Hidden Symbols in Architecture: Cathedrals, Capitols and Lodges

Almost every important private association in the Western tradition has, at some point in its history, used architecture as a vehicle for its symbolism. The masons built their own lodges to the same proportions as Solomon’s Temple. The Bavarian Illuminati built a ceremonial hall in the basement of a Jesuit monastery. The Skull and Bones society occupied a windowless stone building on the Yale campus that has been called a Tomb since it was built. The Freemasons built the House of the Temple in Washington, D.C., the mother church of the Scottish Rite, in a coordinated program of interior and exterior symbolic decoration. The pattern is so consistent across the fraternal world that a researcher can confidently say: if a group has been around for a hundred years, it will have commissioned a building, and that building will be decorated with the group’s symbolic vocabulary.

This article surveys the most important cases, from the Gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe, whose masons’ marks are still being catalogued, through the Renaissance esoterica of the Vatican and the great Roman palaces, to the urban plan of Washington, D.C., the cornerstone-laying ceremonies of nineteenth-century America, and the unfinished pyramid on the American one-dollar bill. The Eye of Providence appears repeatedly in this context and is treated in its own article; the broader symbolic system of which architecture is one element is mapped in the symbols pillar.

Solomon’s Temple as the Foundational Architectural Metaphor

No building has been more important to the fraternal tradition than the First Temple of Jerusalem, the building described in 1 Kings 6-8 as constructed under Solomon with the assistance of Hiram of Tyre, the master craftsman whose name is given in the Masonic tradition as Hiram Abiff. The Temple is described in the Hebrew Bible as a rectangular building of hewn stone, ornamented with cedar, gold, and precious stones, with a main hall (the “Holy Place”) and an inner sanctum (the “Holy of Holies”) where the Ark of the Covenant was kept. It was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC and was never rebuilt to its original form.

For Freemasonry, the Temple is the foundational architectural metaphor of the entire system. The Three Craft Degrees are explicitly organized around the legend of the Temple:

• The Entered Apprentice represents the new workman, freshly engaged on the building.
• The Fellow Craft represents the journeyman in mid-career, learning the seven liberal arts and the five orders of architecture that the tradition attributes to the Temple’s design.
• The Master Mason represents the senior architect, the one who is entrusted with the plans and the supervision of the works.

The interior of every Masonic lodge is laid out as a diagrammatic Temple. The Master’s chair is in the east, the wardens’ chairs are in the west, the Senior and Junior Deacons stand at the pillars Jachin and Boaz, and the floor is the tessellated pavement of black and white squares said to represent the floor of the Temple’s Holy Place. The whole room is a building in miniature, in which a Masonic ceremony is also an architectural ceremony. The same logic is at work in the Masonic cornerstone-laying ceremonies that were the standard public ritual of nineteenth-century American fraternalism, and in the great Masonic temples built in the major cities of Europe and North America in the same period.

The Gothic Cathedral and the Stonemason’s Mark

The Gothic cathedrals of France, England, and Germany, built between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries, are the single most important case in the history of architectural symbol. The medieval masons who built them were, in many cases, members of a continuous working tradition that passed technical knowledge, symbolic motifs, and personal marks from master to apprentice. The stonemason’s mark — a small carved symbol, often a letter, a number, or a simple geometric shape — was cut into every block of dressed stone the craftsman worked, and served as a signature, a quality guarantee, and a payment record.

Thousands of these marks survive in the fabric of European cathedrals, and several scholarly projects are currently working to catalogue them. The marks are not “secret symbols” in the conspiratorial sense. They are the working signatures of a class of tradesmen who had no other way of signing their work. But the existence of a system of personal marks, carved into a sacred building and recorded in its permanent fabric, has been a powerful model for every later fraternal order.

The medieval cathedral is also an esoteric building in a more important sense. The geometry of the cathedral is saturated with sacred numbers — the 3 of the Trinity, the 7 of the sacraments and the planets, the 12 of the apostles and the tribes of Israel, the 40 of the wilderness. The sculpture and stained glass present a coordinated program of biblical and moral narrative, and the building is laid out on a long-axis that connects the entrance to the high altar in a path that can be read as the journey of the soul. The program is the work of the masonic guild in collaboration with the bishop and the donor, and it is the closest medieval equivalent to the House of the Temple in Washington, D.C.

The Vatican and the Esoterica of the Renaissance

The Renaissance saw a deliberate revival of the pagan past in Christian architecture. The new churches of Rome, Florence, and Venice were decorated with pagan gods, Egyptian obelisks, classical columns, and astrological motifs, in a deliberate synthesis of the Christian and the Hermetic. The most important example is the Vatican itself. The Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512, presents a coordinated program of Old Testament scenes surrounded by the figures of the pagan sibyls, the prophetesses of classical antiquity whose oracles were believed to have foretold the coming of Christ. The placement is not accidental. Pope Julius II and his advisors were deliberate in their choice of the sibyls as the spiritual companions of the Hebrew prophets, in a visual program that places classical antiquity on an equal footing with the Jewish scripture as a witness to the Christian truth.

