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• n  confusion resulting from failure to understand
• n  something designed to mystify or bewilder
• n  the activity of obscuring people's understanding, leaving them baffled or bewildered

• At first, they professed mystification, but then, after some consideration, they pointed fingers at one man: Dick Cheney.
• The fact is, you have been made a victim of what the French call 'a mystification,' in other words a piece of undergraduate pleasantry.
• In Haditha, where a Marine patrol killed 15 civilians on the morning of Nov 19, the news is certain to be greeted with mystification and scepticism.

• bewilderment
• obfuscation
• puzzlement
• befuddlement
• bafflement
• bemusement

Quotes

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• David ÄŒerný in AFP
  Grotesque exaggeration and mystification is a hallmark of Czech culture, and creating false identities is one of the strategies of contemporary art,David Cerny said in a statement of the exhibition in Brussels organised by the Czech EU...
• Slavoj Zizek in DigitalJournal.com
  To chastise it outright,says Zizek, "to condemn it as 'bad', is an ideological operation par excellence, a mystification which collaborates in rendering invisible the fundamental forms of social violence."
• Simone de Beauvoir in guardian.co.uk
  The fact is that the traditional woman is a mystified consciousness and an instrument of mystification,De Beauvoir writes. "She tries to conceal her dependence from herself, which is a way of consenting to it."