In the ceremony, the Candidate is taken through several rooms which figuratively represent his spiritual and Masonic life from Craft Masonry, through despair, to a Rose Croix Chapter and the discovery of the Lost Word. At the start, he is taken from a Master Mason (3º) to a 17º Mason, a Knight of the East and West, of symbolic age, coming – as the ritual explains – at a time of dire calamity with but incomplete pre-Christian knowledge.
The ceremony of the 18° seeks the Perfection of Christian virtues in Faith, Hope and Charity. It is an immensely thought provoking, impressive and beautiful ceremony which instils an even greater warmth of the Brotherly love, on which the whole Masonic movement is founded.
Following perfection, the ensuing “feast of fraternal affection” is a wonderful moment of shared Freemasonry all too often lost in other degrees.
The Rose Croix, like Freemasonry as a whole, is not a religion. It does, however, serve to point the way.