Secrecy and Mystery

Secrecy is a pervasive and fundamental aspect of Bhaktapur's life. Its major symbolic representation is in the worship of the dangerous deities—above all in the Tantric mode with its emphasis on esoteric secrets, swearing of oaths to keep those secrets, and levels of initiation into progressively deeper ones.

Secrecy is clearly associated with the cellular units of Bhaktapur and is, in fact, a condition of their cellularity.^[45] What separates their affairs from outsiders is, in large part, the confidentiality of those affairs. In

large part this confidentiality is to protect each unit from the moral scrutiny of larger units, to allow the unit to regulate its own affairs as far as possible. The moral scrutiny of a larger unit is liable to be censorious and carries a serious and consequential risk of the loss of the public prestige, the ijjat , of the unit.

On the religious level the secrecy is focused on the name, form, nature, and proper worship of the unit's tutelary deity, and on the special craft and professional knowledge of a thar . The revealing of any of a group's secrets by one of its members, usually implying a violation of an oath taken during an initiation, would be a very serious breach of an individual's relation to the group and, more generally, of his or her general status as an adequate "person." Secrecy makes the unit equivalent to a mandala^[*] , a circle in which some sort of religious potency can be bound, collected, and isolated to some purpose. The boundary, which can be represented in space by a line, can in the life of a group be represented by a boundary of secrecy. In analogy to the mandala^[*] , secrecy is similarly associated in the affairs of the units that have it with the concentration, boundedness and possession of some kind of "power" within the unit itself.

Many component units contribute elements to larger ritual or symbolic performances. Mask makers, ritual dancers, potters, image markers, astrologers, Brahmans, Acajus, and so forth may all contribute objects and/or actions. As we have repeatedly emphasized, it is essential that their outputs into the ritual or festival be effective. These outputs are public. However, the way that the mask maker gathers the proper clay, forms the mask in traditional ways, and brings the preliminary stages of siddhi into the mask are secret. It is essential that the cell perform properly, but the details hidden by secrecy are not the concern of the larger group.^[46] But the fact of the secrecy in itself, the knowledge that a group has its required initiations and hidden rituals, gives outsiders a conviction and a confidence that proper, effective, and powerful actions are being done within a unit to produce the efficacy of their contribution to the public city. This means that it is essential to know that there are secrets. A completely hidden secret, hidden so well that no one knew that a group had any would not convey this sign of corporate siddhi to outsiders. In Bhaktapur, knowledge by others that a group has secrets, or more precisely has the secrets it is supposed to have, is a sign that it is an effective and necessary component of the larger system .^[47]

The secrecy of a group becomes a mystery for those who know there is a secret, but do not know what it is. To turn a secret into a mystery

means that there often have to be ways of signaling, of advertising the presence of secrets. While it is common knowledge that corporate groups have special mantra s, deities, and hidden rites, and that there are parts of temples and houses where no one but the initiate can enter, there are other ways of advertising secrets. One is to warn people to avoid stumbling on them, for they may, it is typically said, be dangerous to an outsider.^[48] People know, for example, that the Nine Durgas perform important secret dances in various parts of the city late at night during certain phases of their annual cycle and, knowing where they will dance, avoid these areas. For, it is said, if they are seen, the person who saw them would then have extremely bad luck or might die. We have noted the related idea in Tantrism that if improperly initiated and qualified people try to learn Tantric secrets and procedures, they would become blind or insane or would die.

Thus secrecy has to be advertised in order to be effective in the larger system and, sometimes, to prevent outsiders from stumbling on it. The advertisement sometimes takes flamboyant forms. During Biska:, the solar New Year festival (chap. 13), for example, where an image of a secret dangerous deity is to be brought out of its temple to some other part of the city, there is also a false secret image. While people are watching a procession carrying the portable public image of the deity, a priest will run through the crowd carrying something wrapped in cloths. People will say, with an air of special knowledge, that what is being carried is the "real" and secret image. The bundle that the priest is carrying is, in fact, just a decoy; the "real" image is being carried in true secrecy. This device of a false secret has the virtue of advertising the presence of a secret and at the same time protecting it.

The symbolically constituted dimension of Bhaktapur's life, its mesocosm, is in part structured through bounded information. These areas are the property of various corporate groups, and are organized into the larger hierarchical system of statuses. Secrecy is the means by which these bounded areas are maintained; and the possession of secrets is equivalent to the possession of economic and political force in the "material" realm. To tell the secrets is to destroy them as secrets essential to the special functions of differentiated, interrelated units, and thus is to destroy much of the effective structure of the city.^[49]

The system of secrecy has one unintended consequence. It makes loss of traditional knowledge through time, knowledge located in a multitude of bounded groups, very much more likely than the loss of a widely

shared knowledge would be, and at the same time it may prevent an awareness that some aspects of cultural knowledge have, in fact, disappeared. People assume that the esoteric meaning of various symbolic forms is known by "someone" within some one of the city's units. Experts, not knowing the meaning of some form or the details of some ritual technique, will assume that it is known to someone elsewhere. Thus, for example, the nature and meaning of certain faces placed in the headband of some of the masks of the Nine Durgas dancers are thought by Brahmans, mask makers, and the Gatha dancers (see color illustrations) themselves to be known to one of the other of these three concerned groups, but the knowledge is apparently lost.