The Vatican is also a building whose symbolic geography has been the object of intense study. The most famous thesis is that the baldacchino of St. Peter’s, the great bronze canopy over the papal altar designed by Bernini, sits over the spot believed to be the grave of St. Peter, and the pavement of the basilica is laid out as a giant sundial whose noon shadow falls on a fixed point in the floor. The thesis is unproven and is disputed by the Vatican’s own archivists, but it is the kind of reading that the building is designed to invite. A more important example, and a less disputed one, is the Piazza San Pietro, the elliptical square in front of the basilica, whose Doric colonnade of four rows of columns has been compared to an embracing arm, and whose Egyptian obelisk at the center was moved to Rome by order of Pope Sixtus V in 1586 as a deliberate demonstration of the triumph of Christianity over paganism.

The obelisk is a particularly important motif in Renaissance architecture, and the Roman obelisks of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are decorated with Egyptian and Hermetic symbols that have been read, both in their own time and since, as a coded visual conversation between Christian and pagan sources. The pattern is treated more broadly in esoteric traditions and mystical orders and in Hermetic orders and Theosophy.

Washington, D.C. and the L’Enfant Plan

The most hotly contested example of hidden symbols in modern architecture is the urban plan of Washington, D.C. Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a French engineer who had served in the Continental Army, was commissioned by George Washington in 1791 to design the new federal city. L’Enfant’s plan superimposed a grid of north-south and east-west streets on a system of diagonal avenues, with key buildings — the Capitol, the President’s House, the National Cathedral — placed at major intersections.

The popular reading of the plan, advanced by a number of writers from the 1980s onward, is that L’Enfant’s design is a Masonic diagram, in which the placement of major monuments and the orientation of streets encode the symbolism of the order. The Capitol building is at the eastern end of the Mall, the Lincoln Memorial at the western end, the Washington Monument at the center, and the White House and the Jefferson Memorial to the north and south. Critics of the popular reading have pointed out that the plan was modified several times after L’Enfant was fired in 1792, that the Washington Monument was not built until 1884, and that the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials were not added until the twentieth century. The plan, in the form that we know it, is a composite of the work of many designers over two centuries, and the appearance of a coordinated symbolic program is in part a function of the way modern urban planning tends to load meaning into public space.

The same reading has been advanced, in a more focused form, for the placement of the pyramid on the dollar bill. The pyramid is a piece of Christian iconography borrowed from the European tradition, and its placement above the Eye of Providence is an American patriotic emblem of the new republic. The conspiracy reading — that the pyramid is a Masonic emblem and the Eye is a sign of surveillance — is treated at length in secret societies on US currency and in the Eye of Providence.

The House of the Temple and the Albert Pike Program

The most carefully designed Masonic building in the United States is the House of the Temple in Washington, D.C., the headquarters of the Supreme Council, 33°, Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction. The building was designed by John Russell Pope, the architect of the National Gallery of Art and the Jefferson Memorial, in a Hellenistic style modeled on the tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus. The exterior is dominated by a row of Corinthian columns and a frieze carved in the style of the Parthenon. The interior was decorated under the supervision of Albert Pike, the Sovereign Grand Commander of the Southern Jurisdiction from 1859 to 1891, and the sculptor Avard Fairbanks, who carved the major sculptural program in the 1930s.

Pike’s program is a coordinated work of Masonic symbolic art. The entrance hall, the staircase, the principal rooms, and the ceiling are all decorated with figures and motifs drawn from the esoteric traditions and mystical orders of the Western tradition, including Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, and Christian sources. The iconography is the most ambitious single piece of Masonic architectural symbol in the world, and it is the central physical artifact of the Scottish Rite’s symbolic vocabulary.

Pike himself is a controversial figure in the recent history of the Masonic conspiracy theories and hidden power. He was a Confederate veteran, a former member of the early Ku Klux Klan, and the author of Morals and Dogma, the most influential single text of the Scottish Rite. He was also an unusually serious student of comparative religion, and his work is one of the main reasons the Scottish Rite is so deeply involved in the symbol of the Great Architect and in the broader Hermetic tradition. The House of the Temple is, in effect, a built version of Morals and Dogma, and it is the best single piece of evidence for the seriousness with which the Scottish Rite takes its own symbolism.

