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."[374] But in the case of the Rose-Croix degree there is surely some justification for the term in legend, if not in proven fact, for, as we have already seen, 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.M. (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."[375]

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 variations. 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 Cross; and finally, that a degree of the Rose-Croix was founded in circ. 1741 without any connexion existing between these succeeding movements. Even if we deny direct affiliation, we must surely admit a common source of inspiration producing, if not a continuation, at any rate a periodic revival of the same ideas. Dr. Oliver indeed admits affiliation between the seventeenth-century fraternity and the eighteenth-century degree, and after pointing out that the first indication of the Rose-Croix degree appears in the Fama Fraternitatis in 1613, goes on to say:

It was known much sooner, although not probably as a degree in Masonry, for it existed as a cabalistic science from the earliest times in Egypt, Greece, and Rome, as well as amongst the Jews and Moors in times more recent, and in our own country the names of Roger Bacon, Fludd, Ashmole, and many others are found in its list of adepts.[376]

Dr. Mackey, quoting this passage, observes that "Oliver confounds the masonic Rose-Croix with the alchemical Rosicrucians," and proceeds to give an account of the Rose-Croix degree as worked in England and America, which he truly describes as "in the strictest sense a Christian degree."[377] But the point Dr. Mackey overlooks is that this is only one version of the degree, which, as we shall see later, has been and still is worked in a very different manner on the Continent.

It is, however, certain that the version of the Rose-Croix degree first adopted by the Freemasons of France in about 1741 was not only so Christian but so Catholic in character as to have given rise to the belief that it was devised by the Jesuits in order to counteract the attacks of which Catholicism was the object.[378] In a paper on the Additional Degrees Mr. J.S. Tuckett writes:

There is undeniable evidence that in their earliest forms the Ecossais or Scots Degrees were Roman Catholic; I have a MS. Ritual in French of what I believe to be the original Chev. de l'Aigle or S∴P∴D∴R∴C∴ (Souverain Prince de Rose-Croix) and in it the New Law is declared to be "la foy Catholique," and the Baron Tschoudy in his L'Étoile Flamboyante of 1766 describes the same Degree as "le Catholicisme mis en grade" (Vol. I. p. 114). I suggest that Ecossais or Scots Masonry was intended to be a Roman Catholic as well as a Stuart form of Freemasonry, in which none but those devoted to both Restorations were to be admitted.[379]