Louis Jacolliot

Louis Jacolliot (31 October 1837 – 30 October 1890) was a French barrister, colonial judge, author and lecturer.

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 (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, and 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 (1869) (The Bible in India, or the Life of 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.

He has been described as a "prolific but unreliable" writer. 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 (1874). Among other things, he claimed that Hindu-writings (or unspecified "Sanskrit tablets") 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, which has since been deemed unreliable by numerous scholars including Ann-Marie Etter. This work influenced Friedrich Nietzsche: see Tschandala.

He died in Saint-Thibault-des-Vignes, Seine-et-Marne.