The Arch and the Rainbow Revd N. B. Cryer, Addlestone (Ian Allan Regalia), 1996. £24.95.

This is, in my opinion, an important contribution to the continuing investigations into the origins of Freemasonry. Neville Cryer, for many years now a member of the research lodge Quatuor Coronati, has contributed a number of papers probing into masonic history. In particular, he has adopted the approach of looking at ritual elements remaining in the disparate modern degrees, both within and beyond the Craft, and posing the question of whether these might not be residues of some earlier more comprehensive and unified ritual structure, one with its roots deep within ancient operative practice. It is this approach that he adopts in The Arch and the Rainbow.
    During a detailed examination of the history and structure of the Mark and Royal Ark Mariner degrees, Cryer poses an intriguing suggestion: originally Freemasonry may have worked a seven degree system. A system which arose from a union between two distinct masonic traditions – the operative and the speculative - sometime prior to the 1720s. There is early evidence to support this, one example being an eighteenth century Irish Mark certificate illustrating a seven-stepped progression for masonic advancement. The earliest Scottish reference to the Mark Degree in a minute of 1770 lists a seven degree system: Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, Master, Mark Master Mason, Excellent, Super-Excellent and Royal Arch Mason.
    But support is not proof and one methodological criticism which can be made is that equal weight seems to be given to evidential documents deriving from the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The latter may be derivative from the former, and there is no reason to assume that our nineteenth century predecessors had greater access to original data than we do today.
    It is to be hoped that this book will receive wide distribution and spur a new generation of masonic researchers into further investigating the origins of Freemasonry.
    Michael Baigent