“How an authorised ceremony became a family of Royal Arch workings“

A 20–30 minute interactive lecture for a Royal Arch Chapter

Basis	Keith Tallon’s “The Evolution of the Royal Arch Ritual”
Approach	Evidence-led; interactive; suitable for delivery in Chapter
Timing	Approximately 24–28 minutes, including brief responses

Delivery note

The questions are invitations, not tests. Accept two or three brief answers, acknowledge them, and move on. If time is short, omit the responses marked ‘brief’ rather than cutting the historical argument. Stage directions appear in grey; audience questions appear in red.

OPENING — FOUR BOOKS, ONE CEREMONY

Most Excellent and Companions, I should like to begin with four ritual books.

DISPLAY, OR NAME, FOUR WORKINGS: DOMATIC, ALDERSGATE, PERFECT CEREMONIES AND OXFORD.CAN YOU NAME THE RITUAL USED IN THIS CHAPTER? (DOMATIC- THE 2013 EDITION)

They all describe the same Royal Arch. They lead the Candidate through the same broad drama. They bring him to the same discovery. They are recognisably members of one family—and yet they do not always use the same words, give precisely the same directions or explain everything in quite the same way.

So here is my first question. It requires no special historical knowledge.

Qn. If an official Royal Arch ritual was settled nearly two centuries ago, why do we now possess several different workings?

PAUSE. ACCEPT TWO OR THREE SUGGESTIONS: MEMORY, LOCAL CUSTOM, PRINTING, PERSONAL PREFERENCE, OR CHANGE OVER TIME.

I suspect that most of the answer is already in the room. A ceremony may be authorised at the centre, but it has to be remembered, taught and performed locally. Between those two points lies the history of ritual.

The late Keith Tallon, for many years a Preceptor of the Aldersgate Chapter of Improvement, examined that history with unusual care. His conclusion was deliberately provocative. Although the Chapter of Promulgation gave our ceremony its settled form in 1834 and 1835, Tallon believed that the wording of our modern ritual books may owe more than we realise to a printed ritual published by George Claret in 1845.

I do not propose simply to declare Tallon right and several eminent Masonic historians wrong. That would replace one authority with another. Instead, I invite you to look at the evidence with me and decide what it permits us to say.

Our question is therefore a simple one: if Grand Chapter settled the ceremony in 1834, why do our present workings not reproduce it exactly?

BEFORE 1834 — A CEREMONY STILL TAKING SHAPE

We must begin before there was an authorised text to depart from.

John Hamill, one of the foremost historians of English Freemasonry, gave a properly cautious answer to the question of the origin of the Royal Arch: we do not know precisely when, where or how it began. There are early references and surviving fragments, but no convenient moment at which somebody wrote at the top of a page, ‘Today I have invented the Royal Arch.’ Ritual does not usually develop like that.

The earliest known English minute recording the ‘Raising’ of a Brother to the Royal Arch comes, rather surprisingly, from a Moderns Lodge at Bristol in 1738. From about 1751 the Antients worked the Royal Arch in their Lodges. The Moderns later developed separate Chapters, from about 1766.

At that time admission was normally restricted to Past Masters. The practice known as Passing the Chair allowed a Brother to acquire the qualification, sometimes in a Lodge and sometimes in a ‘previous lodge’ held within the Chapter. The password for admission was connected with the Installed Master’s degree.

The surviving manuscripts studied by Hamill and Bernard E. Jones show development rather than uniformity. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a comparatively simple ceremony with a short lecture appears to have grown into a fuller dramatic ceremony accompanied by six catechetical lecture sections.

Those lectures were not quite the Historical, Symbolical and Mystical Lectures familiar to us. They were conducted by question and answer, rather as the Craft lecture sections still are. Yet Hamill observed that much of their substance would remain recognisable to a Companion today.

They also contained much more explicit Christian material. Readings from the Old Testament and from St John’s Gospel gave the ceremony a strongly Christian character. Some references had already disappeared before 1834, but others survived until the settlement following the Union.

Let us pause there.

Qn. If you had attended three Chapters in about 1800, before an authorised national working existed, what do you think would have remained constant—and what would have varied?

TAKE ONE OR TWO ANSWERS.

The story and the discovery would probably have been recognisable. Particular words, movements, readings and explanations might have varied considerably. That distinction—between the architecture of a ceremony and its verbal decoration—will matter later.

UNION AND THE SEARCH FOR ORDER

The rival Grand Lodges of the Antients and the Moderns united in 1813. Their Grand Chapters followed in 1817. The Articles of Union described the Royal Arch as belonging to pure Ancient Masonry, but union on paper did not immediately produce uniformity on the floor.

