The Knight of the Brazen Serpent is the 25th degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite and the third of the four “Mystery Degrees” worked in a Council of Kadosh. It takes its name from the bronze serpent that Moses raised on a pole in the wilderness, and it asks a demanding question: if a man is to be healed, forgiven and made better, how much of that work must he do himself? The degree’s answer is that each of us is responsible for remaking his own character, by honest repentance, real reform and a steady growth in knowledge.
The degree at a glance
- Body: Council of Kadosh (19°–30°), among the philosophical degrees that follow the Chapter of Rose Croix.
- Degree: 25°, Knight of the Brazen Serpent. The meeting is styled a “Synod”, from the Greek word for an assembly.
- Group: the third of the Mystery Degrees (23° to 26°), which study the ancient initiations of Egypt, Greece, Persia and elsewhere and the hope of immortality they taught.
- Setting today: in the Southern Jurisdiction’s Revised Standard Pike Ritual, a desert tent called the House of the Light, where Sufi masters receive an initiate named Idris.
- In the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction: the 25° is a different degree altogether, “Master of Achievement”, which uses the life of Benjamin Franklin to show the value of industry and a life well spent.
The lesson
The degree’s name comes from the account in Numbers 21. The Israelites, tired of their wandering and of the manna that fed them, turned on Moses and complained that they had been led out of Egypt only to die. Venomous serpents came among the camp, many died, and when the people repented Moses was told to set a serpent of brass on a pole; anyone who had been bitten could look at it and live. Centuries later the same bronze image was itself being worshipped, and King Hezekiah had it destroyed. Rex Hutchens draws several lessons from the story in A Bridge to Light: be grateful for what God has given, stay alert so that you neither corrupt nor are corrupted, and remember that faith joined with sound reason is the surest guide a person has.
Albert Pike, in the opening of his lecture in Morals and Dogma, calls this degree “both philosophical and moral”. It teaches that repentance alone is not enough; mercy and forgiveness are reached through reformation as well. It also explains a large family of Masonic symbols, especially those tied to the old and widespread legend of a death and a return to life, of which the story of Hiram Abif (Pike’s “Khir-Om Abi”) is one version and the Egyptian myth of Osiris, Isis and Horus another. Charles T. McClenachan’s Book of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite (1884) also presents the degree as a symbolic treatment of that universal legend. Its message, in Pike’s reading, is that the reign of darkness is temporary and that of light will be eternal.
Underneath this sits a picture of human nature. Man, the degree teaches, is made of three parts: the flesh, the soul and the intellect. Each needs attention. Duties to family and neighbour belong to the first; the soul, which the ancients believed came down from the heavens, is a spark of the divine; and the intellect is the faculty through which God’s voice can be heard in the mind and heart. Because the soul and mind can be cultivated, a person is never simply finished. Hutchens’ summary of the older ritual’s teaching is that “the destiny of man is to make or create himself”.
The degree has changed more than almost any other in the Rite. The early versions were Hebrew in character, with Moses, Aaron and Joshua as the principal figures and the candidate playing a traveller. Pike rewrote it entirely, moving the scene to Lebanon in the year 1450 and making the candidate a seeker who asks to be received among the Druze, a community famous for guarding its beliefs. Pike seems to have taken the Druze as the mystical voice of Islam. When the Southern Jurisdiction revised its rituals, the editors judged that the Sufi tradition, which shares much with Freemasonry, was the better choice. The introduction to the 2010 edition of A Bridge to Light says this degree “required virtually a complete revision”. In the current version the candidate learns from Sufi teachers, including some of the humorous tales of Mullah Nasruddin, that truth is often present without being recognised, and that a short, funny story can carry a profound lesson.
Duties of the degree
- Duty: fulfil your destiny and remake yourself by reformation, repentance and an ever-widening knowledge. The emphasis is on practice: choose one fault you can actually conquer, and conquer it, rather than promising perfection.
