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.

[13] The classical scholar and collector Richard Payne Knight's study of pre-Christian cultures included much on the subject of Priapus, a Greco-Roman god of fertility and male genitalia.

[25][26] In 1865 George Witt, a collector of antiquities, suffered a bad illness; on his recovery, he wrote to Anthony Panizzi, the head of the British Museum, offering his phallocentric collection of 434 artefacts: During my late severe illness it was a source of much regret to me that I had not made such a disposition of my Collection of "Symbols of the Early Worship of Mankind", as, combined with its due preservation, would have enabled me in some measure to have superintended its arrangement.

In accordance with this feeling I now propose to present my collection to the British Museum, with the hope that some small room may be appointed for its reception in which may also be deposited and arranged the important specimens, already in the vaults of the Museum—and elsewhere, which are illustrative of the same subject.

[30] Also included in Witt's acquisitions were artefacts from Greek, Egyptian and Roman antiquity, reliefs from Indian temples, medieval items and nine bound scrapbooks containing prints and watercolours of fertility-related objects from cultures around the world.

[33] He also donated works of shunga—Japanese erotic art—the first of that style held by the museum[34] and what he thought was a medieval chastity belt, although this was a fake manufactured in Victorian times.

[40] One application—made in 1948—was from a scholar who requested a copy of the collection's register; he was asked to explain "his qualifications for the study of the catalogue, the use he proposed to make of the photostats, and the arrangements made for the disposal thereof at his death".

[25] The classicist Jen Grove considers that rather than being embarrassed by its ownership of salacious and pornographic material, the British Museum actively and systematically sought out sexual antiquities, either to add to the Secretum or into their main holdings.

This enthusiastic acquisition continued from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, including the period from 1912 when the Secretum collection was being broken up and transferred to other departments within the museum.

[41] Objects began to be released from the Secretum early in the twentieth century, with some artefacts transferred to the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities in 1912.

The last entry into the Secretum was in 1953, when the British Library passed to the museum some 18th-century condoms that had been used as bookmarks in the 1783 publication A Guide to Health, Beauty, Riches and Honour.

[51][44] Some classicists and curators—including Gaimster and the archaeologist and museum curator Catherine Johns—have written that what Johns calls "Victorian prudery" was behind the decision to segregate the sexually graphic items from the main collection.

[54] The art curator Marina Wallace also considers that a paternalistic approach was behind the decision, and that the censorship of items was made by educated men, who thought themselves able to study artefacts that displayed erotic or sexually graphic images without offence or the danger of moral corruption, whereas the images would "offend the weaker members of society, that is to say, children, women and the working classes".

[57] The historian Victoria Donnellan considers the collection "represents an interesting case study for the shifting lines of acceptability versus perceived obscenity".