Godfrey Higgins

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all the Anacalypsis (1833 and 1836) and The Celtic Druids (1827).

Drawing aside the veil

Higgins named his great book for what he meant to do: Anacalypsis, an attempt to draw aside the veil of the Saitic Isis, an inquiry into the origin of languages, nations and religions. The veil is the one the goddess of Sais was said to wear, which no mortal had lifted, and behind it he hoped to find the single first religion of mankind. His method is to set side by side the gods, names, rites and symbols of every people he can read of, from India to Ireland, until, as he believed, their common source appears.

One first religion

In the beginning, Higgins teaches, all mankind had one religion and one learned priesthood. Its god was the one supreme being, worshipped under the emblem of the Sun, the fire and light that give life, and known also as the divine wisdom or reason, the Logos of the Greeks. Its priests were masters of astronomy, kept the calendar and taught by allegory. From its home in the East, which he places in India and the lands north of it, it spread across the old world, and every later faith, Buddhist, Brahmin, Persian, Egyptian, Jewish, Druid and Christian, is a dialect of it, broken by time, by the pride of priesthoods and by forgetting.

The cycle of six hundred years

The key to the old astronomy, for Higgins, is the neros, a cycle of six hundred years that Josephus names as the great year of the patriarchs, who lived long enough to learn the periods of the stars. At the end of each cycle, in his reading, the ancients awaited a renewal of the world and the birth of an incarnation of the divine wisdom, a saviour to open the new age. He finds the hope in Virgil's prophecy of a child who brings back the golden age and in the Indian teaching of the descents of Vishnu, and he reads the long line of the saviours of the nations as the same hope returning at each turn of the cycle.

The names that sound alike

His chief instrument is the likeness of names. Letters, he holds, were at first few and served also as numbers, and the same holy names, carried by the first priests, survive under many disguises: the sacred syllable Om in the Hebrew Amen, the name Iao in Jehovah, the Indian Cristna in the Greek Christos. He takes a likeness of sound for a trace of descent, and from such traces he builds his map of the first faith's journeys.

The plain fact is that the kinship of languages is shown by regular correspondences of sound running through whole vocabularies, not by single likenesses, and his derivations do not stand.

The Druids and the stones

In The Celtic Druids he applies the key to Britain. The Druids were no barbarians but a learned priesthood of the first religion, come from the East, kin to the Brahmins and the Magi, and the stone circles of Britain and Ireland are their temples of the Sun. He reads the numbers of their stones, circles and avenues as records of the cycles of the sky, and the great serpent of stones at Avebury, as William Stukeley had before him, as a temple of the Sun and the serpent. The Culdees, the old monks of Iona and Ireland, are for him the Chaldeans under a Christian name, the last keepers of the first faith.

Tolerance as a duty

What Higgins drew from all this was a duty of respect. If every faith is a dialect of one first religion, then none may persecute another, and the ill will between the churches, and between Christians and Muslims, rests on ignorance of their common root. So he defended the Prophet of Islam against the hostile picture of him usual in England, argued that the Christian Sunday is not the Jewish Sabbath and binds no one by law, and asked of his readers that every honest belief be met with the same fairness.