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 THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF
RELIGION AND SECRECY

Secrecy is a central and integral component of all religious traditions. Not limited simply to reli-
gious groups that engage in clandestine activities such as hidden rites of initiation or terrorism,
secrecy is inherent in the very fabric of religion itself. Its importance has perhaps never been more
acutely relevant than in our own historical moment. In the wake of 9/11 and other acts of reli-
gious violence, we see the rise of invasive national security states that target religious minorities
and pose profound challenges to the ideals of privacy and religious freedom, accompanied by the
resistance by many communities to such efforts. As such, questions of secrecy, privacy, surveillance,
and security are among the most central and contested issues of twenty-first century religious life.
The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Secrecy is the definitive reference source for the key topics,
problems, and debates in this crucial field and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising twenty-
nine chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into five parts:

• Configurations of Religious Secrecy: Conceptual and Comparative Frameworks

• Secrecy as Religious Practice
• Secrecy and the Politics of the Present
• Secrecy and Social Resistance
• Secrecy, Terrorism, and Surveillance.

This cutting-edge volume discusses secrecy in relation to major categories of religious experi-
ence and individual religious practices while also examining the transformations of secrecy in
the modern period, including the rise of fraternal orders, the ongoing wars on terror, the rise of
far-right white supremacist groups, increasing concerns over religious freedom and privacy, the
role of the internet in the spread and surveillance of such groups, and the resistance to surveil-
lance by many indigenous and diasporic communities.
The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Secrecy is essential reading for students and researchers
in religious studies, comparative religion, new religious movements, and religion and politics. It
will be equally central to debates in the related disciplines of sociology, anthropology, political
science, security studies and cultural studies.

Hugh B. Urban is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University,
USA. He is the author of numerous books, including Secrecy (2021), The Church of Scientology (2010),
Magia Sexualis (2005), and Tantra (2003).

Paul Christopher Johnson is Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies at
the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. His books include Secrets, Gossip and Gods: The
Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé (2002), Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the
Recovery of Africa (2007), and Automatic Religion: Nearhuman Agents of Brazil and France (2021).
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edition
Edited by Steven Engler and Michael Stausberg

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The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Secrecy

Edited by Hugh B. Urban and Paul Christopher Johnson

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-

Handbooks-in-Religion/book-series/RHR
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK
OF RELIGION AND SECRECY

Edited by
Hugh B. Urban and Paul Christopher Johnson
 Cover image: Getty Images | Sean Gladwell
First published 2022
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter Hugh B. Urban and Paul Christopher Johnson;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Hugh B. Urban and Paul Christopher Johnson to be identified as the authors of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
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and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Urban, Hugh B, editor. | Johnson, Paul C. (Paul Christopher), 1964-editor.
Title: The Routledge handbook of religion and secrecy/edited by Hugh B. Urban
and Paul Christopher Johnson.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2022. | Series: Routledge
handbooks in religion | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021048273 (print) | LCCN 2021048274 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367857417 (hbk) | ISBN 9781032228655 (pbk) | ISBN 9781003014751 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Secrecy—Religious aspects.
Classification: LCC BL65.S37 R68 2022 (print) | LCC BL65.S37 (ebook) |
DDC 200—dc23/eng/20211207
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048273
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048274

ISBN: 978-0-367-85741-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-22865-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-01475-1 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003014751

Typeset in Bembo
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
 CONTENTS

List of Figures viii

Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction: From the Social Lives of Secrecy to the Secret Lives

of the Social: Notes on Religion, Power, and the Public 1
Paul Christopher Johnson and Hugh B. Urban

PART I
Configurations of Religious Secrecy: Conceptual and Comparative
Frameworks 15

1 Mysticism and Secrecy 17

Arthur Versluis

2 Esotericism and Secrecy 26

Kennet Granholm

3 Gender, Sexuality, and Secrecy 45

Hugh B. Urban

4 Psychedelica Sub Rosa: The Eleusinian Mysteries and the Psychedelic Imagination 57
Christopher Partridge

5 Architectures of Secrecy 71
Paul Christopher Johnson

6 Secret Lives of the Superpowers: Secrecy, the Paranormal,

and the Remote Viewing Literature 85
Jeffrey J. Kripal and Christopher Senn

v
 Contents

PART II
Secrecy as Religious Practice 103

7 Secrecy in Islam, Sufism, and Shiʿism 105

Mark Sedgwick

8 Concealing the Concealment: Towards a Politics of Kabbalistic Esotericism 120

Elliot R.Wolfson

9 Keeping Secrets: The Social Practice of Gnostic Secrecy 131

April D. DeConick

10 Secrecy’s Situational Ironies: Hiding and Its Consequences

for Covert Buddhists in Japan 151
Clark Chilson

11 Notions of Secrecy and the Unknown/Hidden in Chinese Culture 163

Barend ter Haar

12 Secrecy in South Asian Hindu Traditions: “The Gods Love What Is Occult” 174
Gordan Djurdjevic

13 Reflections on Secrecy in Yolngu Religion 187

Ian Keen

14 AWO – The Nature and Essence of Secrecy in Yorùbá Religious

Traditions: Conversations with Ifá Diviners 199
Jacob K. Olupona

PART III
Secrecy and the Politics of the Present 211

15 Secrecy and Freemasonry 213

Henrik Bogdan

16 The Sacred, the “Secret,” and the Sinister in the Latter-Day Saint Tradition 228
Christopher James Blythe

17 The High Magic of Jesus Christ: Materializing Secrets in Brazil’s Valley of

the Dawn 243
Kelly E. Hayes

18 Secrecy, Sex Abuse, and the Practice of Priesthood 258

John C. Seitz

19 From Resistance to Terror: The Open Secret of Jonestown 275

Rebecca Moore

vi
 Contents

PART IV
Secrecy and Social Resistance 287

20 “Crypto-Paganism” in the Late Antique World: Models of Religious

Concealment in a Christian Empire, Fourth to Sixth Century CE 289
David Frankfurter

21 Hopi Knowledge and the Ethnographic Allure of Secrets 306

Adam Fulton Johnson

22 Secrecy, Spirit Work, and Women’s Fugitive Speech in

the Creolophone Caribbean 320
Elizabeth McAlister

23 Lifting the Eucharistic Veil―Allan Rohan Crite as Afro-Anglican Mystagogue 329

Hugh R. Page, Jr. and Stephen C. Finley

PART V
Secrecy, Terrorism, and Surveillance 341

24 Weaponizing Secrecy: The FBI’s War on Black Radical Religion 343

Sylvester Johnson

25 Varieties of Religion and Secrecy in American White Power Movements 355

Damon T. Berry

26 The Islamic State and the Management of Secrecy 370

Haroro J. Ingram and Craig Whiteside

27 Conspiracy Theories about Secret Religions: Imagining the Other 380

David G. Robertson

28 Xenophobia and Conspiracism after 9/11 391

Michael Barkun

29 Imagining Secret Wars 400

Mark Juergensmeyer

Index 409

vii
 FIGURES

5.1 The Hilma af Klint Foundation, HaK 1047. Courtesy of Moderna Museet,
Stockholm. From her notebook of 1930–31, pp. 52–53 77
5.2 Goetheanum under construction, 1 April 1914 79
5.3 First Goetheanum, 1914–22, Dornach, Switzerland 79
5.4 Andrea Chan’s winning design, “A Temple for Hilma” 80
5.5 312 Azusa Street, Los Angeles, 1906. Source: Wikicommons 81
17.1 Armas, Photo by Márcia Alves 248
17.2 Uniform, Photo by Márcia Alves 249
17.3 Indumentária, Photo by Márcia Alves 250
17.4 Indumentária, male and female, Photo by Márcia Alves 250
17.5 Radar de Centúria 251
17.6 Centurion Medium 252
23.1 Crite, illustration from All Glory 334
23.2 Crite, illustration from All Glory 335
23.3 Crite, illustration from All Glory 336
23.4 Crite, illustration from All Glory 337

viii
 CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Barkun is professor emeritus of political science in the Maxwell School at Syracuse
University. His numerous books include A Culture of Conspiracy, Religion and the Racist Right, and
Disaster and the Millennium. He has been a consultant to the FBI and a member of the academic
advisory board of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.

Damon T. Berry is assistant professor of religious studies at St. Lawrence University. He has
published in The Journal of Hate Studies, Security Journal, and Politics & Religion, and is the author
of Blood & Faith: Christianity in American White Nationalism (2017).

Christopher James Blythe is a research associate at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious
Scholarship at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints
and the American Apocalypse (Oxford University Press, 2020). Blythe is currently co-editor of the
Journal of Mormon History and co-president of the Folklore Society of Utah.

Henrik Bogdan is a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Gothenburg. His

main areas of research are Western esotericism, New Religious Movements and Freemasonry.
He is the author of Western Esotericism and Rituals of Initiation (2007); editor of Brother
Curwen, Brother Crowley: A Correspondence by Aleister Crowley and David Curwen (2010); and
co-editor of Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism (2012), Occultism in a Global Perspective
(2013), Sexuality and New Religious Movements (2014), Handbook of Freemasonry (2014), and
Western Esotericism in Scandinavia (2016). Bogdan is the editor of the Oxford Studies in
Western Esotericism Book Series, and Secretary of the European Society for the Study of
Western Esotericism.

Clark Chilson is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University
of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Secrecy’s Power: Covert Shin Buddhists in Japan and Contradictions
of Concealment (2014) and the co-editor of two books: The Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions
(with Paul Swanson) and Shamans in Asia (with Peter Knecht). He has published articles on Kūya,
Ikeda Daisaku, non-religious spiritual care in Japan, and Naikan, a meditative practice that has
been used as a psychotherapeutic intervention.

ix
 Contributors

April D. DeConick is the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of New Testament and
Early Christianity at Rice University. She is the author of The Gnostic New Age and also the
editor-in-chief of Gnosis:The Journal of Gnostic Studies.

Gordan Djurdjevic is an independent scholar. He is the author of India and the Occult: The
Influence of South Asian Spirituality on Modern Western Occultism (2014) and the co-author of
Sayings of Gorakhnāth: Annotated Translation of the Gorakh Bānī (2019).

Stephen C. Finley is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African and African American
Studies at Louisiana State University. He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters
on African-American religions, as well as the forthcoming book: In and Out of this World: Material
and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam (2020).

David Frankfurter holds the William Goodwin Aurelio Chair of the Appreciation of
Scripture in the Department of Religion at Boston University. He is the author of numerous
books, including Religion in Roman Egypt (1998), Evil Incarnate (2006), and Christianizing Egypt
(2017).

Kennet Granholm is an independent scholar with expertise in contemporary esotericism. He is

the author of Dark Enlightenment:The Historical, Sociological, and Discursive Contexts of Contemporary
Esoteric Magic (2014) and Embracing the Dark:The Magic Order of the Dragon Rouge (2005).

Kelly E. Hayes is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University-Indianapolis.

The author of Holy Harlots: Femininity, Sexuality, and Black Magic in Brazil (2011). Hayes is cur-
rently finishing a book on the Valley of the Dawn for Oxford University Press.

Haroro J. Ingram is a Senior Research Fellow with The Program on Extremism at George
Washington University. His research has been published in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism,
Australian Journal of Political Science, War on the Rocks, The Atlantic, The National Interest and The
Washington Post, among others. He is also co-author of The ISIS Reader (2020).

Adam Fulton Johnson is a historian of human science, specifically anthropological fieldwork

among indigenous communities. He is presently an Assistant Professor in History, Philosophy, and
Sociology of Science in Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University. His next research
will investigate indigenous millenarianism and social science research.

Paul Christopher Johnson is Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies at
the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and editor of the journal, Comparative Studies in Society
and History. His books include Secrets, Gossip and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé
(2002); Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa (2007); and, most
recently, Automatic Religion: Nearhuman Agents of Brazil and France (2021).

Sylvester Johnson is Professor in the Department of Religion and Culture and founding dir-
ector of the Center for the Humanities at Virginia Tech. He is the author of award-winning
books, The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity and African American Religions,
1500–2000, as well as the co-editor of The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security Before
and After 9/11.

x
 Contributors

Mark Juergensmeyer is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University
of California, Santa Barbara. He has written or edited approximately 30 books and 300 articles,
including the award-winning Terror in the Mind of God:The Global Rise of Religious Violence.

