SCOTTISH RITE LEGITIMACY: A.G. PITTS.

AMERICAN FREEMASON, DECEMBER 1912

ON the occasion of the Scottish Rite Congress held at Washington in
October, the question of the relative legitimacy of the several soi-disant
Supreme Councils of the United States came up again.  I have been again
furnished with the data for a decision of this question, but I am unable to
become interested in it. And as I am accustomed to spend days in
exhausting the evidence upon Masonic questions of much less apparent
actuality, this inertia of mine perhaps calls for explanation.

The explanation is this: So far as I can see there is no choice between the
several bodies.  There can be none, whatever the facts.  I have just as
much light to begin peddling the Scottish Rite degrees tomorrow, if I
choose, as has Brother Richardson, or Brother Smith, or Brother Bayliss,
or any one of the agents of their respective Supreme Councils.

Hundreds of Masonic degrees were drifting around Europe in the latter half
of the eighteenth century.  Now, it is claimed that five Jewish brethren
brought together thirty-three of these degrees in 1801 at Charleston, South
Carolina, and that thus the Scottish Rite begun.  Now, for goodness sake,
will someone try to make me understand how that gave these five brethren
a monopoly of these thirty-three degrees? Please make it very plain and
simple, and use words of one syllable, so far as possible, for I am afraid
that this side of my mind must be in a state of arrested development.

Afterward, as I gain, Brother Cerneau came to America with the same
degrees, all, or twenty-five of them.  As to this personage, all other
authorities agree that he was an honest and worthy man, yet all the
"regular" Scottish Riters agree that he was a fiend, a devil, that he had
horns and hoofs, that he was a parricide, a traitor, an outcast, an animal
who had descended below the level of a man.  All this he became by
bringing to America these Scottish Rite degrees which he had found
kicking around Europe, the property of any man that thought them worth
picking up and dusting off.

At this time, too, the Scottish Rite was dead in the United States, for,
practically, it died a-borning.  Cerneau was not interfering with anybody or
encroaching upon anyone's exclusive territorial rights, if such a thing there
could be in Scottish Rite Masonry.

Now, if it were true that the Northern and Southern Supreme Councils can
trace their descent from the Charleston body of 1801, and any of these
others can not, what does that signify?.  If the five brethren had a right to
appropriate the degrees in 1801, why did not Cerneau have an equal right
to appropriate them afterward? Haven't I an equal right to appropriate them
today? How on earth did the five Hebrew brethren in Charleston come to
own them? Twenty-five of them, at least, were the property of another Rite,
if there was any property in them at all.  The Charleston body was not the
heir, the successor nor the assignee of this other Rite.  These men took
what they wanted off the accumulated pile of high degrees, and then they
and their successors got themselves all appointed upon the police force;
so that now, if anyone else tries to help himself, precisely as they helped
themselves, he is taken into custody and executed by these Masonic
policemen without judge or jury.  And we thought that the New York police
had originated something new!

Now, of course I am very innocent, and very ignorant of Scottish Rite
matters, but if you are going to try to answer my questions, gentle reader,
whoever you may be, don't try to ring in anything about the "Constitutions
of 1786." I am pretty green, but there has to be a little gold plate on the
brick.  If you believe in the Constitutions of 1786, or if you will say that you
do so believe, I am asking no questions of you; for you are either mentally
deficient or interestedly crooked.  In either case your opinions or your
theories could have no  weight with any man whose knowledge of the
history of these Rites is even rudimentary.

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