Christian Kabbalah and Indo-Iranian Philology: The ‘Anacalypsis’ of Godfrey Higgins

Abstract

With the late 18th and early 19th century the movement of speculative antiquarianism in France and Great Britain reached its peak. Figures like Charles Dupuis, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, Jacob Bryant, or Georges Stanley Faber might have been different in the final aims of their theoretical architecture, but they nevertheless had many objects in common. One key figure of the early 18th century was Charles Vallancey (1731–1812), who with immense efforts tried to demonstrate how a primordial European religion was created by the Druids. His student was the freemason Godfrey Higgins (1772–1838), who in his intentions was even more ambitious than his predecessor. In his Celtic Druids (1827) and especially in his two-volume Anacalypsis (1836) Higgins, according to his opinion, consistently demonstrated how the oldest of all religions was based on a simple model of astral-religious Buddhism, and especially Jews were the heirs of this tradition. Christian Kabbalah was forming a key instrument to support this theory, by laying open the inner – Buddhistic – sense of the Pentateuch. The paper aims to give a survey of Higgins complex synthesis and exemplifies his use of Christian Kabbalah in his Anacalypis.