Zeitgeist Source: Godfrey Higgins

Peter Joseph was digging thru the ANACALYPSIS to create his Zeitgeist Movie segment on religion.  The full title is:  Anacalypsis: An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil of the Saitic Isis or an Inquiry into the Origin of Languages, Nations and Religions.  The book was published in 1833 in yet another example of Peter Joseph weaving his tale with 19th century occultists. By 1927, only 550 copies had been printed.

For the most part, Higgins makes it clear that the book is esoteric and masonic:  “I think it right to warn my reader, that there are more passages than one in the book, which are of that nature, which will be perfectly understood by my Masonic friends, but which my engagements prevent me explaining to the world at large”.

This book is considered a precursor to another of Zeitgeists sources, Helena Blavatsky, the mother of the new age movement and founder of theosophy, a favorite theme for the Zeitgeist Movie.  The same investigator also alleged similar plagiarism in Madame Blavatsky’s 1888, work, The Secret Doctrine.^{[10]  http://www.theohistory.org/thcovers/thscan103.html#Anchor-of-47942}

Godfrey Higgins was a freemason, a group which Peter Joseph draws heavy from to create his religious story.

Godfrey Higgins was also a druid, a chief amongst them.  According to Ross Nichols, Higgins was a “Chosen Chief” of the Order of Druids, founded by John Toland in 1717.  Gerald Massey, another Zeitgeist source is also a Chief Druid.

Higgins was claimed a member of An Uileach Druidh Braithreaches(The Druid Order), an ancient Druid order that predates the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; however, these claims are unsubstantiated.

Higgins in 1829 stated that he was preparing a review of “all the ancient Mythologies of the world, which, however varied, and corrupted in recent times, were originally one, and that one founded on principles sublime, beautiful, and true.” This review would become Anacalypsis.

Read here  http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/prescott06.html

Here you can read a digital scan of Peters source:  http://www.archive.org/stream/anacalypsisanat00higggoog#page/n5/mode/2up

THE ANACALYPSIS IS CONSIDERED A PRECURSOR TO HELENA H BLAVATASKYS SECRET DOCTRINE BY THEOSOPHISTS

In his devastating essay The Sources of Madame Blavatsky’s Writings (Appendix C, V.S. Solovoff, A Modern Priestess of Isis, 1895), W. Emmette Coleman claimed to have identified some 2,000 passages copied from other books without proper acknowledgment, and suggested that Isis was compiled from little 100 books and periodicals. Coleman also claimed that The Secret Doctrine was a rehash of other books and permeated with unacknowledged plagiarisms.

Coleman’s charges are difficult to rebut, since they are specific and pedantic, although the conventional defence against plagiarisms is that H.P.B. received texts ‘in the astral light’, while it is well known that her collaborators were obliged to check and edit a mass of inchoate material before it could be shaped into a systematic presentation. G.R.S. Mead, perhaps the greatest scholar of the Theosophist movement, admitted that friends had ‘devilled assiduously for H.P.B. at the British Museum and otherwise’ *

*G.R.S. Mead “Facts about ‘The Secret Doctrine’” Occult Review April 1927 p. 249.

Coleman’s claim that Isis derived from ‘little over 100 books’ is supported by Col. Olcott’s statement (Old Diary Leaves, First Series, Chapter XIII p. 207) that ‘our whole working library scarcely comprised one hundred books of reference.’ Coleman meticulously listed the number of passages ‘plagiarised’ from specific books. One source which he mentioned only in passing was ‘the writings of Godfrey Higgins.’ This source deserves closer examination.

The main works of Godfrey Higgins have always been rare books, difficult to obtain. These include The Celtic Druids (1827; 1829) and Anacalypsis (2 vol., [47] 1833-36). The first work, intended as an introduction to the second, has been long out of print. The major work Anacalypsis was first published in a limited edition of only 200 copies. It was partially reprinted in 1878, and in full in a limited edition of 350 copies in 1927. In 1965, I wrote a study of Higgins for an edition of 1,000 copies issued by University Books Inc., New York. I was struck by the similarity between certain basic ideas of Higgins and those of H.P.B. Because of the rarity of Higgins’ books these similarities have not received the attention they deserve.

SO THERE YOU HAVE IT.  MORE THEOSOPHY.