Founding Fathers, Secret Societies Freemasons, Illuminati,

Rosicrucians, and the Decoding of the Great Seal 2nd Edition

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many have made this book possible. First among them is my wife, Zohara
Meyerhoff Hieronimus, to whom this work is dedicated. A glance at the
afterword will tell you why.
Laura Cortner provided invaluable assistance editing, researching, and
rewriting for both the first and second editions. Her extreme dedication to
the project made it possible to meet the deadline for the revised edition, and
I am very grateful for her contributions. Other transcribers were Rebekah
Grossman, Janet Kinne, Lisa Burke, and Nate Thompson, the senior
producer for Hieronimus & Co. productions. Thanks also to Leyan
Darlington and Dr. Peter Hinderberger for keeping my body healthy while I
worked under stressful conditions.
My alma mater, Saybrook Institute; my doctoral committee adviser,
Stanley Krippner, Ph.D.; and outside reader, Willis Harman, Ph.D., were
instrumental in guiding my doctoral studies upon which much of this book
is based. This publication would not have taken its present form without
their direction. My friendship with David Ovason and his encouragement
and advice and extraordinary publications (see bibliography) were
paramount in keeping me centered during difficult and trying times. My
dear friends and coworkers Margie Herskowitz and Paul Trattner provided
timely help with the astrological charts of the Founding Fathers. Thank you
also to Jamaica Burns, our editor at Destiny Books, for many excellent
suggestions and refinements.
My son, Plato, and daughters, Maré and Anna, have patiently listened to
their father’s enthusiasm for this work, which always gives me great
pleasure. Inspiration was also provided by the spirits of my patron, Mari H.
Milholland; my late mother-in-law, Mrs. Lyn P. Meyerhoff; and my distant
uncle, Thomas Galen Hieronymus.
Many thanks also to White Eagle.
 CONTENTS

Cover Image
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: The League of the Iroquois and the Great Law of Peace
The League of the Iroquois
The Anglo-Iroquois Alliance and the Albany Plan
More Evidence to Show the Critics
We, the Iroquois

Chapter 2: Secret Societies and the Founding of a Nation

Secret Societies: A Definition
Freemasons
Rosicrucians
The Illuminati
The Order of Skull and Bones
The Metaphysical Leanings of the Founders
George Washington
Benjamin Franklin
Thomas Jefferson
William Barton and Charles Thomson
Conclusion
Chapter 3: The History of America’s Great Seal
The Great Seal of the United States
The Barton-Thomson Designs
The Unknown Man and the Seal
Conclusion

Chapter 4: The Return of the Reverse of the Great Seal and the Design of
the Dollar Bill
The Reemergence of the Neglected Reverse
The Dollar Bill
Some Possible Reasons for Suppression of the Reverse
The Scary “Satanic” Seal
The Rising Popularity of the Reverse
The Great Seal and the One-Dollar Bill: A Numerological Analysis
The Secret Geometry of the One-Dollar Bill
Conclusion

Chapter 5: A Symbolic and Mythological Analysis of the Reverse of the

Great Seal
The Power of Symbols
The Function of Archetypes
Talismanic Symbols as Transformers
The Mandala: The Mother of All Symbols
The Impact of Mythology on Society
Conclusion

Chapter 6: The Great Seal and the Paradigm Shift

The Seal’s Reverse as Symbol of a New Paradigm
The Contemporary Transitional Period: The New Order of the Ages
The Synchronicity of the Return of the Reverse of the Great Seal and the New Paradigm
Growth Experiences and the Reverse of the Great Seal
The Monomyth or Hero’s Journey
Personal Mythology
The Great Story
Conclusion

Chapter 7: The Blueprint for America’s Vision and Fulfillment

Ye Are Brethren
 Esoteric Beliefs about America’s Destiny
A Blueprint for Destiny
Planetary Regeneration
Doing It Now

Afterword
Appendix 1: The Great Pyramid, Symbol of Mystery
Redating the Sphinx
The Orion Theory
Controversy in the 1990s
All Things Are Vibration
The Land of Osiris
The Extraterrestrial Connection

Appendix 2: The Nature of Talismans

Talismanic Symbols
Sympathy and Similars
Synchronicity
Meaning
Protoplasm
Protoplasmic Images
Strata of the Psyche
Archetypes and Talismans
The Cell and the Talismanic Process

Footnotes
Endnotes
Bibliography
About the Author
About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company
Copyright & Permissions
 INTRODUCTION

