Secrecy

Edited by Aaron M. Ullrey

The sacred and the secret have been linked from earliest times. Both elicit feelings of . . . the “numinous consciousness” that combines the daunting and the fascinating, dread and allure. Both are defined as being set apart and seen as needing protection.

—Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation [1]

Secrecy lies at the very core of power.

—Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power [2]

 

Secrecy is an essential feature of all social interaction and human discourse. The central dynamic of withholding and disclosing information, secrecy structures all our social relations in one way or another. The philosopher Charles Barbour aptly observes that secrecy “is a condition of our relations with others, or a condition of interaction, and we can only reveal ourselves to one another, and indeed to anything other . . . in so far as, at the exact same moment, we conceal as well. . . . [S]ecrecy is not simply one kind of social interaction among many, or one way that we might decide to engage with the world . . . It is something that structures all of our engagements and all of our relations with everything. . . . There is always some secret.”[3] The pervasive role of secrecy throughout human cultures is no less true in the domain of religion, a domain that, among other things, claims there exists a hidden or an unseen reality, a power or a presence beyond ordinary perception that holds tremendous, even ultimate, kinds of authority. “Without secrets, religion becomes unimaginable,” as the historian Paul Christopher Johnson puts it, “for religion is in its cultural sense a technology of periodic human access to extraordinary powers, which generally remain concealed, and in its social sense a group of people who share such a technology.”[4]

Yet secrecy is by no means simple, singular, or homogeneous. It is something more like a social strategy that lends itself to a tremendous number of different uses and interpretations. Secrecy functions like a key node, knot, or “linchpin” (to use Michel Foucault’s term) in the social fabric at the critical intersection of different social, political, and religious interests.[5] These interests range widely from elitist claims to specialized sacred knowledge that reinforce the dominant social-political order to dissident claims that challenge or subvert the status quo.[6]

In the following entry, I offer a brief discussion of ways to usefully distinguish the complex categories of secrecy, privacy, and esotericism, and then I examine six forms or modalities of secrecy, each illustrated by one or two examples. These six modalities include (1) the adornment of silence, (2) the advertisement of the secret, (3) the eros of the secret, (4) secrecy as social resistance, (5) the terror of secrecy, and (6) the litigation of the secret. To conclude, I offer brief comparative comments on the shifting role of secrecy in the strange new world of twenty-first century religious violence, government and corporate surveillance, and the rapid erosion of individual privacy.

The terms secrecy, privacy, and esotericism have each been defined and distinguished in a variety of ways. My understanding of secrecy is largely influenced by the work of the German sociologist Georg Simmel and his 1906 seminal essay, “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies.” Simmel advances that secrecy is a sociological “form” independent of its contents; it conceals different kinds of “secrets” and is deployed for different religious, cultural, and political purposes. Derived from the Latin verb secernere, secrecy is literally what “separates” or “distinguishes,” dividing those who know from those who do not know. For Simmel, secrecy is a triadic phenomenon that defines relationships among (1) one who knows a secret, (2) one or more with whom a secret is shared, and (3) one or more from whom as secret is withheld.[7] In this way, secrecy is closely tied to relations of power. Indeed, following Foucault’s assertion that knowledge and power are typically closely associated, secrecy—the careful control of access to valued information—lies at the critical intersection or at the slash between power/knowledge.[8] The anthropologist Michael Taussig aptly asserts that “secrecy (that ‘lies at the very core of power’) [is] a powerful stimulus to creativity, to what Simmel . . . called ‘the magnification of reality,’ by means of the sensation that behind the appearance of things there is a deeper, mysterious, reality, that we may here call the sacred, if not religion.”[9]

Perhaps even more contested than secrecy, the category of esotericism has been defined in a variety of ways over the past three decades, and the category continues to be the subject of intense debate.[10] Virtually all definitions agree that secrecy is one aspect of the broader phenomenon of esotericism, but secrecy is not identical with esotericism. For example, Steven Engler and Mark Q. Gardiner suggest esotericism is best defined not “monothetically” by a single feature but rather “polythetically” by a number of different features, and a given phenomenon need only share a significant number of those features to be usefully labeled esotericism.[11] Engler and Gardiner’s eighteen features of secrecy include, among others, hierarchical and historical transmission of knowledge, social and discursive secrecy, claims to perfect knowledge, realization of spiritual powers, transmutation of the self, realization of a higher self, universal correspondences, and being labelled as “esoteric,” “occult,” or “gnostic.”[12] While this polythetic model is by no means the only way of conceptualizing esotericism, it is one of the more useful approaches; it rightly suggests I think, that secrecy is an important aspect of esotericism, but it is by no means the same as esotericism.

