By ALEX HORNE, F. P. S.
1897 - 1988
The first printed
reference to a Royal Arch Degree comes in connection with a little work by Dr.
Fifield Dassigny (Dublin, 1744) as part of a general discussion of Masonic
conditions in Ireland and elsewhere.
Here Dassigny makes mention of a certain “Brother of probity and wisdom,
who had some space before attained that excellent part of Masonry in London,”
but gives no further details as to what this “excellent part of Masonry”
consisted of. But he did say that he had
been informed that some Royal Arch Masons did assemble in York in 1744, and
were “excellent Masons,” comprising “an organized body of men who have passed
the Chair and given undeniable proofs of their skill.” Bernard E. Jones, in his excellent and definitive
Freemasons’ Book of the Royal Arch (London, 1957) – a companion volume
to his equally authoritative Freemasons’ Guide and Compendium (London,
1950) – says that “there is a general consensus of opinion that his
(Dassigny’s) statement is sound evidence of an early R. A. Degree in working order,
even at a date a few years earlier than 1744;” and in Scotland as well where a
Lodge Minute from Sterling is found, date July 30, 1743, citing two petitioners
who, “having found qualified, they were admitted Royal Arch Masons of this
Lodge.”
Now, as to the
essence of the Royal Arch, in the early formative years, we get some tentative
suggestions in the way of words, phrases, ideas, that crop up here and there in
our printed literature, such as the Early Masonic Catechisms of the 18th
century, and in newspaper accounts, and other sources, and which are later
found to have become incorporated into Royal Arch work. A characteristic example is The Whole
Institutions of Free-Masons Opened (Dublin, 1725), with its reference to
“the primitive Word” pointing to “God in six Terminations: to wit I am, and Jehovah is the answer to
it,” and citing as proof, the first verse of St. John. What is sometimes referred to as “Scots”
Masonry may have contributed to this type of tradition, this being a superior
kind of Masonry, it was believed, which R. F. Gould says “had as its motif the
discovery in a vault by Scottish Crusaders of the long-lost and Ineffable Word”
as cited by Jones, who offers two early sections of his work on the development
of the proto-material that gradually accumulated and finally crystallized into
what we have today as the Royal Arch Degree.
The most dramatic
illustration of the above is the story of John Coustos and his Lisbon
experiences with the Portuguese Inquisition who imprisoned and tortured him, in
an effort to elicit the secrets of the hated Freemasons. The story of his life and sufferings (he was
a Swiss-born British subject) is briefly told in Mackey’s Encyclopedia of
Freemasonry, but the original Inquisition documents, giving his verbatim
“confession,” have been found and translated, and can be read in detail in the
Transactions of Quatuor Coronati, Ars Quatuor Coronatorum (A.Q.C.), vol. LXVI,
pp. 107 – 123. (See also the article
“John Coustos” in a more recent volume LXXXI).
The confession actually makes reference to the year 1743, but we find
him in 1732 to have been a member of Lodge No. 98, now extinct. What he told his tormentors must therefore be
referred to his own Masonic knowledge from around the earlier date given. In his Confession, he told his Examiners of
the original basis of Freemasonry believed to have been founded in the building
of King Solomon’s Temple, with its division of several grades of Workers, and
what ensued in connection with that building; and, when later “the destruction
took place of the famous Temple of Solomon there was found beneath the First
Stone (the Foundation Stone?) a tablet of bronze upon which was engraved the
following word – JEHOVAH, which means ‘God’….”
Analyzing this situation, Bernard E. Jones thinks that “it is beyond
question that in the 1730’s a Craft ritual – that is, the ritual of a Lodge in
London or Paris - … contained elements which now are unknown to the Craft, but
which, in an elaborated form, are present in today’s R.A. ritual,” and that
“some elements of the R.A. legend were probably known to a few English or
French lodges at an early date within their three degrees….”
Whatever its
origin and method of development, this soon became a “Fourth Degree” some time
after 1751, when the Grand Lodge of the so-called Antients had come into
existence, adopting this Fourth Degree into its Lodge working, with the sole
stipulation that a Master Mason could be “exalted” into the Royal Arch only if
he had “passed the Chair,” as in the Dassigny statement; that is, had become an
Installed Master of his Lodge.
Parenthetically, it must be explained that the Installation of a
Master-Elect, in England, is partly a private affair, conducted in the presence
of Masters and Past Masters only, for the purpose of conferring upon him the
secrets of a Master, after those below that rank have been requested to
retire. The Antients were meticulous in their
requirement that every Mast-Elect be properly installed; contrary to the
Moderns, who were generally negligent in that matter. Laurence Dermott, the militant and sometimes
pugnacious Grand Secretary of the Antients, proudly proclaimed the Royal Arch
to be “the root, heart and marrow of Masonry” and insisted that that only an
Installed Master had the right to enjoy this exalted privilege. But, so desirable had this privilege become,
after a while, and so great was the pressure from all sides to enjoy it, that
some means had to be found to accommodate those who had not had the opportunity
of becoming Installed Masters, yet without destroying the requirement of what
had become looked upon as a “landmark.” Thus
was developed the “constructive” practice of creating a “virtual Past Master”
artificially, by the conferral of a special Past Master Degree on an ordinary
Master Mason; obviously a pious subterfuge – even Bernard E. Jones is willing
to admit as much – and it had its anomalies.
