| Sumario: | In late nineteenth-century Britain, Friedrich Max Müller's (1823–1900) views on primeval Indo-European religious thought were clearly outmoded and long surpassed by the then fashionable—but perceived to be highly problematic in a later period (and today)—focus of evolutionary anthropologists on so-called savages as prehistorical representatives. Max Müller's older perspective dating back to the 1850s still had, however, an unsuspected cohort of followers in faraway lands who incarnated his philological credo and who adopted and adapted some of his ideas to new contexts, namely, the notion that "scriptless" peoples could have a sophisticated spirituality that could not be measured by observers insufficiently acquainted with their language. New Zealand salvage ethnographer Elsdon Best (1856–1931), who was transmuting Max Müller's theses at the turn of the twentieth century and as late as the 1920s, is a case in point. Elsdon Best followed a hypothesis expounded upon in one of Max Müller's latest books, Anthropological Religion (1892), namely that different levels of religious thought had been reached at an early age by different social strata. Max Müller's concept of an elite esotericism found an echo in and deeply affected Best's ethnographic reconstitution of pre-European Aotearoa/New Zealand—a paramount illustration of traveling theory.
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