- Lesson: man is composed of the flesh, the soul and the intellect, and a good life gives each its due.
- Lesson: man is a reflection of the Divine, as the moon and planets reflect the light of the sun.
- Lesson: do not weary God with petitions. Gratitude for the ordered, life-giving cycle of the seasons matters more than a stream of requests.
The degree also warns against standing still. To stop studying is to begin losing what has already been learned, so a Knight of the Brazen Serpent is expected to keep reading, thinking and testing his convictions for the rest of his life.
Symbols and regalia
The apron is white, lined and edged with black. Its white side carries golden stars set out like the Pleiades, the Hyades, Orion and Capella; the black side carries silver stars for Perseus, Scorpio and the Great Bear. A radiant triangle sits in the middle of the white side. On the flap is a serpent forming a circle with its tail in its mouth, an ancient emblem of eternity, enclosing a scarab, the Egyptian beetle of rebirth. Gold stars around the edge stand for four bright “royal” stars of the ancient sky: Regulus, Aldebaran, Antares and Fomalhaut.
The cordons are two broad ribbons worn crossing each other. The crimson one bears the names of great lawgivers and gods of antiquity together with the image of a bull carrying a disc and crescent, an Egyptian sacred animal. The white watered ribbon bears goddess names associated with the harvest and the moon, over a dog’s head and a crescent. Together, according to A Bridge to Light, the two ribbons stand for the generating and the productive powers of nature. Gold stars on the breast repeat the royal stars of the apron.
The jewel is a gold Tau cross topped with a circle, the Egyptian crux ansata or ankh, with a serpent twined around it. It carries Hebrew inscriptions referring to suffering and to the brazen serpent of the Bible. In the revised ritual the members wear long white robes and turbans and no apron or cordon at all, and the jewel is the only regalia of the degree.
Important symbols listed by Hutchens are the sun, the moon, the brazen serpent and the Pythagorean right-angled triangle. The serpent carries two meanings at once. In the night sky the ancients saw the constellation Scorpio as a serpent that brought in the dark half of the year, so it stood for malice; but because a snake sheds its skin and seems to grow young again, it was also an emblem of renewal and immortality. Pike adds that in Egypt an outstretched serpent meant divine wisdom and a serpent biting its tail meant eternity.
Reflections
A Bridge to Light leaves the reader with one question: is it possible to find your way to Heaven alone? The degree’s answer is no. A good life is measured partly by whether others are glad you lived, and the older ritual put the hope this way: that when a man has died there will be some who say he did not wish to find his way to heaven alone.
Pike, who was rarely short of words, has a gentle warning for anyone tempted to laugh at the star-lore of the ancients. “We smile at these notions of the ancients,” he writes, “but we must learn to look through these material images and allegories, to the ideas, struggling for utterance” (Morals and Dogma, lecture XXV). He ends the lecture with an old writer’s line that sums up the whole degree: “Certainly it is Heaven upon Earth to have a man’s mind move in charity, rest in Providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.”
Please view the video on the left, for a more detailed explanation of the 25th° Degree.
Sources:
– Rex R. Hutchens, A Bridge to Light: The Revised Standard Pike Ritual, 4th edition, edited by Arturo de Hoyos (Washington, D.C.: The Supreme Council, 33°, S.J., 2010), introduction and chapter “The 25th Degree – Knight of the Brazen Serpent”. Purchase ‘A Bridge To Light‘ by Rex R. Hutchens
– Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), lecture XXV “Knight of the Brazen Serpent”. Purchase ‘Morals & Dogma‘ by Albert Pike.
– Charles T. McClenachan, The Book of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1884). Purchase ‘The Book of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry’ by Charles T. McClenachan.
– Numbers 21:4–9 and 2 Kings 18:4 (the brazen serpent).
– Scottish Rite, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction, “Scottish Rite 25th Degree”: https://scottishritenmj.org/degrees/degrees-25