ABSTRACT
A few comments are necessary here. In the first place, Abbé Gabriel Louis Calabre Pérau’s Le Secret contained useful rituals of the first and second degree, but what it wrote about the third degree was useless. Louis Travenol’s Catéchisme (written under the pen-name Leonard Gabanon) remedied this,2 but an unknown author found necessary to publish the next year Le sceau rompu , which gave many corrections of both. As a result, lodge officers now needed to have all three booklets before them in order to work properly. What the anonymous author of the Trahi did, was to collect the best information from all three into one volume, which made it one of the two most successful published rituals in the middle of the eighteenth century. The term ‘plagiarism’ is hardly warranted here; the author stated openly and explicitly that he had included all of Le Secret into the Trahi for example. In the eighteenth century, such copying was not unusual, and not frowned upon in the way we are inclined to do today.
