Let’s say you are Maurice Marciano: small of stature, sun-kissed, dapper, with a rough Gallic timbre, hooded chestnut eyes, white hair. You smell—sh-h-h—of Hermès, though with your three brothers you founded Guess, the eternally eighties apparel, fragrance, and accessories company that celebrates blondness, buxomness, and acid-washed jeans. Several years ago, you and your younger brother Paul, seeking a place to house a large collection of contemporary art, bought a hundred-and-ten-thousand-square-foot travertine-and-marble Scottish Rite Masonic temple on Wilshire Boulevard, in Los Angeles. You wanted to run away from this thing—forget it!—but you couldn’t. Now all you want is for the visitors to your museum to have the same experience that you had upon entering: Whoa.

Built in 1961 by Millard Sheets, a prolific mosaic artist and bank architect, the building was more or less abandoned by the Masons in the mid-nineties, given over to rave promoters and spillover crowds from nearby synagogues on the High Holidays. At its peak, in the sixties, the Masonic temple is said to have had eighteen thousand members; its vast auditorium could seat two thousand. Unlike regular Freemasonry, which has three degrees, Scottish Rite has thirty-two, which are attained by performing dramatic initiation plays. According to Susan Aberth, an art-history professor at Bard who serves as the Marcianos’ Masonry consultant, the dramas provided a welcome outlet for the frustrations of mid-century middle-class male life. “Businessmen who sold shoes could escape their homes and become patriarchs of old and fight with swords and do things that masculinity did not allow,” she said. “It was a safe space.”

The building was a Tut’s tomb of ritual accoutrements. There were scripts for plays likely never seen by the uninitiated: “4th Degree: Court of the Secret Master,” “32nd Degree: Master of the Royal Secret.” In the basement, the Marcianos found special cabinets containing fezzes, crowns, faux-chain-mail headdresses, fanciful Egyptian-style hats like the ones worn by Osiris, or Papa Smurf; a huge space devoted to strappy Biblical sandals. “Those guys like a lace-up sandal, I’ll tell you that much,” Aberth said.

“The wildest, wildest was the wig room,” Maurice Marciano said the other day in the museum. (The building will open to the public, as the Marciano Art Foundation, on May 25th, with a show that includes work by Paul McCarthy, Louise Lawler, and Sterling Ruby.) Marciano wandered around the room he thinks of as “the museum of the museum,” where the Masonic objects—sceptres, ledgers, velvet capes, combo goggle-blindfolds known as hoodwinks, and, everywhere, the all-seeing eye with compass (“G,” for “Geometry” or “God”)—will be on permanent display. “We want to explain the process of becoming a Freemason. I hope they’re not going to get mad, because they can be so secretive.”

An occult fraternal order is not a bad way to describe the contemporary-art scene. Some of our most cryptic symbologists dabble in Masonic iconography: Bruce Nauman’s “Topological Gardens,” in which words such as “Fortitude” and “Justice” appear in neon on classical buildings, brings to mind the eighteenth degree of the Scottish Rite; Matthew Barney devoted one of his “Cremaster” films to a Masonic murder plot.

In the temple’s lobby, Marciano described how he had carefully preserved the mosaics and the terrazzo floors but removed a fresco depicting the history of Freemasonry in California. Before him was a thirty-foot-long Cindy Sherman print, in which Sherman wears a velvety tunic with an all-seeing eye, knee-high boots, and a wig. “My God! People come in and they have Cindy Sherman dressed as a kind of Freemason welcoming them,” Marciano said.

Speaking of symbols, is there a more potent one than the Guess logo, an upside-down red triangle that in three strokes conjures up Claudia, Anna Nicole, and Paris? Its shape has a certain Masonic resonance. “Their thing was all about geometry, the pyramid and all that,” Marciano said. “You reverse the pyramid, it’s the Guess triangle!”

Aberth, the on-staff symbologist, elaborated. “We live in a forest of signs we no longer understand,” she said. “A triangle pointing down is a really early alchemical symbol, symbolizing the downward flow, and water, which always represents the feminine. Since Guess makes sexy women’s jeans, I think it’s great that it’s a symbol of femininity. Definitely, it represents the pubic triangle. I mean, how could it not?” ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated the auditorium’s seating capacity.