His great project had for its goal to set out to reconstruct the high primeval civilization. Reinterpreting Classical and Renaissance evocation of the Golden Age in mankind's early history, Court de Gébelin asserted that the primitive worldwide civilization had been advanced and enlightened. He is the intellectual grandfather of much of modern occultism. His centers of focus are the familiar ones of universal origins of languages in deep time and the hermeneutics of symbolism. While his views on hermeneutics and religious matters were largely conservative, his original ideas and research on the origin of language earn him a place among pioneers of linguistics. Court de Gébelin presented dictionaries of etymology, what he called a universal grammar, and discourses on the origins of language. His volumes were so popular he republished them separately, as "Histoire naturelle de la parole, ou Précis de l'Origine du Langage & de la Grammaire Universelle" ("Natural History of Speech, or a Treatise on the Origins of Language and of Universal Grammar"), in Paris, 1776.