The Craft addressed its ritual differences through the Lodge of Reconciliation. The Royal Arch settlement came later. In 1834 a committee was appointed to clarify and confirm the ceremonies. Its work was approved under the Duke of Sussex, then First Grand Principal, on 2 November 1834.

The revision did more than tidy the wording. It belonged to a larger Masonic settlement. The Craft had been opened beyond an exclusively Christian formulation. If the Royal Arch formed part of pure Ancient Masonry, it too had to be capable of welcoming qualified Brethren of different faiths. Explicitly Trinitarian material was therefore removed or recast.

The qualification was also widened. The Royal Arch ceased to be confined to those who had passed through the chair of a Craft Lodge; a Master Mason of the prescribed standing could be exalted.

There were evidently different systems to reconcile. In Grand Chapter on 4 November 1835, advice was sought because a Zerubbabel Elect proposed to work according to the Atholl system. Grand Chapter responded by declaring that the ceremonies adopted in 1834 were those which every Chapter had a duty to adopt and obey.

That sounds decisive. There was an approved ceremony and an instruction to use it. We might therefore expect the story to end: one authority, one ritual, one working.

But it did not end. It had only reached its most interesting point.

THE CHAPTER OF PROMULGATION — AUTHORITY WITHOUT A BOOK

Grand Chapter did not distribute the authorised ritual as a printed book. Instead, it created the Chapter of Promulgation for six months in 1835. Its purpose was to demonstrate the new Installation and Exaltation ceremonies so that Companions could see them worked and carry them back to their own Chapters.

This was thoroughly Masonic. Ritual was to be communicated by performance: seen, heard, practised and remembered. It was also a formidable means of quality control. Those present did not merely read a rubric; they witnessed the relationships between the words, the officers, the furniture and the movement.

But consider the practical difficulty. A Companion might travel from Carlisle, Newcastle, Truro or Wales to observe a demonstration in London. He then faced a journey home which could occupy days. He had no authorised printed text in his case. He carried the ceremony chiefly in his memory, perhaps assisted by notes made afterwards.

Qn. Imagine that tonight you watch an unfamiliar ceremony once, without a book. Tomorrow morning, what will you remember most accurately: the exact sentences, or the shape of what happened?

ALLOW THE ANSWER TO EMERGE.

Most of us would retain the dramatic landmarks. We should remember who entered, who challenged him, where the discovery occurred and how the ceremony reached its conclusion. We might preserve memorable phrases. But small verbal differences, transitions and rubrics would be much less secure.

This leads to the central paradox. Grand Chapter sought uniformity, but the authorised ritual was promulgated through a method which naturally permitted variation.

That does not mean the Chapter of Promulgation failed. It established the architecture of the modern ceremony. But architecture is not the same thing as every word spoken within the building.

Here the Church of England offers a useful parallel. An authorised liturgy can prescribe the words and principal actions of a service. Yet it does not produce identical worship in every church. Pace, music, ceremonial emphasis and local custom continue to differ. Authority supplies a common form; performance turns it into a living tradition.

Royal Arch ritual seems to have behaved in much the same way. Grand Chapter authorised; the Chapter of Promulgation demonstrated; individual Companions remembered; local Chapters performed; and repeated performance gradually established custom.

THE RED BOOK IN THE STRONGROOM

For many years, discussion of the 1834 settlement suffered from a rather obvious difficulty: the authoritative manuscript was not generally available.

Then, in 1947, among old files and papers at Freemasons’ Hall, an Assistant Librarian reportedly found a slim foolscap volume bound in red leather, bearing a Royal Arch device in gold. It contained fourteen closely written sheets. At the head of the first page appeared the word ‘Approved’, followed by the signature of the Duke of Sussex and the letters GMZ—Grand Master Zerubbabel, an earlier title for the First Grand Principal.

The volume was shown to the Grand Scribe Ezra and placed in his safe. In the stricter culture of Masonic secrecy then prevailing, the discoverer was told to say nothing about it. Photographs and a transcription were eventually made, and publication was later authorised.

For the first time, comparison did not have to depend entirely upon recollections of what the Chapter of Promulgation might have demonstrated. Its approved manuscript could be set beside the printed rituals which followed.

That comparison produced a surprise. The manuscript plainly contains the same basic story and dramatic structure as our present ceremony. Yet its exact wording is not consistently the wording of Domatic, Aldersgate, Perfect Ceremonies or Oxford.

