Secretum

About

The Secretum (Latin for 'hidden away') was a British Museum collection of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that held artefacts and images deemed sexually graphic. Many of the items were amulets, charms and votive offerings, often from pre-Christian traditions, including the worship of Priapus, a Greco-Roman god of fertility and male genitalia. Items from other cultures covered wide ranges of human history, including ancient Egypt, the classical era Greco-Roman world, the ancient Near East, medieval England, Japan and India.

Many of the early donations or sales to the museum, including those from the collectors Sir Hans Sloane, Sir William Hamilton, Richard Payne Knight and Charles Townley, contained items with erotic or sexually graphic images; these were separated out by museum staff and not put on public display. Modern scholars believe the segregation was probably motivated by a paternalistic stance from the museum to keep what they considered morally dangerous material away from all except scholars and members of the clergy. By the 1860s there were around 700 such items held by the museum.

In 1865 the antiquarian George Witt donated his phallocentric collection of 434...