COMMITTED TO THE FLAMES. The history and rituals of a secret Masonic rite. Arturo de Hoyos and S. Brent Morris Lewis Masonic, Hersham, 2008. Hardback, 290pages. £19.99. ISBN: 978-0-85318-293-1

This book is written by two thirty-third degree masons from the United States. Arturo de Hoyos, 33º, is the Grand Archivist and Grand Historian of the Supreme Council, 33º, Southern Jurisdiction (S.J.), USA, and America’s foremost authority on the history and rituals of the Ancient and Accepted Rite. Dr. Brent Morris, Ph.D, 33º, is the Managing Editor of the Scottish Rite Journal of the Supreme Council 33º, S.J., the largest circulation Masonic magazine in the world; he is also a member Quatuor Coronati Research Lodge No. 2076 (E.C.). And in this tome, their joint expertise is adroitly fused in an historic and crypto-analytical study of two intriguing and enigmatic Masonic manuscripts.
     The manuscripts in question, known as the Folger Manuscripts, were written in cipher in the early nineteenth-century by an American physician and master Freemason, Robert Benjamin Folger M.D. (1803-1892), hence their name. However, their contents remained a mystery until they were deciphered in the 1950s by the American Freemason and scholar, Will Baden, using a crypto-analytic technique known as ‘matched plain and cipher’. Upon cracking the code, the manuscripts were found to contain a good interpretation of first three Degrees of the Rectified Scottish Rite’, a degree system little known in the United States, but popular in countries like France, Belgium and Switzerland. The Rite began in the 1780s and arose from the ashes of its predecessor, the Rite of Strict Observance, which had been founded thirty years earlier by the German Baron, Carl Gottlieb von Hund.
     The title of this book derives from Folger’s own instruction which he left on these strangely coded documents, that is, after his death they were to be consigned to the flames. Thankfully for Masonic researchers his instruction was never carried out and almost two centuries on, readers can now read these fascinating documents unhindered, as their de-coded contents have been reproduced in the second half of this tome. Therefore, I would thoroughly recommend this work to anyone with an interest in cryptology or Masonic ritual development.

Matthew Scanlan