Eye of Providence

The device is a piece of European Christian iconography and its setting is the Counter-Reformation. A radiant eye within an equilateral triangle, the triangle for the three persons and the eye for the sight that misses nothing, appears in ceilings, altarpieces, pulpits, tombs and printed title pages across Catholic Europe from the sixteenth century, and passes without friction into Lutheran and Reformed use. Pontormo's Supper at Emmaus of 1525 carries it. It is in the plasterwork of Baroque abbeys, over the doors of parish churches, and it was still being installed in the nineteenth century.

The eye on its own, without the triangle, is older as a figure for divine attention, and the textual warrant is scattered through the Psalms and Proverbs: the eye of the Lord is upon them that fear him; the eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good. Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquity have their own eyes of gods and of the sun, none of which is the ancestor of this one along any traceable line, whatever is claimed for the Eye of Horus in popular accounts.

Only the dating matters for what follows. This was ordinary church furniture, in many thousands of buildings, for roughly two hundred years before it appeared on a national emblem or in a Masonic lodge.

The Great Seal of the United States was designed over six years by three successive committees. An eye in a triangle was proposed in the first of them, in 1776, on the suggestion of Pierre Eugene du Simitiere, a Swiss-born artist engaged as a consultant because the committee had no heraldic knowledge of its own. The final design was assembled in 1782 by Charles Thomson, Secretary of Congress, and adopted on 20 June that year. The reverse carries an unfinished pyramid of thirteen courses with the eye above it, and the mottoes Annuit Coeptis, he has favoured our undertakings, and Novus Ordo Seclorum, a new order of the ages. Thomson's explanation, submitted to Congress with the design, glosses the eye as the frequent interpositions of providence in favour of the American cause. That is conventional eighteenth-century Christian providentialism and nobody at the time found it remarkable.

Freemasonry did take up an all-seeing eye, and the earliest clearly documented Masonic use is 1797, in Thomas Smith Webb's Freemason's Monitor, fifteen years after the seal. Both drew on the same church-ceiling stock, which by then had been available for two centuries. Only a minority of the men on the seal committees were Masons, and du Simitiere, who introduced the eye, was not among them. That the two emblems resemble each other is a fact about a shared source, not evidence of a shared author.

The reverse of the seal was little seen for a century and a half. It went onto the one-dollar bill in 1935, at the urging of Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace and with Roosevelt's approval, and that is when it entered general circulation and general suspicion.

The conspiracy literature is a genre with a documented history and can be described as one. It begins in the 1790s with the Abbe Barruel and John Robison, who explained the French Revolution as the work of the Bavarian Illuminati, a real society founded at Ingolstadt in 1776 and suppressed by the Elector of Bavaria within about a decade, whose actual size and lifespan cannot carry the weight put on them. The Illuminati did not use this symbol. The nineteenth century contributed the Taxil hoax, which its author publicly confessed as a fabrication in 1897 and which is still quoted; the twentieth added the John Birch Society's reading of Novus Ordo Seclorum as an announcement of world government; and the internet era has produced an enormous body of video and image material in which the eye stands for whatever the maker most fears. None of that is a reason to avoid the symbol or to treat the anxiety as unintelligible. It is a reason to be able to say plainly when the device was made, by whom, and out of what.