Like secrecy and esotericism, privacy is by no means a simple, static, or singular thing. On the contrary, as the historian Sarah E. Igo has shown in her thorough genealogy of privacy in modern America, privacy is a fluid and shifting concept continuously transformed and redefined over the past two hundred years.[13] Perhaps one of the most useful distinctions between privacy and secrecy is suggested by Carol Warren and Barbara Laslett: “Privacy is consensual where secrecy is not.”[14] Privacy refers to information and acts considered morally and legally neutral, such as consensual sex with one’s married partner or attending a “mainstream” religious organization. Secrecy refers to information or acts perceived to be morally or legally suspect, such as engaging in sexual acts criminalized in a given society or affiliation with a group labeled a “terrorist” organization. Moreover, secrecy tends to be surrounded with and enforced by sanctions for the disclosure of valued information, such as, for example, Edward Snowden’s leaking of classified intelligence from the National Security Agency (NSA), including global surveillance programs.[15]

Secrecy often functions as a kind of “adornment” or “adorning possession,” one of Simmel’s most useful insights. Like jewelry or fine clothing, the possession of secret knowledge enhances status and reputation even as it conceals parts of one’s identity. In Simmel’s words, “This involves the paradox that what recedes before the consciousness of others and is hidden from them is emphasized in their consciousness; that one should appear as a noteworthy person through what one conceals.” Secrecy’s adorning function can be symbolic, but it can also be a literal, metaphoric enhancement of authority as a bearer of secrets. Special clothing, regalia, ornamentation, and other markers of status announce one so adorned to be a possessor of secret knowledge. Consider the elaborate regalia that typically accompanies esoteric groups such as Freemasonry in its myriad forms, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in England, and the Valley of the Dawn in Brazil.[17]

One of the most dramatic examples of esoteric adornment is found in the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, which first emerged in France and spread widely in the United States in the nineteenth century. While most Masonic orders offer three grades of initiation, the Scottish Rite developed an elaborate hierarchy of thirty-two degrees, plus the thirty-third ceremonial degree of Sovereign Grand Inspector General. Each degree was accompanied by increasingly impressive titles, jewelry, and regalia.[18] If we can speak of a form of “material religion” and “material Christianity,” then we can also speak of a kind of “material esotericism” represented by but not limited to the example outlined above in which physical adornments such as jewelry, costumes, and headgear are intimately tied to status and rank in an esoteric order.[19] Esoteric adornment is a profound source of what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls “symbolic capital,” which are the nonmaterial resources of status, authority, and prestige. Like all forms of capital, secrecy as symbolic capital tends to reproduce, growing in power through the ascending degrees of initiation within an esoteric organization.[20] Regarding the Scottish Rite in nineteenth-century America, historian Mark Carnes notes that “on lodge nights, men who had climbed the corporate ladder . . . exulted in the explicit challenges and confrontations . . . the swords, the crowns, the miters of authority. When the lights blazed forth and the men strode across the stage, they wielded power.”[21]

Secrets are rarely, if ever, entirely hidden. They are typically advertised through being partially revealed while their contents remain largely obscured. After all, a secret is only valuable if others know that someone possesses some rare and important information, and a secret retains its value only if its content remains largely elusive. This paradox of concealment is what Paul Christopher Johnson aptly dubs “secretism” or the “active milling, polishing, and promotion of the reputation of secrets” accompanied by the “promiscuous circulation of the secret’s inaccessibility.”[22] Advertising secrecy was commonplace in the nineteenth century amid the widespread revival of interest in magic, esotericism, and the occult across Europe and the United States. Wouter Hanegraaff notes that nineteenth-century Europe was a thriving “occult marketplace,” inspired in no small part by the print revolution of the modern period that spawned an unprecedented wave of literature on magic and the occult sciences.[23] One obvious example of a modern advertisement of the secret is  the Theosophical Society, founded by Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891) and Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907) in New York in 1875. 

