Annual meeting of the Supreme Grand Chapter: new Irish ritual introduced in the Royal Arch – Regular Grand Lodge of Italy.
On Saturday 29 November, the annual meeting of the Supreme Grand Chapter of the Royal Arch of the Grand Lodge of Italy was held at the Hotel Parco dei Principi in Rome. The event was particularly important as the opening and closing ceremonies were conducted using the new Irish ritual. The decision to introduce Irish ritual (while obviously maintaining the English “Aldersgate” ritual for those Chapters that so desire) was necessary due to the decision of the Regular Grand Lodge of Italy to introduce the ritual of the Mark where it had long been, namely as a ceremony preceding the ‘Exaltation’ to Companion of the Royal Arch, completion of the Degree of Master Mason.

In his historical reconstruction, Grand Master Fabio Venzi highlighted how the first references to Mark Masonry are present (albeit in generic form) in Scottish Lodges in 1599 and 1600 (this practice is attested to in Shaw’s Statutes), and it is documented that in northern England the Mark Degree was conferred by many Craft Lodges.

In his historical reconstruction, the Grand Master emphasised how historians unanimously agree that initially the Mark Man Degree, the first part of the ceremony, was initially conferred on Fellow Crafts (in the English Lodges of Bristol this practice continued until 1813), while the next degree, Mark Master, was granted to Mark Masons who were already Master Masons.

Regarding the rituality of the Mark, the well-known English historian Neville Barker Cryer (former Second Grand Principal of the Supreme Grand Chapter of the United Grand Lodge of England) also emphasises how originally the two “degrees” of Mark Man and Mark Master were separate and conferred in two different ceremonies, so that of Mark Man was considered a true “additional rank”, which could have remained so without further development. Recalling how the Degree was divided into two parts in the past, Neville Barker Cryer emphasises that the context in which the ceremony opens is unequivocally that of the Degree of Fellow Craft. Barker Cryer therefore considers the subsequent ritual evolution, which de facto deprived the Second Degree of an important and fundamental part, to be “illogical”. the Fellow Craft, who, in addition to not receiving his distinctive “mark”, is not shown how to use the tools of the Degree or how to receive his wages, but, above all, is not made aware of the “stone” that will later be fundamental in the construction of the “Arch” and will lead to the completion of the rituality of the Degree of Master Mason in the Holy Royal Arch.

In the eighteenth century, the Degree of Master of the Mark was associated with the Degree of the Royal Arch (as is the case in Ireland and Scotland, and today in the GLRI), and was a precursor to it. By subsequently separating the rituality of the Mark from that of the Royal Arch, the fundamental “ritual connection” was lost, along with the explanation of why the “keystone” is so fundamental in the rituality of the Royal Arch, the keystone placed in the arch at the entrance to the Sancta Santorum.

The Grand Master concluded by mentioning how the fundamental part of the Irish and Scottish “System” is the ceremony that essentially “unites” the rituality of the Mark and that of the Royal Arch, placed between the ceremony of “Advancement” to the Mark and “Exaltation” in the Royal Arch, namely the ceremony of the “Passage of the Veils”.

The Grand Master will discuss the profound esoteric and initiatory component of the “Passage of the Veils” ceremony, true “spiritual passages” probably inspired by the Kabbalistic symbolism of the Tree of Life and its Sephirot (divided by four veils), at the next meeting of the Supreme Grand Chapter.