recondite

recondite, abstruse, occult, esoteric can all mean being beyond the power of the average intelligence to grasp or understand.

Recondite stresses difficulty resulting from the profundity of the subject matter or its remoteness from ordinary human interest. It often, especially as applied to persons, implies scholarly research carried beyond the bounds of apparent usefulness

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the recondite and occult in human nature alike attract the insurgent temper— Lowes

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profound and scholarly, but often recondite to the point of obscurity— Woodring

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Abstruse suggests extreme complexity or abstractness in the material as well as its remoteness from the ordinary range of human experience or interest

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the vast army of illiterate or semi-literate people who distrust the learned world, especially the abstruse world of science— Meyer

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the last quartets and piano sonatas of Beethoven, which are some of the most abstruse music ever written— Whitehead

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Occult basically implies secret, mysterious knowledge purporting to be attainable only through special and often supernatural or magical agencies and not through ordinary channels of human reason

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the occult sciences

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whether it be from natural predisposition or from some occult influence of the time— J. R. Lowell

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But often the word is used with much weakened force to mean little more than mysterious

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the sense of occult rivalry in suitorship was so much superadded to the palpable rivalry of their business lives— Hardy

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juries selected by some occult procedure satisfactory to the judges— Amer. Guide Series: Nev.

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Esoteric basically implies knowledge guarded by, and imparted only to, members of a cult or inner circle of initiates

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the esoteric sects, which guard a mystery known only to the initiated— Sperry

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but it is extended in general use to describe knowledge in the possession only of adepts, students, and specialists

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as far as the general public was concerned the museum was an esoteric, occult place in which a mystic language was spoken— Saarinen

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Analogous words: scholarly, erudite, *learned: *pedantic, scholastic, academic