Blavatsky’s two key texts were themselves “advertised secrets” with titles invoking hidden mysteries that would be revealed: Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888). Claiming to be a translation of an ancient text called the Book of Dzyan, Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine begins by assuring that readers know how awesome, rare, and valuable it is: “An Archaic Manuscript—a collection of palm leaves made impermeable to water, fire, and air . . . is before the reader’s eye.”[24] Blavatsky reminds the reader that she can reveal only a tiny portion of the true depths and magnitude of the esoteric knowledge in this text, leaving the rest for only the most dedicated initiates to pursue: “It is almost unnecessary to say that only portions of the Stanzas are here given. Were they published completely they would remain incomprehensible to all save the few highest occultists.”[25] In sum, the Secret Doctrine offers a tantalizing promise of ancient secret knowledge, but it makes clear that its contents are only a glimpse of deeper mysteries beyond.

More than a simple art of concealment or a form of symbolic capital, secrecy is a complex play of seduction. It is an ars erotica involving a subtle dialectic of lure and withdrawal, partial concealment and partial revelation, veiling and unveiling, a dialectic that mystics and scholars frequently compare to the playful dynamic between lover and beloved. As the historian and philosopher Elliot Wolfson eloquently puts it in his study of secrecy in the Jewish mystical tradition, there is often a deep “link between esotericism and eroticism, which is related more specifically to the insight that transmission of secrets requires the play of openness and closure basic to the push and pull of eros.”[26]  The seductive nature of the secret comes close to what the French philosopher Georges Bataille calls erotism. Not a mere matter of nudity, Bataille’s erotism depends on the play (le jeu) between clothing and striptease, between taboo and transgression, between the creation of prohibitions and the delicious overstepping of those boundaries.[27]

In many esoteric traditions, secrecy is quite literally and physically tied to eroticism through various forms of sexual ritual. In medieval Kabbalah, the union between the Kabbalist and his wife symbolizes the union of the male and female aspects of the Godhead. In Hindu Tantric traditions, sexual union serves as either the symbolic or literal union of Shiva and Shakti, the divine male and female principles. In modern esoteric traditions, the experience of sexual orgasm is harnessed as a source of magical power to be wielded for material and spiritual ends.[28]

One of the clearest examples of this eros of the secret is the controversial British occultist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). Drawing upon Western esoteric traditions such as Kabbalah and Asian traditions such as yoga and Tantra, Crowley experimented with sexual magic; indeed, he saw the secret of sexuality as the greatest source of magical power, potentially achieving any worldly or spiritual aim. As he put it, “if this secret [of sexual magic], which is a scientific secret, were perfectly understood . . . here would be nothing which the human imagination can conceive which could not be realized in practice.”[29]

Both metaphorically and literally, then, the play of concealment and revelation can be a means to achieve an intimate union with the divine.

[26] Elliot R. Wolfson, “Occultation of the Feminine and the Body of Secrecy in Medieval Kabbalah,” in Rending the Veil: Concealment and Secrecy in the History of Religions, ed. Elliot R. Wolfson (Seven Bridges Press, 1999), 119; see also Urban, Secrecy, Chapter 3, and Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Jeffrey J. Kripal, eds., Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism (Fordham University Press, 2011).

While secrecy can serve as a source of symbolic power, authority, and status that is displayed and deployed by elites at the top of the social hierarchy, it can also serve as a source of social resistance wielded by those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, what the political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott called a “weapon of the weak.” Secrecy plays a basic protective role for marginal and dissident groups so they might bond discreetly and evade the scrutiny of legal systems and police. Scott describes secrecy providing a “hidden transcript” or a way to “exploit all the loopholes, ambiguities and lapses” in the dominant social-political order in order to carve out “a tenuous life in a political order that . . . forbids such a life.”[30]

Secrecy is a tactic commonly deployed by groups that face racial, religious, and class discrimination.[31] Using subtle forms of coded language and complex symbolism, these groups create their own subversive discourse of resistance that allow them to fly under the radar of the dominant authorities and find alternative forms of status and power—“a kind of black-market symbolic capital” exchanged outside the dominant capitalist marketplace.[32]

One of the most striking examples of this use of secrecy as social resistance is seen in the Five Percenters, a.k.a. Nation of Gods and Earths, an offshoot of the Nation of Islam that emerged in Brooklyn in the 1960s and appealed to young African American men in urban environments. The Five Percenters faced intense scrutiny from the police and FBI, and their founder, Clarence 13X, born Clarence Edward Smith (1928-1969), was arrested and imprisoned in Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Beacon, New York. The Five Percenters devised their own complex, coded-language system called the Supreme Alphabet and Supreme Mathematics, reworking common letters and numbers into a subversive esoteric discourse designed to elude the authorities and transmit the deeper message that every Black man is, in fact, a God or Allah in the flesh.[33]

