The Master of the Royal Secret is the 32nd degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite and the culmination of its regular course of degrees. In it the lessons of the Lodge of Perfection, the Chapter of Rose Croix, the Council of Kadosh and the 31st degree are gathered into one teaching, and the “Royal Secret” that gives the degree its name is explained. Despite the name, that secret is not a hidden doctrine but an idea the Supreme Council has openly published: equilibrium, the balance that runs through nature, society and the human soul.
The degree at a glance
- Body: Consistory (31°–32°).
- Degree: 32°, Master of the Royal Secret in the Southern Jurisdiction; Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret in Pike’s Morals and Dogma, in the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction and in most other Supreme Councils.
- Roots: before the first Supreme Council was formed at Charleston in 1801, the highest grade of the 25-degree system compiled by Estienne Morin was the Prince of the Royal Secret, and the founders of the Scottish Rite knew that system as the “Order of Prince of the Royal Secret”.
- Setting: a Chamber of Consistory hung in purple and gold, at the centre of which is “the Camp”, an imaginary Masonic encampment in which every degree of the Rite has its place.
- Status: the last degree a member receives in the ordinary course. In the Southern Jurisdiction the Rite is organised in Orients (broadly, states) divided into Valleys, and a 32° Mason wears a black cap; the honours beyond it, the KCCH and the 33°, are conferred by election.
The lesson
Rex Hutchens describes the 32nd degree in A Bridge to Light as the one that “selects, clarifies and unifies into a single coherent doctrine” all the duties and lessons of the earlier degrees. It continues the Rite’s journey eastward, back in time to the oldest religious ideas Pike knew of. Pike believed the earliest faith was that of the ancient Aryan peoples of central Asia, whose ideas he traced in the Zoroastrian religion of Persia and the Vedic religion of India. Hutchens is candid that Pike relied heavily on the nineteenth-century scholar Max Müller and repeated some of his errors, so these passages should be read as a window on nineteenth-century learning rather than as current scholarship. The value lies in the moral point: the great religions share common ideas about a single Creator, the struggle between good and evil, and the free will that makes each person responsible for his choices.
The candidate enters the chamber in the dress of a Knight Kadosh and, as the light rises, passes from the practical knight to the “Magus” or sage, a seeker of knowledge. He is led through the Camp and the duties of all the earlier degrees are briefly recalled. Hutchens explains that becoming a Master of the Royal Secret means binding oneself far more firmly to everything already promised in the earlier degrees, because only doctrine, faith or knowledge that bears fruit in action is of any value.
Then comes the Royal Secret. Hutchens is explicit that it is “no secret in the normal sense of the word”. “Secret” here means mystery, something not fully understood, and the search for it is meant to run through every part of life. The answer the degree gives is equilibrium. Pike describes it in Morals and Dogma as a series of balances: between God’s infinite wisdom and infinite power; between divine justice and divine mercy, which together produce equity; between necessity and human free will; between good and evil in the world; between authority and individual liberty, which together make free government; and finally, within each person, between reason and moral sense on one side and appetites and passions on the other. Pike insists that the appetites are not evil in themselves. They are forces given by God, to be governed by reason rather than destroyed.
Duties of the degree
The duties are expressed as five kinds of soldier:
- A Soldier of the Light seeks truth and knowledge, because ignorance is a prison of the mind.
- A Soldier of Freedom demands a free vote and voice for the people and keeps his own voice, vote and opinion free.
- A Soldier of the True Religion opposes spiritual tyranny over conscience with reason and truth, not force.
- A Soldier of the People encourages others to be self-reliant and independent, so that they cannot be led blindly by the unfit.
- A Soldier of Scottish Rite Masonry is zealous in his duties to God, his country, his family, his brethren and himself. The special enemy he fights, in himself and others, is inaction.
The lessons that go with them are that the human is ever interlaced with the divine, that only doctrines, faith or knowledge which bear fruit in action are of value, and that to work is to worship.
Symbols and regalia
The cordon is four inches wide and doubled, worn from the right shoulder to the left hip. Its principal side is black edged with white and bears a red Teutonic cross with a silver double-headed eagle; the reverse is crimson, with a black Teutonic cross at the height of the heart. The jewel is a gold Teutonic cross with frosted arms and the numerals XXXII in a green wreath.
The apron is white silk or velvet, twelve inches square, edged with two stripes of gold lace with black velvet between them and fringed in gold. Its flap carries six flags in blue, red and gold, a gold Teutonic cross, an eye in rays and a black double-headed eagle holding a gold sword. The body of the apron shows the tracing board of the degree, and the reverse is crimson. The apron is shown here for its history; as the two complete-regalia images show, it is not part of the regalia normally worn today. The black cap marks a 32° Mason.
Important symbols listed by Hutchens are the Camp, the Lesser and Greater Tetractys, the five-pointed and seven-pointed stars, the triple interlaced triangles and the Trimurti, a three-faced bust. The Camp is drawn as a nest of geometric figures (a circle within a triangle, pentagon, heptagon and nonagon) on whose sides the members of each degree are encamped beneath their own banners, so that the whole Rite is seen at a glance as one army with one purpose. The double-headed eagle, emblem of the Rite, looks both ways at once, as the balance of the Royal Secret requires.
Reflections
A Bridge to Light ends its survey of the regular degrees with a personal question: do you endeavour to achieve the Royal Secret in your life and within yourself? A balanced life, Hutchens writes, is “a rush of contraries”: work and rest, joy and sorrow, thought and action, care for others and care for oneself, this life and preparation for the next.
Pike’s own conclusion is a fitting last word for the whole course of degrees. This equilibrium, he writes, “teaches us, above all, to reverence ourselves as immortal souls, and to have respect and charity for others, who are even such as we are”, people “deserving to be loved and pitied, but never to be hated nor despised” (Morals and Dogma, lecture XXXII).
Please view the video on the left, for a more detailed explanation of the 32nd° 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 32nd Degree – Master of the Royal Secret”. 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 XXXII “Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret”. Purchase ‘Morals & Dogma‘ by Albert Pike.
– Wikipedia, “Scottish Rite” (Morin’s Rite of the Royal Secret; Orients and Valleys) and “Supreme Council, Scottish Rite (Southern Jurisdiction, USA)”.
– Scottish Rite, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction, “Scottish Rite 32nd Degree”: https://scottishritenmj.org/degrees/degrees-32