Now Christmas is even closer and you may be counting the dollar bills left in your rapidly thinning wallet to see if you use cash or plastic to buy gas. Don’t use all your dollar bills. Take one home and examine it with care. It’s full of secrets. Some of them are here. Others you can find by contemplation along the lines indicated.

In 1776 the designing of the Great Seal of the United States was put into the charge of three remarkable people: Thomas Jefferson, John Adam and Benjamin Franklin. Since the publication of the Da Vinci Code and the movie National Treasure a great many people have become more aware that they have taken for granted many things in their lives that are in fact loaded with interest and mystery.

It would take a very long time to notice and decode all the spiritual and magical symbolism on the common dollar bill with its Great Seal, but in the interest of noticing some of what has not been noticed because of its familiarity let’s do a little bit of investigating.

First of all notice what isn’t there. Nowhere on the bill is the symbol $ for a dollar. Most currencies in the world, or at least those few dozen that I have seen, put the standard currency symbol on the note. Not the dollar. We will see later where that symbol comes from.

I have before me a well worn one dollar bill dated 2003 that I will use for providing a sequence to this letter. It has several bank code letters and numbers that never served a magickal or spiritual purpose. On it is the seal of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Massachusetts, with a central capital letter A. The other reserve banks use different letters. They have no magickal or spiritual significance.

Look on the back of the note and see the Roman numerals MDCCLXXVI on the base of the truncated pyramid on the left hand side. This is the significant number 1776, the date of the beginning of what the Founding Fathers regarded as a great experiment in nation building.

This experiment was meant to start in 1776 and then continue with the assistance of God into a New Age during which one nation would grow from the many comprising it, and the truncated pyramid would become complete, based firmly on that foundation laid down in 1776 by the giant intellects and personalities who had this great vision.

The dollar bill is a model of careful planning. Like an orthodox Tarot card none of the lines or shadings or line-ups of symbols is by chance. It is possible that those who reproduce the notes now have no idea of the symbols they are giving to the public. I don’t doubt that there is a certain vociferous and deliberately ignorant minority that would be very upset to know what we are going to say about the symbols they unwittingly carry about in their pocket books.

The origin of the word dollar is interesting in its own right. It occurs, you will notice, only once on each side of the bill. The word comes from the German word taler. This was the name of silver coins in Bohemia around 1520. The silver came from a place called Joachimsthal, this means Joachim’s valley, or thaler. (Joachim is the name of one of the pillars on the High Priestess Tarot card in an orthodox Tarot.) The front…the obverse of the coin showed the crucified Christ. The back, the reverse, showed a serpent coiled round a cross. Close to the serpent’s head were the letters NU and on the other arm of the cross is the number 21.

This whole side of the coin symbolized the fiery serpent that Moses put on a pole so that everyone who looked at it would be cured of their current problems, which at the time included being bitten by venomous snakes. The story is in the 21st chapter of Numbers, hence NU21.

Why am I bothering to tell you this? Well, the artist who designed the thaler wanted to show the connection between the magical healing power of this serpent and the healing power of the Christ, so he put it on a cross. He may also have known what is known to Kabbalists that the word for serpent, Nachash in Hebrew has the same letter sum as the word Messiach, the word for Messiah. Every Hebrew letter has a number value and the science of gematria connects those words that have the same total. The serpent of Genesis and the serpent on the pole of Moses are connected with the Messiah, in Hebrew mysticism and advanced Tarot.

And there’s more. Look at the $ sign with these new concepts and you will see the serpent still coiling round the pole.

If you are old enough to have read Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, around 1920 you might remember the remark made by one of the characters who was lamenting the power in the hands of the bankers. He said that the dollar sign has “chased the crucifix clean off the map.” This comment would only be significant to those who knew where the dollar sign originally came from.

If you are into alchemy you will recognize the alchemical symbol of the T cross with an S imposed on it to represent the power of healing. It was the symbol of the staff of Mercury who rules finance and banking in astrology. Very appropriate for a piece of currency. You can still see it in modified form in the caduceus of the AMA and the single serpent form used on ambulances.

Going on with this for a moment… I mentioned that Nachash and Messiach had the same letter total. In each case this total was 358.

