THE BLOODLESS REVOLUTION

Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

TRISTRAM STUART

DEDICATION

To my father

SIMON STUART

(1930–2002)

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

I: GRASS ROOTS

1 Bushell’s Bushel, Bacon’s Bacon and The Great Instauration

2 John Robins: The Shakers’ God

3 Roger Crab: Levelling the Food Chain

4 Pythagoras and the Sages of India

5 ‘This proud and troublesome Thing, called Man’: Thomas Tryon, the Brahmin of Britain

6 John Evelyn: Salvation in a Salad

7 The Kabbala Stripped Naked

8 Men Should be Friends even to Brute Beasts: Isaac Newton and the Origins of Pagan Theology

9 Atheists, Deists and the Turkish Spy

II: MEATLESS MEDICINE

10 Dieting with Dr Descartes

11 Tooth and Nail: Pierre Gassendi and the Human Appendix

12 The Mitre and the Microscope: Philippe Hecquet’s Catholic Fast Food

13 Dr Cheyne’s Sensible Diet

14 Clarissa’s Calories

15 Rousseau and the Bosoms of Nature

16 The Counter-Vegetarian Mascot: Pope’s Happy Lamb

17 Antonio Cocchi and the Cure for Scurvy

18 The Sparing Diet: Scotland’s Vegetarian Dynasty

III: ROMANTIC DINNERS

19 Diet and Diplomacy: Eating Beef in the Land of the Holy Cow

20 John Zephaniah Holwell: Voltaire’s Hindu Prophet

21 The Cry of Nature: Killing in the Name of Animal Rights in the French Revolution

22 The Marquis de Valady faces the Guillotine

23 Bloodless Brothers

24 John ‘Walking’ Stewart and the Utility of Death

25 To Kill a Cat: Joseph Ritson’s Politics of Atheism

26 Shelley and the Return to Nature

27 The Malthusian Tragedy: Feeding the World

EPILOGUE

ABBREVIATIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

NOTES

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATES

SECTION ONE

Studio of Jan Brueghel the Elder, ‘Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden’, Flemish, early 17th century. Leeds Museums and Galleries (Lotherton Hall) UK/ The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: LMG 142825)

Frans Snyders, ‘The Butcher’s Shop’ c.1640– 50. Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: XIR 47570)

Jan Brueghel the Elder & Peter Paul Rubens, ‘Adam and Eve in Paradise’, c.1615. Mauritshuis, The Hague, The Netherlands/The Bridgeman Art Library (ref: BAL 7152)

David Teniers the Younger, ‘In the Kitchen’, 1669. Noortman, Maastricht, The Netherlands/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: NOR 61586)

Frontispiece of Christopher Plantin ed. ‘Biblia Sacra, Hebraice, Chaldaice, Grace & Latine’, Antwerp, 1569. The British Library, London

Ivory Cabinet, showing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Sri Lanka, late 17th century. V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London (ref: CT62950)

Iskandar meeting the Brahmans, India, 1719. From the latter half of a manuscript of Firdawsi’s ‘Shahnama’. The British Library, London (ref: Add. 18804, f.117v)

‘Maître François’ (illuminator), ‘Alexander the Great meeting the Indian ‘‘gymnosophists’’, or naked philosophers’. From St Augustine, ‘La Cité de Dieu’, Books I-X, Paris. 1475– 1480. Koninklijke Bibliotheek National Library of the Netherlands, Den Haag, Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum (ref: MMW, 10 A 11, f. 93v)

Bhairavi Ragini, First Wife of Bhairava Raga, Folio from a Ragamala (Garland of Melodies), Bilaspur, Himachal Pradesh, India, 1685– 1690. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, Museum Associates Purchase. Photo © 2006 Museum Associates/LACMA

Banyans and Brahmins, from Jan Huygen van Linschoten, ‘Itinerario’, 1596. The Brenthurst Library, Johannesburg, South Africa. Photograph by Clive Hassall

‘Indian huts’ from Jan Huygen van Linschoten, ‘Itinerario’, 1596. The Brenthurst Library, Johannesburg, South Africa. Photograph by Clive Hassall

John Evelyn’s ‘pietre dure’ cabinet showing Orpheus charming the beasts by Domenico Bennotti & Francesco Ffanelli, 1644– 50. V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London (ref: CT64605)

School of Jan Brueghel the Elder, ‘Orpheus charming the animals’, Flemish, c.1600– 10. Galleria Borghese, Rome. Alinari Archives/Corbis

SECTION TWO

Joseph Highmore, ‘The Harlowe Family’ from the illustrations of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, 1747– 8. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: YBA 156350)

Jean Baptiste Greuze, ‘Girl weeping over her Dead Canary’, c.1765. National Gallery of Scotland/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: NGS 230482)

Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun, ‘Self Portrait in a Straw Hat’, 1782. The National Gallery, London

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, ‘The Milkmaid’, before 1784. Louvre, Paris/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: XIR 90016)

Frontispiece of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘Discours sur l’Origine et les Fondemens de l’Inegalité ’, Marc Michel, Amsterdam, 1755. The British Library, London

Jean Baptiste Greuze, ‘The White Hat’, by c.1780. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/ The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: BST 216007)

Attributed to Marie Victoire Lemoine, ‘Young Woman with a Dog’, c.1796 Bucharest National Museum of Arts/AKG Images, London

Jean Laurent Mosnier, ‘The Young Mother’, c.1770– 80. Musée Municipal, Macon, France/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: XIR 180450)

Eugene Delacroix, ‘Liberty Leading the People’, 1830. Louvre, Paris/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: XIR 3692)

C.J. Grant, ‘Singular effects of the universal pills on a green grocer!’ From ‘Grant’s Oddities’, London, 1841, plate 8. The Wellcome Trust Medical Photographic Library (ref: V0011125)

‘The Mansion of Bliss. A New Game for the Amusement of Youth’, William Darton, London, 1822. V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London (ref: CT26924)

The Old Fort, Playhouse and Holwell’s Monument, Calcutta, from Thomas Daniell, ‘Views of Calcutta’, 1786. The British Library, London (ref: P88, 88)

Attributed to Johann Zoffany, ‘Portrait of John Zephaniah Holwell’, 1765. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (ref: P.961.244)

Marquis de Valady (1766– 1793) and his wife, daughter of the Comte de Vaudreuil.

Courtesy of Christian de Chefdebien

SECTION THREE

Akbar ordering the slaughter to cease, from Abul Fazl’s ‘Akbarnama’, Mughal, c.1590. Johnson Album 8, no 4. V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London (ref: I.S.2– 1896)

King Solomon and the animals, from the ‘Iyar-i-Danish’ c.1595. Chester Beatty Library, Dublin (ref: CBL In. 4.74)

Majnun and the hunter, from an illustrated ‘Silsilat al-Zahab’, Akbar’s court, India, 1613. Chester Beatty Library, Dublin (ref: CBL In. 8.61)

Top-cover of pen box, signed by Manohar, India, Deccan, late 17th century. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon B. Polsky Fund, 2002 (2002.416 ab)

Jewel casket, detail of lady holding tree, attributed to Rahim Deccani. Deccan (or probably Golconda) or Kashmir, India, c.1660. V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London (ref: CT104143)

Jewel casket, detail of seated European, attributed to Rahim Deccani. Deccan (or probably Golconda) or Kashmir, India, c.1660. V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London (ref: CT104144)

The ‘pietre dure’ Orpheus on Shah Jahan’s Throne in the Hall of Public Audiences in the Red Fort, New Delhi, India, by Ebba Koch. Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, Graz, Austria, 1988

Todi Ragini, Second Wife of Hindol Raga, Folio from a ‘Ragamala’ (Garland of Melodies), Jaipur, India, c.1750. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, Museum Associates Purchase. Photo © 2006 Museum Associates/LACMA

Detail of an illustrated vijnaptipatra, by Ustad Salivahana, AD 1610. Courtesy of Shri Jitendra Shah, Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Institute of Indology, Navrangpur, Gujarat, India.

Illustration from the ‘Lalitavistara’ by the Buddhist Scribe Amrtananda: commissioned by Captain Knox, an officer of the East India. Company’s army, resident in Nepal in 1803– 4. The British Library, London (ref: I.O. SAN 688)

James Fraser, ‘A street scene in the village of Raniya’, 1816– 20. The British Library, London (ref: Add.Or.4057)

James Gillray, ‘French Liberty and British Slavery’, London, c.1789. The British Library, London/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: BL 22564)

James Gillray, ‘Consequences of a Successful French Invasion or We teach de English Republicans to work’, London, c.1798. The Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: NCO 190453)

James Gillray, ‘Temperance enjoying a frugal meal’ (Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz; King George III), 1792. The National Portrait Gallery, London (ref: NPG D12461)

James Gillray, ‘A voluptuary under the horrors of Digestion’ (King George IV), 1792. The National Portrait Gallery, London (ref: NPG D12460)

James Gillray, ‘New morality …’, London, 1798. The National Portrait Gallery, London (ref: NPG D13093)

Edward Hicks, ‘The Peaceable Kingdom’, c.1840– 5. Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: TBM 84503)

INTEGRATED

Thomas Bushell, the Superlative Prodigall, from Thomas Bushell, ‘The First Part of Youth Errors’ (London, 1628). The British Library, London

Golden Age, from ‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses’ (London, 1732). The British Library, London (ref: 11375.aa.23)

Ranters and Shakers, from George Hall ‘The Declaration of John Robins, the false Prophet, otherwise called the Shakers God’ (London, 1651). The British Library, London

A naked rout of Ranters, from John Collins ‘Strange Newes from Newgate’ (London, 1650/1). The British Library, London (ref: E.622.3)

Naked Adamites, from Obadiah Couchman, ‘The Adamites Sermon’ (F. Cowles: London, 1641). The British Library, London

Roger Crab’s horoscope consultation with William Lilly, ‘de Revelatione’. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, England. (ref: MS Ashmole 427 f. 51v)

Roger Crab, ‘The English Hermite’ (London, 1655). The National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG D2220)

Illuminated letter S, from Roger Crab, ‘The English Hermite’ (London, 1655), p. 2. The British Library, London (ref: G.1024.E.826.1)

Jan van Grevenbroeck, Marco Polo in Tartar Attire. Museo Correr, Venice/ The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: XIR 34703)

Indian cow worship, from the frontispiece of Thomas Herbert, ‘A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile, Begunne Anno 1626 Into Afrique … and some parts of the Orientall Indies’ (William Stansby: London, 1634). The British Library, London

Brahmin with cow, from Frontispiece of Henry Lord, ‘A Display of two forraigne sects in the East Indies’ (London, 1630). The British Library, London (ref: 147.a.20)

Horoscope of the Nativity of Thomas Tryon’s daughter, from John Gadbury, ‘Collectio Geniturarum’ (London, 1661/2), p. 195. The British Library, London

Robert White, Portrait of Thomas Tryon after unknown artist. From Thomas Tryon, ‘The Knowledge Of A Man’s Self ’ (T. Bennet: London, 1703). The National Portrait Gallery, London (ref: NPG D8242)

Naked Adamites, from Bernard Picart, ‘Ceremonies et Coutumes Religieuses de Tous Les Peuples Du Monde ( J.F. Bernard: Amsterdam, 1736). The British Library, London (ref: IV.213)

Drawing by John Evelyn of the Evelyn family house at Wotton, Surrey, from the terrace above the gardens, 1653. The Trustees of the British Museum, London

From Knorr von Rosenroth et al., eds, ‘Kabbalæ Denudatæ’, Volume II. ( J.D. Zunneri: Frankfurt, 1684). The British Library, London

Illustration of a Slaughterhouse and Butchering Tools from Denis Diderot et al., ‘Encyclopedia’ 1751. Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis

Isaac Newton, ‘Irenicum’. King’s College Library, Cambridge (ref: Keynes 3, f.5)

Illustration from the eight volumes of ‘Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy’ (London, 1692– 4). The British Library, London (ref: 1482.bb.25)

Edward Tyson’s chimpanzee before and after dissection, from Edward Tyson, ‘Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris’ (Thomas Bennet et al.: London, 1699). The British Library, London

Portrait of George Cheyne. Edinburgh University Library, Sir William Thomason-Walker Collection (Licensor www.scran.ac.uk)

William Hogarth’s Stage One from the ‘Four Stages of Cruelty’. William Hogarth/V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London (ref: JX1832)

‘Equality’ engraved by L. Gautier, c.1793/4 after Antoine Boizot. Musee de la Revolution Francaise, Visille, France/The Bridgeman Art Library, London (ref: REV 131559)

‘The Interior of a Native Hut’ from A. Colin, ‘Twenty four Plates illustrating Hindoo & European Manners in Bengal … after sketches by Mrs c. Belnos’ (Smith & Elder: London, 1832), plate 14. V&A Images/ Victoria and Albert Museum, London (ref: CT69834)

Roberto de Nobili dressed as Indian ‘sanyassin’. The British Library, London (ref: 4869.dd.15.T17343)

James Gillray, frontispiece of John Oswald, ‘The Cry of Nature’ ( J. Johnson: London, 1791). The British Library, London (ref: 1388b.26)

James Sayers, ‘John Bull’s sacrifice to Janus’ (Hannah Humphrey: London,1794). The National Portrait Gallery, London (ref: NPG D12257)

Woodcut by Bewick, from George Nicholson, ‘On the Conduct of Man to Inferior Animals’ (G. Nicholson: Manchester; Whitrow: London, 1797). Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, England (ref: Johnson f. 235)

Richard Newton, ‘A Blow Up at Breakfast!’ (W. Holland: London, 1792). The Trustees of the British Museum, London (ref: PD 8092)

‘John Stewart’ by Henry Hoppner Meyer, after J.E.H. Robinson. The National Portrait Gallery, London (ref: NPG D4935)

James Sayers, ‘Caricature of Joseph Ritson’, 1803. The National Portrait Gallery, London (ref: NPG D9623)

Title illustration from ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley (1797– 1851). Engraved by Theodor M. von Holst. Bridgeman Art Library (ref: XJF 105430)

Mahatma Gandhi at the Vegetarian Society, 1931, seated next to the socialist reformer, Henry Salt. Courtesy of Jon Wynne Tyson/West Sussex Wildlife Protection

‘Waldesfrieden’ from Richard Ungewitter, ‘Nacktheit und Kultur’, 1913. The British Library, London

‘Heil Goring!’ from Kladderadatsch, 1933. From ‘The Nazi War on Cancer’ by Robert N. Proctor. (Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1999)

Der Führer als Tierfreund. Nazi propaganda material, c.1936. AKG Images, London

INTRODUCTION

Stranded in the countryside and confronted with a live chicken which he has to roast, Withnail is paralysed. ‘I think you should strangle it instantly,’ says his anxious friend Peter, ‘in case it starts trying to make friends with us.’ ‘I can’t,’ he adds, ‘those dreadful, beady eyes’ (Bruce Robinson, Withnail & I (1987)). In 1714 the philosophical wit, Bernard Mandeville, mused on a very similar predicament: ‘I question whether ever any body so much as killed a Chicken without Reluctancy the first time,’ he commented wryly, ‘yet all of them feed heartily and without Remorse on Beef, Mutton and Fowls when they are bought in the Market.’¹ Western society has fostered a culture of caring for animals; and it has maintained humanity’s right to kill and eat them. Today, negotiating compassion with the desire to eat is customary, and there are clearly defined lifestyles available for each person’s particular taste. But it was only after the word ‘vegetarian’ was coined in the 1840s, followed by the formation of the Vegetarian Society in 1847, that ‘vegetarianism’ was applied to a distinct movement that could easily be pigeon-holed, and ignored. Before that, meat-eating was an open question that concerned everyone and it affected not just people’s choice of diet but their fundamental ideas about man’s status on earth.*

In the era preceding the Industrial Revolution the question of meat-eating was one of the fiercest battle-fronts in the struggle to define humanity’s proper relationship with nature. The vital question: ‘should humans be eating animals?’ was a serious challenge to Western society’s belief that the world and everything in it had been made exclusively for mankind. Vegetarians called for a wholesale reappraisal of the human relationship with nature. Man was lord of the creation: but what kind of a lord, vegetarians asked, ate his own subjects?

It started with the Bible – with the very first chapter of Genesis. The first words God said to Adam and Eve after creating the world were: ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’ (Genesis 1:28). In the remote world of fourth-century BC Athens, this view was echoed with remarkable consonance by Aristotle, probably the most revered authority in Western culture after the Scriptures: ‘plants are created for the sake of animals, and the animals for the sake of men’.² These two pillars of cultural authority provided a religious and philosophical sanction for humanity’s predatory instincts (a characteristic of hominid behaviour which arose more than a million years ago). Anything that wasn’t recognisably Homo sapiens stood little chance of being valued beyond its basic utility. But there were always counter-currents and cracks in the edifice, and it was into these fractures that vegetarians thrust their cultural crowbars.

Man was lord of the earth; but in what, exactly, did his dominion consist? In the beginning at least, according to the Bible, man’s dominion over the animals apparently did not include killing them – for the very next thing God had said to Adam and Eve was: ‘Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed … and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat’ (Genesis 1:29). From this primeval culinary instruction most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theologians deduced that Adam and Eve were restricted to eating fruit and plants, and all creatures lived together in herbivorous peace. It was only much later (1,600 years by standard chronology), when the earth had been destroyed and wed again in Noah’s Flood, that God altered the charter to mankind.³ When Noah came down from the Ark, God told him, ‘the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things’ (Genesis 9:2–3). As the scholar John Edwards explained with relish in 1699, this was as much as to say, ‘you have as free liberty now, since the Flood, to eat the Flesh of every living Creature, as you had before the Flood to feed on every sort of Herbs and Fruits, tho you were stinted as to Flesh. This is the clear sense and import of the words; and consequently proves, that eating Flesh before the Flood was unlawful.’

The friction between God’s permission to prey upon animals and the ideal of mankind in harmony with creation produced a fault line which vegetarians sought to magnify. Even as the biblical strictures faded in society, equivalent values remained prevalent, and their legacy can still be traced in modern society, particularly in the deep-rooted beliefs on either side of the environmental debate.

Meat-eating came under fire from a spectacular array of viewpoints in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Revolutionaries attacked the bloodthirsty luxury of mainstream culture; demographers accused the meat industry of wasting resources which could otherwise be used to feed people; anatomists claimed that human intestines were not equipped to digest meat, and travellers to the East presented India as a peaceful alternative to the rapacity of the West. Radicals and eccentrics contested their society’s values head on; but many of the era’s foremost thinkers also wrangled over the issues, leading to a reassessment of human nature. The luxury of choosing to abstain from meat may have been restricted to small sectors of European society, but these often drew their inspiration from the underfed poor who seemed to live, and labour, without needing vast quantities of meat. The cultural elites in turn influenced agronomic, medical and economic policies which determined the diets of populations as a whole.

The arguments that raged in the formative period between 1600 and 1830 helped to shape the values of modern society. Understanding the history of our ideas sets modern culture in a striking new light and can overturn our most entrenched assumptions. The early history of vegetarianism reveals how ancient ethics of abstinence, early medical science and Indian philosophy have influenced Western culture in profound and unexpected ways.

Returning to a state of harmony free from carnage became a fervent wish for many in the seventeenth century; it remained an idyllic dream even for those who recognised its impossibility. It was part of what can be called prelapsarianism: the desire to return to the perfection enjoyed by mankind before Adam and Eve’s ‘lapse’ in Paradise. Prelapsarians often wished to reinstate the harmonious relationship with the animals enjoyed in Eden. Their ‘dominion’ would be benevolent and kind, not a savage tyranny: an ideal which seventeenth-century radicals used in their attack on oppression and violence in human society.

In 1642 civil war broke out between Royalists and Parliamentarians, plunging England into years of bloodshed. Men and women of all political stripes searched for an alternative to the anarchy around them by trying to recreate a society based on paradisal peace and harmony. The Royalist Thomas Bushell followed his master Francis Bacon’s advice by testing whether the primeval diet was the key to long life and spiritual perfection. On the radical wing of the Parliamentary faction, puritanical fighters for democracy used vegetarianism to articulate their dissent from the luxurious mainstream, and called for a bloodless revolution to institute a slaughter-free society of equality. Religious extremists chimed in with the announcement that God dwelt within the creatures and mankind should therefore treat them all with love and kindness.

One other external force joined the fray, exerting a surprising influence on Western culture. European travellers to India ‘discovered’ the ancient Indian religions and the fascinating doctrine of ahimsa, or non-violence to all living things. They interrogated Hindus and Jains on its philosophical ramifications; with astonishment, they observed animal hospitals, widespread vegetarianism and extraordinary kindness even to the most lowly creatures. News of Indian vegetarianism proved a radical challenge to Christian ideas of human dominance, and it contributed to a crisis in the European conscience. To many it seemed that the idealists’ dreams had become a reality. Vegetarians got down on their knees, calling on the ancient Indian philosophers to lead humanity away from its state of corruption and bloodshed.

Europe’s encounter with Indian vegetarianism had a massive impact well beyond the radical fringe. A thriving trade in travel literature inflamed the eager inquiries of serious philosophers and fuelled the curiosity of a wide popular audience. The travellers themselves tended to ridicule Indian vegetarianism as absurd soft-heartedness, but many readers saw in the Indian system a powerful and appealing moral code. Members of the philosophical establishment – John Evelyn, Sir Thomas Browne and Sir William Temple – recognised that the Indian vegetarians proved that people could live happily on the original fruit and vegetable diet. Sir Isaac Newton’s reading about Eastern sages helped to convince him that ‘Mercy to Beasts’ was one of God’s first and most fundamental laws from which Europeans had long since apostatized. Sceptics at the end of the seventeenth century used Indian vegetarianism to plant a powerful blow on European religious and social orthodoxies, arguing that Indians upheld the original law of nature: to do unto others (including animals) as you would be done by.

The impact of Indian vegetarianism vitally influenced a shift away from the Bible’s mandate of unlimited dominion. It encouraged people to imagine that broadening the sphere of ethical responsibility was beneficial for humans as well as for nature itself. Indian philosophy – and principally the doctrine of ahimsa – triggered a debate that has evolved over time into the modern ecological crisis.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a time of immense scientific development. New discoveries and systematising theories emerged from all over Western Europe and filtered out into the widely educated population. Microscopes plunged the observing eye into thitherto invisible worlds; surgical explorations opened up concealed areas of the human body; ever-growing tables of astronomical observations from bigger and better observatories drove human knowledge deeper into space; accumulated navigational skills extended the known world almost to its limits, bringing new peoples and new species under the scrutiny of Enlightenment science – or ‘Natural Philosophy’ as the discipline was then known. If the vegetarian argument was to prosper it would have to keep up with the times and adapt its logic to modern systems of thought. Vegetarians developed elaborate scientific ways of defending their philosophy, and plugged their views into the main channels of Enlightenment thought.

Intrepid investigations with the scalpel confirmed that the human body was almost identical to that of apes and very similar to other animals, which put the study of anatomy and physiology centre-stage in philosophical debate. Man was partly an animal: but scientists wanted to know exactly what sort of animal, herbivore or carnivore? A substantial sector of the intellectual world concluded that the human body, in its original form, was designed to be herbivorous – thus substantiating the scriptural evidence that the primeval diet was fruit and herbs.

Science flourished in the eighteenth century, but it was founded on the schism with received modes of thought engineered by the philosophers René Descartes and his vitally important rival, Pierre Gassendi. Within their new frameworks, Descartes and Gassendi set to work on the most pressing questions: the nature of the soul, of man, and man’s place between God and nature. Contrary to all expectations, both Gassendi and Descartes agreed that vegetarianism could be the most suitable diet for humans. Amazingly, three of Europe’s most important early seventeenth-century philosophers – Descartes, Gassendi and Francis Bacon – all advocated vegetarianism. At no time before or since has vegetarianism been endorsed by such a formidable array of intellectuals, and by the 1700s their pioneering work had blossomed into a powerful movement of scientific vegetarianism.

Anatomists noticed that human teeth and intestines were more akin to those of herbivores than those of carnivores. Dieticians argued that meat did not break down in the digestive system, clogging blood circulation, whereas tender vegetables easily dissolved into an enriching fluid. Neural scientists discovered that animals have nerves capable of exquisite suffering, just as humans do, and this was discomfiting for people who based their entire moral philosophy on the principle of sympathy. At the same time, the study of Indian populations indicated that abstinence from meat could be conducive to health and long life. This helped to transform the image of vegetarianism from a radical political statement into a sound medical system. The idea that the vegetarian diet could be the most natural was so astonishingly prevalent in university medical faculties across Europe that it appears to have been close to a scientific orthodoxy.

Numerous vegetarian doctors emerged all over Europe, transforming these scientific arguments into practical dietary prescriptions for patients believed to be ailing from over-consumption of flesh. These diet-doctors became conspicuous figures in society, much like the celebrity dieticians of today, but they were also primary movers in pioneering medical research. Meat was almost universally believed to be the most nourishing food, and in England especially, beef was an icon of national identity. It was still common to suspect that vegetables were unnecessary gastronomic supplements and that they were prone to upset the digestive system in perilous ways. The vegetarians helped to alter such suppositions, by presenting evidence that vegetables were an essential nutritional requirement, and that meat was superfluous and could even be extremely unhealthy. The vegetarians thus played a key role in forming modern ideas about balanced diets and put a spotlight on the dangers of eating meat, especially to excess.

Believing that the vegetable diet was healthier and meat was positively harmful invariably led people to the conclusion that the human body was designed to be herbivorous, not carnivorous, and that killing animals was unnatural. Examining natural laws was supposed to provide insights into God’s creational design, independent from scriptural revelation. The new scientific observations were seen to endorse the old theological claims for the origins of the vegetable diet, and it gave added force to the view that human society’s savage treatment of lesser animals was a perversion of the natural order.

These deductions were backed up by changing perceptions of sympathy which became one of the fundamental principles of moral philosophy in the late seventeenth century, and has remained an abiding force in Western culture. The idea of ‘sympathy’ in its modern sense as a synonym for ‘compassion’ was formulated as a mechanical explanation of the archaic idea of sympatheia, the principle – spectacularly adapted to vegetarianism by Thomas Tryon – according to which elements in the human body had an occult ‘correspondence’, like a magnetic attraction, to similar entities in the universe. Descartes’ followers explained that if you saw another person’s limb being injured, ‘animal spirits’ automatically rushed to your corresponding limb and actually caused you to participate in the sense of pain. Although the Cartesians thought that sympathy for animals should be ignored, later commentators argued that the instinctive feeling of sympathy for animals indicated that killing them was contrary to human nature. Vegetarians seized upon the unity of the ‘scientific’, ‘moral’ and ‘religious’ rationales and tried to force people to recognise that eating meat was at odds with their own ethics. Although most people preferred not to think about it, the vegetarians insisted that filling the European belly funded the torture of animals in unpleasant agricultural systems, and ultimately the rape and pillage of the entire world.

All these claims were fiercely repudiated and a distinct counter-vegetarian movement quickly rallied in defence of meat-eating. The intensity as well as the wide proliferation of the debate testifies to just how familiar the vegetarian cause became, and just how challenging most people felt it to be. It threatened to oust man from his long-held position as unlimited lord of the universe – and worse still, to deprive people of their Sunday feasts of roast meat. Leading figures in the medical world accepted some of the vegetarians’ reforms – that people should eat less meat and more vegetables – but urgently asserted that man’s anatomy was omnivorous or carnivorous not herbivorous, and that vegetables alone were unsuitable for human nourishment. Several philosophers, novelists and poets likewise insisted that sympathy for animals was all very well, but should not be taken to the extreme of vegetarianism.

Nevertheless, prominent members of the cultural elite espoused at least some of the views of the vegetarians and inspired a considerable back-to-nature movement in which diet played an important role. The novelist Samuel Richardson allowed the vegetarian ideals of his doctor, George Cheyne, to infiltrate his best-selling novels, Clarissa and Pamela. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, concurring with the anatomical case, argued that the innate propensity to sympathy was a philosophical basis of animal rights, thus spawning a generation of Rousseauists who advocated vegetarianism. The economist Adam Smith took on board the doctors’ discovery that meat was a superfluous luxury and this provided an important cog in the taxation system of his seminal treatise on the free market. By the end of the eighteenth century vegetarianism was advocated by medical lecturers, moral philosophers, sentimental writers and political activists. Vegetarianism had sustained its role as a counter-cultural critique, backed up by evidence that many in the mainstream of society could accept.

The history of vegetarianism adumbrates recent revisionary criticism which questions traditional oppositions between the so-called irrationalism of religious enthusiasts and the ‘Enlightenment’ rationalism of natural philosophers. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the vegetable diet was munched raw at the communal board of the political and religious extremists – but it was also served with silver cutlery at the high table of the Enlightenment to the learned elite.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Europe was dominated by a culture of radical innovation – diverse movements bundled together under the name Romanticism. Hinduism became the object of veneration as a new wave of Orientalists travelled to India, learned Indian languages and translated Sanskrit texts to the delight of Western audiences. Some East India Company servants were so overcome by the benevolence of Indian culture that they relinquished the religion of their fathers and employers to embrace Hinduism as a more humane alternative. This played into the hands of radical critics of Christianity, such as Voltaire, who used the antiquity of Hinduism to land a devastating blow to the Bible’s claims, and acknowledged that the Hindus’ treatment of animals represented a shaming alternative to the viciousness of European imperialists. Even those more dedicated to keeping their Christian identity, such as the great scholar Sir William Jones, found themselves swayed by the doctrine of ahimsa, seeing it as the embodiment of everything the eighteenth-century doctors and philosophers had scientifically demonstrated.

As the ferment of political ideas brewed into revolutionary fervour in the 1780s, the vegetarian ideas from former centuries were incorporated once again into a radical agenda. Hinduism was held up as a philosophy of universal sympathy and equality which accorded with the fundamental tenet of democratic politics and animal rights. The rebel John Oswald returned from India inflamed with outrage at the violent injustice of human society and immersed himself in the most bloodthirsty episodes of the French Revolution. Others developed Rousseau’s back-to-nature movement and lost their heads on the guillotine defending their vegetarian beliefs. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley joined an eccentric network of nudist vegetarians who were agitating for social revolution and immortalised their ideas in a series of vegetarian poems and essays. As atheism waxed, the anthropocentric bias of European Christianity was eroded, and humans were forced to acknowledge that they were more closely related to animals than was entirely comfortable. Utopian reformers still had the model of primeval harmony seared into their imaginations even though many of them regarded Eden as no more than a myth, so they learned to treat Judaeo-Christianity as an anthropological curiosity and paved the way for modern ideas about humanity and the environment.

As environmental degradation and population growth became serious problems in Europe, economists turned to the pressing question of limited natural resources. Many realised that producing meat was a hugely inefficient process in which nine-tenths of the resources pumped into the animal were wastefully transformed into faeces.

Utilitarians argued that since the vegetable diet could sustain far more people per acre than meat, it was much better equipped to achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Once again the enormous populations of vegetarian Indians and Chinese were held up as enlightened exemplars of efficient agronomics. Such calculations eventually led to Thomas Malthus’ warnings that human populations inexorably grew beyond the capacity of food production, and that famine was likely to ensue.

By the early nineteenth century most of the philosophical, medical and economic arguments for vegetarianism were in place, and exerting continual pressure on mainstream European culture. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the ideas inevitably transformed, but continuities can be traced to the present day. Figures as diverse as Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi and Leo Tolstoy developed the political ramifications of vegetarianism in their own ways, and continued to respond to India’s moral example.

When studying ideas that people formulated hundreds of years ago, it is important to understand them on their own terms, irrespective of whether they are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ according to present-day understanding, because to do so allows them to provide insight into assumptions that still prevail in modern society – of which, in their nature, we are commonly unaware. The remarkable and long under-appreciated lives of early vegetarians are inroads into uncharted areas of history; they simultaneously shed light on why you think about nature the way you do, why you are told to eat fresh vegetables and avoid too much meat, and how Indian philosophy has crucially shaped those thoughts over the past 400 years.

* Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers generally used ‘Man’ to denote ‘mankind’ comprising both genders, usually with a patriarchal bias. It would be a distortion to avoid using their term.

PART ONE Grass Roots

ONE Bushell’s Bushel, Bacon’s Bacon and The Great Instauration

Driving out of London over Highgate Hill on a cold March day in 1626, Sir Francis Bacon noticed spring snow still lying on the ground and seized the opportunity to test whether ‘flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt’. Bacon descended from his carriage in a flourish of compulsive inquisitiveness, purchased a hen from a poor woman, made her gut it, and then stuffed it with snow himself. Before he could publish the results of this, his last experiment, the snow chilled Bacon’s own flesh, and he was struck by a coughing fit so severe he could not return home. As he lay in the damp bed in the nearby house of his friend the Earl of Arundel, his condition worsened, and within days Bacon, one of England’s greatest philosophers, was dead.¹

Born in 1561, Bacon had struggled to the very top of the political ladder; he had been a member of Queen Elizabeth’s council and Lord Chancellor to King James VI and I. Despite his relatively modest background as the grandson of a sheep-reeve, he had been knighted and ennobled with the titles of Baron Verulam and Viscount St Albans. Above all, he was respected throughout Europe for philosophical works in which he envisaged an intellectual project of limit-defying scale. By gaining comprehensive knowledge of the natural world, Bacon believed that people could improve their control over the environment until eventually they would reinstate the felicity that Adam enjoyed in Eden. In the title of his unfinished work, The Great Instauration (from the Latin Instauratio – restoration, inauguration), he signified that his vision was the beginning of the restitution of mankind’s lost power. His audacious optimism fired the imagination of the keenest minds of the ensuing centuries, and his name became the touchstone of the Enlightenment. When King James first read Bacon’s writings he proclaimed that ‘yt is like the peace of God, that passeth all understanding’.²

Bacon’s escapade with the frozen chicken was not an isolated whim. He had been studying the properties of food for years and in 1623 published in Latin The Great Instauration’s third part: The History Naturall and Experimentall, Of Life and Death. Or the Prolongation of Life. The quest to discover the secret to long life had been an obsession since ancient times, and Bacon himself considered it the ‘most noble’ part of medicine.³ For Bacon, no less than people today, diet took centre-stage. Though ironically his investigations into the ‘preservation of flesh’ actually caused his own flesh to perish, Bacon hoped that discovering the ideal food would help lead men back to their original perfection.

Bacon noticed that it was healthy to eat plenty of fruit and vegetables on a daily basis. But if it was longevity you were after, he advised his readers to ignore the usual chatter about the Golden Mean and go for either of the extremes. Strengthen your constitution by undergoing a ‘strict Emaciating Dyet’ of biscuit and guaiacum tree resin: this would weaken you in the short term, but set you up for a long life. Going to the other extreme, Bacon agreed with Celsus, the first-century AD medical encyclopaedist, that gastronomic excess could also be good for you. This amusing mandate for indulgence – which eighteenth-century medics rallied around when their appetites came under fire from the vegetarian doctors – no doubt informed the approving tone of the contemporaneous biographer, John Aubrey, when he wrote that Bacon’s one-time assistant, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, periodically over-indulged, getting himself blind drunk at least once a year. Dying at the age of ninety-two, Hobbes was later wilfully enrolled by eighteenth-century vegetarians as a fine example of the benefits of temperance.⁴

‘Man, and Creatures feeding upon Flesh, are scarcely nourished with Plants alone,’ wrote Bacon in 1623. ‘Perhaps, Fruits, or Graines, baked, or boyled, may, with long use, nourish them;’ he added. ‘But Leaves, of Plants, or Herbs, will not doe it.’ Surviving exclusively on leaves and greens (‘herbs’ meant herbaceous plants including things like cabbage) had already been attempted with catastrophic effects by the Foliatanes, a convent of ascetic nuns who fed on nothing but foliage. But Bacon did allow that humans and carnivores could survive on vegetables if the ingredients were well chosen, and his Latin original shows him to have been even more open to the vegetarian diet than his disconcerted posthumous translators made it sound.⁵ Bacon noticed that there was substantial statistical evidence that vegetarianism was one of the extremes that could aid longevity: Pythagoras, the sixth-century BC Greek philosopher renowned for his theorem on right-angled triangles, also taught his disciples to abstain from meat, and Pythagoreans such as Apollonius of Tyana ‘exceeded an hundred yeares; His Face bewraying no such Age’. Indeed, Bacon catalogued numerous vegetarians recorded in history who had lived unusually long lives: the desert-dwelling Jewish sect of vegetarian Essenes, the Spartans, the Indians and plenty of Christian ascetics. ‘A Pythagoricall, or Monasticall Diet, according to strict rules,’ concluded Bacon, ‘seemeth to be very effectual for long life.’

So while Hobbes swallowed whole Bacon’s aphorisms about indulgence, another flamboyant young male acolyte, Thomas Bushell (1594–1674), was ruminating over his master’s approbation of the vegetarian way. Thomas Aubrey described both Hobbes and Bushell scurrying along behind Bacon transcribing his thoughts during strolls in his garden – each preparing to carry Bacon’s legacy forward in their own divergent ways.

In 1621 Bacon’s glittering political career came to an abrupt end. He was made the scapegoat in a political tussle about monopolies and the victim of a personal attack by his rival Edward Coke. Left to the mercy of Parliament by the King, Bacon was accused of taking bribes; he was fined £40,000, briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London and banished from court in disgrace. In the wake of this scandal there followed more severe allegations: that Bacon was a sodomite and paid his young male servants, Bushell among them, for sex. Satirical verses circulated, laughing at the matching of their names: Bacon was ‘A pig, a hog, a boar, a bacon/ Whom God hath left, and the devil hath taken’, while his servant pecked at his bushel of grain, but ‘Bushell wants by half a peck the measure of such tears/ Because his lord’s posteriors makes the buttons that he wears’. (The buttons refer to the garish fashion of embellishing suits with buttons, leading to the double-entendre nickname ‘buttoned Bushell’.)⁶

Taking his fate stoically, Bacon devoted himself to philosophical enquiries, but Bushell – who had joined Bacon’s household at the age of fifteen, risen to be his seal-bearer and was entirely dependent on his patron – faced despair. Following Bacon’s fall from grace and subsequent death, Bushell was plunged into dejected remorse. Lurching from a life of wanton profligacy, in which his greatest achievement had been running up enormous debts and attracting the attention of James I for the gorgeousness of his attire, he left behind him London’s gaming houses, bawdy Shakespearean plays and buxom whores of Eastcheap, and dramatically refashioned himself as the ‘Superlative Prodigall’.

