ottish Rite, or at the present time in England
the Ancient and Accepted Rite.

Why was this Rite called Scottish? "It cannot be too strongly insisted
on," says Mr. Gould, "that all Scottish Masonry has nothing whatever to
do with the Grand Lodge of Scotland, nor, with one possible
exception--that of the Royal Order of Scotland--did it ever originate in
that country."[374] But in the case of the Rose-Croix degree there is
surely some justification for the term in legend, if not in proven fact,
for, as we have already seen, according to the tradition of the Royal
Order of Scotland this degree had been contained in it since the
fourteenth century, when the degrees of H.R.M. (Heredom) and R.S.Y.C.S.
(Rosy Cross) are said to have been instituted by Robert Bruce in
collaboration with the Templars after the battle of Bannockburn. Dr.
Mackey is one of the few Masons who admit this probable affiliation, and
in referring to the tradition of the Royal Order of Scotland observes:
"From that Order it seems to us by no means improbable that the present
degree of Rose-Croix de Heredom may have taken its origin."[375]

But the Rose-Croix degree, like the Templar tradition from which it
appears to have descended, is capable of a dual interpretation, or
rather of a multiple interpretation, for no degree in Masonry has been
subject to so many variations. That on the Continent it had descended
through the Rosicrucians in an alchemical form seems more than probable.
It would certainly be difficult to believe that a degree of R.S.Y.C.S.
was imported from the East and incorporated in the Royal Order of
Scotland in 1314; that by a mere coincidence a man named Christian
Rosenkreutz was--according to the Rosicrucian legend--born in the same
century and transmitted a secret doctrine he had discovered in the East
to the seventeenth-century Brethren of the Rosy Cross; and finally,
that a degree of the Rose-Croix was founded in circ. 1741 without any
connexion existing between these succeeding movements. Even if we deny
direct affiliation, we must surely admit a common source of inspiration
producing, if not a continuation, at any rate a periodic revival of the
same ideas. Dr. Oliver indeed admits affiliation between the
seventeenth-century fraternity and the eighteenth-century degree, and
after pointing out that the first indication of the Rose-Croix degree
appears in the _Fama Fraternitatis_ in 1613, goes on to say:

It was known much soone