Secrecy can operate as an effective tactic of social resistance, but it can also serve as a weapon of political violence, revolution, and terrorism. As the writer Elias Canetti famously observed, secrecy is the “core of power” that allows an animal predator to stalk its prey, just as it can allow human insurgents to camouflage their identity and cloak an attack.[34] Clandestine groups often exploit the terror of secrecy to magnify and exaggerate their own sense of power and significance, for, as sociologist Marcel Mauss explains, “a secret society usually possesses significant powers, even terrifying ones.”[35]

Examples of secrecy and political violence can be found everywhere, from the White Lotus Society in China to the Carbonari in Italy, from the Jugantar movement in colonial India to contemporary al-Qaeda and ISIS networks.[36] Much of the focus by politicians and the media in the United States since 9/11 has been on Islamist terrorist groups.[37] However, as Jonathan Masters notes, this is often to the neglect of more pervasive and arguably more dangerous homegrown American terrorist groups, including the vast array of white supremacist, militia, and antigovernment groups such as Aryan Nations, Christian Identity, the Ku Klux Klan, various neo-Nazi and neo-Confederate groups, and more recently the Proud Boys and others involved in the 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol building. Recent studies reveal that the number of deaths caused by far-right, homegrown extremist groups have significantly outnumbered those by radical Islamist groups in the U.S.A. over the past two decades.[38]

Many far-right terrorist groups make sophisticated use of the secrecy and concealment offered by social media platforms such as 4chan, 8chan, and the dark web; they use these platforms as recruitment devices and as a means of disseminating video of their activities, including violent acts.[39] One of the most striking examples of terrorists’ use of social media was the series of attacks on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. In March 2019, an Australian white supremacist named Brenton Tarrant attacked two Islamic centers in two consecutive shootings that killed fifty-one people, posting his assault online and livestreaming it on Facebook. Tarrant asked his viewers to post the images virally and many did, for some 1.5 million copies of the video were uploaded to Facebook within twenty-four hours of the attack.[40] In frighteningly graphic form, both the advertisement and the terror of secrecy were seen on full display when the shooter exploited the power of secrecy as a violent weapon. Secrecy’s effective power as an instrument of fear, shock, and horror extended through the global reach of social media. 

The final modality of secrecy is the litigation of the secret. While esoteric knowledge is often a highly valued source of symbolic and material capital, it can easily become the subject of intense legal dispute. Over the past century, esoteric organizations have advanced fervent legal battles over intellectual property, copyrights, and trademarks. These disputes range from the Urantia Foundation’s struggle over intellectual property rights to Bikram Yoga’s claims to copyright for sequences of yoga postures.[41]

Perhaps the most obvious example of the litigation of the secret in recent memory involves the Church of Scientology.[42] Founded by the American science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard in 1953, the Church of Scientology developed a complex map of the spiritual path named the “Bridge to Total Freedom.” The upper levels of the Bridge include a series of highly esoteric grades called Operating Thetan (OT) in which the “Thetan” or spirit advances along the Bridge to become increasingly free through advancing along the Bridge from the limitations of the material world and acquire supernatural abilities. While the Bridge is marked “confidential, the OT levels were released into the court record during the trial of ex-Scientologist Steven Fishman in 1990, and these secrets found their way into major newspapers and then onto the Internet. In 1993, Larry Wollersheim, another ex-Scientologist, began posting the OT materials on his website FACTNet (Fight Against Coercive Tactics Network), which he designed to spread information about what he regarded to be abusive cults. In response to the dissemination of confidential information, Scientology formed its Religious Technology Center (RTC) to safeguard its copyrights and trademarks, and the church began to pursue aggressive litigation against ex-members.[43] In 1995, a federal judge ordered a raid on Wollersheim’s home and the confiscation of all of his computers and files, sparking an intense legal battle that dragged on several years until reaching a settlement in 1999.[44]

Fights over the circulation of Scientology’s confidential materials highlight a fundamental tension between freedom of religion and freedom of speech. From this church’s perspective, the debate over its secret materials and their circulation is a matter of the free exercise of religion and a church’s right to maintain control over the dissemination of its confidential materials. Scientology’s OT materials, the church maintains, are not only copyrighted or trade secrets, they are also sacred texts that should be respected. From the perspective of critics and ex-members, conversely, this is a matter of free speech and individuals’ rights to speak openly about Scientology in order to spread much-needed information about a controversial group.[45]

This brief entry cannot possibly do justice to the complexity and diversity of secrecy as a topic, and there are many more forms and modalities not explored here. But, from these few examples, we can see that secrecy is by no means a simple or singular phenomenon; instead, it is something more like a complex knot or node in the social fabric that lends itself to many uses.

