The accumulation of comparative learning made it possible to attempt a religious history on an enormous scale. Godfrey Higgins (1772–1833), a Yorkshire magistrate and reformer, pursued one in Anacalypsis. He moved among divine names, coins, symbols, and astronomical cycles, looking for the relationships that would explain them together. The work appeared after his death, leaving readers to navigate a reconstruction whose range was part of its attraction.
India occupied a central place in the ancient world he imagined. Names such as Abraham and Brahma seemed to point toward an eastern inheritance that later religions had preserved in altered forms. Solar worship and recurring cycles helped him connect saviour figures and sacred histories. A teaching might survive through a priestly succession even when its public expression changed.
The number of proposed connections made the book rich in possibilities and difficult to assess as a whole. A convincing example could encourage confidence in the next, although each required evidence of its own. Earlier authors also entered the work with purposes that Higgins did not necessarily share. Bringing their material together did not make their accounts of religion agree.
Later occult readers found much they could select and develop, which gave the work a life beyond assent to its complete argument. Its posthumous publication also places a limit on claims about what earlier contemporaries might have drawn from it. Higgins belongs beside the religious restorations of the early nineteenth century as one ambitious participant in a much broader search. His attempt to recover a first creed remained a work of comparative reading, even as others announced that lost religious truth had returned through new revelation.