20th° Degree – Master of the Symbolic Lodge

The 20th degree turns from the Revelation imagery of the previous degrees to the Craft lodge itself. It is a degree about leadership: what it means to preside over Masons, to teach them, and to set them an example. Its ceremony is admired for its simplicity, and its message is that a Master leads first of all by the way he lives.

The degree at a glance

• Number and title: 20th degree, Master of the Symbolic Lodge in the Southern Jurisdiction (S.J.). Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma uses the older title, Grand Master of All Symbolic Lodges, which is still used in France and Canada alongside “Master ad Vitam” (Master for life). England and Wales call it Venerable Grand Master.
• Body: the Council of Kadosh in the S.J. In the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction (N.M.J.) it is conferred in the Consistory as “Master ad Vitam”, with an entirely different drama in which Benedict Arnold seeks a pardon for his treason, and the lesson that Masonry casts no mantle of charity over treason.
• Setting: a symbolic lodge room, without historical scenery; the second part of the ceremony brings together great lawgivers of the ancient world.
• Origins: Mackey notes that the old ritual carried a legend of Christian Masons who left the Holy Land after the destruction of the Temple by Titus and settled at Kilwinning in Scotland, which led him to think the degree came from the Templar-inspired system associated with the Chevalier Ramsay.

The lesson

Hutchens explains that over the years many changes have been allowed in the way Scottish Rite degrees are staged, but the Rubric, the official guide to permitted modifications, singles this one out for protection. It calls the 20th degree a pure classical drama and instructs that “Nothing should be added, and nothing subtracted.” Its power comes from very plain means: candles, squares, triangles and pillars, the oldest symbols of the Craft.

The room is hung in blue and gold, the colours of the cloud in which God appeared to Moses. Three columns stand in a triangle at its centre, inscribed Truth in the East, Justice in the West and Toleration in the South, and these are taught as the three great principles that support the fraternity. Nine candles, arranged in three groups of three, form a picture of the 47th Problem of Euclid, the theorem of Pythagoras. As the new Master lights them one by one, they become the nine “great lights” he is expected to carry and spread: veneration, charity, generosity, heroism, honour, patriotism, justice, toleration and truth.

The tracing board takes the lesson further. It shows an octagon, the shape halfway between the square of earthly life and the circle of the spiritual, surrounded by squares and triangles bearing the initials of twenty-nine Masonic virtues, among them prudence, temperance, firmness, fidelity, forgiveness, kindness, gratitude to God and love of mankind. At the top stand the greatest of them all: truth, justice and toleration. The path from the square to the circle is the path from the earthly to the perfect, and the Master is meant to walk it in front of his brethren.

In the second part of the ceremony the hall is brilliantly lit and the candidate hears from nine sages and lawgivers: Zoroaster, Manu, Hermes, Confucius, Moses, Hammurabi, Numa, Alfred the Great and Socrates. Each speaks of justice, mercy, moderation or honest judgment, and together they warn against hasty and uncharitable verdicts. The idea is that the Master of a lodge stands in a long line of lawgivers and must judge as fairly as the best of them.

Duties of the degree

A Bridge to Light gives the duties of a Master of the Symbolic Lodge in two short lines:

• to dispense light and knowledge;
• to practise the Masonic virtues both in and out of the lodge.

The lessons that accompany them are that truth, justice and toleration are indispensable to anyone who presides over a lodge, and that example is the best method of teaching ever found. Pike adds a special charge: to help restore Masonry to its “primitive purity”, so that it is never an object of ridicule nor a humiliation to its candidates, and never to let a meeting close without reminding the brethren of the virtues shown on the tracing board.

Symbols and regalia

The apron is yellow, bordered and lined with sky blue. In the centre are three equilateral triangles, one inside another, with the initial letters of the nine great lights in their corners. In the middle of the innermost triangle is the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter Hebrew name of God, written in Phoenician characters, crossed by the Hebrew words for “Let there be light” from Genesis 1:3.

The cordon is a broad ribbon of yellow and sky blue, or two ribbons, one of each colour, worn crossing each other. The jewel is gold, like the triangles on the apron, and carries the same words and letters. Red gloves complete the regalia shown here.

Hutchens lists the degree’s important symbols as the triangle, the square, the octagon, the candles, the three pillars and the right-angled triangle of Pythagoras. The ancients considered the 3, 4, 5 right triangle the most beautiful of all, and the number nine, three times three, was for them a perfect number.

Reflections

Pike’s lecture for this degree is unusually direct and practical. On the meaning of all the Craft’s stories he writes:

“We teach the truth of none of the legends we recite. They are to us but parables and allegories, involving and enveloping Masonic instruction; and vehicles of useful and interesting information.”

Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma, 20° Grand Master of All Symbolic Lodges

He closes with a list of what a Master should urge on his brethren: to love one another, to tolerate all religious and political opinions, to put the sage above the soldier or the prince, and to make sure that “their professions and practice, their teachings and conduct, do always agree.” His motto for the degree is equally plain: “Do that which thou oughtest to do; let the result be what it will.”

Rex Hutchens turns all of this into a single question that applies to every Mason, whether or not he ever sits in the Master’s chair: is your behaviour the same both in and out of the lodge?

Please view the video on the left, for a more detailed explanation of the 20th° Degree.