The importance of "Mystification"

In the "Strict Observance" the disappearance of the Leadership into the "unknown", evolved in to a social myth that helped increase the weight of the arcanum and the moral self-control associated with it.

The "Great Unknown" were always present somewhere, but everywhere at the same time, and, like the "vanished" of the Illuminati, who secretly sought to occupy that void, they could at anytime sit in judgment on the Member's conduct and demeanor. In the German Lodges the original compulsory secrecy had, as it were, hypostatized itself. It had yielded towards and trend toward mystification, promoting faith in an omnipotent, secret, and direct rule beyond the state.

- Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Modern Society, MIT Press, 1988, P. 78