# secretist
## English
### Etymology

From secret +‎ -ist.

### Noun

secretist (plural secretists)
* (obsolete) A dealer in secrets or arcana.
** 2011, Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth, page 175:Boyle condemned "the avarice" of those "secretists" who secured profit through the practice of intellectual privacy .
** 2011, Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump:Laboratories were to be contrasted with the private shrines of "secretist” philosophers and Hermetics whom Boyle criticized for their refusal to communicate in public.
** 2018, Lawrence Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest, page 108: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 .
** 2024, David Tavárez, The Oxford Handbook of Ritual Language, page 89: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.
* A secretive person; a keeper of secrets.
** 2003, Daniel Harms, John Wisdom Gonce, The Necronomicon Files: The Truth Behind The Legend:An exhibitionist rather than a secretist, Crowley published much material that was previously hidden from the public.
** 2019, Katarzyna Lecky, Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance, page 116: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."
** 2022, Richard F. Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, page 290: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, William J. Claxton, The Mastery of the Air: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".
* A member of a secret society or a known society with secret ceremonies.
** 1890, The Reformed Presbyterian and Covenanter - Volume 28, page 216: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.
** 1905, Matthias Loy, Story of My Life, page 184:The resolution was adopted with little difficulty, and all communion with secretists and all reception of secret society members ceased .
** 2002, Paul Christopher Johnson, Secrets, Gossip, and Gods, page 59:In the previous discussion of secrecy, we distilled many of the variants of secretist practice and the social formations linked to them .

#### Related terms

* secretism

### Anagrams

* testerics