22nd° Degree – Knight Royal Axe, Prince of Libanus

The 22nd degree is the Scottish Rite’s tribute to honest work. Its setting is the forests of Mount Lebanon, which supplied the cedar for the great building projects of the Bible, and its hero is a knight who must put aside his rank and pick up the tools of a carpenter before he can be admitted. The lesson is simple and still pointed: labour is not a curse or a disgrace, but the mission of every human being.

The degree at a glance

• Number and title: 22nd degree, Knight of the Royal Axe, or Prince of Libanus (“Libanus” is the Latin form of Lebanon). The Northern Masonic Jurisdiction (N.M.J.), England and Wales, France and Canada use the shorter Prince of Libanus.
• Body: the Council of Kadosh in the Southern Jurisdiction (S.J.); the Consistory in the N.M.J., where the degree introduces a Brother to a group of woodcutters who test whether he will set aside his rank and status, and teaches that honest work is honourable in the sight of God and man.
• Setting: the Middle Ages, at the time of the Crusades. The candidate comes as a German, or Prussian, knight who has travelled to Mount Lebanon.
• Bodies: Hutchens notes that bodies of this degree are traditionally called Colleges, after the legend at its heart.

The lesson

Hutchens stresses that, despite its references to King Solomon’s Temple, the degree does not return to the legend of Hiram Abif. Its story is a legend of craftsmen. According to the ritual, the crusaders learned the degree from the Druze of Mount Lebanon, a close-knit religious community known for keeping its doctrines private, who were said to have preserved the “Colleges of Artificers”, the guilds of craftsmen that tradition traces to ancient Rome. The ritual goes further still, suggesting that the Roman colleges may themselves have come from the people of Lebanon, who felled the cedars for Noah’s Ark, the Ark of the Covenant and Solomon’s Temple, and who shared with the Israelites the ancient mysteries in which Hiram, King of Tyre, and Hiram Abif were both initiated. Hutchens is clear that this is legend, but it explains the degree’s name, its workshop setting and much of its symbolism. Some scholars, he adds, have seen parallels between the old craft colleges and Freemasonry.

The ceremony takes place in two rooms. The first is a plain carpenter’s workshop on the mountain. The second is the Council Room of the Round Table, hung in red for zeal, with a round table at its centre to show, as at King Arthur’s court, that everyone who sits there is equal. The candidate arrives expecting to be admitted on the strength of his birth and his Masonic rank, and is told that this is not enough. He must take off the marks of his rank, work alongside the woodcutters and earn their unanimous approval. Felling the cedar, in this degree, means bringing an end to privileges that come from birth rather than effort.

Having shown that he respects labour, he is taught the meaning of the carpenter’s tools. The saw stands for patience and determination, because those who work for the improvement of the world must be content to advance slowly. The plane, which smooths away unevenness, stands for Masonry removing the prejudices of ignorance. The axe stands for the march of civilisation, and for the Mason’s task of cutting down the poisonous trees of intolerance, bigotry, superstition, uncharitableness and idleness so that the light of truth and reason can reach the human mind.

The cedar itself is a rich symbol. Tall, fragrant, strong and resistant to rot, it was prized in the ancient world for masts, beams and pillars, and the Bible calls it “the glory of Lebanon”. Like the Tree of Life in the 19th degree, it calls to mind growth, endurance and renewal.

Duties of the degree

A Bridge to Light gives the Prince of Libanus a single duty:

• to respect labour for its own sake, and to work.

Its lesson is just as brief: work is the mission of man. Pike’s lecture expands on this. Daily work, honestly done, is blessed by God; employers who understand the dignity of even the simplest labour will not oppress those who work for them; and, in Pike’s words, duty “evermore forbids us to be idle.”

Symbols and regalia

The apron is white, lined and bordered with purple. In the middle is a round table with mathematical instruments and unrolled plans on it. On the flap is a three-headed serpent: its body is idleness, and its heads are the three vices that idleness breeds, drunkenness, impurity and gambling. Hutchens remarks that these vices have ruined many young lives and brought great nations to decline.

The order is a broad ribbon in the colours of the rainbow, lined with purple. It may be worn as a collar or as a sash from right to left.

Webmaster’s note: The rainbow colours do NOT have anything to do with any political or gender movement such as LGBTQ rights etc… This regalia was developed well before any such type movement was even mentally conceived. The colours are purely spiritual and refer to the prince of Libanus. The regalia, just like everything else in Freemasonry, is NOT political or gender based at all, whatsoever.

The jewel, hanging from the collar, is a gold axe. Hutchens calls the axe the great tool of civilisation: under its blows the ancient forests gave way to farms, settled communities, laws and the arts, which is why the degree holds that the axe is nobler than the sword. Its head, handle and blade carry the initials of the people and places linked with the “holy enterprises” built from the cedars of Lebanon, from Noah and his sons, through Moses and the craftsmen of the Tabernacle, to Solomon and the rebuilders of the Second Temple. Red gloves complete the regalia shown here. The other symbols Hutchens lists are the cedars of Lebanon and the carpenter’s saw, plane and axe.

Reflections

Pike sums up the degree in one sentence:

“Sympathy with the great laboring classes, respect for labor itself, and resolution to do some good work in our day and generation, these are the lessons of this Degree, and they are purely Masonic.”

Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma, 22° Knight of the Royal Axe, or Prince of Libanus

He goes on to argue that “Masonry is the apotheosis of WORK”, that ploughmen, builders, inventors, scientists, poets and writers all stand on one common level, and that Masonry’s real task is to honour what he calls “the more extraordinary virtue of ordinary life”: the patience and quiet sacrifice of people whose daily toil is never celebrated.

Rex Hutchens closes with a question that every working person might ask: if a man finds self-respect in his work, does it matter how much prestige the world attaches to it?

Please view the video on the left, for a more detailed explanation of the 22nd° Degree.