There are many types of masonry. Freemasonry has broken up into several different organizations. In our next conversation with Clair Barrus, he will tell us a little bit about these different organizations and how they differ from each other.
Clair: So it’s a little bit complicated. So the foundational masonry is Craft or Blue Lodge Masonry, that’s the first three degrees. These other things that branch out from that are not above it. This is considered top: Master Mason. There’s three degrees and you end up Master Mason.
…
There’s York Rite and there’s Scottish Rite masonry. In America, different degrees would kind of get imported over from Europe where masonry was more established and would independently get started up here and there. Then as time went on, people would say, we better organize this group of degrees, and we better organize that group of degrees. So you have a building of what they called York Rite, cried even though there was another York Rite in England, but there’s an Americanized York Rite, and that’s primarily what I talk about. There’s a Scottish Rite that was more popular over there, but that was also here. They all tell similar stories. They all talk about temple. Masonry is all about temple, either temple grounds, or in the temple, itself. It can be different temples, but it’s all about temples. In York Rite, you have the foundational three degrees, the first three degrees of Craft or Blue Lodge Masonry, it’s called. And then you have a set of degrees called Royal Arch Masonry, another set of degrees called Cryptic Rite Masonry, and another set of degrees called Knights Templar Masonry. So that’s the York Rite, and each of those sets of degrees have interesting things. I think in particular, Royal Arch Masonry and Cryptic Rite Masonry have interesting parallels with Joseph Smith, and may have been influential.
Clair: So, can I tell you about Cryptic Rite Masonry?
GT: Yeah.
Clair: So Cryptic Rite Masonry comes from the word crypt. The rituals and the myth of Cryptic Rite Masonry has to do with Enoch, the prophet Enoch and mount Moriah, which later is where Solomon’s Temple would be built.
…
Clair: Now let’s fast forward to Royal Arch Masonry, which is really the story of masonry in about 600 BC. [This is] about the time that the temple gets destroyed. There are temple ruins. Some people come, going through the temple rubble, masons find a stone lid, which is the lid that Enoch had created, which is the entrance to the cryptic temple. They open up that stone lid, they descend down into there, and there they find the Ark of the Covenant. There are actually nine chambers in this underground temple, and the Ark of the Covenant. So there’s a missing piece of the story. We don’t know how the ark got in there, but it does. This ought to sound familiar to Indiana Jones fans.
GT: Yes, I was just going to say [that.]
Check out our conversation….
