If the religions of distant peoples descended from an early shared teaching, their differences called for a history of separation. Joseph Görres (1776–1848) undertook one in Mythengeschichte der asiatischen Welt (1810), his history of the mythologies of Asia. The work appeared as Creuzer was beginning his related study of religious symbols. Görres gave particular attention to the relationships that migration might explain.
An important source was the Oupnek’hat, the Latin version of the Indian Upanishads made through Persian. It seemed to offer access to religious thought older than the traditions more familiar to European readers. Görres used such material to interpret accounts of creation and divine life across Asian and Mediterranean peoples. Differences could become the results of a teaching carried into new circumstances and expressed in new forms.
The geographical ambition extended beyond Asia. Reports of American peoples entered conjectures about movement from the Old World, allowing resemblances on another continent to become part of the same religious history. Görres worked through books and reports in the Rhineland, connecting places by means of traditions he encountered in print. The migrations he proposed were interpretations of that material, rather than journeys documented at every stage.
This made the work dependent on translations and travellers whose purposes could differ substantially from his own. A description of a monument might establish what it looked like without establishing the ancestry he assigned to its makers. His reconstruction gave those descriptions a large historical setting, but the setting did not follow automatically from the observation. As more American materials reached European readers, the distinction became increasingly important, particularly when the traveller responsible for them objected to the conclusions drawn in his name.