In gematria it is a general rule that the digit sums of the magickal numbers are also significant. Let’s check. 3+5+8=16. Is there a 16 somewhere on the bill? Yes there is.

You have 16 words in the roundels on the back of the bill: Annuit cœptis (2), MCCCLXXVI (1), Novus Ordo Seclorum (3), The Great Seal (3), E Pluribus Unum (3) and Of the United States (4). Total 16.

If any of that was deliberate then adding the 1 and 6 of 16 should show something on the bill too. Well, 1+ 6 = 7 and there are seven words beneath the two roundels: ‘The Great Seal of the United States.’ There are seven places where the word ‘one’ appears on the back of the bill, though one of them is in Latin…unum.

Now a little bit of fairly recent history. It was Franklin D. Roosevelt who ordered that a new dollar bill should be designed in 1935. He requested that the design should involve the symbolism of the Great Seal of America. And it did. Now one side of the Seal contained the pyramid and the other side contained the eagle. Both included magickal and Masonic symbols as Roosevelt knew, being a Freemason. He wasn’t the only one involved. Henry A. Wallace was Secretary of Agriculture and Henry Morganthau was Secretary of the Treasury. All were involved in the design and all were Masons.

Now the first Seal involved the work of Jefferson, Adam and the other Franklin but the actual cutting of the Seal in metal was done by Robert Scott of Philadelphia. He too was a Mason.

He inserted the number 13 into the heart of the Seal because it was the number of colonies that opposed Britain. Thirteen is not an unlucky number for the United States. Look at the eagle on your dollar bill. There are 13 leaves on the olive branch together with 13 berries. There are 13 arrows in the eagle’s claws. There are 13 stars in the constellation above the eagle’s head. The shield has 13 vertical divisions and 13 horizontal divisions. There are 13 layers of stone on the pyramid. The motto E Pluribus Unum (Out of many the one)also contains 13 letters, so does the motto Annuit Coeptis (He favors our undertaking).

Thirteen in Tarot is the number of transformation...the death of one thing being the birth of another. It is a very fortunate card. The bad press it has is probably something to do with the fact that the Templars were arrested and suffered badly on a Friday the 13th. And everybody at the time knew that.

If you take a magnifying glass and look at the front of the bill you will see thirteen stars on the chevron on the Seal of the Treasury. It also has the symbols of a balance and a key, both magickal and religious symbols in various modalities. If you are used to really looking at orthodox Tarot cards where every line, color and shape is a set of correlated symbolisms you will find the dollar bill pretty fascinating.

Take the stars above the eagle’s head. There are 13 of them, and each one is a five pointed star, like the pentagram of Leonardo Da Vinci that represents mankind. The points in alchemy represent Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Spirit and the upright star is used by magicians in many ways. It was also important in astrology because the planet Venus seems to go forwards and backwards in the sky and over a period of years traces out a five pointed star, which was the symbol of Venus. The flags of Islam have a crescent moon and Venus as the Morning Star on them. About 50 countries currently have this star on their flags.

But now look even more carefully at how the 13 are arranged. Almost all the symbolism has at least two layers. By joining the stars with straight lines you can make a six pointed star comprised of two intersecting, equilateral triangles. In alchemy this is what happens when the triangle representing fire intersects with the triangle representing water. The resulting figure is sometimes called the Seal of Solomon, or the Star of David and is used in magical and spiritual practices all over the map. It would take a complete book to deal with this symbol alone, and it is obvious that the 13 stars were not arranged that way for nothing.

This collection of stars was called a constellation. By this, the designers meant to say that the new country was the equivalent of a new constellation in the heavens.

Let’s move on, though we could carry on with the eagle or the stars for a lot longer. The Eye above the truncated pyramid is sometimes called the Eye of Providence by Masons. As Franklin was a Mason and suggested the Eye to the original artist we know it was meant to be more than just a picture. In Masonry there are many variations of the Eye of Providence. Sometimes it is a radiant five pointed star that contains an eye, sometimes a G, standing for God or Geometry depending on the way you were taught about it. Paul Foster Case has written a complete book about the meaning of the G. Don’t take my little summary as the last word.