The supreme anomaly came about, on at least one recorded occasion, here
in Maine, when an applicant who was indeed an Installed Master in his own
right, still had to take this “virtual Past Master” Degree in order to be
“exalted!”
This anomaly of a
Past Master Degree continued to be maintained by the Antients in England, and
was even accepted by some Moderns Lodges who were friendly toward the Royal
Arch, in spite of the fact that their own Grand Lodge did not recognize it. And it was not till after the Union of the
two rival Grand Lodges in 1813 that this unnecessary necessity of a Past Master
Degree came to be discontinued in England.
Their new regulations now only require that a Master Mason – any Master
Mason – must be in good standing as such for at least four weeks in order to be
a suitable Candidate for exaltation in the Royal Arch. In our own country, however, this requirement
of a preliminary Past Master Degree for exaltation still exists in a good many
Chapters, but the talk of its possible and desirable repeal is always in the
air. Our late Brother Ward K. St. Clair,
and avid student of Masonic ritual in all its forms, has provided us with an
informative study on The Degree of Past Master: a Degree of the Chapter,
while Bernard E. Jones himself has a paper in the 1957 volume of A.Q.C.
on “Passing the Chair.”
It is interesting
to note that many of the Moderns openly sought exhaltation, in Chapters
established for that purpose, and even some Grand Lodge officers did likewise,
despite their official hostility toward it.
The Antients kept up their faithful adherence to it, first as a Fourth
Degree in their Grand Lodge system, and subsequently in their Grand
Chapter. But when it came time to try
and form a union between the two rival Grand Lodges, they found themselves at
loggerheads over this question of the Royal Arch, which the Antients refused to
give up, against the opposition of the Moderns, even for the greatly desired
object of forming a union. Finally, and
no doubt after much soul-searching, a compromise was found. It was jointly announced in the Act of Union
that “pure Ancient Masonry consists of Three Degrees and no more, namely those
of Entered Apprentice, the Fellow Craft, and the Master Mason including the
Supreme Order of the Holy Royal Arch” – the latter now being looked upon not as
a Degree (which would have made four, as with the Antients). But it obviously had all the trappings of a
Degree, in that there was an esoteric and uplifting ceremony, and the
communication of the secret Words and Signs of recognition, with a Legend of
its own, leading to the Recovery of the Lost Word. The Royal Arch had become a Degree that was
not a Degree!
As to this
Recovery theme in the Royal Arch, this had at one time led to a thought –
entertained by a previous century of Masonic students – that this Recovery (as
well as the original Loss) was all part of the Third Degree itself, but had
subsequently come to be separated off to make for a Fourth Degree. This has given rise to what was at the time
referred to as the “mutilation” theory of the Third Degree, a theory that is no
longer accepted by serious students.
These now believe that the Royal Arch legend actually developed on its
own, but perhaps in association with the legend of the Third Degree of which
the Royal Arch was a “completion.” But
even this milder form of the theory is not now accepted on all sides, and Harry
Carr says he prefers to think of the Royal Arch as only an “extension” of the
Third Degree rather than an actual “completion.”
As indicated in
the Act of Union cited above, the intimate nature of the association of the
association of the Royal Arch and the Grand Lodge system in England is further
accentuated by the fact that the Three Principals in the one are found to be
the same individuals as three Grand Lodge officers in the other, not by
accident but by choice, those forming an interlocking governing body between
that has obvious advantages in coordinated control over these two systems. In this country, of course, the Royal Arch
with its Grand Chapter is only a “concordant body,” entirely self-ruling and
free and separate from the Grand Lodge in whose midst it dwells.
It is now time to
discuss more intimate matters respecting the Royal Arch, within the limits of
propriety. This we can do with a
reference to a little work by Roy A. Wells under the title Some Royal Arch
Terms Examined [A. Lewis (Masonic Publishers) Ltd., 1978]. Through the medium of only sixty-four pages
of print, aided by fourteen illustrations, the author manages to impart a good
deal of the Royal Arch philosophy and something of its inner nature. This he does by analyzing certain key Hebrew
words in use in the ritual, tracing them to their Biblical roots, and
interpreting them by reference especially to some 16th and 17th Bibles (the
Geneva and the Barker) with their clarifying and suggestive marginal notations. It is soon found that this exposition is of
interest not only to Royal Arch Masons, but to every Master Mason as well,
because of the existence of many of these words and phrases in Craft working
and literature, and in the background of Craft ideas in general. And the book is even found to be of interest
to Scottish Rite Masons as well for analogous reasons, primarily because of the
common basis of the Legend of King Solomon’s Temple found in the 13th Degree of
the Rite, know there also as the “Royal Arch of Solomon.” Here the words may be somewhat different, but
the music is the same, and based on the same motif, the Recovery of the Lost
Word. So also the rebuilding of the
Temple of Solomon (destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar), as told in the English Royal
Arch, has its corollary in the 15th and 16th Degrees of the Rite, which also
treat of the rebuilding. There are other
significant parallelisms, in symbolism an allegory, in legend and
ceremonial. Hence the importance of the
work under review, to all of us, and the explanatory semantics involved
therein.
