Cryptic Masonry · Degree
Royal Master
Conversations at the building of the Temple: the Cryptic story begins before its loss.
Royal Master is one of the two principal degrees conferred in a Council of Cryptic Masons. Its setting is deliberate and striking: it takes place before the death of the chief architect of the Temple, so the candidate hears conversations that look forward to a loss the other degrees narrate only after the fact, making plain why what will be lost is worth preserving.
History
The Cryptic degrees are, in their documented form, the youngest part of the York Rite. The Royal Master degree developed in the United States in the early nineteenth century, in the same ferment that produced the organized Council system itself. Degrees of this character had circulated among Masons for some years before Councils of Royal and Select Masters were formally constituted in the 1810s and 1820s, and when the Councils took shape they gathered these degrees into a coherent body, one organized around the Temple’s secrets and their safekeeping.
The name “Cryptic” itself points to the shared theme: the vault, the crypt beneath the Temple, and the deposits entrusted there. The Royal Master degree introduces that theme through the figure of a workman whose understanding of what must be preserved sets the stage for the Select Master degree.
In the York Rite
Cryptic Masonry is described on the original source as the last part of the Rite dealing specifically with the Hiramic Legend, and the gateway to the Temple-restoration tradition. Royal Master opens that gateway; Select Master completes its principal degrees, and many Councils add Super Excellent Master as an honorary degree. See the Council page and the degree histories index for the whole sequence.