Scottish Rite History

Origin of the Scottish Rite

After the organization of the Grand Lodge of England in 1717, Masonry became very popular. It passed over the Channel to France in 1725 where many ritualists invented numerous “Side Degrees” subject to no governing body, and hawked them about the country and through the continent.

In 1740, Chevalier Ramsey, a Scottish nobleman, gave some famous lectures in Paris and Bordeaux on the origin and objects of Masonry. He subdivided the “Three Degrees” and concocted Degrees from the parts explained by his philosophic lectures.  He established a Lodge, which he called Harodim, but the French styled it Scotchman’s Lodge Masonry, which fact may have had something to do with the misnomer, “Scottish Rite.”

The Scottish Rite had its beginning in France.  In 1754, the Chevalier de Bonneville established in the College of Clermont in Paris a chapter of twenty-five so-called High Degrees. This college was a sort of refuge for the Stuarts of Scotland, which fact may also have had some bearing on the name Scottish Rite.  The body established by Bonneville, including the three Symbolic Degrees, was called the Rite of Perfection. In 1758, these Degrees were taken by Marquis de Lernais to Berlin where they in the following year were placed under a body called the Council of the Emperors of the East and West, which was formed at Paris from the ruins of the Clermont Chapter.

In 1762, it is said that Frederick the Great “formed and promulgated” what is known as the Constitutions of 1762. In 1786, a reorganization took place in which eight Degrees were added to the twenty-five and the name changed to the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.  By these Constitutions, Frederick resigned the authority of Grand Commander, which title he had held since the adoption of the Grand Constitutions in 1762, and deposited his Masonic prerogatives with a council in each nation to be composed of Sovereign Grand Inspectors General of the Thirty-third and last Degree of Freemasonry.

Scottish Rite comes to America

In 1761, the year before Frederick the Great was said to have taken under his patronage all Masonry in Germany, Stephen Morin of France was commissioned Inspector General for the New World by the Grand Consistory of Sublime Princes of the Royal Secret in Paris to introduce the Rite in America. Morin established bodies in Santo Domingo and Jamaica, but he did not enter the North American continent.  He did, however, commission Henry Andrew Francken, who had come to Jamaica, to establish the Rite in the American Colonies.

Francken reached New York in 1767 and established a Lodge of Perfection in Albany, the first in continental “America.”  Francken brought a copy of the Grand Constitutions of 1762 with him, which he left at Albany. Both Morin and Francken were given authority to establish Lodges and to appoint Inspectors possessing powers equivalent to their own. Records of many established Lodges of Perfection seem to have been lost, but some accounts are still extant.  A Lodge of Perfection was established at Philadelphia in 1781. In 1783, one was organized at Charleston, South Carolina, by Isaac DeCosta. A Lodge was established at Baltimore in 1796 by Henry Wilmans, a Prussian, but the source of his authority is not definitely determined.

The Lodges of Perfection from the beginning were in full harmony with the Symbolic Lodges, assuming no authority over them and invariably beginning their work with the Fourth Degree. Agreeable to the Constitutions of 1786, in 1813 the United States was divided into two Jurisdictions of the Rite.  The Northern Jurisdiction now consists of fifteen states, and the Southern Jurisdiction of thirty-five states. Since 1845, each jurisdiction, “In deference to the Constitutions of the York Rite practiced in this country, waives its rights of privileges, so far as they relate to the first three Degrees of Ancient Craft Masonry.”

The Double-Headed Eagle