History of the Origin of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite

Every Freemason begins with the three degrees of the lodge: Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason. These three degrees form the foundation of the whole Craft, and no later degree is considered higher in dignity than that of Master Mason. Over the centuries, however, many Masons have wished to continue their study beyond the third degree. For them, a number of additional systems have developed, each offering a further series of ceremonies and lessons. The largest and most widespread of these systems is the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite.

The Scottish Rite consists of thirty-three degrees. The first three are the familiar degrees of the lodge, which in most countries are conferred by the ordinary Craft lodges and not by the Rite itself. The degrees from the fourth to the thirty-second are worked in a series of bodies with traditional names, such as the Lodge of Perfection, the Chapter of the Rose Croix, the Council of Kadosh and the Consistory. Each group of degrees explores a theme through allegory and drama: the search for what was lost, the meaning of faith, hope and charity, the duties of justice and chivalry, and the struggle between light and darkness in human life. The thirty-third degree is an honorary degree of service, conferred on a small number of members by the governing body of the Rite.

That governing body is called a Supreme Council. In each country, or in each territory called a jurisdiction, one Supreme Council holds authority over the Rite. Its members carry the title of Sovereign Grand Inspector General, and its presiding officer is called the Sovereign Grand Commander. The Supreme Councils of the world recognise one another and maintain fraternal relations, although each is independent in its own territory.

Why “Scottish”?

The name often causes confusion. The Rite did not originate in Scotland, and the Grand Lodge of Scotland has never practised it as part of its own system. The word “Scottish” comes from eighteenth-century France, where certain new degrees were called écossais, meaning “Scottish”. These degrees claimed a link with Scotland, partly because Scotland was imagined as a land of ancient and hidden Masonic wisdom, and partly because of the influence of Scottish and Irish exiles who lived in France after the fall of the Stuart kings. The name therefore records a legend and an atmosphere rather than a place of birth.

Ordo ab Chao

The motto of the thirty-third degree is Ordo ab Chao, Latin for “order out of chaos”. It appears on the earliest official documents of the Rite, issued at Charleston in South Carolina at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The motto expresses a moral ideal: the work of bringing harmony, reason and structure into a world that often seems confused and divided.

For many years, the Scottish Rite page of this website offered a scanned extract from an old book. That extract came from the General History of Freemasonry in Europe by the French Masonic historian Emmanuel Rebold, published in an English translation around 1867. The chapter in question was titled “History of the Origin of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, and Organization of the Supreme Council of that Rite for France”.

The text that follows retells Rebold's account in new words. It follows the order of his chapter and presents his main arguments, his names and his dates. Rebold wrote as a critic. He wished to separate what he called the “true history” of the Rite from the legends that its early leaders had placed around its origin. His tone was often sharp, and some of his opinions reflect the disputes and prejudices of his own time. Those opinions are reported here only where they are needed to understand his argument.

Historical research has continued since Rebold's day, and some of his claims are no longer accepted. Where modern historians clearly disagree with him, this text says so briefly. The aim is not to judge the Rite, which today is a respected part of Freemasonry in many countries, but to explain how it came into being and why its early history has been so much debated.

Rebold begins with the moment when the Rite reached France. On 22 September 1804, in Paris, a body was organised under the title “Supreme Council of Sovereign Grand Inspectors General of the 33rd and last degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite for France”. Its founder was Count Alexandre François Auguste de Grasse-Tilly, the son of the French admiral of the same name who had fought in the American War of Independence. The Count acted under a patent dated 21 February 1802 and issued to him at Charleston, South Carolina, by a body that called itself the Supreme Council for America. That patent gave him full powers to initiate Masons and to establish lodges, chapters and consistories of the Rite in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the present-day Haiti.

Before following the Count to Paris, Rebold turns to the question of where the Charleston authority itself had come from. To answer it, he first quotes the account that the leaders of the Rite had published about their own origins. This account came from a report prepared for the Supreme Council at Charleston in 1802 by one of its members, Dr Frederick Dalcho. It was later printed in Dublin in 1808. According to Rebold, almost everything published afterwards about the origin of the Rite was taken, more or less directly, from this report.

