Scotch [sic] Rite Masonry Illustrated

[The following are now redundant: far superior scans of both volumes (from a 1905 reprint) were uploaded to the Internet Archive in 2011 from copies in the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University.]

Blanchard, Jonathan: Scotch Rite Masonry Illustrated (2 vols). Chicago: Ezra A. Cook, 1882. Many reprints.

Vol. 1 (4°-18°)
Vol. 2 (19°-33°)

Something I've so far held off doing with the CP Scribd account is uploading unmodified works found elsewhere on the web. These volumes however are in my view (a) of sufficient interest and (b) comparatively hard to find online (compared with say Ordo Ab Chao, Duncan's, the Morgan exposure, etc.), so I'm breaking with policy on this count.

This work contains what is purported to be the ritual of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite from the fourth to the thirty-third degree inclusive, interspersed with a hostile, not to say demented, commentary by Blanchard. At the time it was published there were in the USA two well-established "Supreme Councils" of AASR, whose rituals differed and had been repeatedly revised, in some cases quite radically, since the original foundation of the Supreme Council, Southern Masonic Jurisdiction in 1801. Blanchard's book does not represent the ritual used under either; it represents the "Cerneau" rituals; based on those of Morin's rite (see for example The Francken Manuscript) and other AASR workings in some respects, different in others (most notoriously in Kadosh).

Joseph Cerneau, like the founders of the SMJ Supreme Council, had been a 25° member and Deputy Inspector General of Morin's Rite of the Royal Secret (sometimes known as the Rite of Perfection) and in 1807 organised a "Sovereign Grand Consistory" in New York, which later turned into a "Supreme Council 33°" in imitation of Mitchell and Dalcho's Charleston operation. The SMJ refused to recognise this body, and in 1813 supported the establishment of the Supreme Council, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction in opposition to Cerneau. Cerneau's original body was eventually (1867) absorbed by the "regular" NMJ council; however in the previous year one Harry Seymour, after being kicked out of the Scottish Rite under NMJ for involvement in Memphis-Misraim, got himself a Cerneau charter and later went on to charter John Yarker (expelled from AASR in 1870 by the Supreme Council for England and Wales, apparently also for involvement in Memphis-Misraim), from whom the "Cerneau" rite passed to Theodor Reuss and Aleister Crowley; thus the very fact which makes Blanchard's work more or less worthless for the study of the "regular" Scottish Rite makes it more useful than the likes of Ordo ab Chao or Pike's Magnum Opus for the study of the Masonic influences on the O.T.O.

Unfortunately the format in which I found these made any serious tidying up of the PDFs, deskewing of pages, &c., impossible, or at least non-straightforward. These are scans, presented one page spread for each page of the PDF, and have been run through an OCR process; text (unproofed) is selectable if you download the PDFs, but not images.

NB: There were problems with the original upload, in running a conversion on the PDF files some pages in both volumes were rotated and overcropped by Ghostscript; this should now have been fixed.