This chapter addresses the most common problems in historiographic approaches to religious content in Freud’s oeuvre through a close reading of Freud’s first foray into the ancient Mother cult that appeared in the Zentralblatt at the end of 1911. I explore how misleading assumptions about the untitled four-paragraph text known as “Great is Diana of the Ephesians” reflects broader issues in scholarship on religion in psychoanalysis. I demonstrate that these historiographical trends on religious content has effectively obscured Freud’s main point, which turns out to an editorial epistle announcing Freud’s editorial control of the Zentralblatt after Alfred Adler’s resignation hidden in the metaphoric chaff of religious hootenanny.

Chapter 7 looks at the place of the recognised orientalist William Jones in the longer history of British interpretations of Hinduism sketched out in this book. It argues that his work represents a significant turning point in the formulation and reception of British accounts of Indian philosophical religion. In the first instance his religious outlook, which it identifies as closest to the Rational Dissent of late eighteenth-century Unitarianism, preferred an account of Indian religion that posited it as mystical and sublime, and therefore more malleable to Biblical scripture. This, in turn, made it particularly attractive to those seeking to redefine Britain’s relationship with India in the wake of war with Revolutionary France as one paternalist guardianship of ancient customs and traditions. At the turn of the century, British interpretations of Indian religion were thus to be stripped of any heterodox implications, and aligned with the institutionalisation of orientalist knowledge, as a branch of imperial governance.