Ian Keen gained a BSc in anthropology at University College London and a PhD in anthro-
pology at the Australian National University. Since then, he has lectured at the University of
Queensland and the Australian National University. His anthropological research has mainly
been located in the Northern Territory of Australia. He is currently an Honorary Associate
Professor in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology and a member of the Emeritus Faculty
at the ANU.

Jeffrey J. Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice
University. He is the author of numerous books, including Esalen (2007), Mutants and Mystics
(2011), Comparing Religions (2014), and Secret Body (2017), among others.

Elizabeth McAlister is Professor of Religion at Wesleyan University. Her research focuses on

Afro-Caribbean religions including Haitian Vodou, race theory, transnational migration, pente-
costalism, and spiritual warfare. She is the author of Rara! Vodou, Power and Performance in Haiti
and its Diaspora (2002).

Rebecca Moore is Emerita Professor at San Diego State University. She is the author of
numerous books, including Understanding Peoples Temple and Jonestown (2009) and Women in
Christian Traditions (2015). She has also created a large archive of digital materials on Peoples
Temple, available at the website http://jonestown.sdsu.edu.

Jacob K. Olupona is Professor of African Religious Traditions, with a joint appointment as

Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard
University. He is the author of several books, including: City of 201 Gods; Òrìsà Devotion as World
Religion, and Kingship, Religion, and Rituals in a Nigerian Community.

Hugh R. Page, Jr. is Vice President and Associate Provost and Professor of Theology and
Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is co-editor, with Stephen C. Finley and
Margarita S. Guillory, of Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: “There is a Mystery”
(2014).

Christopher Partridge is Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Politics,

Philosophy, and Religion at Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of numerous books,
including The Re-Enchantment of the West (2004–2005), Introduction to World’s Religions (2005), and
High Religion (2018), as well as the editor of The Occult World (2015).

David G. Robertson is Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University, co-founder of

the Religious Studies Project, and co-editor of the journal Implicit Religion. His work applies
critical theory to the study of alternative and emerging religions, “conspiracy theory” narratives
and the disciplinary history of the study of religions. He is the author of UFOs, the New Age
and Conspiracy Theories: Millennial Conspiracism (2016) and co-editor of After World Religions:
Reconstructing Religious Studies (2016) and the Handbook of Conspiracy Theories and Contemporary
Religion (2018).

xi
 Contributors

Mark Sedgwick is professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at Aarhus University and previously
taught for many years at the American University in Cairo. He has been working on Sufism since
the 1990s, and is the author of several books on the topic, such as Against the Modern World (2004),
Islam and Muslims (2006), and Western Sufism (2016).

John C. Seitz is a scholar of U.S. religion. His research focuses on the historical and ethnographic
study of U.S. Catholics and on theoretical questions in the study of religion. Seitz’s publications
include No Closure: Catholic Practice and Boston’s Parish Shutdowns (2011). He has contributed art-
icles to Material Religion, Church History, American Catholic Studies, U.S. Catholic Historian,
and Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, among others. In 2020, Working Alternatives:
American and Catholic Experiments in Work and Economy, a volume Seitz co-edited with Christine
Firer-Hinze, was published with Fordham University Press. Seitz serves as Associate Professor in
the Department of Theology and as an Associate Director for the Francis and Ann Curan Center
for Catholic Studies at Fordham University.

Christopher Senn is a PhD candidate in the History of Religions at Rice University, with a
special interest in the intersection of science and spirituality in contemporary America. He also
holds an MA in Religion from Rice University and an MA in History from the University of
South Alabama.

Barend ter Haar is Professor of Chinese Studies at Universität Hamburg. He is the author of
numerous books, including Practicing Scripture: A Lay Buddhist Movement in Late Imperial China
(2014), Guan Yu:The Religious Afterlife of a Failed Hero (2017), and Religious Culture and Violence in
Traditional China (2019).

Hugh B. Urban is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University.
He is the author of numerous books, including Secrecy (2021), The Church of Scientology (2010),
Magia Sexualis (2005), and Tantra (2003).

Arthur Versluis is Professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. He is the author
of numerous books, including The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance (2001), Magic and
Mysticism (2006), and American Gurus (2014). He is also editor of JSR: Journal for the Study of
Radicalism, and was founding editor of the journal Esoterica, which now is a biannual print book
series, Studies in Esotericism.

Craig Whiteside is an Associate Fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism

and an Associate Professor for the Naval War College, Monterey and teaches at the Naval
Postgraduate School. He is a senior associate with the Center on Irregular Warfare and Armed
Groups at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island and lectures at the U.S. Air Force
Special Operations School. Whiteside’s current research focuses on the doctrinal influences of
the leadership of the Islamic State movement, the evolution of its political-military doctrine since
1999, and the tribal engagement strategy that fueled its return since 2008.

Elliot R. Wolfson holds the Marsha and Jay Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of
California Santa Barbara. He is the author of numerous books, including Through a Speculum That
Shines (1994), Language, Eros, Being (2005), Open Secret (2009), A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream
(2011), and Heidegger and Kabbalah (2019), among many others.

xii
 INTRODUCTION
From the Social Lives of Secrecy to
the Secret Lives of the Social: Notes
on Religion, Power, and the Public
Paul Christopher Johnson and Hugh B. Urban

We all guard secrets. The process of filtering, deciding which words to share with others and
which to temper or leave unsaid, is basic to all of social life. Secrecy is likewise fundamental to
the enterprise of religion, a quest to commune with sources of power that only sometimes reveal
themselves. Religious people seek to learn mysteries that remain hidden to most. As part and
parcel of religion, secrecy has to do with sources of power that are elusive, only sometimes open
to humans, and never knowable in full. Divine sources of power always recede just out of reach
or sight. From this point of view, religion is a set of traditions and techniques granting periodic
human access to extraordinary powers that generally remain concealed.1 Without secrets and
the estrangement and bafflement they seed, religion would be unnecessary. All would already be
clear, and the need for religion would disappear.2 For as long as our present condition of limited
knowledge persists—and it is hard to imagine that condition changing—secrecy is, and will
remain, an enduring feature of religious practice.
A secret is something valuable but concealed, and often valuable because it is concealed. A piece
of knowledge that seems to exist but is locked away, masked, or obscured is joined to a belief that
its very elusiveness is a problem to be solved, but also something to be protected. To hide and to
unveil, to contain and reveal—this is the rhythm of secrecy, and also of religion (Wolfson 1999;
Johnson 2005). Following Bruce Lincoln, we define religion as “a discourse whose concerns tran-
scend the human, temporal, and contingent, and that claims for itself a similarly transcendent status,”
plus the practices, communities, and institutions that maintain and fortify that discourse (Lincoln
2003: 6–7). A particular religious tradition, then, consists of a group of people who share certain
discourses about transcendent, mostly concealed knowledge, and a set of practices or technolo-
gies directed toward its revelation. And yet, while all religions seek human relations with generally
mysterious powers that are revealed only in moments breaking into everyday experience, not all
religions embrace secrecy to the same degree, nor do all historical contexts equally evoke secrecy as
a defense against outside intrusion.The comparative unevenness of religious secrecy is an issue this
Handbook unpacks. Since their discourses and techniques are elaborated and revised over time, their
unfolding metamorphosis means that religions are living, changing things.
Sometimes religion has been castigated as uniquely or especially secretive in comparison with other
arts and technologies. From Enlightenment philosophes to the most recent generation of atheists and
other “nones,” religion is imagined, from this point of view, in the form of cryptic texts, hidden sancta,
smoke and hooded robes, and in that caricature juxtaposed with images of light, transparency, and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003014751-1 1
 Paul Christopher Johnson and Hugh B. Urban

public visibility. In the crafting of this invidious profile of religion, the language of optics and seeing
is often applied (Comaroff and Comaroff 2003: 292). Here is Diderot writing in 1770: “Lost in the
darkness of an immense forest with only a small flickering light to guide me, an unknown person
arrives and says: ‘My friend, blow out your candle to better find your path.’That man is a theologian”
(1821: 246). Light and dark, the open and the opaque, oligarchy versus democracy.
The authors here pull no punches in the critique of religious secrecy and its risks, yet they also
insist, against a perspective like Diderot’s, that religion is not uniquely sinister. Rather than setting
“religion” apart as a pernicious domain, the study of secrecy brings religion into conversation
with other domains of social life. Religious secrecy is, we suggest, best seen as a subgenre of the
social lives of secrecy broadly cast. It is, however, an important subgenre. For, if religious secrecy
pervades the practice of local congregations, its force also scales up, reaching into national and
international governance.

Secrets, the Public, and the Private

Secrecy is standard in the procedures of diplomacy, including in relation to issues of human rights,
weapons inspections, peace negotiations, commerce, industry, medicine and, increasingly, digital
cybercraft on the deep web. If secrecy is mostly standard procedure, “transparency” is often the
preferred argot. The discourse of transparency, though, far from signaling trust or open communi-
cation, assures us of its lack. Its special invocation guarantees that at most times and in most places,
we should expect none. No surprise, then, that calls to transparency and the wild proliferation of
conspiracy theories have together produced complicated social networks that thoroughly blur the
lines of religion, science, and politics—as if they were ever discreet domains to begin with. How do
transparency and secrecy walk hand in hand with such easy insouciance (Sanders and West 2003)?
Several authors of this handbook interrogate the interstitial spaces of secrecy and the public, espe-
cially in relation to police forces and the state, and how claims of transparency serve to disguise and
obscure extralegal actions and states of exception.Yet since secrecy is often defined in relation to the
public and the private, we must also establish a working definition for the latter terms.
Different analytical constructions of the public include the liberal-economistic model, where
“public” denotes the domain of influence of the nation-state; the classical model of the “public”
as a political community of citizens, distinct from both the market and the nation-state; the
“public” as a general sphere of face-to-face interactions and social intercourse, such as in a café,
a bar, a train-station, or the street; and the “public” as the market economy (Weintraub 1997).
Chapters in this Handbook draw from classical ideas of the public to frame the concept of the
public as a broad realm of human sociability and symbolic exchange, including virtual, but they
are especially concerned with defining “the public” in relation to transparency, and how transpar-
ency works as a religious problematic. We approach “the public,” then, as an empirical problem
rather than an assertion, one articulated, at least in part, through its contraries: blockage, obfusca-
tion, dissimulation, legerdemain, camouflage, and strategic concealment. “Public,” from this point
of view, is an ongoing contest and fight. There are often good reasons for religious traditions
to resist transparency to the public. Public transparency, after all, indicates a physical or semi-
otic space where one can neither choose who will be encountered or what will be exchanged,
nor can one control the consequences and risks of the revelation. In an ideal scenario like that
imagined in Habermas’ (1994) formulation of a public sphere that mediates between the state
and the masses, which, in cafés, salons and newspapers generates “public opinion” and the possi-
bility of critique through the development of reasoned communication, there would be little to
fear from becoming public.We are less sanguine than Habermas about the so-called public sphere
at the present historical juncture.

2
 Introduction

In the twenty-first century, reasoned, literate communication may be less important in cre-
ating the public sphere than factors like the control of mass media systems. And it may be
too restricted also to account for the peculiar “public space” of venues like cyberspace. When
religions are composed of partly national or global media circulations, they become available for
use and appropriation by groups far removed from a given tradition’s geographic center. New
media generate new publics (e.g., Meyer and Moors 2006). As they become public, they move
from restricted circulation, the key to secrecy, into open circulation. Georg Simmel already noted
the risk at the outset of the twentieth century: becoming public entails an objectification of
protected knowledge, and may cause a breach in the boundary of a secret society. That is why
many traditions carefully constrain representations and their circulation, and why initiations into
secret societies carefully control the transmission of information, and the mode of presentation.
To become public, then, is the moment of a religious tradition’s detachment from restricted
use into general visibility. Its signs and symbols are no longer protected. Rather, they
may be appropriated by distant audiences that did not produce them. Multiple publics and
“counterpublics,” to take Michael Warner’s term, may emerge around the same set of symbols,
discourses and practices. Warner asks,

What determines whether one belongs to a public or not? Space and physical presence do
not make much difference; a public is understood to be different from a crowd, an audi-
ence, or any other group that requires co-presence. Personal identity does not in itself make
one part of a public. Publics differ from nations, races, professions, or any other groups that,
though not requiring co-presence, saturate identity. Belonging to a public seems to require
at least minimal participation, even if it is patient or notional, rather than a permanent state
of being. Merely paying attention can be enough to make you a member.
(Warner 2002: 53).

