the Order as a
whole. For the years following after the suppression of Masonry in
France were marked by the most important development in the history of
the modern Order--the inauguration of the Additional Degrees.

The Additional Degrees

The origin and inspiration of the additional degrees has provoked hardly
less controversy in masonic circles than the origin of Masonry itself.
It should be explained that Craft Masonry, or Blue Masonry--that is to
say, the first three degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and
Master Mason of which I have attempted to trace the history--were the
only degrees recognized by Grand Lodge at the time of its foundation in
1717 and still form the basis of all forms of modern Masonry. On this
foundation were erected, somewhere between 1740 and 1743, the degree of
the Royal Arch and the first of the series of upper degrees now known as
the Scottish Rite or as the Ancient and Accepted Rite. The acceptance or
rejection of this superstructure has always formed a subject of violent
controversy between Masons, one body affirming that Craft Masonry is the
only true and genuine Masonry, the other declaring that the real object
of Masonry is only to be found in the higher degrees. It was this
controversy, centring round the Royal Arch degree, that about the middle
of the eighteenth century split Masonry into opposing camps of Ancients
and Moderns, the Ancients declaring that the R.A. was "the Root, Heart,
and Marrow of Freemasonry,"[354] the Moderns rejecting it. Although
worked by the Ancients from 1756 onwards, this degree was definitely
repudiated by Grand Lodge in 1792,[355] and only in 1813 was officially
received into English Freemasonry.

The R.A. degree, which is said nevertheless to be contained in embryo in
the 1723 Book of Constitutions,[356] is purely Judaic--a glorification
of Israel and commemorating the building of the second Temple. That it
was derived from the Jewish Cabala seems probable, and Yarker,
commenting on the phrase in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ quoted
above--"Who knows whether they (the Freemasons) have not a higher order
of Cabalists, who keep the Grand Secret of all entirely to
themselves"--observes: "It looks very like an intimation of the Royal
Arch degree,"[357] and elsewhere he states that "the Royal Arch degree,
when it had the Three Veils, must have been the work, even if by
instruction, of a Cabalistic Jew about 1740, and from this time we may
expe