Secrecy and the arcana: why wisdom was hidden

In April 1510 Abbot Johannes Trithemius, a celebrated German scholar, received from the young Cornelius Agrippa the manuscript of the first version of De occulta philosophia. In his letter of reply he praised the work and added a piece of advice destined to become famous: common knowledge may be shared with anyone, while higher and secret knowledge should be reserved only for the most trusted friends capable of understanding it. The advice sums up an age-old attitude that runs through the whole history of esotericism: the idea that certain truths must remain hidden.

The silence of the ancients

Ancient sources attribute to the Pythagoreans a strict discipline of silence, called echemythia. According to the tradition handed down by Iamblichus and Porphyry, disciples had to keep silent for years before being admitted to the deepest doctrines, and the school's knowledge was not to be divulged to outsiders. The story of the Pythagorean Hippasus, punished according to legend for revealing a mathematical secret, shows how seriously tradition regarded the breach of this bond.

The mysteries of Eleusis, celebrated in honour of Demeter and Persephone for about a millennium, imposed on initiates an absolute ban on revealing what they had seen. The secret was kept so well that scholars still debate the precise content of the ceremonies. Aristotle too, according to a distinction reported by Aulus Gellius in the Attic Nights, is said to have separated his public lectures, called exoteric, from those reserved for his disciples.

Secrecy in the Christian tradition

The Gospel of Matthew contains a precept that Renaissance philosophers often quoted: do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not cast pearls before swine. In the early centuries Christians practised a form of reserve known as the discipline of the secret, which kept the explanation of certain rites for the baptised. Pico della Mirandola, in the Oratio, maintains that Moses too transmitted orally to the seventy elders a secret doctrine, the kabbalah.

For the humanists these testimonies proved that the highest wisdom had always been guarded in veiled form, through myths, symbols, riddles and allegories. The veil served not only to protect the truth from the profane, but also to stimulate the search of those capable of going beyond the surface of the text.

Agrippa and the word “esotericism”

Agrippa adopts Trithemius's advice. In De occulta philosophia he declares that he has scattered certain doctrines across different places in the work, so that only attentive readers can piece them together. It is a literary device found in many Renaissance texts, and it contributed to the book's mysterious reputation, considered by many readers a kind of riddle to be deciphered.

The noun “esotericism”, by contrast, is much more recent. The French term ésotérisme appears in 1828 in the work of the historian Jacques Matter devoted to Gnosticism and spread during the nineteenth century. Before then people spoke of occult philosophy, of arcana, of mysteries or of secret wisdom. The word derives from the Greek esoterikos, “inner”, and originally indicated teaching addressed to the inner circle of disciples.

The history of secrecy shows that esotericism does not coincide with mystery for its own sake. For the ancients and for Agrippa, to hide meant to respect the difficulty of truth and the need for preparation, both intellectual and moral, in order to receive it. Today scholars regard it as a legitimate chapter in the history of European culture.