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