April 22

In the Gods We Trust…

On April 22, 1864, Congress authorized the first American coin to bear the words “In God We Trust.” It was a two-cent piece, minted during the bloodiest war in American history. But pull any dollar bill from your pocket, and the theology runs considerably deeper than the motto…

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The coin was a practical object, born of crisis. By 1864, two years into the Civil War, Americans had hoarded virtually all gold and silver coinage out of circulation. Commerce was grinding toward paralysis. Congress authorized a new two-cent piece in bronze as an emergency measure—cheap enough to spend, durable enough to circulate. The design was plain: a federal shield on the obverse, a simple wreath on the reverse, and above the shield, on a flowing ribbon, four words that had never appeared on American currency before.

IN GOD WE TRUST.

The phrase had been lobbied into existence by Reverend M.R. Watkinson, a Baptist minister from Ridleyville, Pennsylvania, who wrote to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase in November 1861 arguing that a nation at war should declare its trust in God on its coins. Chase agreed and directed Mint Director James Pollock to incorporate the sentiment into new coinage designs. The original prototypes read “God Our Trust” and “In God Is Our Trust” before Chase settled on the version we know. The Coinage Act of April 22, 1864, authorized it. The following year, Congress extended the motto to gold and silver coins. It spread gradually, disappeared from some denominations in subsequent redesigns, and was finally mandated by law on all U.S. currency—coins and paper alike—in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, when Congress decided the phrase neatly distinguished a God-trusting republic from a godless communist one.

So runs the official account. It is accurate, as far as it goes. But pull a dollar bill from your pocket and turn it over. The motto is the least esoteric thing on American currency. Not by a considerable margin.

The Eye and the Pyramid

The reverse of the one-dollar bill has been carrying one of the most symbolically loaded images in the Western esoteric tradition since 1935. At left, above an unfinished pyramid of thirteen steps, an eye floats within a triangle, radiating light. Above it: ANNUIT CŒPTIS. Below it: NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM. The date MDCCLXXVI—1776—is inscribed in Roman numerals at the pyramid's base.

This is the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, adopted by Congress in 1782. It was not placed on the dollar bill until 1935, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt—a 32nd-degree Freemason—and his Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace—also a 32nd-degree Freemason—agreed that the time had come to put both sides of the seal on the redesigned dollar note. Wallace had been struck by the reverse's symbolism for years. He called the unfinished pyramid with the Eye above it “a glorious idea,” writing to Roosevelt that it represented the building of the New Deal and the democratic order. Roosevelt, characteristically, worried mainly that the Latin would offend Catholic voters. He was reassured that NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM meant not “New World Order”—as conspiracy theorists have insisted ever since—but the more Virgilian “a new order of the ages,” taken from the Eclogues.

The designer of the seal's reverse was not a Freemason. The Great Seal was developed through three successive committees between 1776 and 1782, and the Eye of Providence above the pyramid was first proposed in the initial design by Pierre-Eugène du Simitiere—an artist and naturalist, not a Mason. The final design was largely the work of Charles Thomson, Secretary of the Continental Congress, and William Barton, a heraldic expert. Neither was a Freemason. Benjamin Franklin—who was—served on the first committee and contributed nothing of Masonic character to the designs. The Eye of Providence was not yet a standard Masonic symbol in 1782. It entered the Masonic lexicon formally in 1797, fifteen years after the seal was adopted, when it appeared in Thomas Smith Webb's Freemasons' Monitor as a symbol of the Great Architect of the Universe's eternal watchfulness.

The timeline, in other words, runs the other way: the Great Seal borrowed from a broader Christian and Renaissance tradition of the all-seeing eye as divine symbol, and Freemasonry subsequently absorbed the same imagery—partly, one suspects, because the overlap was too resonant to ignore. By the time FDR and Wallace put the seal on the dollar bill in 1935, both men were Masons living in a culture that had thoroughly identified the Eye of Providence with Masonic esotericism. Whether they were thinking of Masonry or the New Deal when they approved the design is, in the end, a question about intent rather than meaning. The symbol carries what it carries regardless of what anyone intended.

The Meanings of the Symbols

Read slowly and the reverse of the dollar bill is a theological statement of considerable ambition. The pyramid—thirteen steps for the thirteen original states, but also an ancient symbol of permanence, of the structure that outlasts its builders—sits incomplete, its apex missing, replaced by the Eye. Charles Thomson's own explanation, submitted to Congress with the design in 1782, is unambiguous: “The pyramid signifies Strength and Duration: The Eye over it and the Motto allude to the many signal interpositions of providence in favour of the American cause.” The unfinished pyramid is the republic under construction. The Eye is the divine force that watches over and completes what human hands cannot finish alone.