To conclude, I would like to offer some broader reflections on the changing role of secrecy and privacy in the twenty-first century amid the shifting landscape of the post-9/11 world and the massive new powers of governmental and corporate surveillance. Writing more than fifty years ago, Elias Canetti recognized the growing power and threat of secrecy, noting the development of military secrets such as the atomic bomb and dictatorial threats to democracy spreading worldwide: “It is only today that we fully realize how dangerous secrecy can become. In different spheres, it has become loaded with more and more power.”[46] Today, Canetti’s warnings seem not only prescient but eerily relevant. The dangers we face in the early twenty-first century, however, are ones Canetti could not have imagined in the early years of the Cold War: a far more diffuse nuclear threat than in Canetti’s time, the spread of terrorist groups worldwide, and increasingly antidemocratic movements emerging in even the most established democracies.[47] 

We also face the expansion of a vast and immensely powerful national security apparatus that operates outside public scrutiny, wielding ever-more-sophisticated forms of surveillance. As Shoshana Zuboff argues in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the events of 9/11 were used by the U.S. and other governments to claim a radical “state of exception” that justified a seemingly endless “war on terrorism” and facilitated rapid acceleration of surveillance technologies. “The 9/11 terrorist attacks thrust the intelligence communities into an unfamiliar demand curve that insisted on exponential increases in velocity . . . In this environment of trauma and anxiety, a ‘state of exception’ was invoked to legitimate a new imperative: speed at any costs.”[48]

In the United States, the rapid expansion of the national security apparatus has included aggressive legislation such as the Patriot Act and massive programs of warrantless wiretapping undertaken by the NSA and other agencies. A primary target of these new powers of surveillance is often minority religious communities, particularly Islam, as observed in the NYPD and FBI’s aggressive monitoring and infiltration of mosques in New York City and other areas in the post-9/11 era.[49]

At the same time, as Zuboff explains, government agencies increasingly partner with private corporations such as Google and Facebook, whose powers of surveillance are often more effective, more invisible, and more insidious than those of the NSA or FBI. Private commercial and advertising services today track much of our daily activities—“what we read, listen to, and look at, where we travel to, shop and dine, and with whom we speak and associate,” Zuboff writes, “and they monitor us mostly with our consent.”[50] Seemingly “private” and for-profit entities such as Facebook and Google are themselves entangled in the complex web of surveillance as part of the modern military-industrial-information complex. Particularly in the wake of 9/11 and the state of exception created by the global war on terror, agencies such as the NSA and CIA began to seek active cooperation with big corporations that have more sophisticated surveillance technologies than the government itself. “Google and other businesses stepped into this state of exception with new methods of data collection,” according to Zuboff, “and at the same time, government agencies began to actively imitate and adopt the methods of these technology giants.”[51] 

Many observers have concluded that privacy may be an increasingly endangered species. As Scott McNealy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, infamously put it in 1999, “Privacy is dead. Get over it.”[52] Beneath the all-seeing eye of government agencies and the even more insidious tracking of social media and search engines, the very idea of privacy is today a kind of naïve anachronism. While privacy may be severely weakened, if not yet deceased, secrecy seems to be a different matter. There seems to be an inverse relationship between individual privacy and government and corporate secrecy: As the former grows smaller, the latter expands to the point where some critics wonder whether the ideals of individual privacy and governmental transparency have been inverted. The legal scholar David D. Cole argues that “in 1956, at the height of McCarthyism in the US, sociologist Edward Shils wrote that liberal democracy demands confidentiality for its citizens and transparency for government. Today it is the citizenry that is increasingly transparent while government operations are shrouded in secrecy.”[53]

