The Great Seal of the United States ( Great Seal of the United States ) is used to prove the authenticity of certain documents in the government US . It was in 1782 that it was used publicly for the first time.
Summary
- 1Description
- 2History
- 3Dollar bill
- 4Current version
- 5Reverse of the seal in conspiracy theories
- 1Eye of Providence
- 2Pyramid
- 3Belonging of the creators of the seal to Freemasonry
- 6Notes and references
- 7Related articles
Description
It features a bald eagle with outstretched wings holding an olive branch in one greenhouse and thirteen arrows in the other, all symbolizing peace as well as defense through war. The bird is surmounted by thirteen stars recalling the original thirteen states. The eagle has its head turned towards the olive branch, to its right, to symbolize a preference for peace. 1 The E Pluribus Unum (literally “Of many, one”) banner recalls the reunion of the 13 states that formed the United States.
The 13 states of origin are also recalled by the 13 stripes of the coat of arms, the 13 arrows, the 13 leaves and 13 olives of the olive branch (these last two representations being by tradition and not formalized) as well as by the sentence “E Pluribus Unum” which contains 13 letters.
The front of the seal displays the national coat of arms 2 , and appears on federal state documents such as passports or flags. It is within this framework that the colors of the coat of arms are specified, its use on the seal being monochrome.
The seal of the President of the United States and that of the Vice-President are strongly inspired by the Great Seal of the United States. But the seal of the Senate of the United States is rather distant (with Phrygian cap , bundles and absence of eagle).
History
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Dollar bill
1 dollar bill
The Great Seal appears on the reverse side of the US dollar bill . Following a decision by Franklin D. Roosevelt , president at the time of its conception in 1935, the seal is reversed; the back of the seal (the face that includes the Eye of Providence at the top of a pyramid ) is on the left and the front on the right.
Current version
The version currently in use by the State Department is much the same as the 1885 version, itself based on Lossing’s version in 1856.
Reverse the seal in conspiracy theories
Many Masonic conspiracy theories see the reverse side of the Great Seal as a sign of the influence of Freemasonry on the United States government . These theories are based on three main arguments:
Eye of Providence [ edit | modify the code ]
The flip proposed by the 3 th Committee in 1782
The Eye of Providence is said to be a Masonic symbol.
Although the Eye of Providence is a very common symbol in United States Freemasonry today , it was not yet the case in the 1770s and 1780s, when the Great Seal was drawn. It was an essentially Christian symbol, present in very many churches. Unlike the triangle alone or the triangle with a tetragrammaton (other traditional Christian representations of God ), it appears only very rarely in early Masonic documents. It was not until 1797, several years after its appearance in the Great Seal of the United States, that it began to spread in Freemasonry 3 .
Pyramid
The reverse designed by Lossing in 1882
The pyramid is said to be a Masonic symbol.
In traditional Masonic symbolism, as early as 1745 at least, we find a “pointed cubic stone”, composed of a cube surmounted by a pyramid with a square base, but no pyramid as such 4 . Pyramids as such are not the subject of any entry in most reference works on Masonic symbolism. While sometimes present in Masonic iconography later, especially during the great period of egyptomania the xix th century, it is almost always as a decorative element. There are also personal studies carried out by Freemasons on the symbolism of the pyramid, but no more than on any other symbol or subject of reflection without Masonic specificity. Finally, the “Egyptian” aspect of the Great Seal pyramid does not appear until well after its creation, on the version drawn by historian Benson John Lossing, in 1882. Previously, the drawing does not really show a pyramid , but rather a stack of 13 steps of decreasing sizes.
Ownership of seal creators Freemasonry
Currency letters used to reconstruct the word ” mason “.
The designers of the seal would all have been Freemasons.
This is not the case 5 . Benjamin Franklin was unquestionably a Freemason and was, among others, Venerable of the Lodge of the Nine Sisters for two years, but none of its proposals for the seal was not retained 6 . Among the four whose ideas were retained, neither Charles Thomson nor Pierre Ducimetière nor William Barton were Freemasons. Regarding Francis Hopkinson , a possible Masonic affiliation has sometimes been mentioned, but has never been demonstrated 7 , 8 .
Other “clues”, or supposed to be such, have been pointed out by the supporters of the Masonic conspiracy theories, such as the decryption of the word ” mason ” by superimposing two triangles (see figure opposite), or the fact that the year of the declaration of independence of the United States , engraved at the base of the pyramid, or also that of the founding of the Illuminati of Bavaria .
