Comparative mythology and religion

F. Max Müller

1823 – 1900

Friedrich Max Müller was a German-born Oxford philologist and orientalist who founded the discipline of comparative mythology and was one of the first Western scholars to systematically study Sanskrit, Vedic religion, and the sacred texts of Asia. His fifty-volume Sacred Books of the East series (1879–1910), which he edited for Oxford University Press, provided the first comprehensive English translations of Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, and other Asian scriptures, making the primary sources of world religion accessible to Western scholars and esotericists for the first time.