Secrecy

"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 Brèuder 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"--