Godfrey Higgins (30 January 1772 in Owston, Yorkshire – 9 August 1833 in Cambridge) was an English magistrate and landowner, a prominent advocate for social reform, historian, and antiquarian.

His book Anacalypsis, was published posthumously, in which he asserts a commonality among various religious myths, which he traces back to the supposed lost religion of Atlantis.

[3] In a surprise visit he forced staff to open doors which revealed female patients kept in "a number of secret cells in a state of filth, horrible beyond description...the most miserable objects I ever beheld."

[3] He developed a regimen to study the meaning of life and religion, and wrote: I came to a resolution to devote six hours a day to this pursuit for ten years.

Higgins' own death, on 9 August 1833, resulted from an illness which he suffered while attending a meeting of The British Association for the Advancement of Science at Cambridge.

[5] Higgins' main writings were part of the syncretism of the day, which was an attempt to associate Biblical narratives to evidence emerging about other religious traditions.

[6] According to Ronald Hutton, Higgins' Anacalypsis says that, the megalithic remains scattered across the world had been the works of a great nation unknown to history, which had discovered religion and writing.

This had given its system of spirituality and philosophy to the ancient Indians, Chaldeans, Hebrews, Egyptians, and Druids alike, based on a veneration of the sun with a threefold personification of deity and a myth of a saviour god who dies and then returns.

This device not only dealt with the question of why no objective evidence of the ancestral civilization remained, but effectively turned the Atlanteans into a blank sheet upon which an ideal religion could be delineated, composed of the writer's favourite aspects of those known to history.