I began my research into the Great Seal of the United States in 1966, just
after graduating from college, when I discovered the pyramid on the back of
one of my few remaining dollar bills. I was familiar with the Great Seal’s
obverse or eagle side, but that day the symbols on the seal’s reverse
captured my attention and filled me with wonder. I wrote the State
Department asking about its history and meaning, and their reply was a full-
color folder on the seal’s obverse that made no mention of the seal’s other
side. Thinking this an oversight, I inquired again. They responded with a
black-and-white photograph of the seal’s reverse, but still no explanation. I
took that to mean I had to look elsewhere.
The Great Seal’s reverse entered my life at a critical point. I saw America
at that time as a disintegrating culture. To me, the imagery on the seal’s less
well known side suggested a nation with a greater destiny than wars and
hypocrisy. I was perplexed by and disappointed with our government’s
apparent disinterest in this important symbol of our national purpose.
On my own, I soon found several works that fed my curiosity about the
reverse’s meaning and the mysterious origins of its symbols. Some authors
asserted that the seal’s design had originated from secret societies:
Freemasons, Rosicrucians, and Illuminati. For these writers the seal was
emblematic of a nation in transformation. I felt that I had discovered a
potent image that stood for America’s greatness.
All nations and humans have a special destiny, which, if fulfilled, leads to
their enlightenment. How does one discover national or world destiny?
There are many ways, but often the destiny of a nation is embedded in its
national coat of arms or Great Seal—especially if the nation’s founders are
conscious of the importance of symbols—and America’s founders were
especially adroit at choosing symbols that expressed the philosophy of the
new republic.
 It is one thing to express something, however, and another to have it
heard, understood, and acted on. The Founding Fathers’ intention to have a
two-sided seal was signed into law on June 20, 1782. Since that time, the
State Department and Congress have kept half of the Great Seal in the dark,
and at times intentionally. The more familiar obverse of America’s Great
Seal is dominated by the eagle. The reverse of the seal bears an eye in a
triangle over a pyramid and two Latin mottoes. Most people have seen this
symbol only on the back of the one dollar bill, and before 1935, when it was
placed on currency, very few Americans had ever seen it at all.
It was not until 1891 that the State Department allowed access to its
department files on the Great Seal and, because of this, early seal historians
and subsequent generations of historians who depended on sources
predating 1891 were often misinformed.
In 1976 the State Department published the definitive history of
America’s Great Seal, The Eagle and the Shield. This book is a godsend to
those who wish to know the seal’s history. Like earlier State Department
publications, however, it rejects the idea of cutting a die, making a metal
impress, of the seal’s reverse for use on official documents.
What the State Department has not considered are the consequences of
not recognizing the importance of the founders’ vision of America. Will our
neglect impair the fulfillment of our national destiny? It seems to me that,
by ignoring the vision of our Founding Fathers, we have altered our
capacity to fulfill the goals established by those distinguished men. In
effect, as interest grows in our national symbol, especially its reverse, the
whole country is experiencing a greater capacity to comprehend the
spiritual vision of those who brought America into being.
By the mid-1990s many other authors and researchers had begun
focusing on the Founding Fathers and the Great Seal, and until now it had
not seemed necessary to update this book with so many others writing on
the subject. To my surprise, however, none of the other books that deal with
the Founding Fathers and the Great Seal have made the connection to the
influence of the League of Iroquois that I discuss in chapter 1. This is a
connection that has only strengthened in evidence since the first edition of
this book, and chapter 1 is one of the main sections that has been updated
for this edition.
 Other new sections are the discussions of the Freemasonic links to both
the Knights Templar and the Native American Indians; John Dee and
Francis Bacon and the New World; the Order of Skull and Bones;
background on the three Great Seal committees; the archetype of the
Unknown Man and the seal; the rise of feminine consciousness; the
synchronicity of the return of the reverse of the Great Seal with information
on morphic resonance and conscious acts of creation; a mathematical
decoding of the dollar bill; and a numerological analysis of the mottoes on
the seal and dollar. I have also rearranged the chapters that deal with the
symbolic and mythological analyses of the seal in the hopes that they will
read more easily, and added information on talismans, archetypes, and
personal mythology. There are also two new appendices to update readers
on the extraordinary leaps in research into the monuments at the Giza
plateau in the past decade and to offer more information on the nature of
talismans.
Judging by the blockbuster success of The Da Vinci Code (nineteen
million and counting) and Touchstone Pictures’ film National Treasure,
interest in codes, ciphers, and symbols left behind by the Founding Fathers
is at an all-time high—with the mysterious pyramid and eye in the triangle
getting particular attention. Granted, the poetic license taken by the writers
of these thrillers may create more misconceptions, pseudohistory, and
antagonism from fundamentalists and establishment historians, but they are
meant to be entertainment. I am just cheered by seeing them use much of
the good research drawn from credible new sources that are usually ignored
and ridiculed by the gatekeepers of what we know as “history.” Perhaps
future blockbusters will feature in equally stunning ways the contributions
of the Native Americans to the foundation of this American nation. If any
budding filmmakers or studio executives are reading this, you will find an
irresistible hero by the name of Canassatego discussed in chapter 1, who, in
my opinion, should receive credit as one of our nation’s Founding Fathers.
America has a noble purpose and meaning and the vision of our
Founding Fathers is far more profound than we have ever suspected. By
looking to the reverse of the Great Seal, those of us who are depressed
about the future of this country can find hope and encouragement. The
reverse of the Great Seal is reminding us that the true destiny of America is
to spread the transformation of human consciousness beyond our individual
country and to the planet. The reverse seal is a diagram of who we are as
individuals, a country, and a planet, for when “thine eye be single, thy
whole body shall be full of light” (Matthew 6:22).
Our nation (and the world) faces a very bleak period ahead, perhaps as
dark as the times at Valley Forge. But unlike General Washington, we have
been provided a lamp of wisdom to show the way. That lamp is America’s
Great Seal, and the illumination it is providing is currently only at half
strength. We can adjust the power of our torch by increasing knowledge
about its use and knowing where to shine it. This book provides such
knowledge. Our willful use of this knowledge may determine America’s
success in achieving its goals and fulfilling its spiritual destiny.
 1
THE LEAGUE OF THE IROQUOIS AND THE
GREAT LAW OF PEACE