ANNUIT CŒPTIS: “He has favored our undertakings.” The subject is God—or Providence, or the Great Architect, depending on your tradition. The past tense is deliberate: the Revolution has already been won, the favor already demonstrated. It is a statement of accomplished grace.

NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM: “A new order of the ages.” Thomson took it from Virgil's Fourth Eclogue—“magna ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo,” the great order of the ages is born anew—a poem that the medieval Christian tradition had read as a prophecy of Christ, and which the Founding Fathers repurposed as a prophecy of the Republic. A new dispensation. A reset of the cosmic clock. 1776 in Roman numerals at the pyramid's base is not merely a date. It is the anno zero of a new era.

And on the obverse of the seal—the eagle side, the side that also appears on the dollar bill—the heraldic eagle holds thirteen arrows in its left talon and an olive branch in its right. Above its head, thirteen stars form a hexagram—a six-pointed Star of David—surrounded by a cloud-burst of light. E PLURIBUS UNUM on the ribbon in its beak: out of many, one. The thirteen colonies, the thirteen original states, the thirteen steps of the pyramid—the number recurs with a frequency that students of Kabbalah and sacred geometry will find either meaningful or coincidental, depending on their prior commitments.

The Founding Fathers’ Secret Lodge

Fourteen American presidents have been confirmed Freemasons, beginning with George Washington, who was initiated in 1752 at Fredericksburg Lodge No. 4 in Virginia and who laid the cornerstone of the Capitol building in full Masonic regalia in 1793. Thirteen of the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution were Masons. The street plan of Washington D.C.—designed by Pierre Charles L’Enfant, himself a Mason—has been analyzed for decades for Masonic geometrical symbolism, with varying degrees of credibility. What is not in doubt is that Freemasonry was the dominant fraternal and philosophical institution of the early American republic, and that its language—the Great Architect, the unfinished temple, the all-seeing eye, the levels and plumb lines of moral rectitude—was the common intellectual currency of the men who designed the country's symbols.

Freemasonry in the eighteenth century was not the arcane secret society of later conspiracy literature. It was the Enlightenment's institutional form: a fraternity built on the proposition that men of different religious backgrounds could find common ground in a rational, architecturally-metaphored moral philosophy, with the Hebrew temple of Solomon as its central myth and the tools of the stonemason's craft as its symbolic vocabulary. The square and compass that appear on Masonic lodges worldwide represent, respectively, the moral rectitude of living in right relation to others and the capacity to circumscribe one's passions within proper limits. The apron worn by initiates traces its symbolism back to the craftsmen who built Solomon's Temple. The three degrees of the Blue Lodge—Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, Master Mason—enact a drama of initiation, loss, and recovery whose central mysteries concern death, resurrection, and the transmission of sacred knowledge.

The Founding Fathers who were Masons operated in a world where this symbolic vocabulary was neither exotic nor suspect. It was the language of educated Enlightenment culture. When they designed a republic and needed symbols for it, they reached naturally for what was available—and what was available, in 1776 and 1782, was a visual and conceptual vocabulary saturated with Masonic, Hermetic, and broader esoteric resonance. Whether they were consciously encoding occult doctrine into the national iconography, or simply using the symbolic language of their time, is a question the dollar bill does not resolve.

The Mysterious Motto

Return, finally, to the two-cent piece of 1864 and its four words. IN GOD WE TRUST emerged from a genuine religious crisis—a nation tearing itself apart, seeking reassurance that Providence had not abandoned it. It was added to currency not to encode a secret doctrine but to declare a public faith, loudly and legibly, on the most democratic object in circulation: the coin that everyone touches, everyone spends, everyone passes on.

But the god named on that coin had been watching from the apex of the pyramid for eighty years already. Not the personal deity of the Baptist minister who lobbied for the motto, necessarily—but the Great Architect, the Eye of Providence, the divine intelligence that the Founders believed had favored their undertaking and stood watch over the unfinished temple of the American republic. Annuit cœptis: He has approved our undertakings. In God we trust: the same thought, two centuries apart, on the same currency.

The dollar bill is, among other things, a compressed esoteric text—carrying within its imagery the Hermetic tradition of the all-seeing divine eye, the Masonic myth of the unfinished sacred structure, the Virgilian prophecy of a new cosmic age, and the Civil War republic's public declaration of theistic faith. Most people handle it a dozen times a day without reading a word of it.

The occultist's advantage, as always, is knowing where to look.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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