ROSE CROIX. A History of the Ancient & Accepted Rite for England and Wales. Brig. ACF Jackson. 289pp (hard cover). Lewis Masonic Books. £15.50. ISBN 0 85318 151 9.

According to Gabriel Naudé's Instruction a la France sur la verité de l’histoire des Frères de la Rose-Croix (Paris, 1623), placards had appeared that year in the French capital announcing that the ‘Invisible Brothers’ were about to put in an appearance:

“We, being deputies of the principle College of the Brothers of the Rose Cross, are making a visible and invisible stay in this city through the Grace of the Most High, towards whom turn the hearts of the Just. We show and teach without books or marks how to speak all languages of the countries where we wish to be, and to draw men from error and death.”

Naudé’s view was that ‘their’ mission was altogether more sinister. Another work published in that year of 1623 was more specific: Horrible Pacts made between the Devil and the Pretended Invisible Ones.
    The publication of this nonsense was clearly intended to, and seems to have succeeded, in creating a witch scare. This was no joke. The burning of witches was a regular occurrence during this period, and the justice available for such cases was invariably a mass of prejudice. According to the latter work – a kind of prototype for 300 years of Satan-scares – 36 Invisibles were dispersed about the world in groups of six.
    The meeting to decide to send their ‘reps’ to Paris had occurred, it says, in Lyons the previous June, and was followed by a Grand Sabbath at which a demon appeared in great lustre. His appearance then made the adepts imitate the accusations made against the Templars i.e: that they prostrated themselves before the evil-one and swore to abjure Christianity in all its aspects.
    For so selling their souls they obtained the power to travel with full pockets to whereso’er they wished and were granted the eloquence to attract dupes for the Devil. In a perversion of the rules of the Rosicrucian Fama Fraternitatis (pub.1614), it says that they could not be recognised because they were attired as ordinary men.
    Brigadier Jackson’s book, Rose Croix, informs us that some 140 years later the ‘Rose Croix Brothers’ appeared again in a new form – not, this time, as fictional witches culled from Catholic nightmares, but as Freemasons.
    In 1761 comes the first mention of the Sovereign Prince Rose-Croix applied to the holders of the degree of Knight of the Eagle in the confused and confusing world of French ‘Scottish’ Masonry. Apart from the Thirty Years War and tremendous religious and social upheavals, what else had occurred during those 140 years?
    Freemasonry, established in France between 1725 and 1730, grew rapidly, partly due to a fashionable interest in English institutions among the French educated classes. While the Parisian Grand Lodge dominated French Masonry in the 1730s, more exotic forms of Masonry began to proliferate across the nation.
    In France, there was (and is) a far greater enthusiasm than in England for chivalric themes with mystical tendencies. Chivalric Masonry was influenced by the Scots emigré to France, Andrew Michael Ramsay who, in 1737, published a speech claiming that Freemasonry began during the period of the Crusades. Other enthusiasts picked up the idea and attached the chivalric mythology to the condemned order of the Knights Templar.
    Largely as a result of Ramsay’s efforts, chivalric and mystically-oriented Masonry with its ‘high-grades’ beyond the three Craft degrees became known in France as ‘Scottish Masonry’. Some Scottish rites make use of the mythology of the ‘chosen masters’ (maîtres élus), sent by Solomon to arrest the assassins of Hiram Abif.
    In 1754, Martines de Pasqually, a man said to have travelled the east in search of wisdom (the Rosenkreuz archetype) set up an order called the Scottish Judges in Montpellier. Six years later, in Bordeaux, he established the Cabala-influenced Order of Elect Cohens, of which Order Pasqually was Grand Sovereign.
    The Elect Cohens practised a form of ceremonial magic: a combination of the Catholic Mass with the works of Renaissance occultists such as Henry Cornelius Agrippa. Pasqually claimed to be in contact with unearthly beings.
    He held an animist conception of the universe, a universe pulsating with life on many planes or in ulterior dimensions to those experienced by human beings ordinarily. His ceremonies were regulated by astrological considerations.
    According to Pasqually, “The bodies of the universe are all vital organs of eternal life.” The Moon and the Sun figured prominently in his system. Equinoxes were chosen as propitious times for important rituals, to encourage good spirits.