I love these two sayings: “History is the lie commonly agreed on,” and
“History is something that never happened, written by people who were not
there.” I think the first one was said by Voltaire and the second by Francis
Bacon, but I was not there, so I can’t be sure. It was America’s own Henry
Ford who was once credited with saying, “History is bunk!” and though he
later said he was quoted out of context, he still agreed with the sentiment
expressed. In the 1739 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanac, Ben Franklin
said it another way: “Historians relate, not so much what is done, as what
they would have believed.” Mark Twain’s own twist on it goes like this:
“The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.” And
George Orwell summed it up this way: “History is written by the winners.”
Bacon, Voltaire, and Franklin were painfully conscious that historical
accounts, if they were to survive, must not offend those in charge. For these
writers, history was at best a compromise, full of codes and ciphers to
protect not only the authors but also their messages.
Contemporary examinations of America’s Founding Fathers must
consider just such deliberately disguised truths. It is very difficult to
understand the founders if we depend only on what historians say about
them. Our founders espoused too many controversial views that they
recognized must be carefully phrased. We cannot expect to read the inner
truths of history if we look only at the surface of written accounts. Although
there may be more information available today on America’s democratic
origins, the average person is usually not conscious of our country’s
unfolding. When I say that our view of the historical origins and founding
of American democratic institutions is distorted and incomplete, I do not
say it merely to generate controversy. Consider the discovery and
colonization of America. What confidence could we have in a professor
who clung to the pronouncement that Columbus discovered America? Not
much, especially if we already knew that Leif Eric-son, the Vikings, and
perhaps even the Phoenicians, Africans, and Jews visited America fifteen
hundred years before Columbus arrived.
During my undergraduate days I learned that American democracy came
from Europe and that this republic was the child of the Age of Reason, out
of which grew the democratic ideal. While Europe dreamed of a utopian
type of representative government, America manifested it. The distance
from Europe afforded us by the Atlantic Ocean played a key role in our
successful development of representative government, and the political
philosophies of Kant, Montesquieu, Locke, and others influenced the
thoughts of the men who established the republic. But that’s just part of the
story. Until recently, one of the most important influences on our Founding
Fathers has been unrecognized, in part because it is alien to the way we
have come to view the “noble savages” who called America their home
long before the white man came.
Within the past few decades another view of the Native Americans has
developed. It has long been acknowledged that a group of six Indian tribes
in the Northeast joined together as the League of the Iroquois to promote
peace and human rights. What has emerged more recently is a detailed
examination of the very major influence that this league had on Ben
Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Thomas Paine.
Franklin and Jefferson borrowed consciously and freely from the
democratic methods by which these people had governed themselves for
four centuries. Without the league’s guidance and advice, Franklin and
Jefferson would not have achieved their goals so well.
We are born at the right time and place to rediscover how the Native
Americans influenced our fledgling democracy because Donald A. Grinde
Jr. and Bruce E. Johansen have reignited the controversy with their
groundbreaking work. Much of the material in this chapter can be attributed
to their individual and coauthored works; their thesis has strengthened even
further since the first edition of this book in 1989. From Grinde’s The
Iroquois and the Founding of the American Nation (1977) to Johansen’s
Forgotten Founders (1982) (which Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at
Wounded Knee, highly praised), to their coauthored 1991 book, Exemplar of
Liberty, and their more recently published papers (1996, 1999, 2003)—by
acknowledging the American Indian contribution to the U.S. Constitution,
Grinde and Johansen impart justice that is long overdue.