‘Thomas Bushell, the Superlative Prodigal’ from Thomas Bushell, The First Part of Youths Errors (1628)

The young man took his penitence to anchoritic extremes. In his later writings, Bushell described how he first retired to the Isle of Wight disguised as a fisherman, and afterwards to the Calf of Man (an islet just off the Isle of Man) where he took up residence on the desolate summit of a cliff 470 feet above the Irish Sea. There, he said, ‘in obedience to my dead Lord [Bacon’s] philosophical advice, I resolved to make a perfect experiment upon myself, for the obtaining of a long and healthy life.’ He shunned meat and alcohol, living instead on a ‘parsimonious diet of herbs, oil, mustard and honey, with water sufficient, most like to that [of] our long liv’d fathers before the flood, as was conceiv’d by that lord, which I most strictly observed, as if obliged by a religious vow’.

The austerity of Bushell’s diet was clearly rooted in the Christian (and pre-Christian) tradition of abstinence from meat and monastic penitence. By imposing strictures on the body, it was believed, the soul would be regenerated and cleansed of sin. And it was meat and alcohol, above all, that were identified as the principal items of luxury. The problem for Bushell was that in Protestant England ascetic fasting was seen as a superstitious vestige of Catholicism. By giving up meat and living like a monk he risked being accused of having secret Catholic sympathies. In his confessions, The First Part of Youths Errors (1628), Bushell vigorously defended himself: if all the saints – Anthony, Augustine, Jerome, Paul the hermit and the Apostles themselves – had been ascetics, he demanded, then why shouldn’t he, a terrible sinner, be one as well?⁷

Bacon too was aware of how suspicious his predilection for vegetables could seem. Regardless of being called a Catholic, Bacon was afraid he would be accused of sympathising with the medieval vegetarian heretics, the Manicheans and Cathars, whom the Inquisition had genocidally suppressed with fire and sword. Anxious to avoid such a fate, Bacon issued repeated disclaimers: ‘Neither would we be thought to favour the Manichees, or their diet, though wee commend the frequent use of all kindes of seedes, and kernels, and roots … neither let any Man reckon us amongst those Hereticks, which were called Cathari.’ Bacon was trying to shift discussions of diet away from its old heretical connotations into the new idiom of enlightened philosophy. His opinions, he insisted, were based on empirical facts and not on religious dietary taboos.⁸

Happily, Bacon’s healthy vegetable diet appears to have done Bushell a world of good. By the time he was buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey in 1674 at the fine old age of eighty, Bushell had become a legendary figure, and is still remembered today as the Calf of Man’s most famous inhabitant. For a while, he was also rich. Having come down from his cliff, he pursued Bacon’s practical tip on reclaiming silver and lead mines in Wales and established his own mint in Aberystwyth. God was so pleased with his vegetarian penitence, he claimed, that He gave Bushell power to subdue the ‘Subteranean Spirits’ which usually hindered mining projects. With the profits that flowed from the earth, he proclaimed his intention to realise Bacon’s plans for a ‘Solomon’s House’ – the utopian establishment depicted in Bacon’s unfinished work, New Atlantis. Bacon had imagined an ideal colony where scientific endeavour (including a primitive form of genetic engineering) was enhanced by the inhabitants’ rigorous lifestyle, some of them purifying their bodies by living in three-mile-deep caves below the mountains. Bushell’s institution was not quite what Bacon had imagined. It was more like a philanthropic dining facility for his miners, where instead of being fed the complete meal Bacon had devised – a fermented-meat drink – they were fed on Bushell’s own meagre diet of penitential bread and water.

Bushell himself retreated, meanwhile, to his estate at Road Enstone, near Woodstock in Oxfordshire, where he created a ‘kind of paradise’ in a grotto garden around a cave which became famous for a natural spring generating a series of spectacular hydraulic contraptions. He was no doubt inspired by Bacon’s cave-dwelling multi-centenarian wise men and by the ‘paradise’ garden at Bacon’s mansion in Gorhambury where the pair used to spend hours in meditation. In his new abode Bushell kept up his old dietary resolve, writing that he still ‘observ’d my Lords prescription, to satisifie nature with a Diet of Oyle, Honey, Mustard, Herbs and Bisket’. King Charles I and Queen Henrietta visited Bushell in his grotto in 1636, and for their pleasure he organised the performance of a masque about a vegetarian prodigal hermit. The Queen expressed her appreciation by installing an extremely rare Egyptian mummy in Bushell’s damp grotto home (where it slowly went mouldy and was lost to posterity).

When civil war broke out in 1642, Bushell roused himself from his tranquil retreat. As political affiliations polarised those who questioned and those who believed subjects had no right to question, Bushell remained fervently loyal to King Charles. Bacon had foreseen the political turmoil and spent his career defending the royal prerogative; faithful to Bacon as always, Bushell became a mainstay of the Cavaliers’ military campaign against the Roundheads. He turned his miners into the King’s lifeguard, bankrolled the Royalist army with silver and a hundred tons of lead-shot from his mines, put down a mutiny in Shropshire, and defended (yet another island) Lundy in the Bristol Channel. Eventually surrendering to the onslaught of the Parliamentary army, he was arrested and seriously wounded in the head, but then attained the protection of Lord Fairfax. With many of his loans unsettled other than by a quaint but otherwise worthless thank-you letter from King Charles, Bushell went back to his garden, as Horace to his Sabine Farm and the poet Andrew Marvell to Nun Appleton, rejecting the anarchy of Cromwell’s interregnum in preference for his own private Eden.⁹

Bushell’s dietary strictures followed an ancient Christian tradition which conceived of vegetarianism as a back door to regaining paradisal perfection. Like several Church fathers, the ascetic St Jerome (AD c.347– 420) – revered for plucking a painful thorn from a lion’s paw and composing the Latin Bible in his penitential cave – associated the gluttony of flesh-eating with Adam’s intemperate eating of the forbidden fruit. If people wanted to undo the curse of the Fall, they would have to start by abstaining from flesh: ‘by fasting we can return to paradise, whence, through fullness, we have been expelled.’ ‘At the beginning of the human race we neither ate flesh, nor gave bills of divorce, nor suffered circumcision,’ said Jerome. These were concessions granted after the Flood, ‘But once Christ has come in the end of time,’ he said, ‘we are no longer allowed divorce, nor are we circumcised, nor do we eat flesh’.¹⁰ This provided a theological rationale for relinquishing meat which lasted for centuries. As Sir John Pettus suggested in 1674, we ‘multiply Adams transgression by our continued eating of other creatures, which were not then allowed to us’.¹¹

This tradition had come under fire ever since the Protestants had split from the Roman Church. John Calvin (1509–64), co-founder of the Reformation, had tried to untangle such literal-minded dietary loopholes. He cast doubt over the vegetarianism of the early patriarchs by pointing out that God gave Adam and Eve animal skins to wear when he ejected them from Eden’s balmy realm, and that ever since the time of Cain and Abel people had sacrificed animals. But even if they didn’t eat the animals they sacrificed, he stressed, the important point was that God did eventually give ‘to man the free use of flesh, so that we might not eat it with a doubtful and trembling conscience’. Anyone who thought mankind should be vegetarian was being blasphemously ungrateful for God’s generosity. He had one message for such hyper-scrupulous quibblers: shut up and eat up.¹² But this was not enough to stem the longing for perfection, even in Protestant countries, and Bushell was one of many who still hoped to reclaim his lost innocence by abstaining from flesh.

In the masque he laid on for the King and Queen, Bushell depicted (and perhaps played) the part of the vegetarian hermit – clearly modelled on himself – who claims to have lived in the same Oxfordshire cave and subsisted on the same vegetable diet ever since the time of Noah. The hermit tells his audience he lives in a reconstructed Golden Age, ‘In which no injuries are meant or done’. The masque ended with the hermit inviting the King to join his world (and forget for a while the looming political crisis) by sharing in the feast of home-grown fruit.¹³

The Golden Age, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Bushell was indulging in the common feeling that the biblical story of original harmony was analogous to the classical Greek and Roman myth of the Golden Age, when justice reigned, iron was yet to be invented and no animals were slaughtered. In 1632, just before Bushell’s masque, the travelling poet George Sandys had published his extremely influential translation and commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Sandys portrayed the Golden Age menu of wild blackberries, strawberries, acorns and ‘all sorts of fruit’ in a much more appetising light than translators hitherto, and added enthusiastically that ‘this happy estate abounding with all felicities, assuredly represented that which man injoyed in his innocency: under the raigne of Saturne, more truly of Adam.’¹⁴ Eating meat, he added, was ‘a priviledge granted after to Noah; because [‘hearbes and fruits’] then had lost much of their nourishing vertue’. Meat-eating, according to this reasoning, was an unfortunate consequence of the Flood. In the climactic finale of Metamorphoses, Pythagoras comes forward and delivers a lengthy diatribe against eating animals – ‘How horrible a Sin, / That entrailes bleeding entrailes should intomb! / That greedie flesh, by flesh should fat become!’ Sandys noted that Pythagoras’ vegetarianism was an attempt to reinstate the peacefulness of the Golden Age because killing animals proceeded ‘from injustice, cruelty, and corruption of manners; not knowne in that innocent age’.¹⁵ Pythagoras’ example was an inspiration to early vegetarians like Bushell.

Giving up meat altogether may have been rather quirky in early seventeenth-century England, and Bushell was well aware that his notions could be mistaken for ‘the Chymera of a phanatick brain’.¹⁶ He further risked his reputation by successfully lobbying the government to release from prison several members of religious groups who were also trying to reinstate the conditions and even the diet of Eden, such as the Rosicrucians, the Family of Love and the Adamites (who took the Adamic lifestyle to its extreme by shedding their clothes and living in the naked purity of Eden before the figleaves).¹⁷

It may seem as if Bushell had by this time descended into a religious dream world, but his extreme diet was endorsed by scientific rigour. Bushell’s immersion into vegetarianism was an act of religious fervour, but it was simultaneously the realisation of a Baconian project: he presented himself as a human guinea-pig in Bacon’s ‘perfect experiment’ for lengthening human life on a vegetarian diet. As Bushell said, his dietary attempt to gain a long and healthy life was based on that of ‘our long liv’d fathers before the flood’. It was statistically evident that the average age of the ‘antediluvian’ patriarchs was in excess of 900 years, topped by Adam’s descendant, Methuselah, who lived to 969 (Genesis 5). What – everyone wanted to know – was the secret of their longevity?¹⁸ Once permission to eat meat was granted after the Flood, human life expectancy plummeted from 900 to the current average of around 70. It seemed at least plausible to the enquiring mind that it was eating meat that had curtailed human life so dramatically;¹⁹ perhaps by relinquishing it one could regain some of those lost years. This may sound like it competes in crankiness with today’s diet-doctors, but few then dared doubt the basic facts set out in the Bible. Even the philosopher René Descartes seems to have believed it. It may seem surprising that religious extremes and experimental philosophy coincided in such a spectacular way, but it was a trend that would continue for at least two centuries. Bacon and Bushell raised many of the questions about vegetarianism that dominated the ensuing debate.

Far from being the exclusive territory of extremists, undoing certain effects of the Fall was also the basis of Bacon’s intellectual endeavour. Bacon’s idea of the reclamation of Adamic knowledge became the manifesto for the seventeenth-century advancement of learning. The utopian reformers of the Civil War period Jan Amos Comenius and Samuel Hartlib hoped that their new system for universal education, or pansophism, would restore ‘Light, Peace, Health … and that golden age which has ever been longed for’. Their contemporary, the radical doctor Nicholas Culpeper, promised that his brand of the regulated temperate diet could mitigate malign celestial influences and make life on earth ‘a terrestiall Paradise to him that useth it’.²⁰ The kabbalists Knorr von Rosenroth and Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont believed that reclaiming knowledge would reinstate the harmony ‘which so many thousands of Christians have wished and groaned for, for such a long time’.²¹ Even members of the Royal Society – the pinnacle of British scientific exploration chartered by Charles II in 1662 – thought that they were gradually working mankind back to the universal knowledge enjoyed in Paradise.²²

Bushell’s idealistic vegetarianism fitted hand in glove with the intellectual project inaugurated by his master Francis Bacon. Bacon’s experimental philosophy would restore mankind to the universal knowledge lost in Adam’s Fall and discover the secret to longevity. Vegetarians would join forces by testing the dietary hypotheses and simultaneously restoring mankind to lost innocence and perfection. The dietary means to returning to antediluvian health was also a route to spiritual restoration. In Bushell’s ‘perfect experiment’, the spiritual and the ‘scientific’ marched side by side.

Bacon did not challenge the universally accepted doctrine that man had rightful dominion over nature; indeed, he held this as his philosophical paradigm. But Bacon did argue that man’s power over creation carried an important caveat: ‘There is implanted in man by nature,’ he wrote in The Advancement and Proficience of Learning (1605), ‘a noble and excellent Affection of Piety [pity] and compassion, which extends it selfe even to bruit creatures’. God had given man dominion, but He had also encoded him with a sentiment of compassion which moderated his behaviour to animals. Only ‘contracted & degenerate minds’, said Bacon, failed to heed the edict encapsulated in the biblical book of Proverbs, ‘A Just man is mercifull to the life of his Beast’ (Proverbs 12:10).

Bacon’s translation of this Proverb took the compassionate treatment of animals further than most Christians were comfortable with. The 1611 King James version rendered it ambiguously, ‘A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast’, and the Latin Vulgate simply says novit (‘recognises’), while in the original Hebrew the righteous man’s concern for his domestic animals may well be purely self-interested. Bacon was partaking in the pervasive, though often frowned-upon, tradition of seeking in the Bible laws that endorsed kindness to animals.

His motive for doing so was partly fuelled by the desire to find an equivalent in Judaeo-Christianity of the laws of humanity that he identified in other cultures. In doing this, he pushed forward one final major philosophical development which was to transform thinking in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: that Western and Eastern cultures shared close moral affinities regardless of their religious differences. This had roots in the medieval and Renaissance idea of the ‘virtuous gentile’, but it took on greater prominence and complexity as travellers had increasing opportunities to observe foreign cultures first hand. Bacon dubiously claimed that the Mosaic law against eating blood, found in Genesis, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, was Moses’ counterpart of laws found all over the world that enforced mercy to animals: ‘even in the sect of the Esseans and Pythagoreans, they altogither abstain’d from eating Flesh; which to this day is observed by an inviolate superstition, by many of the Easterne people under the Mogol.’ The law of pity, Bacon concluded, was not just a Jewish law, it was embedded in human nature, so it was little surprise to find that diverse religions enforced it. When other cultures could provide such useful comparisons that helped to prove his views on the properties of human nature, no wonder Bacon regarded the voyages of discovery as an important aspect of restoring man’s universal understanding. The Indians and the Pythagoreans took their opinions to superstitious extremes, but their vegetarianism, Bacon said, was the realisation of a true and noble principle. Misguided as they perhaps were, they nevertheless exemplified natural human mercy more than the ‘contracted & degenerate minds’ of his own society. This was a daring valorisation of a foreign ethical code, and Bacon later moderated it by comparing their superstitions with the Muslim taboos on pork and bacon.²³ This idea of instinctive sympathy added still more force to the scientific dietary reasons for becoming vegetarian. Richard Baxter (1615–91), one of the chief Puritan ministers in the Civil War, clearly exemplified how the medical and the moral motives propelled each other. When he was told to give up meat to save his ailing health, he consoled himself by reflecting that God had ‘put into all good men that tender compassion to the bruites as will keep them from a senseless royoting in their blood’; ‘all my daies’, he wrote, eating meat ‘hath gone, as against my nature, with some regret; which hath made me the more contented that God hath made me long renounce it’.²⁴

Bacon’s cultural analysis found a common cause in Christian and Indian teaching; as usual Bushell went a step further and cultivated the comparison in himself. In 1664 – more than forty years after Bushell first adopted the vegetable diet – the like-minded advocate of Indian vegetarianism and fellow Royalist John Evelyn called on Bushell in his cave. He was mightily impressed by the hermit’s way of life as well as the Edenic garden layout: ‘It is an extraordinary solitude,’ Evelyn wrote. ‘There he had two mummies; [and] a grott where he lay in a hammock like an Indian.’ Although he was probably thinking of American Indians not East Indians, in Evelyn’s eyes Bushell had taken on the identity of another culture, removed from the turbulent society around him.

Bacon and his assistant Bushell glimpsed many of the philosophical and spiritual developments of the ensuing two centuries – with regard to vegetarianism as much as any other field. Their combination of religion, science and morality forecast the religious debates of the seventeenth century, the medical enquiries of the Enlightenment, and even the Eastern philosophy that forced itself on the conscience of Europe. Bacon and Bushell’s ‘perfect experiment’ would be recast, retested and reformed time and time again.

TWO John Robins: The Shakers’ God

In the middle 1600s Adam – father of mankind – rose from the dead, brushed away over 5,000 years of subterranean dust, and came to deliver his descendants from the sin he had brought into the world. Quickly acquiring himself a new Eve – whom he also called ‘Virgin Mary’ – and impregnating her with a child called Abel who was also Jesus reincarnated, Adam set about accumulating disciples. He entranced all who happened to hear him by raising the dead and speaking in the original language of mankind, and convinced witnesses that they had seen visions of him miraculously riding on the wind like a flame, flanked by dragons and heavenly beasts. Before long, Adam’s biblical coterie accompanied him everywhere he went. His faithful associates included Judas the betrayer, the prophet Jeremiah, and the ill-fated Cain. To all these, Adam promised that he would reinstate Paradise on earth as it was before the Fall. Records show that a sizeable number of Londoners believed him.¹

Adam – otherwise known as John Robins, the radical seventeenth-century prophet – was a classic product of the English Civil War. Were it not for the political, religious and social mayhem the Civil War brought in its wake, Robins would never have gained such a following nor such fame. Seven years of bloodshed had shaken even the strongest nerves. From 1642 to 1649, the nation had turned on itself with such violence that hardly a family escaped unscathed, and in that unsettling environment Robins’ fervent preaching appealed to many confused and disillusioned minds.

The worst of war had ended with the execution of Charles I and the establishment of Oliver Cromwell’s republic, but in the early days of Cromwell’s rule lack of religious state control and the first ever free press combined to foment a plethora of extreme religious and political movements. Royalists all over Europe looked on aghast as God’s deputy on earth was overcome by a furious rabble. Parliamentarians, on the other hand, saw the world opening into a new era of justice and purity. But radicals soon became frustrated by the comparative moderation of Cromwell’s parliamentary settlement. They had been fighting for liberty against what they saw as monarchical and episcopal tyranny, and had pinned their hopes on a new era of equality in which justice would no longer be stifled and corrupted by a callous and indiscriminate elite. They had staked their lives, belongings and loved ones against a system in which the blood and sweat of the poor paid for the excesses of a frivolous court life – against the right of one man to treat millions as the objects of whim and fancy. To their horror, Cromwell’s republic began to look like the same tyranny all over again.

Disillusioned radicals turned for solace to the Bible. The Church had always promised that the Messiah would come again to establish a new heavenly kingdom after a period of violence and turmoil. Millenarian groups began to predict that Jesus’ second coming was nigh. Even most ministers of the established Church instructed their parishioners to prepare for Judgement Day.²

The time was ripe for Robins’ religious debut. When he came forward and declared himself the saviour they had been waiting for, dozens of disciples rallied to his cause. Twenty-three people were eventually charged in court for worshipping Robins, and there were clearly many more. They were mockingly dubbed the Shakers for their quaking fits of divine inspiration, and startled onlookers lumped them together into a larger heterogeneous movement known as the Ranters – those revolutionary fanatics noted for wild preaching, radical politics and stripping naked in public. Some of Robins’ contemporaries believed he was also responsible for founding movements that would prove as long-lasting as the Quakers and as important as the Levellers, whose activism in the army had been partly responsible for bringing down the monarchy.³

Like Jesus (to whom he compared himself), Robins wrote nothing down, but we do have the records of the state and of his former followers, one of whom said in a memoir that the Shakers ‘pray’d unto him, and they fell flat on their Faces and Worshipped him, calling him their Lord and their God’.⁴ Buoyed up by his disciples’ support, Robins’ vanity appears to have reached dizzying heights. He publicly declared that ‘the Lord Jesus was a weak and Imperfect Saviour, and afraid of Death.’ Robins himself, by contrast, ‘had no fear of Death in him at all’.⁵ Even Robins’ enemies did not deny his powers; rather, they accused him of witchcraft and even of being the devil himself.⁶

Like other radical sects, the Shakers pooled their worldly goods and lived in a primitive communism with their leader.⁷ Upending conventional morality, Robins encouraged his followers to swap spouses and set an example by taking the wife of his head disciple.⁸ Characteristically of the seventeenth-century radical sects which often gave women equal status with men, about half of the Shakers were women. It was also rumoured that they liked to gather together naked – the same was said of the Quakers and the Adamites – because covering the body was a sign of the Fall, and anyone who wanted to return to innocence had to start by stripping down to Adam and Eve’s state of shameless undress. Understandably, allegations of free-love practices abounded in the popular press.⁹

Decades later, Lodowicke Muggleton, who went on to lead a sect of his own, remembered wistfully that it really had seemed at the time as if Robins were Adam come again. ‘For who upon Earth did know, at that time,’ Muggleton pondered, ‘whether he was False or True: I say none, not one.’¹⁰

Having established his identity, Robins, like all cult leaders, pledged to guide his followers to a promised land, the Mount of Olives in the Holy Land of Jerusalem where he would feed them on manna from heaven.¹¹ He elected a stand-in Moses to lead the way, and started gathering people in London to prepare for their escape. Robins vowed that once he had collected a crowd of 144,000 (the number of saints in the tribe of Israel, as prophesied by Revelation), he would part the waters of the English Channel and march them over dry land, away from the uproar of England, to safety and bliss.¹² Robins was the King of Israel; following him to Jerusalem, his supporters thought, would pave the way for Christ’s return.¹³

A notorious wild prophet by the name of Thomas Tany (or ‘Theau-raujohn’), joined forces with Robins by erecting tents for each of the so-called tribes of Israel and declaring that his people would follow Robins to Jerusalem. Some of Robins’ followers, and Tany himself, took their enthusiasm for Judaism so seriously that they claimed to have learned Hebrew and even to have circumcised themselves.¹⁴ Tany kept up the mission – even after Robins had been clapped in jail. He claimed on his own behalf that he was the rightful King of France, England and the Jews, and was arrested for violently wielding a sword at Parliament a week after Oliver Cromwell had been offered the title of King, and for symbolically burning pistols, a sword, a horse’s saddle and the Bible. Tany perished many years later in an attempt to effect Robins’ journey to Jerusalem. The boat he built to carry him there sprang a leak during the crossing to Holland, and he and his crew were all drowned.

Ranters and Shakers from The Declaration of John Robins (1651)

A naked rout of Ranters from Strange Newes from Newgate (1650/1)

Naked Adamites from The Adamites Sermon (1641)

The claims Robins and Tany made of biblical descent probably did not seem strange to their contemporaries. Many Puritans had long envisaged the English as a lost tribe of Israel awaiting deliverance from their own Egyptian-style bondage.¹⁵ Thinkers like Jan Amos Comenius aimed to restore man’s lost perfection by converting all the Jews. Ironically, these hopes fuelled the philo-Semitism of the seventeenth century and Robins’ followers were instrumental in a successful campaign to force Parliament to allow Jews to live freely in England.¹⁶ More than a century later William Blake (who dabbled in the Muggletonian cult established by Robins’ ex-followers) was still living in hope: ‘Till we have built Jerusalem,/ In England’s green and pleasant land’.¹⁷

The first Adam had lost Paradise. The second Adam, Christ, had promised to restore everything to its former perfection. John Robins confirmed that he was none other than ‘the third Adam, that must gain that which the first lost’.¹⁸ His followers obediently declared that ‘John Robins is the same Adam that was in the Garden.’¹⁹ As John King, another disciple, put it, John Robins ‘is now come to reduce the world to its former condition, as it was before the fall of the first Adam’.²⁰

The original Adam lived on the pure fruits of Eden, so it was logical for Robins to insist that his followers should adhere to Paradise’s strict vegetable diet.²¹ Thomas Bushell had taken up the vegetable diet to be like Adam before the Fall; John Robins claimed that he was Adam, and vegetable cuisine seems to have been an essential adjunct to his cult. There were other millenarian prophets at the same time proclaiming that the return to the pre-fallen state would require a revival of the original vegetarian diet, like the philo-Semite George Foster who prophesied in 1650 that animals would be involved in the universal freedom which was coming to humans.²² Like many vegetarians to come, Robins also condemned the use of alcohol: ‘it was not of Gods making: it is the drink of the Beast (said he) a poysonous liquor, and wo be unto all them that drinks it.’²³ Non-radical contemporaries found Robins’ dietary antics shocking – it was hardly believable that life could be sustained on vegetable food without flesh – but they knew what he was getting at. ‘Their food is onely bread and water, although they have plenty of monies to buy other provisions,’ explained one bemused contemporary, emphasising the Shakers’ asceticism.²⁴

In a neater and more detailed combination of scatology and eschatology, Robins’ ex-follower and later arch-rival John Reeve condemned his dietary laws to his face: ‘thou didst deceave many People,’ he bellowed, ‘and then gavest them leave to abstain by degrees from all kind of Food, that should have preserved and strengthed their Natures: But thou didst feed them with windy things, as Aples, and other Fruit that was windy; and they drank nothing but Water.’²⁵ In the guts of his followers, said Reeve, Robins’ high-blown vegetarian doctrines turned into nothing but malodorous hot air. Most contemporaries agreed: vegetables may have been all right for Adam in Paradise, but they were hardly appropriate for the average earthly being. This common prejudice seemed to be empirically demonstrated by Robins’ experiments. Reeve narrated a woeful tale which, if true, leaves Robins guilty of irresponsibility in the extreme:

he commanded his Disciples to abstain from Meats and Drinks, promising them that they should in a short time be fed with Manna from Heaven, until many a poor Soul was almost starved under his Diet, yea and some were absolutely starved to Death, whose Bodies could not bear his Diet.²⁶

Reeve squarely identified Robins as a devilish false prophet of the type St Paul had warned would come and deceive the people by ‘Commanding to abstain from meats’ (1 Timothy 4:1–5).²⁷ Robins wasn’t God, or Adam: he was Satan and he had led many people astray, to their and his own perdition.²⁸

Unperturbed, Joshuah Garment, Robins’ representative Moses, proudly called their group ‘the people that live by water and bread’. They emphasised that their bloodless diet contrasted to the bloodiness of their oppressors, and combined their vegetarianism with vehement anti-war sentiments and pacifism. Garment denounced his persecutors as ‘bloudy Prelates’ whose ‘Law is Sword’, and predicted that their ‘thirstings after the bloud’ will be punished, for God took no pleasure in ‘those that delight in bloud’. Robins, by contrast, was ‘the peaceable man’ and his followers ‘the peaceable multitude that shall never bear arms offensive or defensive’.²⁹

These stirring words, with their imagery of blood, bloodthirstiness and bleeding, were a reaction against the violence of the Civil War. Garment, who enlisted as a soldier, witnessed murder and had probably been obliged to kill. His conversion was sudden. One day, after three years of fighting against the King, God personally commanded him to leave the army and effect instead a bloodless revolution ‘by the sword of the spirit, not by the sword of man’. God’s voice ordered him to wait ‘in love and peace, till peace and love is established in the Earth’.³⁰ Garment became convinced that violence could never achieve his idealistic aims, and his aversion to killing humans and drawing their blood appears to have spread into a repulsion towards bloodletting of all kinds. Universal peace was a prerequisite of Christ’s millennial kingdom as Isaiah had prophesied in the Bible,³¹ and this fusion of pacifism and vegetarianism would become a prevalent motif among blood-sated radicals.

The Shakers’ strong repulsion from blood may have been reinforced by their reversion to Jewish law which forbade the eating of blood. To King James I’s amusement, groups of ‘Christian Jews’ earlier in the century had resurrected the Mosaic law, holding that it was ‘absolutely unlawful to eat any swines flesh or blacke puddings’ (i.e. pork or blood). Contemporaries likened the waywardness of the Ranters to the absurdity of the Judaist leader, John Traske, who had been brutally punished in 1618 and starved on a diet of bread and water until he agreed to break his resolve by eating pork. His wife, who was found still languishing in prison in 1639, twenty-one years after her first arrest, obstinately stuck to her scruples. ‘She has not eaten any flesh these seven years, neither drunk anything but water,’ reported an appalled commissioner; but there she remained until at least 1645 when a fellow prisoner at last persuaded her to change her diet.³²

Ridicule from the press and mocking crowds did nothing to sway the Shakers from their course. The strong arm of the law, however, eventually did. By 1650 Parliament had reached the end of its tether with the religious radicals, and in August passed the landmark Blasphemy Act, specifically tailored to suppress John Robins and the Ranters.³³ There was a swift crackdown, and one by one the Ranters were picked off and put behind bars. Several of Robins’ followers were arrested and held in the Gatehouse Prison at Westminster, where they were pumped for information about ‘where John Robins, alias Roberts dwelleth’. Eventually, after almost a year of covert information-gathering, in spring 1651 the authorities caught up with Robins at one of his clandestine meetings in Long Alley in Moorfields and he and his supporters were interrogated and sent to the New Prison at Clerkenwell.³⁴

During the trials it was alleged by the prosecution that Robins had encouraged his followers to believe that he was God, for which the Blasphemy Act prescribed a six-month imprisonment on the first offence (with probable whipping and hard labour, the inconvenience of unpalatable lodgings and disease, and the inevitable accumulation of debt from prison charges). In order to encourage the Shakers to recant, it was clearly stated that a second offence would bring banishment, a sentence that, if flouted, would be punished by death ‘without benefit of Clergy’ (a quick route to eternal damnation).³⁵ Government sources claimed that in court Robins’ followers fell down at Robins’ feet, chanting, clapping, screaming, and calling on him for deliverance.³⁶

Though Robins and some of his followers strenuously argued that he had never claimed to be more than a prophet, Robins was sentenced.³⁷ The arrests and trials broke the communalism of the Shakers. Their detractors jeered that their leader couldn’t even part the waters of the Thames to save them from jail – let alone whisk them off to Paradise. Eventually most of them got off with a plea bargain by signing a document forswearing their faith in Robins and agreeing that they had been led astray by the devil. Only one recalcitrant follower, Thomas Kearby, remained loyal. He ‘cursed and reviled the Justices in open Court’, refused to recant, and was condemned to six months in the Westminster House of Correction with corporal punishment and hard labour.³⁸

During his initial weeks of imprisonment, Robins continued to preach from the open window of his prison cell. In February of the following year he was either still in jail, or had been re-sentenced. But one ex-disciple claimed that, soon afterwards, Robins wrote Cromwell an apology which secured his release. Thanks to the profits he had made from his followers, he was able to repurchase his old estate and retired to the country.³⁹ Whether or not this is true, Robins disappeared from view. But his blend of political radicalism, divine inspiration and vegetarianism lasted for decades.

Robins was condemned for flouting the Blasphemy Act’s criminalisation of anyone maintaining ‘him or her self, or any other meer Creature, to be very God … or that the true God, or the Eternal Majesty dwells in the Creature [i.e. the created universe] and no where else’.⁴⁰ Robins was not the only one preaching such blasphemies. The Act was designed to suppress a rash of dissidents, such as the Leicester shoe-maker-turned-soldier-preacher, Jacob Bauthumley, who were proclaiming that ‘God is in all Creatures, Man and Beast, Fish and Fowle, and every green thing’.⁴¹ This idea that God was in animals as well as in man was deeply subversive, particularly because it blurred the vital distinction between the natural and divine worlds and smacked of the idolatrous practices condemned in the first commandment. It also had dangerous implications for man’s treatment of the brutes, and the State did what it could to lance the festering gangrene of heresy.

The leader of the communist Diggers, Gerrard Winstanley, was among the most notorious advocates of such beliefs. In April 1649, Winstanley led a band of comrades to the edge of Windsor Forest to occupy the land. For too long landowning elites had exerted a monopoly over the earth and its produce; food prices had reached record highs and the poor were being deprived of the barest necessities. It was time to reclaim nature’s heritage. The Diggers illegally started to dig the soil, manure it, and plant it with crops for their own sustenance: ‘everyone that is born in the land may be fed by the earth his mother that brought him forth,’ declared Winstanley, ‘all looking upon each other as equals in the creation.’ Calling on the disaffected masses to join them, the Diggers advertised the virtues of their home-grown corn, parsnips, carrots and beans: ‘we have peace in our hearts and quiet rejoicing in our work, and filled with sweet content, though we have but a dish of roots and bread for our food.’⁴² Digging the land to grow crops, they promised, would free the poor from enforced labour and from the unreliable and inherently oppressive market economy of food.

Much as Winstanley seized the land to return it to the people, so also he grabbed hold of God and pulled Him down to earth. The Church had always kept God closeted up in heaven where only the established priesthood could access Him. But like many radicals of his time, Winstanley insisted that God was all around us, in every thing on earth. In contrast to traditional theologians who tended to regard matter as dirty and potentially evil, Winstanley stressed that all creatures were inhabited by divinity and should therefore be treated with love and reverence, ‘as well beasts as man-kinde’.⁴³ This egalitarian spirituality upturned the traditional hierarchies between people, and it challenged mankind’s disregard for animals. Strictly speaking, Winstanley did not break the Blasphemy Act because he did not claim that God dwells in the created universe ‘and no where else’, and he did not go to the extreme of the pantheists who literally identified the world with God. But his doctrines were nevertheless radical and extremely threatening.

Winstanley did not doubt that man was supposed to be lord of the creation, just as God was lord over man. But he took the radical step of arguing that Christ’s most important commandment – to do as you would be done by – applied not just to fellow humans, but also to animals. In order to undo the corruption of the Fall, man had to start by ‘looking upon himselfe as a fellow creature (though he be Lord of all creatures) to all other creatures of all kinds; and so doing to them, as he would have them doe to him’.⁴⁴

It might seem logical that with such beliefs Winstanley would have to be a vegetarian. But he did not explicitly state that everyone had to stop killing or eating animals. Most contemporaries with similar beliefs were not vegetarian. If one argued that it was wrong to kill an animal because God dwelt in all living things, it could also be argued that it was wrong to kill cabbages. Indeed, if man, nature and divinity were parts of a unified whole, there would be no reason why animals should not give up their lives for humans who were just another part of that same unity.⁴⁵ Jacob Bauthumley, whose theology in this respect was very similar to Winstanley’s, explained how one could believe that animals were inhabited by God, and still happily slaughter them. He pointed out that an animal death was no death at all: men and beasts were just different parts of ‘one intire Being’, so when animals died their flesh returned to dust and their life was reabsorbed into God.⁴⁶ It is unsurprising, therefore, to find that in 1652, after the Diggers had been violently disbanded by the Government, Winstanley provocatively incited the poor to ransack butchers’ shops and steal from the common flocks for their food.⁴⁷

However, some individuals did argue that it was wrong to take away life which came from God. This line appears to have been taken, for example, by certain English members of the Family of Love. These clandestine confederates were disciples of the sixteenth-century Dutch mystic, Hendrik Niclaes, who taught that God suffused the universe and that it was wrong to do violence of any sort because God ‘created all things, that they should have their being’.⁴⁸ He told his followers to recreate on earth a new Eden, where people ‘kill not. for they have no Nature to Destroying. But all their Desyre is, that it mought all live, whatsoever is of the Lyfe’.⁴⁹ In the 1640s, a bricklayer-preacher from Hackney called Marshall who was a soldier-turned-pacifist associated with the Family of Love, echoed Hendrik Niclaes by announcing to a teeming crowd ‘that it is unlawfull to kill any creature that hath life, because it came from God’.⁵⁰ The heretic-hunting Presbyterian minister Thomas Edwards added Marshall’s vegetarian doctrine to his blacklist of blasphemies, Gangraena (1645–6), where he warned that unauthorised preachers like Marshall were teaching that ‘’Tis unlawfull to fight at all, or to kill any man, yea to kill any of the creatures for our use, as a chicken, or on any other occasion’.⁵¹

Believing that God dwelt in nature provided a radical theological basis for reforming man’s relationship with animals. It was added to the growing arsenal of vegetarian arguments. It led many to egalitarian politics, to pacifism, and in some cases to believing that it was wrong to kill anything at all. Later in the century, Thomas Tryon revived beliefs like Winstanley’s and argued that God’s presence in the creatures made meat-eating a direct violence against the deity. With Robins, Winstanley and the Family of Love all preaching doctrines related to vegetarianism, a cross-party radical agenda was emerging which included dissent from mainstream society’s bloodthirsty eating habits.

THREE Roger Crab: Levelling the Food Chain

In the same year that Robins retreated from London, another war veteran stepped into the breach as the arch-enemy of meat-eaters. Roger Crab had been fomenting trouble for years, and now he deployed vegetarianism as an attack on political and economic injustice. Like Robins, Crab was hardened to the severity of political censure. His first recorded run-in with the State was back in 1646 when Cromwell’s New Model Army had defeated the Royalists and King Charles I surrendered to the Scots. There would be no more fighting until 1648, when Charles escaped from Hampton Court to the Isle of Wight, precipitating the country’s second civil war. During the lull between the two wars, arguments raged in Parliament between those who wished to compromise with the King and those, such as Generals Cromwell and Fairfax, who realised that the New Model Army had shed its blood for the cause and was not to be fobbed off. On the radical wing of the debate, the Levellers were stirring up mutiny, demanding the abolition of the monarchy and a massive extension of the franchise.

