The Knight Kadosh, or Knight of the White and Black Eagle, is the 30th degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, the last of the chivalric degrees and the summit of the Council of Kadosh. “Kadosh” is Hebrew for “holy”, so the title means Holy Knight. Its story is drawn from history, the destruction of the Knights Templar in the early fourteenth century, and its lesson is a call to action: a Mason must spend his life working for the good of humanity, armed outwardly with determination and inwardly with faith in God, love of his fellow men and knowledge. Few Masonic degrees have been more misrepresented by critics, so this page sets out only what the Southern Jurisdiction itself has published about it.
The degree at a glance
- Body: Council of Kadosh (19°–30°); this degree gives the whole body its name.
- Degree: 30°, Knight Kadosh, or Knight of the White and Black Eagle. The white and black recall the division of good and evil in the world.
- Origins: a Kadosh grade, under the longer title “Illustrious and Grand Commander of the White and Black Eagle, Grand Elect Kadosh”, was the 24th of the 25 grades worked in Paris by the Council of Emperors of the East and West around 1758. The first Supreme Council adopted it as the 30th degree in 1801, Albert Pike rewrote it in the 1850s and the Southern Jurisdiction revised it again around 2000.
- Historical figures: Jacques de Molay, last Grand Master of the Knights Templar; King Philip IV of France; and Pope Clement V.
- In the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction: no degree called Knight Kadosh is conferred. Its 30° is “Grand Inspector”, a trial in an English civil court in the fourteenth century, in the reign of Edward II, whose lesson is to be attentive, impartial and fair when judging others. Some summaries of the Knight Kadosh confuse the two degrees.
The lesson
The Knights Templar were founded during the Crusades. In 1307 King Philip IV of France had the Order’s members arrested, and Pope Clement V later suppressed it. Its Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, confessed under torture, withdrew his confession and was burned at the stake in Paris in 1314. Tradition says that before he died he summoned both king and pope to answer before God within the year, and both did die within months. Rex Hutchens’ A Bridge to Light uses this episode as the historical background of the degree.
From that story the degree draws a lesson about power. Hutchens explains that the crown in the symbolism of the degree represents every ruler who has abused power, reigned for himself rather than his people, or crushed liberty. The cross, he stresses, is “not a symbol of any particular religion or creed”; it becomes a symbol of oppression only when it is fused with the crown, that is, when church and state unite to rule men through fear and superstition. The skull reminds the candidate that death strips away rank and privilege. The conclusion Hutchens draws is that individuals are supreme over institutions, and that constitutional government, with its checks and balances and its separation of political life from religious authority, is the best protection of human dignity.
Critics have sometimes described the degree as a call to revenge on the Church or on governments. A Bridge to Light says the opposite. Personal vengeance is self-destructive, and Masonry “does not seek to avenge the wrongs of history by warring against the political and religious institutions which spawned them”; it wars instead against the vices of which those historical events are examples. The work of a Knight Kadosh, in other words, is moral and educational, not political or sectarian.
Hutchens sums up the purpose of the degree as making “real, in action, the noblest sentiments of man”. Its mission is to restore to every person the full dignity of humanity, and to make true again the old description of man as made in the image of God. Albert Pike’s own lecture on the degree in Morals and Dogma is unusual: much of it quotes a hostile writer on the Templars and answers him in notes. Pike begins by observing that Masonry has often profited from its enemies, because the anti-Masonic persecution of 1826 drove away the half-hearted and left the committed to rebuild: “that which is persecuted, grows.”
Duties of the degree
A Bridge to Light gives the duty in a single line: labour unceasingly for the good of mankind. Drawing on Pike’s Legenda for the 19th to 30th degrees, Hutchens breaks that duty into a lifelong campaign:
- War against ignorance. Knowledge is power, and only an informed person is truly free; tyranny feeds on ignorance.
- War against spiritual tyranny, meaning intolerance: any attempt to dictate what people must believe and to punish them for thinking otherwise.
- War against despotism, which begins by controlling people’s actions and ends by trying to control their thoughts.
- War against vice, a struggle never finally won on earth, in which the only true victory is a moral one.
- Steadfastness in adversity, following the example of the Templars and of Masonry’s own recovery after persecution.
The lessons of the degree are to arm yourself with faith in God, love toward your fellow men and knowledge, and to remember that great examples are the noblest legacy of the past, enriching a nation more than wealth or power.
An important note in this degree, to war against ignorance, tyranny, despotism and vice:
“The arms wherewith to war against Tyranny, Superstition and Ignorance, are Knowledge, Virtue and Love, and Charity for mankind.” (Albert Pike, Legenda XIX–XXX, p. 161, as quoted in A Bridge to Light)
The webmaster of this website has taken this charge of the 30th degree as one of his major goals, hence the reason for this website!
Symbols and regalia
No apron is worn in this degree. The cordon is a black watered silk ribbon, four or five inches wide, edged with narrow silver lace and worn across the body from left to right. Embroidered on it in scarlet are the letters K and H, the first and last letters of the Hebrew word Kadosh, together with two Teutonic crosses and a double-headed eagle with outspread wings, holding a poniard in its claws. The eagle’s heads and the blade are gold; the oval handle of the poniard is half white and half black, for the division of good and evil in the universe.
The jewel is a silver double-headed eagle, about an inch across, resting on a gold Teutonic cross enamelled in red. The images above also show the ceremonial poniard with its belt and holster, the sash and the gloves.
Important symbols listed by Hutchens are three skulls, three funeral urns, the mystic ladder and the double-headed eagle. The skulls stand for the long human story of guilty power and murdered innocence, and the central one, wreathed in laurel and amaranth, for De Molay and the immortality of a good name. The double-headed eagle looks to both past and future. The mystic ladder has seven rungs on one side for the seven liberal arts of the ancients (grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy), reminding the Knight that knowledge is climbed one step at a time and that a fall is not final if he begins to climb again. Its other side carries meanings that the Rite keeps for its members.
Reflections
A Bridge to Light asks: are the knightly virtues obsolete in the modern world? The degree’s reply is that the armour and the castles have gone, but the work has not. Ignorance, intolerance and the abuse of power take new forms in every age, and so does the need for people who will stand against them with knowledge, patience and charity, while being true to themselves and standing for what is right and just in their own lives.
Hutchens’ own description of the ideal is a good place to end: the true Knight Kadosh is “armed outwardly with steel but inwardly with faith in God, love toward his fellow man and knowledge”.
Please view the video on the left, for a more detailed explanation of the 30th° 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), chapter “The 30th Degree – Knight Kadosh or the Knight of the White and Black Eagle” (including its extracts from Pike’s Legenda XIX–XXX). 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 XXX “Knight Kadosh”. Purchase ‘Morals & Dogma‘ by Albert Pike.
– Wikipedia, “Knight Kadosh” and “Scottish Rite” (history of the grade and degree names by jurisdiction).
– Scottish Rite, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction, “Scottish Rite 30th Degree”: https://scottishritenmj.org/degrees/degrees-30