birth_date: 1837-10-31 00:00:00
avg_rating: 3.77
name: Louis Jacolliot
about: Louis Jacolliot was a French barrister, colonial judge, orientalist, author and lecturer.He lived several years in Tahiti and India during the period 1865-1869 as a judge, getting in touch with numerous social and religious indian groups.He has been described as a prolific writer for his time with a great knowledge of indian religion. His works although are not philological accurated and are mostly sensationalistic and made for a bourgeoise public. His most famous book is La Bible dans l'Inde, Vie de Iezeus Christna (The Bible in India, or the Life of Iezeus Christna; 1869) in which he compares the accounts of the life of Bhagavan Krishna with that of Jesus Christ in the Gospels and concludes that it could not have been a coincidence, so si Louis Jacolliot was a French barrister, colonial judge, orientalist, author and lecturer.He lived several years in Tahiti and India during the period 1865-1869 as a judge, getting in touch with numerous social and religious indian groups.He has been described as a prolific writer for his time with a great knowledge of indian religion. His works although are not philological accurated and are mostly sensationalistic and made for a bourgeoise public. His most famous book is La Bible dans l'Inde, Vie de Iezeus Christna (The Bible in India, or the Life of Iezeus Christna; 1869) in which he compares the accounts of the life of Bhagavan Krishna with that of Jesus Christ in the Gospels and concludes that it could not have been a coincidence, so similar are the stories in so many details in his opinion. He concludes that the account in the Gospels is a myth based on the mythology of ancient India. Jacolliot does not claim that Jesus was in India as some have claimed. "Christna" is his way of spelling "Krishna" is an evidence and he wrote that Krishna's disciples gave him the name "Iezeus" which means "pure essence" in Sanskrit. However, Sanskrit philologist Max Müller confirmed that it is not a Sanskrit term at all and "it was simply invented" by Jacolliot.Another succesful Jacolliot's book was Occult science in India, written during the 1860s and published 1875 (English translation 1884). Jacolliot was searching for the "Indian roots of western occultism" and makes reference to an otherwise unknown Sanskrit text he calls Agrouchada-Parikchai, which is apparently Jacolliot's personal invention, a "pastiche" of elements taken from Upanishads, Dharmashastras and "a bit of Freemasonry". Jacolliot also expounds his belief in a lost Pacific continent, and was quoted on this by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled in support of her own Lemuria. However, he relocated this lost continent to the Pacific Ocean and linked it to the Atlantis-myth. Furthermore, his "discovery" of Rutas is somehow similar to the origin of the Mu-Story.During his time in India he also collected Sanskrit myths, which he popularized later starting in his Histoire des Vierges. Les Peuples et les continents disparus (1874). Among his works is an essay on his Voyage aux ruines de Golconde and a translation of the Manu Smriti which influenced Friedrich Nietzsche and his concept of Tschandala, ...more
death_date: 1890-10-30 00:00:00