secret-sacred

Adjective

secret-sacred (not comparable)

1. In Australian Aboriginal culture, restricted to initiated men, or to women; not public knowledge.
   • Most major Australian museums now hold secret/sacred material in a separate storage area, with access restricted to specified curatorial staff and to those members of the relevant Aboriginal community who have the right to view such material.2001, Moira G. Simpson, Making Representations: Museums in the Post-Colonial Era
   • While it is true that, in some areas, women possessed secret-sacred knowledge and rituals, nowhere was this corpus considered more important for social reproduction than that held by mature men, who claimed they exercised their responsibilities for the society as a whole.2004, Robert Tonkinson, Individual Creativity and Property-Power Disjunction in an Australian Desert Society, in Property and Equality: Ritualization, Sharing, Egalitarianism

   Synonyms:

   secret and sacred