Would you have been initiated into the Rite of Memphis?

The “Egyptian” Rite of Memphis has its statutes, printed in 1849: an age, a sponsor, an inquiry, a will, three questions and an oath. Seven questions, each set beside what the text says.

Jacques-Étienne Marconis founded the Masonic Rite of Memphis in Paris in 1838; it was later joined to the Rite of Misraïm. In 1849 he published its history, its statutes and the ritual of the first degree in Le Sanctuaire de Memphis. That is the book we follow. Nothing is sent anywhere.

1. Are you free, lettered and of good morals?

Statutes, title VII, art. 3: no outsider may be received “unless he is of free condition”, nor if he is “illiterate” or “of bad morals”. Art. 1 adds: not before the age of eighteen.

Yes Perhaps No

2. Are you a peaceable citizen, obedient to the laws of your country?

Same article: he cannot be presented unless he is known as “a peaceable citizen, a friend of order and obedient to the laws of his country”.

Yes Perhaps No

3. Would someone answer for you with his own person?

“No one may be admitted unless he is presented by a Brother” (art. 2). That brother swears before the lodge: “I answer for him body for body, soul for soul” (p. 66).

Yes Perhaps No

4. Could you write your will, and answer three questions?

Before anything else he is made to “write his will”. Then three questions: what should man think of the first cause? what does he owe himself? what does he owe his fellow men? (pp. 66–67).

Yes Perhaps No

5. Would you consent to an oath that binds you for life?

At the door of the temple: “to enter our Order, one must be bound by a terrible oath”. The oath, the text says, offends neither the obedience owed to one’s country, nor one’s belief, nor honour. “Dost thou consent to take this oath?” (p. 71).

Yes Perhaps No

6. Would you have the courage to undergo trials, in chains?

He is asked “whether he feels he has the courage to bear the trials”; on his answer he is bound “with an iron chain” for the first journey (p. 67).

Yes Perhaps No

7. Would you leave your titles at the door?

“Leave thy worldly dignities and decorations at the door; enter only with the escort of thy virtues.”

Yes Perhaps No

J.-É. Marconis, Le Sanctuaire de Memphis, Paris, 1849; our translation from the French.

See my result

Where this comes from

The ceremony, step by step

The book of 1849 gives the reception into the first degree. The outsider first waits alone, in a place the ritual calls “the bosom of the earth and the shadows of night”; there he writes his will and answers the three questions. His “jewels and metals” are taken from him. The lodge reads his answers; if they are fit, the Brother Terrible binds him with an iron chain and takes him on the first “mysterious journey”, through the elements “he must cross before reaching the door of the temple”.

Before the door, two brothers in blue robes, armed with swords, stop him: “Whither goest thou? Hast thou fulfilled the conditions required to be admitted among us?” Then comes the question of the oath. Only afterwards does he receive the light, and the address that tells him to leave his dignities at the door.

We read only the passages quoted; the detail of the journeys is not given here.

The text

Jacques-Étienne Marconis, Le Sanctuaire de Memphis, ou Hermès, Paris, 1849, read on archive.org. The book holds two versions of the age rule: eighteen in the general statutes, nineteen in the lodge regulations, with an exception “in favour of the sons of masons”. The scan is poor: the page numbers are those it lets us read.

A former head of an order tells that one lodge of this rite, in the twentieth century, received only the heads of other organisations. The statutes of 1849 say nothing of the kind: they ask for probity and learning.

This test sets your answers beside a book of 1849. It initiates no one and belongs to no obedience; the lodges of Memphis-Misraïm today have their own rules.