Today, there are more than twenty complete zodiacs in Washington, D.C., each one pointing to an extraordinary mystery. David Ovason, who has studied these astrological devices for ten years, now reveals why they have been placed in such abundance in the center of our nation's capital and explains their interconnections. His richly illustrated text tells the story of how Washington, from its foundation in 1791, was linked with the zodiac, with the meaning of certain stars, and with a hidden cosmological symbolism that he uncovers here for the first time.

Fascinating and thoroughly researched, The Secret Architecture of Our Nation 's Capital is an engrossing book that raises provocative questions and otters complex insights into the meanings behind the mysterious symbols in Washington.

David Ovason explores the ancient belief that two children, both named Jesus, were born in Bethlehem to two sets of parents named Joseph and Mary. Although the gospels of Matthew and Luke give some support to the tradition of 'two Jesus children', the idea was not adopted by the established church. It lingered on, however, particularly in the literature of esoteric sects such as Gnosticism, and later in fifteenth-century Italian art. Ovason pays close attention to the ancient literature discovered at Qumran near the Dead Sea, and at Chenoboskion in Egypt. Hebrew, Aramaic, Coptic and Greek texts from those sites confirm the belief in the existence of two messiahs. Ovason also explores many fascinating and apocryphal texts that contain references to the two children, which were later expunged or glossed over by church apologists. The author goes on to speculate about why the tradition then became so popular again in early fifteenth-century Italian art, and studies traces of the two children theme in the work of Ambrogio Borgognone, Defendente Ferrari, Raphael and Leonardo de Vinci. This is fascinating reading for anyone interested in church history and theology, and esoteric traditions.

Do you know the true meaning of a dollar?

Few people do. Now an expert on arcane symbolism uncovers the fascinating secret meanings behind the design of the money we use every day.

In The Secret Symbols of the Dollar Bill, David Ovason explores the visual complexity and magic behind the world's most influential currency. Lively and readable, this extraordinary book invites you to take a dollar bill in hand and set off on a visual adventure. You will discover dazzling explanations of its secret contents -- from the symbols derived from the Great Seal to the extraordinary strands of numerology interwoven into its structure, to sur-prising hidden alignments.

Once you discover the magic and mystery revealed in The Secret Symbols of the Dollar Bill, you will find that the dollar in your wallet is worth so much more than what you can buy with it.

And now I will unclaspe a Secret booke, And to your quicke conceyving Discontents, Ille reade you Matter, deepe and dangerous As full of peril and adventurous Spirit...- William Shakespeare, "King Henry IV", Part I. Whilst Shakespeare's genius is universally recognized, there is a hidden, secretive side to his work that is little known: the fact that he made use of a mysterious code that figures widely in the esoteric literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. The Bard of Avon was a master of such encoding, and his methods were continued, in the Folio of 1623 and in his various memorials, by those who had known him. However, Shakespeare was not the inventor of this code. Among the many arcane authors who made use of it before him was Michel Nostradamus, the famous French prophet and savant. As David Ovason reveals, many leading esoteric writers - alchemists, occultists and Rosicrucians - contributed to this 'Secret booke'. Among the more outstanding English literary figures who used the code were the mysterious adviser to Elizabeth I, John Dee, the turbulent author of "The Alchemist, Ben Jonson", and the more classically-minded Edmund Spenser, whose poem "The Faerie Queene" is the best-known esoteric work of the period. "Shakespeare's Secret Booke" reveals many other literary figures who together form a remarkable underground literary movement, including the most influential esotericist of the period, Jacob Boehme, and alchemists such as the English polymath Robert Fludd. Another was Shakespeare's contemporary, the youthful Johann Valentin Andreae, credited as author of "The Chymical Wedding" - a Rosicrucian work replete with sophisticated examples of encoding. The fact that all these writers used the same or similar encoding points to a secret teaching designed to be recognized by initiates. Ovason explores and, for the first time, reveals what Shakespeare alluded to as 'a Secret booke'.