Warner’s idea helps open classical notions of the public to the pressing issue of cyberspace and
transparency. For our purposes in this Handbook, the key point is the historical and anthropo-
logical question of how and why secrets become public, or vice versa, and with what risks.
The other key term with which secrecy is typically contrasted is privacy. Various authors
have defined these terms in different ways, and understandings of both privacy and secrecy have
changed significantly over time (see Igo 2018; Weintraub 1997; Manderson, Davis, Colwell, and
Ahlin 2015). However, one of the most useful distinctions is suggested by Warren and Laslett
(1977), who argue that “privacy is consensual, where secrecy is not.” In other words, privacy
involves a voluntary decision not to disclose certain information, whereas secrecy tends to be
surrounded by sanctions for the disclosure of information. For example, one’s beliefs and practices
as a Muslim citizen in the U.S. might be private, but initiation into many esoteric groups—such
as most forms of Freemasonry and related fraternal orders—requires vows of secrecy. Moreover,
privacy generally refers to information and acts that are considered to be morally and legally
neutral, whereas secrecy often refers to information or acts that are perceived to be morally or
legally suspect. For example, involvement in a group that is labeled a terrorist organization would
largely be secret rather than simply private (see also Urban 2021).
In the twenty-first century, amidst new wars on terror and ever expanding networks of sur-
veillance, the relationship between secrecy, privacy, and the public has grown even more complex
and contested. As Hugh Urban recently argued, the very notion of the public is at risk, since the
present is characterized by an increasing loss of personal privacy alongside a constant expansion of
government secrecy (Urban 2021; see Zuboff 2019).The so-called public sphere is now a dark web
of shadows, to continue with the optics metaphor, even as everything about private individuals’ life

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is widely visible online. The very saturation of the public sphere with secrets can even be seen as
a new modality of concealment. The constant barrage of deception ensures that no verification or
truth-telling can ever really occur, since there is always new doubt in play about source and author
of any given claim, always a new dissimulation to track. We are all exhausted, perhaps not unlike
“the public” as a term of hope or aspiration for some shared, consensual idea of the real.

Secrecy as Social Capital

Secrecy brokers all communication, from the micro-scale to the macro, from your private psy-
chic life to the global economy and the shifting plates of the political order (Bok 1983; Barbour
2017). As Gabriel García Márquez remarked to his biographer, Gerald Martin, when asked about
his 1956 Paris affair with Tachia Quintana, “everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life,
and a secret life” (Martin 2008: 205).The public was already known or in circulation.The private
could be discovered through research.The secret would never be shared, or at least never declared
or conceded; at best it might appear, in code, somewhere in Márquez’s books.
Indeed, most of the world remains opaque to any one of us. But despite Márquez’s protest
against his biographer’s question, secrecy is a thoroughly social affair. After all, the story that he
refused to impart was eagerly shared by Quintana herself, who found prestige through its telling.
Secrecy is a block in the circulation of information that restricts it from some while enabling
its access by others. Its value depends first and foremost on a difference in status, for without
this inequality, secrets hold no power. Even non-human animals respect this economy. A squirrel
gives care to not call attention to the tree where food is cached to carry it through winter; a dog
shows off a bone with pride, but then buries it so that only she knows where to find it again.
Non-human animals show the obvious advantages of secrets. Those advantages include not only
the enhanced odds of survival, but also the power to share the valued information, retract it, or
exchange it for something else (Canetti 1984: 290). Not only are we all keeping secrets, then, we
are also always trading them, and trading on them. But the more we shift our gaze to the study of
willfully manufacturing and maintaining secrecy, the more we move toward a peculiarly human
propensity. Whatever the role of secrets in the social lives of non-human animals, the capacity of
strategizing to keep secrets or not, and strategizing about their value, seems a uniquely human vice.
Strategic secrecy seems a distinctly human game, one we play to puzzle, please, and control each
other. In this game, we are at once the tormented souls and the devils that do the tormenting.3
All social relations involve degrees of secrecy, and so also calculation. As the word calculation
suggests, secrets comprise a form of economy, an economy which itself must remain secret (Jütte
2015). Take a simple example: A stock trader shares inside information with a friend. This person
may tell another friend or, on the other hand, report the inside trader. She holds secrets within
secrets. The insider-trading tip is one restricted secret, and the fact that it was illegally passed on
to another now makes two. It is not difficult to see how secrets multiply and become difficult to
track, even for those trading them. Indeed, the challenge of keeping track of the secrets of business
transactions gave birth to a specific guild, a cabal of trusted scribes called “secretaries.” Their title
announced their purpose, as the record-keepers of private affairs and discrete transactions. Secrets
are intrinsic to economic competition, but they are expressed in the titles of political guilds too,
from the “Sekretariat” of the Commission of the U.S.S.R. formed in 1926, to the roving bands
draped in QAnon shirts in the present-day United States; the “Q,” or so we are told, making
reference to a level of security clearance at the U.S. Department of Energy. But who can be
sure? As in the political sphere, titans of arts, industry, and commerce labor to protect secrets
from what they may perceive as an over-hungry public sphere, populated by journalists, lawyers,
bloggers, photographers, hackers and more, an endless battle of information and dissimulation.

4
 Introduction

Secrecy’s uses to advance and secure power by national security agencies, policing, and terror are
notorious, and not a few thinkers have noted the ways certain religious movements and totali-
tarian politics are linked in their uses of, and valuation of, secrecy.4

Secrecy as Control, Secrecy as Resistance

Equally vivid in the crises of the present, on the other hand, is the terror of total surveillance; no
privacy allowed, a scenario expressed as vividly in George Orwell’s 1984 as in Foucault’s history
of surveillance and the birth of the carceral regime.5 No one knows the protective value of secrets
better than the one falsely accused or imprisoned, the migrant worker constantly under threat
of deportation, or the former criminal deprived of the right to vote, all in the name of the law
and transparency. There is no clear line, either historically or theoretically, from transparency to
democracy and participatory politics, or from secrecy to violence and oppression. The question,
including for religious communities and traditions, is how the values and practices devoted to
privacy (in its positive framing) and concealment (in its negative one) versus revelation and trans-
parency should best be balanced.
We should remember, too, that secrecy has been as important to resistance movements and to
the marginalized as to the enforcers. As a kind of “hidden transcript,” secrecy can also serve as an
effective “art of resistance” or “weapon of the weak” wielded by dissident, deviant, or disenfranchised
social groups (Scott 1992).6 “At the core” of Afroamerican rituals convened under slavery were
places called hush harbors, hidden glades to gather under cover of darkness, chosen and arranged
for the protection they gave (Raboteau 1978: 219). The Haitian Revolution launched by enslaved
Africans and creoles against French overlords was begun, according to oral history, in a clandestine
Vodou ritual convened in August 1791, in Bois Caiman, the Alligator Woods, after participants took
a blood oath of silence about the imminent revolt. Native American sun dances held on the North
American plains each summer are never announced publicly or open to strangers, in part because
they were outlawed by the U.S. government from 1883–1934, and forced to perform the rituals
clandestinely (Brown 2011; Jorgensen 1986; Walker 1980).7 The point is that secrecy is complicit
in violence and also in the resistance to it, offering subtle resources of strength. Secrets do not have
to be as dramatic as the launch of a revolution to count as resistance. Barbara Myerhoff described
the joy of Huichol peyote pilgrims dining, upon their return, under the disapproving gaze of white
Mexican restaurant owners: the Huichol were “unspeakably happy—sharing a precious secret, giddy
with our invisible treasure, realizing that no outsider could tell that we had been transformed…”
(1976: 167).The story points to the subaltern force of secrecy, its capacity to bond a group together
and hold it tight even under the censorious gaze of the white and the wealthy.
The issues of power and resistance are important, but there is a risk that secrecy-as-authority
and secrecy-as-resistance can become too rigid of an opposition. The forms of secrecy are
constantly changing with the historical moment, as the chapters in the Handbook show. Key
is to recognize the ways that secrecy modulates the movement of a given religious tradition
from “outsider” status to the mainstream, or vice versa. There are historical conditions under
which secrecy is activated, particularly in the face of the perceived threat, and other conditions
under which secrecy retreats and becomes less important. Secrecy mediates between histor-
ical moments of a given religion’s status as persecuted, prohibited or marginalized from a
dominant cultural center and that same religion’s becoming a public or well-known religion
that is accepted and legally protected; or the inverse transition, from public valorization to
exclusion, even the loss of being considered a legally bona fide “religion” at all. Secrecy in this
sense offers what Georg Simmel called an “intermediate station for progressing and decaying
powers” (1906: 472).

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Material and Bodily Modes of Secrecy

In this Handbook, the authors examine religious secrecy not only in terms of language and silen-
cing, but also in terms of things, senses, and bodies. Perhaps masks are the most obvious material
form of religious secrecy. Used by too many societies to name here, masks fulfill two roles at once,
blocking the actual human face of the dancing god or spirit and, second, presenting an alternative
face, that of a metahuman being who is usually not present or invisible, but who has suddenly
appeared. In this way, the mask both hides and announces (Nooter 1993). But there are many
other material forms of secrets to be explored in the chapters to come. Georg Simmel, to wit, saw
money as not only an intermediary that facilitated secrecy—since one could now conduct land
transactions nearly invisibly—but even as a material secret. With money, one could hide riches
in pockets or billfolds; it could be publicly demonstrated, or held close to the vest. Secrecy can
also take the form of social bodies. One example is in the form of a crowd, as Walter Benjamin
described. The urban bohemian can only be at home in a city and in a crowd, where she can
remain invisible, as a member of what Benjamin called the city’s secret societies (1999: 895).
Secrets can take the form of individual bodies too. Simmel invoked the unspoken codes
of proper corporeal distance (“spiritual private property”) and the risk of “coming too near”
(1906: 453–454). The notion here is that the body itself enacts codes of concealment and reve-
lation, beyond or outside of words; secrecy, then, as bodily practice or a habitus that should not
be invaded or encroached upon. Then, too, Simmel invoked the pedagogy of secrecy, an “art of
silence” that could be demonstrated and taught through bodily imitation (1906: 474). Consider,
on this score, the way that secrecy in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé is produced and performed in
initiations that generate a “closed body” (corpo fechado), a body made into a physical container
of power (axé) and protected against harmful intrusions (Johnson 2005: 108–126).
If secrecy is a discourse, then, it is also a physical text, a way of marking presence and absence in
body, sound, and ink. Toni Morrison’s book Sula (1974), for example, includes a character named
as a secret, a person called “Private.” Private wonders why he was given the name. The attribution
begins to work on him, occupying his thoughts, becoming part of his corporeal identity. Being
named as a kind of living secret, Private’s moniker begins to work recursively on him, shaping
how he thinks, speaks, and acts. In similar fashion, the phrase Top Secret, when stamped on a folder,
gives the dossier an allure at the same time as it emplots it in a story, a network of rules, procedures,
material structures and laws related to security, and a series of sanctions when they are breached.
Naming something “secret” is a material act with secondary effects and consequences. An entire
material apparatus is brought to life by the invocation of the terms of secrecy in certain contexts—
say, company secrets in the context of transnational hacking or corporate raiding. As we draft this
Introduction, hundreds of pharmaceutical corporations are racing to find, make, and test a vaccine
for COVID-19, alongside nation-state laboratories.Three have already succeeded at the time of this
writing, and these winners will reap unthinkable profits and prestige. Only imagine the security
protocols and secrecy surrounding the research and the labs where it is being done.
Secrets include ideas, words, and acts, then, but also to materials and institutions: walls, locks, borders,
guards, weapons, commissions, and protocols. In terms of religion, architecture is often a materialization
of secrecy, with protected rooms, special doors and thresholds, and choices of color and sound that gen-
erate at the same time secrecy and a sensory experience of the sacred (Gell 1998). Materials like texts,
clothing, buildings, or money take part in secrecy as a presentation, in the sense of Ervin Goffman’s
attention to the components of successful performances; successful, that is, in their ability to sustain the
“expressive coherence of the reality that is dramatized,” in this case that of being in the presence of a
secret (1959: 141). In this Handbook, we raise the material problem of how secrets are rendered present
or, put otherwise, how absence and silence are made materially perceptible to the senses.

