Freemason Degree Rituals Explained

The three Craft Degrees of Freemasonry — Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason — are the foundation of every regular Masonic tradition in the world. Each is a dramatic ritual that uses the working tools of the medieval stonemason as symbols of moral self-improvement. Although the obligations are administered in private, the structure of the rituals is well documented and the moral symbolism is openly published in the Monitor of each Grand Lodge.

The Setting: The Blue Lodge

The ceremonies of the three degrees take place in a “Blue Lodge”, a room laid out in imitation of King Solomon’s Temple. The Master sits in the East under a canopy; the Senior Warden sits in the West; the Junior Warden in the South. Pillars named Boaz and Jachin stand at the entrance. A checkered mosaic floor represents the mingling of joy and sorrow, the rough ashlar and the perfect ashlar sit on the pedestal, and the Three Great Lights — the Volume of Sacred Law, the Square and the Compasses — lie open on the altar.

The Entered Apprentice Degree

The candidate for the first degree is brought blindfolded into the lodge and, in the course of the ceremony, is “made” an Entered Apprentice. The candidate undertakes a series of challenges that symbolise the moral tests of life: he is divested of metals, he kneels at the altar, he receives the light of Masonry and he is given the working tools of an Entered Apprentice, the twenty-four-inch gauge and the common gavel. The most famous moment of the degree is the communication of the Secret Handshake of an Entered Apprentice, a sign of the grip and a word that vary by jurisdiction.

The moral teaching of the degree is the basic Masonic virtue: purity of intention. The candidate is taught that, having been received in darkness, his new life is one of self-knowledge and labour.

The Fellow Craft Degree

The second degree is passed by another set of charges and another obligation. The candidate, having made progress as an Apprentice, is “passed” to the rank of Fellow Craft. The principal symbol of the degree is the pillar of Wisdom, on which the candidate traces the five liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic and geometry. The working tools given in this degree are the plumb, the level and the square.

The Fellow Craft degree is the most explicitly intellectual of the three. Its central lecture is a moralisation on the seven liberal arts and sciences. The classic Craft ritual connects the degree to the building of King Solomon’s Temple and the original craftsman tradition from which speculative Freemasonry descends.

The Master Mason Degree

The third and most solemn degree of the Craft is the Master Mason. Its central drama is the legend of Hiram Abiff, the master architect of Solomon’s Temple, who was murdered by three Fellow Crafts who wished to extract from him the secrets of the Master Mason’s word. The candidate in the degree represents Hiram in his death and is later “raised” to life — a re-enactment of the resurrection.

The moral teaching of the degree is the immortality of the soul, the certainty that virtue will be rewarded, and the duty of brotherly love. The Master Mason is given the trowel, the most emblematic of the working tools, and the obligation that binds him in all three degrees is complete. The candidate also receives the Grand Hailing Sign, the Grand Word and the Five Points of Fellowship, which together are the strongest fraternal recognition signs in the Craft.

The Apron, the Lambskin and the Working Tools

Throughout all three degrees, the white lambskin apron is the central piece of regalia. It is invested on the candidate in the first degree and is the badge of a Mason for life. The apron is decorated differently in each degree: the Entered Apprentice wears a plain white apron with simple rosettes; the Fellow Craft adds two rosettes; the Master Mason adds a third.

The Higher Degrees

Beyond the three Craft Degrees, regular Freemasonry offers “appendant bodies”. The most common are the Royal Arch (which completes the third degree according to its own doctrine), the Cryptic Degrees, the Chivalric orders including the Knights Templar and the Scottish Rite, which extends to the thirty-third degree. The Scottish Rite in particular draws heavily on the esoteric Christian tradition and on Hermetic symbolism.

Why Secrecy?

The traditional answer given by Masons is that the secrets of the Craft are too sacred to be cast before the uninitiated. The non-traditional answer, given by historians, is that the secrecy of the Masonic degree rituals and the recognition signs is what binds members together emotionally and what gave the early fraternity its cachet in an age of formal societies. Whichever explanation one prefers, the rituals remain, in their essentials, the same in every regular Grand Lodge in the world.

Sources and Further Reading

The standard reference is the Monitor of each Grand Lodge — most importantly the United Grand Lodge of England’s Book of Constitutions (current edition 2018) and the various American state-grand-lodge monitors. For the scholarly treatment, the standard work is David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry (1988), and for the 18th-century ritual, Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlightenment (1991) and The Origins of Freemasonry: Facts and Fictions (2006). For the relationship to medieval craft practice, the relevant article is John Hamill, “The English Craft” in Ars Quatuor Coronatorum (1989), the most-cited Masonic research journal. For the Scottish Rite, Arturo de Hoyos, ed., The Scottish Rite Ritual Monitor and Guide (multiple editions).

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