booknetsaWebster-secretSocietiesAndSubversiveMovements

cia signified the Cross, the square and the compass the union between the Old and New Testaments, etc. So
" the mysteries of Masonry were in their principle, and are still, nothing else than those of the Christian religion."(34)
Baron Tschoudy, however, declares that all this stops short of the truth, that Freemasonry originated
long before the Crusades in Palestine, and that the real " ancestors, fathers, authors of the Masons, those illustrious
men of whom I will not say the date nor betray the secret," were a " disciplined body " whom
Tschoudy describes by the name of " the Knight of the Aurora and Palestine." After " the almost total destruction
of the Jewish people " these " Knights " had always hoped to regain possession of the domains of
their fathers and to rebuild the Temple, and they carefully preserved their " regulations and particular
liturgy," together with a " sublime treatise " which was the object of their continual study and of their philosophical
speculations. Tschoudy further relates that they were students of the " occult sciences," of which
alchemy formed a part, and that they had " abjured the principles of the Jewish religion in order to follow
the lights of the Christian faith." At the time of the Crusades the Knights of Palestine came out from the
desert of the Thebad, where they had remained hidden, and joined to themselves some of the crusaders who
had remained in Jerusalem. Declaring that they were the descendants of the masons who had worked on the
Temple of Solomon, they professed to concern themselves with " speculative architecture," which served to
disguise a more glorious point of view. From this time they took the name of Free Masons, presented themselves
under this title to the crusading armies and assembled under their banners.(35)
It would of course be absurd to regard any of the foregoing accounts as historical facts; the important
point is that they tend to prove the fallacy of supposing that the Johannite-Templar theory originated with
the revived Ordre du Temple, since one corresponding to it so closely was current in the middle of the preceding
century. It is true that in these earlier accounts the actual words " Johannite " and " Templar " do not
occur, but the resemblance between the sect of Jews professing the Christian faith but possessing a " particular
liturgy " and a " sublime treatise "-apparently some early form of the Cabala-dealing with occult science,
and the Mandans or Johannites with their Cabalistic " Book of Adam," their Book of John, and their ritual,
is at once apparent. Further, the allusions to the connexion between the Knights who had been indoctrinated
in the Holy Land and the Scottish lodges coincides exactly with the Templar tradition, published not only by
the Ordre du Temple but handed down in the Royal Order of Scotland.
From all this the following facts stand out: (1) that whilst British Craft Masonry traced its origin to the
operative guilds of masons, the Freemasons of France from 1737 onwards placed the origin of the Order in
crusading chivalry; (2) that it was amongst these Freemasons that the upper degrees known as the Scottish
Rite arose; and (3) that, as we shall now see, these degrees clearly suggest Templar inspiration. The earliest
form of the upper degrees appears to have been the one given by de Bérage, as follows: 1. Parfait Maçon
Élu. 2. Élu de Perignan. 3. Élu des Quinze. 4. Petit Architecte. 5. Grand Architecte. 6. Chevalier de l'Épée et
de Rose-Croix. 7. Noachite ou Chevalier Prussien.
The first of these to make its appearance is believed to have been the one here assigned to the sixth
place. This degree known in modern Masonry as " Prince of the Rose-Croix of Heredom or Knight of the
Pelican and Eagle " became the eighteenth and the most important degree in what was later called the Scottish
Rite, or at the present time in England the Ancient and Accepted Rite.
Why was this Rite called Scottish? " It cannot be too strongly insisted on," says Mr. Gould, " that all
Scottish Masonry has nothing whatever to do with the Grand Lodge of Scotland, nor, with one possible exception-that
of the Royal Order of Scotland-did it ever originate in that country."(36) But in the case of the
Rose-Croix degree there is surely so justification for the term in legend, if not in proven fact, for, as we have
already se en, according to the tradition of the Royal Order of Scotland this degree had been contained in it
since the fourteenth century, when the degrees of H.R. (Heredom) and R.S.Y.C.S. (Rosy Cross) are said to
have been instituted by Robert Bruce in collaboration with the Templars after the battle of Bannockburn.
Dr. Mackey is one of the few Masons who admit this probable affiliation, and in referring to the tradition of
the Royal Order of Scotland observes: " From that Order it seems to us by no means improbable that the
present degree of Rose-Croix de Heredom may have taken its origin."(37)
But the Rose-Croix degree, like the Templar tradition from which it appears to have descended, is capable
of a dual interpretation, or rather of a multiple interpretation, for no degree in Masonry has been subject
to so many variation. That on the Continent it had descended through the Rosicrucians in an alchemical
form seems more than probable. It would certainly be difficult to believe that a degree of R.S.Y.C.S. was
imported from the East and incorporated in the Royal Order of Scotland in 1314; that by a mere coincidence
a man named Christian Rosenkreutz was-according to the Rosicrucian legend-born in the same century and
transmitted a secret doctrine he had discovered in the East to the seventeenth-century Brethren of the Rosy
Nesta H. Webster — Secret Societies and Subversive Movements — Part I
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