6
 Introduction

Theories of Secrecy
There is now a large body of fine scholarship on religious secrecy from many disciplinary approaches.
There is the work of comparative scholars of religion such as Kees Bolle, Hans Kippenberg, Guy
Stroumsa, Jeffrey Kripal, and Elliot Wolfson; the sociological work of scholars such as Stanton Tefft;
anthropological and ethnographic studies of secrecy in specific cultural contexts such as Ian Keen’s
work on Australian aboriginal traditions, Andrew Apter’s work on Yoruba religion, Andrew Lattas
writing on Melanesian cargo cults, and Timothy Landry’s work on Vodún; as well as the emer-
ging field of Western esotericism pioneered by Antoine Faivre, Wouter Hanegraaff, and others.8
However, for the sake of our brief introduction to this volume, we want to highlight just a few of
the most important approaches that will also be most relevant for the chapters that follow.
The cornerstone text for theorizing secrecy remains Georg Simmel’s celebrated 1906 essay,“The
Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies.” For Simmel, secrecy is bound up with everyday social
forms like friendships and marriages, where it has effects on practices, sentiments, and the imagin-
ation. All of social life requires wagers of faith about mostly unverifiable qualities of others, a wager
made manifest in “intensities,” degrees and ratios of the known to the unknown (1906: 446).While
secrecy wends through all social life, Simmel pushes us to recognize the links between secrecy
and power. For two or more persons to be bound together in the possession of secret knowledge
requires the exclusion of others—the desiring third (1906: 457). Moreover, the bond shared by
secret-holders rests as much on the simple consciousness of having a secret as it does on any specific
content, since it confers status, at least to the desiring third party. Thus, it frequently happens that
someone will publicize the very fact of having a secret, leading to discourse about having secrets
(Geheimnistuerei) quite apart from the fact of having a secret or not, or of what it might consist of
(1906: 486). Paul C. Johnson translated Simmel’s neologism, Geheimnistuerei, as “secretism,” and used
it as a key analytic in his work on Brazilian Candomblé, a tradition in which the discourse about
foundational secret knowledge (fundamentos) and who can legitimately claim to have it, and initiate
others into it, versus who is accused of mere invention or fakery, is central to the internal dynamics
of ritual life.While there are general valences to the kinds of information that constitute such foun-
dational secrets, and durable patterns of the ritual performance of gaining “it,” the specific content
of that information is also always in flux. Thus, as scholars from Simmel to Michael Taussig (1999;
1998) argue, there is no necessary, absolutely specific content to religious secrecy, notwithstanding
claims to the contrary. Rather, secrecy is a revolving door of information that keeps some informa-
tion, and some people, “in, “and others, “out.” The paradox of secrecy is that its power only exists
in relation to its possible revelation—power is only fully realized in the moment of a secret’s telling,
much like money’s power is most densely felt in the moment of its consumption (1906: 465).9 This
places secret societies in a position of risk.The stakes and the “intensities” of mutual confidence are
raised by the chronic prospect of the alliance’s destruction (1906: 491).
Simmel was uncannily prescient in certain ways. For example, by noting the ways money
facilitates secret power through its compact invisibility, its abstract immaterial character, and
its capacity to extend transactions to far-flung geographical regions, he anticipated contem-
porary uses of secrecy in money-laundering, offshore untraceable accounts, and tax evasion, not
to mention the buying and selling of political influence.10 In this respect and others, secrecy
is viewed as the enemy of democracy, which tends to elevate transparency and publicity as its
virtues. Noteworthy is that even in 1906, Simmel observed a striking lack of transparency in the
transactions of the U.S. Congress, and how it produced a “super-individual” authority with a
corresponding lack of accountability (1906: 496).
In terms of secrecy and religion, Simmel claimed that the respective confidence games of
religious faith and social faith have nothing to do with each other. But in fact he showed the

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opposite: that religious faith and social life rest on very similar metaphysics of hiddenness and
revelation (1906: 450).
Tanya Luhrmann, working on witchcraft movements in Britain, develops several key themes
beyond their appearance in Simmel’s text (1989: 149–160). One is the experience of secrecy for
the individual, including enjoyment, pleasure, and the healing power conveyed by the sensation
of having secret knowledge. A second issue she attends to is how the experience of secrecy is
mediated by symbolic images, creating a kind of private enclave of double secrecy, bounded
in one sense as that which you keep hidden from others, and in a second sense because the
experiences are not in any case communicable to others. Third and even more important, is the
therapeutic value of participating in secret societies. Against arguments that secrecy arises from
deprivation or the desire for power, secret magic is ultimately about the attempt to gain control
over one’s own life and circumstances. Whether secret practices are effective or not is ultimately
unimportant in comparison with the fact that the actor feels that they have gained control over,
or insight into, their fate. By identifying one’s experience with, in, and through powerful secret
symbols and narratives, the unknown or unsayable becomes legible: “Therapy seems to work
when someone externalizes, or labels, some internal feeling and then is able to transform it.” But
along with imagination and symbols, the masked quality of secrecy is crucial to the healing. Even
as the participant gains self-knowledge, that knowledge arrives only in oblique, indirect ways that
make it tolerable to awareness in ways that more direct, unmediated forms of knowing might not
be. The secret-sharers together build a protected world, a zone of trust in which to experiment
with new, redescribed versions of themselves. Members of secret societies, Luhrmann claims in a
way reminiscent of William James’ notion of “healthy-minded” religion, are happier people. Or
so Luhrmann claims. Several of the chapters in this volume may persuade you otherwise.
Michael Taussig drew on a different thread from Simmel’s and Elias Canetti’s contributions,
namely the way that secrecy continues even when secrets are revealed, such that the phenomenon
seems unbeholden to any particular content: “There is no such thing as a secret. It is an invention
that comes out of the public secret” (1999: 7).The public secret is that which is generally known but
cannot be articulated. It is the obvious thing that one dare not say. Often the public secret is about
state violence, about those disappeared by clandestine police, who remain unnamed even though
everyone knows their fate. Much like a monument that becomes more conspicuous through its
destruction or defacement; or sound that only in its announcement which, a moment after its blast,
disappears; or money that exerts maximum force at the moment of its waste, as Simmel wrote; or,
as Bataille argued, human life at the moment of its execution or sacrifice; a secret’s unmasking only
adds to its power. Taussig argues that secrecy—public secrecy—is a social contract more than a bit
of special knowledge. Masked rituals among the Selk’nam or the Poro are not abandoned when
participants realize that the spirits are in fact elder males (1999: 125). Subcomandante Marcos did
not lose his followers when he was identified by the Mexican government; quite the opposite, his
fame grew exponentially (1999: 260). None of the tawdry secrets released about former President
Donald Trump lessened his power, at least to his devoted following. To the contrary, they only
amplified his stardom, perhaps signaling power exactly by virtue of having compromising secrets
and, nevertheless, remaining in charge. What is the purpose of the public secret, if everyone knows
it exists? Its purpose is to mark and magnify power, to make certain versions of power sacred by
setting them apart as an agreed upon thing that should not be said.And yet, like a monument invites
the desire to deface it, or purity that invites desecration, the secret seems to demand its own disfig-
uring, precisely by virtue of its sacralization.
While Luhrmann emphasizes the in-gathering therapeutic force of secrets and secret society,Taussig
accentuates the movement outward. Together, they reinforce the two-part movement of secrecy
that we also emphasize in this volume. Again, to view religion in relation to secrecy requires paying

8
 Introduction

attention to two distinct movements. The first is that of hiding, the act of classification that removes
something or someone from sight. The second is that of release, the revelation of secrets, a return to
circulation.The return may not be of secrets as substantive information. Instead the revelation may be
about the secret, in the mode of secretism, words and acts hinting that a secret exists and is near, in spite
of its invisibility—“that which is not said even though it gets around” (Baudrillard 1990: 79).
While Luhrmann and Taussig discuss the effects of keeping and revealing secrets, the anthro-
pologist Gilbert Herdt looks more broadly at the power of secrecy to construct an entire sort of
“cultural reality” —and specifically, the cultural reality of gender. In his complex study of men’s
societies among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea, Herdt argues that secrecy is not necessarily
at odds with the dominant culture or with normative gender roles. On the contrary, secrecy
may in fact be essential to the construction of gender roles and to the normative understanding
of masculinity and femininity in a given society. Through an elaborate series of initiations and
secret rites in the Sambia men’s houses, boys are progressively transferred from the feminine
world of mothers and sisters and reborn into the masculine world of fathers and elder males.
“Ritual secrecy,” Herdt concludes, “…was an epic project of gender politics, a kind of endless
reclamation of the male body with a utopian goal: reclassifying boys as men and transferring their
subjectivities form the women’s house to the men’s house” (2003: xv).
In Herdt’s view, secrecy as a form of gender construction often plays an especially important
role in societies that face major disruptions such as violence, war, and rapid cultural range,
offering “a means of establishing trust and interdependence in times of social and political
instability” (2003: xi). This power of secrecy to construct masculinity and homosocial bonding
amidst unstable social circumstances is not limited to remote cases such as Papua New Guinea
but can also be seen in many other contexts ranging from ancient Greece to Victorian England
and America (2003: xiv; see Dover 1978; Carnes 1991).
Lastly, one of the editors of this volume, Hugh B. Urban (2021), suggests a multi-dimensional
approach to religious secrecy that brings together many of the theoretical approaches discussed so
far, while also looking closely at issues of racism, terrorism, and surveillance. Following Foucault,
Urban examines the complex relationships between secrecy, knowledge, and power; indeed, if
Foucault is correct that knowledge and power are intimately related (1980), then secrecy—as the
calculated control of information—lies at the nexus of the “power/knowledge” conjunction.The
sort of power involved here, however, is not primarily material power, but rather the more diffuse
and unseen sort that Bourdieu calls “symbolic power,” which takes the form of non-material
resources such as authority and prestige (1984, 1986).
Secrecy, Urban argues, is by no means a singular or monolithic phenomena; rather, it is best
understood as a kind of knot, node or “lynchpin”—to use Foucault’s term—in the social fabric,
which can be deployed for a wide array of different uses (Foucault 1990: 103). These include:
(1) the role of secrecy as an “adorning” possession that enhances one’s status by virtue of what
it conceals; (2) the “advertisement of the secret” or the ways in which the claim to secret know-
ledge is often announced publicly as a source of symbolic power; (3) the “seduction of the secret,”
or the often erotic play of veiling and unveiling that lies at the heart of secrecy’s allure; (4) secrecy
as “social resistance,” or the role of secrecy as means of challenging, denying, and subverting the
dominant social-political order; (5) the “terror of secrecy,” or the role of secrecy as a tactic of
religious violence, racism, and terrorism; and (6) secrecy as a “historical process,” or the changing
role of secrecy in relation to shifting social and historical contexts.
Finally, Urban argues that the power of secrecy has by no means waned in the contemporary
world but has in many ways grown even more intense in age of religious violence, terrorism,
and ever increasing government surveillance. Whereas the power of secrecy had once been held
primarily in the hands of religious institutions—the church, the lodge, the secret society—that

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power has been increasingly transferred to secular entities such as the NSA, the CIA, and (more
recently) private corporations such as Google and Facebook. The all-seeing eye in the pyramid
that once embodied “One Nation Under God” has today become the all-seeing eye of the NSA
and other agencies that command what some have called our “One Nation Under Surveillance”
(Chesterman 2013). Meanwhile, the rights to privacy on the part of ordinary citizens and reli-
gious communities—particularly marginal religious groups—has shrunken dramatically, almost
to the point of non-existence.

