Hiding places of the wonder-matter

Meaning

Hiding places or concealed retreats: the audience has sought the wonder-matter in many things but has not recognised where it is sheltered or what it would look like. The term belongs to the rhetoric of recognition and disclosure. The preceding assertion that the narrator saw twenty-eight books of Hermes is a claim of personal authority, not a secure identification of an extant corpus or a modern location for the “other world.”