Even before 1647, when Leveller agitation started in earnest, the young Roger Crab was preaching a religious message of regeneration combined with the most virulent radical politics. Baptising crowds of people who had assembled to hear him speak, he incited them to join the ranks against the king.¹ Having a monarch as God’s deputy, he told them, was idolatry. Although by 1649 Parliament would come to agree with Crab, for the moment he had gone too far, and in 1646 the authorities caught up with him while he was haranguing a crowd in Southwark and slung him in jail. It was just as well, said Thomas Edwards (the heretic-basher who hated vegetarians and radicals): Crab was a despicable ‘Dipper and a Preacher’, leading people astray with ‘strange doctrines against the Immortality of the soul’, and telling them ‘that it was better to have a golden Calfe or an Asse set up … then to have a King over them’.²

In 1647 Fairfax got wind of Crab’s sorry plight and was so incensed that he took the case straight to Parliament where, speaking uncompromisingly to newly empowered statesmen, he raised Crab to the status of a cause célèbre. At Crab’s trial, Fairfax complained, Justice Bacon had locked the jury up without food and water until they agreed to return a guilty verdict. Crab had been sent in chains to the White Lyon where he was to remain until he found a way of paying the inordinate sum of 100 marks.³ In being imprisoned for preaching against tyranny, Crab had proved just how tyrannous the system was. As Crab himself later added, he had nearly lost his life on the battlefield when his head was ‘cloven to the braine’; imprisoning him now was the depths of ingratitude. The case created a ripple of excitement: Fairfax’s complaint was copied down and published, and eight years later the newspapers still remembered Crab as a leading Levelling ‘Agitator in the Army’.⁴

Writing in his will at the end of his life, Crab still looked back on this time as the catalyst to his future self; he had nearly ‘departed this humane Life’ but God saw fit to let him be born again ‘upon which account the Lord himselfe took my Soule into his custody’.⁵ Disgruntled and disillusioned by parliamentary policies, Crab left the army to set up a hat shop at Chesham in Buckinghamshire. But like Gerrard Winstanley, he soon came to see commerce as con-artistry; it was the grease that oiled the system of decadent consumerism.⁶ He started stirring up trouble; as one satirical publication declared ‘we have amongst us a Crabbed cavelling fellow, being both a Barber, Hors-Dr. and a Hat-maker, that disturbs and jeers at Ministers that come to preach with us’.⁷ In 1652 he sold his hat shop, gave his estate away to the poor and rented an isolated spot in Ickenham near Uxbridge where he built a little hermitage and started digging the land.⁸ Thrusting himself metaphorically into the wilderness, Crab cast himself as a John the Baptist figure and proceeded to hurl abuse at the system that exploited the poor to satisfy the material pleasure of the few: ‘if John the Baptist, should come forth againe,’ he exclaimed, ‘and call himself Leveller, and take such food as the wildernesse yeelded, and such cloathing, and Preach up his former Doctrine, He that had two coats should give away one of them, and he that hath food should do likewise; How scornfully would our proud Gentlemen and Gallants look of him’.⁹

Reviling the carnal pleasures of the corrupt ‘Sodomite generation’, Crab stopped eating meat and took up the bleakest of vegetable diets. Meat was a sign of wealth; renouncing it was an act of solidarity with the oppressed.¹⁰ Home-grown vegetables were the answer to social inequality, and the key to spiritual regeneration:

instead of strong drinks and wines, I give the old man [‘‘(meaning my body)’’] a cup of water; and instead of rost Mutton, and Rabbets, and other dainty dishes, I gave him broth thickned with bran, and pudding made with bran, & Turnep leaves chop’t together, and grass.

Crab rejected butter and cheese, and like John Robins despised alcohol as much as flesh. The production of beer used up grain which would otherwise be good as food, pushing up prices and oppressing the poorest of the poor. Luxury, Crab noticed, was not just a sign of inequality, it was a cause of it – an economic argument still being used at the end of the century by Thomas Tryon, and again a century later by radicals including Percy Bysshe Shelley.¹¹

Despite his puritanical asceticism, Crab insisted that the vegetable diet was perfectly suited to sustain the body. Standing in a long tradition of vegetarian doctors, Crab opened a folk medical practice, claiming to have up to 120 patients on his books at any one time. The evidence he accumulated from his patients suggested to him that meat was the cause of human ills and abstinence was their cure. ‘If my Patients were any of them wounded or feaverish, I sayd, eating flesh, or drinking strong beere would inflame their blood, venom their wounds, and encrease their disease, eating of flesh is an absolute enemy to pure nature.’ As one newspaper added in more purple prose, Crab claimed that meat made ‘the body a Dunghill, filling it with gross Humors and snakie Diseases, engenderers of Lust, Sloth and Melancholy, that so corrupt the senses & bodies of men and Women, that take aside a little reason, there is no difference between them and bruit beasts.’¹²

Keeping his body in tune with nature’s vegetarian laws, Crab soon achieved spiritual illumination and began consulting the radicals’ favourite astrologer William Lilly, about his revelations.¹³ Then in 1655 Crab journeyed to London and published the first of his radical vegetarian pamphlets, The English Hermite, or, Wonder of this Age. He cut a striking figure – an ex-soldier turned bearded hermit – and his unwonted dietary habits created a sensation in the city. His publisher registered the astonishment with which ordinary folk greeted Crab ‘who counteth it a sin against his body and soule to eate any sort of Flesh, Fish, or living Creature’; ‘his dyet is onely such poore homely foode as his own Rood of ground beareth, as Corne, Bread, and bran, Hearbs, Roots, Dock-leaves, Mallowes, and grasse, his drink is water.’¹⁴

Roger Crab’s horoscope consultation with William Lilly, ‘de Revelatione’

The press had a field day: Crab ‘observes the stricktest life of a Hermet that we have heard of’, announced one popular paper.¹⁵ Even though Crab rarely spoke about animals, contemporaries were anxious that he was eroding the distinction between man and beast, as had his fellow Leveller Richard Overton,¹⁶ so the papers satirically suggested that his reluctance to kill animals stemmed from the fact that he had love affairs with them. Comparing him to a Judaist who wouldn’t eat pigs, the twice-weekly Mercurius Fumigosus claimed that ‘Roger Crab had formerly some such beast to his Valentine; that makes him now to turn Hermit, live in a solitary Cave neer Uxbridge, and feed on nothing but Roots’.¹⁷ Even his publisher liked to poke fun at him. One of his pamphlets is accompanied by a woodcut apparently showing Crab naked, in a compromising position with an unidentified herbivore: Crab, they thought, was taking animal husbandry too far.

Roger Crab, The English Hermite (1655)

Crab swiftly forged a link with the Robins sect by converting the leading Leveller, Captain Robert Norwood, who collaborated with Thomas Tany and was impeached with him for blasphemy in 1651. But the alliance was to be short-lived, for Norwood could not sustain the austerities of his diet-master. Crab’s publisher reported that ‘Cap. Norwood was acquainted with Roger Crab, and being enclining to his opinion, began to follow the same poore diet till it cost him his life.’

Illuminated letter S from Roger Crab, The English Hermite (1655)

The story that the vegetarian diet starved Norwood to death would scarcely seem credible if we did not know that Norwood did indeed perish in 1654, two years after Crab retreated to his hermitage.¹⁸ This was not a good advertisement for the novel diet and it played into the hands of detractors who preferred their beefsteaks to the grass and turnip leaves proffered by Crab. Norwood’s death confirmed John Reeve’s accusations against John Robins, and one later commentator made the unfounded claim that Crab ‘destroyed himself by eating bran, grass, dockleaves, and such other trash’ – even though he actually lived to the impressive age of nearly seventy.¹⁹

This connection with Norwood suggests that there was a loose association of vegetarian radicals. Crab may also have been connected with the Diggers whose membership was largely composed of disaffected Levellers. Both Crab and Winstanley had been Baptists,²⁰ they both said that private property was a curse,²¹ that the upper classes would wither if peasants lived off their own produce instead of labouring for landowners,²² and Crab wielded the digging metaphor, for example in his sequel pamphlet, The English Hermites Spade at the Ground and root of Idolatry (1657).²³ Like Winstanley also, Crab was said to have extended to animals the commandment to ‘do unto others as you would be done by’.²⁴

Like the other vegetarian radicals, as well as some of the Quakers,²⁵ Crab accompanied his retreat into vegetarianism with a conversion to pacifism.²⁶ He pitted his harmless herbivorous lifestyle against his opponents who ‘prepare themselves by thirsting after flesh and blood’.²⁷ Crab even suggested that flesh-eating had triggered the violent passions that led to the war in the first place: ‘that humour that lusteth after flesh and blood,’ he said, ‘is made strong in us by feeding of it.’ Killing animals and eating their flesh was widely believed to inure men to cruelty.²⁸ Crab saw in this the workings of God’s Providence: all aggressive meat-eaters would succumb to their ferocious instincts until they ended up killing each other, thus wiping the carnivorous sinners off the earth.²⁹ Conflating the two meanings of ‘flesh’, Crab hoped that just as he gave up ‘flesh’, so England would give up the ‘fleshly’ cares that motivated violent conflict. This in turn he saw as an allegory of giving up Moses’ old ‘fleshly’ law for the new spiritual laws of Christ.³⁰

According to Crab’s observations, nature unambiguously revealed that meat was bad for the body and the soul. Now Crab had to balance that with evidence from the Book of God. In doing so, Crab inaugurated the English school of vegetarian Bible exegesis, and he managed to manipulate just about any passage in the Scriptures to suit his purposes. Engaging in doctrinal disputes with theologians up and down the country, and apparently deriving some arguments from St Jerome, Crab developed a rigorous scriptural defence of vegetarianism.³¹

For Crab, as for others, vegetarianism started in the beginning, with Adam and Eve. Crab even implied that the Fall itself was caused by Adam lapsing from his God-given diet into meat-eating: ‘if naturall Adam had kept to his single naturall fruits of Gods appointment, namely fruits and hearbs,’ he lamented, ‘we had not been corrupted.’ God permitted mankind to eat the animals after Noah’s Flood, he insisted, only because all the water had temporarily killed off the world’s vegetation.³² God intended mankind to return to the vegetable diet as soon as the earth recovered from the Flood. But having once tasted flesh, Crab complained, men were inflamed by a desire for more, and rejected natural vegetables as ‘trash in comparison of a Beast, or beastly flesh’. From that point on, man was bound on an inexorable decline into corruption and violence. Like other vegetarians on both sides of the political spectrum, Crab imagined his vegetarian hermitage was a route to ‘the Paradise of God from whence my Father Adam was cast forth’.³³

Crab viewed the whole of biblical history as one long saga in God’s attempt to return men to their natural diet. Moses led the Israelites into the desert, Crab claimed, to bring them away from their carnivorous Egyptian masters (perhaps this was even latent in Robins and Garment’s ideas of themselves as Moses figures). When the recalcitrant Israelites ‘murmured, and rebelled against the Lord, lusting after the flesh pots of Egypt’, God punished them: the flock of quails God sent was poisoned and they died with the flesh in their teeth.³⁴ The prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah, and Christ’s apostles, had continued the message by either living on vegetable food or practising harsh asceticism for our emulation.³⁵ The prophet Daniel had confined himself to lentils and water, a diet on which he had achieved divine epiphanies.³⁶ Just as the saints were assisted by animals, so Crab was brought bread in prison by a spaniel, and he claimed that birds came to him from God to inform him of future events.³⁷ Even Christ himself, Crab wilfully suggested, was in favour of vegetarianism: we hear of Christ eating various comestibles, he said, ‘but we never finde that ever he was drunke, or eate a bit of flesh’.³⁸ In a rare example of Crab’s concern for animal welfare, he defended Christ’s feeding of fishes to the five thousand on the grounds that the meal was ‘innocent’ because it was made ‘without hurting any creature that breathed on earth’ (excluding aquatic animals from the category of flesh was a standard division of Catholic fasting laws).³⁹ Even the Passover feast, where Christ decidedly partook of the lamb, was an irregularity which he was obliged to undertake only to fulfil the Jewish prophecies.

Crab’s presentation of the Bible as a monolithic vegetarian manifesto became more problematic when his adversaries threw back at him passages in the New Testament that were clearly designed to abolish old Jewish food taboos. Each of the New Testament passages that Crab and his contemporaries referenced in their disputes about vegetarianism had already been used by St Augustine and St Aquinas against vegetarians such as the heretic Manicheans. The doctrinal dispute was new in England, but it had a history that reached back more than a millennium, and the English clergy were happy to rely on such authoritative texts to prove the unorthodoxy of their adversary.⁴⁰ But Crab – a Houdini of biblical exegetes – found an answer to all his detractors.

Christ had taught that all food should be accepted with thanksgiving and none of it should be rejected as unclean. Crab retorted that this was manifestly absurd since some things were poisonous, and even if meat wasn’t unlawful it was still undesirable. Deftly perverting the sense of St Paul’s famous edict, ‘if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth,’ and his allusion to one ‘who is weak, eateth herbs’, Crab appealed for people to ‘forbear Flesh for my conscience sake, as Paul did declare he would do concerning his weak Brother’.⁴¹ Crab even challenged the passage that John Reeve had used against John Robins’ vegetarianism which warned against devilish prophets ‘commanding to abstain from meats’.⁴² Crab insisted that he commanded no one: he just wanted everyone to be enlightened enough to give up of their own accord.⁴³ By attacking him, he objected, the ignorant English priests were breaking Paul’s commandment aimed specifically at the vegetarian dispute: ‘Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not.’⁴⁴ Despite his efforts at scriptural justification, Crab was defamed by the local priests as a devil and the Puritan minister of St Margaret’s in Uxbridge, Thomas Godboult, told everyone Crab was a witch.⁴⁵ Crab retorted that he was willing to meet any of the clergy for a wrangle, and claimed they had lost the argument so many times they were scared to meet him in public. He had in any case absolutely no respect for the incumbent priesthood or the government that supported it: priests compelled the people to pay tithes, which in Crab’s eyes made the Church a whore-house and the priests its pimps and the whole idea of forcing people to go to church on Sunday turned religion into idolatry. Despite the puritanical fervour of Cromwell’s England, church-goers still saw Sunday as an excuse to dress up in fancy clothes and blow their week’s savings on a feast of roast meat. To Crab, therefore, it was the most sacrilegious day and he made a point of flouting Sabbath laws.⁴⁶

Crab’s seditious ravings were no less threatening to the authorities than they had been back in 1646 when he was put in prison. The priests whom he attacked could criticise his vegetarianism, but there was little they could do about it. His refusal to abide by the Sabbath laws, however, and his overt encouragement to the people to skive off church provided the authorities with the opportunity they needed. By 1657 Crab had been hauled in front of the magistrates at least four times for Sabbath-breaking. He had been set in the stocks in front of Ickenham church, and locked in Clerkenwell Prison on more than one occasion. Crab even claimed that Cromwell had once sentenced him to death. In January 1655 he was locked up and tried before magistrates but managed to get off the charge of calling the government a tyranny.⁴⁷ It was always his vegetarianism that attracted controversy at these times, bringing people in flocks to gaze at him behind bars.⁴⁸

In 1657 Crab stood unrepentantly in court listening to the judges demand that he abide by the laws of the ‘Higher Powers’. In his daring and brilliant retort we get a glimpse of Crab at his strongest: not a wizened hermit eccentrically whiling his life away on a patch of ground in the country as many represented him, but a hardened radical taking on the authorities.⁴⁹ His reply split open the paradox of revolutionary government: he had fought alongside them when they were Cromwellian rebels, he pointed out, ‘with my sword in my hand against the Highest Powers in England, namely, the King and the Bishops, upon which account ye sit here.’ How could they tell him now that rebellion was forbidden when their authority was founded on the biggest rebellion in memory? Crab made them address their own hypocrisy in trying and sentencing a rebel whom they had once championed as one of their own.

Unpopular with the authorities, but blessed with eloquence and charisma, Crab soon attracted a band of vegetarian followers. By 1659, a year before the Restoration of the monarchy, he had converted enough people to earn his group a name – the ‘Rationals’ or ‘Rationallists’. Vegetarianism was their key policy, and it was lauded in a ballad by a publisher, one ‘J.B.’, who counted himself as one of their disciples:

Illustrious souls more brighter than the morn,

Oh! how dark mortals greet you still with scorn,

Admiring at your homely sack-cloth dresse,

Hearbs, Roots, and every vegetable mess

On which you live; and are more healthy far

Than Canibals, that feed on lushious fare;⁵⁰

By this time Crab had become convinced that God was speaking through him, and wrote his pamphlets as if in the voice of God Himself. His competing claims for divine inspiration embroiled him in controversy with the Quakers. In January 1659 the Quaker Thomas Curtis wrote to George Fox with his concerns about a ‘very great and precious’ meeting in Buckinghamshire attended by ‘fish of all sorts’, ‘many of the world, some baptized, and some of Crab’s company’. Crab incited attacks from the well-known Quaker controversialists John Rance and George Salter (who would one day be arrested at a meeting with John Robins’ old rival, John Reeve). Salter derisively attacked the Rationals, calling Crab ‘a corrupt bulk of Fog, who art like a quagmire that sucks up those that comes upon thee’.⁵¹

Crab was later said to have joined forces with the leader of one of the most prominent and long-lasting international mystic organisations of the period, the Philadelphian Society – named after the Greek for ‘brotherly love’.⁵² Crab might have known the spiritual leader of the Philadelphians, Dr John Pordage, since Pordage was a doctor in Cromwell’s army.⁵³ As a deeply subversive clergyman in the parish of Bradfield, Pordage had been ousted from his post for encouraging polygamy, refusing tithes and hosting crazed spiritual revelries with their friends from the Family of Love and the Ranters. Pordage was said to have made an alliance with Thomas Tany, and used fasting as a method of achieving ‘visible and sensible Communion with Angels’.⁵⁴ Pordage himself claimed that he was hastening Christ’s second coming by uniting the dispersed tribes of Israel,⁵⁵ and establishing an ideal primitive community practising ‘Universal Peace and Love towards All’.⁵⁶ Like Crab, Pordage thought one could access God by studying nature, for he said the universe was ‘as ye Cloathing of God’.⁵⁷

There is little evidence to suggest that the Philadelphian Society took up vegetarianism as a whole,⁵⁸ but they were renowned for their extreme fasting and were mocked for not being able to ‘eat and drink their common Dyet’.⁵⁹ One of their later members, Richard Roach, recalled that they modelled themselves on the ascetic Jewish sect of Essenes, believing that austerity made them ‘more conversant wth ye Mysteries of Religion’.⁶⁰ Some Philadelphians believed that animals had souls and would achieve spiritual liberation on Judgement Day, and objected to the abuse of birds, beasts and fishes to satisfy people’s luxury and gluttony.⁶¹ And above all, Crab and Pordage shared a fascination for the mystical vision of the German shoemaker Jacob Böhme (1575–1624),⁶² whose emphasis on personal enlightenment and the pantheistic search for God in nature inspired generations of thinkers. It is difficult to exaggerate Böhme’s influence on European culture: mystics during the seventeenth century revered him; scientists in the Enlightenment clung to his revelations; and the Romantics revived him again for his intense spiritual communication with nature. In the 1650s interest had reached fever pitch with the translation into English of his most important writings. Böhme may not have been vegetarian himself, but judging from the number of vegetarians who shared an interest in Böhme, there was something about his teaching that encouraged it. Perhaps it was his reverence for nature, perhaps his passionate call for all to embrace love in the world and shun the fierce wrath that lay hidden in everything (even God). His specific comments about eating meat are in the vein of traditional Christian asceticism; he complained that the soul is defiled and clad with stinking flesh when ‘the body feedeth upon the flesh of beasts’: ‘Dost thou know why God did forbid the Jews to eat of some sort of flesh?’ he asked, ‘consider the smell of it … and thou shalt discern it.’⁶³

Böhme aspired to the spiritual purity of Adam before the Fall. He wasn’t explicit about any dietary regulations for achieving that goal (which might have been difficult since he believed that before the Fall Adam didn’t even have a material body and so ate no food at all). But vegetarians might have been encouraged by Böhme’s comment that God ‘created so many kindes and sorts of beasts for his Food and Rayment’ only because he had foreknowledge of man’s Fall. If man was to ‘come againe into his first estate’, as Böhme fervently wished, it could follow that he would have to give up eating animals.⁶⁴ Crab also shared Böhme’s theory that ‘Seven Grand Properties’, corresponding to the seven planets, governed the seven spirits of the human body. Crab, whose seven properties were actually more akin to conventional astrology, held that it was the Martian spirit that stirred up flesh-eating and murder.⁶⁵

Most of the radicals of the mid-century period died in anonymity. After the Restoration in 1660 their politics became unpopular and dangerous to espouse. Roger Crab, exceptionally, sustained his local fame until he died in 1680. Secondary sources report a large concourse of people attending his funeral on 14 September at St Dunstan’s Church in the parish of Stepney. In the churchyard a large monument was erected in his memory with a versified tribute to his vegetarianism:

Tread gently, Reader, near the Dust,

Cometh to this Tomb-stone’s Trust.

For while ‘twas Flesh, it held a Guest,

With universal Love possest.

A soul that stemm’d Opinion’s Tyde,

Did over Sects in Triumph ride.

Yet separate from the giddy Crowd,

And Paths Tradition had allow’d.

Through good and ill Reports he past; Oft censur’d, yet approv’d at last. Wouldest thou his Religion know? In brief ‘twas this: To all to do Just as he would be done unto. So in kind Nature’s Law he stood, A Temple undefil’d with Blood: A Friend to ev’ry Thing that’s good. The rest, Angels alone fitly can tell: Haste, then, to Them and Him; and so farewel.⁶⁶

The lines – written by a more proficient poet than Crab himself – represent vegetarianism as perfectly compatible with orthodox Christianity. To a large degree this agenda seems to have been achieved: he had been married in 1663 to a widow, Amy Markham, in St Bride’s church; he was buried in the yard of another Anglican church, and according to the parish register was considered a ‘Gentleman’.⁶⁷ This elevated status betrays his former radical rejection of personal property and social distinction, but it shows that he kept his vegetarian message alive in the wholly altered political environment of the Restoration.

Vegetarianism was a familiar expression of political and religious dissent in seventeenth-century England. It is unclear to what extent the Robins sect, the Diggers, the Family of Love, George Foster, Thomas Tany, Robert Norwood and Roger Crab were actively conspiring with each other. But diet was an integral part of a broadly cohesive radical agenda which they shared. Vegetarianism, for some, was an inherent part of the revolution. After their gory experience in the Civil War, veterans developed an aversion to blood so strong that they extended it to shedding animal blood. The rejection of violence, oppression and inequality went hand in hand with vegetarianism in a movement that aimed to achieve a bloodless revolution. Later, in the revolutionary 1780s and 1790s, vegetarianism re-emerged as part of a radical ideology. In the period between, vegetarianism survived by adapting to different cultural contexts, though often carrying with it traces of the old agenda. Roger Crab was the pioneer: lifting vegetarianism out of its Civil War context and refashioning it to new tastes laid the foundations for its continuation in Restoration England.

FOUR Pythagoras and the Sages of India

Clown: What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?

Malvolio: That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.

Clown: What think’st thou of his opinion?

Malvolio: I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.

Clown: Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness: thou shalt hold th’ opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits; and fear to kill a woodcock, lest thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam. Fare thee well.

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, IV. ii

While meat-eating Christians fended off the vegetarian schism at home, another force was gathering strength that would assail them with even greater intensity. Having accustomed themselves to thinking of Europe as the pinnacle of humanity, travellers were shocked to find in India a thriving religion which had been sustained in a pristine form since well before – and virtually oblivious to – the invention of Christianity. The discovery of a people following an unbroken tradition of vegetarianism and exercising an extreme moral responsibility towards animals radically challenged European ideas about the relationship between man and nature. The stories of Indians living at peace with the animal kingdom were imaginatively merged with Christian traditions of prelapsarianism and Puritanism, and were a catalyst of Europe’s seventeenth-century vegetarian renaissance. This neglected movement in European history profoundly affected some of the period’s best-known figures and has had a lasting influence on Western concepts of nature.

On arrival in India, European travellers were astonished when they noticed that the modern ‘Brahmins’ – the Hindu priest caste, custodians of the Sanskrit scriptures – were the direct descendants of the ancient ‘Brachmanes’ encountered by Alexander the Great 2,000 years earlier. When the erudite Italian aristocrat, Pietro della Valle, encountered naked, dreadlocked, ash-smothered ‘Yogis’ with painted foreheads on his travels to India in the 1620s, he affirmed with confidence that ‘There is no doubt but these are the ancient Gymnosophists so famous in the world … to whom Alexander the Great sent Onesicritus to consult with them’.¹ For travellers and readers alike – brought up on the primordial antiquity of the Bible – this was a disorientating realisation.

Merchants were excited by the trade in Indian diamonds, cotton and spices but thinkers all over Europe became obsessed with unlocking the jealously guarded secrets of India’s strange and wonderful religions.² Missionaries were having a tough time getting Indians interested in Christianity, but Europeans at home were fascinated by Hinduism. Inevitably, Christian writing about India was distorted by religious bigotry and underwritten by Europe’s nascent political agenda, but some seventeenth-century travellers examined Indian culture with remarkably open minds and even downright admiration. Enthusiastic descriptions were full of fantasies and projections too, but some aspects of Indian culture managed to penetrate the barriers of inter-cultural communication.³ Readers at home developed such an insatiable craving for genuine Eastern knowledge that ideas taken from Indian philosophy were incorporated into debates about religion, science, history, human nature and ethics. At times, Hindu culture appeared so awesome that it shook Europe’s self-centredness to its core.

The seventeenth-century ‘discovery’ of Indian vegetarianism was an astoundingly fertile cross-cultural encounter, but it was built upon an ancient history of passionate curiosity. Even before Alexander the Great reached India in 327 BC, its vegetarian philosophers were renowned in the ancient Greek world.⁴ According to the historians whom Alexander took on his military expedition, the moment the Greek army arrived in the ancient university town of Taxila (now in Pakistan), Alexander despatched his messenger Onesicritus to find the famous ‘gymnosophists’, or ‘naked philosophers’. In a legendary episode, which came to epitomise the meeting of East and West, Onesicritus came across a group of Brahmins sunning themselves on the outskirts of town. They burst into laughter at the sight of his hat and extravagant clothing, and derided his attempts to understand a translator’s rendition of their transcendent wisdom with the caustic comment that it was like ‘expecting water to flow through mud’.⁵ Eventually one of them was prevailed upon to deliver a potted summary of Indian philosophy. Onesicritus was immediately struck by the similarities between Indian and Greek thought. In amazement, he told the Brahmins that like them Plato had taught the immortality of the soul and that their key doctrine of vegetarianism had been advocated in Greece by Pythagoras, Socrates, and even Onesicritus’ own teacher, Diogenes.⁶

Although there are significant differences in their respective moral systems, it is nevertheless an extraordinary coincidence that roughly contemporaneous seminal Indian and Greek philosophers, the Buddha and Pythagoras, both taught that a soul’s reincarnations depended on behaviour in previous lives, and that it was wrong for people to eat animals. Faced with this enthralling correlation, European matchmakers fantasised about possible explanations for centuries; even today it remains one of the unsolved mysteries of world religion.⁷ It was well known in ancient Greece and Rome that Pythagoras had travelled to Egypt and Persia in search of philosophical knowledge, and many, then and later, found it irresistible to imagine that he must have reached India.⁸ Lucius Apuleius (AD 124–c.170), author of The Golden Ass, announced that the ‘pre-eminent race called Gymnosophists’ had indeed taught Pythagoras ‘the greater part of his philosophy’.⁹

Pythagoras was believed to have launched Hellenistic philosophy, introducing the interlinked seminal concepts of the immortality of the soul through reincarnation or ‘metempsychosis’, the notion that all living things are kindred, and the corollary that it was wrong to cause suffering to animals.¹⁰ Pythagoras wrote nothing down, but his doctrines became the basis of Plato’s philosophy. It became a staple belief among Platonists that the Greek philosophical tradition owed its origins to India. Even those who thought the Egyptians were the first to invent philosophy could agree, since Egypt was widely believed to be an ancient Indian colony.¹¹

Tracing Greek philosophy back to the Brahmins was a theory of inestimable significance. Despite cavils from Aristotle, it put the ideal of vegetarianism near the heart of ancient philosophy and enticed generations of travelling philosophers to drink at the original fountain of knowledge in India. Philostratus (AD 170–245) wrote a semi-fictional biography of Christ’s first-century neo-Pythagorean rival, the legendary magical man-god and abolisher of sacrifices, Apollonius of Tyana.¹² Following in Alexander’s footsteps to visit the Brahmins of Taxila, Apollonius defended vegetarianism, saying that the earth ‘grows everything for mankind; and those who are pleased to live at peace with the brute creation want nothing’, while carnivorous men, ‘deaf to the cries of mother-earth, whet their knife against her children’. ‘Here then,’ explained Apollonius, ‘is something which the Brahmins of India … taught the naked sages of Egypt also to condemn; and from them Pythagoras took his rule of life.’¹³ Joining the dots between similar ethical systems, Apollonius posited Indian vegetarianism as a mandate for re-establishing harmony with the natural world. He was unambiguous: the basis of Pythagorean vegetarianism was Indian and the Brahmins were the fount of all true philosophy.

Plotinus (AD 205–70), the founder of Neoplatonism and principal Western proponent of metempsychosis, tried and failed to get to India to meet the Brahmins,¹⁴ but his vegetarian star-pupil Porphyry (AD c.234–305) did the next best thing. Porphyry read the now lost account by the pagan convert to Christianity Bardesanes of Edessa (AD 154– c.222), who had interviewed a group of Indian ambassadors in Mesopotamia as they made their way to the court of the sun-worshipping homosexual-orgiast Emperor of Rome, Elagabalus.¹⁵ In his seminal vegetarian treatise, On Abstinence from Animal Food, Porphyry championed the Brahmins for living on the natural products of the earth. ‘To eat other food, or even to touch animate food,’ explained Porphyry, ‘is thought equivalent to the utmost impurity and impiety.’ Eating meat was not technically against the law in India, Porphyry explained, but the Brahmins believed that abstinence from flesh was the purest diet (mirroring the arguments being made by ascetic flesh-abstaining Christians).¹⁶

Porphyry’s vituperative detestation of the Christians, and Apollonius’ stalwart rivalry with them, did not help to ingratiate the Brahmins or vegetarianism to Jerusalem’s new religion. The Church fathers had much to say about abstinence from flesh, so the vegetarian Brahmins presented them with complex doctrinal questions. Was Indian vegetarianism a sign of prodigious spirituality, or was it blasphemous superstition? Worse still, could their diet give support to the contemporaneous vegetarian heresies breeding back home?

The Athenian pagan convert, St Clement of Alexandria (AD 150– c.215), was keen on flesh-free diets, which no doubt gave him a special interest in the Indian gymnosophists who, he said, ‘feed on nuts, and drink water’. But the extremity of their abstinence, he insisted, made them dangerously similar to the heretical Gnostic Encratites, whom he called ‘blockheads and atheists’.¹⁷ St Hippolytus (fl. AD 234) also damned the Brahmins by suggesting in his Refutation of all Heresies, that it was from them that the Encratites originally derived their doctrines. Yet he grudgingly admitted that the Brahmins themselves appeared to live in a sort of Paradise, in which their food literally grew on trees. That the Brahmins did not have to cultivate the earth to get their bread implied that they somehow lived outside the remit of God’s curse on Adam: ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.’¹⁸ The pagan Greeks thought of the Indians living like the inhabitants of the Golden Age, the earth yielding fruit and grain to them without any labour.¹⁹ Christians translated such fantasies into the belief that Eden had originally been situated in India.²⁰ On the other hand, lacking cultivation was sometimes construed as a sign of lack of ‘culture’, making the Indians uncivilised savages.²¹

But Bardesanes’ enthusiasm for India was infectious. Bishop Euse-bius of Caesarea, who wrote the Ecclesiastical History during the fourth-century Roman persecution, repeated Bardesanes’ comment that the Brahmins ‘neither commit murder, nor worship images, nor taste animal food, nor are ever intoxicated … but devote themselves to God’.²² That they did not worship idols (which was true of some Hindus) suggested that they were Christians in spirit, even though they had not heard of Christ. The even more enthusiastic hermit St Jerome (AD c.347–420), in his defence of abstinence from flesh, declared that the Brahmins exemplified the spiritual benefits of fasting and were worthy of imitation by any Christian. He cited them alongside Diogenes and the Essenes, and even the unimpeachable biblical examples of Daniel the Prophet, Moses, John the Baptist and all the antediluvians including Adam and Eve. The Brahmins, said Jerome with admiration, ‘are so rigidly self-restrained that they support themselves either with the fruit of trees which grow on the banks of the Ganges, or with common food of rice or flour’.²³ This ringing endorsement by one of the most revered Church fathers inspired Christian vegetarians for centuries.

Such willingness to identify points of contact between Hinduism and Christianity found its apotheosis in the monastic Bishop of Helenopolis, Palladius (AD c.363–431), who dramatised a dialogue between Alexander and Dandamis the Brahmin. Dandamis shuns Alexander’s splendid gifts, outsmarting the ‘conqueror of many nations’ with the rebuttal that, ‘The earth supplies me with everything, even as a mother her child with milk,’ and quips that it is better to be fed to beasts than to make oneself ‘a grave for other creatures’.²⁴ Paraphrasing arguments from Palladius’ own teacher, St John Chrysostom (AD 347–407), the Archbishop of Constantinople, and echoing Cynic philosophy, Dandamis says that even wolves were better than humans for at least they only ate meat because their nature compelled them to.

Palladius’ account was incorporated into later versions of the hugely popular medieval Alexander Romance which spread throughout Europe, and possibly reached India in time to influence the sacred Buddhist text, the Milindapanha, a dialogue in which the vegetarian sage Nagasena converts Menander, the Greek King of Alexander’s Bactrian kingdom. In the Alexander Romance the Brahmins claim to live in blissful harmony: ‘When we are hungry, we go to the trees whose branches hang down here and eat the fruit they produce.’ These Brahmins explicitly combine their vegetarianism with anti-monarchical sentiments; their role as entrenched critics of Western consumerism, tyranny and carnivorousness was growing apace.²⁵

The extent to which medieval Christendom was ready for a new encounter with India was illustrated by Marco Polo’s literary success on his arrival in Europe in the 1290s. After growing up at the court of Kublai Khan at Shang-tu (Xanadu) and travelling in Asia for more than twenty years, Marco Polo was captured by the Genoese and clapped in jail. Fortuitously, he was made to share a cell with the romance writer Rustichello. Polo whiled away the hours of imprisonment by dictating what he had seen in the East, and, between them, the two prisoners produced one of the most extraordinary travel adventures of all time, written like a medieval romance – except that this time nearly everything they said was true.²⁶

Rather than simply ridiculing the outlandish cultures he had encountered, Polo made a striking leap towards cultural relativism. He recognised that by their own standards and even his own, the Brahmins were exceedingly virtuous. They were scrupulously honest, they bathed regularly (unlike Europeans), and they lived extraordinarily long and healthy lives during which, Polo explained, they would not eat or ‘kill any creature or any living thing in the world, neither fly nor flea nor louse nor any other vermin, because they say that they have souls’.²⁷ With such eye-witness reports, Europeans were quick to hold up the Brahmins as a quintessential embodiment of the ‘virtuous pagan’.

Marco Polo in Tartar attire

Among the many other wonders Polo described was Adam’s Peak on Ceylon (Sri Lanka) which was said by local Muslims to contain Adam’s grave, and by ‘idolaters’ to hold a footprint of the Buddha.²⁸ Decades later, in 1338 the Pope’s ambassador, John of Marignolli, was sent off to the East to examine the new Christian missions. He visited Ceylon to check up on Polo’s fantastic reports about Adam’s grave and was utterly astonished to discover that, as Polo had suggested, ‘Paradise is a place that (really) exists upon the earth’.²⁹

Back home, Marignolli wrote up his experiences for Emperor Charles IV whom he served as chaplain. He described how he had strolled through the garden that was once Adam’s home, tasting mangoes, jackfruit, coconuts and bananas which, like the local spices, Marignolli surmised, were descended from the luscious trees of Paradise. On this mountain he found the remains of Adam’s marble house, an imprint of Adam’s foot, and – most amazing of all – a monastery populated by holy men (clearly Buddhists) who, he said, ‘never eat flesh, because Adam and his successors till the flood did not do so’. These extremely holy, half-naked monks were as virtuous as any people on earth – despite not being Christians. They confounded Marignolli by arguing ‘that they are not descended either from Cain or from Seth, but from other sons of Adam’. They claimed that the hill they lived on had protected them – and the original artefacts of Paradise – from the ravages of Noah’s Flood. ‘But as this is contrary to Holy Scripture’, Marignolli added nervously, ‘I will say no more, about it.’ He could not resist the temptation of saying more, however, for he had found something that fulfilled Christians’ wildest dreams: ‘Our first parents,’ he concluded, ‘lived in Seyllan upon the fruits I have mentioned, and for drink had the milk of animals. They used no meat till after the deluge, nor to this day do those men use it who call themselves the children of Adam.’