Methodologies and Challenges in the Study of Secrecy

In addition to complex theoretical questions, the study of religious secrecy also poses some deeply
tangled and difficult methodological problems. Among others, it raises the basic questions of how
one can—and indeed, whether one should—attempt to study a tradition that is secret and by defin-
ition off-limits to non-members of a particular religious community. There is a fundamental sort of
epistemological and ethical “double-bind” inherent in the study of secrets: namely, how can one ever
really know with certainty that one has penetrated the true “inner secret” of an esoteric tradition?
And, supposing that one could, how could one then in good conscience reveal that to a non-initiated
audience of outsiders (see Urban 1998; Apter 2007)? Or is the very attempt to do so a kind of vio-
lence or theft of another culture’s valued knowledge and symbolic resources? After all, the history of
European colonialism in India, Africa, and the Americas is filled with examples of scholars who have
invaded the esoteric traditions of other cultures, often working hand-in-hand with European imperial
powers who pillaged the material resources of those same cultures (see Clifford 1988; Urban 1998).
To make matters still more complicated, there is also a certain unevenness in the question of
which groups should be “exposed” and which should be “protected.” There is a difference, it would
seem, between revealing the secret knowledge of a religious group that has already been subjected
to political and material domination—such as Native Americans, indigenous African communities,
Australian aboriginals, or others who have been conquered and colonized—as opposed to a group
that has enjoyed tremendous political and material power—such as the Afrikaaner Broederbond in
South Africa or the many secret white supremacist groups in the contemporary United States (Tefft
1992; Berry 2017). In some circumstances, one could make a compelling argument that protecting
the secrets of a marginalized community is a moral imperative, but in others, one could argue
that revealing the secrets of a violent, oppressive, racist, or terrorist group might be an equal if not
more compelling moral imperative (see Mitchell 1993; Urban 2021).
There is surely no easy or singular answer to this complex problem of the study of others’
secrets. Each of the chapters in this volume, moreover, will offer a different sort of response to the
ethical and epistemological double bind inherent in religious secrecy. Some approach it in largely
textual and historical terms, focusing on the more visible record of what has been recorded pub-
licly about religious secrets; others approach it in more intimately ethnographic ways, exploring
the lives and experiences of members of esoteric communities; and still others discuss the para-
doxical hidden-yet-visible nature of religious secrecy itself, which is always partially revealed and
partially concealed, always “advertised” even as it is mostly kept out of public view. Our aim in
this volume is not to resolve this tension but rather to highlight it and to explore a wide variety
of different methodological approaches to the study of religious secrecy.

Outline of the Handbook

This handbook is organized in five main sections, which cover a wide range of individual religious
traditions as well as a number of larger theoretical and comparative themes. The chapters include

10
 Introduction

both narrowly-focused studies of specific historical examples and broader theoretical reflections on
secrecy as a cross-cultural category, with material drawn from antiquity to the present.
Part I, “Configurations of Religious Secrecy,” explores the larger theoretical dimensions of
secrecy and its relations to other religious phenomena, ranging from mystical experience to drug
use. The chapters in this section examine the topic of secrecy in a broad, cross-cultural context,
discussing general aspects of secrecy as they have been expressed in a number of different reli-
gious and historical examples. The “configurations” of secrecy here include: mysticism, esoteri-
cism, sexuality, architecture, the paranormal, and psychedelics.
Part II,“Secrecy as Religious Practice” then examines the role of concealment in a series of specific
religious traditions and historical case studies. Chapters in this section include more focused studies of
particular geographic regions—such as West Africa, Australia, South Asia, Japan, and China—as well
as analyses of specific esoteric religious traditions—such as Shin Buddhism, Gnosticism, Jewish mys-
ticism, and Islam. Secrecy, in turns out, is by no means unusual within or marginal to “mainstream”
religious practice but on the contrary runs through the very fabric of most traditions as the discourse
of the unseen and the transaction with hidden power that is arguably the very stuff of religion itself.
Part III, “Secrecy and the Politics of the Present,” explores a series of modern examples,
discussing the complex role of secrecy in contemporary history, politics, culture, and social
change. The chapters in this section range from studies of European Freemasonry to the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and from esoteric movements in Brazil to mystical themes
in African-American art. Far from an anachronistic leftover from the “pre-modern,” secrecy con-
tinues to pervade a wide array of contemporary religious movements and cultural phenomena.
Part IV, “Secrecy and Social Resistance,” examines the role of secrecy as a means of challen-
ging, critiquing, and/or subverting the dominant social and religious order. If secrecy can be
deployed as a powerful weapon of the state or of ruling institutions, it can also be used by mar-
ginal or persecuted minority groups as a kind of “weapon of the weak” in order to bypass, elude,
or undermine those institutions. The chapters in this section explore an array of examples of this
sort of social resistance, such as the continuation and concealment of pagan religious practices
under a Christian empire, indigenous religious practices in Hawai’i and the American Southwest,
and the complex, often dissident and subversive role of secrecy in Haiti.
Finally, Part V, “Secrecy, Terrorism, and Surveillance,” discusses the complex and changing role
of secrecy in the context of religious extremism, global violence, and new concerns over security,
information technologies, and privacy.The chapters in this section examine several forms of reli-
gious extremism—such as the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL or Da’esh) and American white power
movements—as well as the ways in which various states and government agencies—such as the
FBI, CIA, and NSA—have responded to extremists with ever more powerful and invasive tech-
nologies of surveillance. Finally, this section also examines the deep and increasingly pervasive
role of conspiracy theories and conspiratorial thinking, which seems in many ways an inescapable
counterpart to the growing power of state secrecy and surveillance.

Conclusion
Few issues so evidently link media technologies; interpersonal relations; politics, religion, and vio-
lence; not to mention contemporary debates on surveillance and privacy (Chesterman 2013; Igo
2018; Zuboff 2019). All are in significant respects structured around the question of what kind of
information is or should be secret, how said secrets are defined, bounded, and circumscribed, and
the nature of the borders separating gnostic from public or mundane knowledge. Secrecy brokers
and mediates how authority works in religion, but, even more, secrecy is constitutive of the very
notion of religion, as a special form of technique, skill, knowledge, and power that only appears

11
 Paul Christopher Johnson and Hugh B. Urban

under special circumstances, in certain places, with certain people; only in relation to certain texts
or objects, and never as a permanent state, which is why it must be continually pursued. “Doing
religion,” in whatever local terms it is cast, is never complete. It is always a process that must be
revisited, reworked, rethought, and redone. Re-, re-, re-. Always again, the need to discover or
discern the secret, the saving thing that is mostly, usually, not visible.
We leverage theories of secrecy to bring new perspectives to bear on the interpretation of the
comparative history of religions. But this Handbook also brings these theoretical frames to the
politics of the present, as well as to vivid descriptions of both mainstream and little-understood
religious movements that remain on the edge of the public sphere (as secret movements) but
nevertheless exerted, and continue to exert, considerable influence in the world that we share,
however obscured and disguised it seems to any single one of us.

Notes
1 On this point, see Otto (1958), Bok (1983), Johnson (2005), Urban (2021). As Bok put it, “The sacred
and the secret have been linked from earliest times. Both elicit feelings of…the ‘numinous consciousness’
that combines the daunting and fascinating, dread and allure. Both are defined as being apart and seen
as needing protection” (6).
2 Wrote Bruce Lincoln, “religion thus flourishes in the in-between world that we all inhabit, where the
sense of alienation is part of the normal existential state, but something which may still be overcome—
occasionally, partially, and temporarily…” (1994: 1).
3 We take this formulation from Schopenhauer.The full sentence reads:“For the world is Hell, and men are on
the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it” (1973: 48). See also Simmel (1906: 445).
4 Here we think of Adorno, among others, who saw the esotericism of U.S. astrology and its formulaic
decrees of individual fates “in the stars,” as part and parcel of that nation-state’s politics (Adorno 1994).
5 Wrote Foucault, “The transition from the public execution, with its spectacular rituals…to the penalties
of prisons buried in architectural masses and guarded by the secrecy of administrations…is the transition
from one art of punishing to another, no less skillful one” (1995: 257).
6 As Foucault put it, “silence and secrecy are a shelter for power, anchoring its prohibtions; but they also
loosen its hold and provide for relatively obscure areas of tolerance” (1990: 101).
7 In addition to the “external” secrecy leveraged by the Lakota and other Plains tribes in relation to the
U.S. government and the public, there were and are many “internal” uses of secrecy within religious
practice: the secret language of shamans, or the secrets told by spirits to individual persons, for example.
See Walker (1980: 181, 204, 208). The same dynamic is reported in many other Native American
traditions. On the Zuni, see for example, the pioneering work of Frank H. Cushing (1981).
8 See the bibliography at the end of this chapter for a more complete list of references on religious
secrecy. For a very useful bibliographic essay on religion and secrecy, see Duncan (2006). Key works in
this area include: Tefft 1980; Bellman (1984); Bolle (1987); Lindstrom 1990; Tefft (1992); Faivre (1994);
Kippenberg and Stroumsa (1995); Keen (1998); Urban (1998); Lattas 1998; Wolfson (1999); Johnson
(2005); Scheid and Teeuwen (2006); Barkun (2006); Apter (2007); Chilson (2014); Hanegraaff (2014);
Jütte (2015); DeConick (2016);Von Stuckrad 2016; Kripal (2017); Landry (2018); Urban (2021).
9 This point anticipated in key respects the argument George Batailles would make about “the sacred”
which, he argued, was perceived in the frenzy of waste—sacrifice, carnival—because only then are we
removed from the rational economy of efficiency. See Bataille (1991);Yelle (2018).
10 Though he misjudged the degree to which a modern credit-economy would remove the uses of secrecy
(Simmel 1906: 446).

References
Adorno, T.W. (1994) The Stars Down to Earth, New York: Routledge.
Apter, A. (2007) Beyond Words: Discourse and Critical Agency in Africa, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Barbour, C. (2017) Derrida’s Secret: Perjury,Testimony, Oath, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Barkun, M. (2006) “Religion and Secrecy After 9/11,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74 (2):
275–302.

12
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
off, and my skull was always the hardest, and my paddle was never
lost, and my nose was never de-Romanized by the branches, I set it
down as a maxim, to keep clear of trees in a stream.
Still it was tempting to go under shady groves when I tried to surprise
a flock of herons or a family of wild ducks.
Once we came upon twenty-four herons all together. As my boat
advanced silently, steadily gliding, it was curious to watch these birds,
who had certainly never been disturbed before by any boat in such a
place.
They stared eagerly at me and then looked at each other, and evidently
took a vote of the assembly as to what all this could mean. If birds'
faces can give any expression of their opinions, it is certain that one of
these herons was saying then to the others "Did you ever?" and an
indignant sneer was on another's beak that plainly answered, "Such
impudence indeed!" while a third added, with a sarcastic chirp, "And a
foreigner too!" But, after consultation, they always got up and circled
round, flew down stream, and then settled all again together in an
adjourned meeting. A few minutes brought me to their new retreat,
and so we went on for miles, they always flying down stream, and
always assembling, though over and over again disturbed, until an
amendment on the plan was moved and they bent their way aside.
A pleasant and favourable breeze springing up, which soon freshened
into a gale, I now set my sails, and the boat went with very great
speed; dashing over rocks and bounding past the haymakers so fast
that when one who caught sight of her had shouted to the rest of his
"mates," the sight was departed for ever before they came, and I
heard them behind me arguing, probably about the ghost.
But it was a shame to be a phantom ship too often, and it was far
more amusing to go right into the middle of these people, who knew
nothing about the canoe, who had never seen a boat, and never met a
foreigner in their lives. Thus, when a waterfall was found too high to
"shoot," or a wide barrier made it advisable to take the boat by land, I
used to walk straight into the hayfields, pushing the boat point
foremost through a hedge, or dragging her steadily over the wet
newly-mown grass in literal imitation of the American craft which could
go "wherever there was a heavy dew." On such occasions the
amazement of the untaught clowns, beholding suddenly such an
apparition, was beyond all description. Some even ran away, very often
children cried outright, and when I looked gravely on the ground as I
marched and dragged the boat, and then suddenly stopped in their
midst with a hearty laugh and an address in English, the whole
proceeding may have appeared to them at least as strange as it did to
me.

"In the Hayfields."