Dalcho's report told a grand story. It said that the “sublime and ineffable degrees” had been established in Scotland, France and Prussia soon after the first crusade, that they had been neglected between 1658 and 1744, and that a Scottish gentleman had then visited France and re-established a Lodge of Perfection at Bordeaux. It went on to say that by 1761 these high degrees had spread across Europe, and that the King of Prussia, Frederick the Great, had been recognised by all as their supreme chief. The report named other princely patrons as well, including Duke Charles of Södermanland in Sweden and, in France, Louis of Bourbon, the Duke of Chartres and the Cardinal Prince de Rohan.

The report then described the decisive events. On 25 October 1762, it said, “Grand Constitutions” had been ratified at Berlin for the government of all the high-degree bodies throughout the world. In the same period, a brother named Stephen Morin had received, on 27 August 1761, a patent in Paris appointing him Inspector General for the New World. Finally, the report explained that King Frederick, wishing to secure the future of the high degrees after his own death, had created the thirty-third degree and had placed his powers in the hands of a Supreme Council of nine brethren in each nation.

The sublime degrees are at this moment (1802) as they were at the time of their first formation; they have not undergone the slightest alteration—the least addition.

These words from the report claimed perfect continuity with a distant past. To give the document greater authority, the Supreme Council at Charleston had it affirmed by Isaac Auld and Emmanuel de la Motta, approved by its Grand Commander for life, Colonel John Mitchell, and certified by Abraham Alexander, who signed as Secretary of the Holy Empire. It was then sent as a circular to Masonic authorities around the world.

Rebold did not accept this story. In his view, the report belonged to a long tradition of Masonic writing in which authors invented an honourable antiquity for their own creations. He remarked, with some irony, that the authors of the Scottish Rite had at least been more modest than many others. They had not placed the birth of their system at the beginning of the world, but only at the time of the crusades. Even so, he argued, their account was not supported by any genuine document or established fact.

Rebold also noted what the report did not contain. It spoke of authentic documents and of archives that had existed for centuries, yet it did not quote or reproduce any of them. A reader was therefore asked to believe the story on the authority of the Council alone. Rebold left aside the question of whether Dalcho had himself composed the report after 1802 in order to answer later doubts. He preferred, as he said, to compare its claims directly with the known facts of history.

His method was simple. He would first describe how the high degrees had actually developed in the eighteenth century. He would then show that the thirty-three degrees, the Supreme Councils and the role of Frederick the Great could not have existed in the form the report described.

Rebold started from the conviction that Freemasonry, in its original form, knew only three degrees. He believed that ancient and medieval Masonry had worked with three degrees of initiation, and that the English Craft had continued this practice. Modern historians are more cautious about the early centuries, and many think that the operative masons worked with only one or two grades. All agree, however, that the speculative Freemasonry that emerged in Britain in the early eighteenth century was built on the three Craft degrees.

Rebold went on to suggest that, between 1640 and 1660, supporters of the exiled Stuart kings had used Masonic meetings as a cover for political plans and had created two additional degrees: Scottish Master as a fourth degree and Templar Mason as a fifth. This theory was popular among nineteenth-century writers, but present-day historians find no reliable evidence for it. The so-called Jacobite origin of the high degrees is now generally treated as a legend in its own right.

On firmer ground, Rebold recalled the founding of the Grand Lodge in London in 1717. With that event, he wrote, Freemasonry changed from a craft organisation into a philosophical institution, and it adopted only the three symbolic degrees. The new Freemasonry soon crossed the sea. Rebold placed the first lodge outside Britain at Dunkirk in 1721 and a lodge in Paris in 1725. From France, the Craft spread rapidly into the Low Countries, the Netherlands and Germany.

It was in France that the so-called Scottish degrees first flourished. Rebold associated their introduction, between 1736 and 1738, with the Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay, a Scottish writer living in Paris. Ramsay is famous for an oration he composed in 1737, in which he connected Freemasonry with the crusading knights. Rebold described him as a promoter of the new degrees and as an agent of the Jesuits. Modern scholars agree that Ramsay's oration had great influence on the imagination of French Masons, but there is no evidence that he created any degree himself, and the claim of Jesuit involvement is not supported.

Rebold also gave an important role to Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the claimant to the British throne. He wrote that the prince founded a chapter at Arras in 1747, and that noblemen of his circle used its warrants to spread the Scottish degrees. Historians today regard the Arras charter as a later invention, although it was widely believed in the nineteenth century. In a footnote, Rebold listed other bodies that he considered better documented: a mother lodge of the Scottish Rite at Marseille in 1751 and the Chapter of Clermont in Paris in the 1750s.

