Freemasonry

This article was published in The Encyclopedia of American Religious History, 2 volumes, Edward L. Queen II, Stephen R. Prothero, and Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr., editors (New York: Facts on File, 1996) 1: 241-242. In the article I mistakenly assert that the Great Seal of the United States, which was adopted in 1782, contained the Masonic symbol of the All-Seeing Eye. Rather, the Seal’s symbol appears to have derived from the older Christian depiction of the Eye of Providence, which was equally picked up by the fraternity just slightly later in the 1780s, eventually becoming one of the brotherhood’s most prominent symbols. (The Egyptian pyramid is not a mainstream Masonic symbol at all.)