The water of the river all at once became here of a pale white colour,
and I was mourning that my pretty scenes below were clouded; but in
about thirty miles the pebbly deeps appeared again, and the stream
resumed its charming limpid clearness. This matter of dark or bright
water is of some importance, because, when it is clear you can easily
estimate after a little experience the general depth, even at some
distance, by the shades and hues of the water, while the sunk rocks,
big stones, and other particular obstacles are of course more visible
then.
Usually I got well enough fed at some village, or at least at a house,
but in this lonely part of the river it seemed wise to take provender
with me in the boat, and to picnic in some quiet pool, with a shady tree
above. One of the very few boats I saw on the river appeared as I was
thus engaged, and a little boy was in it. His specimen of naval
architecture (no doubt the only one he had ever seen) was an odd
contrast to the beautifully finished canoe made by Searle. He had a
pole and a shovel; the latter article he used as a paddle, and his boat
was of enormous thickness and clumsiness, made of three planks,
abundantly clamped with iron. I gave him some bread, and we had a
chat; then some butter, and then some cheese. He would not take
wine, but he produced a cigar from his wet jacket, and also two
matches, which he lighted with great skill. We soon got to be friends,
as people do who are together alone, and in the same mode of
travelling, riding, or sailing, or on camels' backs. So we smiled in
sympathy, and I asked him if he could read, and gave him a neat little
page prettily printed in German, with a red border. This he read very
nicely and was glad to put in his ragged pocket; but he could scarcely
part from me, and struggled vainly to urge his tub along with the
shovel till we came to a run of dashing waves, and then of course I had
to leave him behind, looking and yearning, with a low, murmuring
sound, and a sorrowful, earnest gaze I shall never forget.
Shoals of large and small fish are in this river, and very few fishermen.
I did not see ten men fishing in ten days. But the pretty little Kingfisher
does not neglect his proper duties, and ever and anon his round blue
back shines in the sun as he hurries away with a note of protest
against the stranger who has invaded his preserves. Bees are buzzing
while the sun is hot, and when it sinks, out gush the endless mazes of
gnats to hop and flit their tangled dances, the creatures of a day—born
since the morning, and to die at night.
Before the Danube parted with the rocks that had been on each side
for days together, it played some strange pranks among them, and
they with it.
Often they rose at each side a hundred feet without a bend, and then
behind these were broken cliffs heaved this way and that, or tossed
upside down, or as bridges hanging over chasms.
Here and there a huge splinted tooth-like spire of stone stuck out of
the water, leaning at an angle. Sometimes in front there was a veritable
upright wall, as smooth as if it were chiselled, and entirely cutting off
the middle of the stream. In advancing steadily to such a place it was
really impossible to determine on which side the stream could by any
means find an exit, and once indeed I was persuaded that it must
descend below.
In other cases the river, which had splayed out its width to that of the
Thames at Hungerford, would suddenly narrow its size to a six-foot
passage, and rush down that with a "whishhh!" The Rob Roy cheerily
sped through these, but I landed to scan the course before attempting
the most difficult cuts.—Oh how lonely it was! A more difficult vagary
to cope with was when in a dozen petty streams the water tumbled
over as many little cascades, and only one was passable—sometimes
not one. The interest of finding these, examining, trying, failing, and
succeeding, was a continuous delight, and filled up every mile with a
series of exciting incidents, till at length the rocks were done.
And now we enter a vast plain, with the stream bending round on
itself, and hurrying swiftly on through the innumerable islands, eddies,
and "snags," or trees uprooted, sticking in the water. At the most
critical part of this labyrinth we were going a tremendous pace, when
suddenly we came to a fork in the river, with the volumes of water
going down both channels nearly equal. We could not descend by one
of these because a tree would catch the mast, so I instantly turned into
the other, when up started a man and shouted impetuously that no
boat could pass by that course. It was a moment of danger, but I
lowered the sails in that moment, took down my mast, and, despite
stream and gale, I managed to paddle back to the proper channel. As
no man had been seen for hours before, the arrival of this warning
note was opportune.
A new amusement was invented to-day—it was to pitch out my empty
wine-bottle and to watch its curious bobbings and whirlings as the
current carried it along, while I floated near and compared the natural
course taken by the bottle with the selected route which intelligence
gave to the Rob Roy. Soon the bottle became impersonated, and we
were racing together, and then a sympathy began for its well-known
cork as it plumped down when its bottom struck a stone—for the bottle
drew more water than my canoe—and every time it grounded there
came a loud and melancholy clink of the glass, and down it went.
The thick bushes near the river skirted it now for miles, and at one
place I could see above me, through the upper branches, about 20
haymakers, men and women, who were honestly working away, and
therefore had not observed my approach.
I resolved to have a bit of fun here, so we closed in to the bank, but
still so as to see the industrious group. Then suddenly I began in a
very loud voice with—
"Rule, Britannia,
Britannia rules the waves."

Long before I got to the word "slaves" the whole party were like
statues, silent and fixed in amazement. Then they looked right, left,
before, behind, and upwards in all directions, except, of course, into
the river, for why should they look there? nothing had ever come up
from the river to disturb their quiet mead. I next whistled a lively air,
and then dashing out of my hiding-place stood up in my boat, and
made a brief (but, we trust, brilliant) speech to them in the best
English I could muster, and in a moment afterwards we had vanished
from their sight.
A little further on there was some road-making in progress, and I
pulled up my boat under a tree and walked up to the "barraque," or
workman's canteen, and entered among 30 or 40 German "navvies,"
who were sitting at their midday beer. I ordered a glass and drank their
health standing, paid, bowed, and departed, but a general rush ensued
to see where on earth this flannel-clad being had come from, and they
stood on the bank in a row as I waded, shoved, hauled, paddled, and
carried my boat through a troublesome labyrinth of channels and
embankments, with which their engineering had begun to spoil the
river.
But the bridges one had now more frequently to meet were far worse
encroachments of civilization, for most of them were so low that my
mast would not pass under without heeling the boat over to one side,
so as to make the mast lean down obliquely. In one case of this kind
she was very nearly shipwrecked, for the wind was so good that I
would not lower the sail, and this and a swift current took us (me and
my boat—she is now, you see, installed as a "person") rapidly to the
centre arch, when just as we entered I noticed a fierce-looking snag
with a sharp point exactly in my course. To swerve to the side would be
to strike the wooden pier, but even this would be better (for I might
ward off the violence of a blow near my hands) than to run on the
snag, which would be certain to cut a hole.
With a heavy thump on the pier the canoe began to capsize, and only
by the nearest escape was she saved from foundering. What I thought
was a snag turned out to be the point of an iron stake or railing,
carelessly thrown into the water from the bridge above.
It may be here remarked that many hidden dangers occur near
bridges, for there are wooden or iron bars fixed under water, or rough
sharp stones lying about, which, being left there when the bridge was
building, are never removed from a river not navigable or used by
boats.
Another kind of obstruction is the thin wire rope suspended across the
rivers, where a ferry is established by running a flat boat over the
stream with cords attached to the wire rope. The rope is black in
colour, and therefore is not noticed till you approach it too near to
lower the mast, but this sort of danger is easily avoided by the
somewhat sharp "look-out" which a week or two on the water makes
quite instinctive and habitual. Perhaps one of the many advantages of
a river tour is the increased acuteness of observation which it requires
and fosters.
I stopped next at a clumsy sort of town called Riedlingen, where an
Englishman is a very rare visitor. The excitement here about the boat
became almost ridiculous, and one German, who had been in America
and could jabber a little in English, was deputed to ask questions, while
the rest heard the answers interpreted.
Next morning at eight o'clock at least a thousand people gathered on
the bridge and its approaches to see the boat start, and shoals of
schoolboys ran in, each with his little knapsack of books.[XIII.]
The scenery after this became of only ordinary interest compared with
what I had passed through, but there would have been little spare time
to look at it had it been ever so picturesque, for the wind was quite a
gale,[XIV.] and right in my favour, and the stream was fast and tortuous
with banks, eddies, and innumerable islands and cross channels, so
that the navigation occupied all one's energy, especially as it was a
point of honour not to haul down the sail in a fair wind.
Midday came, and yet I could find no place to breakfast, though the
excitement and exertion of thus sailing was really hard work. But still
we hurried on, for dark clouds were gathering behind, and thunder and
rain seemed very near.
"Ah," said I inwardly, "had I only listened to that worthy dame's
entreaties this morning to take good provision for the day!" She had
smiled like the best of mothers, and timidly asked to be allowed to
touch my watch-chain, "it was so schon," so beautiful to see. But,
oddly enough, we had taken no solid food on board to-day, being so
impatient to get off when the wind was strong and fair. The rapid pace
then brought us to Ehingen, the village I had marked on the map for
this night's rest. But now we came there it was found to be too soon—I
could not stop for the day with such a splendid breeze inviting
progress; nor would it do to leave the boat on the bank and go to the
village to eat, for it was too far from the river, and so the current and
sails must hurry us on as before.
Now and then I asked some gazing agriculturist on the bank where the
nearest houses were, but he never could understand that I meant
nearest, and also close to the river; so the end of every discussion was
that he said, "Ya vol," which means in Yankee tongue, "That's so"; in
Scottish, "Hoot, aye"; in Irish, "Troth, an' it is"; and in French, "C'est
vrai"; but then none of this helps one a bit.
I therefore got first ravenous and then faint, and after mounting the
bank to see the turns of the river in advance, I actually fell asleep
under a tree. The wind had quite subsided when I awoke, and then
quaffed deep draughts of water and paddled on.
The banks were now of yellow mud, and about eight or ten feet high,
quite straight up from the water, just like those on the Nile, and several
affluent streams ran from the plain to join the river. Often, indeed, I
saw a church tower right ahead, and laboured along to get there, but
after half-a-mile the stream would turn sharp round to one side, and
still more and more round, and at last the tower once in front was
directly behind us. The explanation of this tormenting peculiarity was
simply this,—that the villages were carefully built away from the river
bank because it is a bad foundation, and is washed away as new
channels are formed by the flood.
When the light began to fail I took a good look at the map, and
serpentine bends were marked on it plain enough indeed, but only in
one-half of their actual number; and, moreover, I saw that in the forest
we had now entered there would be no suitable villages at all. The
overhanging trees made a short twilight soon deepen into night; and to
add to the interest the snags suddenly became numerous, and some of
them waved about in the current, as they do on the Upper Mississippi,
when the tenacious mud holds down the roots merely by its weight. All
this made it necessary to paddle slowly and with great caution, and to
cross always to the slack side of the stream instead of by one's usual
course, which, in descending, is to keep with the rapid current.
Sometimes I had to back out of shallows which were invisible in the
dark, and often I stopped a long time before a glance of some ripple
obscurely told me the probable course. The necessity for this caution
will be evident when it is remembered that in case of an upset here
both sets of clothes would have been wet together, and without any
house at hand to dry them.
All at once I heard a bell toll quite near me in the thick wood, and I
came to the bank, but it was impossible to get ashore on it, so I
passed that place too, and finally made up my mind to sleep in the
boat, and soon had all sorts of plans in course of devising.
Just then two drops of rain came on my nose, and I resolved at once to
stop, for if my clothes got wet before I was snug in the canoe there
would be little comfort all night, without anything solid to eat since
morning, and all my cigars already puffed away.
As I now cautiously searched for some root projecting from the bank to
make fast to, a light appeared straight in front, and I dashed forward
with the boat to reach it, and speedily ran her into a strange sort of
lake or pond, where the stream ceased, and a noise on the boat's side
told of weeds, which proved to be large round leaves on the surface,
like those of the Victoria Regia lily.
I drew up the boat on shore, and mounted the
high bank through a thicket, carrying my long
paddle as a protection against the large dogs
which farmhouses sport here, and which might
be troublesome to quarrel with in the dark. The
house I came to on the top of the precipice had
its window lighted, and several people were
talking inside, so I knocked loudly, and all was
silence. Then I knocked again, and whined out
that I was a poor benighted "Englander," and
hoped they would let me in, at which melancholy
tale they burst out laughing, and so did I! After
an argument between us, which was equally
intelligible on both sides, a fat farmer cautiously
took the light upstairs, and, opening a window,
thrust the candle forward, and gazed out upon
me standing erect as a true Briton, and with my
paddle, too, but in reality a humiliated vagrant
begging for a night's lodging.
 After due scrutiny he pulled in his head and his
candle, shut the window, and fell to laughing
immoderately. At this I was glad, for I never found
it difficult to get on with a man who begins in good
humour.
Presently the others went up, and I stood their
gaze unflinchingly, and, besides, made an eloquent
appeal in the vernacular—mine, not theirs, be it
clearly understood.
Finally they were satisfied that I was alone, and,
though probably mad, yet not quite a match for all
of them, so they came down gallantly; but then
there was the difficulty of persuading the man to
grope down to the river on this dark night to carry
up a boat.
With some exertion we got it up by a better way,
and safely locked it in the cowhouse of another
establishment, and there I was made thoroughly comfortable. They
said they had nothing to eat but kirchwasser, bread, and eggs, and
how many eggs would I like? so I said, "To begin with, ten," and I ate
them every one. By this time the priest had come; they often used to
send for the prester to do the talk. The large room soon got full, and
the sketch-book was passed round, and an India-rubber band made
endless merriment for the smaller fry, all in the old routine, the very
mention of which it may be tedious to hear of so often, as indeed it
was to me to perform.
But then in each case it was their first time of going through the
performance, and they were so kind and courteous one could not
refuse to please such people. The priest was very communicative, and
we tried to converse in Latin, for my German was not good enough for
him nor his French for me. But we soon agreed that it was a long time
since our schoolboy Latin days, though I recollect having had long
conversations in Latin with a monk at Nazareth, but there we had ten
days together, and so had time to practise.
Thus ended the 1st of September, the only occasion on which I had to
"rough it" at all during the voyage; and even then, it may be seen, the
very small discomforts were all the results of gross want of prudence
on my own part, and ended merely by a hard day's work with breakfast
and dinner merged into a late supper. My bill here was 3s. 6d., the day
before, 4s. 6d., including always wine and luxuries.
CHAPTER VI.
Day-dream—River Iller—Ulm—A stiff king—Lake Constance—Seeing in the
dark—Switzerland—Coloured Canvas—Sign talk—Synagogue—Amelia
—Gibberish.