The value of this
work for Master Masons stems from, among other things, the Craft working
discussed in such 18th century publications as Three Distinct Knocks
(1760) and Jachin and Boaz (1762), giving so-called “secret” words and
their Hebrew equivalents and meanings, and it is interesting to note in this
connection the freedom with which English Masons treat what we would here call
the esoteric elements in our ritual, whether Craft or Royal Arch, a fact that
was brought out in my review of Harry Carr’s book, The Freemason at Work. The concordant fact that this freedom has not
brought about any noticeable loss in the fortunes of Freemasonry in the United
Kingdom, or criticism on the part of the Grand Lodge, is another thing to be
borne in mind.
The similarity in
basic material, language and practice, sometimes found in both Craft and Royal
Arch working, also serves to support the contention of some students of ritual
history to the effect that the Royal Arch was not just an “innovation” and
something intrinsically “new,” as some think, but that it was actually
developed out of the same storehouse of legend and ceremonial practice that
gave rise to our Three Degrees in the Craft – one line going one way, and the
other going the other way, finding divergent lines of development in the
process. Like the letter “V,” with its
two arms, jutting forth from the same starting point at the corner.
A good example of
this dichotomy is a word that is well know to the English Craftsman, as well as
on the Continent, especially in France – “Mac Benash” – with its occasional
varied spellings and mutilations found in the Early Masonic Catechisms of the
18tth century, and which Prichard’s Masonry Dissected (1730) says
“signifies the Builder is smitten.” Roy
Wells here points to the Barker Bible (1580) which makes reference to I
Chronicles 2:49, with a marginal notation to the words “Machbana Machbenah” and
the alternative interpretation: “the smiting of the builder.” Its suggestion of a reflection of the Hiramic
Legend is obvious.
The author here
cites a number of French expositions, such as the 1751 work which contains the
following passage:
“A master stepped
forward to raise Adoniram (a frequently used French substitute for Hiram): he took hold of him by the hand, and the
first two fingers coming away as a result of putrefaction, he informed the
Brethren by using the Hebrew word, Mac Benac, that is to say, the flesh falls
from the bones.”
A similar piece
of folklore or legend, but this time in connection with the patriarch Noah and
his three sons Shem, Ham and Japheth, is found in an English MS., published in
the collection Early Masonic Catechisms edited by Knoop, Jones and Hamer
– the now well-known Graham MS. (1726), lost sight of for a long time
and not rediscovered until 1936. The
author sites this legend at length, but the interesting portions are as
follows:
“Shem Ham and
Japheth…(went) to their father Noah’s grave for to try if they could find
anything about him for to Lead them to the vertuable (veritable) secret which
this famous preacher had….
“Now these 3 men
had allready agreed that if they did not find the very thing it self, that the
first thing that they found was to be to them as a secret…. So (they) came to the Grave, finding nothing
save the dead body all mist consumed away (and) takeing a greip of a ffinger it
came away (and) so from Joynt to Joynt (and) so to the wrest (and) so to the
Elbow (and) so they Reared up the dead body and supported it setting ffoot to
ffoot knee to knee Breast to breast
Cheeck to cheeck and hand to back (and) cryed help o ffather…. So they agreed for it a name as is known to
free masonry to this day.”
This legend has
led to the thought, entertained by some, that there might have been and early
Noachite Legend, perhaps ante-dating the Hiramic. But the phrase “this day” should not cause
anyone to think that there is any connection between the “name” said to have
been used in 1726 and the word that is in use today. Despite our traditional conservatism, things
have a habit of changing.
The
characteristic Royal Arch motto “Holiness to the Lord” is shown to have
occasional Craft uses as well, the Hebrew equivalent being actually found in
the Arms of the United Grand Lodge of England, originally adapted from the Arms
of the Grand Lodge of the Antients. The
Biblical root in this instance goes back to Exodus 28:36. The word “Giblim” also has Craft connotations
in some places, and goes back to I Kings 5:18, with its reference to “stonesquarers,”
to which the 1580 Barker Bible has the notation: “The Ebrewe word is Giblim, which some say
were excellent masons.” The name
“Jehova” is also found in some of the Early Masonic Catechisms, and can be seen
in some French tracing boards.
Several characteristic Royal Arch words and phrases such as “El Shaddai,” “Rabboni,” “Jah Bul On,” and many others are similarly examined and traced to their Biblical roots and interpretations, while the first syllable in “Ab-Bal,” with its “father” connotation, has Craft associations in “Abi” and “Abiv” first found in Luther’s German Bible of about 1530, in connection with the name “Huram.”
(Adapted from The Philalethes, Volume XXXI, Number 5, October 1978, pages 20 – 22)
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