Most Excellent Master

Most Excellent Master is the third degree conferred in a Royal Arch Chapter. Its setting is a moment of triumph: the completion and dedication of King Solomon’s Temple, when the work begun in the Craft degrees is at last finished and the builders gather to celebrate what their hands have made.

History

Unlike the Mark and Royal Arch degrees, whose roots reach back to eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland, Most Excellent Master is an American development. It emerged in the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as American Masons organized their Capitular system and the degrees that would carry the Temple story from its building to its loss and recovery. The degree found its place in the monitorial literature of the period, the era of Thomas Smith Webb’s widely used Masonic monitors, and from there spread through the Grand Chapters of the several states.

Its historical content is drawn from the biblical account of the Temple’s completion under Solomon: the finish of the work, the sanctifying of the building, and the bringing in of the Ark. The degree thus answers a narrative need within the York Rite: it marks the fulfilment of the building story before the destruction and loss that the later degrees lament and repair.

In the York Rite

Most Excellent Master follows Past Master and prepares the candidate for the crowning Royal Arch degree in the Chapter. The Capitular sequence is summarized on the degree histories page.