Dictionary

secretist en · NOUN

Etymology

From secret + -ist.

Meanings

1. (obsolete) A dealer in secrets or arcana.
   • The thirteenth century Zohar, a Jewish mystical text, announced its value in secretist terms, featuring as its main sections "The Secret Midrash,” Midrash ha-Neelam, and “Secrets of the Torah” Sitre Torah. 2024, David Tavárez, The Oxford Handbook of Ritual Language, page 89:
   • Laboratories were to be contrasted with the private shrines of "secretist” philosophers and Hermetics whom Boyle criticized for their refusal to communicate in public. 2011, Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump:
   • Boyle condemned "the avarice" of those "secretists" who secured profit through the practice of intellectual privacy . 2011, Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth, page 175:
   • They reinforce their linkage of the Royal Society's program with Restoration social order by heaping together as ther opposite "the knowledge claims of alchemical 'secretists' and of sectarian ' enthusiasts ' who claimed individual and unmediated inspiration from God , or whose solitary treading [ sic ] of the Book of Nature produced unverifiable observational testimony . 2018, Lawrence Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest, page 108:
2. A secretive person; a keeper of secrets.
   • When the slave-girl heard these words she said, "O my lord, indeed a secret is not lost whereof thou art the secretist; nor shall any affair come to naught for which thou strivest. 2022, Richard F. Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, page 290:
   • The monarch frames his defense with a definition of a good prince as categorically without private interests: "for Kings being publike persons, by reason of the office and authority, are as it were set (as it was said of old) upon a publike stage, in the sight of all the people, where all the beholders eyes are attentively bent to look and pry in the last circumstance of their secretist drifts." 2019, Katarzyna Lecky, Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance, page 116:
   • An exhibitionist rather than a secretist, Crowley published much material that was previously hidden from the public. 2003, Daniel Harms, John Wisdom Gonce, The Necronomicon Files: The Truth Behind The Legend:
   • In the old days the secretist party would have regarded this publication as a policy which led the nation in the direct line of "losing the war". 2022, William J. Claxton, The Mastery of the Air:
3. A member of a secret society or a known society with secret ceremonies.
   • In the previous discussion of secrecy, we distilled many of the variants of secretist practice and the social formations linked to them . 2002, Paul Christopher Johnson, Secrets, Gossip, and Gods, page 59:
   • No oathbound secretist is free to obey God, or church, or State; he must obey the behest of an irresponsible society, or as it may prove to be, a band of infamous conspirators. 1890, The Reformed Presbyterian and Covenanter - Volume 28, page 216:
   • The resolution was adopted with little difficulty, and all communion with secretists and all reception of secret society members ceased . 1905, Matthias Loy, Story of My Life, page 184:

Forms

Relateds

secretism