Marignolli – perhaps with the misleading assistance of Muslim interpreters – readily incorporated vegetarian Buddhism into the biblical tradition. He claimed that the ‘skins’ Adam and Eve were given to wear after the Fall were actually coconut-fibre clothes (as modelled by the inhabitants of Ceylon). The vegetarian Buddhists and Brahmins of India, according to this dazed Christian, were continuing the prelapsarian vegetable diet. Having abandoned his initial caution, Marignolli doffed his European clothes, donned a coconut-fibre sarong, and joined the Buddhist fraternity until it was time for him to return. The Franciscan who set out to check up on the progress of the Eastern Catholic mission ended up using vegetarianism as a bridge between his religion and Buddhism.³⁰

The Renaissance travellers who followed the missionaries to India reinforced expectations of finding remnants of Paradise. When the Venetian merchant Nicolò Conti returned from his Indian travels in 1448, the Pope sent his secretary, Poggio Bracciolini, to record what he had seen. The ancient Greek accounts of India – principally Strabo’s Geography (AD 23) – had just been rediscovered, and Conti’s new stories caused huge excitement. He spoke of ‘Bachali’ – presumably the descendants of the converts Bacchus had made on his mythical trip to India – who ‘abstain from all animal food, in particular the ox’.³¹ The Brahmins (whom Poggio differentiated from the Bachali) were great astrologers and prophets, living free from diseases to the age of 300, and their asceticism competed with anything practised in Europe.³²

In 1520 the German cleric Joannes Boemus published his Omnium gentium mores, leges & ritus, a massive comparative ethnology which went through innumerable editions in French, Italian, Spanish and in English as The Fardle of Facions (1555). Boemus filled out what the classical sources did not provide with utopian fantasy: the ‘unchristened Brahmanes’, he said, put Europeans to shame by living a ‘pure and simple life … content with suche foode as commeth to hande’.³³ This was hardly less fantastic than the part-fictional, part-plagiarised Travels of Sir John Mandeville written in the mid-1300s, which had imagined the ‘Isle of Bragman’ inhabited by pagans ‘full of all virtue’ living chaste and sober lives in ‘perpetual peace’.³⁴ Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) was inspired by similar idealistic reports; More’s Utopians, like the Indians, exercise temperance, are kind to animals and live in political harmony; there is even a cryptic suggestion that they are gymnosophists.³⁵

This type of exotic idealism was elaborated by scores of other writers, such as Tommaso Campanella who wrote The City of the Sun in 1602, soon after being committed to twenty-five years’ imprisonment for attempting to establish a Hermetic solar utopia in Calabria. The narrator of Campanella’s story – a world-travelled sea captain – reports that the inhabitants of the City of the Sun rarely drink wine, never get the diseases of gluttonous Europe, live for up to 200 years, and derive their deistic* religion from the Brahmins.³⁶ Campanella was so aware that vegetarianism would be expected of his ideal community that he wittily took the issue face on: ‘They were unwilling at first to slay animals, because it seemed cruel; but thinking afterward that it was also cruel to destroy herbs which have a share of sensitive feeling, they saw that they would perish from hunger … Nevertheless, they do not willingly kill useful animals, such as oxen and horses.’³⁷ More than a century later the theme was still very much alive, reappearing satirically in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) in which the barbarous flesh-eating Yahoos contrast with the idealised Houyhnhnms who only eat herbivorous food (as does Gulliver during most of his residence with them).³⁸ Like the travel literature they were based on, these utopian works critiqued European manners by setting them against other cultures. It is little wonder that puritanical enthusiasts in Europe sought to recreate the ideal communities at home which they read about in both travel and utopian literature.

As the voyages of discovery fuelled a new wave of interest in India, travel literature became a subject of serious intellectual study. Renaissance scholars started interpreting Indian religions along similar lines as classical Greek and Roman paganism, forging the path for the late eighteenth-century Orientalism of Sir William Jones.³⁹ Some travellers were even bold enough to legitimise Indian customs by pointing out similarities with their own culture. In 1515, a Florentine envoy wrote from Cochin to tell Giuliano de Medici that he had encountered vegetarians who ‘do not feed upon anything that contains blood, nor do they permit among them that any injury be done to any living thing, like our Leonardo da Vinci’.⁴⁰ Da Vinci – who was himself rumoured to have travelled in the Orient – had spent decades ranting against cruelty to animals and deploring how man had made himself their ‘sepulchre’, despite the plentiful vegetable food provided by nature. Like the Hindus, he even lamented that eating eggs deprived future beings of life. Contemporaries related how da Vinci used to buy caged birds to set them free – an act of charity long associated with Pythagoras, and a habit now being remarked upon by European travellers in India.⁴¹

Renaissance Neoplatonists had developed a method of syncretising the various pagan philosophies from Greece, Rome and Egypt and decoding them to find the hidden truths that lay behind their fantastic exterior. Some teachings of paganism were thus made compatible with Christianity. When new information became available on Indian ‘gentiles’ (or ‘Gentoos’ as they were often called), it was partially incorporated into this ready-made framework. But the Indians stood out, for unlike other bygone pagan peoples, they still existed. To some, this made them more threatening, but to anyone predisposed to learn from ancient Eastern sages, it made the Indians particularly sensational. Europeans were familiar with the vegetarian teachings of Pythagoras, and they had the biblical story of Eden engraved upon their hearts. But the Indian vegetarians stimulated an unparalleled renewal of interest, and the constant flow of varied reports about them encouraged a constant reappraisal of their significance. Europeans did project their own preconceptions onto Indian vegetarianism, but some tenets from Indian philosophy still managed to enter Europeans’ consciousness. Indian culture exerted a powerful influence which altered Western understanding of the religious and ethical issues raised by the practice of abstaining from meat.

At the tail end of the fifteenth century, after years of trying to open the sea route to India, the Portuguese sea-captain Vasco da Gama and his crew limped round the Cape of Good Hope, and flopped – bedraggled and empty-handed – onto the Western coast of India. Da Gama’s mission had a commercial goal: to find a means of importing Indian spices without using the expensive Muslim-dominated land route. But King Manuel of Portugal had also allegedly threatened da Gama that on pain of death he was not to return until he found the legendary Christian King of India, the perennial ‘Prester John’. Almost the first people da Gama’s men met on their arrival were dreadlocked Indians who seemed willing to worship the Portuguese images of the Virgin Mary, possibly seeing in the baby Christ a counterpart of their own baby Krishna. The Portuguese rejoiced at having linked up with their long-lost Christian brothers, and after an initial hesitation about the odd Indian ‘churches’, in a gush of enthusiasm, they knelt down and prayed in the Hindu temples.

The Portuguese soon realised that these ‘Christians’ were not entirely ordinary. They not only ‘ate no beef’, but when da Gama and his men arrived at the Calicut court for dinner they found that – in startling contrast to the lavish banquets of European royalty – the King ‘eats neither meat nor fish nor anything that has been killed, nor do his barons, courtiers, or other persons of quality, for they say that Jesus Christ said in his law that he who kills shall die’. While the Portuguese remained under the delusion that the Indians were Christian, they were more than willing to integrate local vegetarianism into the biblical commandment against killing, and noted with amazement that it was actually perfectly possible for humans to live without eating meat.⁴²

But da Gama and his men gradually realised that they had been mistaken about the Indians’ Christianity and they became less tolerant about their vegetarian foibles. By this time, the other major European powers were eyeing with envy the Portuguese monopoly on Indian trade. At the end of the sixteenth century the Dutch finally muscled in on the game by sending armed galleons to back up their trading ventures. The British followed hot on their heels, promising the Great Mughal an alliance with Queen Elizabeth. They came in search of riches, but they knew there was also a market back home for tales of wonder and adventure, and each nation produced its own scribe of India.

One of the things that fascinated Europeans most were the vegetarians. In fact, only certain groups of Hindus were actually vegetarian. Most Brahmins upheld their caste purity laws by abstaining from meat, and to some Europeans this gave them an aura of austere sanctity. But still more surprising to Western travellers were the masses of ordinary people who lived on what in Europe was considered an exceptionally abstemious diet. Many Banians, the trading caste, were strict vegetarians especially on the Western coast in Gujarat, and some of these joined the all-vegetarian Jains.⁴³ Several Jain monks held prominent positions at the Mughal courts and Europeans were well-placed to observe them there and even interrogate them on their beliefs.⁴⁴ It should be noted that many of the ancient Sanskrit texts that applaud vegetarianism and ahimsa also list numerous exceptions under which meat-eating was allowed and even praised. These included cases of medical necessity; ritual sacrifice of animals; and hunting by the princely-warrior caste, the Ksatriyas.⁴⁵ Sanskrit texts such as the Laws of Manu (200 BC–AD 200) actually state (just like Aristotle) that it was natural for humans to be predators: ‘animals without fangs are the food of those with fangs, those without hands of those who possess hands, and the timid of the bold.’⁴⁶ It was partly because eating animals was natural that abstaining was seen as a virtue. Thus the same text promises that ‘He who does not seek to cause the sufferings of bonds and death to living creatures, but desires the good of all beings, obtains endless bliss.’⁴⁷ Europeans became fixated with the belief system underlying the Indians’ vegetarianism and nearly every traveller marvelled at it, revealing in their responses their own prejudices and preoccupations: what was the proper relation between man and beast? What diet was suitable for the human body? What happened to people’s temperament when they no longer committed daily violence to animals? Whatever the answers to these questions, one thing was certain: encountering Indian vegetarianism triggered a review of European morality. Hinduism became the arena in which these issues were fought out, and the travellers’ varying responses produced a vocabulary for discussing the vegetarian question in the wider context.

The Indians’ apparent animal worship was a massive hurdle for Christians to overcome.⁴⁸ Zoolatry was the ultimate degradation of God and humanity, and many took temple images of animals as proof that Hindus worshipped the devil.⁴⁹ The most prominent instance of ‘animal worship’ in India, which everyone commented on, was the reverence for the cow.⁵⁰ European Christians found the habit abominable – reminiscent as it was of the Israelites’ golden calf and the Egyptian god Apis – and this made a great excuse for pillaging golden cows from temples.⁵¹ The Franciscan missionary to India and China, Odoric of Pordenone (1286–1331), whose account was plagiarised in the widely successful Mandeville’s Travels, wrote disparagingly of pagans who washed in cow dung and urine as if it were holy water.⁵² Scatological details about Indians using cattle faeces as a cleansing agent for houses, bodies and souls became a staple of European writing about Hinduism.⁵³

Indian cow-worship from the frontispiece of Thomas Herbert’s A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile … (1634)

But alongside such stereotyping, Europeans as early as Marco Polo were prepared to see a utilitarian rationale behind cow worship. Cattle, they noticed, were the primary beasts of burden in India, responsible for cultivating the fields as well as providing milk, so any religious law that sought to protect the cow contributed to the agronomy and well-being of the country.⁵⁴ ‘[T]his superior regard for the cow,’ wrote François Bernier in 1667, ‘may more probably be owing to her extraordinary usefulness.’⁵⁵ In fact, there was already a long tradition of reading self-interested motives into cow-protection laws. St Thomas Aquinas, even while arguing against vegetarianism, allowed that some food taboos were rational, instancing Egypt where ‘the eating of the flesh of the ox was prohibited in olden times so that agriculture would not be hindered’.⁵⁶ St Jerome, likewise, commented that in Egypt and Palestine the killing of calves was prohibited in ‘the interests of agriculture’. Even in sixteenth-century England, Queen Elizabeth had outlawed meat-eating during Lent to allow cattle stocks and grazing lands to be replenished.⁵⁷

Brahmin with cow, from Henry Lord’s A Display of two forraigne sects in the East Indies (1630)

However, the protection of animals that were not useful flabbergasted even the most hardened travellers. The sixteenth-century Portuguese writer Duarte Barbosa was astounded by the ‘marvellous’ extreme to which the Indians took ‘this law of not killing anything’. ‘For it often happens,’ he reported, ‘that the Moors bring them some worms or little birds alive, saying they intend to kill them in their presence; and they ransom them, and buy them to set them flying, and save their lives for more money than they are worth.’⁵⁸ He was still more astonished – as future European travellers would be – to find that noxious insects like lice were looked after by special people allotted to the task of feeding them with their own blood.⁵⁹

Christians thought that animals were made for humans, so an animal’s value was dependent on its usefulness. The Hindus and Jains, they perceived, had a fundamentally different system which attributed value to animal life independent from, and even at the expense of, man. In the 1590s the Dutch traveller to India John Huygen van Linschoten articulated this in his internationally best-selling travelogue Itinerario (The Journey), by explaining that the Banians ‘kill nothing in the world that has life, however small and useless it may be’. Despite his culture-shock, Linschoten rendered such morals comprehensible by giving them a Christian gloss: the Hindus, he explained, consider it ‘a work of great charity, saying, it is don to their even neighbours’.⁶⁰ It became common for Europeans to regard the Hindu value of animal life not so much as something completely alien, but as an extension of laws compatible with Christianity such as ‘loving thy neighbour’.⁶¹ In that framework, Hindus were seen by some as more virtuous than Christians. As one English gentleman put in the 1680s, it was ‘a sad thing’ that in respect of their treatment of animals ‘Christians, very many of them, may go to School, and learn of Infidels and Heathens to reform their Lives and Manners’.⁶²

The ultimate surprise for the Europeans were the Indian ‘animal hospitals’.⁶³ Again, Europeans were most challenged by the fact that such hospitals expended effort and money on animals that were past their usefulness. ‘They have hospitals for sheepe, goates, dogs, cats, birds, and for all other living creatures,’ wrote Ralph Fitch, the first Englishman to write a travelogue on India in 1594. ‘When they be old and lame, they keepe them until they die.’⁶⁴ In Europe, sick animals or cattle past their productive age were automatically killed. The ‘ingratitude’ that this implied became a source of anxiety for Europeans.⁶⁵ Hindus appeared to be extraordinary exemplars of charity, which put some European noses out of joint. Many travellers responded to this with ridicule, but others were impressed by the workings of a moral system that was entirely neglected in the West.

In dealing with this challenge, Europeans projected onto the Indians the simplified Pythagorean idea that they abstained from killing animals for fear of hurting a reincarnated human soul. This implied that the Hindus were not valuing the life of the animal itself, but the soul of the human trapped within it. Since most Christians dismissed reincarnation as a preposterous theological error, interpreting Hindu vegetarianism in this way deflected the ethical challenge and amputated their principle of non-violence (ahimsa). It meant that writers could fall back on the long-standing Christian tradition of ridiculing the Pythagorean objection to eating flesh, as the Christian theologian Tertullian put it in the second century AD, ‘lest by chance in his beef he eats of some ancestor of his’.⁶⁶ One author who assessed the scientific case for vegetarianism at the end of the seventeenth century, simply declared that the Pythagoreans didn’t count as vegetarians because their diet was based on ‘a Mistake in their Philosophy, and not a Law of Nature’.⁶⁷ Christians defused the moral strength of vegetarianism by reducing it to a comical superstition.

Having projected Pythagoreanism onto the Hindus, some Europeans explained the similarity by claiming that Pythagoras had taught the Indians their vegetarian doctrines, rather than the other way round.⁶⁸ This gave Pythagoras the European a superior status, and it also meant that Brahmins could be more readily assimilated into biblical history by claiming that they and their philosophy were descended from the Egyptians. By the time the clergyman Samuel Purchas published his enormous anthology of travel literature in 1625, the idea that the Indians were identical to Pythagoreans was already widespread. Purchas himself thought Pythagoras must have been to India and he printed several authors who had noticed, as King James I’s ambassador to Jahangir, Sir Thomas Roe, put it in 1616, that the Indian ‘Pythagorians’ believe in ‘the soules transmigration, and will not kyll any living creature, no, not the virmine that bites them, for feare of disseising the speiritt of some frend departed’.⁶⁹ Purchas made Indian vegetarianism part of common parlance and, inevitably, these ideas wove themselves into Europe’s cultural fabric.

In the 1620s the humanist nobleman, Pietro della Valle (1586–1652), was astonished when a Brahmin called ‘Beca Azarg’ told him that Pythagoras was the same person as the Hindu god Brahma; that it was ‘Pythagoras’ who had taught metempsychosis and vegetarianism to the Brahmins and that they still revered his books.⁷⁰ It was, laughed della Valle, ‘a curious notion indeed, and which perhaps would be news to hear in Europe, that Pythagoras is foolishly ador’d in India for a God’. ‘But this,’ concluded della Valle, ‘with Beca Azarg’s good leave, I do not believe.’⁷¹ Henry Lord, chaplain to the English trading post at Surat in Gujarat, did believe it. In the hope that Hinduism could be reconciled to Christianity by purging it of Pythagorean doctrines, in 1630 he set himself up as a latter-day heretic-hunting St Augustine, calling upon the Archbishop of Canterbury to reprimand the Hindus for disobeying God’s instruction to eat flesh.⁷² By contrast, the French editor of The Open Door to Hidden Paganism (1651), the most advanced account of the Hindus, by the Dutch missionary Abraham Rogerius, took the view that ‘Plato and Pythagoras were not ashamed to learn the basic tenets of their philosophy from the Brahmans.’⁷³ In a conservative backlash against such liberal views in the China illustrata of 1667, the Jesuit scientist-missionary Athanasius Kircher retorted that metempsychosis had been carried to India by an execrable band of Egyptian priests and had subsequently been spread across the Eastern world (along with its corollary vegetarianism) by a ‘deadly monster’ called Buddha, ‘a very sinful brahmin imbued with Pythagoreanism’. ‘These are not tenets, but crimes,’ concluded Kircher venomously. ‘They are not doctrines, but abominations.’⁷⁴

In 1665 Edward Bysshe dragged the debate into the forefront of modern politics by publishing an anthology of the ancient writings on India, including Palladius’ dialogue, in which he presented the Brahmins as pure idealists who stood up to Alexander just as modern Puritans stood up to the tyranny of Charles II.⁷⁵ In the context of mid-century Puritanism, Sir Thomas Roe’s chaplain, Edward Terry (1589/90–1660), gave a strikingly accurate account of the ancient doctrine of ahimsa – that an animal values its life just as humans value theirs, so destroying it manifestly against its will constitutes an act of violent injury (himsa). This was a remarkable moment of cross-cultural understanding which Terry appears to have accomplished by interviewing Jain monks, probably in Gujarat or while travelling with Jahangir’s court. However, he did not want to give too much ground to the Indians; he drew attention away from the morally powerful doctrine of ahimsa by claiming that their main reasons for being vegetarian were the ‘mad and groundlesse phansie’ of Pythagorean metempsychosis and the false commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill any living Creature’. He castigated them for ‘forbearing the lives of the Creatures made for mens use’, but nevertheless acknowledged that they provided a better moral example than Christians who fought unrighteous wars and made riotous ‘havock and spoil’ with the animals. Going some way to meet them, Terry lauded their temperance and felt that their other ‘excellent moralities’ showed that the divine law of nature was ‘ingraved upon [their] hearts’.⁷⁶

As the seventeenth century matured, liberal philosophies started to compete more strongly with the Christian orthodoxies about man and nature. Over the heads of the Indian vegetarians, the great minds of the day fought out their disputes. Were Brahmins ignorant idolaters or ancient philosophers who could teach a thing or two to the Europeans?

The seminal analysis of Indian vegetarianism came from a most unlikely quarter, and showed how the association with Pythagoras could be a path towards assimilating Hinduism. François Bernier, who served as physician at the court of the Great Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb for eight years in the 1660s, had been trained in sceptical and Epicurean philosophy under Pierre Gassendi. With this enlightened background, Bernier attacked Indian culture not simply because Hindus were deluded idolaters who failed to see the obvious truth of Christianity; rather, his ridicules were aimed at the practice of superstitious rituals (many of which, he noted, were equivalent to the irrational beliefs of European Christians).⁷⁷ Bernier smiled wryly as he watched Hindus gathering en masse to bathe in sacred rivers, banging on cymbals and using incantations to ward off the evil influence of an eclipse. He recited all the ‘monstrosities’ of Hindu culture from widow-burning to sun worship. But there was one doctrine for which Bernier pulled his punches: their Pythagorean vegetarianism.

Perhaps the first legislators in the Indies hoped that the interdiction of animal food would produce a beneficial effect upon the character of the people, and that they might be brought to exercise less cruelty toward one another when required by a positive precept to treat the brute creation with humanity. The doctrine of the transmigration of souls secured the kind treatment of animals … It may also be that the Brahmens were influenced by the consideration that in their climate the flesh of cows or oxen is neither savoury nor wholesome.⁷⁸

Bernier’s willingness to recognise the health benefits of abstaining from meat may have been inspired by his master, Gassendi, who had himself been a staunch advocate of the vegetable diet (see chapter 11). But Bernier even rendered the doctrine of reincarnation comprehensible to Europeans by arguing that it was not designed to protect animals for their own sake, but ultimately for the benefit of humans. He was following a common tradition that had long been used to clear Pythagoras from imputations of superstition, exemplified by the third-century Epicurean biographer-philosopher Diogenes Laertius, who claimed that Pythagoras never believed in metempsychosis, but that ‘his real reason for forbidding animal diet’ was to give people ‘a healthy body and keen mind’.⁷⁹ Indeed, this interpretative technique had been used by Christians on the Bible, for example when St Thomas Aquinas insisted that if Moses appeared to care for animals, he was really just trying ‘to turn the mind of man away from cruelty which might be used on other men’.⁸⁰ Erasing from Hinduism the ethic of respect for animal life, and replacing it with European ideas of diet, agronomy and temperament, may seem like aggressive manipulation, but in doing so Bernier was treating Hinduism in much the same way as Christians treated the Bible. By transposing exegetical traditions onto Indian practice and regarding the Hindus as pseudo-Pythagoreans, Bernier developed a humanist interpretation of Indian culture that detected a reservoir of ancient sagacity behind their ‘fables’.

Having identified its potential, Bernier was astonished by the advantages of vegetarianism, noticing in particular that it was India’s greatest military asset. Whereas European armies were weighed down with barrels of salted beef and tankards of wine – without which the European soldier would absolutely refuse to fight – Indian armies were perfectly content with readily transportable dried food such as lentils and rice. He looked on with disbelief as Aurangzeb’s immense army transported enough provisions for ‘prodigious and almost incredible’ numbers of people.⁸¹

Such concrete evidence of the benefits of vegetarianism made a sizeable dent in the typical European argument that meat-eating was essential for sustaining human life, or at least for strength and virility. It was commonly supposed that anyone who abstained from flesh must be effeminate, weak and lazy. This, Europeans said to themselves, was what made it so easy for meat-eating Muslims and Europeans to conquer Indian vegetarians.⁸² This idea of Asian effeminacy, which dates back at least 2,500 years to Hippocratic medical ethnology, became one of the most pervasive means of denigrating Hindus, especially towards the end of the eighteenth century.⁸³ But it was counterbalanced by the recognition that the Hindus’ frugality made them at least as long-lived as Europeans, and fuelled their admired industriousness and resilience to disease.⁸⁴

The Europeans’ idea that meat-eating was normal, or essential, was swiftly being demolished by the discovery of vegetarian peoples all over the world. Europeans gradually realised that instead of representing the norm, they were an exceptionally carnivorous society. In Africa and America travellers found people living in primitive simplicity ‘before’ the luxury of civilisation had corrupted them – a state with both Edenic and barbaric connotations.⁸⁵ In the East vegetarianism had been preserved beyond the state of nature by virtuous temperance and the institution of sacred laws against killing animals.⁸⁶ Such discoveries were to provide grist to the mill of any European who wished to argue that eating meat was by no means a nutritional necessity.

Bernier’s attempt to understand and even learn from this Hindu doctrine has to be considered as liberal, especially compared to the invectives of his European contemporaries at the Mughal court, such as the Venetian Niccolao Manucci who described the Indian vegetarians as ‘a people who do not deserve the name of man’.⁸⁷

Bernier’s acquaintance Jean-Baptiste Tavernier was less vituperative than Manucci, but furnished plenty of sensationalist examples of Indian vegetarianism in his Travels in India (1676), warning prospective visitors with the story of a Persian merchant who was whipped to death for shooting a peacock, and noting the extreme lengths taken to ensure that relatives were not killed – in the form of ants in firewood. Tavernier praised the high morality of the Hindus, but he – like many others before and since – could not but see an absurd contradiction in preserving the life of vermin, and yet happily burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands.⁸⁸

Surprisingly, the most enthusiastic seventeenth-century travel writer was an English clergyman, the Reverend John Ovington, who travelled to India in 1689. Ovington accepted Bernier’s utilitarian rationale: vegetarianism clearly made the Indians less cruel, just as healthy, and spiritually and mentally ‘more quick and nimble’. But Ovington even endorsed the Indians’ animal protection practices on their own terms: ‘India of all the Regions of the Earth, is the only publick Theatre of Justice and Tenderness to Brutes, and all living Creatures,’ he said, ‘a Civil Regard … is enjoyn’d as a common Duty of Humanity’. Their innocence, said Ovington, made the Hindus comparable to ‘the original Inhabitants of the World, whom Antiquity supposes not to have been Carnivorous, nor to have tasted Flesh in those first Ages, but only to have fed upon Fruits and Herbs’. Ovington concluded by giving Hinduism a carte blanche of philosophical integrity: ‘there is not one of these Customs which are fasten’d upon them by the Rules of their Religion, but what comport very well, and highly contribute to the Health and Pleasure of their Lives.’⁸⁹

The way was paved for Europeans to take Indian vegetarianism, if not as a lesson in philosophy and justice, then at least in medical health. The voyages of discovery and the new wave of early anthropology that followed in their wake impelled Europe towards a combination of cultural syncretism and relativism. Attempts to sustain the idea that European Christians had the best society often crumbled in the face of evident virtue and integrity in other peoples. International vegetarianism, which plugged directly into European discourses on diet and the relationship between man and nature, proved a serious challenge to Western norms. As readers back home assimilated the information in the travelogues, Indian vegetarianism started to exert influence on the course of European culture.

*For an account of deism, see chapter 9.

FIVE ‘This proud and troublesome Thing, called Man’: Thomas Tryon, the Brahmin of Britain

Thomas Tryon gazed out over the sugar plantations of Barbados. What he saw chilled his heart. With horror he watched lines of slaves labouring under the inhuman whip of their European masters. The cruelty of men claiming to be Christians surpassed all belief: the expatriated Africans were starved until they would eat putrefying horse meat; their limbs were crushed in the sugar mills; they died by thousands in the open fields. While Restoration England grew fat on their sweat and blood, Tryon complained, Barbados was perishing. The forests of the Americas were being depleted at a shocking rate; even the soil was suffering under the insatiable greed of the white man. After years of forcing the ground to produce the same cash crop, Barbados had gone from being ‘the most Fertil’st Spot of all America’, to ‘become a kind of Rock’ which grew nothing without dung fertiliser.¹ All this destruction was committed only to supply luxury goods back in London – that stinking heap of human corruption Tryon had left behind. Everything had gone horribly awry: America was supposed to be a New World in which laws of justice between man and beast would bring about a Golden Age of peace and harmony, not the ransacked sewerage of the Old World.² This was the opposite of what Tryon, in his youthful dreams, had imagined.

Born on 6 September 1634 in the Gloucestershire village of Bibury, Tryon had been sent out to spin wool at the age of six without an education. Working as a shepherd in his spare time he had accumulated enough capital by the age of thirteen to buy himself two sheep, and he swapped one of them for English lessons. Tryon loved his innocent flock and the contemplative life sleeping under the stars, but by the age of eighteen he ‘began to grow weary of Shepherdizing, and had an earnest desire to travel’. Without telling his parents, he packed up his belongings, his life savings and his ideals, waved goodbye to his sheep, said good riddance to his father’s plastering trade and set out for London.³

It was 1653 and the religious radicalism of Cromwell’s interregnum was at fever pitch. Having paid all of his £3 apprenticing himself to a hat-maker near Fleet Street, Tryon soon joined his master’s congregation of Anabaptists, attracted by their austerity, silence and periodic fasting from flesh.⁴ Up in his apprentice’s lodgings, he spent all his spare time and money delving into books on alchemy, herbal medicine and natural magic. In 1657, at the age of twenty-three, he had what he was waiting for – a divine visitation of his own: ‘the Voice of Wisdom continually and most powerfully called upon me,’ he wrote years later in his Memoirs; it told him to relinquish all luxuries and turn to vegetarianism: ‘for then I took my self to Water only for Drink, and forbore eating any kind of Flesh or Fish, and confining my self to an abstemious self-denying Life.’⁵

This was the very year that Roger Crab started calling for followers, and Tryon’s description of his conversion sounds so similar to Crab’s that it could have been lifted straight out of The English Hermite.⁶ So many of their interests are the same – Behmenist mysticism, astrological dietary medicine, vegan diet and even hat-making – that it is tempting to imagine Crab was Tryon’s vegetarian guru.⁷ Tryon called the Sabbath Mammon-worship, and the clergy ‘Jockies in the Art of Wiving’; he railed against upper-class exploitation and warned that private lands were ‘the effects of Violence’.⁸ Like Crab, he mastered the art of twisting the Bible into a vegetarian manifesto – enlisting Moses, Daniel, John the Baptist and Jesus as fellow vegetarians – and revealing that God’s permission to eat meat after the Flood was really an act of ‘Spite and Vengeance’ tempting people into the spirit of wrath.⁹ Humans were supposed to be ‘faithful Stewards’ of God’s creatures, insisted Tryon, not murderous meat-eating tyrants.¹⁰

He joined a group of vegetarians whose doctrines sound similar to those of Crab’s ‘Rationals’, Pordage’s followers or even Winstanley’s Diggers, for they ‘would not eat Flesh, because it could not be procured without breaking the Harmony and Unity of Nature, and doing what one would not be done unto’.¹¹ When Tryon heard the rumours of Indians living in harmony with the animals he was transfixed with joy: vegetarianism was no longer relegated to the backwaters of English religious dissidence – it was the creed followed by entire nations of brother herb-eaters like himself.

Horoscope of the nativity of Thomas Tryon’s daughter (1661/1662)

Like many sectaries of the time, Tryon initially avoided persecution by keeping his head down and refraining from the provocative medium of print. Besides, he had a family to support: after marrying a childhood sweetheart who refused to give up eating meat, and fathering five children,¹² Tryon travelled to Holland and then Barbados where religious toleration was greater and commercial opportunities in the hat trade were lucrative. But after returning to London in 1669 he experienced his second epiphany. In 1682 his inner voice told him ‘to Write and Publish something … recommending to the World Temperance, Cleanness, and Innocency of Living; and admonishing Mankind against Violence, Oppression, and Cruelty, either to their own Kind, or any inferior Creatures’.¹³ Tryon fell to his new allotted task with ardour and over the next twenty years, until his death in 1703, he poured a total of twenty-seven works through the press. Many of them were popular enough to go into multiple editions, his magnum opus, The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness, being reprinted five times in fifteen years. On average over the entirety of his writing career, Tryon went to press once every four months. Some of his works were circulated by the Quaker printer Andrew Sowle and his daughter Tace, and others were distributed by a dozen of England’s most successful commercial booksellers including Elizabeth Harris, Thomas Bennet and Dorman Newman, and were advertised in works as popular as Daniel Defoe’s.¹⁴

By now political radicalism had been stifled by its own failures and, with the accession of Charles II in 1660, Cromwell’s interregnum had given way to the polite culture of Restoration England. In 1688 the Glorious Revolution (also called the Bloodless Revolution) saw an end to James II’s whimsical reign and Parliament gave the crown to his daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange, ushering in a new era of constitutional democracy and relative social tolerance.¹⁵ Tryon accordingly tempered his vegetarian philosophy with an element of compromise. His homely books with titles like The Way to Make All People Rich, The Good Housewife made a Doctor and Healths Grand Preservative were aimed at frugal householders. He encouraged people to forage for wild plants such as watercress, sorrel and dandelion, and lauded local, naturally produced vegetables from the ‘brave noble’ potato to the ‘lively’ leek. He helpfully furnished his readers with step-by-step guides on how best to cook cabbages, as well as his favourite meat-free recipes like ‘Bonniclabber’ which, he explained, ‘is nothing else but Milk that has stood till it is sower, and become of a thick slippery substance’ (try this at your own risk).¹⁶

He also cautioned against over-indulgence, especially in fatty meat, cream and fried foods, which, combined with lack of exercise, he repeatedly warned, cause obesity, obstruct the circulation of the blood and ‘fur the Passages’.¹⁷ But recognising that despite his warnings ‘People will still gorge themselves with the Flesh of their Fellow-Animals’, he deigned to supply his readers with instructions on how to prepare it (boiling rather than frying) so as to avoid the worst of its harmful qualities.¹⁸

In his lifetime Tryon was appreciated by a wide range of people, from recondite astrologers to the famous proto-feminist playwright, poet and novelist Aphra Behn. It is possible that Tryon met Behn in Barbados where his liberal attitudes appear to have influenced her slave-novel Oronooko. Behn described herself as Tryon’s follower, claiming to have tried his vegetarian regime, and in 1685 wrote a laudatory poem about him which is so hyperbolic that it is hard to believe it was not penned with a hint of irony:¹⁹

Hail Learned Bard! who dost thy power dispence

And show’st us the first State of Innocence …

Not he that bore th’Almighty Wand* cou’d give Diviner Dictates, how to eat, and live. And so essential was this cleanly Food, For Man’s eternal health, eternal good, That God did for his first-lov’d Race provide, What thou, by God’s example, hast prescrib’d:²⁰

But any exaggeration would have been less evident then: by the end of his life, Tryon had accumulated such wealth from trading and writing that he purchased some land, bought the title of ‘Gentleman’ (as Roger Crab had done), and even took to wearing a long curly wig.²¹ To some, this seemed like sheer hypocrisy – even the hats he sold were made from beaver-pelts (a fact he later came to regret) – but Tryon no doubt felt he had adapted his politics to fit in with the changing times.²²

Tryon’s works – forerunners of the modern self-help genre – continued to be anthologised for decades. He may not compare in intellectual rigour with his contemporaries John Locke and Isaac Newton, but he sold far more books than Newton did, appealing to a wide lay audience. Tryon’s vegetarian philosophy – an eclectic concoction of notions culled from all over the world – was still being admired years after his death by the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He was thus an important conduit, and the most powerful catalyst for Tryon’s revamping of vegetarianism in the late seventeenth century, when radical vegetarians had dwindled, was the discovery of the Indian Brahmins. Having witnessed the challenge to man’s rights over nature made by the radical pantheism of Winstanley and the Ranters, Tryon noticed the common ground with Hindu vegetarianism, and he embraced it with open arms. Above all, the Indians inspired Tryon with new conviction that a Golden Age of vegetarianism could still be achieved.

Eager to dispossess Western Europe of its monopoly over truth, Tryon argued that the Indian wise men had devised their own ‘natural religion’ by studying nature and receiving divine revelations.²³ In addition, following the speculations of the travel writers (and some erroneous Renaissance translations of Philostratus), Tryon held that Pythagoras had travelled to India and taught the Brahmins his vegetarian philosophy. This contact with Pythagoras plugged the Brahmins into the network of ancient pagan philosophers, known to the Renaissance Neoplatonists as the prisci theologi, who were believed to have passed a pristine sacred theology between themselves and even, some thought, inherited doctrines from Moses.²⁴ Tryon intimated that Pythagoras had inherited his vegetarian philosophy from the antediluvians, so the Brahmins, who had inherited it from him, were the purest remnants of the paradisal tradition left on earth.²⁵

Thomas Tryon by Robert White (1703)

He thought that the Brahmins and Moses essentially followed the one ‘true Religion’, which is ‘the same in all places, and at all times’.²⁶ But whereas the Jews and Christians had corrupted their creed with schisms and wrathful appetites, the Brahmin priesthood – which stretched back millennia in a pure uninterrupted tradition – had preserved their sacred knowledge in its original form. Unenamoured of the malevolent Christian clergy of his own country, Tryon turned to the Brahmins and bowed down to them as the pre-eminent guardians of divine law.

Among the very first works Tryon published was the extraordinary pamphlet, A Dialogue Between An East-Indian Brackmanny or Heathen-Philosopher, and a French Gentleman (1683).²⁷ Reversing the stereotype of civilised Europeans and barbaric Indians, Tryon’s Brahmin greets the Frenchman with ironic allusions to his acquisitive motives for venturing into India and questions him on the tenets and practices of Christians. The Brahmin’s enlightened philosophy, his virtuous temperance, and his unassailable respect for animal life win a moral victory over the depraved and murderous European.²⁸

Merging his voice entirely with the Brahmin’s, Tryon rebuffs the arguments that had hitherto been used by others to denigrate Hinduism. He even defends the Indian practice of saving lice, for, as the Brahmin explains, if people were allowed to kill some animals they would soon believe they could go on to kill others ‘and so by degrees come to kill men’.²⁹ The ‘East-Indian Brackmanny’ was Tryon’s alter ego.³⁰ Although Tryon was trying to reconcile Indian vegetarianism to Judaeo-Christian beliefs, his ranking of Hindus above Christians was shocking and his anti-vegetarian enemy the Quaker controversialist John Field attacked him for having ‘at once Unchristianed (as much as he can) all Christendom’.³¹

Abandoning some of the basic precepts of Christianity, Tryon espoused what he imagined to be the way of the Brahmins. Fusing the vegetarianism of his radical forebears with the Brahmins’ concrete example, he announced with excitement that they have for ‘many Ages … led peaceable and harmless Lives, in Unity and Amity with the whole Creation; shewing all kind of Friendship and Equality, not only to those of their own Species, but to all other Creatures’.³² They had achieved the very state that Robins, Crab, Winstanley and all the prelapsarians had dreamed of.

