In 1999, astrologer David Ovason’s bestselling book The Secret Architecture of Our Nation’s Capital proposed that a hidden pattern based on astrology and occult symbolism underlay the urban design of Washington, DC. This was not news to people inside the occult community, where the esoteric dimensions of urban design have been a subject of discussion for many years. Researchers into leys and related earth mysteries noted long ago that many towns and cities appear to be laid out according to complex patterns, some based on the positions of sun, moon, and stars, while others follow the less easily defined patterns of the ley network. As one of the major centers of ley research, Britain has been particularly well surveyed in this regard, and Alfred Watkins’s classic The Old Straight Track (1925) includes many maps and photographs of complex urban alignments. See leys.
While Ovason’s discoveries may not have been surprising to those familiar with the field, his work provides solid documentation of the role of esoteric symbolism in the design of a major world city. Unlike many other cities, Washington, DC did not come into being by the slow process of urban growth; it was planned and built as the capital of the new United States of America in the years immediately following the American colonies’ successful revolt against Britain. The city’s plan was originally laid out by Pierre Charles L’Enfant and substantially reworked by Andrew Ellicott, both of them Freemasons. They worked a rich tapestry of astrological alignments into the city plan, and this process was later echoed by other architects and builders – many of them also of the Masonic fraternity – who placed more than 30 complete zodiacs and hundreds of other astrological symbols in the architecture of the city. Much of this focuses on the constellation Virgo and on the three stars – Regulus, Arcturus, and Spica – that traditionally frame Virgo’s place in the zodiac. The political importance of Virgo as a symbol of the “virgin land” of America at the time of the city’s founding, no less than the constellation’s deep esoteric connections to deities such as Isis and Ceres, and to the Virgin Mary in Christian myth, make this connection as obvious as it is elegant.
Few modern cities have been as comprehensively shaped by a symbolic plan as Washington, DC but most of the world’s great cities (and a surprising number of the smaller cities and towns) have such geometrical and symbolic structures underlying them, as often as not half buried by a century or more of ignorant modern design and construction. Manuals of architecture and urban design, from the Roman builder Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture straight through into the early modern period, discuss the need to align streets and structures alike with winds, vistas, landforms, and heavenly bodies. These concerns blended with a vision of the world that saw the material world as a reflection of the spiritual realms to create many works of architecture that express traditional wisdom in symbolic and geometric forms. After the coming of the scientific revolution, when these approaches fell out of favor with the mainstream culture, they survived in a handful of secret societies, most specifically in Freemasonry. See Freemasonry.
The rediscovery of the role of Masonic symbolism in urban design has predictably sparked a great deal of discussion among antimasonic conspiracy theorists, who reworked it in search of more evidence for their belief that Freemasonry is a Satanic cult that runs the world. It has also been adopted by several authors in the fields of alternative history and rejected knowledge, who reworked it to fit their own belief that Freemasonry is a lineal descendant of the Knights Templar, the Gnostics, and other currently popular traditions of the past. Alongside Washington Rome, Paris, and an assortment of other cities have been cited as sites of Masonic geometrical design. See Antimasonry; Gnosticism; Knights Templar; rejected knowledge.
At least one other city in the world has a better claim to Masonic design than Washington, DC or any of these others, however. This is the modest American city of Sandusky, Ohio, where the street plan is laid out in the form of a Masonic square and compasses over an ordinary grid of streets. The surveyor who laid out the town, Hector Kilbourne, was also the first Master of the Masonic lodge in Sandusky – a detail that explains the source of the town plan’s Masonic features. To the present writer’s knowledge, however, Sandusky has yet to feature in conspiracy theory or alternate-realities literature, either as a hotbed of devil worship or as a center of the ancient mysteries.
SOURCE:
The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies : the ultimate a-z of ancient mysteries, lost civilizations and forgotten wisdom written by John Michael Greer – © John Michael Greer 2006