The secrets of the ancient Egyptians were also secrets to the ancient Egyptians themselves

The secrets of the ancient Egyptians were also secrets to the ancient Egyptians themselves is the name given to Hegel’s paradox of meaning: a ritual’s mystery may belong not just to the outsider trying to interpret it, but to its participants as well. The formula makes alienation more than a barrier to understanding. It presents opacity as one of the conditions through which meaning acquires depth and can take on new force.

Meaning and Alienation

The example begins with an observer confronted by a mysterious religious ritual and wishing for enough information to uncover its hidden meaning. Hegel’s formula unsettles that expectation: what if the ritual’s meaning is also a mystery to those who perform it? The first experience is then not of a transparent practice whose significance has merely been lost to an outsider, but of meaning already experienced as elusive from within.

The book describes this condition through the thought that “it must mean something, although I do not know what”. Such resistant non-sense exceeds a statement’s simple denotative reference; the excess is what can turn mere meaning into a deeper Sense. The formula therefore does not solve the ritual’s mystery by supplying a hidden explanation. It identifies the participants’ own relation to that mystery as part of how meaning works.

The Dialectical Starting Point

The formula illustrates the book’s account of dialectics as beginning with alienation rather than with an immediate unity that is later disrupted. Meaning does not first appear as a fully transparent content and only subsequently become estranged. Its initial form is already distanced from what it may eventually mean: an empty promise of meaning-to-come, whose content is filled in only later.

This reverses the familiar sequence in which a process moves from immediate unity through alienation toward synthesis. In the account presented here, alienation is the first gesture of positing. Hegel’s Egyptian formula gives that claim a cultural and interpretive shape: the gap between a practice and transparent knowledge of its meaning is not simply a secondary defect, but can be constitutive of meaning itself.

Ideological Reappropriation

The passage extends this logic from religious mystery to ideology. In Journey into Fear, a character begins advocating Socialism at dinner parties to embarrass and annoy his rich wife, but gradually becomes persuaded by his own arguments and ends up an authentic Socialist. The change shows how speech adopted at an ironic distance can cease to be merely instrumental: the speaker is taken in by the position he initially performed for another purpose.

The passage also gives the inverse movement through the Virgen de Guadalupe in colonized Mexico. Christianity had served as the imposed ideology of the Spanish colonizers; the indigenous population appropriated it as a means of symbolizing their own terrible plight. An alienated ideological form could thus become a language for grievances that its original imposition did not intend to express. Together, these examples make Hegel’s formula a model for meanings that are not fully possessed at their origin, yet can be inhabited, transformed, and made to articulate something new.