What is certain is that the number of high degrees grew quickly. The early Scottish degrees were few, but new ones were added until whole systems of many degrees existed. Rebold pointed to a body in Paris called the Council of Emperors of the East and West, which by about 1758 worked a series of twenty-five degrees. The highest of these was called Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret. This system later became known as the Rite of Perfection, and it is the direct ancestor of the Scottish Rite.

Rebold then made an interesting observation. After this period, he wrote, most inventors of new rites had the good sense to reduce the number of degrees rather than increase it. Following the Masonic congress at Wilhelmsbad in 1782, many systems were simplified to seven, ten or twelve degrees. The Rite of Perfection, with its twenty-five degrees, remained the largest. From this Rebold drew his first conclusion: between the 1750s and 1802, no country in Europe, whether England, France, Prussia or Sweden, possessed any council of a Scottish Rite of thirty-three degrees.

The central claim of the Charleston report was that King Frederick II of Prussia had been the supreme head of the high degrees and the author of their constitutions. Rebold therefore examined Frederick's actual Masonic career in some detail, relying on the encyclopedia of the German Masonic scholar Lenning and on correspondence with the Grand Lodge of the Three Globes in Berlin. If that claim could not stand, much of the legend would fall with it.

Frederick was initiated into Freemasonry at Brunswick on 15 August 1738, when he was still Crown Prince. (The English translation of Rebold prints the year as 1788, which is clearly a misprint.) After he became king, he raised the Berlin lodge known as the Three Globes, founded partly by French artists whom he had invited to Prussia, to the rank of a Grand Lodge in 1744, and he served as its Grand Master until 1747. His name remained on its register as Grand Master until 1755, but after 1747 he no longer took an active part in Masonic work.

According to Rebold, Frederick kept a general sympathy for the Craft, but he disliked the new systems of high degrees that entered Prussia in the following years. These systems, Rebold wrote, were brought by the Marquis de Berny and by officers of the French army under the Duke de Broglie during the Seven Years' War. Frederick is reported to have spoken of the high degrees with open disdain and to have predicted that they would become a source of quarrels among the lodges.

Rebold quoted a short letter of 7 February 1778, written from Potsdam to the Royal York of Friendship lodge in Berlin. In it the king thanked the lodge politely for its good wishes on his birthday. Rebold noted that the letter was much cooler in tone than the king's earlier messages, and that afterwards Frederick did not even reply to such greetings. The minutes of the Berlin Grand Lodges, he said, showed that during the last thirty years of his reign the king took no active part in Freemasonry at all.

From these facts Rebold drew his conclusions about the two documents known as the Grand Constitutions. The first was said to have been ratified at Berlin on 25 October 1762. The second, dated 1 May 1786, was said to have been approved by Frederick himself, creating the thirty-third degree and the Supreme Councils. Rebold argued that neither could have come from the king.

Regarding 1786, he pointed to the king's health. Frederick had visited Berlin for the last time in September 1785, to see his sister Princess Amelia and to review the artillery. He then returned to Potsdam, where he spent the winter in severe illness. On 17 April 1786 he moved to his palace of Sanssouci, and he died there on 17 August 1786. A man in that condition, Rebold argued, was in no position to revise an entire Masonic system and to compose new rituals. In Rebold's view, the documents bearing Frederick's name had been fabricated, and he placed their composition around 1804.

Rebold also cited the Grand Lodge of the Three Globes. In letters dated 1833 and 1861, that body had declared formally that the documents circulated under the title of Grand Constitutions of the Scottish Rite, whether in Latin, French or English, were apocryphal. Rebold further noticed that the early accounts of the Rite did not agree with one another. The Book of Gold of the Supreme Council for France, printed in 1807, said that Frederick had raised the twenty-five degrees to thirty-three, while Dalcho's report attributed to him only the creation of the thirty-third degree.

Modern historians have largely confirmed Rebold's main point, though not all of his details. Most now regard the Constitutions of 1786 as not genuinely the work of Frederick the Great, and many believe they were composed in Charleston around the time the Supreme Council was formed. The so-called Constitutions of 1762 are generally identified with regulations drawn up in Bordeaux or Paris in the early 1760s for the Rite of Perfection, without any real link to Berlin or to the Prussian king. Within the Rite itself, the 1786 Constitutions are still honoured as its traditional founding law, whatever their origin.