The League of the Iroquois

The Indians of the northeast corridor of North America (figure 1.1) were not
always a peaceful race. In fact, they were perennially at war with one
another until, as the Iroquois tradition states, Deganawidah, a Huron from
what is now eastern Ontario, proposed the creation of a league of five
Indian nations. He found a spokesperson, Hiawatha, to undertake the
arduous task of negotiating with the warring Indian nations. Hiawatha
succeeded in accomplishing Deganawidah’s dream, and the Senecas,
Onondagas, Oneidas, Mohawks, and Cayugas ceased their struggle and
formed a federal union. A sixth nation, the Tuscaroras, moved northward
from the Carolinas, joining the league around 1714.

Figure 1.1. Map of the Iroquois league, showing the location of the northern Iroquoian
tribes, circa 1600 C.E. (Printed with permission of the New York State Museum, Albany.)

There is some disagreement about when the league began. There is a

good scholarly case to substantiate the traditional oral accounts suggesting
the 1100s C.E. as the founding of the Haudenosaunee confederacy (the
Iroquois called themselves Haudenosaunee, meaning “people of the
longhouse”). Barbara Alice Mann and Jerry Fields have more or less
established the date 1142 C.E. for the Senecas’ approval of the Great Law.1
Arthur C. Parker placed the date at 1390 C.E. and others, such as Paul A. W.
Wallace, at 1450 C.E.2 Probably by at least 1450—forty-two years before
Columbus’s voyage from the decadent Old World—the so-called savages of
the New World had formed a federation that would be the envy of Franklin,
Jefferson, and Washington.
Cadwallader Colden, a contemporary of Benjamin Franklin’s, wrote that
the Iroquois had “outdone the Romans.” As Bruce Johansen puts it:

Colden was writing of a social and political system so old that the
immigrant Europeans knew nothing of its origins—a federal union of
five (and later six) Indian nations that had put into practice concepts of
popular participation and natural rights that the European savants had
thus far only theorized. The Iroquoian system, expressed through its
constitution, “The Great Law of Peace,” rested on assumptions foreign
to monarchies of Europe: it regarded leaders as servants of the people,
rather than their masters, and made provisions for the leaders’
impeachment for errant behavior. The Iroquois’ law and custom upheld
freedom of expression in political and religious matters, and it forbade
the unauthorized entry of homes. It provided for political participation
by women and the relatively equitable distribution of wealth. . . . 3

