The Bogus Rite?

It is curious to note too that most of the bodies which work these higher degrees, such as the "Grand Council of the Emperors of the East and West -- Sovereign Prince Masons," etc., etc., are nearly all worked under instructions from the Chapter of Clermont.
The bastard foundling of Freemasonry the "Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite," is unrecognized by the Blue Lodges. The rite in its present form of thirty-three degrees was recognized at the end of the eighteenth century by some half dozen Masonic adventurers at Charleston, South Carolina. Two of these, Pirlet a tailor, and a dancing master named Lacorne, were fitting predecessors for a later resuscitation by a gentleman of the name of Gourgas, employed in the aristocratic occupation of a ship's clerk, on a boat trading between New York and Liverpool. Dr. Crucefix, alias Goss, the inventor of certain patent medicines of an objectionable character, ran the institution in England. The powers under which these worthies acted was a document claimed to have been signed by Frederick the Great at Berlin, on May 1st, 1786, and by which were revised the Masonic Constitution and Status of the High Degrees of the Ancient and Accepted Rite. This paper was an impudent forgery and necessitated the issuing of a protocol by the Grand Lodges of the Three Globes of Berlin, which conclusively proved the whole arrangement to be false in every particular. On claims supported by this supposititious document, the Ancient and Accepted Rite have swindled their confiding brothers in the Americas and Europe out of thousands of dollars, to the shame and discredit of humanity.

From: "A General History of Free-Masonry in Europe"
By: Rebold, Emmanuel 1868