Having cleared away the legend, Rebold turned to what he regarded as the real history. To trace it, he said, one had to go back almost a century before his own time, to Paris in 1761. There, among the high-degree councils of the French capital, the documented story begins.

In that year a Mason named Stephen Morin, a member of the Grand Lodge of France and of a high-degree chapter, was preparing to travel to the Americas on private business. Rebold describes him as Jewish; later research has questioned this, and his religious background remains uncertain. Morin wished to carry the high degrees, then known as the “Masonry of Perfection”, to the New World. He approached a brother named Lacorne, who had been a substitute of the Grand Master, the Count of Clermont, and who was a controversial figure in the Grand Lodge of that period. Through Lacorne's proposal to the Sovereign Grand Council of the Emperors of the East and West, Morin received a patent dated 27 August 1761.

This patent appointed Morin Inspector General of all the lodges of the New World. It is the one document in the early history of the Rite whose existence historians do not doubt, although the surviving copies differ in detail and the extent of the powers it granted has long been debated. Whatever its precise wording, it gave Morin the authority he needed to establish the high degrees beyond the Atlantic, and to appoint others to do the same.

Morin settled in Saint-Domingue and began to use his powers. Rebold lists the appointments that followed, and these names form the backbone of the Rite's American history. Morin named Moses Michael Hays as Deputy Inspector for North America. He conferred the same dignity on Henry Andrew Francken for Jamaica and the English Windward Islands, and on Colonel Augustine Prevost for the English Leeward Islands and the British army.

Francken later passed his powers to Hays, who was by then a leading Mason in Boston, Massachusetts. Hays in turn appointed Isaac Da Costa as Inspector General for South Carolina. In 1783 Da Costa founded a Sublime Grand Lodge of Perfection at Charleston. After Da Costa's death, Joseph Myers succeeded him. Other inspectors were created for other states: Solomon Bush for Pennsylvania and Barend M. Spitzer for Georgia.

On 15 May 1781, according to Rebold, a council of inspectors met at Philadelphia. This council conferred the rank of Inspector General for Jamaica on Moses Cohen and appointed Isaac Long, together with several residents of Charleston named De la Hogue, Croze-Magnan, Saint-Paul, Petit and Marie, to spread the Rite in the different countries of America. The date of this meeting appears in Rebold's text, but modern historians have found the records of these early years difficult to verify, and some of the appointments may belong to slightly different dates.

In Charleston, the Grand Lodge of Perfection was joined by a Council of Princes of Jerusalem. On 27 February 1788, Rebold writes, a Royal Arch Chapter that held its authority from Dublin was united with it. On 2 August 1795, Colonel John Mitchell was appointed Deputy Inspector General for South Carolina. In 1797 Mitchell conferred this rank on Count de Grasse-Tilly, then living in Saint-Domingue, with powers for the French colonies of America. Rebold adds that the council of inspectors at Charleston called itself the Grand Council of Princes of Jerusalem, and that it issued its documents under this name.

By 1801 the council at Charleston included Colonel John Mitchell, Dr Frederick Dalcho, Abraham Alexander, Isaac Auld, Emmanuel de la Motta and several others. Rebold notes that a number of them belonged to Charleston's Jewish community, which was then one of the largest and most prominent in the United States. His remarks on this point reflect the prejudices of his time and are not repeated here.

Rebold believed that these brethren were dissatisfied with the limited reach of the powers they held under the Rite of Perfection. In his view, they wished to create something larger and more impressive, with greater authority than their existing patents allowed. Their earlier powers, he argued, already rested on uncertain foundations, and a careful Mason should have hesitated to build upon them further. Nevertheless, the plan went forward.

The result was a new Masonic authority with the title "Supreme Council of the Thirty-Third Degree". Its members took the twenty-five degrees of the Rite of Perfection, added eight more, and arranged the whole into a system of thirty-three degrees crowned by the rank of Sovereign Grand Inspector General. The new body raised its own members to the highest dignities, issued patents allowing them to establish the Rite wherever they travelled, and named Colonel Mitchell as its first Grand Commander. Rebold states that Mitchell died at Charleston in 1841, but other sources give an earlier date, and the matter is uncertain.