Meanwhile, with the presidencies of Donald J. Trump, the simultaneous erosions of privacy and expansion of political secrecy have been taken to even more surreal extremes. Not only did President Trump famously refuse to disclose his tax returns upon entering the White House and refuse to return classified documents after leaving office,[54] but in his second term, he quickly undertook a more aggressive push for both government secrecy and public surveillance. In May 2025, the Associated Press reported that the Trump administration was “scrubbing thousands of government websites of history, legal records and data it finds disagreeable. It has sought to expand the executive branch’s power to shield from public view the government-slashing efforts of Elon Musk’s team and other key administration initiatives. Officials have used apps such as Signal that can auto-delete messages containing sensitive information rather than retaining them for recordkeeping.”[55]

At the same time, the Trump administration has hired controversial tech companies such as Palantir—headed by far-right billionaire Peter Thiel—to gather massive amounts of data on ordinary citizens. As the New York Times reported in May 2025, Palantir’s products have been adopted by multiple federal agencies, allowing the president “to easily merge information from different agencies…Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status. Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics.”[56] In the early decades of the twenty-first century, we have clearly entered what the French philosopher Guy Debord aptly dubbed the age of “generalized secrecy” and “unanswerable lies,”[57] though it is combined with a kind of generalized erosion of personal privacy. 

When Canetti warned about the dangers of secrecy back in 1960, he was referring primarily to the secrets of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Today, the dangers of secrecy are less immediately apocalyptic, but they are more pervasive and insidious. These include not only the dangers of white supremacists organizing secretly on 8chan to plot physical violence but also government and corporate entities reducing the very idea of privacy to naïve anachronism while expanding the powers of secrecy to levels never dreamed by even the most esoteric religious groups.

The task of the critical study of religion examining secrecy in the twenty-first century is twofold, at least. On the one hand, our challenge is to critically examine religion itself, to scrutinize what Bruce Lincoln calls, the “temporal, contextual, situated, interested, human, and material dimensions of those discourse that present themselves as eternal, transcendent, spiritual and divine.”[58] On the other hand, our challenge is also to examine the state and corporate entities that monitor, regulate, censor, and in some cases criminalize religious groups, particularly those that stray outside the boundaries of “mainstream” religiosity: Muslims, people of color, new and alternative movements, and those who express dissident political views. The task becomes more urgent upon acknowledging that state and corporate powers of surveillance are expanding exponentially while citizens’ and religious groups’ claims to privacy appear to be dwindling to the point of near nonexistence or inconsequentiality. 

If privacy is dead, secrecy seems quite alive and well.

[1] Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (Pantheon, 1983), 6.

[2] Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984), 290. 

[3] Charles Barbour, Derrida’s Secret: Perjury, Testimony, Oath (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 8.

[4] Paul Christopher Johnson, Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé (Oxford University Press, 2002), 3. See also Kees W. Bolle, ed., Secrecy in Religions (Brill, 1987); Hugh B. Urban, Secrecy: Silence, Power, and Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2021); Hugh B. Urban and Paul Christopher Johnson, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Secrecy (Routledge, 2022); Elliot R. Wolfson, ed., Rending the Veil: Concealment and Secrecy in the History of Religions (Seven Bridges Press, 1999); April DeConick, ed., Secret Religion: Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism (Macmillan, 2016); Hans Kippenberg, ed., Secrecy and Concealment: Studies in the History of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Religions (Brill, 1995).

[5] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (Vintage, 1990), 103.

[6] Urban, Secrecy; Urban and Johnson, eds., Routledge Handbook of Religion and Secrecy.Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (Pantheon, 1983).

[7] Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt Wolff (MacMillan, 1950), 345–78.

[8] Foucault, History of Sexuality, volume I, 103; Urban, Secrecy, 16–22.

[9] Michael Taussig, “Transgression,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 356.

[10] Among other definitions, see Wouter Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Columbia University Press, 2014); Kocku von Stuckrad, Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge (Routledge, 2005); Henrik Bogdan, Western Esotericism and Rituals of Initiation (SUNY Press, 2007); Egil Asprem, “Reverse-Engineering ‘Esotericism’: How to Prepare a Complex Cultural Concept for the Cognitive Science of Religion,” Religion 46 (2016): 158–85.

[11] Steven Engler and Mark Q. Gardiner, “(Re)defining Esotericism: Fluid Definitions, Property Clusters, and Cross-Cultural Debate,” Aries 24 (2024): 151–207. 

[12] Engler and Gardiner, “(Re)defining Esotericism,” 180–83.

[13] Sarah E. Igo, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2018).