If our modern books are not straightforward copies of the authorised manuscript, another influence must be considered.

ENTER GEORGE CLARET

George Claret was an actor, writer, publisher and printer of ritual. In 1838 he published a Craft manual whose title page advertised that Royal Arch ceremonies could also be obtained from him. No surviving Royal Arch edition earlier than 1845 is presently known in the Library and Museum, but in that year his Royal Arch ritual appeared in print.

This was ten years after the Chapter of Promulgation. Roy Wells described Claret as ‘obsessed with authenticity’ and argued that his manual was sufficiently close in date to preserve the newly settled ceremony.

Tallon was not convinced. If Claret had simply transcribed the Promulgation working, why did he wait until 1845- and why did his text differ from the approved manuscript in significant places? Tallon thought it more likely that Claret recorded ceremonies he had seen worked in actual Chapters, perhaps combining received practice, remembered promulgation and his own editorial judgement.

That is plausible, but we should be careful. Resemblance does not by itself prove direct copying. Claret and a later ritual book might both preserve an earlier oral tradition. Or Claret’s printed words may have influenced Chapters, whose subsequent practice was then captured by later compilers. The descent may be a web rather than a single straight line.

Nevertheless, print changes the nature of transmission. A spoken ceremony varies almost invisibly. A printed text can be carried, compared and learned. Once Claret’s book became widely available, it offered something the Chapter of Promulgation had not supplied: a stable set of words.

That gives us a possible division of labour. The Chapter of Promulgation may have fixed the architecture; Claret may have helped stabilise much of the language.

THREE PIECES OF EVIDENCE

Rather than recite every difference, let us examine three. None proves the whole case by itself. Together they show why Tallon reopened the question.

First, the identity of the Chapter. The Promulgation manuscript speaks of the Royal Arch of Jerusalem. Across his editions from 1845 to 1873, Claret repeatedly uses the Royal Arch of Israel. This is unlikely to be a mere confusion between an old-fashioned printed I and J, because he writes ‘Israel’ in full.

Qn. Which expression sounds familiar from the ritual tradition you know: Jerusalem, Israel—or both in different places?

BRIEF RESPONSE. DO NOT TURN THIS INTO A TEST.

The point is not that one word settles the genealogy. It supplies a fingerprint: a distinctive choice which can be followed through later texts.

Second, the opening prayer. The Promulgation manuscript contains the familiar sequence of divine attributes and addresses the ‘Father of the Universe’. Claret does not reproduce that sequence and instead begins ‘Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open’. The two texts plainly belong to the same broad religious and liturgical world, but they are not verbal copies.

The wording is worth noticing for another reason. ‘Unto whom all hearts be open’ echoes the Collect for Purity in the Anglican liturgy. That does not prove that Claret copied a particular service book; it reminds us that Masonic ritualists worked within a wider culture of biblical and liturgical language. Sometimes a familiar phrase may come not from the immediately preceding ritual manuscript but from the language already lodged in the compiler’s mind.

Third, the working tools of the Sojourners. In the narrative, both the Promulgation manuscript and Claret describe the pickaxe loosening the earth and the spade clearing it away. But the Promulgation Symbolical Lecture does not explain the pickaxe, crowbar and shovel in the familiar manner. Claret’s version does—and those explanations pass into later ritual traditions.

This is stronger evidence of influence, because it concerns the presence of a whole explanatory element rather than a single word. Yet even here caution is needed. Claret may have invented it; he may have recorded an existing Chapter practice; or he may have preserved material omitted from the approved manuscript. The honest verdict is not certainty but probability.

These examples teach us to separate three kinds of ancestry. The dramatic sequence may descend chiefly from the 1834 settlement. Particular verbal forms may have travelled through Claret and other printed books. The lectures and explanations may contain later additions preserved by Chapters of Improvement.

A ritual can therefore have more than one ancestor without ceasing to be one ceremony.

WHAT HAPPENED AFTER 1835?

Once ritual entered print, variation did not cease. It became more visible and, in some respects, more durable.

Different ritual books captured different streams of practice. Chapters of Improvement taught their own settled working with admirable fidelity. In 1921, for example, the Aldersgate ritual was published as near to the original working as its custodians believed possible, and with a declared intention that it should remain fixed unless Supreme Grand Chapter required alteration.

Here we see another Masonic paradox. Letter-perfect learning preserves ritual magnificently, but it preserves the text received by that particular tradition. It cannot by itself establish that the received text is identical with the wording of 1834.

