The consensus on the term African Traditional Religion (ATR) seems to be that “religion” is too limiting a concept for traditional practices because they include medicine, knowledge, and prescriptions for everyday life. Yet, as most scholars argue, ATR is the most fitting term one could think of for lack of a better term. Ugandan scholar Okot p’Bitek criticised the likes of Parrinder, Mbiti and Idowu, who made a career of using the term prolifically and by ist introduction, Christianised and Hellenised African traditional practices. ATR became a position from which one could gain entrance into the hallways of “world religions.” However, the debate about the perception that “religion” may actually not be a fully fitting term at all is yet to be taken seriously in the study of ATR with regard to its historical roots and the anti-colonial/imperialist interests connected with these roots. The chapter argues that we can understand the current debates about the term “religion” in (West) African contexts better, if we investigate the ways early Christian intellectuals re-negotiated their African religious identity within Pan-Africanist and esoteric networks. The chapter looks specifically at the nineteenth-century intellectual John Augustus Abayomi Cole, who compared traditional practices to Tarot, the Jewish Kabbalah as well as to scientific research. He became a professing Theosophist and quoted other prominent esoteric figures like the Rosicrucian and Theosophist Franz Hartmann and the Rosicrucian and Occultist Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. Abayomi Cole used their arguments to promote the idea that if recovered from their missionary misconceptions, African traditions were religion and science in an anti-materialist sense. This idea served as the basis to the demand for a truly indigenous church that would be free from missionary oversight, a demand which was highly popular in West Africa at the turn of the century. The chapter thus concludes that in order to understand today’s struggle to define African traditional practices, scholars have to take into account the history of comparison in which Africans were engaged early on.