We’re in this restaurant. The noise level has long since risen above the acceptable, but it’s a noisy restaurant and at least no one’s throwing bread rolls. Intended to thwart counterfeiters, the new, “smart” bills are expected to have their president’s portrait printed off-centre to make space for a watermark, micro-printing that produces tell-tale optical patterns if photocopied, and metallic “planchettes” that change colour when viewed from different angles.But because no US paper currency has ever been declared non-legal tender, and it is hoarded worldwide as a result, the new design will deviate as little as possible from the old. The “Eye of God” is “an ancient symbol of divine Providence”. The motto “E pluribus unum” was taken from the masthead of the Gentleman’s Magazine.Within a few weeks, the US Treasury will announce the most radical redesign of banknotes in its history. The pyramid was chosen because it was “the best-known and the largest building in the world It represented strength and durability”.

Roosevelt, too, so the mythology goes, belonged to a secret society based on the Illuminati, which had the All-Seeing Eye as its symbol.It’s all completely innocent, honestThe official print-out explaining the iconography of the Great Seal contains no mention of Masons or the occult but has a quaintness all its own. The first appearance of the pyramid and eye before the American people was not until new banknotes commissioned by President Roosevelt were printed in 1935. Even after its approval, for reasons that are obscure, only the face of the Seal, with its eagle, and not the back, with its pyramid and eye, were cut in brass. Adams has been cited as leader of an English society of neo-pagans called the Dragons; Jefferson was at one time, allegedly, Grand Master of the Rosicrucians.Shaking hands with the PresidentThe trio’s proposed design for the Seal seems to have stuck in the gullet of Congress, which repeatedly rejected it. The scandal provoked by the club ruined their cause.Besides Franklin, the committee comprised John Adams, the future second president of the United States, and Thomas Jefferson. Benjamin Franklin, one of the three members of the committee appointed to design the Seal, was Grand Master of Masonic lodges in both America and France.

In the 1770s he used his Masonic contacts in Paris to raise funds to buy arms for the American rebels. He and fellow Mason Sir Francis Dashwood, British Chancellor of the Exchequer and founder of the Hellfire Club, worked unsuccessfully to reconcile the British and American governments. Of the 56 American rebels who, in 1776, signed the Declaration of Independence and ordered a seal to be designed, 50 were members of the Masonic Order.Seal of approvalHowever fanciful the myths, there is little doubt that the Masonic Order, to which high-ranking politicians on both sides of the Atlantic belonged, supported the American revolution. The All-Seeing Eye is an emblem in the degree of Master Mason; the Sage of the Pyramids is the name associated with Royal Master, the eighth degree of American Freemasonry. A fifth of all banknotes in circulation are American, so it is not surprising that the dollar’s two devices reproduced from the Great Seal of the United States – that Egyptian pyramid with the top cut off and the All-Seeing Eye emitting a “glory” of light – have inspired modern myths about their origins.
Example: George Washington, who became first president of the United States in 1789, was a member of the Masonic Order. Money talks. But much of what is said by the American dollar bill – the world’s most potent symbol of materialism – is gobbledegook.

Only Smith misunderstood.Or, perhaps, pretended to misunderstand His account alone survives. Ambitious for advancement back in England, he knew the charge of miscegenation could be disastrous. For two long winters an adoring Pocahontas brought the captain food for his starving band. Then, in 1609, he sailed to England without so much as a goodbye Abandoned his princess Ignored his clear obligation. Left to mourn, to grieve, to resort finally to the dependable, if pedestrian, John Rolfe.Smith never did marry – give him that He never realised success, either And he turned the whole fairytale askew.

The lives of chiefs were as a rule spared, and Smith was viewed (erroneously) as the White Chief. The Dark Princess saves the White Chief – standard ritual melodrama. Unless it was merely a traditional tribal sacrament of the execution-rescue variety, not uncommon among the Algonkians. Pocahantas, his saviour.
His saviour – unless, of course, it was all an act. Then, as Smith wrote later, “two great stones were brought”, and right on cue came the piercing cry and running feet, the young body thrown over his, bare arms cradling his head.