Latin occultare, frequentative of occulere, to cover over, from ob plus celare, to hide: the verb means to conceal again and again. Its senses fork early: the everyday act of hiding; the medical sense, occult blood, present but invisible; and the astronomical sense, attested since the 15th century, the eclipse of one celestial body by another, still the standard term when the Moon occults a star. The adjective occultus, hidden, gave French occulte and, by the 16th century, occult sciences: alchemy, astrology, magic, the disciplines whose mechanisms were concealed rather than false. The word never meant supernatural. It meant unexamined.
The occult disciplines took the label willingly: the Emerald Tablet's tradition held that the operations only worked for the initiated, so concealment was not a defect but the technology, the recipe guarded because it was a recipe. Medieval Latin treated occult qualities as a real explanatory category, gravity's action at a distance was an occult quality before Newton was forgiven for it. The line between occult science and science has been renegotiated every century, and the renegotiations are this archive's whole subject.
The claim Jorjani inherits from Heidegger: things do not just happen to be hidden, they become occulted, disclosure and concealment as the two active poles of truth, and the question that matters is never whether something is occult but who did the occulting, the declassification schedule, the destroyed MKUltra files, the 1299 ban on zero; every document in this archive is a ledger of deliberate occultations. Verdict: the etymology supports the active reading, occultare is a thing someone does, not a state something is in. The archive's rule of thumb follows directly: when a fact is labeled occult, the first search is for the occulter. The frequency of that verb is the tell. Hidden once is an accident. Hidden repeatedly is a policy.
If occultation is just one thing passing in front of another, what has been standing in front of the word itself?