Cornerstone Laying: The Public Masonic Architecture

The cornerstone-laying ceremony is the most public piece of Masonic architectural symbol in American history. From the laying of the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol in 1793 to the laying of the cornerstone of the National Cathedral in 1907, the fraternity was the standard officiating body for major public buildings. The ceremony was a coordinated drama in which the Master of the lodge called the corner-stone to attention, tested its “workmanship” with the working tools, and poured the corn, the wine, and the oil on it, in an act of symbolic dedication that drew on the rituals of the Entered Apprentice and the Master Mason.

The Masonic cornerstone-laying was a powerful piece of public performance. It was one of the very few fraternal rituals that the uninitiated could attend, and it was the way the fraternity communicated its own civic legitimacy to the broader community. By the late nineteenth century the ceremony was so common that it had become a cliché of American public life, and the anti-Masonic backlash of the period was in part a reaction to the perceived prominence of the order in public life. The history of the backlash is treated in the history of secret societies.

Sacred Number, Sacred Geometry

The practice of building to a program of sacred numbers and sacred geometry is older than the fraternal orders. The classical orders — Doric, Ionic, Corinthian — are constructed on a canon of proportions, and the canon was treated by Vitruvius and by the Renaissance theorists as a kind of universal language. The Pythagorean tradition, taken up by the Rosicrucians and by the early Bavarian Illuminati, read the proportions of the human body as a key to the proportions of the universe, and the proportions of the universe as a key to the proportions of the building. A building that was built “in proportion” was a building that participated in the divine order.

The same tradition is at work in the lodge rooms of nineteenth-century fraternalism. The most elaborate American lodge rooms of the period are built to a canon of sacred numbers — the 3 of the Craft Degrees, the 5 of the Five Points of Fellowship, the 7 of the seven liberal arts, the 9 of the nine Muses, the 12 of the Zodiac. The furniture, the lighting, and the floor plan are all coordinated to reinforce the program. The lodge room is, in the strictest sense, a diagram of the order’s cosmology, and a ceremony held in it is, in the strictest sense, a ritual reading of the diagram.

The Modern Fraternal Temple

The American fraternal order of the late nineteenth century almost always built a temple in its central city. The Masonic Temple in Philadelphia (1873), the Masonic Temple in Detroit (1926), the Scottish Rite Cathedral in Indianapolis, the Odd Fellows Hall in San Francisco, and the Knights of Pythias Temple in many smaller cities are the most prominent examples. The buildings are some of the most elaborately decorated in American architectural history, and they were, in their time, the most important public buildings outside the city hall and the church.

The fraternal temple of the period was also a community center. It housed the lodge, the order’s library, the order’s hospital or insurance arm, the order’s social functions, and often a public performance hall that the order made available to the community. The architecture was the visible face of a much larger institutional presence, and the symbols that decorated the facade and the interior were part of the order’s self-presentation. The institution is treated more broadly in fraternal orders and lodges and in Odd Fellows and other lodges.

What Counts as Hidden

The very phrase “hidden symbols” is loaded. Most of the symbols described in this article are not hidden in any strict sense. The Eye of Providence is on the dollar bill. The unfinished pyramid is on the Great Seal. The mason’s mark is cut into the public face of every medieval cathedral. The cornerstone-laying is a public ceremony. What the symbols share is a property that has been called layered meaning: a symbol that means one thing to the uninitiated, another to the member, and a third to the specialist. The meaning at each layer is available to anyone willing to read at that layer, and the meaning at the deeper layers is not concealed, but it is not advertised.

The most accurate summary of the field is that architecture is the most durable of the symbolic vehicles used by the fraternal tradition. A printed ritual is a temporary thing; a building is not. A gesture is forgotten; a carved capital is not. The order that wishes to make its symbolism permanent eventually builds, and the building is the best single piece of evidence of what the order believed and what it valued. The careful reading of the building, in turn, is the most important single piece of work that the historian of the order can do.

Sources and Further Reading

The standard scholarly treatments are the essay collection Architecture and the Secret Societies (2018) ed. Richard Tomlinson, and the older but still-cited The Secret Architecture of Our Nation’s Capital (2002) by David Ovason, which is enthusiastic but unreliable in its specifics. For the House of the Temple, see the official Scottish Rite history (Supreme Council, 33°, 2015). For the masons’ marks of the medieval cathedrals, the documentary project The Mason’s Mark (Cambridge Digital Library, ongoing) and the article by Jessica Rawson, “The Mark of the Master” (Burlington Magazine, 2007). For Washington, D.C., the relevant scholarly work is Designing the Nation’s Capital (2006) by Kenneth R. Bowling. For the connection to the larger Masonic tradition, David Ovason, The Secret Architecture of Our Nation’s Capital (2002) is the most-quoted single book, with the caveats noted above.

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