The Ancient and Honourable Fraternity of Royal Ark Mariners
Orders history
The Degree is around two hundred years old and, as its name suggests, it has a nautical flavour taking for its setting the circumstances leading up to the Great Flood and the steps taken by Noah to build the Ark by which mankind was preserved from perishing in the ‘Universal Deluge’. The legend of Noah, his sons, the Ark and the Deluge were enacted in the Mystery Plays of the seventeenth century and continued as catechisms in many of the early Masonic rituals. By the 1750s there was a Degree of Noachites or Prussian Knights. However, the first authentic record of the degree appears in the minutes of a meeting held in Bath in 1790. Numerous records exist throughout the country of the ceremony of Elevation being performed since that date. The claims that a Grand Lodge of Ark Mariners was formed in 1772 and presided over by HRH The Duke of Clarence are not substantiated by the known facts and thus later claims that this Grand Lodge had fallen into disuse, only to be revived in 1871, do not really stand up to any degree of scrutiny. Whilst the degree seems to have been practised in a variety of ways and in a host of different Lodges, there was almost certainly no Grand Lodge presiding over the degree. We are, of course, reminded of the widespread practice of the degree every time we enter a Craft Lodge and observe the use of the dove bearing an olive branch by the Deacons rather than Mercury, the messenger of the Gods, which we see in Mark Lodges.
Degrees of the order
(1st Mark Master Mason)
(2nd royal ark mariner degree)
(2nd royal ark mariner degree)