The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Capital: The Masons and the Building of Washington, D.C.

In this audacious, erudite study, Ovason (The Secrets of Nostradamus) sets out to prove that Washington, D.C., was designed and built largely by Masonic architects--and that they imprinted the beliefs of their brotherhood on the city's layout. Benjamin Franklin, architect James Hoban (who designed the White House), Presidents Garfield and Polk and Statue of Liberty sculptor Frederic Bartholdi were all Masons. Indeed, when President George Washington laid the cornerstone of the Capitol building in 1793, he wore a Masonic apron adorned with occult Masonic symbols and an image of the zodiac. And although textbooks teach that the federal city was the brainchild of French engineer Pierre-Charles L'Enfant, Ovason argues that Washington, Jefferson, U.S. Surveyor General Andrew Ellicott and others--many of them Masons--substantially modified L'Enfant's original blueprint. As a result, Masonic symbolism appears in the marble, plaster, concrete, glass and paint facades of the Federal Reserve, the Library of Congress and other landmarks. This book, the result of a decade of thought and research, establishes the plausibility of Ovason's theory. However, the volume--a labyrinthine, illustrated tome--also contains a good deal of wild speculation. Ovason posits, for example, that the ""earthly triangle"" formed by Capitol/White House/Washington Monument mirrors a triangle of stars in the constellation Virgo, an astrological sign important to the Masons. This, he contends, proves that Masons secretly consecrated the nation's capital to the celestial Virgo. It's an interesting, if dubious, suggestion--but Ovason never establishes the significance of the link between the capital and the occult. (July)