Inside the secret museum: magic, sex, and secrecy in the British Museum‘s secretum, 1866-1896

In 1866 British Museum curators fitted out a room in the museum‘s north basement for Collections Illustrative of Phallic Worship. Equipped with its own catalogue and library and containing nearly a thousand items classified according to different regions of the globe, the Secretum was one of the world‘s first international facilities for collecting and researching religion, sex, and sexuality. Like the British Museum Library‘s famous Private Case of obscene publications, the Secretum had its own catalogue, kept separately from those available to the public. Although Secretum collections were mentioned in government reports and even national newspapers, knowledge about the Secretum‘s contents as well as details of who researched there and what they discovered were disseminated in highly controlled ways. The Secretum was discussed as a ‟secret chamber”. This talk explores the sociality of secrecy among scholars who curated and researched inside the Secretum. I examine how items from the Secretum collections appeared in different contexts, but also how the Secretum and its contents were made absent and occluded. Information about the Secretum was occulted inside masonic and hermetic secret societies, who cultivated the esoteric art of knowing what not to know. Making use of Michael Taussig‘s idea of the public secret - ‟that which is generally known but cannot be spoken” - I investigate how the Secretum institutionalised a classed currency of gentlemanly discretion, mediating male sociability and scholarly distinction at a time when archaeology was marketed towards mass audiences.