The travel literature about India emphasised that the Hindu diet was based on an ethical treatment of animals (indeed, the establishment of fearless harmony between man and the animals through the practice of non-violence was an ideal lauded in Sanskrit scriptures).³³ As George Sandys had commented in his translation of Pythagoras’ speech in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1632), which Tryon read and quoted, the Indians had earned the trust of the animals by treating them with respect. Living in a social order reminiscent of the Golden Age, Sandys wrote excitedly, the Indians ‘are so farre from eating of what ever had life, that they will not kill so much as a flea; so that the birds of the aire, and beasts of the Forrest, without feare frequent their habitations, as their fellow Cittisens’.³⁴ Tryon came to see the fair treatment of animals as the key to the restoration of Paradise. Tryon’s Brahmin affirms that ‘we hurt not any thing, therefore nothing hurts us, but live in perfect Unity and Amity with all the numberless Inhabitants of the four Worlds.’³⁵ By relinquishing flesh the vegetarian Hindus had attained physical and mental vigour and undone the Fall: ‘We all drink Water, and the fragrant Herbs, wholsom Seeds, Fruits and Grains suffice us abundantly for Food,’ declares Tryon’s Brahmin, ‘so we in the midst of a tempestuous troublesom World live Calm, and as it were in Paradise.’³⁶

Inspired by Pythagoras’ vegetarian conversion mission to India, Tryon began to imagine the state of ‘perfect Love, Concord, and Harmony’ he could institute in England – if only its citizens would convert to vegetarianism. Thinking of himself as a new Moses, or, even better, Pythagoras, Tryon told the English people that if they gave up eating meat like the Brahmins, they would achieve spiritual enlightenment, health and longevity, and their relationship with animals would transform from a state of perpetual war to one of Edenic peace.³⁷

Tryon even looked to the Brahmins for a solution to the government’s religious intolerance, by which he and his dissenting compatriots were routinely persecuted. Since the introduction of the Clarendon Code (1661–5) unlicensed religious meetings had been forcibly broken up, 2,000 Puritan ministers had been dismissed, 500 Quakers had been killed and 15,000 others suffered a variety of other punishments. Even after the Toleration Act of 1689 the problem persisted; Tryon’s own publisher Andrew Sowle regularly had his printing shop smashed up and had even been threatened with death.³⁸ In arguments later echoed in John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) Tryon called for universal religious tolerance. He recommended that England introduce the Indian Mughal’s jezia system by which – as the Brahmin explains – anyone not adhering to the Islamic religion of the state simply paid an extra tax in return for ‘unquestioned Liberty for the Exercise of our Religion’.³⁹ Dissenters meanwhile should emulate the Brahmins, he added, for as vegetarian pacifists they would avoid persecution because ‘Governours would fear their Rising or Tumulting, no more than they do the Rebellion of Sheep, or Lambs, or an Insurrection of Robin Red-Brests’.⁴⁰ This was the pacifist philosophy of the Quakers and the Robins sect united with the vegetarian ahimsa of the Hindus and Jains.

Tryon fantasised that the Brahmins in India were the counterparts of the Puritans, Dissenters and religious radicals at home; this comparison had been made before, though often on less favourable terms. Pantheism, nudism, communism, sexual deviance, frugality and even the belief in reincarnation were all characteristics which contemporaries associated with both the Indian holy men and the home-grown religious dissidents.⁴¹ In 1641 the Italian humanist Paganino Gaudenzio compared the vegetarian communist Pythagoreans and Brahmins with the Anabaptists.⁴² Strabo’s ancient Brahmins were pantheist apocalyptists and Alexander’s Dandamis declared that anyone who followed nature ‘would not be ashamed to go naked like himself, and live on frugal fare’.⁴³ Tryon himself was not inclined to nudism, but he did recommend the more socially acceptable practice of wearing as few clothes as possible.⁴⁴ But the resemblance to prelapsarian nudists was inescapable: ‘their Nakedness’, went one comparison of the Christian Adamite sect and the Indian fakirs in 1704, was their way of ‘restoring themselves to the State of Innocence’;⁴⁵ others, like Samuel Purchas, disbelieving their chastity, claimed that the Indian yogis were secretly just like the nudist orgiast ‘Illuminate Elders of the Familists, polluting themselves in all filthinesse’.⁴⁶ As early as the sixteenth century, the Fardle of Facions assumed that puritanical Indian women still enjoyed going ‘buttoke banquetyng abrode’ (shagging other men).⁴⁷ This accusation of hypocritical debauchery was a common slur made against suspect religious cults in Europe.

Tryon was not the first to try to turn the identification of Brahmins with puritanical Dissenters to advantage; others before him had seen the Brahmins as brothers-in-arms against a corrupt world. In 1671 the controversial Quaker George Keith and his co-author Benjamin Furly announced that the Brahmins were so virtuous that they ‘rise up in judgment against the Christians of this age, and fill their faces with shame and confusion’.⁴⁸ They borrowed illustrative stories from Sir Edward Bysshe’s version of Palladius,⁴⁹ and the Rotterdam Calvinist preacher Franciscus Ridderus whose writings anticipated Tryon’s by giving his Brahmin character ‘Barthrou Herri’ lengthy ‘Christlike’ sermons which he copied out of Rogerius’ Open Door.⁵⁰ In 1683 Andrew Sowle presented the Brahmins as ideal vegetarian pacifists in The Upright Lives of the Heathen, an English selection of Bysshe’s anthology of ancient writings, which Tryon may have helped produce (it ends by telling the reader to find out more in Tryon’s Brackmanny, on sale in Sowle’s shop for the bargain price of one penny).⁵¹ And in 1687 one anonymous author, having read the travelogues of Henry Lord and Edward Terry, went nearly as far as Tryon by lamenting that the Hindus set a great example by ‘extending their good Nature, Humanity and Pity, even to the very bruit Creatures’ while shameful Christians were ‘cruel and merciless towards our Beasts’.⁵²

Naked Adamites from Bernard Picart, Ceremonies et Coutumes Religieuses de Tous Les Peuples du Monde

Hindu vegetarianism, as it was presented in the travelogues, had started to exert serious moral pressure on the conscience of Western Christians and Tryon rode this wave as far as it would go. His enthusiasm for the Brahmins peaked in his astonishing Transcript Of Several Letters From Averroes … Also Several Letters from Pythagoras to the King of India (1695), in which he had the nerve to fake an archival discovery of correspondence by Pythagoras and Averröes, the twelfth-century Spanish Islamic philosopher. Tryon appears to have seriously intended to convince the world that Pythagoras, Averröes and the Indian Brahmins were all believers in the same divinely ordained vegetarian philosophy. So amusingly successful was his sham that the Sowle family reprinted it in the eighteenth century alongside The Upright Lives of the Heathen, but the work has more recently lain unidentified in library vaults.⁵³

The Transcript climaxes in a dramatic reconstruction of Pythagoras’ visit to the court of the Indian King, where he is ordered to defend his vegetarian philosophy against the cavils of the (as yet unconverted) Brahmins. The King has summonsed Pythagoras for illicitly spreading this new-fangled unorthodox doctrine of vegetarianism.⁵⁴ The King and the Brahmins throw at Pythagoras the same anti-vegetarian arguments that Tryon’s contemporaries used against him, such as the God-given dominion over the animals and the heroic valour of hunting. But Pythagoras eventually wins the day, and thus India is converted to his doctrines.⁵⁵

By making Pythagoras the original founder of Hinduism it may seem as if Tryon was imposing Western philosophy onto the East. But as it was to Hinduism that he turned to reconstruct Pythagoreanism – with the help of the Indian travelogues – Tryon was actually imposing what he knew of Eastern philosophy onto the West.

The travelogues, of course, are full of Orientalist projections – all European accounts of Hinduism were informed by the writers’ Neoplatonist and Christian preconceptions – but they did also represent some genuine elements of Indian culture. At the very least, their report that there were people in India who taught and practised the principle of non-violence to all creatures was true. Were it not for the material existence of vegetarians in India, Thomas Tryon would never have developed his opinions and he certainly would not have been able to convey them with such clarity.

The vegetarian institutions Tryon’s Pythagoras establishes in India come straight out of the Indian travelogues: animal hospitals,⁵⁶ the practice of saving animals destined for slaughter,⁵⁷ and special reverence for the cow on account of its usefulness.⁵⁸ Like the travel writers, Tryon’s Pythagoras links pacifism and vegetarianism; he endorses the protection of vermin to clarify the total ban on violence and even institutes the taboo over sharing eating vessels with non-vegetarians.⁵⁹ He also recommends dubious practices such as the caste system⁶⁰ and the prohibition of widow remarriage.⁶¹ These doctrines formed the backbone of Tryon’s own edicts, some of which he set forth as commandments for his followers, including the veiling of women after the age of seven.⁶² He seems to have gathered some adherents around him, and may have been responsible for converting Robert Cook, the landowning ‘Pythagorean philosopher’ associated with the Quakers who ‘neither eat fish, flesh, milk, butter, &c. nor drank any kind of fermented liquor, nor wore woollen clothes, or any other produce of animal, but linen’, because, as he explained in 1691, his conscience told him ‘I ought not to kill.’⁶³ In other words, as far as he was able, Tryon established a Brahminic vegetarian community in London.

It was with the help of Indian culture that Tryon freed himself from Christianity’s anthropocentric value system and made a leap into another moral dimension. In the Transcript he did this with the figure of the Indian King. Dismissing the welfare of humans, the Indian King turns to the issue of animal rights, summarising it in starker terms than anyone in seventeenth-century England. Any argument against maltreating animals, he said, ‘must proceed, either because they have a natural Right of being exempted from our Power, or from some mutual Contract and Stipulation agreed betwixt Man and them … if … the former, we must acknowledge our present Practise to be an Invasion; if the latter, Injustice’.⁶⁴ The idea that humans could make social contracts with animals had usually been discussed – by Thomas Hobbes among others – with derision.⁶⁵ The idea that animals had any right to be exempted from human power was an unorthodoxy of incomparable audacity. Animals were there for man’s use; the most they could expect, according to Christian religious and philosophical legislators, as John Locke put it, was an exemption from cruel abuse. Tryon’s Pythagoras, by contrast, argues that even without considering animal rights, it is vain to think that man ‘has Right, because he has Power to Oppress’.⁶⁶ In this Tryon was answering Hobbes who had argued in 1651 that humans had rights over animals solely because they had the power to exert it (or ‘might makes right’).⁶⁷

In complete contrast to the norms of his society, Tryon came firmly down on the side of attributing to animals a right to their lives regardless of human interests. He lobbied Parliament to defend the ‘Rights and Properties of the helpless innocent creatures, who have no Advocates in this World’.⁶⁸ Where was the justification for killing animals, he demanded, when they were, in Tryon’s radical deployment of political language, ‘Fellow-Citizens of the World’?⁶⁹ They were God’s children, created to live on earth and therefore ‘have a Title by Nature’s Charter to their Lives as well as you’, he declaimed.⁷⁰ The ‘True Intent and Meaning’ of Christ’s law to do unto others as we would be done by was, according to Tryon, ‘to make all the Sensible Beings of the whole Creation easy, and that they might fully enjoy all the Rights and Priveleges granted them by the Grand Charter of the Creator’.⁷¹ This spectacular piece of moral renegotiation was a radical step away from the orthodox Christian anthropocentric universe, and one that anticipates modern ecologists’ value-laden claim for non-humans that ‘they got here first’.

Tryon went even a step further. It was the animals’ lack of language – according to Descartes among others – that signified their lack of reason. But Tryon artfully responded to this calumny by writing a series of striking ventriloquistic literary set-pieces, in which animals lament their plight in their own voice.⁷² The animals, Tryon explained, never had a Tower of Babel so they all communicated perfectly even without articulate speech.⁷³ Cattle complain that ‘we suffer many, and great Miseries, Oppression and Tyranny,’⁷⁴ while the birds protest that humans ‘violate our part, and natural Rights’.⁷⁵ The animals point out that the reciprocal favours that pass between a domestic beast and its owner – food and shelter for milk, wool and labour – constitute a tacit contract, the breach of which is gross ingratitude and treachery. Once again, the ideal alternative is represented by the Hindus who allow animals ‘all those Privileges and Freedoms that the Creator had given’;⁷⁶ ‘the People called Bannians,’ said Tryon, ‘are some of the strictest Observers of Gods Law, (viz.) doing unto those of their own kind, and to all inferior Animals and Creatures as they would be done unto.’⁷⁷

Using the behaviour of the Hindus as a permanent backdrop to his enthused writings, Tryon extended his critique of man’s treatment of animals into a wholesale attack on European degradation of the natural world. He observed that man was the only species so unclean that it irreparably defiled and polluted its own living quarters: ‘even the very Swine, will keep their Styes and Kennels sweet and clean,’ he exclaimed.⁷⁸ Like several of his contemporaries, he was disgusted by urban pollution. In ‘The abundance of Smoke that the multitude of Chimnies send forth’, he detected ‘a keen sharp sulpherous Quality’, which he blamed for increasing humidity in the air and causing ‘Diseases of the Breast’. He deplored the peer pressure that had fuelled the spread of tobacco-smoking, correctly recognising the symptoms of addiction, some of the health impacts, and that children of smokers were more likely to pick up the habit. He even complained against passive smoking as it did ‘so defile the common Air’.⁷⁹

In a cycle that anticipates ecological thought, Tryon observed pollution escaping into ‘Rivers which receive the Excrements of Cities or Towns’, enveloping the habitat of other species such as fish, and then returning – in the form of caught fish – to humans as polluted food.⁸⁰ In Tryon’s ‘The Complaints of the Birds’, American birds protest against the destruction of forests by encroaching Europeans: ‘thou takest liberty to cut them down … we are thereby disseized of our antient Freeholds and Habitations,’ they cry.⁸¹ The problem with this world, declaimed Tryon, was ‘this proud and troublesome Thing, called Man, that fills the Earth with Blood, and the Air with mutherous Minerals and Sulphur’.⁸²

Tryon warned that the excessive demand for animal products like wool was over-stretching natural resources, especially since intensive farming had turned animals into ‘a grand Commodity, and (as it were) a Manufacture’.⁸³ He deplored the phenomenon of consumerism which ‘causes great seeming Wants to be where there is not real or natural cause for it’.⁸⁴ People wouldn’t pay a farthing for pointless luxuries like civet and coffee if they were available on Hampstead Heath, ‘and if Hogs Dung were as scarce, its probable it might be as much in esteem’. He called on Europeans to stop ‘ransack[ing] the furthest corners of the Earth for Dainties’, encouraging them instead to be satisfied with the produce of their own soil.⁸⁵ Meanwhile, Tryon imagined, the Hindus lived in total harmony with creation. Fruit and vegetables required less labour-intensive methods of production. By restricting themselves to the vegetable diet, the Hindus subsisted without needing to rape and pillage the planet as Westerners did.⁸⁶

Even though his universe was essentially theocentric,⁸⁷ by putting man in the balance with the animals Tryon anticipated the shift from anthropocentrism to the biocentrism of modern ecological thought. While orthodox Christians tended to insist that all creatures had been made solely for man’s use, Hinduism helped Tryon to develop a system that resembles, and would later be developed into, environmentalism. Surprising though it may seem, given modern history’s usual emphasis on the West’s overbearing influence on its colonies, the encounter with India in the seventeenth century opened the door to a different moral premise and this in turn stimulated a revision of European thought and practice.

Tryon, however, did not place all his eggs in one altruistic basket. He emphasised that vegetarianism was also in the interests of people themselves. Far more efficiently than alchemy, he said, vegetarianism profited mankind by giving them the secret to lifelong health and making them rich by saving money on food. But some of his ‘self-interest’ arguments were the most unconventional of all his ideas. So before leaving the image of Tryon as a prophet of modern environmentalism, we should delve a bit deeper into his philosophy.

It all goes back to the 1650s when Tryon’s attention was first drawn to the Brahmins. Tryon’s favourite book was the Three Books of Occult Philosophy by the sixteenth-century arch-magician from Cologne, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa.⁸⁸ Tryon probably acquired the 1651 English translation when, as a hatter’s apprentice in London, he was trying to train as a magician. This manual of demonic magic was Tryon’s Bible and although he never once named Agrippa (no doubt wishing to avoid censure for having devoted himself to the work of a notorious heretic), he nevertheless built his ideas around Agrippa and frequently copied out whole gobbets from the Occult Philosophy into his own works.⁸⁹ In Agrippa’s chapter ‘Of abstinence … and ascent of the mind’, Tryon came across the magician’s recommendation that aspiring wizards and those who wished to communicate with God should pursue the vegetarian diet of Pythagoras and the Brahmins:

We must therefore in taking of meats be pure, and abstinent, as the Pythagorian Philosophers, who keeping a holy and sober table, did protract their life in all temperance … So the Bragmani did admit none to their colledge, but those that were abstinent from wine, from flesh, and vices …⁹⁰

Tryon was overawed by Agrippa’s instruction and made it his favourite maxim, repeating it time and time again and adapting it to his own purposes. Shrewdly, he spliced these pagan practices into the mainstream of Western beliefs by claiming that this diet was pursued by all the ‘Wise Ancients’ including the biblical patriarchs.⁹¹

Agrippa’s recipe of abstinence was famous among the mystics and magicians of the 1650s, and it may have been the inspiration behind the fasting techniques employed by Thomas Tany, John Pordage and even Roger Crab, who believed, like Agrippa, that ascetic purity was the path to making contact with the ‘aerial spirits’.⁹² Justice Durand Hotham, in his widely read Life of Jacob Behmen (1654) noted that many had tried Agrippa’s dietary short cut to spiritual illumination.⁹³

The ancient philosophers of Egypt, Babylon, Persia and Ethiopia held a legendary status as the most proficient adepts in magic, astrology and abstruse spiritual philosophy.⁹⁴ As one of Tryon’s contemporaries wrote: ‘all those who apply themselves to the Study of these Ænigma’s, go into the Indies, to improve by their Skill, and to discover there the Secrets of Natural Magick’.⁹⁵ Even John Locke asked a friend in India to find out if the Indians really managed to work magic. Vegetarianism was seen as the key to the Brahmins’ spiritual enlightenment and magical powers.⁹⁶

It was from Agrippa that Tryon picked up the idea that the Brahmins were great wise men, and since they were the only surviving strain of the prisci theologi after the demise of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, it was logical for anyone looking for vestiges to turn to them. It was also from Agrippa that Tryon absorbed the notion that man was a microcosm, or compact image, of the universe. Like the Renaissance Neoplatonist Pico della Mirandola, Tryon believed that both Pythagoras and Moses held this doctrine. But Tryon transformed this archaic idea by arguing that it was their fundamental rationale for vegetarianism.⁹⁷

Since man and the universe were both created in the image of God it followed that everything in the universe had a corresponding miniature equivalent in man, and between these corresponding parts Tryon believed there was a hidden sympathetic affinity.⁹⁸ Agrippa taught that man could exert magical powers by exploiting these ‘sympathetic’ forces; but Tryon became much more worried about the influence they had on man.⁹⁹ If you ate an animal, he warned, the part of your nature that corresponded with its nature would be stirred up and you would become like the beast you had eaten. ‘For all things have a sympathetical Operation,’ he explained, and ‘every thing does secretly awaken its like property’.¹⁰⁰

Still worse, when an animal was killed, in its flesh welled up all the spirits of fury, hatred and revenge, ‘for when any Creature perceives its Life in danger, there is such struggling and horror within, as none can imagine.’¹⁰¹ The result of eating a plate of spiritual turmoil was obvious: ‘those fierce, revengeful Spirits that proceed from the Creature, when the painful Agonies of Death are upon it … fail not to accompany the Flesh, and especially the Blood, and have their internal operation, and have their impression on those that eat it, by a secret, hidden way of Simile’.¹⁰² The furious spirits in dead animal flesh stirred up violent passions in the consumer, and by occult communication they could even bring down malign astrological influences causing famine, war and pestilence.¹⁰³ Herbs and seeds, on the other hand, did not lose their lively seminal virtues when harvested.¹⁰⁴ ‘Vegetives,’ he explained (punning on the Latin vegeto – to live), are ‘filled with Powerful Lively brisk Spirit and Vertue.’¹⁰⁵ Eating them made the eater so.

It may seem like a paradox that Tryon forbade eating animals out of both reverence for their life and disgust at the pollution they bring, but this was a dual ethic shared by Christian ascetics such as John Chrysostom and Hindu scriptures such as the Laws of Manu which regulated meat-eating because of both ‘the disgusting origin of flesh and the cruelty of fettering and slaying corporeal beings’.¹⁰⁶ Tryon united them in his critique of meat-eating.

Tryon carried Agrippa’s theories of sympathy into his ideas of the afterlife, and fused them with the belief in reincarnation that he read about in the Indian travelogues. In a complete reversal of orthodox priorities, Tryon gave greater weight to Pythagorean-Hindu doctrines than to Judaeo-Christian revelation and created his own hybrid metaphysical Neoplatonic-Christian-Hinduism. The idea of Christians converting to pagan beliefs was probably the most abhorrent scenario anyone could imagine. And yet Tryon did so with delight. Like Agrippa, he believed that after death badly behaved souls sympathetically attracted to themselves the form of the animal they had behaved most like during life. Agrippa himself had moulded this system by fusing ideas from Plato, Plotinus, the Kabbala, Hermeticism and the heretical Church father Origen. But Tryon added the vegetarian idea that it was flesh-eating that constituted the cardinal sin that made one take on the form of a vicious beast: ‘such as have by continual Violence Oppressed and Killed the Unrevengeful Animals, their Souls and Spirits shall be precipitated and revolved into the most Savage and Brutish Bodies.’¹⁰⁷

This was similar to the received wisdom about Hindu reincarnation – that immoral behaviour causes the soul to be reincarnated in an animal – but Tryon insisted that neither he nor the Hindus believed that animals had immortal souls.¹⁰⁸ Instead of reincarnating into animal bodies on earth, Tryon explained that the afterlife was more like an everlasting nightmare, which did not have material existence: ‘These strange phansies,’ he explained, ‘put the captivated Soul into unexpressible fears & agonies … continuing forevermore in this doleful torture & perplexity, yea the predominating quality gives the form to the new Body, viz. of a Dog, Cat, Bear, Lion, Fox, Tyger, Bull, Goat, or other savage Beasts’.¹⁰⁹

Tryon tried to reconcile this with the Christian belief in resurrection, pointing out that in the Bible it said that outside the gates of heaven ‘are Dogs, Bears, Lyons and the like Beasts of Prey’; these, Tryon claimed, were the souls of wicked men.¹¹⁰ He deftly used the powers of microcosmic sympathy to explain both the Christian and Hindu system, thus suggesting that they were branches of the same true religion. Needless to say, he did not fool his adversaries. John Field – ever on the lookout for chances to discredit Tryon – was appalled, demanding ‘where doth the Scripture so say, or speak of being Cloathed with Hellish shapes in the next World?’¹¹¹

By stepping outside the usual bounds prescribed by the religious authorities in Europe, Tryon developed a metaphysical rationale for vegetarianism which went hand in hand with his physical and ethical arguments. The breadth of his appeal must have been rooted in the diversity of his ideas, there being something in his philosophy for everyone, from the mundane methods of penny-pinching to the grander ideals of prelapsarianism. With remarkable cogency, Tryon treated the Hindus as his guide at every step of the way, reaching from hopeless utopianism down to serious suggestions for social and political reform. His principal accomplishment was welding the novel vegetarian philosophy attributed to the Brahmins with the familiar Neoplatonist and biblical traditions he had grown up with. He reduced this combination into a lifestyle philosophy, which would, he hoped, prevent the hellish degradation of man and nature that he had witnessed in Barbados.

*Moses.

SIX John Evelyn: Salvation in a Salad

Theophilus: There’s a superanuated Custom kept up among the Antients; that to gratify the Appetite violates the Creation …

Arnoldus: Was this the Primitive Practice of our former Ancestors?

Theophilus: I don’t say it was, I discourse the Brachmans that offer this Argument. No Man has a Commission to create Life, no Man therefore by any Law or Custom ought to take Life away; which if he do, he makes himself an Instrument of unnatural Cruelty, and his Body a Sepulchre to bury dead Carcasses in … Were this Argument approv’d of, it would, I suspect, overthrow our design of Angling.

Richard Franck, Northern Memoirs … The Contemplative and Practical Angler (1694)¹

In the first comprehensive account of salmon- and trout-fishing in Scotland, Richard Franck set out the opposition between the Brahmins’ and the Christians’ value of animal life. Franck originally penned his miscellaneous work in 1658 as a republican riposte to The Compleat Angler (1653), in which the Royalist Izaak Walton had tactfully submerged his attack on Cromwellian politics in scaly similes. As an ex-Cromwellian soldier fusing Hinduism in the 1690s with his outdated political Puritanism and mysticism, Franck had much in common with (and may have been directing his dialogue at) Thomas Tryon. Franck’s character Theophilus, who takes the part of the Hindus, transposes the elements of Tryon’s nom de plume Philotheos.

Like Tryon, Franck was tempted by the dreamy similarity between Indian vegetarianism and Edenic harmony, but ultimately he overrode this by evoking the rival idea of Eden according to which animals offered themselves up willingly to man – a notion backed up by the Gospel’s eradication of food taboos. But this was a bait to hook the unwary – for the vice Franck was trying to reel in was gluttony. Franck’s most potent net was woven from the common threads of ‘Hinduism’ and Puritanism: their voices united in condemning unnecessary slaughter for the riotous gratification of excessive appetite. Under the influence of Hinduism – and particularly the account by Edward Terry – Franck shifted the Puritanical detestation of wasting God’s gifts into his specific attack on wasting beings to whom God had given the inherently valuable property of life.² It was this absorption of Hindu vegetarianism that came to occupy the centre ground in social critiques of the late seventeenth century, espoused not just by political outsiders like Tryon and Franck, but by the most prominent thinkers of the intellectual world.

John Evelyn (1620–1706) is most famous for his diary, which, like that of his friend Samuel Pepys, records the quotidian minutiae of seventeenth-century society. A shining torch of the Enlightenment, Evelyn was one of the first members and secretary of the Royal Society, the internationally admired institution of empirical learning. He was a great friend of the eminent scientist Robert Boyle, and, as one of the trustees of the Boyle lectures, a bastion of the new orthodoxy of latitudinarian Anglicanism and Newtonian science. Though a Royalist sympathiser, Evelyn avoided active service during the Civil War by absenting himself on a Grand Tour of Europe. He made friends with the exiled royal family in Paris, and after the Restoration served in various philanthropic political posts until, dismayed by debauchery and intemperance at court,³ he retired to Sayes Court in Deptford, the private estate of his father-in-law.

During his abdication from public service in Cromwell’s era, Evelyn took up gardening, developing Sayes Court into a masterpiece of edible design. Thirty-eight beds of vegetables and a vast orchard of 300 fruit trees led into ‘the apple-tree walk’ which terminated in a moated island covered in waving swards of asparagus, raspberries, a mulberry tree and a blossoming enclosure of fruit bushes.⁴ Later he moved on to the garden at his own home at Wotton in Surrey, where he supplied his wife and household with freshly grown produce, and his nation with advice on everything from tree-planting to city-planning.

As old age cast shadows over the garden of his soul, Evelyn drew together a lifetime’s experience in horticulture to compose his magnum opus, the Elysium Britannicum or Paradisium Revisitum. He never completed this compendious work, and it has only recently been edited from his surviving array of manuscripts. He did publish one chapter, however, as it blossomed into the full-length book, Acetaria. A Discourse of Sallets (1699). This was filled with instructions on how to grow, pick, prepare and eat salad, from the sight-enhancing, anti-flatulent fennel to the eighteen types of pain-quelling, lust-calming lettuce. In the seventeenth century eating a dish of raw leafy vegetables was something of a novelty, out of line with the predominant valorisation of red meat. But with the increasing interest in botany and the rise of gentlemanly vegetable gardening, to which Evelyn himself contributed, salads were to enjoy a vogue. Sowing seeds no longer needed be the sole prerogative of peasants – the most noble foot could grace a spade. On the face of it, Acetaria was designed, as other commentators have pointed out, to encourage the use of salads in the English diet.⁵

A drawing by John Evelyn of the Evelyn family house at Wotton, Surrey, from the terrace above the gardens, 1653

But, like Thomas Tryon, Evelyn also had a theological agenda. His Preface declared that he wished to ‘recall the World, if not altogether to their Pristine Diet, yet to a much more wholsome and temperate than is now in Fashion’.⁶ ‘Adam, and his yet innocent Spouse,’ mused Evelyn, ‘fed on Vegetables and other Hortulan Productions before the fatal Lapse,’ and even until the Flood God did not ‘suffer them to slay the more innocent Animal’.⁷ In the course of his work, Evelyn was carried away by the force of his own arguments and ended up writing one of the most scholarly panegyrics of vegetarianism.⁸

The belief that the prelapsarian diet was healthy and virtuous appears to have become almost an established norm by the end of the seventeenth century. In common with many of his gardening contemporaries – such as Ralph Austen and John Parkinson – Evelyn’s botanical interests and lifelong practical and theoretical work on gardens aimed to recreate a garden like Eden.⁹ The famous gardening expert in the generation before Evelyn, William Coles, displayed this artfully in his Adam in Eden (1657) and he too regarded the vegetable diet as a path to health and long life.¹⁰ The garden, according to Evelyn, was ‘A place of all terrestrial enjoyments the most resembling Heaven, and the best representation of our lost felicitie.’¹¹ Gardens were also like encyclopaedias. Knowing all about plants – and Evelyn’s contemporaries did try to make their botanical knowledge as comprehensive as possible – was like knowing God’s creation as Adam had known it in Paradise. Gardening was Adam’s occupation before the Fall; therefore to garden was to relive the life of Adam. Gardening, said Evelyn, was ‘the most innocent, laudable, and purest of earthly felicities, and such as does certainly make the neerest approaches to that Blessed state’,¹² and he extended this common project into the realm of diet. Adam lived on raw vegetables and fruit in Eden, so if one wanted to live like Adam in Paradise, there was only one diet for it. Many herbs grew wild (‘every hedge affords a Sallet’), and were therefore obtainable without labour, just like food before the Fall.¹³ Composing salad was the original culinary art form: it was ‘clean, innocent, sweet, and Natural … compar’d with the Shambles Filth and Nidor, Blood and Cruelty’.¹⁴

Evelyn complemented this dietary idealism by trying to establish a more harmonious relationship with animals. Just like collecting all plants together in one place, gathering animals to live in harmony was a potent symbol of primeval harmony. Like Pepys he condemned bear-, bull- and badger-baiting as ‘butcherly sports or rather barbarous cruelties’,¹⁵ and he even tried to recreate Eden by setting up a zoo. Evelyn had been inspired by the big-cat menageries of the Turks, but he settled for a more modest collection of tortoises, squirrels and birds.¹⁶ In an emblematic representation of his desire to live in harmony with nature, he personally commissioned an elaborate ebony cabinet, now held the Victoria and Albert Museum, decorated with hard stone and gilt-bronze plaques depicting the mythical Greek vegetarian, Orpheus, taming the animals with his music.¹⁷

As a Royalist, Evelyn was a long way from the republican vegetarians who retreated into hermetic solitude, but his retreat into gardening was no less political. He visited Thomas Bushell in his vegetarian cave, and wrote in 1658 – 9 to Sir Thomas Browne and Sir Robert Boyle (who had also written a paper on salads¹⁸) that he thought gardening was an ideal around which the defeated Royalists could rally.¹⁹ There in their little Edens, Englishmen could recreate the monarchy Adam enjoyed over the creation, living as ‘a society of the paradisi cultores, persons of antient simplicity, Paradisean and Hortulan saints’.²⁰ As a collective community, Evelyn imagined they would live like the abstinent Carthusian friars, sheltered from the malign political world, but spearheading scientific investigation and progress. Although a naïve ideal, it was just such ideas, in line with Francis Bacon’s Solomon’s House, that led to the formation of the Royal Society.²¹

Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82), the famous Royalist physician and historian of gardens, was a particularly appropriate person for Evelyn to write to. In 1650, when vegetarianism was all the rage among the radicals, Browne reflected on its theological and medical implications in his famously witty collection of essays, Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors. He hinted that God might have sent the Flood to punish people for eating flesh (a view he extrapolated from the natural-rights philosopher, Hugo Grotius) and suggested that God permitted flesh because the Flood ‘had destroyed or infirmed the nature of vegetables’. The virtuous continued to abstain, however, and the Pythagoreans and the ‘Bannyans’ still did. All this showed that ‘there is no absolute necessity to feed on any [animals]’; returning to the vegetarian diet, he concluded, might even ‘prolong our days’.²²

Evelyn was a respected gentleman and a family man; his position in the Royal Society ensured his adherence to social norms; even in his diary – in stark contrast to Pepys’ frank confessions of fondling women’s breasts and committing all sorts of peccadilloes – he maintained perpetual decorum, and ‘never used its pages to reveal the secrets of the heart’, as Virginia Woolf once complained.²³ So he avoided anything unseemly in his advocacy of vegetarianism, keeping his distance from mystic counterparts like Thomas Tryon by air-brushing them out of his anthology of herbivores. (Tryon requited this with mutual silence, either ignorant of Evelyn, or too much of an egotist to acknowledge his rival, except perhaps once in a miscellaneous work he might have edited.)²⁴ Evelyn’s vegetarian idealism was a nostalgic grasp at human perfection, but it was always laced with stern-faced pragmatism. His lasting influence was inspiring a country-wide delight in gardening, and encouraging unrepentant carnivores, such as Pepys, to experiment more extensively with the bounty of fruit and vegetables.²⁵

For most of his life at least, Evelyn relished good dishes of flesh; about a third of the recipes in a manuscript cookbook he wrote for his wife contain meat products, and even some recipes in Acetaria acknowledge that the salad is to serve as an accompaniment to mutton broth or minced beef. His diary entries – recording his delectation of oysters and especially home-caught game – reveal that he did not worry too much about what he actually ate; indeed he insisted that there was ‘no positive prohibition’ on eating flesh.²⁶ Perhaps he considered himself vegetarian – indeed a vegetable! – even when he ate meat, for he observed that meat and men were made out of digested vegetation, so man ‘becoming an Incarnate Herb, and Innocent Cannibal, may truly be said to devour himself’.²⁷ Only when he was staving off death in old age did Evelyn subject himself to a strict diet (which made his wife deeply anxious); this was apparently for the sake of his health, but perhaps the experience of writing Acetaria finally determined him to purify himself for the world that was to come.²⁸

Beneath Evelyn’s polite compromising surface, however, lay a true passion. With a literal-mindedness that it is difficult to comprehend today, Evelyn, like many of his contemporaries, fervently believed that Christ’s second coming was on its way. His desire to reform the world to the conditions of Paradise was bound up with his preparation for Judgement Day. The idea of an establishment figure such as Evelyn espousing a religious theme usually associated with the radical mid-century may appear surprising, but many of his colleagues at the Royal Society were following Bacon’s lead, trying to recover the universal knowledge enjoyed by Adam in preparation for the millennium.²⁹ Evelyn strove to differentiate himself from the radical Fifth Monarchy Men and other millenarian groups,³⁰ but his impulses have much in common with Tryon’s yearning to recreate Paradise. Like Tryon, he quoted Isaiah’s prophecy of the millennium and claimed that Christ’s kingdom would be vegetarian: ‘the Hortulan Provision of the Golden Age,’ he said, ‘fitted all Places, Times and Persons; and when Man is restor’d to that State again, it will be as it was in the Beginning.’³¹

Like Tryon also, though the other way round, Evelyn transformed into a truth of immediate relevance the old legend that religious knowledge had been passed down from Adam to the nephews of Noah, through the British Druids, to the Brahmins and thence to Pythagoras and Plato. The pagans, he said, retained ‘some opinions, agreeable to the primitive truth’. Evelyn did not regard the Brahmins as a superior authority to Christian priests, as Tryon did, but the genealogy he gave them illuminated them with a spark of divinity: ‘it was from the people of God that they received their antient Traditions.’³² Along with the Brahmins and Pythagoreans, Evelyn noted that the ancient Chaldaeans, Assyrians and Egyptians were vegetable-eaters, and that this had made them ‘more Acute, Subtil, and of deeper Penetration’.³³ Such beliefs, then, were not confined to marginal eccentrics like Tryon; they appear to have been widespread. Evelyn’s mentor John Beale joined with their friend and fellow fruit-enthusiast Samuel Hartlib in believing that the return of the Golden Age was about to be fulfilled, and added that the ancient knowledge recovered by the modern Europeans, Paracelsus and Robert Fludd had been passed down to them from the Eastern gymnosophists via the Druids.³⁴

Given his belief in their common roots, Evelyn was particularly interested in the similarities between Christianity and Hinduism. In his own copy of John Marshall’s account of ‘the Heathen Priests commonly called Bramines’ (published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society) he excitedly pencilled marginalia on the features of Hinduism that appeared to agree with Christianity. He was intrigued to discover that the Hindus believed in a supreme immaterial God, heaven, hell and eternal life, that they practised ascetic fasting, and had a story about the original man in a garden being tempted by a woman, and of a flood destroying the earth until it was repopulated by a small band of survivors.³⁵ Evelyn regarded the Hindus as distant relics of divine tradition, and this can only have spurred his interest in them. He was also an avid reader of the Indian travelogues; as well as the ancient Greek records on India and Bysshe’s Palladius, Evelyn had pored over the modern descriptions of India by Garcia d’Orta, Jacob Bondt, Johann Albrecht von Mandelslo, Duarte Barbosa, Pietro della Valle and others.³⁶ Although he did not share Tryon’s enthusiasm, the Indians nevertheless played a crucial role in his vegetarian argument.

The biggest obstacle to Evelyn’s proselytisation of the ‘herby-diet’ was that most people thought it was not just ordinary to eat animals, but necessary for survival. While it may originally have been possible to live on vegetables, they thought that Noah’s Flood had sapped the earth of all its goodness, leaving the vegetables less nutritious than they had been; and that the human constitution had been slowly degraded and was now so feeble it needed the stronger nourishment of animal flesh.

