There has been a great lack in international scholarship concerned with ritual and secrecy because so much of the good work is being done in languages that the mono-lingual English-speaking world has no idea exist. The strength of the articles in this collection will come as a considerable surprise even to experts in the field, because the research in Europe is very advanced and frankly is of such high quality that those who are not linguists should look to their laurels. Much is being done in discovering un-mined material in archives and the selections for this volume are a feast of new bibliographical references.