Folks looking at my polished stones often comment on seeing an image in the stone. Usually, I see the image they point out, but I did not see it until it was brought to my attention. It is much like seeing faces or images in the clouds.

Well, this week after I cut and polished a cabochon, I saw the Odd Fellows ‘All Seeing Eye’. A bit of history and personal history is in order.

Rock #4698

The “Eye”

The Odd Fellows were a very popular fraternal organization with over 1,000,000 US members ‘back in the day’. They were social, secretive and ritualistic, much like the Masonic order. They were also charitable and had one basic requirement in order to belong: the belief in a supreme being (God). Their primary and most famous symbol was the ‘All Seeing Eye’ which was also a Masonic symbol. In fact, our founding fathers, many of whom were Masons, wanted the ‘All seeing eye of divine providence’ to be a symbol of divinity which was included on the back of the US $1 bill.

The Odd Fellows All Seeing Eye of Divine Providence

The back of a US $1 bill

So why would I see the ‘All Seeing Odd Fellows Eye’ in my stone? It is a long story, but as a kid, while visiting my grandparents, who lived in a 1798 colonial cape house in Northport, Maine, I had many uncomfortable and strange encounters with the ‘Eye”. The cape house had a center hall with a center staircase which led up to the bedroom where I slept. The hall and stairway were poorly lit with a single bulb with pull chain. On the stairway wall hung a huge, elaborately gold framed Odd Fellows print which, you can guess, featured a very large and scary Odd Fellows Eye and other Odd Fellows symbols and slogans. To a little kid in an ancient colonial house with many verified ghost stories attributed to it, that ‘eye’ was a formidable obstacle to going upstairs to bed–and something I have never forgotten. That ‘eye’ reappeared to me last week in this curious agate from The Carver Agate Field.