Notice that the Eye above the truncated pyramid is a left eye. In magick the left eye corresponds to the Moon and the right eye to the Sun. The eye in the radiant triangle completes the incomplete pyramid. It is intended to convey the idea that the pyramid will be completed with the aid of the all seeing eye of God. The Freemasons originally used the Eye as a symbol of God and the triangle round it as a symbol of the Trinity. If you know about the Egyptian basis of the Wisdom of the Freemasons you will know that the Eye of Horus is involved too, and Celtic magicians would include the universal threefold law of matter...create, sustain, destroy. Everything is in one of these phases, and the law is often symbolized by a straightforward triangle, or a Celtic knot triangle.

Note that there are two eyes on each side of the bill. On the back there is the Eye of Providence and the eye of the eagle. On the front there are the two eyes of George Washington. That pretty frame around Washington if you look at it closely is actually the Greek letter omega. This is the letter of the saying in Revelation…I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last. Omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet, and the early Christians used it as a symbol of the end point towards which they were striving. Teilhard De Chardin worked this idea out beautifully in his idea about the universe evolving towards the Omega point.

The idea of Omega and Washington as symbols is that Washington’s spirit is still guiding the destiny of America. If you fold your bill vertically you will find that Washington’s right eye is exactly on the center fold, just as the eye above the pyramid is on the center line of the pyramid. Fold it and see. And while we are on this eye…if you lay a straight edge exactly across the top of the ONE between the roundels the line goes through the eye on the pyramid and exactly through the bottom star in the constellation. There may be a subtle message there in the connection. The one eye that completes the top of the pyramid connects to the one star that completes the bottom of the constellation

We’ll leave our little canter with Omega, though there is more. What about Alpha. Well in many, many alphabets A or its equivalent is the first letter. It nearly always means ONE. Draw out a large capital A carefully. It contains a triangle. You know where the triangle is on the dollar bill. Take away the triangle from the A, leaving the cross bar, and you have a truncated pyramid. Look at the word AMERICA. It is the base of a pyramid with an invisible top. You could put a straight edge along the first line of the first A and the last line of the last A and draw a triangle.

By using a transparent straight edge you can see how important in the design of the dollar bill the word AMERICA is. Look at George’s side. Put your straight edge down the descender of the letter A in the word STATES. It passes exactly through George’s left eye, and also exactly down the descender of the letter A in DOLLAR.

Flip the bill over and run the straight edge along the ascender of the A in DOLLAR. It passes exactly through another eye, the eye of the eagle. Put your straight edge on the ascender of the last A in AMERICA and the line goes exactly through the central star of the constellation. Do the same thing with the first A in AMERICA and the straight edge exactly hits the center of the bottom edge of the bill. The word AMERICA is obviously very crucial to the design of the back of the bill.

Flip it over. Put your straight edge down the descender of the final A of AMERICA and you hit the exact corner of the bill. Do the same with the ascender of the final A and the straight edge goes exactly through the first star of the chevron. The letter A is obviously crucial in the design of the front of the bill.

How many A’s are there on the front of the bill? No prize now for guessing thirteen. Federal (1), States of America (3), Legal (1), All and Private (3), Washington, D.C. (1), Department …Treasury (2), Dollar (1), Washingon (1). Total 13.

You will see from even this trifling introduction that the people involved in starting this experiment that we call America looked upon it as a work in progress, with the stars as the limit. It is my opinion that the people who initiated this great experiment would be very disappointed to see how it has turned out. They warned in very clear terms of the danger of vested interests getting control of government by virtue of enormous wealth. Their worst dreams have come true. Their wonderful experiment is now run by and for corporations whose only aim is profit. But that’s another story.

If any of this spiritual geometry aspect of the dollar bill interested you then you will probably also be interested in mundane details of it, such as how many dollar bills are printed every month, how many dollar bills are there in a pound, what’s the weight of a million dollar bills, what’s the exact size and thickness of the paper used in bills, about how old are dollar bills when they are taken out of circulation, what does it cost to print a dollar bill, and other things of that ilk.

All such questions can be answered at http://www.treas.gov/education/ Happy hunting. Keep your eyes open for the magickal. It’s hidden in plain sight. Jesus said in the Gospel of Thomas that people are searching for the kingdom of God when it is laid out in plain sight if they only looked. Anything is connected to everything if you look deeply enough and pay attention.