Louis Jacolliot was a French barrister, colonial judge, author and lecturer.
Biography
Born in Charolles, Saône-et-Loire, he lived several years in Tahiti and India during the period 1865-1869. Jacolliot's Occult science in India was written during the 1860s and published 1875. 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 Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled in support of her own Lemuria. In Jacolliot's book La Bible dans l'Inde, Vie de Iezeus Christna , 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" 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. Jacolliot was successfully sued for defamation by Father Honoré Laval ss.cc, and ordered by the Supreme Court of the State of the Protectorate of the Society Islands to pay 15,000 francs in damages. It ordered the suppression of those portions of the pamphlet "La verité sur Tahiti" deemed defamatory, and further ordered that the judgement be printed in the official journal of the Protectorate in French, English, and Tahitian, as well as in three newspapers of the French colonies, three journals of Paris, and four gazettes of provinces of Laval's choosing. He has been described as a prolific writer for his time. During his time in India he collected Sanskrit myths, which he popularized later starting in his Histoire des Vierges. Les Peuples et les continents disparus. Among other things, he claimed that Hindu-writings would tell the story of a sunken land called "Rutas" in the Indian Ocean. 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. Among his works is a translation of the Manu Smriti. This work influenced Friedrich Nietzsche: see Tschandala. Between 1867 and 1876, he also translated select verses of the Tirukkural, an ancient Tamil classic on ethics and morality. He died in Saint-Thibault-des-Vignes, Seine-et-Marne.
