This chapter argues that Oscar Wilde’s critical dialogues in Intentions (1891) present the work of good criticism as an engagement with hermeneutic darkness, attested by his continual return to ‘secrets’ and ‘mysteries’ as models for critical reading. Where Wilde’s frequent use of the word ‘secrets’ across his writing has typically been read in terms of the ‘open secret’ of his sexuality, this chapter suggests that Wilde’s fascination with secrecy also offers a sophisticated model of critical reading, involving a deliberate strategy of remystification rather than elucidation or suspicion. I begin by surveying discussions of secrets in late-Victorian art-writing before examining Wilde’s proximity to various secret societies, reading his depiction of aesthetic experience as a process of ‘initiation’ in connection with his wife Constance’s membership of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Building on Eleanor Dobson’s work on Wilde and spiritualism, I bring Wilde’s secretive criticism into dialogue with discussions of postcritique by Heather Love, Rita Felski and John Michael. Wilde’s critical darkness should be understood, I suggest, in the context of his depiction of secularisation as the fading of divine ‘illumination’ which Wilde diagnoses as an identity crisis for modern critics, paralleling present-day anxieties surrounding the function of criticism.