DAVID BJELAJAC is currently professor of art and the human sciences at The George Washington University. Having a particular interest in the influence of freemasonry on American visual culture, he is the author of two monographs on the painter Washington Allston, including Washington Allston, Secret Societies, and the Alchemy of Anglo-American Painting. He has also recently contributed a chapter on "William Sidney Mount and the Hermetic Tradition in American Art" to The Visual Culture of American Religions, edited by David Morgan and Sally Promey, which will be published by the University of California Press in 2000.