What is royal arch masonry?

The Holy Royal Arch is the natural conclusion and fulfillment of Craft Masonry, providing the ultimate completion to the Masonic journey 21. Under the English Constitution, Masonry is formally defined as consisting of the three Craft degrees and the Holy Royal Arch and no more 1. Though long worked as an expansion and integral part of the Third Degree, it was detached into its own distinct ceremony to accommodate its unique symbolic structure and officers 1.

Eligibility for exaltation into the Royal Arch requires a brother to have been a Master Mason for four weeks 2. According to the Grand Lodge of India, members of a Chapter are known as Companions, and the ritual concerns the re-building of the Temple after the Exile. A Chapter is governed by a trio of Principals—with the First Principal serving as first among equals—and Companions who have served in these chairs are styled Excellent Companions.

Philosophically, while the Master Mason degree dramatizes mystical death and revival, the Royal Arch carries this process to its climax by representing spiritual regeneration, exaltation, and the attainment of a higher order of life 1. Symbolic re-arrangements distinguish a Chapter from a Lodge: the assembly is composed of nine officers grouped in three triads around a central sacred symbol, rather than the seven officers of a Craft Lodge 1.

Historians have emphasized this essential union with the Craft; Dr. W. J. Chetwode Crawley noted that the Royal Arch is "not a separate entity, but the completing part of a Masonic legend" without which the Masonic edifice remains incomplete 2. In North America, the degree developed through eighteenth-century bodies such as Saint Andrew's Chapter in Boston, leading to the formation of the General Grand Chapter in the United States 2.