The threatening rain had not come during the night, and it was a
lovely morning next day, like all the rest before and after it; and as
we were leaving this place I found it was called Gegglingen,[XV.] and
was only nine miles from Ulm.
The lofty tower of the Cathedral of this town soon came in view, but
I noticed it without any pleasure, for this was to end my week on
the Danube; and in my ship's log it is entered as "one of the most
pleasant weeks of my life for scenery, health, weather, exercise, and
varied adventure."
In a pensive mood, therefore, I landed at a garden, and reclined on
a warm mossy bank to have a rest and a day-dream, but very soon
the loud booming of artillery aroused the hill echoes, and then sharp
rattling of infantry firing. The heights around were crested with
fringes of blue-coated soldiers and glistening bayonets, amid the soft
round, cotton-like volumes of smoke from the great guns spurting
out fire long before the sound comes. It was a review of troops and
a sham attack on a fort surmounting the hill, near the battlefield of
long years ago at Ulm. If they fought in heat and fury, let them now
rest in peace.
Come back, my thoughts, to the river at my feet.
I had been with this river from its infancy, nay, even from its birth in
the Schwartzwald. I had followed it right and left, as it seemed to
toddle in zigzag turnings like a child; and I had wound with it hither
and thither as it roamed away further like free boyhood. Then it
grew in size by feeding on the oozy plain, and was still my
companion when it got the strength of youth, dashing over the
rocks, and bounding through the forests; and I had come at last to
feel its powerful stream stronger than my strength, and compelling
my respect. And now, at Ulm, I found it a noble river, steady and
swift, as if in the flower of age; but its romance was gone. It had
boats on it, and navigation, and bridges, and railways, like other
great waters; and so I would let it go on alone, tumbling, rushing,
swelling, till its broad bosom bears whole fleets at Ofen, and at
length as a great water giant it leaps down headlong into the Black
Sea.
Having seen Ulm in a former tour, I was in no mood to "go over" the
sights again, nor need they be related here, for it is only river travel
and lake sailing that we are concerned with; while reference may be
made to the Guide-books if you wish to hear this sort of thing: "Ulm,
lat. 97°, an old Cathedral (a) town, on two (§) hills (see Appx.). Pop.
9763; situated †† on the Danube." At that I stop, and look into the
water once more.
The river is discoloured here,—what is called in Scotland "drumly;"
and this seems partly owing to the tributary Iller, which rises in the
Tyrol, and falls into the Danube, a little way above the town. The
Iller has a peculiar air of wild, forlorn bleakness, with its wide
channel half occupied by cold white gravel, and its banks scored and
torn, with weird, broken roots, gnarled trees, bleakness and fallen,
all lying dishevelled; surely in flood times, and of dark wintry nights,
a very deluge boils and seethes along there.
Then, at last, there are the barges on the Danube, and very
rudimental they are; huge in size, with flat bottoms, and bows and
stems cocked up, and a roofed house in the middle of their
sprawling length. The German boys must have these models before
them when they make the Noah's Arks for English nurseries; and
Murray well says of these barges, they are "nothing better than
wooden sheds floating in flat trays."
In 1839 a steamer was tried here, but it got on a bank, and the
effort was abandoned; so you have to go on to Donauwerth before
this mode of travelling is reached, but from thence you can steam
down to the Black Sea, and the passage boats below Vienna are
very fast and well appointed.
Rafts there are at Ulm, but we suppose the timber for them comes
by the Iller, for I did not notice any logs descending the upper part
of the Danube.
Again, there are the public washhouses in the river, each of them a
large floating establishment, with overhanging eaves, under which
you can see, say, fifty women all in a row, half kneeling or leaning
over the low bulwarks, and all slapping your best shirts mercilessly.
I made straight over to these ladies, and asked how the Rob Roy
could get up so steep a bank, and how far it was to the railway; and
so their senior matron kindly got a man and a hand-cart for the
boat, and, as the company of women heard it was from England,
they all talked louder and more together, and pounded and smacked
the unfortunate linen with additional emphasis.
The bustle at the railway-station was only half about the canoe; the
other half was for the King of Wurtemburg, who was getting into his
special train to go to his palace at Fredrickshafen.
Behold me, then, fresh from Gegglingen and snags, in the
immediate presence of Royalty! But this King was not at all kingly,
though decidedly stiff. He is, however, rather amusing sometimes; as
when by his order, issued lately, he compels sentries to salute even
empty Royal carriages.
I got a newspaper here, and had twelve days to overtake of the
world's doings while we had roamed in hill, forest, and waves. Yet I
had been always asked there to "give the news," and chiefly on two
points,—the Great Eastern, with its electric cable, and the
catastrophe on the Matterhorn glacier, the two being at times
vaguely associated, as if the breaking of the cable in the one had
something to do with the loss of mountaineers in the other.
So, while I read, the train bore us southwards to Fredrickshafen, the
canoe being charged as baggage three shillings, and patiently
submitting to have a numbered label pasted on its pretty brown
face.
This lively port, on the north side of the Lake of Constance, has a
charming view in front of it well worth stopping to enjoy. It is not fair
to treat it as only a half-hour's town, to be seen while you are
waiting for the lake steamer to take you across to Switzerland.
But now I come to it for a Sunday's rest (if you wish to travel fast
and far, rest every Sunday), and, as the hotel faced the station, and
the lake faced the hotel, this is the very place to stop in with a
canoe.
So we took the boat upstairs into a loft, where the washerwoman
not only gave room for the well worked timbers of the Rob Roy to be
safe and still, but kindly mended my sails, and sundry other odds
and ends of a wardrobe, somewhat disorganized by rough times.
Next day there was service in the Protestant church, a fine building,
well filled, and duly guarded by a beadle in bright array.
The service began by a woman singing "Comfort ye" from Handel, in
exquisite taste and simple style, with a voice that made one forget
that this solemn melody is usually sung by a man. Then a large
number of school children were ranged in the chancel, round a
crucifix, and sang a very beautiful hymn, and next the whole
congregation joined in chanting the psalms in unison, with tasteful
feeling and devoutness. A young German preacher gave us an
eloquent sermon, and then the people were dismissed.
The afternoon was drummed away by two noisy bands, evidently
rivals, and each determined to excel the other in loudness, while
both combined to persecute the poor visitors who do wish for
quietness, at any rate once a week. I could scarcely escape from this
din in a long walk by the lake, and on coming back found a man
bathing by moonlight, while rockets, squibs, and Catherine wheels
were let off in his boat. Better indeed was it to look with entranced
eyes on the far off snowy range, now lit up by the full harvest moon,
and on the sheen of "each particular star," bright above, and bright
again below, in the mirror of the lake.
The Lake of Constance is forty-four miles long, and about nine miles
wide. I could not see a ripple there when the Rob Roy was launched
at early morn, with my mind, and body, and soul refreshed, and an
eager longing to begin the tour of Switzerland once more, but now
in so new a fashion. Soon we were far from the shore, and in that
middle distance of the lake where all sides seem equally near, and
where the "other side" appears never to get any nearer as you go
on. Here, in the middle, I rested for a while, and the sensation then
was certainly new. Beauty was everywhere around, and there was
full freedom to see it. There was no cut-and-dry route to be
followed, no road, not even a track on the water, no hours, or time
to constrain. I could go right or left by a stroke of the paddle, and I
was utterly my own master of whither to steer, and where to stop.
The "pat-a-pat" of a steamer's wheels was the only sound, and that
was very distant, and when the boat came near, the passengers
cheered the canoe, and smiles of (was it not?) envy told of how
pleasant and pretty she looked. After a little wavering in my plans, I
settled it was best to go to the Swiss side, and, after coasting by the
villages, I selected a little inn in a retired bay, and moored my boat,
and ordered breakfast. Here was an old man of eighty-six, landlord
and waiter in one, a venerable man, and I respect age more while
growing older.
He talked with me for five hours while I ate, read, and sketched, and
feasted my eyes on mountain views, and answered vaguely to his
remarks, said in a sleepy way, and in a hot, quiet, basking sun.
There are peaceful and almost dreamy hours of rest in this water
tour, and they are sweet too after hard toil. It is not all rapids and
struggles when you journey with a canoe.
Close to the inn was the idiot asylum, an old castle with poor
demented women in it. The little flag of my boat attracted their
attention, and all the inmates were allowed to come out and see it,
with many smiles of pleasure, and many odd remarks and gestures.
Disentangling myself from this strange group, I landed again further
down, and, under a splendid tree, spent an hour or two in
carpenter's work (for I had a few tools on board), to repair the
boat's damages and to brighten her up a bit for the English eyes I
must expect in the next part of the voyage.
Not a wave had energy to rise on the lake in the hot sun. A sheep-
bell tinkled now and then, but in a tired, listless, and irregular way. A
gossamer spider had spun his web from my mast to the tree above,
and wagtails hopped near me on the stones, and turned an inquiring
little eye to the boat half in the water, and its master reclining on the
grass. It was an easy paddle from this to the town of Constance, at
the end of the lake.
Here a douanier made a descent upon me and was inexorable. "You
must have the boat examined." "Very well, pray examine it." His
Chief was absent, and I must put the canoe in the Custom-house till
to-morrow morning. An hour was wasted in palaver about this, and
at first I protested vigorously against such absurdity in "free
Switzerland." But Constance is not in Switzerland, it is in the Grand
Duchy of Baden, and so to keep it "grand," they must do very little
things, and at any rate can trouble travellers. At length an obliging
native, ashamed of the proceeding, remonstrated with the douanier,
and persuaded him at least to search the boat and let it pass.
He took as much time to inspect as if she were a brig of 300 tons,
and, when he came to look at the stern, I gravely pointed to a round
hole cut in the partition for this very purpose! Into this hole he
peered, while the crowd was hushed in silence, and as he saw
nothing but darkness, extremely dark, for (nothing else was there),
he solemnly pronounced the canoe "free," and she was duly borne
to the hotel.
But Constance once had a man in it who was really "grand," John
Huss, the noble martyr for the truth. In the Council Hall you see the
veritable cell in which he was imprisoned some hundreds of years
ago, and on a former visit I had seen, from the tower, through a
telescope, the field where the faggots burned him, and from whence
his great soul leaped up to heaven out of the blazing pile.
"Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
E'en them who kept thy truth so pure of old
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones."

