The Knight of the Sun, or Prince Adept, is the most philosophical and mystical degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite. Its subject is the Book of Nature: the idea that the visible world is the outward expression of an invisible order, and that a Mason who learns to read its symbols learns something about God, about himself and about the way symbols work. Albert Pike thought it important enough to give it the longest lecture in Morals and Dogma, close to a quarter of the whole book. Most Supreme Councils confer it as the 28th degree; the Southern Jurisdiction’s revised ritual now makes it the 27th.
The degree at a glance
- Body: Council of Kadosh (19°–30°). In the revised Southern Jurisdiction ritual the meeting is styled a Council of a Choir of Angels.
- Degree: Knight of the Sun, or Prince Adept; 28° in most jurisdictions, including the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction, and in the older Southern Jurisdiction ritual; 27° in the Southern Jurisdiction’s Revised Standard Pike Ritual.
- Officers: the presiding officer is Father Adam, the warden is Brother Truth, and seven further officers bear the names of the seven archangels of Jewish tradition, each linked with one of the seven planets known to the ancients.
- Setting: the hall is painted to look like open country, with mountains, fields and forests, under a ceiling of moon, planets and stars. A single great light in the south represents the sun.
- In the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction: the 28° keeps the name Knight of the Sun but presents a debate among Rosicrucians over the meaning of the Philosopher’s Stone. Its lesson is that the principles of the Enlightenment are open to everyone through Freemasonry.
The lesson
The degree rests on two old Hermetic sayings: “the visible is the manifestation of the invisible” and “what is above is like what is below”. Rex Hutchens explains in A Bridge to Light that for Pike the study of nature was never only a matter of physics or biology. It was a way of understanding the Creator through what he has made. Nature points beyond itself, and we must take care not to mistake the shadow for the substance.
The degree’s teaching, as Hutchens summarises it, is a philosophy of balance. Two opposite forces, one attracting and one resisting, hold the universe in equilibrium; they are antagonistic but not hostile. Man too is a union of opposites, spirit and matter. Reason begins the explanation of nature and faith completes it, and neither is enough alone. Because there is no empty space in nature, there is no real death, only change, and the person who has stopped clinging to life has also stopped fearing death.
The revision was among the most radical in the Rite. The introduction to the 2010 edition of A Bridge to Light explains that the new Knight of the Sun “presents a lesson on the nature of symbolism and teaches candidates how symbols work and how to use them”. A symbol stands for something else; it both reveals and hides. Hutchens notes that the Latin word revelare literally means “to veil anew”, and the degree warns against confusing a symbol with the thing it symbolises, a habit that has led many people into confusion and folly. Students are urged to imitate nature, which breaks things down and builds them up again, and to learn to take apart what they have learned and put it back together in new and useful ways. Hutchens explains the name of the degree along the same lines. The sun is the source of the light that reveals nature to the eye and a symbol of the divine light that illuminates the mind; and a person who has learned to read the symbols of the Book of Nature has become an adept, a master of the art.
Pike’s enormous lecture ranges over the great questions of philosophy: the nature of God, creation, good and evil, the soul, free will and the moral law. Two of its conclusions sum up the degree. “Even to the Barbarian,” he writes, “Nature reveals a mighty power and a wondrous wisdom, and continually points to God.” And: “Everything is a thought of the Infinite God. Nature is His prose, and man His Poetry.”
Duties of the degree
- Be a lover of wisdom, as Socrates called himself: always learning, never assuming that you have arrived at the whole truth.
- Be faithful to the promises you have made within Masonry. Pike points out that the moral code of Masonry is wider than that of philosophy, because to the law of nature and the law of God it adds the duty a Mason has freely accepted towards every other Mason in the world.
- Lessons: nature reveals power and wisdom and continually points to God; the visible is the manifestation of the invisible; two opposite forces keep the universe in balance; there is no death, only change.
Symbols and regalia
The Knight of the Sun’s regalia is deliberately simple. The apron is plain white lambskin with no border or pattern except an interlaced pentagram traced in vermilion, the five-pointed star that has long stood for the human being and the “microcosm” or little world. The collar is a broad white watered ribbon with a golden eye painted on the right side, a symbol of the sun or of the Deity. There are three jewels: the presiding officer wears a golden sun, the other officers a gold seven-pointed star, and the members a gold five-pointed star.
Important symbols named by Hutchens are the Rebis, the Seal of Solomon, the right-angled triangle and the Pythagorean Tetractys. The Seal of Solomon, two interlaced triangles, one white and one black, represents the “macrocosm”, the great world, and the balance of opposites, an idea Masons also see in the black-and-white chequered pavement of the lodge. The Rebis, meaning “double thing”, is an alchemical figure holding a square and compasses that stands for the union of male and female, matter and spirit. The serpent biting its tail, which frames one of the great painted transparencies of the older ritual, stands for time and for every cycle in nature.
The images on this page show this regalia as it is illustrated in A Bridge to Light: the plain white apron with its interlaced pentagram in vermilion, the broad white collar with the golden eye, the star jewel and the gloves. The scarlet regalia of the Knight Commander of the Temple is pictured on its own page.
Reflections
A Bridge to Light asks a single question of this degree: what can the Book of Nature teach me? The answer the degree offers is patient study. Every symbol, revisited with more knowledge, reveals something it did not reveal before, and the work of a Mason is to keep learning and to help others learn.
Pike, writing on the history of belief, gives a thought worth keeping in mind before judging anyone else’s faith: “The history of religion is the history of the human mind; and the conception formed by it of Deity is always in exact relation to its moral and intellectual attainments” (Morals and Dogma, lecture XXVIII).
Please view the video on the left, for a more detailed explanation of the 28th° 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 27th Degree – Knight of the Sun, or Prince Adept”. 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 XXVIII “Knight of the Sun, or Prince Adept”. Purchase ‘Morals & Dogma‘ by Albert Pike.
– Wikipedia, “Scottish Rite” (table of degree names by jurisdiction).
– Scottish Rite, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction, “Scottish Rite 28th Degree”: https://scottishritenmj.org/degrees/degrees-28