Replies to post #372065 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

This Illuminati stuff some are heavily into never interested me much except to understand just a little why so many apparently are.

This 'one eye' business is one little tidbut just picked up. It hadn't clicked before it was on the U.S. seal and on your dollar bill.

The Eye of Providence: The symbol with a secret meaning?


(Credit: Alamy)

By Matthew Wilson
13th November 2020

How has a seemingly straightforward image – an eye set within a triangle – become a lightning
rod for conspiracy theorists? Matthew Wilson looks at the history of an ambiguous symbol.

Conspiracy theories thrive on cryptic symbols and covert visual signs. The ‘Eye of Providence’ – an eye set within a triangle – is one such symbol, associated with Freemasonry but also linked with the apocryphal Illuminati, a secret group of elite individuals allegedly seeking to control global affairs.

More like this:
- The strange power of the ‘evil eye’
- One of our earliest human symbols
- The ancient symbol that spanned millennia

The Eye of Providence is a lightning rod for conspiracy theorists because it is very much hidden in plain sight: not only does it appear on countless churches and Masonic buildings worldwide, it also features on the reverse of the American one-dollar bill as well as the Great Seal of the United States.

[...]

So how about the Illuminati? The details of the early years of the original group, founded in Bavaria in 1776 and disbanded in 1787, are relatively obscure. Inconveniently we also don’t know how important visual symbols were to the original order. It is true that the Illuminati were inspired by the ideas behind Freemasonry, which had sporadically used the Eye of Providence as a symbol of the Supreme Architect (God), following the lead of many other churches at the time.

-
Unfortunately for the conspiracy theorists, the Eye of Providence on the one-dollar bill tells us
much more about late 18th-Century aesthetics than it does about the authority of secret elites
-

However, the Masons didn’t use the Eye of Providence symbol widely until at least the late 18th Century, and not before Bentham, Le Barbier, Thomson and Barton had adopted it for their very mainstream purposes. Unfortunately for the conspiracy theorists, the Eye of Providence on the one-dollar bill tells us much more about late 18th-Century aesthetics than it does about the authority of secret elites.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201112-the-eye-of-providence-the-symbol-with-a-secret-meaning