The 33rd Degree: What Really Powers Freemasonry?

Everyone has heard of the 33rd degree. Almost no one asks what powers the order that confers it, or what that power does to the people who sustain it.

Everyone has heard of the thirty-third degree. Almost no one asks what a degree is for. UNBOUND starts at the bottom of the ladder: the three Craft degrees, the rough and perfect stone, the drama of death and raising. It then opens the book most often quoted as Freemasonry's voice, Albert Pike's Morals and Dogma (1871). Its own preface tells readers they are free to reject it, and its most famous passage on power turns out to be adapted from the French occultist Éliphas Lévi.

From there the film asks the question behind the whole series: what powers an order? It keeps three levels of answer apart: documented history (culture, identity and loyalty), observable social science (collective effervescence, ritual synchrony, the cost of entry) and theology, Rev Benton's teaching on the egregore, the collective thought-form that can come to govern the people who sustain it.

It examines the danger inside the promise through the Morgan affair of 1826 and the Taxil hoax of the 1890s, and ends with an examination, not a ritual: the degree no one can confer.

The film does not claim that Freemasons worship an entity or practise any rite of sacrifice. Rev Benton's theology is presented as his teaching, not as a historical or scientific finding.

Up next: The Rosicrucian Egregore: Can an Invisible Brotherhood Become a Living Force?