In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Secrecy: Silence, Power, and Religion by Hugh B. Urban
  • Brian C. Wilson
Secrecy: Silence, Power, and Religion. By Hugh B. Urban. University of Chicago Press, 2021. 264 pages. $95.00 cloth; $30.00 paperback; ebook available.

As Hugh Urban observes early on in Secrecy: Silence, Power, and Religion, the idea that secrecy naturally arises from the “mystery at the heart of all religions” (3) has become a commonplace in religious studies. As a theoretical construct, however, it doesn’t take us very far. Indeed, Urban isn’t particularly interested in revealing secrets (the “mystery”), but in how secrecy can function as “a crucial part in the construction of religious authority” (4) regardless of what’s being kept secret. In other words, he is interested not in secrets, but in how secrecy is employed “as a kind of strategy—specifically, a strategy for acquiring, enhancing, preserving, and/or protecting power” (10, italics in the original) whether physical or symbolic.

To this end, Urban has developed a typology of strategies that he applies to six new religious movements conspicuous for their use of secrecy. Along the way, he also discusses the methodological questions of what he calls “the ethical and epistemological double bind of secrecy” (14), that is, whether it is ethical for a researcher to delve into others’ religious secrets and whether any scholar can claim definitive knowledge of such secrets since, “the very structure of the secret implies that it can always only be a partial revelation” (15). And finally, Urban concludes by suggesting how the study of secrecy in religious studies can be applied more widely to the analysis of modern society in which government and large corporations use technology to build regimes of secrecy unimaginable until recently.

When it comes to secrecy, secret societies are the obvious place to begin, and Urban immediately takes on the archetype of the modern secret society—Freemasonry. He does so from an interesting angle, [End Page 129] however, looking at the material culture of the most “elite mystical branch of the craft” (34), the Scottish Rite. As developed in the United States in the nineteenth century by Albert Pike, “the elaborate symbolism, arcana, and mysteries revealed in each of the higher degrees” of the Scottish Rite were made manifest in “the elaborate costumes, jewelry, and regalia that accompanied each of those degrees” (25–26). Urban categorizes this as the “adornment of silence” (23), that is, clothing and ornaments that enhance status by virtue of what they conceal (24). Such “material esotericism” (38) serves not only to advertise one’s access to Masonic secrets but just as importantly, to reinforce unspoken class, gender, and racial hierarchies in an organization supposedly devoted to egalitarianism.

Urban next analyzes the Theosophical Society, which had roots not only in Masonry, but also in the occult revival of the late nineteenth century. Here, the author uses Theosophy to highlight the “advertisement of the secret” (50), that is, a secret “crafted in such a way as to publicize its existence, while also concealing its content, employing the former to carefully but only partially reveal the latter” (52). No better example of this is Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine. Not only did this book’s very title serve to “create [an] aura of mystery, awe, romance, and exotic allure” (53), but so too did the “occult rhetoric” (53) of the text, which hinted at deeper cosmic mysteries that only engaged membership in the Society promised to unlock. The title of Blavatsky’s other major work, Isis Unveiled, hints at Urban’s next category of secrecy: seduction. In this case, the secret functions as “a kind of ars erotica that involves a subtle dialectic of lure and withdrawal, partial concealment and partial revelation, veiling and unveiling” (80). Pivoting from the Theosophical Society to the Confrérie de la Fle`che D’Or, a French sex magic group founded by Maria de Naglowska, Urban specifically focuses on how sexuality proved to be “the occult secret par excellence” (80, italics in original) in the occult milieu of early twentieth-century Europe.

To illustrate the fourth category of secrecy—social resistance— Urban turns to the schismatic Nation of Islam group, the...

pdf

Share