Pyotr Melissino, founder of the Melissino Rite

This paper of mine, which is free to download from my academia profile accessed by clicking here, discusses some of the lost rites of Freemasonry, in particular the rites created on continental Europe during the eighteenth century by such charismatic and enigmatic Freemasons as Martinez Pasqually, Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, Pyotr Melissino and Baron Von Hund. The eighteenth century saw a number of Masonic rites developing in France, Germany and Russia, and though some of these rites ceased to exist by the close of the century, the paper will discuss how they inspired the occult revival of the nineteenth century, the essence of the lost rites influencing Martinism, Memphis-Misraïm and the Swedenborgian Rite. This paper, edited from my book The Lost Rites and Rituals of Freemasonry, published by Lewis Masonic in 2017, has been presented so far to around fifty lodges in England, Wales, Greece and the US, and saw publication in The Plumbline, Vol.25, No.2, (Summer 2018) and more recently in the Transactions of the Leicester Lodge of Research No.2429, 2018-2019.