I often think of Llullian diagrams when I look at the VMS.
Secrecy was not the purpose of the diagrams (although I could see gnostic societies jumping on the idea and using it for secrecy since they do lend themselves to this also), but they do seem baffling to anyone who doesn't know how they are intended to be used.
Many of them were not so much to teach as to remind. Which means that you were supposed to know what you were looking at before you tried to figure them out OR to have someone pointing at it and explaining it as you were learning.
It was a fairly original way of diagramming information at the time and sparked a certain change in the way people thought about diagrams. Llull's charts were not entirely a new idea, Jessie trees and other story-telling aspects of medieval iconography have some of these characteristics, but Llull put a stronger emphasis on the mnemonic aspects of the way the information was incorporated and used a lot of seemingly cryptic text.
So what you get is a diagram that means nothing to most people (most people couldn't read), with inscrutable abbreviations, sometimes a lot of repetition.... but... if you know that is it a mnemonic for a specific Bible passage, for example, and you know the passage (or mostly know it), you can follow the information up the tree, or around the circle, or along a vertex, and work out what it represents. Some of them are difficult to work out even if you do know what they represent. This would move at least some of them into the category of an intellectual exercise.
Secrecy was not the purpose of the diagrams (although I could see gnostic societies jumping on the idea and using it for secrecy since they do lend themselves to this also), but they do seem baffling to anyone who doesn't know how they are intended to be used.
Many of them were not so much to teach as to remind. Which means that you were supposed to know what you were looking at before you tried to figure them out OR to have someone pointing at it and explaining it as you were learning.
It was a fairly original way of diagramming information at the time and sparked a certain change in the way people thought about diagrams. Llull's charts were not entirely a new idea, Jessie trees and other story-telling aspects of medieval iconography have some of these characteristics, but Llull put a stronger emphasis on the mnemonic aspects of the way the information was incorporated and used a lot of seemingly cryptic text.
So what you get is a diagram that means nothing to most people (most people couldn't read), with inscrutable abbreviations, sometimes a lot of repetition.... but... if you know that is it a mnemonic for a specific Bible passage, for example, and you know the passage (or mostly know it), you can follow the information up the tree, or around the circle, or along a vertex, and work out what it represents. Some of them are difficult to work out even if you do know what they represent. This would move at least some of them into the category of an intellectual exercise.