Supreme Grand Chapter also made later authorised changes. Eligibility was widened; ordinary Companions were eventually permitted to be present at the Opening; questionable Hebrew forms and the tripartite word were removed in 1989; a revised Mystical Lecture followed; and a Permitted Alternative version was introduced in 2004. These were not accidental corruptions. They were conscious responses to scholarship, regulation and the needs of the Order.

The history is therefore not a fall from an original perfection. It is a continuing relationship between authority, inherited custom and present understanding.

Tallon compared Claret and the Promulgation manuscript with several present workings. He judged Oxford closest to Claret in the Exaltation, though not in its Lectures; he placed Perfect Ceremonies closest to the Promulgation manuscript, followed by Oxford, Aldersgate and Domatic.

Those rankings are intriguing, but they should be treated as Tallon’s findings rather than mathematical proof. His abbreviated paper does not show us the full comparison table or explain how every difference was weighted. The proper response is not to reject the conclusion, but to ask to see the working—an entirely appropriate Masonic request.

SO, WHICH IS THE ORIGINAL?

We can now return to the four books with which we began.

INDICATE THE FOUR WORKINGS AGAIN.

Which one is the original? The question has become harder, because ‘original’ may mean several things.

It may mean closest to the dramatic form approved in 1834. It may mean closest to the surviving words of the Promulgation manuscript. It may mean closest to Claret’s influential printed record. Or it may mean the form most faithfully transmitted within a particular Chapter of Improvement.

Qn. If a working preserves the structure of 1834, some language printed by Claret, and a century of scrupulous local teaching, is it an original—or a corruption?

PAUSE; INVITE ONE OR TWO VIEWS.

I suggest that those alternatives are too severe. Each of our principal workings is better understood as a witness. It bears testimony to the route by which the common Royal Arch ceremony reached a particular community of Companions.

This does not mean that accuracy no longer matters. Quite the reverse. A Chapter should know which working it has undertaken to perform and should perform it faithfully. Rubric matters; words matter; movement matters. A ceremony assembled casually from several books can lose its coherence.

But fidelity should be accompanied by humility. We may be letter perfect in Domatic or Aldersgate without possessing every word approved in 1834. Our precision proves the care with which a tradition has been handed to us; it does not necessarily prove that no other tradition has a legitimate descent.

That, perhaps, is why the differences can enrich rather than diminish the Royal Arch. Behind the variation lies a shared architecture: recovery after loss, labour amid ruins, descent into darkness, the restoration of light and the discovery of that which was always present but concealed.

The ritual itself concerns recovery. Its history has followed the same pattern. Manuscripts were lost from view and recovered. Words were carried imperfectly but faithfully. Printed books preserved one version while Chapters preserved another. Successive generations cleared away a little more rubbish and looked again at the foundations.

CONCLUSION — A LIVING TRADITION

What, then, can we safely conclude from Keith Tallon’s work?

• First, the Royal Arch ceremony did not spring into existence fully formed. It developed during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
• Second, the settlement of 1834 and the Chapter of Promulgation of 1835 established the essential architecture of the English ceremony.
• Third, the decision to demonstrate rather than distribute an authorised printed text allowed local verbal variation to continue.
• Fourth, George Claret’s publication of 1845 probably became an important intermediary. It may record what Chapters were actually doing, and its accessible wording appears to have influenced later ritual books.
• Fifth, no simple family tree explains every feature. The present workings probably descend from an interaction of authorised form, oral memory, printed ritual and the disciplined practice of Chapters of Improvement.

The Church of England analogy helps once more. An authorised liturgy is not merely ink on paper. It becomes real when a worshipping community inhabits it. So too a Masonic ritual is not merely its book. It exists in the relationship between authorised words, remembered instruction, movement in the Chapter and the understanding awakened in the Candidate.

That leaves us with one final question:

Qn. When we say that our own working is ‘the original’, are we preserving the ritual—or are we preserving the particular road by which the ritual came to us?

PAUSE.

Perhaps the answer is: both. We inherit one road, but all the roads lead beneath the same Arch.

Most Excellent and Companions, thank you.

References

The entries below show why each reference has been included. They distinguish exact quotation, neutral observation and interpretation. Where an original source has not been inspected directly, the quotation is expressly identified as transmitted through Tallon. Evidence comes before conclusion; no inherited quotation should be treated as independently verified until its cited page has been checked.

Key conclusion

The Chapter of Promulgation supplied the architecture; printed rituals, especially Claret’s, helped stabilise the language; Chapters of Improvement preserved distinct streams of the resulting living tradition.