Secrecy: silence, power, and religion

The vestment of power -- The adornment of silence : secrecy and symbolic power in American Freemasonry -- The secret doctrine : the advertisement of the secret in the Theosophical Society and the Esoteric Section -- The seduction of the secret : eros and magic in twentieth-century Europe -- Secrecy and social resistance : the Five-Percenters and the arts of subversive bricolage -- The terror of secrecy : racism, masculinity, and violence in the late Brüder Schweigen -- The third wall of fire : Scientology and the study of religious secrecy in the twenty-first century -- The science of the hidden : secrecy and the critical study of religion in an age of surveillance.

"Urban focuses on six modalities of religious secrecy, each illustrated by one primary example. He starts with nineteenth-century Scottish Rite Freemasonry, then moves to the Theosophical Society of the late nineteenth century; the sexual magic of a Russian-born Parisian mystic, Maria de Naglowska, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Five Percenters, a radical offshoot of the Nation of Islam that formed in the 1960s; and white supremacist movements in modern America, especially the Brüder Schweigen or "Silent Brotherhood" of the 1980s. The final example is the Church of Scientology, allowing Urban to examine the role of secrecy as a dynamic historical process that adapts over time. A bracing read, Secrecy is the culmination of decades of Urban's reflections, and provides an indispensable account of a vexed, ever-present subject"

Includes bibliographical references and index.