Supreme Council was formed in 1804.

Albert Pike and the shaping of the Rite

The new Rite grew modestly until the anti-Masonic movement of 1826 to the early 1840s, set off by the Morgan affair, brought Masonic activity in much of the United States almost to a halt. When the Southern Jurisdiction began to rebuild, its Grand Secretary General, Albert Mackey, turned to a remarkable recruit. Albert Pike (1809–1891), a lawyer, journalist, poet and soldier from Arkansas, received the 4th to the 32nd degrees from Mackey in Charleston in March 1853 and soon set to work on the rituals.

Pike’s first full revision, finished in 1857 and nicknamed the “Magnum Opus” by Mackey, was never officially adopted, but it became the basis of everything that followed. He was elected to the Supreme Council in 1858 and became its Grand Commander in January 1859, an office he held until his death on 2 April 1891. His revision of the degrees was complete by 1884. In 1871 he published Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, a long series of lectures on the degrees that, according to Hutchens, was traditionally given to Southern Jurisdiction candidates on receiving the 14th degree until 1974. Hutchens describes Pike’s degrees as a portrait of how the ideals and institutions of modern society grew slowly and painfully out of the religions, philosophies and persecutions of the past.

Pike’s rituals are still the foundation of Southern Jurisdiction work. In 1995 the Supreme Council decided to produce a standard revision of them, the Revised Standard Pike Ritual, which simplified Pike’s Victorian prose, removed repetition and, among other changes, reversed the order of the 27th and 28th degrees. The Northern Masonic Jurisdiction went further, rewriting and renaming many of its degrees in 2004 and 2006, which is why degree names and stories can differ between the two American jurisdictions.

How the 33 degrees are organised

In the United States a man joins the Scottish Rite after becoming a Master Mason in a Craft lodge, and the Rite’s degrees build on those first three. In the Southern Jurisdiction, which these pages follow, the degrees are worked by four bodies, with the 33rd conferred by the Supreme Council itself:

1. Lodge of Perfection, 4th to 14th degree
2. Chapter of Rose Croix, 15th to 18th degree
3. Council of Kadosh, 19th to 30th degree
4. Consistory, 31st to 32nd degree
5. Honours: the Knight Commander of the Court of Honour (KCCH), a Southern Jurisdiction honour for 32° Masons, and the 33rd degree, conferred by the Supreme Council for outstanding service

The 32nd is the highest degree a member can work towards; the KCCH and the 33rd are honours that cannot be applied for. Elsewhere the arrangement varies. In England and Wales, where the Rite is usually called the Ancient and Accepted Rite or simply “Rose Croix”, chapters confer the degrees up to the 18th and the higher degrees are reserved to the Supreme Council. In much of continental Europe and Latin America the Rite works all thirty-three degrees, including its own versions of the first three.