The traditional date for the founding of this Supreme Council is 31 May 1801. Today it is honoured as the Mother Supreme Council of the World, and every regular Supreme Council traces its descent from it. Rebold, writing as a critic, saw the new body as one more invention in an age of inventions. Modern Masons tend to see it rather as an act of consolidation: the founders took a scattered inheritance of high degrees and gave it a single structure, a single law and a clear governing authority.

To support the new Rite, Rebold says, it was necessary to give it a respectable origin and illustrious patrons. This task fell to Dalcho, Auld and de la Motta, and the report quoted at the beginning of this history was the result. In Rebold's opinion, the legend of Frederick the Great was born in this way.

One of the first acts of the new Council, Rebold writes, was the patent of 21 February 1802 given to Count de Grasse-Tilly. It named him Lieutenant Grand Commander and authorised him to establish a Supreme Council of the new Rite in Saint-Domingue. The Charleston Council then sought recognition abroad. It sent a circular to the Grand Lodges of Europe, which Rebold dates 11 December 1802, announcing its establishment, listing the names of the degrees it conferred, and naming the officers who could confer them in its name. The circular included, for the first time in public, the full list of the thirty-three degrees.

The response from the Grand Lodge of Scotland was cool. Rebold reports that it expressed surprise at so large a number of degrees, and declared that it could never recognise such a collection, since it had always kept Scottish Masonry in the simplicity of its original form. Rebold stressed that the Grand Lodge of Scotland had never practised anything beyond the three Craft degrees. He quoted its laws of 1836, which stated that it recognised no degrees except those of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason.

In a long footnote, Rebold sketched the spread of the Rite in the British Isles. He wrote that the first Supreme Council in Britain was formed at Dublin in 1808, and that Supreme Councils for England and for Scotland followed in 1845 and 1846. Dr Robert Crucefix, editor of a Masonic magazine, took a leading part in founding the English Council. Rebold also mentioned quarrels between rival councils, which he regretted deeply. He noted that the Supreme Council at Charleston itself had become almost inactive for many years and was revived in 1845. He concluded that, although the Grand Lodges did not recognise the Rite, many Grand Orients on the Continent did, and conferred its high degrees together with their own.

Rebold closed this part of his chapter with a severe judgement on the high degrees in general. He thought their legends were mixed with fanciful material about Templars, mystics and alchemists, and that much of their appeal lay in titles and decorations. Many readers will not share this view. For a great number of Masons, then and now, the high degrees have been a rich source of reflection, and their symbolic dramas are valued precisely because they are not meant as literal history.

Rebold then returned to France and to the situation that Count de Grasse-Tilly found there. To understand it, one must know that French Freemasonry had been divided for many years between two bodies: the older Grand Lodge of France and the Grand Orient of France, founded in 1773. The French Revolution had almost silenced Masonic activity, and when lodges began to meet again, the two bodies sought to settle their differences.

In 1799 the Grand Lodge and the Grand Orient reached a compromise and united. Not all brethren accepted it. Under the agreement, the Grand Orient recognised only a rite of seven degrees, the highest of which was the Rose Croix. Masons who held higher Scottish degrees found that they could no longer wear their decorations or use their ranks in the official assemblies. Members of the so-called Scottish party were especially unhappy with this arrangement.

According to Rebold, the Grand Orient responded with firmness. By an order dated 12 November 1802 it excluded from its jurisdiction the Masons of the Scottish degrees who refused the compromise. Rebold considered this an act of intolerance that only increased discontent. Several Paris lodges, and in particular the Lodge of Saint Alexander of Scotland, openly supported the excluded brethren, and preparatory meetings were held to form a new Masonic authority.

The first such authority was based on a patent brought from America by a brother named Hacquet, who had been a notary in Saint-Domingue. His patent came from a body sitting in New York and concerned the twenty-five degrees of the Rite of Perfection that Morin had carried to America in 1761. On this basis a body was formed in Paris under the name of Supreme Council of America.

Some months later, Count de Grasse-Tilly also arrived from Saint-Domingue. He carried the Charleston patent of 1802, which gave him the right to establish chapters, councils and consistories in Saint-Domingue and the other French colonies of America. The revolution in Saint-Domingue, which ended French rule over the island and led to the independence of Haiti, made it impossible for him to carry out this plan.

