Secrecy: Silence, Power, and Religion by Hugh B. Urban

Abstract

Reviewed by: Secrecy: Silence, Power, and Religion by Hugh B. Urban Dmitry Galtsin hugh b. urban. Secrecy: Silence, Power, and Religion. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 2021. Pp. 264. Hugh Urban's book Secrecy: Silence, Power, and Religion was published in 2021, the result of decades-long interest in secrecy and religion, as well as the continuation of the author's studies in Indian Tantra, Western sex magic, and modern esoteric movements.1 Urban's book is focused on "secrecy as [End Page 464] power," and especially "the unique sort of power that religious claims to transcendent authority can wield" (2). The author intends to "theorize secrecy as a broader, cross-cultural, and comparative phenomenon in the history of religion," being preoccupied with "the mysterious workings of power and … the more this-worldly, historical, and material aspects of claims to hidden knowledge" (3). In Urban's view, "secrecy is better understood as a crucial part of the construction of religious authority itself and a fundamental element in both the maintenance and the dismantling of religious power in relation to broader social, political, and historical interests" (4). He claims to be engaged with "critical history of religion" (4), which can't help but bring to mind the basic Marxist approach, having at its core the strategy of unmasking religious claims by deconstructing them into elements, which point to the "material" (whatever is meant by the term) interests and processes, allegedly reflected in human consciousness as religion. The author explicitly speaks of the political implications of the method employed in his study: "The task of the critical history of religion in the twenty-first century is … at least twofold. Not only is our challenge to critically examine religion itself … it is also to examine the state (and now also the corporate) entities that surveil, regulate, censor, and in some cases criminalize religious groups, particularly those that stray outside the margins of 'legitimate' religiosity (particularly, Muslims, people of color, new or alternative religious movements, and those who express dissident political views)" (205). Urban criticizes, on one hand, those historians of religion who, admitting that secrecy is central for their field of study, nevertheless leave the study of secrecy "disappointedly vague, general, and theoretically undeveloped" (3), and on the other those who speak of the "decline in secrecy" following the French Revolution, industrialization, and disenchantment of the world (5–8). Urban views mature and late modernity as the time of "a tremendous new interest in secrecy, in the proliferation of secret societies, esoteric brotherhoods, occult movements, and in the mysteries of the exotic Orient" (5). At the same time, the end of this period in the second half of the twentieth century has seen an unprecedented rise in secrecy related to politics, especially in the United States, as reflected in the quote from David Cole: "Today, it is the citizenry that is increasingly transparent while government operations are shrouded in secrecy" (8). In order to examine secrecy as power, Urban analyzes several phenomena related to the sphere of esotericism and fringe religion, such as Freemasonry and Theosophy of the late nineteenth century, [End Page 465] sex magic of the first third of the twentieth century, the Nation of Islam of the second half of the twentieth century, white supremacy terrorist movements of the 1970s and 1980s, and Scientology of the late twentieth and twenty-first century. Secrecy is understood throughout the book as "a kind of strategy … for acquiring, enhancing, preserving, and/or protecting power" (10). The "power" here is, of course, Pierre Bourdieu's symbolic power, "a power, which the person submitting to grants to the person who exercises it, a credit which he credits his, a fides, an auctoritas … It is a power which exists because the person who submits to it believes that it exists" (10). Secrecy is thus a means of obtaining, preserving, and making symbolic capital: any information guarded by secrecy becomes valuable insofar as it becomes secret and thus contributes to the economy of secrets, the market of exoteric and occult ideas being part of this economy. As a strategy of dealing with symbolic capital, secrecy is subject to a complex dialectics of adornment and vestment...