The Illustrious Order of the Red Cross

The Illustrious Order of the Red Cross is the first order conferred in a Commandery. Its setting is not medieval but ancient: the court of the Persian king Darius, and the appeal of Zerubbabel, the prince who led the return from the Babylonian captivity, for the rebuilding of the Temple at Jerusalem. The order’s great lesson is Truth, and its narrative brings the York Rite’s Temple story to its political rescue: the restoration decreed, the work resumed.

History

Although it is conferred by Commanderies, the Red Cross order is the oldest in setting of the four, and its lineage in form is distinct from the medieval orders that follow it. Degrees and orders bearing the red cross grew up in European Masonic systems in the eighteenth century, attached to the “Scottish” and chivalric sides of Masonic tradition, and American Templar masons absorbed and adapted one such order into their developing system.

By the time the American Commandery system was organized in the early nineteenth century, the period that produced the Grand Encampment of the United States, the Red Cross had taken its fixed place as the first order of the five-order American series: an order of Jewish and Persian antiquity that carries the candidate from the Cryptic story of the Temple’s loss to the threshold of knighthood.

In the York Rite

The Red Cross opens the sequence of the Commandery. It is followed by the Passing Order of St. Paul, the Order of Malta, and the Order of the Temple. All York Rite order histories are indexed on the degree histories page.