Back in France, the Count presented himself as the head of a new Masonry of thirty-three degrees. Rebold points out that his patent concerned the colonies and not France itself. However, the Count learned of the excluded Scottish brethren, who, according to Rebold, had been meeting in modest premises in Paris since their exclusion. He approached them and quickly arranged, under the authority of his Charleston patent, to found a new Masonic power. On 22 September 1804 he established the "Supreme Council for France of Sovereign Grand Inspectors General of the 33rd and last degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite".

Soon afterwards, the new Council organised and installed a Scottish Grand Lodge to govern the Scottish lodges, as Rebold had mentioned at the opening of his chapter. His text gives the date of this installation as 22 October 1805, but most sources place it on 22 October 1804, only a month after the Council itself was founded. Within a short time, the Grand Orient and the new Scottish authority reached an agreement that allowed the Rite to be practised in France under a shared arrangement, although tensions between them continued for many decades.

Rebold ended his chapter with a reproach to two fellow historians, Kauffmann and Cherpin, authors of a Philosophical History of Freemasonry. They had omitted the founding of the Supreme Council and the Scottish Grand Lodge from their account. Rebold suggested that they had done so out of loyalty to the Grand Orient, and he insisted that a historian has a duty to report the facts even when they are uncomfortable. His own motto, he wrote, was to seek the truth and to share it with courage.

The English edition of Rebold's history included a short afterword by its American translator, who signed with the initials J. F. B. He was writing at a time when the Scottish Rite had been growing quickly in the United States for about fifteen years. He acknowledged that Rebold's account would not please those who had devoted their efforts to spreading the Rite, but he considered it a plain and well-supported narrative.

In his summary, Rebold had shown that the Rite was either created at Charleston in 1801 and 1802, or developed there from the twenty-five degrees of the Rite of Perfection that Morin had brought to America. He had also given strong evidence that Frederick the Great had no knowledge of the Rite in its later form. The translator quoted a reflection by Sir William Drummond on how people often prefer an attractive story to a plain truth, and he applied it to the legends surrounding the Rite.

Yet the translator did not reject the Rite itself. He wrote that, even without its supposed royal origin, it could keep all its real excellence as far as it served the purposes of Freemasonry. He proposed, somewhat boldly, that the Rite should remove the legendary claims from its lectures and histories, and that its degrees should be combined with the American system of twelve degrees.

Rebold's criticism did not slow the growth of the Scottish Rite. In the century after his history appeared, the Rite became the most widely practised system of high degrees in the world. Supreme Councils were established throughout Europe, in Latin America, in the Caribbean, in Africa and in Asia. In the United States, a second Supreme Council for the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction was formed in 1813, while the original Charleston Council continued as the Supreme Council of the Southern Jurisdiction.

The most influential figure in the later history of the Rite was Albert Pike, who served as Sovereign Grand Commander of the Southern Jurisdiction from 1859 until his death in 1891. When Pike took office, the rituals of many degrees were incomplete, uneven or little more than outlines. He devoted many years to rewriting them, drawing on a wide range of philosophical, religious and historical sources. His long book Morals and Dogma, published in 1871, offered lectures on the degrees and became a standard work for generations of American Masons. Pike's efforts gave the Rite much of the intellectual depth and dignity for which it is known today.

In 1875 representatives of several Supreme Councils met in Lausanne, Switzerland, to coordinate their work and to agree on common principles. Since then, the Supreme Councils of the world have continued to meet regularly in international conferences. Each remains independent, but they share the same structure of thirty-three degrees, the same honour for the Constitutions of 1786 as their founding law, and the same motto.

Historians today, both inside and outside the Rite, generally accept the broad outline that Rebold defended: that the Rite grew from the French Rite of Perfection, that Stephen Morin carried those degrees to the Americas, and that the thirty-three degree system and the first Supreme Council took shape at Charleston in 1801. What was once a matter of fierce controversy has become an accepted chapter of Masonic history. In this sense, the story of the Rite has itself moved from legend to clearer understanding, from chaos toward order. For the many Masons who find meaning in its degrees, that understanding takes nothing away from the value of the Rite. Its worth lies not in the age of its documents, but in the lessons of wisdom, faith and service that it continues to teach.