Until the arrival of missionaries among the Western Arrernte of the MacDonnell Ranges in Central Australia during the late nineteenth century, the role of sacred imagery was unproblematic and clearly understood by all members of the society. The stone and wooden tablets representing the totemic ancestors and their trajectories across the sacred landscapes of the Arrernte were engraved with concentric circles and totemic motifs. These tablets, known as tjurunga, provided the ‘proof’ of an intact, circular system of belief which could only be challenged by complete outsiders. Those outsiders appeared in the form of Lutheran missionaries, trained at Hermannsburg in Germany, who established a mission settlement 160km west of Alice Springs during 1877. Soon though, it would be Western Arrernte people themselves, led by native evangelists, who posed the greatest threat to the ancient cosmology, contributing directly to the accumulation of tjurunga in museum collections, particularly in German museums. This chapter examines that development, and the role played by Christian imagery at Hermannsburg during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.