To combat this, Evelyn trawled through ancient, medieval, Renaissance and modern texts ‘to shew how possible it is by so many Instances and Examples, to live on wholsome Vegetables, both long and happily’.³⁷ Unfortunately for Evelyn, nearly all the vegetarians he found existed only in ancient records. Pythagoras, Adam and Eve, the inhabitants of the Golden Age were all long gone, shrouded in aeons of dust and beyond the reach of empirical observation.

But the Brahmins saved the day. In a triumphant declaration (and trying to conceal that the Brahmins were the only living example he could name), Evelyn cited ‘the Indian Bramins, Relicts of the ancient Gymnosophists to this Day, observing the Institutions of their Founder’ ‘who eat no Flesh at all’. These foreign vegetarians were not the unverifiable products of hearsay, but the extant people whose habits had frequently been recorded, as Evelyn proudly put it, in ‘the Reports of such as are often conversant among many Nations and People’, and ‘who to this Day, living on Herbs and Roots, arrive to incredible Age, in constant Health and Vigour’.³⁸ He thought of India as a living Eden, a place ‘the most pleasant & smiling of the World’ where plants grew in their paradisiacal perfection, and he credited the travellers’ reports that the Garden of Eden had been situated on ‘Adam’s hill’ in Sri Lanka.³⁹ The Golden Age itself might not be achievable, but vegetarianism was the closest mankind could get.

The fact that the Hindus were still alive provided one of the few pieces of concrete empirical evidence that the vegetable diet was really viable. It was empirical evidence that his colleagues at the Royal Society demanded, rather than the heap of classical authorities he had accumulated. Evelyn envisaged a wholesale experimental investigation into this vegetarian people designed to determine what exactly made them capable of living solely on vegetables ‘whether attributable to the Air and Climate, Custom, Constitution, &c.’ It was his opinion that such an enquiry would prove that living on vegetables was something all humans could do.

Evelyn has been hailed as a forebear of modern environmentalism for his campaign against urban degradation and for encouraging forest conservation and replanting. He revered trees as sacred, especially ancient natural ones, ‘such as were never prophaned by the inhumanity of edge tooles’. Evelyn harked back to the Druidic sacred groves and noticed that sylvan rites were scattered across the world – from Abraham’s Quercetum to the Indians’ holy Banian Tree.⁴⁰ His famous treatise Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest Trees (1664) successfully encouraged English landowners to plant much-needed timber trees, which had been consumed by the greedy furnaces of the iron industry and ravaged by desperate commoners during the interregnum. Forests provided shelter for game, and the trees themselves produced food such as chestnuts (‘a lusty, and masculine food for Rustics’), beech-mast and acorns (‘heretofore the Food of Men … till their luxurious Palats were debauched’). Careful planting could provide country people with most of their food and drink ‘even out of the Hedges and Mounds’, making England more self-sufficient. Not only an act of political restoration, tree-planting, he concluded, was akin to God’s foresting of Paradise.⁴¹ Evelyn even lobbied Parliament to introduce laws to curb air pollution, revolted, like Tryon, by the ‘horrid stinks, uiderous and unwholsome smells’ emitted by the meat manufacturers, and the ‘rotten Dung, loathsome and common Lay Stalls; whose noisome Steams, wafted by the Wind, poison and infect the ambient Air and vital Spirits, with those pernicious Exhalations’.⁴²

But although many of these themes seem similar to Tryon, Evelyn’s universe was fundamentally different. The existence of Hindus did help Evelyn to propose a more harmonious relationship with nature, and to reverse the artificial habits of urban society. But Hinduism did not make Evelyn step outside the confines of his religious orthodoxy. Nature did not have a value independent from mankind in the way it did for Tryon; nature, for Evelyn, was just part of God’s man-centred Providence. For Evelyn, creating harmony in and with nature was just a part of the human spiritual quest and a prerequisite for the millennium.

Nevertheless, whether it was his original intention or not, Evelyn did formulate a new position for the status of man’s relations with animals. Having empirically demonstrated that the vegetable diet was viable, Evelyn shifted the ground on which stood the usual justification for killing and eating animals. While most regarded meat-eating as a necessary cruelty – determined by the order of nature and the constitution of man – Evelyn had shown it to be nutritionally unnecessary. If meat-eating was unnecessary, the cruelty it entailed could be considered morally reprehensible. Evelyn did make emotional and moral appeals against ‘the cruel Butcheries of so many harmless Creatures; some of which we put to merciless and needless Torment’. Now that he had shown that it was possible to live by the innocent sport of gardening without shedding a drop of blood, he could judge that meat-eating was cruelty and intemperance.⁴³

A similar idea is suggested in Book XV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses where Pythagoras points out that ‘The prodigall Earth abounds with gentle food;/ Affording banquets without death or blood.’⁴⁴ But Evelyn made it relevant by transforming it from an ancient poetic ideal into a scientific observation. In that the Brahmins were a keystone in Evelyn’s rational, empirically substantiated argument, Hinduism had a role in developing a new position with regard to animals.

The case for or against Brahmin vegetarianism became the subject of a much wider controversy at the end of the seventeenth century. The disagreement escalated into a pitched battle between the so-called ‘Moderns’ (who believed that modern science had advanced humanity to its highest pinnacle ever) and the ‘Ancients’ (who held that antique civilisations were superior). Evelyn, who had always tight-roped between the two, found that the Brahmins suited his compromise perfectly: they had the hallowed stamp of antiquity and stood up to modern empirical scrutiny. But others thought that simplistic conjectures about ancient vegetarians were outweighed by the statistical evidence on modern ascetic monks at home. ‘There are many Monastical persons now that live abstemiously all their lives,’ wrote Thomas Burnet, chaplain to William of Orange, in The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684–91), ‘and yet they think an hundred years a very great age amongst them.’ Burnet concluded that vegetarianism ‘might have some effect, but not possibly to that degree and measure that we speak of.’⁴⁵

The ambassador to the Dutch, Sir William Temple (1628–99), picked up the gauntlet as principal protagonist of the Ancients and was later defended by his secretary Jonathan Swift in A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books (1704).⁴⁶ Temple argued, like Evelyn (who admired Temple’s garden estate), that conclusions based on modern Catholic monks were nugatory because people would have to be vegetarian for generations before purging themselves of the malignant effects of meat-eating. It was necessary instead to find examples who had sustained vegetarianism for many ages. The Brahmins, observed Temple, were the most ancient of all philosophers and he made them the heroes of his ‘Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning’ (1690). The Moderns were dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants and could see a long way, he conceded; but the Greek and Roman ancients had been standing on the shoulders of even greater giants – the Brahmins. These Indian philosophers were the originators of Greek ideas from vegetarianism to the eternity of matter and the four cardinal virtues, which, he said, ‘seem all to be wholly Indian’. Their modern descendants, ‘the present Banians’, had preserved their secret to long life which had long since been lost in the West. They were the only people to have carried into a state of advanced civilisation the original laws of nature which were elsewhere only visible in primitive tribes. ‘Their Justice, was exact and exemplary,’ said Temple of the Brahmins, ‘their Temperance so great, that they lived upon Rice or Herbs, and upon nothing, that had sensitive Life.’ ‘It may look like a Paradox to deduce Learning, from Regions accounted commonly, so barbarous and rude,’ he declared, but it was only the bigoted Eurocentrism of the Moderns that had erased the fact that the West’s greatest qualities were derived from the ancient East.⁴⁷ Temple’s dressing up of the Brahmins in the garb of the Enlightenment was such a powerful spin that when the Modern chaplain William Wotton refuted Temple, he did so by going for Pythagoras’ jugular and lambasting the Brahmins. Their vegetarianism, he argued, was based on nothing but the doctrine of transmigration – ‘a precarious idle Notion, which these besotted Indians do so blindly believe, that they are afraid of killing a Flea or a Louse’. The Brahmins’ chief employment for the last three thousand years, concluded Wotton derisively, has been depriving themselves of the lawful conveniences of life.⁴⁸

Freed from its superstitious husk and recommended as a rational pursuit of nature’s laws, Indian vegetarianism was championed by some of the most admired thinkers of the day. At exactly the same time that Tryon was flooding the popular market with his spiritual polemics, Evelyn and Temple were enshrining the Indian vegetarians in the mainstream of intellectual debate. The Brahmins were held up as torches lighting the way to a true understanding of health, nutrition and an ethical responsibility towards nature.

SEVEN The Kabbala Stripped Naked

Baron Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont (1618–98) had never been comfortable with the settled life of a manorial lord. He had been persecuted by the Inquisition in his Catholic homeland of Louvain, near Brussels, and had, at an early age, escaped to become a ‘wandering hermit’ in more liberal countries. Filled with philosophical ardour, in 1670 he set out on a quest to England, determined to propagate a great theological discovery: that reincarnation was a true doctrine, compatible with the fundaments of Christianity. He hoped to find support in England because there had been a resurgence of interest in reincarnation there. Although widely criticised, his controversial arguments won the ear of some leading philosophers. John Locke, though deeply sceptical, spent many hours in conversation with Helmont and carefully studied his many books.¹ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), the leading natural philosopher in Hanover, adapted his notions into the influential theory of Preformation according to which organisms grew from pre-existent microscopic life-forms. Helmont carved another inroad through which exotic sources influenced European ideas about the moral status of animals.

One of Helmont’s first ports of call in England was Henry More (1614–87), the leading figure among the Cambridge Platonists. This band of academics had for decades sought to introduce into Christianity ideas drawn from the philosophies of Plato and Pythagoras, such as the existence of a world-soul which infused all of creation. Like his contemporary Gerrard Winstanley, More abhorred cruelty to animals and he thought that their souls – effluxes of the world soul – might be immortal, though he did not believe that they reincarnated into humans or vice versa.² However, he did argue that human souls had existed in a former state and incarnated on earth to live a life or two of atonement for a sin they had committed in a pre-existent state.³ This doctrine of ‘pre-existence’ was similar enough to Helmont’s beliefs for Helmont to hope that he could convert More to his cause.

Helmont had adopted the belief in reincarnation after studying the Kabbala – mystical Jewish texts written down from the twelfth century AD onwards. In early kabbalist writings reincarnation (called gilgul in Hebrew) only applied to humans,⁴ but by the fourteenth century kabbalist texts such as the Zohar were claiming that human souls could descend into animals and even into inanimate objects for punishment and expiation until they were ready to return to God. In 1677 with the help of a team of Rabbis, Helmont and the Christian Hebrew scholar Knorr von Rosenroth published the first Latin translations of kabbalist texts. The title of their groundbreaking book was the Kabbala Denudata, or ‘The Kabbala Stripped Naked’ and it aimed to unite Christians, Jews and pagans into the one true faith. In it they included two texts on reincarnation by the sixteenth-century kabbalist cult-leader from the holy city of Zefat, Rabbi Isaac ben Solomon Luria (1534–72) and his follower Chaim Vital (1543–1620). Luria had taught that the earth was animated by sparks which had fallen from the primordial spiritual body of Adam and that in order to return from their fallen state these sparks, or souls, had to pass through an ascending cycle of reincarnations.⁵ As Henry More explained in an essay which was printed in the Kabbala Denudata: ‘Every spirit found in a bit of gravel is liable to be transformed into a plant, and from the plant into an animal, from the animal to a human being, and from the human being to an angel, and from the angel to God himself.’⁶

The belief that lower beings had souls did not necessarily mean it was wrong to kill animals. On the contrary, when an animal was ritually sacrificed its soul, or spark, was released from its bestial prison. But it did encourage the compassionate treatment of animals.⁷ The cult of compassion that grew up among the kabbalists led to legends that Isaac Luria was a vegetarian and considered unkindness to animals (tzaar baalei chaim) a sin and a hindrance to the achievement of perfection. Vital apparently claimed that the ascetic Luria loved God’s creatures so much that he never killed an insect, even an annoying one like a mosquito or fly.⁸

Helmont adapted Luria’s system of reincarnation to accord with Christian doctrines like the resurrection, and in several of his own works he tried to convince others to follow his lead.⁹ It may seem mystical and slightly mad, but this optimistic theodicy was dangerously seductive for liberal Christians who were tired of fire and brimstone. Fitting reincarnation into the Christian world view justified God by giving sinners another stab at salvation.¹⁰ According to orthodox Christian belief, souls born into tribes of cannibalistic savages had no chance of becoming Christian and no chance of getting to heaven. Instead of believing that such souls were plunged directly – and eternally – into hell, Helmont suggested that they would be progressively reincarnated until they were reborn as Christians.¹¹ Like Luria, Helmont believed that this held for all members of the creation, so that even the souls of wild animals, by ‘an advance and melioration’, would eventually incarnate in a Christian and be saved.¹² He even developed the kabbalists’ notion that God carefully balanced the birth and death rates of animals and humans in order to ensure a steady flow up the chain of being.¹³ Helmont was ashamed that Christians – who should have been the enlightened ones – were labouring under the mental tyranny of hell, while Jews (and even pagans!) were guided in their actions by the ‘wise and solid Notion’ of reincarnation.¹⁴

Kabbalæ Denudatæ (1684)

For most of Helmont’s contemporaries it seemed obvious that the kabbalists’ gilgul was just a rehashed version of the Pythagorean and Indian doctrine of metempsychosis.¹⁵ This very accusation had always been levelled – perhaps correctly – at kabbalists within the Jewish community. Indeed, similar anxieties about importing pagan doctrines into Christianity can be traced back to the beginning of the Renaissance when the Byzantine theologian George Gemistos Pletho (1355–1450/ 52) first introduced Plato and Strabo’s account of India to the Italian humanists. It was from these texts, as well as some recent accounts of India (perhaps by Marco Polo), that Pletho discovered that all wise men, from Zoroaster to the Brahmins, believed in reincarnation. In favour of these venerable authorities, Pletho abandoned Christianity’s comparatively recent innovations, and converted to the ancient doctrine of metempsychosis.¹⁶ In the ensuing uproar, Pletho’s books were burned by the Patriarch of Constantinople and the chapters in which he addressed the issue of meat-eating are lost. But his works on metempsychosis survived and were reprinted in 1689 and 1718, just when there was a renewed interest in reincarnation in Europe.¹⁷

Helmont insisted, like More and many of their Jewish predecessors, that in fact it was Pythagoras and the Hindus who had learnt the doctrine from the Jews, not vice versa.¹⁸ His aim, he explained, was to reinstate reincarnation ‘corrected, reformed, and stripped of that disguised and deformed shape … purged of those Mistakes, and reduced to the Primitive streightness and simplicity’, ‘and so accommodated to the Principles of Christian Religion’.¹⁹ Initially, Helmont met with considerable success. A splinter group of Helmontians emerged, defending his claim that gilgul was a scriptural doctrine not a Platonic incursion. In the 1690s Reincarnationists were identified by one Anglican critic as being among the worst three dissenting movements of the age. Christians warned that the belief in reincarnation dissolved the fundamental difference between animals and humans.²⁰

Surprisingly, Helmont converted the prominent Quaker George Keith, noted for his enthusiasm about the virtue of the Brahmins. Keith realised that Helmont’s doctrines could reconcile the orthodox tenet that one had to believe in Christ, with his passionate feeling that people who had never heard of Christ could still get to heaven (by being reincarnated as Christians).²¹ The entire Quaker community on both sides of the Atlantic was polarised by Keith’s controversial kabbalistic reforms. When he gave a sermon in Philadelphia the crowd rioted and the magistrates smashed down his podium with axes. Keith’s followers destroyed the podium of his opponents and he was eventually ejected from the Society of Friends because of his equivocation about transmigration.²²

Christian believers in reincarnation were predisposed to be sympathetic to the suffering of animals. But they kept a strong arm between themselves and heretical vegetarianism. This was articulated in 1661 when an anonymous author from More’s set (probably George Rust) championed the Platonic doctrines of the heretic Church father Origen in A Letter of Resolution concerning Origen and the Chief of his Opinions.²³ Origen was famous for being vegetarian, but Rust reiterated Origen’s categorical denial (against the accusations of St Jerome) that this had anything to do with Pythagorean superstition. Origen did believe that animals’ souls would be resurrected on the Day of Judgement, but Rust insisted that Origen never believed that humans could reincarnate into animals.²⁴ This ancient debate was resuscitated in a European-wide spate of Origenist works by several theologians, including the extraordinary Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721). Huet later went on to argue that Pythagoras and the Brahmins had taken their doctrines from the Jews,²⁵ and apparently commissioned the Jesuit missionary in India, Father Bouchet, to compose a detailed essay distinguishing Origen’s doctrines from Hindu and Pythagorean metempsychosis and vegetarianism.²⁶

No one felt the tension between believing in reincarnation and maltreating animals more acutely than the ‘Oxford Platonist’, Joseph Glanvill. A cleric like More and Rust, Glanvill propounded an even more outspoken defence of transmigration, which he anonymously published in 1662 as Lux Orientalis, Or An Enquiry into the Opinion of the Eastern Sages, Concerning the Præexistence of Souls. The doctrine of transmigration, announced Glanvill, was attested by ‘the Indian Brachmans, the Persian Magi, the Ægyptian Gymnosophists, the Jewish Rabbins, some of the Græcian Philosophers, and Christian Fathers’.²⁷ Taking his ideas from the Kabbala, Glanvill asserted that souls that had sinned before the creation of the earth were compressed into Adam’s loins in Eden. But instead of behaving like good children trying to recompense for their former sin, the souls egged Adam on to sin for a second time, thus condemning themselves (that is, us) to a life of suffering on earth.²⁸ It took more than just one lifetime to atone for such heinous criminality, so each soul had to reincarnate until they had purged themselves and were ready to return to God.²⁹ In Lux Orientalis, Glanvill restricted his discussion of pre-existence to humans alone, but in the same year wrote privately to a fellow Origenist that their beliefs logically led to fully blown Pythagorean metempsychosis, ‘for what account els can be given of the state of beasts who some of them are all their lives subject to the tyrannicall tastes of merciless man, except we suppose them to have deserv’d this severe discipline by some former delinquencyes.’ The question of justice to animals was integral to the issue of reincarnation and it racked Glanvill with consternation. If animals had not sinned in a former life, how could one possibly justify treating them the way we do? Faced with this appalling conundrum, Glanvill argued that since God could not be so unjust as to make innocent animals suffer, it was necessary to believe that animals had deserved their suffering by being extremely sinful in former lives. The only alternative, he painfully conceded, was the Cartesian belief that they didn’t suffer at all because they were just senseless machines.³⁰ But Glanvill’s philosophical loophole was not the end of the discussion. Both More and Helmont were intimate friends with Lady Anne Conway, one of the most advanced women philosophers of her generation. During their walks in the woods and groves of her estate, Lady Conway became a convert to Helmont’s creed and she realised that it had profound implications for the moral status of animals. Conway took ideas directly from Luria’s Kabbala and devised an elaborate system that, like Glanvill’s, argued that animals deserved the suffering to which they were fated, but that nevertheless humans ought to act responsibly towards them.³¹ In her philosophical Principles, published anonymously by Helmont after her death in 1690, Conway held that animals – like all matter in the creation – were continually trying to improve and would eventually improve enough to become human and thence return to their spiritual origins. Thus ‘a Horse may in length of Time be in some measure changed into a Man’. She seems to have been unclear whether this transformation happened by metamorphosis, metempsychosis or more prosaically by being eaten and raised up the food chain. Conversely, if a man led a brutish life, his spirit would ‘enter into the Body of a beast, and there for a certain time be punished’.³² Like Tryon (who may have heard of Conway through her friend George Keith), she maintained that ‘if a Man hath lived … a Brutish [life]… he … should be changed into that Species of Beasts, to whom he was inwardly most like, in Qualities and Conditions of Mind.’³³

Conway explained that it was in the interests of all creatures to unite in their effort to return to God. God created all species, explained Conway, to ‘stand in a mutual Sympathy, and love each other; so hath he implanted a certain Universal Sympathy and mutual Love in Creatures, as being all Members of one Body, and (as I may so say), Brethren, having one common Father’.³⁴ If a man ‘kills any of them, only to fulfil his own pleasure, he acts unjustly, and the same measure will again be measured unto him’, she warned. Conway did not state whether she thought killing animals for food counted as unnecessary ‘pleasure’ and thus stopped short of advocating vegetarianism, but her philosophy provided a foundation for the ethical treatment of animals.³⁵

This inclusion of animals in the process of gilgul captured the imagination of others and a flurry of Reincarnationist books stimulated a widespread theological debate. The anonymous author(s) of a tract called Seder Olam: Or, The Order of Ages, described a monist system of ascension almost identical to Conway’s, explaining that ‘even the basest Creature … may be changed, either into the noblest, or at least into some part of the noblest Creature’.³⁶

Gilgul provided Christians with an alternative framework for understanding non-human life forms. Animals were striving in partnership with their fallen human brothers and sisters to improve and reclaim their lost divine status. It was everyone’s responsibility to lend a helping hand in the common cause of mutual improvement. This did not necessarily mean desisting from killing animals (though it could), but it did mean treating them with due consideration for their plight. Although it never gained a foothold in the established Christian Churches, the kabbalist gilgul joined forces with the beliefs of Origen, Pythagoras and the Hindus, and became a persuasive doctrine that continued to inspire European minds for centuries. Some of the most prominent vegetarians in later decades owed something to the accommodation of gilgul into Christianity.

EIGHT Men Should be Friends even to Brute Beasts: Isaac Newton and the Origins of Pagan Theology

One autumn day in 1665, while sheltering from plague-stricken Cambridge at his home in Woolsthorpe, the twenty-two-year-old Isaac Newton (1642–1727) sat pondering the fall of apples to the ground. He had always had a speculative turn of mind. His family had put him to work on the farm at the age of seventeen, but he was forever to be found reclining beneath a tree with a book instead of watching the cattle, and in the end they sent him back to grammar school. At the age of eighteen Newton became an undergraduate at Cambridge University, where he swiftly made his first major discovery simply by closing the curtains of his room to direct a shaft of sunlight onto a prism. Watching the familiar spectacle of white light refracting into all the colours of the spectrum, he hit upon an explanation which resolved a fundamental principle of light and colour. After graduating in the spring of 1665, and spending the autumn amongst the orchards at home, he extended his speculations in another direction. Since gravity exerted its power on objects such as apples even when they were high up in the air, he reflected, why should not this invisible power extend as far as the moon? By 1687, when Newton had established himself as a formidable scientist at the Royal Society, his calculations finally proved that the pull from the earth kept the moon in orbit, and ultimately that universal gravitation synchronised everything from the cycles of the largest planets to the tiniest particles bound together in matter. This single glorious manifestation of God’s omnipotence was what kept the entire universe in harmonious motion.¹

Newton is famous for his scientific discoveries with which, from his cloister in Trinity College, he revolutionised Europe’s understanding of the physical laws of nature. But Newton did not limit his curiosity to physics: he was equally interested in discovering the moral laws of God’s creation. Only by studying both the moral and physical laws could he come to understand God in His entirety. If God used the simple power of gravity to unite all things in the universe, might He not have used one moral law to bind together all His creatures, including animals?

Newton was renowned among his Cambridge colleagues for his extremely peculiar dietary habits. He rarely allowed his experiments to be interrupted by convivial eating hours and his friends noted that even those meals that were brought privately to his room he pushed around the plate in absent-minded disinterest.² His step-niece Catherine Conduitt, who lived with him when he moved to London to become Master of the Royal Mint, complained that ‘his gruel or milk & eggs that was carried to him warm for his supper he would often eat cold for his breakfast.’ Her husband John confirmed that ‘His cat grew fat on the food he left standing,’ and others joked that in Cambridge his meals were finished off by ‘ye old Woman, his Bedmaker’. After Newton’s death there was a flurry of anxious attempts to make sense of these prandial oddities and his modern biographer, Richard S. Westfall, wrote that ‘No peculiarity of Newton’s amazed his contemporaries more consistently.’³ Newton’s amanuensis, William Stukeley, tried to defuse gossip by explaining that Newton’s temperate breakfasts of bread, butter and orange-peel infusion were the key to his self-control and long life.⁴ So Newton, with his head in the skies, was remiss about meals, and the meals we do hear about were meagre, mainly fleshless – but not explicitly vegetarian.

Sir Isaac was ‘a Lover of Apples, and sometimes at Night would eat a smal roasted Quince’, reminisced his assistant and relative Humphrey Newton.⁵ So passionate about apples was Newton that he applied his genius to encouraging the plantation of orchards in Cambridgeshire.⁶ More than anything else, agreed John Conduitt, it was ‘vegetables & fruit which he always eat very heartily of’. Did he choose to eat ‘little flesh’, as John Conduitt reported, to combat the chronic bladder condition of which he eventually died?⁷ Was he dieting according to the rules for scholars set out in Luigi Cornaro’s Sure and Certain Methods of Attaining a Long and Healthful Life?⁸ Was he following the advice of his alchemical adviser, Michael Maier, that practitioners should eat plenty of fruit?⁹ Or was there a more intimate connection between the apples he observed and those he ate?

The burgeoning vegetarian movement was quick to claim Newton as one of their own, triggering a debate that has raged ever since. Newton’s personal acquaintance, the vegetarian doctor George Cheyne, often used him as a shining example of the benefits of a flesh-free diet: ‘Sir Isaac Newton, when he studied or composed,’ claimed Cheyne, ‘had only a Loaf, a Bottle of Sack and Water, and took no Sustenance then but a Slice and a weak Draught as he found Failure of Spirits’.¹⁰ Albrecht von Haller inserted this exciting data into his highly respected Elementa Physiologiae, and from then on it was repeated time and time again by vegetarians trying to prove that their diet enhanced mental acuity.¹¹ By 1860 the American vegetarians Sylvester Graham and Amos Bronson Alcott were making such capital out of this claim that their opponents, Andrew Combe and James Coxe, felt compelled to defend Newton from this slur on his character. With indignant bluster, they complained that ‘Allusion is sometimes made to Sir Isaac Newton, as another example of the beneficial effects of a vegetable diet’; but, they continued, it was obvious that Newton ate meat because he ‘occasionally suffered from gout’, the classic ailment of carnivores.¹² Heedless of such remonstrances, scores of vegetarian societies around the world still list Newton among their favourite predecessors.

The denial that he was vegetarian seemed to have gained a sure footing when, in a bundle of household papers, a bill was found showing that one goose, two turkeys, two rabbits and one chicken were delivered to Newton’s household in the space of a single week. In addition, at the time of his death Newton owed £10 16s 4d to a butcher and a total of £2 8s 9d to a poulterer and a fishmonger. This surely shows that Newton indiscriminately gorged on animals at a rate scarcely imaginable to modern appetites. Or does it? Newton certainly served his guests meat (they said so), and the other members of his household no doubt did not expect to go without.¹³ But since Newton ate separately from his family, there is no guarantee that he ate these groceries himself, even if it seems probable.

Some saw a suspicious correlation between Newton’s dietary habits and his renowned sympathy for animals. ‘He had such a meekness & sweetness of temper,’ wrote John Conduitt, ‘that a melancholy story would often draw tears from him & he was exceedingly shocked at any sort of cruelty to man or beast, mercy to both being, the topick he loved to dwell upon’.¹⁴ In the notebook Conduitt kept about Newton, there is one barely legible page that records both that ‘He preferred’ (or ‘pursued’?) to ‘live on vegetables’ and that he could ‘not bear sports that kill beasts – as hunting & shooting’.¹⁵ Reading between the lines, it seems that Conduitt believed Newton preferred not to eat the objects of his pity.

It is to Voltaire – who did more than anyone to popularise Newton’s philosophy in the decades following his death – that we owe the story of the falling apples. (Voltaire himself learned it from Catherine Conduitt, and the inspirational apple tree was visited as a shrine until it blew down in 1820.) The universe was bound together by one physical law, and, according to Voltaire, Newton believed that people were bound together by the universal law to ‘do as you would be done unto’ – the Golden Rule which every person was able to deduce with the natural faculty of sense. Voltaire extrapolated that Newton even extended the universal disposition of compassion to beasts. ‘He acceded only with repugnance to the barbarous usage of feeding ourselves with the blood and flesh of beings similar to us,’ declared Voltaire. ‘He found it a truly awful contradiction to believe that animals feel, and to make them suffer. His morality accorded in this point with his philosophy.’¹⁶ Voltaire would have gone to almost any lengths to promote Newton as the hero of natural religion and opponent of Descartes’ ruthless theory about animals. But just how connected was Newton’s philosophy with his morality?

In his quest to discover God’s universal laws of morality, Newton undertook a massive project of biblical and historical scholarship, which he executed with the same intellectual rigour as he did his physical experiments.¹⁷ He believed that ‘in ye beginning’ God revealed to mankind the laws upon which they were to base their religion. Since that time, mankind had corrupted God’s original religion into all the idolatrous and superstitious cults that existed on earth. Even Moses, thought Newton, had introduced unnecessary and potentially schismatic doctrines. Christ himself had not revealed any new moral laws, and Christians had muffled the simple divine message with numerous elaborations and bodges.

Newton’s mission – as important to him as discovering the laws of gravity – was to scrape away all these accretions and reconstruct the pure original religion. He tried to do this by comparing the world’s different religious beliefs as they were recorded in ancient texts from Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece as well as in several modern travelogues.¹⁸ Anything he found to be common to all or most cultures he took to be a remnant of mankind’s shared heritage. (Claiming that universally held beliefs were ‘innate’ had become virtually untenable in the face of John Locke’s 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Like Locke, Newton did think that some ideas – such as belief in God – were common all over the world because different peoples independently used their reason to come to the same conclusions, but Newton was more interested in showing that universal laws had been inherited from a shared cultural heritage.¹⁹)

For Newton, the history of mankind’s heritage hinged on the story of Noah. After the Flood was over, when the only surviving humans were those living in Shinar below Mount Ararat in Babylonia, God delivered to Noah a reiteration of the true religion. As Noah’s community grew and divided into numerous satellite states, this original code was spread across the world, only to be corrupted in most places beyond recognition.²⁰ Newton’s passionate desire was to lead the world back to the true source: ‘tis not to be doubted but that ye religion wch Noah propagated down to his posterity was the true religion.’²¹

Newton completed most of his religious research in the 1680s and arranged it under the provisional title Theologiae Gentilis Origines Philosophicae, or The Philosophical Origins of Gentile Theology. Daunted by the unorthodoxy of his own conclusions, Newton realised that it would be perilous to publish them. Even after the Toleration Act of 1689, his disbelief in the Holy Trinity would alone have been punishable by severe fines, loss of position and even death. When faced with compulsory ordination into the ‘corrupt’ Anglican Church in 1675, Newton chose disgrace and dismissal from his Trinity fellowship. His position was saved at the last minute by a special royal dispensation, but it was at the price of silence.²² Today, his theological work remains a confusion of Latin and English manuscripts scattered between the libraries of Jerusalem and Cambridge and is only now being gathered together and published online by the Newton Project. However, Newton did incorporate some of his findings into a subsequent book about his new technique of using astronomy to recalculate ancient historical events. This he left as a parting gift to the world and it was published as The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended within months of his refusal to take the Anglican sacrament on his deathbed.

From a careful study of this book and his unpublished manuscripts, it is clear that Newton felt he had discovered the fundamentals of the original religion, both its ceremonial form and its moral base. The ceremonial form of the original religion was solar. A fire was placed in the centre of a sacred space surrounded by seven flames, symbolising the sun encircled by the seven (pre-Copernican) planets. This ceremony had been designed by God to teach the first people the heliocentric mechanics of the universe, while simultaneously encouraging the worship of God through the magnificence of His creation. Newton found evidence of this religious rite among the biblical Patriarchs, the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, Numa Pompilius’ Pythagorean Romans, the Druids of Stonehenge and similar sacred circles in Denmark and Ireland; and in modern travel narratives he found the same among the Tartars and the Chinese; finally, he concluded that it had been the blueprint for the Second Temple in Jerusalem.²³ The universality of such formations convinced Newton that it must have been the form of the original religion revealed to Noah and spread by him to his descendants, ‘For in ye first ages … I understand not how one & the same religion could so soon spread into them all had it not been propagated wth mankind in ye beginning.’²⁴

This solar ceremony had been literally moved across the earth when Noah’s descendants each took a coal from the original sacred fire with them on their travels. The fire-worshipping Zoroastrian Persians and the Brahmins, Newton thought, were still burning the same fires today.²⁵

Along with the glowing embers, Newton believed that Noah’s people carried with them the essential moral laws. Predictably, two of them were the key biblical commandments to love God and to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ (Leviticus 19:18; Matthew 22:36–40). But the third major law that Newton identified – much more controversially and unexpectedly – was the commandment of ‘mercy to animals’. Newton’s promotion of this notion as a cornerstone of religious morals has been overlooked by recent scholarship.

In a tortuous explanation of various biblical passages, Newton argued that God instituted mercy to animals when he prohibited Noah from eating blood: ‘But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat’ (Genesis 9:4).²⁶ The prohibition of blood-eating was so important to Newton that he wrote a separate essay entirely on the subject. Sadly, when Viscount Lymington sold off Newton’s papers in the 1930s, this essay was purchased for £12 by an elusive Parisian called Emmanuel Fabius, and has never been seen since. However, Newton made the subject a central part of The Philosophical Origins of Gentile Theology, The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended and his condensed manuscript essay ‘Irenicum’; he also worked it into his unfinished history of the Church and even envisaged making it the final conclusion of a new edition of Opticks, his groundbreaking work on the properties of light.²⁷

The prohibition of blood is the basis of Jewish kosher and Islamic halal laws in use today, and of the Old Testament decree that blood was to be let out of sacrificial animals and offered to God. Unlike most Christians, Newton thought that the blood law was not a mere ceremonial taboo: it was a moral instruction of the most fundamental importance, designed to ensure that animals were killed in the least painful way, by slitting their throat and drawing out all their blood. This was, he believed, far preferable to the usual practice in Europe of throttling beasts or banging them on the head with a hammer before cutting their throats (indeed, seventeenth-century legislation stipulated that bulls should be baited by dogs before their meat was fit for sale in a butcher’s shop).²⁸ ‘Strangling’, wrote Newton in a draft manuscript, ‘is a painful death & therefore we are not to strangle things or eat them with their blood, but to let out their blood upon the earth. For we are to avoid all >unnecessary< acts of cruelty.’ (He added ‘unnecessary’ as a qualifying afterthought: if people were going to define eating animals as a ‘necessary cruelty’ then the blood law would at least force them to do it in the most humane manner possible.)²⁹

In his enthusiasm for the original laws, Newton was inspired by the Jewish rabbis who had always revered the ‘seven laws of Noah’ – the sheva mizvoth b’ne Noah. But the prevailing view among theologians, as John Selden (1584–1654) had recently shown, was that abstinence from blood was not one of the seven, and there was no question of it being a law for the protection of animals.³⁰ Yet Newton went out on a limb to adjust the traditional Noachic laws to fit in with his overall scheme. Newton was so sure of his interpretation that he claimed the law God actually established was ‘mercy to animals’ and that the prohibition of blood was just one euphemistic way of getting the message across. In his triumphant conclusion to chapter one of The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended he summarised the essential laws of the original religion; in the final condensed form he did not even mention the blood, instead replacing it with what he saw as its intended meaning: ‘So then, the believing that the world was framed by one supreme god, and is governed by him; and the loving and worshipping him, and honouring our parents, and loving our neighbour as our selves, and being merciful even to beasts, is the oldest of all religions.’ These few laws, he explained, were the basis of ‘the primitive religion of both Jews and Christians, and ought to be the standing religion of all nations’.³¹

Illustration of a slaughter-house (1751)

The prominence Newton gives to the law of mercy to animals is extremely unusual. But he went still further. Astonishingly, it transpires that Newton considered mercy to animals an integral adjunct of the central commandment ‘love thy neighbour’, rendering it – in other drafts of the same manifesto – ‘all men should be friends to all men & even to bruit Beasts’. Newton’s expansion of the sense of ‘neighbour’ to include animals was an unorthodoxy nearly as extreme as that of his contemporaries Tryon, Crab and Winstanley, and was, of course, said to be the belief of the vegetarian Indians.³²

Loving one’s neighbour was itself an extension of loving God (Matthew 22:36–40), so Newton appears to have deduced that in its purest form there was only one divine law which bound all beings together from God down to the smallest creature. This, it seems, was a moral analogy to the physical law of gravity which bound everything together from the sun to the smallest particle. The solar form of Noah’s original religion was an emblem of both the physical and the moral law.