Nineteenth-and twentieth-century historians supported Cadwallader

Colden’s conclusions. Lewis Henry Morgan, for example, observed in
1851, after a decade of close association with the Iroquois, that their civil
policy prevented the concentration of power in the hands of any single
individual and inclined rather to the division of power among many equals.
The Iroquois prized individual independence, and their government was set
up so as to preserve that independence. The Iroquois confederation
contained the “germ of modern parliament, congress and legislature.”4
The symbol of the Iroquois league’s Great Law of Peace was the Great
Tree of Peace. Paul A. W. Wallace, in The White Roots of Peace, related that
“the Iroquois fed their minds and guided their actions by means of symbols.
When Deganawidah stood before the first council of the United Nations at
Onondaga and planted the Tree of the Great Peace, he planted in the hearts
of his people a symbol that was to give power and permanence to their
union.”5
The Iroquois excelled at the management of human relationships. To
them, peace was the law. Peace was righteousness in action and the great
good. They used the white pine tree as their symbol for peace (see figure
1.2) and likened its roots stretching to all corners of the earth to the
extension of peace and law to all humankind. The branches symbolized
shelter, security, and protection provided by the law of peace. If the law of
peace was the constitution of the union of the tribes, then the tree was the
living symbol of their constitution.
The eagle atop the tree symbolized watchfulness and a need to be ever
vigilant and farseeing, and to stand guard to defend liberty, the peace, the
union, and the constitution. The war club beneath the tree symbolized the
burial of weapons of war because hostilities between the five nations ended
in their union. Starting in October 1775, the flag flown from the American
fleet to intercept British supplies coming to Boston had a design that may
have been inspired by the Iroquois league’s Great Tree of Peace. It shows a
white ground with a green pine tree and the motto “An Appeal to Heaven.”
The standard explanation for this design relates the tree to the important
income-producing lumber trade, but I wonder what Deganawidah would
have thought of that?
In Arthur C. Parker’s account of the Iroquois Great Law of Peace he
notes, “Here, then, we find the right of popular nomination, the right of
recall and woman suffrage flourishing in the old America of the Red Man.”
This was all in place “centuries before it became the clamor of the New
America of the white invader. . . .”6 J. N. B. Hewitt observed that the
Iroquois league significantly departed from tradition in separating military
and civil affairs and in tolerating all forms of religion.7 Arthur Pound noted
that the unwritten Iroquois constitution—perhaps the world’s oldest—also
contained almost “all the safeguards” ever instituted “in historic parliaments
to protect home affairs from centralized authority.”8 This rich Native
American democratic tradition was the real source for the new Americans’
distinctive political ideals. Indeed, centuries before Columbus arrived in the
New World, democracy was alive and well, just waiting for the Founding
Fathers to discover it.

Figure 1.2. The Great Tree of Peace, the primary Iroquois symbol for the confederacy.
(Illustration by John Kahionhes Fadden.)

John Kahionhes Fadden, who drew many of the illustrations in this chapter, is a
Mohawk artist and director of the Six Nations Indian Museum in the northeastern
Adirondack Mountains. The museum has been family-owned since its opening in 1954
by Ray, Christine, and John Fadden, who are of Mohawk Akwesasne descent. The
museum contains precontact and postcontact artifacts, contemporary arts and crafts,
diagrammatic charts, posters, and other items of Haudenosaunee culture as well as of
other Native American cultures. The Six Nations Indian Museum is open in July and
August and by appointment to groups in June and September. It is located at 1462
County Route 60, Onchiota, NY 12989 and may be reached by telephone at (518)
891–2299 or by e-mail at [email protected].

Is it surprising that the American Indians established a democratic

government of their own before the time of the white man? The colonists
also borrowed from their diet (corn, potatoes, turkey, squash, avocados,
tomatoes, apples), some of their medicine, language, and clothing. Early
settlers—and later Americans—owed their very existence to the Indians. As
Felix Cohen asserted, “The real epic of America is the yet unfinished story
of the Americanization of the white man.”9

The Anglo-Iroquois Alliance and the Albany Plan

Benjamin Franklin became aware of the accomplishments of the Iroquois
league and spread the word through his work as a printer. Besides his
newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, which could be found in
Philadelphia’s most prominent homes, he published booklets detailing the
proceedings of Indian treaty councils as early as 1736. One such council
was held in 1744 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where representatives from
Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania met with the chiefs of the Iroquois
league and agreed to an Anglo-Iroquois alliance. Both sides needed this
alliance to halt France’s determination to dominate the New World. The
colonies agreed to control the recurrent problem of Scotch-Irish
frontiersmen who were squatting on Indian land without permission, and in
return the Indians would side with the English against France.
In the course of this meeting on July 4, 1744, the Indian spokesperson,
Canassatego, much revered by both Indians and colonists, advised that the
colonies unite, just as the Indians had done centuries before (see figure 1.3).
Johansen provides this intriguing sketch of what could truly be called one
of America’s native Founding Fathers:

Canassatego was praised for his dignity and forcefulness of speech and
his uncanny understanding of the whites. At the 1744 treaty council,
Canassatego reportedly carried off “all honors in oratory, logical
argument, and adroit negotiation,” according to Witham Marshe, who
observed the treaty council. Marshe wrote afterward that “ye Indians
seem superior to ye commissioners in point of sense and argument.”
His words were meant for Canassatego. An unusually tall man in the
days when the average height was only slightly over five feet,
Canassatego was well muscled, especially in the legs and chest, and
athletic well past his fiftieth year. His size and booming voice, aided
by a commanding presence gave him what later writers would call
charisma—conversation stopped when he walked into a room.
Outgoing to the point of radiance, Canassatego, by his own admission,
drank too much of the white man’s rum, and when inebriated was
known for being unflatteringly direct in front of people he disliked.
Because of his oratory, which was noted for both dignity and power,