[14] Warren and Laslett, “Privacy and Secrecy: A Conceptual Comparison,” Journal of Social Issues 33, no. 3 (1977): 43–51.

[15] Urban, Secrecy, 8–14, 187–91.

[16] Simmel, “Sociology of Secrecy,” 337. See also Urban, Secrecy, 23–50.

[17] On Masonic regalia, see C. Lance Brockman, ed., Theater of the Fraternity: Staging the Ritual: Space of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, 1896–1929 (University of Mississippi Press, 1996); Urban, Secrecy, 23–50. On regalia in the Valley of the Dawn, see Kelly E. Hayes, “The High Magic of Jesus Christ: Materializing Secrets in Brazil’s Valley of the Dawn,” in The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Secrecy, eds. Hugh B. Urban and Paul Christopher Johnson (Routledge, 2022), 243–257.

[18] Brockman, Theater; Urban, Secrecy, Chapter 1. On the Scottish Rite in the U.S., see Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (Supreme Council of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, 1871); Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (Yale University Press, 1989); William Fox, Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle: Two Centuries of Scottish Rite Freemasonry in America’s Southern Jurisdiction (University of Arkansas Press, 1999); Jonathan Blanchard, Scottish Rite Freemasonry Illustrated (Ezra A. Cook, 1881).

[19] Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (Yale University Press, 1995); Urban, Secrecy, Chapter 1.

[20] Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (Greenwood, 1986), 241–58. See also Hugh B. Urban, “The Torment of Secrecy: Ethical and Epistemological Problems in the Study of Esoteric Traditions,” History of Religions 37, no. 3 (1998): 209–48.

[21] Carnes, “Scottish Rite and the Visual Semiotics of Gender,” in Theater of the Fraternity: Staging the Ritual Space of the Scottish Rite, 1896-1929, ed. C. Lance Brockman (University of Mississippi Press, 1996), 89–90.

[22] Johnson, Secrets, 3. See also Urban, Secrecy, Chapter 2, and Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford University Press, 1999).

[23] Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 219.

[24] Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy (Theosophical University Press, 1988), 1.

[25] Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, 2 vols. (Theosophical University Press, 1988), 1:31 and 1:23. On Theosophy see Olav Hammer and Mikael Rothstein, eds., Handbook of the Theosophical Current (Brill, 2013), and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, ed., Helena Blavatsky (North Atlantic Books, 2004).

[27] Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (City Lights Books, 1987).

[28] Elliot R. Wolfson, Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism (SUNY Press, 1995); David Gordon White, Kiss of the Yogini: ‘Tantric Sex’ in Its South Asian Contexts (University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Hugh B. Urban, Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (University of California Press, 2005).

[29] Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography (Hill and Wang, 1969), 767.

[30] James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (Yale University Press, 1992),138–139; see also Simmel, “The Sociology of Secrecy,” 347; Urban, Secrecy, Chapter 4; and Paul C. Johnson, “Secretism and the Apotheosis of Papa Doc Duvalier,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74, no. 2 (2006): 425.

[31] Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (University of California Press, 1991), 378–379; Urban, Secrecy, Chapter 5.

[32] On black-market symbolic capital, see Urban, “Torment of Secrecy,” and Urban, Secrecy, Chapter 5.

[33] Urban, Secrecy, Chapter 5; Juan M. Floyd-Thomas, “A Jihad of Words: The Evolution of African American Islam and Contemporary Hip-Hop,” in Noise and Spirit: The Religious and Spiritual Sensibilities of Rap Music, ed. Anthony B. Pinn (New York University Press, 2003), 56.

[34] Canetti, Crowds and Power, 290.

[35] Marcel Mauss, Manual of Ethnography (Berghahn Books, 2007), 119.

[36] Haroro J. Ingram and Craig Whiteside, “The Islamic State and the Management of Secrecy,” in The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Secrecy, edited by Hugh B. Urban and Paul C. Johnson (Routledge, 2022, 370–379); Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics and Power in the Study of Religion (University of California Press, 2003), Chapter 2.

[37] Jonathan Masters, “Militant Extremists in the U.S.,” Council on Foreign Relations, February 7, 2011, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/militant-extremists-united-states.

[38] Southern Poverty Law Center, “Hate Groups Increase for Second Consecutive Year as Trump Electrifies Radical Right,” Southern Poverty Law Center, February 15, 2017, https://www.splcenter.org/resources/stories/hate-groups-increase-second…. See also Damon T. Berry, Blood & Faith: Christianity in White Nationalism (Syracuse University Press, 2017), 199–208, and Kath­leen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard University Press, 2018), 238–39. 

