ANCIENT AND ACCEPTED SCOTTISH RITE

The Origins of the Rite

What is the origin of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite ? What is its history, authentic or apocryphal? What are its specificity and consistency? I suggest that you approach these different points in the light of our Obedience, the Obedience of the Universal Fraternity.

Originally, the AASR was a system of high ranks (what remained in Anglo-Saxon countries) and not a rite of blue or symbolic lodges. This is the Supreme Council of the Southern Jurisdiction in Charleston who, in 1801, institutionalized grades 4 ^th to 33 ^th degree ^[1] , and EBITDA was largely developed in the United States, particularly under the leadership Albert Pike, ^[2] and elsewhere, to the point of becoming the most practiced rite in the world.

In France in the early nineteenth ^th century, at the initiative of Alexandre Francois Auguste de Grasse , with its American Masonic experience that is sealed an act of union or arrangement between the Grand Orient France and the Supreme Council of the 33 ^rd degree in France. In 1804, the 3 grades Apprentice, Companion, Master of the Blue Lodges were also created.

The ritual, in its gestural, oral and symbolic practices in the lodges, is fixed between 1805 and 1820, after the rectified Scottish rite and the French rite, and just before the Emulation rite. ^[4] It is codified in the Guide of Scottish Masons (or notebooks of the three symbolic grades of the Old and Accepted Rit).

Regardless of the terminology, the AASR, as it stands, is therefore neither fundamentally Scottish nor truly ancient. So, why these qualifiers Scottish and old? And what about "accepted"?

How is the Scottish AASR? Referring aware of the Scottish rite, born in the XVIII ^th century and linked to the presence of many Scottish Freemasons in the front row, and especially their decisive influence in the outcome of speculative masonry, as well as for stand of English masonry. At the time, the term Scottish lodge also referred to improvement lodges to distinguish them from blue or English lodges. Outside the Scottish lodges, Scottish master masons would have been present as early as 1733 at the Temple Bar Lodge in the east of London. Fleeing the chaos of conflicts in their islands, the Stuartist exiles in France created the Scottish Masonic order with the Scottish Lodge in the Orient of Bordeaux.

Why is the AASR “old”? By allusion to the Grand Lodge of the Antients of Scotland which practiced a different masonry from the English masonry practiced by the Moderns. In doing so, by advocating a return to tradition, the Ancients developed a rite paradoxically more recent than that of the Moderns.

In the texts, the Guide to Scottish Masons is itself largely borrowed from the manuscript “The three distinct strokes” of 1760, a reference text for the Antients ritual. Other Masonic antecedents, the Constitutions of Bordeaux of 1762, by establishing 25 degrees of the rite of perfection, laid the foundation of the AASR. French brothers, including Etienne Morin , owner of letters patent from 1761, exported this rite to the West Indies, to Saint Domingue from 1762 and then to the United States where the constitutive process of the AASR will be completed. The Berlin Constitutions of 1786 brought the AASR to 33 degrees and cemented its unity with the mottos "Ordo ab chao" and "Deus meumque jus" definitively imposed in 1885.

In AASR, what does “accepted” mean? It is about the habit taken in the symbolic lodges to accept members not exercising the trade of mason. To the masons of the corporations and to the free masons, of profession but freed, therefore add outsiders, accepted masons, thus marking the passage from an operative masonry (which builds a work) to a speculative masonry (which is enriched by its observation).

In Masonic practice, the AASR is defined as an initiatory, traditional, humanist and symbolic order.

It is first of all an initiation rite tending to spiritual realization, based on the quest for self-knowledge through work of introspection. The AASR conceives of Freemasonry as a society whose object is individual improvement, without any direct intervention in the secular world, but exclusively through work in a lodge where no political or religious discussion is allowed. However, "the vast field of spiritual activity" which opens up to the Freemason must also inspire his "conduct in the profane world". ^[9]

The AASR is also a traditional rite based on a complex heritage with the different influences that have structured the rite: the Teutonic origins for the constituent texts, the alchemy with the hermetic formula VITRIOL in the cabinet of reflection, the Templar chivalry. Deist, it rests on the faith in a supreme power or creative principle, named Grand Architect of the Universe, and in a light, a Volume of the Sacred Law.

The AASR is also humanist because its objective is to "bring together what is scattered" thanks to a universal spirit of fraternity, in order to allow the construction of the Temple of Humanity.

Finally, the AASR is by essence symbolic, in the individual quest, the tools, the initiatory journeys. In this progression, everyone must find their own spiritual path.

The ritual specificity of the AASR, which differentiates it from other Masonic rites, is strong. It is first before even the initiation with the passage under the band. It is then by the

red color of the aprons and the decorations, then in the various times of the dress with the outline of the lodge table, the reading of the prologue of Saint John , or even in the stroll by marking the angles. It is again by the Scottish acclamation Houzzé! Houzzé! Houzzé! to which certain progressive or socially open lodges and lodges add the French republican motto "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". ^[10] It is finally during the feasts with the toast of the tuileur.