The 1764 Santo Domingo Manuscript
Santo Domingo Manuscript to the Francken Manuscript and to it alone , out of the hundreds of Enlightenment Masonic rituals that can be consulted in the many archival collections today . It caught my attention when I studied the degree of Knight of the Sun ; I noticed that in the corpus of around fifty eighteenth-century rituals that I had identified only this manuscript had almost the same text as the Francken Manuscript . I then made the same comparisons for the degrees of Secret Master , 6 Knight of the East , 7 and so forth . The results were identical . For the degree of Knight Kadosh , 8 the demonstration is , if possible , even more convincing . Aside from the positioning of a paragraph spanning a few lines , and two short missing sections , the texts of the rituals in the two works , even though they are around twenty pages long in cramped writing , are exactly the same ! In contrast , the twenty or so eighteenth-century Kadosh rituals that I have collected are all significantly or very clearly different . Moreover , only the Knight Kadosh rituals in the 1764 Santo Domingo Manuscript and the Francken Manuscript contain certain extremely characteristic details , such as the notable error stating that Clement VI ( rather than Clement V ) was the Pope who abolished the Order of the Temple , or a curious list of books on the history of the Templars that the Brothers are invited to consult .
The final element supporting this close link is the presence in the 1764 Santo Domingo Manuscript not ( unfortunately ) of a complete ritual , but of a text relating to the degree of Prince of the Royal Secret ( the first such text known ). Folio 69 features a long development entitled “ Ralliement des Princes Sublimes ” (“ Assembly of the Sublime Princes ”). As the last page of the manuscript is certified to be from May 9 , 1768 , we can consider that the degree of the Royal Secret therefore dates back to the period before 1768 . The small note at the top of the ritual of the Knight of the Sun takes us back four more years . The Knight of the Sun is described as the “ 21st degree after which the only superior is the Sublime Order * preceded by the Grand Master Elect who covers it under the title of Grand Inspector of the Lodges .” This convoluted wording first gives us the following succession to the top of the system : Knight of the Sun , Grand [ Master ] Elect Grand Inspector ( the traditional name for the Kadosh ), and the “ Sublime Order *” that the author does not dare name , but which must refer to the “ Assembly of the Sublime Princes ” described just after the Kadosh ritual in our manuscript .
Yet this comment was “ written at the camp of the great river in June 1763 [ for 1764 ].” This shows that the “ Royal Secret ” existed and was practiced in Santo Domingo in 1764 , when Etienne Morin , who a few months before had returned from a long journey , spread his system on the island . In fact , it is my belief that the whole series of “ Scottish ” degrees ( that is , almost the whole manuscript , which displays a certain unity ) was copied in 1764 . Only the last few pages on the Elect Cohen were added later , in 1768 . This document therefore gives a fixed
6
Pierre Mollier and Jacques Léchelle , “ Le Manuscrit Saint-Domingue 1764 à la source du manuscrit Francken — I . Le grade de Maître Secret ,” Renaissance Traditionnelle 113 ( 1998 ): 31 – 45 .
7
Pierre Mollier and Jacques Léchelle , “ Le Manuscrit Saint-Domingue 1764 à la source du manuscrit Francken — II . Le grade de Chevalier d ’ Orient ,” Renaissance Traditionnelle 114 ( 1998 ): 123 – 151 .
8
Pierre Mollier and Jacques Léchelle , “ Le Manuscrit Saint-Domingue 1764 à la source du manuscrit Francken — III . Le grade de Grand Inspecteur Grand Élu ou Chevalier Kadosh ,” Renaissance Traditionnelle 120 ( 1999 ): 234 – 277 .
6