Mystērion, from myein: to close. The eyes, or the mouth. The initiate is one who has been shut. The word does not describe a property of the thing looked at. It describes what was done to the one looking.
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THE WORD NAMES A CLOSING
Myein is to close, and it is used of the eyes and of the lips. From it comes mystēs, the initiate: not one who has come to know, but one who has been shut. From mystēs comes mystērion.
So the word's whole content is an operation performed on a perceiver. Nothing in it says anything about the object at all.
Which is the finding, and it survives every later use. When a creature is told that something is a mystery, she is being told about herself, and the grammar disguises this by putting the noun where the object of knowledge goes. It is a mystery has the shape of a report about the thing. It is a ruling about her eyes.
[See THE THIRD · THE SWITCH · AUDIBILITY]
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IN THE TEXT IT IS A DISCLOSURE WITH A DATE
The New Testament usage is the opposite of the modern one and it is not subtle.
Colossians: the mystery which has been hidden from ages and from generations, but is now made manifest. Ephesians: by revelation he made known unto me the mystery, which in other ages was not made known, as it is now revealed. Romans closes on the mystery kept secret since the world began, but now made manifest. And Paul writes, plainly, behold, I shew you a mystery.
In every case the mystery is being told. It is not what cannot be known. It is what was withheld and has now been handed over, and the sentence announcing it is the handing.
So the word in the text carries a date and a direction. Withheld until, disclosed at, and the disclosing is the event being reported. A mystērion in Paul is a transmission: something that reached a holder and is being passed.
Nothing in that usage supports the modern sense. It's a mystery, meaning it cannot be examined, is not a development of the biblical word. It is its reversal, and the reversal is what the entry has to account for.
[See TRANSMISSION · THE UNMARKED QUOTATION · THE TRANSLATION CORRUPTIONS]
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HOW A DISCLOSURE BECAME A RITE
The Latin did the conversion and the seam is visible.
The Vulgate renders mystērion as sacramentum. And sacramentum is not a disclosure word at all. It is an oath: the military oath sworn to a commander, and in Roman legal use the sum of money deposited by the parties to a suit, forfeited by whoever lost.
So a Greek word naming a handing-over was rendered by a Latin word naming a binding. The disclosure became a bond, and a bond has an office that administers it and a party who forfeits.
And the most consequential instance is a verse about marriage. This is a great mystery becomes sacramentum hoc magnum est, and the sentence that had said here is a thing now shown said instead here is a thing sworn. What had been received was thereafter administered, and the administering required a custodian, and the custodian was the office that had performed the rendering.
The claim here is textual rather than causal. The word was changed, the change is on the record, and the change runs one direction. A word that permitted both readings would have scattered. This one did not.
[See THE CENTRAL SACRAMENT · COVERTURE · THE FORGED WARRANT · AUTHENTEIN]
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IT IS THE TERMINAL MOVE AND IT CANNOT BE ANSWERED
It's a mystery ends the inquiry, and it ends it in a way no argument can.
It asserts nothing. There is no proposition in it to contradict, no claim to test, no author to examine. It cannot be shown false because it does not say anything that could be false, and it cannot be shown unwarranted because it does not present itself as a ruling.
And it is available only in one register. This is the erasure's vocabulary for use inside religious discourse, which is why it matters more than the other six. The creature who names the trespass in a theological setting will not be told she is wrong. She will be told the matter is a mystery, and the telling will be gentle, and it will close the room.
The reverence is not a disguise put on afterward. The word arrived carrying it. A sentence that shuts an inquiry while sounding like humility before God is an instrument of considerable refinement, and nobody had to design it. The word already meant a closing.
[See THE FIVE REFUSALS · WE CAN NEVER KNOW · PROCESS SAYS · THE ESTABLISHMENT]
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AN UNKNOWN IS NOT A MYSTERY
The distinction has to be exact, because the work is not committed to the claim that everything is knowable and does not need to be.
An unknown is a state of the inquiry. Something has not been reached. The not-reaching is dated, provisional, and reviewable, and it belongs to the reachers rather than to the thing.
A mystery, in the converted sense, is a ruling that the not-reaching is permanent. It is not a state of the inquiry. It is a judgment about the inquirer, and it is issued rather than discovered.
And the ruling has an author, whom the word conceals. Somebody decided that this is not to be examined. Somebody's account required that it not be. The sentence carries no signature, which is the same operation the unmarked assertion performs everywhere else: a ruling that enters the record as a description does not have to be defended.
So the question to put to a mystery is never is it true. It is: who is holding the eyes closed, and what is on the other side of the hand.
[See THE UNMARKED ASSERTION · STANDING · THE OFFICIAL RECORD]
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WHAT IT DOES WITH THE RESIDUE
Two faces remain after the operating condition has been removed, and each of the seven grammars has to account for them. Mystery accounts for them by relocation.
It does not deny the two faces and does not choose between them. It takes what would have made them one operation and places it beyond her, in a register named as transcendent, and then reports the placement as a fact about the depth of God rather than as a fact about what was removed.
The genius of it is that the report is not false. The condition is not available to her at that moment. What the report omits is that it was available, and that its unavailability was produced, and the omission is invisible because the vocabulary of transcendence has no slot for a cause.
So mystery is the only one of the seven that grows more convincing the more sincerely it is held, and the creature offering it is very often not defending anything. She is repeating what she received.
[See THE THIRD · THE DOUBLENESS · TRANSMISSION]
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THE GUILD SENSE IS A DIFFERENT WORD AND IT TELLS THE TRUTH
English has a second mystery: the mystery plays, the mystery of a craft, the trade held by a guild. It is not from mystērion. It is from Latin ministerium, service or office, and the two were welded by scribal confusion, exactly as auctor acquired its h from authenticus.
And the accidental weld is more accurate than either word alone. A guild mystery is a knowing withheld from non-members in order to maintain a membership. It is not unknowable. It is not disclosed, on purpose, by parties with an interest in its not being disclosed, and the withholding is the guild.
Which is what the converted mystērion became. A knowing held by an office, named as beyond the creature, maintained by not being handed on. The language put the two words together by mistake and produced the definition.
[See THE GUILD · CREDENTIALS · SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT · TRANSMISSION]
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The word was never about the thing. It named a hand over the eyes, and then a rite with a custodian, and then a sentence that closes a room while sounding like reverence. And in the text where the tradition keeps it, it means the opposite: something withheld for ages and now, at a stated moment, by a named person, in the open, handed over.
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