Novus Ordo Seclorum
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The phrase Novus Ordo Seclorum (Latin for "New Order of the Ages") appears on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, first designed in 1782 and printed on the back of the American dollar bill since 1935. It is also appears on the coat of arms of the Yale School of Management, Yale University's business school. It is often mistranslated as "New World Order", but the Latin for that phrase would be Novus Ordo Mundi.
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Origin and meaning
The phrase is taken from the fourth eclogue of Virgil, which contains a passage that reads:
- Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas;
- magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.
- iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna,
- iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto.
- "The last prophecy has come to the Cumaean Sibyl; a brand new great order of the ages is born; for now the Virgin and the age of Saturn have returned; now a new Child has been sent from the heavens." (Latin prose would normally spell the word saeculorum, but that form is impossible in hexameter verse: the ae and o are long, the u short by position. For the medieval exchange between ae, æ and e, see Æ; medieval is another example.)
Medieval Christians read Virgil's poem as a prophecy of the coming of Christ.
The word seclorum does not mean "secular," as one might assume, but is the genitive (possessive) plural form of the word saeculum, meaning (in this context) generation, century, or age. Saeculum did come to mean "world, worldly" in late, Christian, Latin, and "secular" is derived from it, through secularis.
Thus the motto Novus Ordo Seclorum can be translated as "A new order of the ages." It was proposed by Charles Thompson, the Latin expert who was involved in the design of the Great Seal of the United States, to signify "the beginning of the new American Era" as of the date of the Declaration of Independence.
Popular culture
Novus Ordo Seclorum is also the name of a high quality encryption program in Cryptonomicon, a novel by Neal Stephenson. The name is said to be a pun based on the fact that the program puts data in a "new order" that cannot be unscrambled for "ages".
Conspiracy theory
Some of those who believe that the Freemasons and the Jacobins are conspiring to control the world claim that the motto is inspired by Freemasonry, and is one of the clues to the True Masters of the World. These theorists assert that the word should be spelt secolorum [sic], and the alleged first o is omitted for occult reasons. By circumscribing the 6 pointed Star of David over the pyramid, 5 of the 6 apices (the 6th being the 'All-seeing eye'), point near letters spelling S-M-O-N-A, which can be rearranged to spell Mason (also monas and moans, out of 120 combinations of letters). As any American dollar bill will show, the directions are not exact, and four of the apices point to empty space; the letters are at the ends of the nearest words.
The advocates of the theory also cite the 13 steps to ascend the pyramid, and the 72 visible blocks on the front, which they connect with the supposed 72-letter Name of God (they miscall it the Tetragrammaton), from which the names of the Archangels are derived and the decans of the heavenly plane are so numbered.
More conventional thinkers regard the thirteen steps as referring to the thirteen colonies. If the blocks are correctly counted and their number intended, 72 has other mystical meanings: it was sacred to the ancient Egyptians, as Plutarch says; so were the decans. Both Jews and Christians use it as the number of nations on the Earth.
See also
Egypt in the European imagination