[39] Joan Donovan, “How Hate Groups’ Secret Sound System Works,” The Atlantic, March 17, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/03/extremists-understand…. See also Urban, Secrecy, 187–96.

[40] Billy Perrigo, “The New Zealand Attack Exposed How White Supremacy Has Long Flourished Online,” Time, March 20, 2019, https://time.com/5554783/white-supremacy-online-christchurch.

[41] Andrew Ventimiglia, Copyrighting God: Ownership of the Sacred in American Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2019); Andrea Jain, Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014).

[42] Hugh B. Urban, The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion (Princeton University Press, 2010); Ann Brill and Ashley Packard, “Silencing Scientology’s Critics on the Internet: A Mission Impossible,” Communications and the Law 19 (1997): 1–23; Alan Prendergast, “Stalking the Net,” Westword, October 4, 1995, https://www.westword.com/news/stalking-the-net-5055577; Mark Fearer, “Scientology’s Secrets,” in Composing Cyberspace: Identity, Community, and Knowledge in the Electronic Age, ed. Richard Holeton (McGraw-Hill, 1997), 350–52.

[43] Religious Technology Center, “Holder of the Dianetics and Scientology Trademarks,” RTC.org, 2025. https://www.rtc.org; Urban, Scientology, Chapter 6.

[44] Urban, Church of Scientology, Chapter 6; Brill and Packard, “Silencing Scientology’s Critics”; Fearer, “Scientology’s Secrets”; Prendergast, “Stalking the Net”; Hugh B. Urban, “Fair Game: Secrecy, Security, and the Church of Scientology in Cold War America,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74, no. 2 (2006): 356–89.

[45] Urban, Scientology, Chapter 6.

[46] Canetti, Crowds and Power, 296.

[47] Urban, Secrecy, Chapter 5; Ingram and Whiteside, “Islamic State.”

[48] Shoshan Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Public Affairs, 2019), 115; see also David Lyon, Surveillance after September 11 (Polity, 2003), and Simon Chesterman, One Nation Under Surveillance: A New Social Contract to Defend Freedom without Sacrificing Liberty (Oxford University Press, 2013). 

[49] Tahseen Shams, “Visibility as Resistance by Muslim Americans in a Surveillance and Security Atmosphere,” Sociological Forum 33, no. 1 (2018): 73–94; David Cole, Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security (New Press, 2006), 195–218; Elaine Scarry, “Resolving to Resist: Local Governments are Refusing to Comply with the Patriot Act,” Boston Review, February 1, 2004, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/elaine-scarry-resolving-resist.

[50] David Cole, “Preserving Privacy in a Digital Age: Lessons of Comparative Constitutionalism,” in Surveillance, Counter-Terrorism and Comparative Constitutionalism, ed. Fergal Davis, Nicola McGarrity, and George Williams (Routledge, 2014), 96, and Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 115.

[51] Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 116. See also David Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life. (Open University Press, 2002),143–44, and Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (Public Affairs, 2018), 5.

[52] Judith Rauhoffer, “Privacy Is Dead, Get Over It! Information Privacy and the Dream of a Risk-Free Society,” Information and Communications Technology and Law 17, no. 1 (2008): 185–97. 

[53] Cole, “Preserving Privacy,” 97. See also Scarry, “Resolving to Resist.”

[54] Joshua D. Black, “Presidential Tax Transparency,” Yale Law and Policy Review 40, no. 1 (2021): 1–77; Jaclyn Diaz, “Trump’s Classified Documents Trial Is Set,” NPR.org, July 21, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/07/21/1188280400/things-to-know-donald-trump-c….

[55] Bill Weissert, “The Future of History: Trump Could Leave Less Documentation Behind than Any Previous US President,” Associated Press, May 18, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/trump-presidential-records-retention-documen….

[56] Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolick, “Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans,” New York Times, May 30, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-ameri…. See also Josh Marcus, “Has Big Brother Arrived? Inside the Trump Effort to Centralize Government Data on Millions of Americans,” The Guardian, May 30, 2025, https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-d….

[57] Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (Verso, 2011). See also Urban, Secrecy.

[58] Bruce Lincoln, “Theses on Method,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8, no. 3 (1996): 225–27; see also Urban, Secrecy, 187–205.

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