On the Masonic Order of Misraïm: From its creation to the present day, on its antiquity, its struggles, and its progress

Marc Bédarride's De l'Ordre Maçonnique de Misraïm (1845) is the foundational document of the Rite of Misraïm - one of the most esoterically ambitious of all Masonic high-degree systems, claiming ninety degrees organized across seven series and tracing its sacred lineage from Adamic prehistory through Egypt, the Solomonic Temple, the Crusades, the Italian Renaissance, and the campaigns of Napoleon's armies to the formal constitution of its French Supreme Power during the Hundred Days of 1815. Written by one of the Rite's co-founders as an act of defiant affirmation during a period of governmental suppression, the work is simultaneously a sacred history of initiatic transmission, a first-person Masonic memoir, a polemical defense against rival bodies including the Grand Orient de France and the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, and a primary source document of the first order for scholars of nineteenth-century esotericism and Freemasonry.

Bédarride's forty Stations carry the reader from the antediluvian patriarchs - Adam as first Grand Conservator, Seth as preserver of antediluvian wisdom, Noah as transmitter across the flood, Misraïm as founder of Egyptian civilization - through the construction of Solomon's Temple, the Adonhiramite and Crusader degrees, medieval initiatic lineages in Italy and Spain, the Kabbalistic and Rosicrucian currents of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and into the extraordinary milieu of Napoleonic Freemasonry, where the Rite of Misraïm took definitive form in the lodges of Venice, Naples, Milan, and Paris.

This combined edition presents the first complete English translation of both volumes, the work of Tau Phosphoros - a 33 , 66 , 90 , and 96 of the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis-Misraïm with decades of active initiatic practice in the Egyptian current. The translation is accompanied by a substantial Translator's Introduction situating the Rite historically from its Napoleonic origins through the transmission lineages of Theodor Reuss, Papus, Jean Bricaud, Constant Chevillon, and Robert Ambelain to the contemporary Free Illuminist current; and by 666 documentary footnotes identifying historical personages, classical and Masonic sources, ritual terminology, and points of historical controversy. An Afterword by PALAMAS, 33 , 90 , 96 , presents the text as operative spiritual material and offers a practitioner's method for engaging the Stations as living initiatic transmissions through the Égregore of Memphis-Misraïm.

For initiates of the Egyptian Rites, scholars of Western esotericism and Masonic history, and serious students of initiatic literature.