ABSTRACT
Notably these authors were not really interested in examining contemporary religious developments in their own societies, even less in using such developments in their own attempts to construct a comparative category of religion. For example, F. Max Müller writes in a letter about eosophy: “Unfortunately, the only thing that the large public admires in India is the folly of Esoteric Buddhism and eosophy, falsely so called. What a pity it is that such absurdities, nay, such frauds, should be tolerated!” (quoted in Van
den Bosch 2002: 160-61). Somewhat exceptionally, Tylor was interested in the contemporary phenomena of Spiritualism, but he seems to have pulled back from using the term “spiritualism” instead of “animism” as the core concept in his denition of religion (“belief in Spiritual Beings”) because he felt it would confuse his universal theory with the particularities of the Spiritualist movement. Frazer, meanwhile, was critically interested in the fate of contemporary Christianity, but he only treated this matter implicitly and on the basis of deductions from his history of comparative phenomena, which precluded Christian data. In sum, the pioneers of the study of religion largely ignored local phenomena in their own backyards and projected their theories onto “others”, elsewhere.