Daily Invocation

There was a daily invocation wherein the Elect Cohen would trace a circle on the floor, at the centre of which was inscribed the letter ‘W’ below a candle. The Cohen then stood in the circle and, holding a light to read the invocation, would begin: “O Kadoz, O Kadoz, who will enable one to become as I was originally when a spark of divine creation? Who will enable me to return in virtue and eternal spiritual power?”
    The purpose of the invocations and evocations was ultimately to open communication with what Pasqually described as the “Active and Intelligent Cause”.
    In 1772, Pasqually sailed to Santo Domingo in the Caribbean, leaving the Assemblée in the hands of his followers Bacon and Jean-Baptiste Willermoz. Pasqually never returned, dying in Port-au-Prince in 1774.
    Bacon then joined the Grand Orient, a mainstream French masonic order (founded in 1772), while Willermoz (1730-1824) not only joined the Strict Observance Rite (founded in 1754 by Baron Hund) but also founded several influential orders of his own: the high-degree masonic order of Chevaliers Bienfaisants de la Cité Sainte, also known as the Rite Écossais Rectifié and also the Chevaliers de l’Aîgle Noir et Rose-Croix, a rite containing strong alchemical and neo-Rosicrucian themes.
    According to Jackson, it was possibly in the year 1765 that Willermoz completed a Rose-Croix ritual which apparently forms the basis of that practised today as the 18th degree of the Ancient & Accepted Rite. It would have been helpful if a copy of Willermoz’s ritual appeared in the book next to that currently practised (though there are international variations), but that would be too much to expect from a member of an order sworn to secrecy. And here lies one of the problems of the book.

Little Ritual Detail

How can an historian take altogether seriously a book produced by an enthusiastic member of a secretive organisation? Consequently, the book contains very little actual detail about the content of the Ancient & Accepted Rite.
    It is clear that only members will find this book really useful – and as there is no comparable work for the ‘general reader’ or student, we just have to ‘lump it’. This is a pity. The book piles up its information with absolutely no regard for the sociology, politics, philosophy, psychology, religion or science of the period concerned.
    The ordering of the book is confused in that the line of story and development of idea is never followed with any real consideration for the reader. But this is a common and glaring fault of books produced by masons for the masonic market.
    Serious editing seems to be out of the question. There is a whiff of hieratic anal retention. Are we really supposed to know what we are lucky to be told? Dare we ask for more explanation? No, we are to be given assorted facts. Lots and lots of them. Mason shall speak unto mason, and none else shall hear! What a path to enlightenment!

Spreading Masonry

So, what do we learn in the main about the Ancient and Accepted Rite? In 1761, a French creole named Etienne Morin (d.1771) received a patent from the Grand Lodge of France, naming him as Inspector General with duties to spread Masonry across the Atlantic.
    It is not made clear in the book whether Morin headed to the West Indies (arriving in 1763) with a Rose-Croix ritual, least of all the one “possibly” completed by Willermoz two years later. Anyhow, a year after this ‘possible’ completion, Morin seems to have begun the ‘1762’ (backdated) Constitutions that the A&A Rite of today regards as important foundation documents.
    What was Morin’s relationship with Willermoz and all those occult-minded masons back in Bordeaux and Lyons? We are not told. Is this to keep the shine on the A&A Rite? A year later (1767) Morin’s deputy, Francken, formed the Lodge of Perfection and Council of Princes of Jerusalem at Albany, New York.
    This was the same year in which France’s Grand Master, the Comte de Clermont, expressed his wish that Rose-Croix degrees be restricted to a few masons of high rank. And so, after (a somewhat disgraced) Morin’s death in 1771, the long-winded story goes on.
    In 1783 a Lodge of Perfection is opened at Charleston – a key date for today’s Supreme Council, Southern Masonic Jurisdiction (USA). In 1813, the Supreme Council, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction USA is founded.

Move to Duke Street

In 1845, England’s Junior Grand Deacon Dr Crucefix (1797-1850) receives a patent from the Supreme Council, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction and becomes England’s Most Puissant Grand Commander with Dr George Oliver DD (1782-1867) as his lieutenant Grand Commander. In 1911, England and Wales’ Supreme Council moves to 10 Duke Street SW1, where this reviewer was ‘perfected’ in the 18th degree not so long ago.
    So what’s all the fuss about? The Rose Croix ritual as currently practised in England is a Trinitarian Christian ritual which places the aspirant symbolically among the events of the ‘Easter weekend’ after a long journey, during which he has learnt the values of faith, hope and love.

Ladder to Perfection

He turns up in Jerusalem to hear that the “cubic stone” (a masonic/alchemical image for Christ – the ‘lost Word’) is pouring forth blood for the redemption of mankind. The aspirant learns that life is a ladder to perfection symbolised in part by the fragrance of roses and vouchsafed by deep thought on the meaning of the Cross, and held in balance by the triple virtues of Faith, Hope and Love.
    Effectively, the ‘slain master’ of the Craft degrees is identified with Christ and to ‘die in Him’ is to be reborn in the spirit.
    There is very little in Jackson’s book to explain the many symbols employed in the ritual or much consideration of why anyone should particularly want to experience a ritual made up of the moral commonplaces of old-fashioned Sunday schools and wholesale lifting of texts from the New Testament.
    Jackson’s book appears to this reviewer as confused as its subject matter.
    Tobias Churton