Aotearoa was among the last major landmasses settled by Polynesian voyagers, around 1250 CE. It carries a double esoteric history: the Māori tohunga tradition — priests, healers, carvers and navigators trained in whare wānanga — and the Western esoteric orders that arrived with colonisation, including the Stella Matutina's Whare Ra in Havelock North (1913–1978), the last purpose-built Golden Dawn temple in the world.
In 1907, the Tohunga Suppression Act criminalised tohunga practice, describing tohunga as "designing persons" practising on the "superstition and credulity" of Māori people. It produced nine convictions in fifty-five years and was repealed in 1962. Rongoā Māori, the traditional healing practice, survived the statute and is today recognised within the New Zealand health system. The related essay What the Law Could Not Kill tells the fuller story of the two temples and the statute between them.