Mystification, which classical theorists typically align with the religious mind, plays a recurring role in social theory. It is argued that when confronted with inexplicable phenomena, the religious falsely project a reality beneath appearances. Theorists critique this misapprehension based on naturalistic assumptions, or the presumed impossibility of a transcendental world. However, several authors propose that the concept is neither exclusively religious nor limited to imagined anthropomorphisms, suggesting that this critique is one-sided and asymmetrical. Alternatively, I will examine mystification as a structure or form, apart from its religious deployment and the valuations of theorists who condemn it. Through several contemporary sources, a layered model of reality emerges as a common and necessary condition of scientific inquiry. Using a structuralist discourse analysis, I will attempt to distill what is constant beneath a differentiated surface, or coherence in units larger than the text by examining pattern. This process begins with an inductive examination of mystification as it develops through classical and contemporary social theory, with the goal of defining its essential characteristics, or ‘grammar’. The resulting structure contains ontological and strategic dimensions, which incorporates an independent and opaque reality that also delegates work between the mystified object and the subject. Similarly, I will inductively extract the language or signals of this structure, or mystification as a way of speaking. I will then apply this structure and its associated signals to a theoretical sample to identify the author’s ontological claims. This analytical tool can be used to examine the reality claims in theory generally and how these claims inform operational characteristics, thereby providing a potential enhancement to paradigm modeling. More importantly, I will argue that identifying a structure of mystified discourse is indispensable to programmatic reflexivity and that only trans-theoretical measures permit a symmetrical examination of theory, or theoretical self-examination. In this way, I am not using sociology to demystify the work of others, but to understand and normalize mystification as discourse across theoretical perspectives.