Secret Master is the fourth degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite and the first conferred beyond the three Craft degrees, opening the Rite's Lodge of Perfection. The Scottish Rite numbers its degrees four through thirty two, plus an honorary thirty third, continuing directly from the Master Mason degree a candidate already holds rather than repeating the Craft sequence in a different form.
The Rite organizes its twenty nine numbered degrees, four through thirty two, into four bodies conferred in sequence: the Lodge of Perfection, which Secret Master opens; the Chapter of Rose Croix; the Council of Kadosh; and the Consistory, which closes with the thirty second degree before the separate, honorary thirty third. This four body structure is the organizational backbone of the entire Rite, and Secret Master's place as the very first degree beyond the Craft gives it a threshold role comparable to Entered Apprentice's place at the start of the basic Lodge sequence.
The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite itself took its settled modern form, including this degree numbering, over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, developing out of an earlier and less standardized landscape of high degree Freemasonry in France and its colonies before the Rite's organization into fixed jurisdictions consolidated the sequence into the form still worked today.