How do the teachings of the Craft degrees compare to those of the Royal Arch?

The Royal Arch is an expansion and completion of the Third Degree, serving as its natural conclusion and fulfillment 1. While Craft Masonry dramatizes mystical death and revival into a new life, the Royal Arch carries this process further by portraying the candidate's exaltation or spiritual apotheosis 1.

Wilmshurst compares the Master Mason degree in the Craft to the theological formula of suffering, burial, and rising again, whereas he equates exaltation in the Royal Arch to ascending into heaven 1. In his interpretation, the preliminary Craft degrees deal primarily with the discipline and purification of the candidate's gross corporeal nature and temporal mentality 1. The Royal Arch, by contrast, addresses the higher reaches of human consciousness, representing a state in which personal consciousness comes into union with the Divine 1.

This distinction is also reflected in the symbolic appointments of the degrees. In the Craft degrees, the central light shines from above in the Second Degree and appears as a guiding ray in the East in the Third Degree; in the Royal Arch, Wilmshurst observes that this central sacred symbol descends fully to the floor, signifying that the immortal principle has taken root substantially within the physical organism 1. Furthermore, while the Third Degree exhibits the resumption of former faculties in a sublimated state, the Royal Arch represents total spiritual regeneration, symbolically termed squaring the circle, and the passage of the soul from temporal captivity to spiritual peace 1.

Historical practice also links the two systems. In England, eligibility for the Royal Arch was once restricted to Past Masters, which gave rise to the practice of passing the chair before eligibility was extended to Master Masons generally 2. Chetwode Crawley notes that the Royal Arch is not a separate entity from the Craft legend but its completing part, without which the symbolic structure is left incomplete 2.