Throughout Shiʿi history, there has been a tension between the tendency to exaggerate the sanctity of the representatives of God on earth, and the sober denial that humans participate in this sanctity. This has been most evident in the Imams’ excommunication of their ‘extremist’ followers (ghulāt), but it was a pivotal dynamic at moment of crisis, when members of the Shiʿi community would seek to resolve the crisis through claims to represent divine truth. The production of the Twelver Occultation doctrine was one such moment, when the demise of the line of living Imams required the intervention of charismatic individuals to create a set of doctrines and institutions which would hold the community together in a radically new era. This paper investigates the earliest, formative phase of the development of the Twelver Occultation doctrine, between 874-900 CE. During this period, numerous different solutions were proposed to the crisis of succession that followed the death of the 11th Imam, al-Ḥaṣan al-ʿAskarī in 874 CE. How and why did the doctrine of the Hidden Imam constitute itself? Using the early Twelver and Shi’i sources, I reconstruct who were the key political players before and after the death of the 11th Imam, and create a narrative for the eventual triumph of the occultation idea. Instead of the traditional Twelver narrative of a smooth succession from the power of the Imams to the representative authority of the Four Envoys (safīrs), I argue that we recognize a transitional period before the rise of the Envoys in which a group of the fiscal agents of the Imam collaborated to ensure some semblance of continuity, while maintaining a theology of uncertainty, represented as the “I-don’t-know-ites” (lā-adriyya), in the heresiographies. This gave way to the more positive doctrine of the Occultation of the 12th Imam, child of al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī, with the rise to preeminence of the Second Envoy, Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. ʿUthmān al-ʿAmrī. In this paper, I recover the voices of opposition to Abū Jaʿfar, and show how he was able to establish his authority in spite of both moderate and extremist opposition to his assumption of the quasi-Imamic authority of the safirate. Finally, I show how the contestation of claims to authority in this earliest period of Twelver identity lays foundations that become incorporated into the canonical doctrine of the Occultation which crystallized in Twelver works of the late 10th to mid 11th centuries CE.