Select Master (York Rite)

Select Master is a degree of the York Rite's Council body, the Cryptic Masons, conferred after Royal Master and generally treated as the capstone of the Council sequence in most jurisdictions, though some confer an additional Super Excellent Master degree beyond it. Council membership itself follows completion of the Chapter degrees, including Royal Arch Mason, placing Select Master well into the York Rite's overall sequence rather than near its beginning.

The Council's degrees are called Cryptic because their shared narrative setting involves a hidden vault, a concealment and recovery theme that extends the Royal Arch's own preoccupation with something lost from an earlier era of the Craft's history. Select Master develops that theme further within the Council's own sequence, a structural relationship documented in general Masonic reference literature on how the York Rite's three bodies build on one another.

Jurisdictional variation is more visible at this level of the York Rite than in the basic Craft degrees: not every jurisdiction confers Select Master in the same order relative to Royal Master, and the optional Super Excellent Master degree that some Councils add beyond it has no equivalent in others, a pattern typical of the York Rite's appendant bodies once a Mason has moved past the more uniformly worked Craft degrees and into the Chapter and Council sequences.

Select Master belongs to the Council body's Cryptic degrees, named for a shared narrative setting involving a hidden vault, a concealment and recovery theme that general Masonic reference literature describes as an extension of the Royal Arch's own preoccupation with something lost from an earlier era of the Craft's symbolic history. This thematic continuity across the Chapter and Council bodies is documented consistently in encyclopedic treatments of the York Rite.

Published accounts of the York Rite's structure note that Select Master, and the Cryptic degrees generally, occupy a less publicly discussed position than Royal Arch Mason or Knight Templar, appearing more often in specialist Masonic reference works than in general popular treatments of Freemasonry, a visibility difference that tracks the Council body's own smaller membership relative to the Chapter and Commandery.

As with the York Rite's other degrees, the publicly documented material covers the vault theme's general shape and its place in the Chapter to Council sequence, not the specific ceremonial content a Council transmits only to its own members.

General Masonic reference works note that the Cryptic degrees were, historically, a later addition to the York Rite's overall structure than the Chapter degrees beneath them, a documented sequencing fact that helps explain why Select Master and its companion degrees receive comparatively less general attention than the older, more established Royal Arch.