—Milton.

Does not a thought or two on such great things make other common
things look small?
True and good—but we may not stop always in the lake to ponder
thus, for the current is moving again, so let us launch the Rob Roy
on our old friend, the Rhine.
It is a change to cross a quiet lake after being hurried on a rapid
stream like the Danube, and now it is another change to paddle
from the lake into a wide river like the Rhine, which speeds fast and
steady among lively scenes. The water is deep, and of a faint blue,
but clear enough to show what is below. The pebbly bottom seems
to roll towards you from underneath, and village churches appear to
spin quietly round on the banks, for the land and its things seem to
move, not the water, so glassy its surface steadily flowing.
Here are the fishers again, slowly paying out their fine-spun nets,
and there is a target-hut built on four piles in the river.
The target itself is a great cube of wood, say six feet on each side. It
is fired at from another hut perched also on post in the water, and a
"marker" safely placed behind the great block of wood turns it round
on a vertical pivot, and so patches up the bullet-hole, and indicates
its position to those who have fired.
The Rhine suddenly narrows soon after leaving the Boden See, or
Lake Constance as we call it, but the banks again open out till it is a
mile or two in breadth. Here and there are grassy islands, and you
may notice, by long stakes stuck on the shallows, which tremble as
the water presses them, that the channel for steamers is very
roundabout, though the canoe will skim over any part of it
comfortably. Behind each islet of tall reeds there is a fishing-boat
held fast by two poles stuck in the bottom of the river; or it is
noiselessly moving to a more lucky pool, sculled by the boatman,
with his oar at only one side,—rather a novel plan,—while he pays
out the net with his other hand. Rudely-made barges are afloat, and
seem to turn round helplessly in the current of the deeper parts, or
hoist their great square sails in the dead calm—perhaps for the
appearance of the thing—a very picturesque appearance, as the sail
has two broad bands of dark blue cloth for its centre stripes. But the
pointed lateen sail of Geneva is certainly a more graceful rig than
the lug, especially when there are two masts, and the white sails
swell towards you, goosewinged, before a flowing breeze.
The river has probably a very uneven bottom in this part, for the
water sometimes rushes round in great whirlpools, and strange
overturnings of itself, as if it were boiling from below in exuberant
volume with a gushing upwards; and then again, it wheels about in
a circle with a sweep far around, before it settles to go onward.[XVI.]
On the borders of Switzerland the German and French tongues are
both generally known at the hotels, and by the people accustomed
to do business with foreigners travelling among them.
But in your course along a river these convenient waiters and
polyglot commissionaires are not found exactly in attendance at
every village, and it is, therefore, to the bystanders or casual
loungers your observations must be addressed.
Frequent intercourse with natives of strange countries, where there
is no common language between them and the tourist, will gradually
teach him a "sign language" which suits all people alike.
Thus, in any place, no matter what was their dialect, it was always
easy to induce one or two men to aid in carrying the canoe. The
formula for this was something in the following style.
I first got the boat on shore, and a crowd of course soon collected,
while I arranged its interior, and sponged out the splashed water,
and fastened the cover down. Then, tightening my belt for a walk, I
looked round with a kind smile, and selecting a likely man, would
address him in English deliberately as follows—suiting each action to
the word, for I have always found that sign language is made more
natural when you speak your own tongue all the time you are
acting:—"Well now, I think as you have looked on enough and have
seen all you want, it's about time to go to an hotel, a gasthaus.
Here! you—yes, you!—just take that end of the boat up, so,—gently,
'langsam!' 'langsam!'—all right, yes, under your arm, like this,—now
march off to the best hotel, gasthaus."

"Langsam."

Then the procession naturally formed itself. The most humorous

boys of course took precedence, because of services or mischief
willing to be performed; and, meanwhile, they gratuitously danced
about and under the canoe like Fauns around Silenus. Women only
came near and waited modestly till the throng had passed. The
seniors of the place kept on the safer confines of the movement,
where dignity of gait might comport with close observation.
In a case of sign talking like the foregoing you can be helped by one
substantive and one adverb; and if you pronounce these clearly, and
use them correctly, while all the other expressions are evidently your
language and not theirs, they will understand it much better than if
you try signs in dumb show or say the whole in bad German, and so
give rise to all possible mistakes of your meaning.
But it is quite another matter when you have forgotten (or have
never acquired) the foreign word for the noun you wish to name,
though, even then, by well chosen signs, and among an intelligent
people, a good deal can be conveyed, as may be shown in the
following cases.
Once I was riding among the Arabs along the Algerian coast, on my
way from Carthage, and my guide, a dense Kabyle, was evidently
taking me past a place I wished to visit, and which had been duly
entered in the list when he was engaged.
I could not make him understand this, for my limited Arabic had
been acquired under a different pronunciation in Syria; but one
night, it happened that a clever chief had me in a tent, or rather a
hut, just like the top of a gipsy cart. I explained to him by signs (and
talking English) that the muleteer was taking me past the place it
was desired to see. Then I tried to pronounce the name of that
place, but was always wrong, or he could not make it out; it was
Maskutayn, or "bewitched waters," a wonderful volcanic valley, full of
boiling streams and little volcanoes of salt.
At length, sitting in the moonlight, signs were tried even for this
difficult occasion. I put my chibouque (pipe) under the sand and
took water in my hand, and as he looked on intently—for the Arabs
love this speaking action—I put water on the fire in the pipe-bowl,
and blew it up through the sand, talking English all the time. This
was done again, and suddenly the black lustrous eyes of the
Ishmaelite glistened brighter. He slapped his forehead. He jumped
up. You could almost be sure he said "I know it now;" and then he
roused the unfortunate muleteer from his snorings to give him an
energetic lecture, by means of which we were directed next day
straight to the very place I desired to find.
In a few cases of this international talking it becomes necessary to
sketch pictures, which are even better than signs, but not among
Arabs. During a visit to the fair of Nijni Novgorod, in the middle of
Russia, I passed many hours in the "Chinese street" there, and
found it was very difficult to communicate with Ching Loo, and even
signs were useless. But they had some red wax about the tea-
chests, and there was a white wall beside us, so upon this I put the
whole story in large pictures, with an explanatory lecture in English
all the time, which proceeding attracted an audience of several
scores of Chinamen and Kalmuks and other outlandish people, and
the particular group I meant to enlighten seemed perfectly to
understand all that was desired.
And so we suppose that if you can work your paddle well, and learn
the general sign language, and a little of the pencil tongue, you can
go very far in a canoe without being starved or homeless; while you
are sure to have a wide field in which to study the various degrees
of intelligence among those you meet.
To come back, however, from the Volga to the Rhine.
The current flows more and more gently as we enter the Zeller See,
or Unter See, a lake which would be called pretty if our taste has not
been sated for a while by having a snowy range for the background
to the views on Constance.
But the Lake of Constance sadly wants islands, and here in the Zeller
See are several, one of them being of great size. The Emperor of the
French had passed two days at his chateau on this lake, just before
we arrived. No doubt he would have waited a week had he known
the Rob Roy was coming.[XVII.]
However, as we were too late to breakfast with his Majesty, I pulled
in at the village of Steckborn, where an inn is built on the actual
edge of the water, a state of things most convenient for the aquatic
tourist, and which you find often along this part of the Rhine. In a
case of this sort you can tap at the door with the paddle, and order
a repast before you debark, so that it is boiling and fizzing, and the
table is all ready, while you put things to rights on board, and come
leisurely ashore, and then tie the boat to the window balcony, or, at
any rate, in some place where it can be seen all the time you
breakfast or dine, and rest, and read, and draw.
Experience proved that very few boys, even of the most mischievous
species, will meddle with a boat which is floating, but that very few
men, even of the most amiable order, will refrain from pulling it
about when the little craft is left on shore.
To have your boat not only moored afloat but in your sight too,—
that is perfection, and it is worth additional trouble to arrange this,
because then and for hours of the midday stoppage, you will be
wholly at ease, or at any rate, you will have one care the less, the
weary resting traveller will not then be anxious about his absent
boat, as if it were a valuable horse in a strange stable.
The landlord was much interested in the story of my voyage as
depicted in the sketch-book, so he brought a friend to see me who
could speak French, and who had himself constructed a boat of two
tin tubes,[XVIII.] on which a stage or frame is supported, with a seat
and rowlocks, the oddest looking thing in nautical existence. I
persuaded him to put this institution into the water, and we started
for a cruise; the double-tube metal boat, with its spider-like gear
aloft, and the oak canoe, so low and rakish, with its varnished cedar
deck, and jaunty flag, now racing side by side, each of them a rare
sight, but the two together quite unprecedented.
The river here is like parts of the Clyde and the Kyles of Bute, with
French villages let in, and an Italian sky stretched overhead. We
rowed across to a village where a number of Jews live, for I wished
to visit their Synagogue; but, lo! this was the Grand Duchy of Baden
land, and a heavily-armed sentry found us invading the dominion, so
he deployed and formed square to force us to land somewhere else.
The man was civil, but his orders were unreasonable, so we merely
embarked again and went over to Switzerland, and ran our little fleet
into a bramble bush, to hide it while we mounted to an auberge on
the hill for a sixpenny bottle of wine.
The pretty Swiss lass in charge said she once knew an Englishman—
but "it was a pity they were all so proud." He had sent her a letter in
English, which I asked her to let me read for her. It began, "My dear
little girl, I love you;" and this did not sound so very proud for a
beginning. My boating friend promised to make her a tin cafetiere,
and so it may be divined that he was the tinman of the village, and a
most agreeable tinman too.
She came to see us on board, and her father arrived just in time to
witness a triangular parting, which must have puzzled him a good
deal, Amelia waving farewell to a "proud" Englishman and a nautical
whitesmith, who both took leave also of each other, the last sailing
away with huge square yards and coloured canvas, and the Rob Roy
drifting with the stream in the opposite direction.
Every day for weeks past had been as a picnic to me, but I
prolonged this one into night, the air was so balmy and the red sun
setting was so soon replaced by the white moon rising, and besides,
the navigation here had no dangers, and there were villages every
few miles.
When I had enough of it, cruising here and there by moonlight, I
drew up to the town of Stein, but all was now lonely by the water-
side. This is to be expected when you arrive late; however, a slap or
two on the water with the paddle, and a loud verse of a song,
Italian, Dutch, a pibroch, any noise in fact, soon draws the idlers to
you, and it is precisely the idlers you want.
One of them readily helped me with the boat to an inn, where an
excellent landlady greeted the strange guest. From this moment all
was bustle there, and very much it was increased by a German
guest, who insisted on talking to me in English, which I am sure I
did not understand a bit better than the Germans who came to listen
and look on.
 CHAPTER VII.
Fog—Fancy pictures—Boy soldiers—Boat's billet—Eating—Lake Zurich—
Crinoline—Hot walk—Staring—Lake Zug—Swiss shots—Fishing Britons
—Talk-book.

In the morning there was a most curious change of air; all around
was in a dense white fog. Truly it was now to be "sensation rowing;"
so we hastened to get off into this milky atmosphere. I have an idea
that we passed under a bridge; at least the usual cheers sounded
this time as if they were above me, but the mist was as thick as our
best November Cheshire-cheese fogs, and quite as interesting. On
several occasions I positively could not see the bow of my boat, only
a few feet from my nose. The whole arrangement was so
unexpected and entirely novel,—paddling on a fast invisible stream—
that I had the liveliest emotions of pleasure without seeing anything
at all.
But then fancy had free play all the time, and the pictures it drew
were vivid and full of colour, and, after all, our impressions of
external objects are only pictures, so say the philosophers; and why
not then enjoy a tour in a fog, with a good album of pictures making
the while in the brain?
Sounds too there were, but like those of witches and fairies—though
perhaps it was only the cackling of some antique washerwomen on
the banks. However, I addressed the unseen company in both prose
and poetry, and was full of emphasis, which now and again was
increased by my boat running straight into the shore.
The clearing away of the fog was one of the most interesting
evolutions of nature to be seen. In one sort or other every traveller
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