We have long known, from sociology and the writings of Simmel, how important the secret is for man. The secret ritual, the secret club, the secret formula – these create a new reality for man, a way of transcending and transforming the everyday world of nature, giving it dimensions it would not otherwise possess and controlling it in arcane ways. The secret implies, above all, power to control the given by the hidden and thus power to transcend the given – nature, fate, animal destiny. Or, as Greenacre put it,”… the secret relates at its most primitive level to body organs and processes … it contains more fundamentally the struggle with the fear of death …”
The secret, in other words, is man’s illusion par excellence, the denial of the bodily reality of his destiny. No wonder man has always been in search of fountains of youth, holy grails, buried treasures – some kind of omnipotent power that would instantly reverse his fate and change the natural order of things.
E. Becker, p.237
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