In the moral, physical and ceremonial dimensions, Newton saw that God had repeatedly employed the formula of ‘seven in one’. Just as the seven planets, represented by the seven flames around the sacred fire, were held around the sun by the one divine force of gravity, so Newton appears to have concluded that the seven Noachic laws were constituent parts of the one over-arching law of love and mutual respect. This septenary principle even applied to the laws of light, for Newton had analysed white light into the seven ‘homogeneal’ colours of the spectrum, just as the musical scale was composed of seven notes.³³ In its moral dimension, the law kept all God’s creatures bound together by the love that bound them to God. No wonder Newton ushered animals into the fold of the moral law. As Newton himself explained, God’s invisible presence was manifested in the workings of the universe and ‘particularly in that of the bodies of animals’.³⁴

Given that mercy to beasts was the only contentious commandment in Newton’s universal religion, much of his work focused on proving its legitimacy. For Newton’s contemporaries, this emphasis was so surprising that to some extent it eclipsed the astronomical subject of the Chronology. When dedicating the Chronology to Queen Caroline, who had always been friendly to Newton, John Conduitt (who was responsible for posthumously publishing it) passed over Newton’s revolutionary chronological method, and instead called for her endorsement of Newton’s discovery that banning ‘cruelty, even to brute beasts’ ought to be part of ‘the standing Religion of all Nations’.³⁵ Newton’s voice, echoing resoundingly after his death, reached the royal ears which during life he had sworn not to offend. It was probably after hearing about Newton’s theory that John Clarke (the brother of Newton’s friend Samuel Clarke) argued in his Boyle Lecture of 1719 that the law against eating blood was ‘intended to prevent all Cruelty towards brute Creatures; and that … they should be put to the least Pain that is possible’.³⁶

Newton no doubt felt supported in his beliefs by his favourite Jewish scholar, the twelfth-century Rabbi Moses ben Maimun (Maimonides), who had similarly tried to smash a conventional Jewish disregard for animals by insisting that some of Moses’ laws were for the protection of animals (though conversely the prohibition of blood, he believed, was instituted because Satanist pagans drank it to ‘fraternize with the djinns’).³⁷ Claiming that Moses instituted mercy to animals was not unheard of in Christendom either. Francis Bacon said that laws like abstaining from blood were ‘not so meerely Ceremoniall, as Institutions of Mercy’ (though he was by no means calling for its restitution);³⁸ and in a famous article against cruelty to animals in The Guardian (1713), referred to by Conduitt in his notes on Newton, Alexander Pope argued that Moses had instituted mercy to beasts.³⁹ But the dominant Christian line, since St Thomas Aquinas and St Clement of Alexandria, was to deny animals any moral status by claiming that such laws were solely for the protection of humans.⁴⁰ This was endorsed by both the Catholic commentators, such as Joannes Mercerus, and by Reformers like John Calvin who said ‘that God intends to accustom men to gentleness, by abstinence from the blood of animals …[because otherwise] they would at length not be sparing of even human blood’.⁴¹ Newton’s contemporary, the theologian John Edwards, agreed that eating blood made people cruel to each other: ‘God therefore commanded those of Noah’s Posterity to refrain wholly from Blood, that they might not proceed from cruelty to Beasts, to killing of Men. Besides,’ added Edwards, ‘this may seem partly to be a natural Law, Blood being a gross Meat, and not fit for nourishment.’⁴² Newton probably agreed that eating blood inflamed men to cruelty, but he stressed that the prohibition was also for the sake of the animals themselves.⁴³

Most Anglicans in any case believed that since Christ sacrificed his own blood the law against eating blood had been dissolved.⁴⁴ But Newton insisted that the Gospel did not have the power to abolish the prohibition of blood as it did the Mosaic food taboos because the blood law was a Noachic law and therefore universal and permanent. Furthermore, he argued, the Acts of the Apostles clearly stated that when the early Christians met at Antioch for a doctrinal convention they explicitly decreed that the Gentile converts could ignore all the Mosaic traditions except the prohibition of eating blood, strangled animals, meat sacrificed to idols, and fornication (Acts 15:24, 29; 21:25).⁴⁵ This heavily disputed passage preyed on the conscience of many a Christian blood-eater. As one Protestant Reformer put it in 1596: ‘The Apostles commaunded to abstaine from bloud … What Christian observes that this day? and if some few do feare to touch such things, they are mocked of the rest.’⁴⁶ A few seventeenth-century controversialists, like Newton, usually under the cover of anonymity, did brave the flak to warn fellow Christians of their peril. The author of A Bloudy Tenent confuted, Or, Bloud Forbidden (1646) argued that it was ‘A cruell thing to eat life itself’: eating the life-blood of an animal after it was dead was a token of more ‘extreame crueltie, and unmercifulnesse’ than killing the animal in the first place.⁴⁷ This conscientious pamphleteer was immediately lambasted by the author of The Eating of Blood Vindicated, who mockingly retorted that ‘This mans charitie is more to the bloud of a dead beast, than it is either to the life itself of man or beast.’⁴⁸ In 1652 the controversy was reignited by the comically titled, Triall Of A Black-Pudding. Or, The unlawfulness of Eating Blood, which argued that ‘God would not have Men eat the life and soul of Beasts, a thing barbarous and unnaturall.’⁴⁹ In the 1660s William Roe repudiated the blood-abstaining ‘Hæmapesthites’, calling the error a ‘virulent Contagion’ based on a false reading of Acts.⁵⁰ But the stain would not budge. In 1669 John Moore, a church minister on the Isle of Wight, attacked ‘Blood-eaters’ in Moses Revived … Wherein the Unlawfulness of Eating Blood is clearly proved, claiming that blood was the food of devils.⁵¹ John Evelyn, Newton’s colleague at the Royal Society, agreed that the prohibition had never been revoked – but recognised that trying to preach down the eating of hog’s pudding was in vain;⁵² and Thomas Tryon insisted that it was impossible to get a pound of flesh without a drop of blood, so even eating meat was a cardinal sin.⁵³ Newton was more extreme even than these critics (save Tryon); they emphasised that eating blood fostered cruelty towards humans; Newton was concerned with the welfare of the animals having their blood shed.

Despite the differences between Newton and these controversialists, association with them and the Judaists opened Newton to ridicule. Catherine Conduitt felt this keenly and leapt to defend Newton against the accusations levelled by his successor in the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, William Whiston:

Whiston has spread about that Sr I[saac] abstained from eating rabbitts because strangled & from black puddings because made of blood, but he is mistaken Sr I. did not – he often mentioned & followed the rule of St Paul Take & eat what comes from the shambles without asking questions for conscience sake[.] he said meats strangled were forbid because that was a painfull death & the letting out the blood the easiest & that animals should be put to as little pain as possible, that the reason why eating blood was forbid was because it was thought the eating blood inclined men to be cruel.⁵⁴

If Newton had followed his principles to the letter he would have had to abstain from all butcher’s meat – and this is what some contemporaries advocated.⁵⁵ But Whiston, who shared Newton’s desire to revive Primitive Christianity and also believed that vegetarianism was suitable for lengthening life,⁵⁶ suggested that Newton was primarily concerned with strangled animals like rabbits. Catherine Conduitt indicated that he overcame his conscience by adhering to St Paul’s instructions to put social conformity first (1 Corinthians 10:25–7). But even this reveals that Newton was in a constant state of moral conflict.⁵⁷ In the solitude of his private rooms, perhaps Newton did avoid eating animals slaughtered in a manner contrary to God’s fundamental laws. (Interestingly, Descartes, who was a closet vegetarian, also preferred ‘to be served separately or to eat alone’.⁵⁸)

It was an odd leap of imagination for Newton to insist so categorically that the biblical prohibition of blood was really against cruelty to animals. His aim had been to find fundamental principles that everyone could agree on – and yet he was willing to stake all on his contentious interpretation of the law against blood. How did he become so convinced of it? No doubt personal sentiments predisposed him to find in divine law something answering his own feelings of sympathy. But equally crucial to his argument was the evidence from foreign cultures.

Newton never said that the original religion banned eating animals, but he was fascinated by the wide spread of vegetarianism in cultures all over the world; he seems to have regarded such instances of superlative clemency as vestiges of the original law of mercy to beasts.⁵⁹ He thought that ancient Egypt had preserved the original religion in a strikingly pristine form, and seems to have gone out of his way to show that they were vegetarian. He read the histories of the fourth-century BC Egyptian priest Manetho and the first-century BC Sicilian Diodorus, who had said that the primitive Egyptians ‘fed upon Herbs, and the natural Fruit of the Trees’. Newton manipulated this evidence to make it sound as if the Egyptians lived in a state of Golden-Age innocence and that this led seamlessly into their (much later) religious abhorrence of killing animals.⁶⁰ Eliding various sources and stories into one pithy conclusion, Newton declared that ‘The Egyptians originally lived on the fruits of the earth, and fared hardly, and abstained from animals.’⁶¹

When a band of French scholars sneakily laid their hands on a manuscript copy of Newton’s work, they triggered a massive cross-Channel controversy by retorting that the real reason why the Egyptians abstained from eating meat was because they were abominable animal-worshippers. This, they argued, was obvious from the fact that when the Israelites went to live in Egypt, the Bible testifies that the Jewish custom of sacrificing bulls, sheep and goats was an affront to Egyptian zoolatry.⁶² Newton explained this away and insisted that at that time the Egyptian religion was not idolatrous paganism but a slightly corrupted version of the original religion inherited from Noah; indeed, the Egyptian King Ammon, he sometimes thought, was no other than Ham, Noah’s grandson.⁶³

Why was Newton so eager to prove this? His most controversial argument was that Judaism was based on Egyptian religion. Moses had excised the errors that had crept into the original religion among the Egyptians but essentially, said Newton, ‘Moses retained all ye religion of ye Egyptians concerning ye worship of ye true God.’ Judaism, Newton concluded, was Moses’ resuscitation of the Noachic religion as it had been propagated in an imperfect form by the Egyptians.⁶⁴ Nudging aside the Mosaic revelation in this way was an unspeakably radical move and turned the entire basis of the Judaeo-Christian belief system on its head.⁶⁵

Though Newton did not specifically say it, he clearly thought that Egyptian vegetarianism was the counterpart – perhaps even the source – of Moses’ law of mercy to beasts. This put pagan vegetarianism into the limelight. Rather than seeing it as a sign of satanic zoolatry, Newton regarded it as evidence that the Egyptians were following the original laws of God. Moving to still more exotic pastures, the vegetarians in India, he set about studying all the ancient sources and several travel narratives including Manucci, Chardin, Tavernier, Purchas and the best of all Indological studies, Abraham Rogerius.⁶⁶ He gleaned further information from Gerard Vossius, and from Eusebius who convinced him that the ancient Brahmins ‘abstained from ye worship of Idols & lived virtuously’.⁶⁷ In his personal library, which survives in Trinity College, Cambridge, Newton folded the corner of the pages where Strabo, Philostratus and various humanist scholars described the similarity between Indian and Pythagorean vegetarianism.⁶⁸

How did the ancient Brahmins manage to preserve the original religion in such a pure non-idolatrous state? Newton propounded the fantastic theory that the ‘Brahmans’ were descended from ‘the Abrahamans, or sons of Abraham, born of his second wife Keturah, instructed by their father in the worship of ONE GOD without images, and sent into the east’. Genesis said that after Isaac was born Abraham packed off his children by Keturah and other concubines ‘eastward, unto the east country’, and so it seemed plausible that they were the original Brahmins. This enthusiastic dot-joining had been indulged in by many others, including the sixteenth-century savant Guillaume Postel (1510–81), who tried to recover a pristine Noachic religion like Newton’s.⁶⁹ In addition, the alchemist Michael Maier connected this genealogy of the Brahmins with the theory, posited by Agrippa and Newton’s favourite Jewish medieval astrological theologian Abraham ibn Ezra (1092–1167) (who had himself read genuine Hindu texts), that Enoch, Abraham’s grandson by Keturah, was in fact the same person as the great Egyptian magus, Hermes Trismegistus.⁷⁰ The door was open to seeing Hinduism as a relic of the original religion.

According to Newton, one of the greatest religious reformations in world history occurred in 521 BC when Hystaspes, father of King Darius of Persia, returned from a crash-course in pure religion with the Brahmins, joined forces with Zoroaster and led the Reformation of the Persian magi. Between them, they abolished idolatry and instituted monotheism by importing the Egyptian wisdom preserved in Babylon and fusing it with ‘the institutions of the ancient Brachmans’.⁷¹ In a pincer movement with the Egyptians carrying the original religion eastwards,⁷² and the Brahmins exporting it west, the whole of the ancient world enjoyed a restitution of some of the pristine elements of Noah’s original religion.

Finally Europe enjoyed the fruits of the reform, because, as Apuleius and others said, Pythagoras travelled through Egypt to the Eastern philosophers, and brought their philosophy back to Greece.⁷³ Newton explained the ramifications of this in his sensational endorsement of pagan vegetarianism in the opening paragraph of his frequently redrafted manuscript essay, ‘Irenicum, or Ecclesiastical Polyty tending to Peace’:

All Nations were originally of the Religion comprehended in the Precepts of the sons of Noah, the chief of wch were to have one God, & not to alienate his worship, nor prophane his name; to abstain from murder, theft, fornication, & all injuries; not to feed on the flesh or drink the blood of a living animal, but to be mercifull even to bruit beasts … Pythagoras one of the oldest Philosophers in Europe, after he had travelled among the Eastern nations for the sake of knowledge & conversed with their Priests & Judges & seen their manners, taught his scholars that all men should be friends to all men & even to bruit Beasts … This was the religion of the sons of Noah established by Moses & Christ & is still in force.⁷⁴

One of Isaac Newton’s manuscript versions of the essay Irenicum

Newton clearly regarded Eastern and Pythagorean vegetarianism as a remnant of God’s original law, and he made it a central pillar in the bridge between pagan religions and Judaeo-Christianity. It may look as if Newton just slipped his ideas into the old mould of the prisci theologi, but in fact he had gone much further. Unlike most contemporaries, Newton did not think that Pythagorean vegetarianism was based on the abhorrent belief in metempsychosis.⁷⁵ On the contrary, he suggested that the vegetarianism of Pythagoras and of ‘the Eastern nations’ was an extension to animals of the law ‘love thy neighbour’ which they inherited from Noah. When Pythagoras returned to Europe from his travels, what he brought with him was a secularised version of Noah’s original religion, as well as all the heliocentric astronomic and mathematical knowledge the Eastern sages had preserved. Newton said that his own scientific work, like his religious research, was not so much discovery as recovery, for Pythagoras and the ancient inheritors of the original solar religion had known nearly everything that he had revealed in his magnum opus, the Principia of 1687.⁷⁶ In terms of religious and scientific reform, this put Pythagoras, Newton’s fellow mathematician, scientist and moralist, in line with Moses, Christ and Newton himself.⁷⁷

Interpreting pagan religions as corruptions of Judaeo-Christian theology was standard practice. The widely influential ‘universal histories’ of Newton’s contemporaries, Pierre-Daniel Huet, Gerard Vossius and Ralph Cudworth, had all made this case.⁷⁸ John Selden and Joannes Mercerus both agreed with St Clement of Alexandria that Pythagoras (and the Brahmins) derived their ‘mildness towards irrational creatures from the [Mosaic] law’, even though they maintained that Moses himself didn’t care about animals at all.⁷⁹ These ethnocentric speculations were provided with extra ballast when travellers suggested that Indian abstinence from flesh was basically the same as abstinence from blood. Sir Thomas Roe, for example, described Hindus ‘that will not eate any thing wherin ever there was any blood,’ and he strengthened the comparison to Judaism by referring to their temples as ‘synagoags’.⁸⁰

But Newton reversed the tide: rather than interpreting pagan doctrine solely through the lens of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, he allowed pagan religion to influence his interpretation of Judaeo-Christianity. It was pagan vegetarianism that helped to convince him that the Bible’s law against blood was really a law against cruelty to animals. Europeans projected Pythagorean notions onto Indian culture, but it is also the case that Newton projected Indian values back onto Christianity. Rather than just seeing pagan vegetarianism as a corruption of the law against blood, he saw them both as branches from one original root – the law of mercy to animals. Newton may have thought that being vegetarian was taking the commandment further than was necessary, but pagan vegetarianism was clearly preferable to the Christians’ total abandonment of any restraint on their consumption of blood, their methods of slaughter, and their cruel and neglectful treatment of animals. Europe was in universal breach of one of the most fundamental laws of God. Bizarre though it may seem, and heretical it would have appeared to his contemporaries, Newton considered that some pagan cultures were closer to the true religion in that respect than the Christian world he lived in.

Newton’s attempts to reinstate a true understanding of the physical universe went hand in hand with his desire to re-establish the original laws of God.⁸¹ If Westfall is right that ‘he may even, in his innermost heart, have dreamed of himself as a prophet called to restore the true religion’, then we must include in his reforms the readjustment of man’s relationship with nature. For the sake of his peace and quiet, and for social conformity, Newton did not openly campaign for the restitution of the true religion. From his posthumous and unpublished legacy, however, it is clear that Newton passionately wanted his scientific revolution to be accompanied by a bloodless revolution.

So was he a vegetarian, or wasn’t he? In practice, probably not – at least, not all the time – but there may have been periods in which he did adhere more strictly to his dietary principles. Along with the scientific and moral wisdom lost with the ancient world, Newton thought he could recover the forgotten art of alchemy. Closeted away in a special building in his garden, Newton often stayed up for several nights feverishly keeping his alchemical cauldron burning, sifting through ancient recipes, adding ingredients and trying to find real chemical processes in arcane formulae. This was Newton’s main pursuit until the mid-1690s, at which point he suffered a severe nervous breakdown – explained by biographers variously as the effects of chemical poisoning or his acute religious crisis.⁸²

In the user’s guide to alchemy, Michael Maier told aspiring alchemists that the Egyptian priests, Orpheans, Samothracian Cabiri, Persian magi, Brahmins, Ethiopian gymnosophists, and Pythagoreans were all alchemists dedicated to the secrets of nature.⁸³ Maier had even read Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s recent Itinerario and enthusiastically alerted the alchemical and Rosicrucian brotherhoods to the fact that the renowned, frugal Brahmins had survived into the modern world, representing an unbroken chain of alchemical and natural wisdom at least as old as Abraham.⁸⁴ Newton had read and marked up his copies of Porphyry and Philostratus and owned a copy of Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy; he knew that the ancient philosophers purified themselves by abstaining from meat.⁸⁵ Modern alchemists all agreed that adepts had to be pure and temperate or their efforts would be wasted.⁸⁶ Even Newton’s favourite prophet Daniel had, according to Josephus (AD 37–100 ), acquired the occult skill of the Chaldaeans by forbearing ‘to eat of all living creatures’.⁸⁷ Newton once told Conduitt that ‘They who search after the Philosopher’s Stone by their own rules [are] obliged to a strict & religious life,’ and Conduitt commented that ‘Sr I excelled in both.’⁸⁸ Perhaps when attempting alchemical feats, Newton followed in the footsteps of the ancient wise men, keeping himself pure by refusing to eat animals.⁸⁹

Newton shared many opinions more usually associated with retrospectively marginalised characters like Thomas Tryon.⁹⁰ But although by Newton’s contemporaries’ standards such beliefs were far out, his religious opinions can be seen as pushing an Enlightenment agenda. His faith was founded on an empirical observation of the universe (the power of gravity alone was enough to prove the existence of God), and his religion was based on a comparative examination of world cultures. Not only did he challenge entrenched orthodoxies about man’s relationship with nature, he also threw aside the millennia-old detestation of ‘pagans’ and established that they had the same origins as European Christianity.

NINE Atheists, Deists and the Turkish Spy

By the end of the seventeenth century, a band of secretive philosophers were taking the inquisitive principles of the early Enlightenment to a logical extreme. Some proponents of the radical Enlightenment merely doubted a few biblical tenets; others rejected religion outright. At the heart of the movement were the deists, who accepted that the world had been divinely created but regarded all other religious doctrines as highly suspect human fabrications. Bundled together by contemporaries and invariably misrepresented in the press, the ‘deists and atheists’ were regarded as the epoch’s greatest threat. At the head of this supposedly demonic alliance stood the apostate Jew Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77) whose philosophy spread across Europe in clandestine manuscripts and books, triggering a new wave of thinkers for whom it often seemed – shockingly to Christians – that ‘God’ meant little more than ‘nature’.¹ Because they rejected tradition as a basis for morality, they were commonly portrayed as amoral, Godless rakes. But many of these ‘libertines’ believed they were simply ringing the death knell for an outdated system of oppression.

Under the scrutiny of their unflinching gaze, customary treatment of non-Europeans and the natural world came in for a dramatic reappraisal. This effort reached a pinnacle in the incredible eight volumes of Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, purportedly a cache of personal papers penned in Arabic by an Ottoman spy called Mahmut operating in Paris from 1637 to 1682. The letters unfold Mahmut’s story as he lives through this fraught period of Christian – Muslim relations preceding Europe’s final defeat of the Ottoman army in 1683 after narrowly escaping humiliation in the final siege of Vienna. Mahmut’s intelligence despatches to his political masters in Constantinople concerning the European courts’ military actions and political intrigues are interwoven with gripping stories about his escapes from assassination, his failed affair with a married Greek woman, his culture shock and psychological turmoil as a Muslim in Europe. The Turkish Spy is a deeply sympathetic political romance.

The first volume was in fact written by the Francophile Genoan journalist Giovanni Paolo Marana (1642–93) after his release from an Italian jail for sedition, and the subsequent seven anonymous volumes may have been the work of a coterie of British authors (with an aberrational sequel added in 1718 by Daniel Defoe).² From the moment of its first publication, the Turkish Spy was a literary sensation throughout Europe. Among the most popular works of the period, read by adults and children alike, it was published in Italian, French, English, German and Russian; reissued at least thirty times and was still being read more than a century later, not least by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.³

Part of its popularity was due to its position at the vanguard of a new literary genre: the novel. Widely imitated, the Turkish Spy spawned a rash of fabricated collections of letters such as Charles Gildon’s The Post-boy rob’d of his Mail: or, the Pacquet Broke Open (1692), and was a forerunner of Samuel Richardson’s novels. Numerous other copy-cat spy thrillers rolled off the press, including the Golden Spy, Jewish Spy, German Spy, London Spy, York Spy, and Agent of the King of Persia. Mahmut’s role as an outsider in Europe also mirrored that of della Valle and Bernier in their travel narratives which were themselves written in the form of letters and from which the Turkish Spy occasionally copied whole chunks verbatim. Indeed, the Turkish Spy’s sceptical comparison of different cultures was a logical progression from the voice Bernier developed in his travelogues. From this point on, the satirical foreign observer became a standard figure of European literature, perfected, for example, in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), Voltaire’s Letters of Amabed (1769) and Eliza Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796).⁴

Particularly curious given its popularity is the fact that the Turkish Spy is one of the most radical assaults on established religion to have made it past the censors into print – apparently providing a rare glimpse of the openness to scepticism and even closet deism in Europe.⁵ In the interests of the plot, Mahmut himself vacillates between the extremes of devout mystical enthusiasm and Epicurean atheism,⁶ going so far as to suggest that the world is no more than a random conglomeration of atoms ‘Tack’d, and Stitch’d, and Glew’d together, by the Bird-lime of Chance’.⁷ But the most sustained philosophical position constructed by the Turkish Spy as a whole is revealed when Mahmut declares his allegiance to ‘a Sort of People here in the West, whom they call Deists, that is, Men professing the Belief of a God, Creator of the World, but Scepticks in all Things else’. In a remarkable display of the authors’ knowledge of Islamic history, Mahmut aligns himself and the European deists with the tenth-century coterie of irenic Neoplatonist Muslims based in Basra and Baghdad, the Ikhwan al-Safa. Mahmut says correctly that the ‘Sincere Fraternity’ (as he calls them) made inviolable pacts and met in secret clubs to discuss all topics ‘with an Unrestrained Freedom … without regarding the Legends and Harangues of the Mollahs’.⁸

The Turkish Spy evaded prosecution for irreligion partly by disavowing its most execrable opinions as belonging to the ‘Muslim’ writer.⁹ But even the moments when Mahmut professes pious adherence to Islam – despite his denials that there is any solid basis for doing so – are surreptitious rhetorical devices used by the authors to show that dogmatic faith in any religion (including Christianity) is absurd. His argument for the authenticity of the Qur’an is a mirror image of the Christian defence of the Bible; if European readers were to dismiss one, they had to dismiss the other. Likewise, his withering demolition of Judaeo-Christian mythology, his fears of the Inquisition’s lethal persecution, and his passionate yearning to share his religious doubts, are neatly consistent both with Mahmut’s Muslim identity and with the anonymous free-thinking authors who spoke through him.¹⁰

Religions are human inventions, and ceremonial prayers, declares Mahmut, are nothing but ‘Hocus-Pocus-Whispers’.¹¹ ‘What signifies it,’ he asks in a classic statement of indifferentism, ‘whether we believe the Written Law or the Alcoran; whether we are Disciples of Moses, Jesus, or Mahomet; Followers of Aristotle, Plato, Pythagoras, Epicurus, or Ilch Rend Hu the Indian Brahmin?’¹² With its liberal Muslim hero arguing that religious affiliation was little more than social conformity,¹³ the Turkish Spy opened the door to an unusually favourable view of Ottoman Islamic culture (which, it showed, was no more or less legitimate than European Christianity).¹⁴

Having cleared the ground with the bulldozer of scepticism, Mahmut proceeds to display an astonishingly fervent admiration for one particular religious group: the Indian Brahmins.¹⁵ An ardent reader of Indian travelogues, and frustrated with the biased accounts of Jesuit missionaries, he begs his masters to send him as their agent to the Great Mughal so he can interview the Brahmins himself. ‘There is nothing that I have a greater Passion for these many Years,’ he declares, ‘than … to converse with the Bramins, and pry into the Mysteries of their Unknown Wisdom, which occasions so much Discourse in the World. I know not what ails me, but I promise my self more Satisfaction from their Books … or from the Lips of those Priests … than from all the Prophets and Sages in the World.’¹⁶

Indeed, it transpires that the Brahmins are a linchpin in the Turkish Spy’s attack on Christianity, for Mahmut snidely points out that their ancient Sanskrit scriptures – as the recent travelogues had revealed to the discombobulation of Christians – described events that happened many thousands of years before the biblical beginning of the world. The realisation that Indian history pre-dated everything in the Bible struck a blow to Christianity, and it gave powerful ammunition to the sceptics’ argument that religions were products of history’s tangled thicket and not transcendent truths.¹⁷

Having loosened Christianity’s stranglehold over moral norms, and also established India as an alternative moral platform, the seven anonymous volumes of the Turkish Spy then launch into an attack on one of Europe’s most basic tenets: man’s right over nature.¹⁸

Putting Europeans to shame by contrasting them to the humane Indians, Mahmut declares that ‘India is at Present the onely Publick Theatre of Justice toward all Living Creatures.’ The idea of applying justice to animals flew in the face of all expected norms. And yet, Mahmut intends to convert his readers to this cause: ‘I have been long an Advocate for the Brutes, and have endeavour’d to abstain from injuring them my self, and to inculcate this Fundamental Point of Justice to others.’¹⁹ Mahmut’s effusions about Indian vegetarianism often replicate passages in John Ovington’s Voyage to Suratt (which, strangely, was not published until 1696); but the Turkish Spy transformed the dreamy utopian tradition of prelapsarian harmony into the much more radical demand for real legislative or moral reform.²⁰

In Mahmut’s opinion, Hinduism had preserved what was once a universal law of nature to which all cultures bear vestigial testimony.²¹ Beginning with Islam, Mahmut claims that Muhammad the Holy Prophet charmed animals and discoursed with them just like Orpheus, Apollonius or St Jerome. In repayment for his kindness, wild animals listened to Muhammad’s preaching and a leopard guarded his cave ‘and did all the Offices of a kind and faithful Servant’.²² Mahmut concedes that the Prophet ‘did not positively enjoin Abstinence from Flesh’, but insists that he recommended it and that his first disciples refrained ‘from Murdering the Brutes’. Transposing onto Islam arguments familiar from vegetarian Bible glosses, Mahmut adds that the Qur’anic food laws were designed to make it as difficult as possible to eat flesh.²³

Turkish ‘charity’ to animals was by then a familiar trope: Francis Bacon compared the Turks to Pythagoras and the Brahmins for bestowing ‘almes upon Bruit Creatures’, while George Sandys described their universal ‘charitie’ of which Samuel Purchas had commented that ‘Mahometans may in this be examples to Christians.’²⁴ Other commentators were more critical of their soft-heartedness, and, as a Turk himself, Mahmut lamented that bigoted Europeans ‘censure the Mussulmans, for extending their Charity to Beasts, Birds and Fishes … who, in their Opinion, have neither Souls nor Reason’.²⁵ Mahmut’s aim is to isolate Western Christians with regard to their rapacious treatment of animals.

Next, Mahmut enrols Judaism to the cause, writing to his Jewish confederate that the Mosaic law ‘obliges all of thy Nation to certain specifick Tendernesses towards the Dumb Animals’. (That the law contradicts itself by also instituting barbaric sacrifices, argues Mahmut, only shows that the Bible is a hopelessly unreliable ‘Collection of Fragments patch’d up’.²⁶) The true original law, explains Mahmut, having heard the story from the legendary ‘wandering Jew’, was still maintained by the descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel. This isolated stock, he says, reside beyond a mountain range in northern Asia living off the fruit of the land, adhering to the common oath: ‘I will not taste of the Flesh of any Animal, but in all things observe the Abstinence commanded by Allah to Moses on the Mount.’ While the Christians and Jews had debased their Bible so much that they believed that the law ‘Thou shalt not Kill’ only applied to humans, the lost tribes (and to some extent the modern Muslims) had not forgotten that ‘This Prohibition … extends to all Living Creatures.’²⁷ At the heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Mahmut identifies a long-lost vegetarian dictate.

Christianity too, ventures Mahmut, was originally vegetarian. Like Thomas Tryon and Roger Crab, he invokes John the Baptist (who did not eat ‘locusts’ as the translations of the Bible stated, but, as a true rendering of the Greek revealed, ‘plant buds’ like asparagus²⁸), Jesus’ brother James, and even Jesus himself, who ‘was the most Temperate and Abstemious Man in the World’.²⁹ Jesus, he claims, was a member of the Essenes, the ascetic Jewish sect who ‘would rather suffer Martyrdom, than be prevail’d on to taste of any Thing that had Life in it’.³⁰

Mahmut doesn’t stop there. He finds vegetarianism in all cultures: ancient Egyptian, Persian, Athenian, Druidic, Lacedemonian, Spartan, Manichean and ‘almost all Nations of the East’. His taxonomic collation of the world’s civilisations is a stepping stone between the Renaissance prisci theologi and eighteenth-century Orientalism. Making Neoplatonism and deism bedfellows, he fervently declares that he is ‘inflam’d afresh with Pythagorism, Platonism, and Indianism’.³¹

For the most part, Mahmut recognises that cultural values are arbitrary; but if something occurred universally, it was reasonable to suggest that it was natural (a deduction not so far from those of modern sociobiology). In comparing world cultures, the Turkish Spy came to the same conclusion as Isaac Newton, Thomas Tryon and no doubt numerous other contemporaries: that the universal law of nature ‘to do as you would be done by’ applied to animals as well as humans. Vegetarianism, he concludes, is based on ‘the Fundamental Law of Nature, the Original Justice of the World, which teaches us, Not to do that to another, which we wou’d not have another do to us. Now, since ‘tis evident, That no Man wou’d willingly become the Food of Beasts; therefore, by the same Rule, he ought not to prey on them.’³² ‘In a Word,’ Mahmut declares, ‘let us love all of [the] Human Race, and shew Justice and Mercy to the Brutes.’³³

Thomas Hobbes had argued in Leviathan (1651) that ‘doing as one would be done by’ was a mutual contract which it was impossible to make with the beasts because they did not understand human speech. The Turkish Spy used its empirical analysis of world cultures and its ethnographic description of Hinduism to challenge the basis of Hobbes’ argument. In a scene reminiscent of Michel de Montaigne’s affectionate sport with his cat, Mahmut pointedly explains how the social contract can be undersigned without the use of verbal language: ‘I contract Familiarities with the Harmless Animals,’ he explains. ‘I study like a Lover to oblige and win their Hearts, by all the tender Offices I can perform … Then when we once begin to understand each other aright, they make me a Thousand sweet Returns of Gratitude according to their Kind.’³⁴ Identifying the reciprocal agreement as a natural law meant that the social contract was embedded in nature, and thus animals were bound by it too.

Western Christians, by contrast, had manipulated the Bible to give them authority for their abhorrent behaviour: ‘They assert, That all Things were made for Man, and style him Lord of his Fellow-Creatures; as if …[they] were Created onely to serve his Appetite.’³⁵ The Bible itself was not at fault. It had been wilfully co-opted to justify Christians’ gluttony, cruelty and pride, providing a mandate for the ‘Epicurism of those, who ransack all the Elements for Dainties’.³⁶ The true Christian message, argued Mahmut, was encapsulated in the harmony of Paradise which was an image of the original state of the world when man and beast did as they would be done by. By decoding the prelapsarian myth as anthropological data, the Turkish Spy showed that even Christianity enshrined a mandate for the natural law regarding animals.

To show that adherence to nature’s laws was still a viable option, the authors of the Turkish Spy put Mahmut into regular correspondence with five living vegetarians. Most prominent of them is Mahmut’s spiritual guru, Mahummed the Hermit, who lives in a cave on Mount Uriel and has recreated harmony with the animal kingdom – just like the Prophet – converting the idea of saintly kindness to animals into a manifesto for interspecific egalitarianism.³⁷ Others include a Christian hermit, a Muslim monk and Mirmadolin the mendicant who ‘suck’d the Milk’ of Mother Earth like the first inhabitants of the world.³⁸ Mahmut writes to them about other vegetarian hermits such as ‘Ilch Rend Hu’, the centenarian miracle-working hermit of Kashmir described by François Bernier.³⁹

Mahmut repeatedly (about thirteen times) expresses his ardent desire to become a vegetarian hermit too, but in practice his ‘Voracious Appetite’ always tempts him back into eating flesh. He is perpetually racked by a crisis of conscience, ‘self-condemn’d for living contrary to my Knowledge’.⁴⁰ This is the subject of frequent lamentation:

the Divine Providence has scatter’d up and down the Surface of this Globe, an Infinite Variety of Roots, Herbs, Fruits, Seeds … as in a most pleasant Garden or Paradise of Health. But alas, instead we break the Rules of Hospitality; and rushing violently on the Creatures under his Protection, we kill and slay at Pleasure, turning the Banquet to a Cruel Massacre: being transform’d into a Temper wholly Brutal and Voracious, we glut our selves with Flesh and Blood of Slaughter’d Animals. Oh! happy he that can content himself with Herbs and other Genuine Products of the Earth.⁴¹

Even with the added incentive that meat in Paris is not halal, Mahmut’s resolution to ‘taste of Nothing, that has Breath’d the Common Air’ is almost certainly short-lived, like his miserable attempt to abstain from alcohol.⁴²

Mahmut also thinks that ascetic abstinence from flesh elevates the intellect and is the path to spiritual restoration.⁴³ However, in moments of disillusionment, he sardonically reflects that his experiences of religious ecstasy while abstaining from flesh are really the physiological effect of fasting and hyperventilation induced by repeatedly saying prayers (a sceptical critique of asceticism that Bernier deployed in his comments on Indian yogis).⁴⁴ But despite these scoffs at monasticism, Mahmut remains committed to the morality of vegetarianism and sees it as ‘the way of perfection’ and the route to Paradise.⁴⁵

His tumultuous wrestling between ethics and appetite is designed as a manual on how to become a vegetarian in real life. Addressing the social difficulties any aspiring vegetarian would have to contend with, Mahmut acknowledges that were his vegetarian sentiments publicly known, his neighbours ‘would censure me as a Heretick, a Fool, or a Madman’.⁴⁶ Turning away from authorities and reasons, Mahmut ultimately appeals to his human instincts: ‘am I not obliged to obey the Inspirations of my Nature, or Better Genius, which tells me, ‘Tis a Butcherly and Inhuman Life, to feed on slaughtered Animals?’⁴⁷ At the same time as being an emotional appeal, this also makes the subtle claim that the law of nature is inscribed in every human: this is the voice of nature speaking. There is no doubt that the Turkish Spy promoted the cause of vegetarianism across Europe; it opened the minds of its readers to the far-flung ethics of the Brahmins and recommended treating animals with high standards of justice. Unlike their mystical contemporary Thomas Tryon, the authors of the Turkish Spy advanced their case in a finely tuned voice which blended cool rationality with heartfelt human sympathy.

The Turkish Spy showed what could happen when European norms were abandoned for a fresh examination of man’s relationship with nature, especially when they were held up against the moral example of Indian vegetarianism. But the Turkish Spy was not an isolated case. The scriptural sanction for killing animals was the mainstay for justifying meat-eating. Indeed, one of the principal functions of religion was to create a fundamental distinction between man and beast. Once faith in Scripture was shaken, and people started turning to other ways of codifying behaviour, the ethics of meat-eating became more problematic. Even the defenders of meat-eating in the past had acknowledged that without the express permission from God in Genesis, the idea of eating animals would be repellent and one would do it, as Calvin said, with a ‘doubtful and trembling conscience’.⁴⁸ One critic of the deists, John Reynolds, realised that one of the worst aspects of dismissing Scripture was that it undermined man’s right to kill animals. He argued that everyone who denied revealed religion should logically be vegetarian. The intelligence of animals, our sympathy for them, the inferior nutritional quality of meat, and the practice of the Indian vegetarians, all suggested that it was wrong to eat flesh: if the Bible and with it God’s permission to kill animals was just a mythical invention, he said, then everyone would have to ‘let the Butcher’s Trade be cashier’d from off the Face of the Earth; let the Shambles be converted into Fruiterer’s Shops, and Herb-Markets …[and] have done with their Ragous, with their Fricassies, and Hashes, made of broken Limbs of dismember’d Brother-Animals.’⁴⁹ The Bible was the meat-eaters’ greatest bulwark, and the foes of religion were also the biggest enemies of meat.

Man’s dominion and superiority over nature had for millennia been framed by theology. When deists and free-thinkers came to challenge this framework, the distinct boundary between man and nature, which the Judaeo-Christian tradition had reinforced, either vanished or had to be redrawn. Contemplating vegetarianism became a fashionable way of articulating a rejection of orthodox Christianity as a whole. This trend was often coupled with interest in Eastern culture and the use of that perspective in attacking European norms. At the time of the Turkish Spy’s publication, there was a coterie of free-thinkers in Britain who were clearly willing to scrutinise the practice of meat-eating from a radical perspective.

