The controversy over claims that “primitive” peoples around the world originally held a belief in a Supreme Being, which I described in the last chapter, was played out in the context of New Zealand throughout a large part of the twentieth century around claims that the indigenous Māori people possessed an elevated idea of a Supreme Being called Io long before they ever came into contact with Christian missionaries. The debate concerning Io as the primordial Māori God received international attention in the 1980s, when the highly respected historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith devoted a chapter in his Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (1982) to disputing the historical evidence used by those who, as part of the mid- to late- twentieth-century Māori cultural renaissance, were claiming that the pre-Christian Māori belief in Io is comparable with the Christian idea of God. By evaluating the case on which the early argument for a pre-Christian Māori belief in a High God was founded, Smith re-ignited the primitive monotheism debate in ways that bear directly on contemporary events in New Zealand.

In this chapter, following Smith's lead, I begin by outlining the historical development of the Io idea by examining the position advanced in the early part of the twentieth century by the eminent New Zealand ethnographer, Elsdon Best, which he based largely on a translation by S. Percy Smith of The Lore of the Whare-wānanga by Hoani Te Whatahoro (J. A. Jury).