Even before the Turkish Spy, those who questioned religious orthodoxy also often questioned dietary norms. The heretical sixteenth-century ex-Jesuit Guillaume Postel and his followers were among the first ever people to be accused of being ‘Deites’.⁵⁰ The Inquisition imprisoned Postel for trying to prepare for the second coming by uniting all the world’s religions under his humanist banner and joining forces with the Family of Love. Postel influenced the heretic Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676) whose challenge to Christian orthodoxy in turn inspired the Turkish Spy.⁵¹ Postel, like the Turkish Spy, was particularly interested in the vegetarian Indians. Poring over the travel accounts of Marco Polo and Ludovico de Varthema among others, Postel was overwhelmed by the virtue of the Indian Brahmins, who, he remarked, ‘abstain from everything that has life like the Pythagoreans’. The Buddhist holy men of Japan, he noted admiringly, also ‘never eat flesh, nor any animals, from fear that the flesh would make them unruly.’ This, he said, was a universal practice ‘approved of from all times’, in which, like the Pythagoreans, the Buddhists exceeded even the purest Christians. He concluded that the Buddhists had originally been Christians who had ‘bit by bit converted the truth of Jesus into the fable of Shiaca [Buddha]’; they and the Brahmins still held divine secrets that had been lost to the West and had constructed these into a perfectly adequate religion through their own superior reasoning faculties.⁵² Even though skewed by idealism, such syncretic impulses were like porous inlets through which Asian culture influenced the West’s construction of man’s relationship with nature. Renaissance Neoplatonists, India-loving deists and eighteenth-century Orientalists all contributed to changing European culture by importing the Indian perspective.

Most people holding radical anti-Christian views concealed themselves in anonymity, circulating their ideas in clandestine manuscripts, or using ruses like the Turkish Spy to air their ideas in print. Foremost in the British network of deists were Charles Blount (1654–93) and Charles Gildon (1665–1724) and it may be that these two even had a hand in writing the Turkish Spy. (If Charles Blount was involved, his decision to escape government spies and the harangues of his detractors by stoically hanging himself in 1693 would help to explain the embarrassing two-year delay between the publication of the Turkish Spy’s fifth and sixth volumes.⁵³)

In 1680 Blount had used his study of paganism – particularly the writing on Hinduism by Rogerius, Bernier, Tavernier, Roth and Kircher – to assault Christian orthodoxy.⁵⁴ Blount translated and copiously annotated Philostratus’ biography of the legendary vegetarian, Apollonius. But his critics quickly realised that his book was no simple reservoir of erudition, for beneath its placid surface lurked the serpent of sardonic scepticism.⁵⁵ There was also a broadside critique of society’s bloodthirsty practices.

In his notes on Apollonius’ attempts to abolish sacrifice, Blount propounded a popular conspiracy theory which blamed the superstitious practice of sacrificing animals on the priesthood who ‘grew so covetous, that nothing but the Blood of Beasts could satiate them’. As well as ensuring a constant supply of ‘Rost-meat to the Priests’, Blount went on, ‘The other concern, viz. of the State in those great Sanguinary Sacrifices, was by innuring the People to such horrid and bloudy Sights … rendring them fitter for the Wars, and thereby more capable either of defending or enlarging their Empire.’ Meat-eating, Blount showed, was a sinister instrument that the state and its conspiratorial allies, the priesthood, had used to tax the people and make them submit to killing each other for the amelioration of their masters’ estates. The people were still suffering under the yoke of this legacy, said Blount, for ‘at the Battel of Edgehill it was generally observ’d, that one Foot-Regiment of Butchers, behaved themselves more stoutly than any other Regiment of either side.’⁵⁶

In this context, the ancient vegetarians, Orpheus, Pythagoras and Plato, were elevated as heroic rebels against an oppressive priesthood. They had always rejected sacrifices, said Blount, considering it ‘a great crime to kill any harmless innocent Beasts, they being intercommoners with men on Earth’.⁵⁷ As well as condemning the ‘detestable Recreation’ of hunting, which, as Agrippa had said, consisted in making ‘War against the poor Beasts; a Pastime cruel, and altogether tragical, chiefly delighting in bloud and death’, Blount showed that the Pythagoreans’ vegetarianism, far from being superstitious, was a rational decision based on the preservation of health and the political subversion of tyranny.⁵⁸

It would be jumping the gun to suggest on the basis of his sardonic writings that Blount really advocated vegetarianism. He knew that all creatures lived by ‘devouring and destroying one another’. ‘Nay,’ he conceded, ‘we cannot walk one step, but probably we crush many Insects creeping under our feet’.⁵⁹ But his attack on gluttony was a sincere aspect of his social critique, and he did carry it into his personal life by claiming that ‘For my own part, I ever eat rather out of necessity, than pleasure’.⁶⁰

Radicals like Blount felt they had much in common with Pythagoras and the Brahmins. They even reinterpreted the doctrines of reincarnation and pantheism to suit their materialist agenda. Reincarnation, they explained, really referred to the recycling of matter in the universe. As Blount’s contemporary, John Toland (1670–1722) explained, ‘Vegetables and Animals become part of us, we become part of them, and both become parts of a thousand other things in the Universe.’⁶¹ If matter was perpetually recycling from one thing to another, then all living beings were basically made of the same stuff. There was no essential difference between a man and an oyster.⁶² The Turkish spy, who at times felt he was ‘a profess’d Pythagorean, a Disciple of the Indian Brachmans, Champion for the Transmigration of Souls’, even suggested that the sympathetic force of ‘Magnetick Transmigration’ ensured that ‘souls’ were attracted to locations that matched their nature.⁶³

These arguments provided a notion of eternal life through the perpetuity of matter and of cosmic justice which worked by natural laws without the need for divine intervention. They also provided a basis for ethical equity between all life forms, and a kind of karmic incentive to moral behaviour. Thus Pythagoras and the Indians, traditionally regarded as the arch-pedlars of superstition, were refashioned as the founding fathers of non-religious ethics, and this in turn encouraged the deists to espouse their vegetarian ideals.⁶⁴ It was not long before critics claimed that ‘Pythagoras was a Deist’ and that Buddhism and Hinduism were ‘nothing but Pantheism or Spinozism’.⁶⁵

Charles Gildon, a shady figure in the literary world, used the oriental perspective to attack orthodoxy in his Golden Spy (1709).⁶⁶ In The Oracles of Reason (1693), which he compiled with Charles Blount, he used the antiquity of Chinese and Indian culture, just as the Turkish Spy had done, to undermine faith in the absurdly dwarfish history in the Bible.⁶⁷

Gildon’s anonymously published The Post-boy rob’d of his Mail (1692), as the title suggests, is a miscellany of letters like the Turkish Spy, and one of the letters contains a rare account of Thomas Tryon’s followers. Gildon co-opted Tryon’s vegetarianism into an anti-Christian political statement by emphasising that Tryon derived his beliefs from the Hindus, not from Christian Scripture, and that he thought eating ‘our Brethren and Fellow-Creatures’ was ‘Opression’ and ‘qualifies Men to be sordid, surly, and Soldiers, Hunters, Pirates, Tories, and such as wou’d have the bestial Nature fortify’d; that they might act like Lions, and Devils, over their own kind as well as over all other Creatures’.⁶⁸ So it seems that Gildon, Blount, and possibly the authors of the Turkish Spy, recognised some common ground between their own views and Tryon’s vegetarianism. Gildon may have been encouraged to do this by their mutual friend Aphra Behn. Perhaps the vegetarian ideas in the Turkish Spy were inspired by or even supposed to be a mockery of Tryon.⁶⁹

Although Tryon subscribed to all sorts of mystical inventions, he shared with the radical sceptics a desire to erode traditional orthodoxies. His ‘East-Indian Brackmanny’ is a precursor of Mahmut as an Oriental vegetarian critic of Western society, and his Letters From Averroes (1695) combines this Oriental critique with the letter format which slyly uses a Muslim character to challenge Christian dogmatism.⁷⁰

At the end of the seventeenth century the vegetarian question was as prominent as it ever has been in Western intellectual debate. The parameters of culture were shifting radically. The exclusive powers of the Church were giving way to unorthodoxy, empiricism and relativism. Political turmoil and monarchy in Britain were replaced, in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, by constitutional democracy which fostered open-minded debate. Enlightened intellectual movements combined with new access to information on foreign cultures to challenge traditional values. Fundamental assumptions were under constant review, and the right to eat meat was one of them. With the flood of information on the vegetarian Indians, more and more people were questioning their long-held belief that eating animals was a natural, necessary part of human life. There were so many prominent thinkers from widely different intellectual backgrounds who were challenging the practice of killing animals that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the late seventeenth century harboured a vegetarian renaissance. In many minds at least, there had been a bloodless revolution.

PART TWO Meatless Medicine

TEN Dieting with Dr Descartes

René Descartes was born in La Haye in 1596, and when he was one his mother died of a lung disease which he inherited. He was a sickly baby and was not thought likely to survive, but survive he did, and in combating his own weak constitution he came to believe that he had found the secret to long life. His blend of solitary reflection and steadfast adherence to mathematical reasoning created a new climate in European philosophy which, by the end of the seventeenth century, had flourished into the Natural Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Rather than relying on second-hand religious doctrines, Descartes showed how to establish truth firmly on the principle of ‘Reason’. This breach with religious tradition created a need to reconstitute the mandate for man’s superiority over the rest of creation. But Descartes’ legacy was an enduring schism in European thought, the remnants of which can still be felt today.

At the Jesuit school of La Flèche, he had been raised from the age of eight on the old school theories of Aristotelian philosophy and Augustinian theology according to which the world was divided into matter, immaterial spirit and an ‘intermediate substance’. When Descartes came to scrutinise his education with his rigorous method of sceptical reasoning, he agreed with the Aristotelians that humans had an immaterial rational soul: as he explained in his Meditations (1641), the fact that he could say ‘I think, therefore I am’ proved this beyond doubt. He also agreed with the Aristotelians that animals lacked the rational soul – their inability to speak languages was proof enough of that. But he thought that the Aristotelians’ claim that animals were animated by an intermediate sensitive soul was meaningless mumbo-jumbo. If animals had no soul, they had to be made purely of matter, and as Descartes believed that matter by itself could not think, he concluded that animals were just like soulless machines. All their actions were the result of automatic material cause and effect; they did not even have feelings or sensations as humans did. They were only alive in so far as the heat of their heart pumped blood around their bodies.¹ As Descartes’ chief disciple, the Jesuit Father Nicolas Malebranche, explained in his Search after Truth (1674–5), ‘The Cartesians do not think that Beasts feel Pain or Pleasure, or that they love or hate any thing; because they admit nothing but what is material in Beasts, and they do not believe that Sensations or Passions are Properties of Matter’; ‘the Principal of a Dog’s Life,’ wrote Malebranche provocatively, ‘differs very little, if at all, from that of the Motion of a Watch.’² This, rather than Scripture, was the rational justification for killing animals: they did not suffer; indeed, given the mechanical nature of their life, they hardly even ‘died’.

Descartes’ ability to explain the operation of a body in mechanistic terms – as the great intricate clockwork of God – provided the foundation for a powerful school of physicians in the eighteenth century, and insofar as he showed how ‘life’ worked without the need for ‘soul’ he led the way to a modern scientific understanding of living things.³ But although he won many followers, his rigid dualism – dividing everything so starkly into matter and spirit – and particularly his relegation of animals to the status of insensible lumps of dirt, became the focus of widespread protest all over Europe, notably in England.

People found it hard to accept his contention that animals had no sensation as it contradicted a common-sense view of animal behaviour and made a nonsense of their sentimental attachment to pet dogs. In the intellectual backlash, many philosophers preferred to think that animals had souls and reason rather than concede that they were mere machines.⁴

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes agreed with Descartes that animals lacked reason, but he suggested that mind was made of matter and therefore animals could think to some extent.⁵ Hobbes did not think this accrued to animals any sort of moral protection from humans, even though, like Descartes, he thought the scriptural permission to Noah an insufficient basis for eating them. For Hobbes, might made right: all beings had the right to kill for their own preservation, and humans – by forming alliances with the use of their reason and language – had become powerful enough to kill any animal they chose (while beasts, lacking reason and language, were incapable of entering into the contract of forbearance from conflict enjoyed by human beings).⁶

The philosophical Duchess of Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish (1624–74), sustained a lengthy correspondence about animals with Descartes and voiced her dissent in her striking poetry:

As if that God made Creatures for Mans meat,

To give them Life, and Sense, for Man to eat;…

Making their Stomacks, Graves, which full they fill

With murther’d Bodies, that in sport they kill …

And that all Creatures for his sake alone,

Was made for him, to Tyrannize upon.⁷

Descartes’ new philosophical view of animals, it seemed to many, was still worse than the disdain fostered by Aristotle and Augustine. Most of the earlier seventeenth-century radical vegetarians, whose main inspiration was the Bible, ignored or remained ignorant of the debate Descartes had triggered.⁸ But the vegetarian-oriented deists – Blount, Gildon, the Turkish Spy and Simon Tyssot de Patot – identified Descartes as their common enemy, and embraced instead the more conducive animal-friendly philosophy of his rival, Pierre Gassendi.⁹ If Reason proved that humans had souls, declaimed Mahmut in the Turkish Spy, then the fact that animals were clearly intelligent showed ‘the Brute Animals to have Souls as well as We’; if it did not, he warned, then ‘ ‘tis as easie to defend, That Humane Nature it self is but Matter’.¹⁰ (As the traveller to India, John Ovington, had said, even the Pythagoreans and Indians knew that.)¹¹

Descartes felt he had established man’s superiority on the firmest foundations, but because he based it on rational argument rather than Scripture, he opened the door to opposite deductions. Reversing both Descartes’ and Hobbes’ rationale for eating animals, the Turkish Spy concluded that ‘it is little less Injustice to Kill and Eat them, because they cannot speak and converse with us, than it would be for a Cannibal to murder and devour thee or me, because we understood not his Language nor he ours’.¹² It was precisely this sort of grotesque logical deduction from Hobbes’ theory of the ‘War of Nature’ that the German philosopher Samuel Freiherr von Pufendorf sought to clear up with his monumental counter-vegetarian article in The Law of Nature and Nations (1672). Pufendorf gave the vegetarians a great deal of space; he was liberally uncritical of Brahmins and other vegetarian peoples and he even endorsed the vegetarians’ argument that meat made people vicious and that humans were better suited to a herbivorous diet. But he explained that men had an indissoluble right to kill because the hostility and competition between them and animals was (in contrast to the occasional conflicts between men) acute and irreparable. Nevertheless, he insisted that the vegetarians were right in so far as ‘foolish Cruelty and Barbarity’ to animals was indisputably reprehensible.¹³

Members of the public were appalled to hear that Cartesians kicked and stabbed animals to make the point that their cries had no more significance than the squeak of a door. As one horrified witness testified, ‘They administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference, and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they had felt pain.’ Descartes himself was renowned for having cut open his own dog to show exactly how the animal machine operated. Cartesians became indelibly marked as the most inhumane of philosophers. Even Descartes’ contemporary Henry More the Platonist, who admired Descartes to the extent of keeping a portrait of him in his closet, could not accept the doctrine of the beast-machine: ‘my spirit,’ pleaded More to Descartes in a letter, ‘through sensitivity and tenderness, turns not with abhorrence from any of your opinions so much as from that deadly and murderous sentiment … the sharp and cruel blade which in one blow, so to speak, dared to despoil of life and sense practically the whole race of animals, metamorphosing them into marble statues and machines.’ It was better to be a Pythagorean and believe animals had immortal souls than to be so cruel to the creatures, he said.

Descartes, however, urged that far from being cruel, his philosophy was the only just system. If animals could feel pain then man and God were guilty of the most horrendous crimes. Humans (as Augustine explained) deserved to suffer because they had sinned, and had the promise of heaven to look forward to. But innocent animals had never sinned, so how could one justify allowing them to suffer? The only way of excusing mankind’s treatment of animals was to insist that animals were incapable of sensation. ‘And thus,’ announced Descartes, ‘my opinion is not so much cruel to wild beasts as favourable to men, whom it absolves, at least those not bound by the superstition of the Pythagoreans, of any suspicion of crime, however often they may eat or kill animals.’¹⁴ Descartes, in his own opinion, had come up with the only viable justification for eating meat. Deny what he said was true, he implied, and morally you would be obliged to take up vegetarianism. As one later vegetarian cynic commented, ‘One must either be a Cartesian, or allow that man is very vile.’¹⁵

The extraordinary irony is that Descartes was in any case free from the suspicion of committing crimes to animals because he was, by preference, a vegetarian. According to his friend and biographer Father Adrien Baillet, Descartes lived on an ‘anchoritic regime’ of home-grown vegetables. He did not manage to live like this consistently, but at his own table he served ‘vegetables and herbs all the time, such as turnips, coleworts, panado, salads from his garden, potatoes with wholemeal bread’. On this Lenten diet he shunned flesh, though he ‘did not absolutely forbid himself the use of eggs’. Baillet explained that this was because Descartes believed that roots and fruits were ‘much more proper to prolong human life, than the flesh of animals’.

It is often forgotten that Descartes conceived of himself as a physician as much as a rationalist philosopher. Descartes claimed that improving human health ‘has been at all times the principal goal of my studies’, and he vowed in the Discourse on the Method (1637) to dedicate himself to ‘no other occupation’ than freeing mankind from sickness ‘and perhaps also even from the debility of age’. Descartes conducted dietary experiments upon himself and concluded that meat was unsuited to the mechanism of the human body, whereas the vegetable diet could, in the words of his friend Sir Kenelm Digby, ‘lengthen out his life span to equal that of the Patriarchs’.

Like the mystical Rosicrucians he so admired, Descartes dispensed free medical advice throughout his career, and shared his secret about the efficacy of vegetables with other ‘friends of his character’. His companion the Abbé Claude Picot was so impressed that after spending three months at Descartes’ hermit-like retreat in Egmond, ‘he wanted to reduce himself to the institute of Mr Descartes, believing that this was the only way to make a success of the secret which he claimed our Philosopher had discovered, to make men live for four or five hundred years.’ When in 1650 Descartes died at the pitiful age of fifty-four, Picot – after all the claims he made for his diet – was understandably discomposed, and insisted that without a freak accident ‘it would have been impossible’; others even suspected that Descartes had been poisoned.¹⁶

Descartes’ mechanistic physiology convinced him both that it was morally acceptable to eat meat and, simultaneously, that it was healthier not to. This reasoning placed him at the crossroads of the vegetarian debate of the eighteenth century. Ethical vegetarianism was built on a refutation of Descartes’ ‘beast-machine’; medical vegetarians used his mechanistic system of the body to explain the benefits of the vegetable diet. The fact that Descartes himself saw no contradiction between refusing one and embracing the other could be viewed as demonstrating the absolute distinction between the medical and ethical motives for vegetarianism – but that is not how some eighteenth-century doctors saw it. When they argued that the body’s hydraulic mechanism was clogged and damaged by meat, they almost invariably acknowledged that this implied that God never intended humans to eat animals.

Descartes’ diet ostensibly had nothing to do with ethical objections to killing animals. Indeed, his Discourse on the Method directed a specific attack against the cult of loving animals inaugurated by Michel de Montaigne’s Apology for Raymond Sebond (1585). Descartes’ dualist theory of the beast-machine seems to have been devised partly in order to extinguish these feelings of compassion. This is borne out by Descartes’ early manuscripts which show that he first devised the idea of the animal automata in 1619–20 after his friend and superior brother at the Jesuit college, Father Molitor, presented him with the animal-friendly Treatise on Wisdom (1601) by Montaigne’s disciple Pierre Charron.¹⁷

Following Descartes’ lead, Malebranche also attacked the ‘dangerous’ Montaigne for being ‘angry with Men; because they separate themselves from … Beasts, which he calls our Fellow Brethren, and our Companions’.¹⁸ Malebranche explained that sympathy was just a mechanical process in the body – like blood circulation, an animal function as bestial as a sexual urge – and should therefore be subjugated like other carnal appetites to the superior power of reason: and reason indicated that animals were not really feeling pain in any case.¹⁹ This lesson was lost on ‘Persons of a fine and delicate Constitution, who have a lively Imagination, and very soft tender Flesh’, especially women and children who, he said, ‘are Mechanically dispos’d to be very Pitiful and Compassionate’.²⁰ But Malebranche recognised that even being as convinced as he and Descartes were that animals did not feel pain was no protection against this corporal feeling of sympathy. For this inescapable automatic compassion, he said, ‘often prevents those Persons from Butchering Beasts, who are the most convincingly perswaded they are meer Machines’. He warned that failing to realise that the body was sending misleading signals was ‘a prejudice that is very dangerous in view of its consequences’.²¹

Though tantalisingly unverifiable, it would be most surprising if Descartes’ medical decision to abstain from meat also made him feel better because it avoided the irrepressible sensation of sympathy for animal suffering. But by the end of the eighteenth century at least, that is precisely what some commentators believed was the case. One author even implied that it was because of his humanity that, ‘in imitation of the good natured Plutarch, [Descartes] always preferred fruits and vegetables to the bleeding flesh of animals.’²²

Regardless of Descartes’ own feelings, it is superlatively ironic that this Cartesian mechanistic explanation of sympathy was turned into an argument for ethical vegetarianism in the eighteenth century. The fact that sympathy was an innate function of human anatomy convinced many that it was an embodiment of natural or divine law – especially since most people believed God had personally designed the human body. This came to underwrite the argument that sympathy was an innate source of moral and social principles, formulated by the ‘moral sense’ philosophers from the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) to Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) and David Hume (1711–76), until it was finally revised by Immanuel Kant (1724– 1804).²³ It became common to extrapolate the same argument onto sympathy for animals and for Jean-Jacques Rousseau this constituted a basis for animal rights. As the Dutch physician-philosopher Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) expressed it in 1714, because sympathy ‘proceeds from a real Passion inherent in our Nature, it is sufficient to demonstrate that we are born with a Repugnancy to the killing, and consequently the eating of Animals’.²⁴ At a time when natural observations carried as much force as biblical strictures, this deduction of natural law became one of the most potent arguments for vegetarianism. Anti-vegetarians fiercely responded by adopting the neo-Cartesian argument that sympathy should be subjugated to reason and to the scriptural permission to kill animals.

Even if Descartes was not one of those described by Malebranche, who knew animals were machines but still could not bring themselves to kill them, his extraordinary legacy influenced both sides of the medical and ethical vegetarian debate which flourished throughout the eighteenth century.

ELEVEN Tooth and Nail: Pierre Gassendi and the Human Appendix

In 1699 the anatomy lecturer at Surgeon’s Hall in London, Edward Tyson, made a breakthrough in the understanding of humanity’s relationship to beasts. For the first time in Western science, Tyson dissected the body of an ape, and to the fascination of all found that in nearly every way it resembled a human. He called it the ‘Orang-Outang’ – Malayan for ‘Man of the Woods’ – or in Latin, Homo sylvestris, and his specimen still stands in the upright posture of a human in the British Museum. The ‘Orang-Outang’ was in fact a young chimpanzee, but Tyson’s observations were nevertheless sensational and were still being consulted 150 years later when Charles Darwin (1809–82) devised his theory on the ‘missing link’.

Tyson’s chimp shed new light on the perennial question about the distinction between humans and animals: this ‘pygmie’, said Tyson, was ‘no man, nor yet a common ape but a sort of animal between both’. As far as he could see there was no difference between the two, even ‘the Brain in all Respects, exactly resembling a Man’s’. Contrary to expectations, Tyson believed this disproved the ancient atheist idea that man was just a sophisticated ape. In accordance with Descartes’ philosophy, Tyson argued that if there was no physical difference and yet animals still couldn’t speak or reason, man’s pre-eminence must reside in the ‘Higher principle’ of a rational soul. However, in the longer term, Tyson’s observations did lend force to the argument that humans were not essentially different from animals.

Tyson’s dissection has gone down as a landmark in the history of human self-knowledge, but its immediate impact is less well known. If the ape was corporally identical to humans, Tyson’s contemporaries began to wonder, mightn’t its habits tell us something about human nature? As one anxious reader (perhaps John Evelyn) scribbled in the margin of Tyson’s book Orang-Outang, King Charles I had to put down his court ape for being disturbingly lecherous.

Edward Tyson’s chimpanzee, before and after dissection (1699)

What about other natural appetites? Before he cut the poor chimp open, Tyson had been charmed by its virtuous temperance: it had got extremely drunk the first time someone gave it a jug of wine, but subsequently it restricted itself to just one glass with every meal, which proved, said Tyson, that the ‘Instinct of Nature teaches Brutes Temperance; and Intemperance is a Crime not only against the Laws of Morality, but of Nature too.’ The chimp also seemed to show that St Paul’s commandment against food taboos was a natural law, for it ate anything that was set before it, which – in the absence of any information on its natural feeding habits – led Tyson to suggest tentatively that ‘I can’t but think, (like a Man) that they are omnivorous.’

It is true that chimps do occasionally prey on monkeys but the ape we now call the orang-utan is exclusively herbivorous. Tyson and his contemporaries were confused about the difference between the great apes which made it difficult to collate behavioural observations with anatomical studies made back home. Travel books that Tyson quoted described other apes which ‘feed upon Fruits that they find in the Woods, and upon Nuts; for they eat no kind of Flesh’. If it was true that the apes were herbivorous and if their bodies were identical to man’s, wouldn’t that imply that humans were naturally designed to be herbivorous too? This set the stage for one of the most enduring and heated debates of the century: if man was an animal, what sort of an animal was he: carnivore or herbivore? What implications did this have for human nature: vicious or benign?¹

Immediately after dissecting the ape, Tyson released a series of articles ‘On Man’s feeding on Flesh’ in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. These were written in response to the enquiries of the ex-medical student, now Oxford Professor of Geometry and founder member of the Royal Society, John Wallis (1616–1703). As if the turn of the century demanded a new direction in thinking, Wallis and Tyson formally set out the new agenda: that man’s eating of meat was to be scrutinised on an empirical, rather than scriptural, basis. ‘Without disputing it as a Point of Divinity,’ declared Wallis, ‘I shall consider it (with Gassendus) as a Question in Natural Philosophy, whether it be proper Food for Man.’²

As Wallis noted, the empirical vegetarian tradition had in fact been inaugurated seventy years earlier by the philosopher ‘Gassendus’, or as he is known today, Pierre Gassendi. Gassendi shared Descartes’ detestation of the fusty old Aristotelian scholasticism, but rejected Descartes’ excessively speculative rationalism, and emphasised instead that human knowledge is based on empirical sensory experience. Though less well known than his adversary today, Gassendi’s resuscitation of Epicurean atomism spawned one of the most important philosophical movements in Europe. He taught such writers as Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–55), the big-nosed libertin érudit, and influenced a whole school of eighteenth-century materialists, ultimately paving the way for modern atomic theories.³

Given Epicurus’ reputation as an arch-atheist and hedonist, Gassendi was sailing close to the wind by espousing his materialist philosophy and he was constantly fending off accusations of being an atheist and drunken libertine himself.⁴ But Gassendi insisted that Epicurus was misunderstood: his ethic of attaining pleasure meant avoiding pain by detaching oneself from fleshly appetites, and Epicurus proved this by living a heroically sober and temperate life. The Epicurean diet, said Gassendi, far from being a gluttonous feast, was more like that of peasants and Pythagoreans ‘who live on nothing but bread, fruit and water, and who maintain themselves to a marvel, without hardly ever having need of doctors’.⁵ Epicurus took his temperance so far that he allegedly maintained ‘a total abstinence from Flesh’.⁶

With regard to the allegations of atheism, Gassendi was a Catholic abbot and professed an implicit faith in man’s immortal soul; but in opposition to Descartes’ impassable line between spirit and matter, Gassendi thought of the soul as a rarefied substance like a flame which pervaded and animated the body. Descartes’ definition of animals as soulless, mindless and thoughtless machines was consequently fallacious, since they too had an animating soul even if it was not immortal.

Developing his objections to Descartes in unison with Hobbes, Gassendi suggested that as everything in the human mind came there only by the senses, and as animals had the same organs of sense as humans, it seemed clear that animals would think just like humans. Gassendi claimed that animal thoughts were not essentially different from ‘reason’ and differed only in the degree of their perfection: ‘though animals do not reason so perfectly and about so many things as man, they still do reason,’ Gassendi wrote to Descartes in 1641, ‘though they do not utter human expressions (as is natural seeing they are not man) yet they emit their own peculiar cries, and employ them just as we do our vocal sounds.’⁷

By this time Gassendi’s dispute with Descartes on behalf of the animals was more than a decade old. In 1629, soon after leaving the company of Descartes’ friends in Paris, Gassendi travelled to northern Europe where he met another of the greatest intellectuals of the period, the chemist Jan Baptista van Helmont (1579–1644), father of Franciscus Mercurius the kabbalist. Of all subjects they could have chosen, Helmont and Gassendi engaged in a debate about vegetarianism which they later pursued in letters to each other, and which Gassendi finally built into one of the most influential philosophical works of the seventeenth century, the Syntagma Philosophicum (posthumously published in 1658).

Like Tyson and Wallis decades later, Gassendi’s principal argument was based on comparative anatomy, a discipline as old as Aristotle. Gassendi adapted this part of his argument from Plutarch’s essay ‘On the Eating of Flesh’ (1st century AD). Man, Plutarch had argued, ‘has no hooked beak or sharp nails or jagged teeth, no strong stomach or warmth of vital fluids able to digest and assimilate a heavy diet of flesh.’⁸ For Plutarch, the corporal design of the human body indicated that nature intended humans to be herbivorous.

A millennium and a half later, Gassendi produced the mandate for philosophical vegetarianism, by proclaiming that ‘The entire purpose of philosophy ought to consist in leading men back to the paths of nature.’ He gave new precision to Plutarch’s anatomical argument by pointing out that carnivores had sharp, pointed, unevenly spaced teeth, whereas the teeth of herbivores were short, broad, blunt, and closely packed in jaws that joined perfectly for effective grinding. Human teeth, with their prominent molars and incisors, he said, were most like the herbivores. Gassendi concluded that ‘Nature intended [men] to follow, in the selection of their food, not the first, namely the carnivorous, but the latter, which graze on the simple gifts of the Earth.’ This observation, he said, was corroborated by the herbivorous diet instituted by God in Eden and by the myths of the classical Golden Age: ‘in this time of innocence,’ Gassendi speculated, ‘man did not want to drench his hands in the blood of animals.’ Because our teeth weren’t properly designed for chewing flesh, he said, they couldn’t cope with all the membranes, tendons and sticky fibres, leaving too much work for our stomachs, overcharging the system with succulent juices and clouding the spirits. Fruit and vegetables, on the other hand were easy to break down into pulp.

Helmont’s interpretation of the facts was totally different. He insisted that man was a microcosmic combination of all the animals: he had the canine teeth of carnivores and the molar teeth of herbivores, and could be nourished by the flesh of them all. That flesh also tasted delicious and nourished the human body was clear proof that ‘it was permitted to man by his nature, to eat the flesh of animals’.⁹

Gassendi retorted that the similarities between ourselves and animals – rather than being a mandate for eating them – should teach us to recognise our consanguinity. Taking a sideswipe at ‘a celebrated man’ (presumably Descartes), Gassendi argued that in terms of anatomy ‘monkeys can pride themselves on having the same as us’; ‘notwithstanding they are earthly, they are coeval with us, however much we are used to despising them.’

‘So how come you do not abstain from eating meat?’ Gassendi imagined his opponent asking, to which he replied that his nature had been depraved by being brought up a carnivore, and that it would be dangerous to change his diet all of a sudden (a pervasive assumption rooted in ancient medicine¹⁰). But nevertheless, he conceded, ‘I admit that if I were wise, I would abandon this food bit by bit, and nourish myself solely on the gifts of the earth: I do not doubt that I would be happier for longer and more constantly in better health.’¹¹

It was ironic that Gassendi framed some of his arguments in opposition to Descartes, for this was just the sort of conclusion that Descartes appears to have come to. Perhaps when Descartes and Gassendi had their famous reconciliatory meeting in 1647, this was one of the topics they agreed upon. If the opinion of Descartes’ disciple, Antoine le Grand, is anything to go by, the Gassendists and Cartesians both agreed that humans were naturally herbivorous. In the Entire Body of Philosophy, According to the Principles of the Famous Renate des Cartes (1672), le Grand endorsed every point of Gassendi’s vegetarian argument. The fact that eating raw meat was instinctively repellent, he insisted, shows ‘that Flesh is not our Natural food, being only introduc’d by Lust, which hath quite changed our Nature from its Primigenial Inclination and Temper’. If a boy were raised on a natural fruitarian diet, le Grand speculated, he might ‘not be inferiour to Stags in running, nor to Apes in climbing of Trees’.¹²

Gassendi’s medical arguments developed into a long-lasting scientific tradition. This received a massive boost in 1678 when his major works were abridged and translated from Latin into French by an ex-pupil who had just returned from travelling in India and was now at the medical faculty of Montpellier.¹³ This vital redactor of Gassendi’s theories was no other than François Bernier, the most influential interpreter of Indian vegetarianism in seventeenth-century Europe – who suggested that abstaining from meat had originally been a rational practice based on the preservation of health and the inculcation of good morals. Although Bernier never said so in his travel writing, he had probably been predisposed to the medical arguments for vegetarianism by Gassendi, his friend and mentor.

In Bernier’s hands, Gassendi’s vegetarian arguments underwent a fascinating transformation. Gassendi had little empirical evidence that the vegetable diet really was as healthy as he hypothesised, but Bernier used his experience in India to show that vegetarians really were at least as healthy as meat-eaters. So, in Bernier’s Abrégé de la Philosophie de Gassendi, where Gassendi noted that ancient pagan philosophers and Christian ascetics lived on the vegetable diet, Bernier updated this information with the crucial contemporary fact that ‘even now many people of the East Indies still do’. Where Gassendi argued that the fortitude of herbivorous animals suggested that plants were very nourishing, Bernier inserted the comment that ‘the Indians who live on nothing else are just as strong, and at least as healthy as us’.¹⁴ And when Gassendi wrote that Diogenes, Seneca and Lucretius were exemplars of Epicurean frugality, Bernier appended an entire essay on the living ‘Indian Diogenes’, in order, he explained, ‘to shew that all these fine things we have spoken of, are not only bare Philosophical Speculations, but that there are whole Nations, who lead as sparing a Life’. The Brahmins, Banians and naked Indian fakirs eat hardly anything but lentils and rice, never eat flesh, and yet, said Bernier, ‘they live as contented, as quiet, and pleasant as we do, and far more Healthy, at least full as strong and lusty as we are.’¹⁵

Most intriguing of all – given his professional status as an academic physician – is Bernier’s attention to Indian medicine. Although he did not think much of their anatomical knowledge – and ridiculed them for fleeing every time he cut open an animal alive to demonstrate the circulation of the blood – he did think their medical practice could teach Europeans something, even though it ‘differs essentially from ours’. In his travelogue, Bernier noted that for Indians ‘the sovereign remedy for sickness is abstinence; nothing is worse for a sick body than meat broth.’ This went against the prevailing practice in France where feeble patients were considered in need of ‘strengthening’ with rich meat broths. And yet, Bernier noted that the Indian practice of abstinence from flesh seemed like an effective remedy, used by both Hindus and Muslims alike.¹⁶ In the Abrégé Bernier converted this into a full-blown defence of vegetarianism, arguing that meat broths did more harm than good and that ‘a great part of Asia believe them to be mortal to fever patients, and that this was, apparently, Hippocrates’ opinion, since he usually prescribes them nothing but oat broth’.¹⁷

Bernier adopted the Indian method of treatment by abstinence from flesh in his own medical practice: ‘I might mention also a Person of great Eminency, who was severely tormented with the Gout, but by my Advice, yielding to live one Year very abstemiously, and scarce to Eat any Flesh (according to the Custom of the Indians, who nevertheless are very healthy and strong, and are rarely troubled with such Distempers) was perfectly cured.’¹⁸ Indeed, Bernier had cured himself of such ailments as soon as he arrived in India. This, he extrapolated, was proof that vegetarianism was a healthy diet for anyone.

Not only did Bernier’s experience in India turn him away from the use of meat broths in medicine, it even seems to have convinced him that flesh-eating itself was bad for the health. Bernier, who despised Hinduism as a whole, ended up converting – at least on an intellectual plane – to what he saw as one of its principal doctrines.

Bernier forcefully injected the teaching of Indian medicine into the European tradition at exactly the time that other doctors were starting to revive the ancient Hippocratic use of therapeutic dieting. This was a medical reform that profoundly affected the understanding of lifestyle and which can be seen as the beginning of modern notions about balanced diets, the requirement of fresh vegetables and the nutritional viability of vegetarianism. Bernier thought the Indian doctors were leading the way.

In the 1670s the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), a doctor himself, spent fifteen months curing his own ailments among medical colleagues in Montpellier. He befriended Bernier, frequently quizzed him about India, avidly making notes in his diary on Indian physiology and metempsychosis; he read his travel narratives, which inspired him to study the other major works on Hinduism by della Valle, Lord, Roe, Ovington and Rogerius, and these provided the variety of cultural perspectives Locke employed in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).¹⁹ Locke agreed with Gassendi that animals could think, and he even seems to have been influenced by the ‘Hindu’ doctrine (reported by Rogerius) that humans were only more intelligent than animals because their brains (not their souls) were better constructed.²⁰

It may also have been thanks to Bernier that, in his widely used educational guidebook Thoughts Concerning Education (1692), Locke joined Gassendi in criticising the custom of weaning children onto meat, suggesting that they would be much healthier if they ‘were kept wholly from flesh the first three or four years of their lives’ – a practice he recognised was hardly likely to catch on among parents who were ‘misled by the custom of eating too much flesh themselves’. Like Bernier, Locke also recommended that most children’s ailments should be cured by ‘abstinence from flesh’, and in a conclusion that foreshadowed the social critiques of later vegetarian doctors, Locke attributed ‘a great part of our diseases in England, to our eating too much flesh, and too little bread’.²¹ The anatomical vegetarianism of Gassendi merged with the Indian example observed by Bernier and became a serious foundation for a reassessment of man’s natural diet.

Gassendi stressed that sensory observation was the means by which people acquired knowledge, and this Epicurean methodology underpinned the early Enlightenment’s emphasis on empirical observation. The similarity to Locke’s philosophical mantra has led many to suggest that Locke was deeply indebted to Gassendi, an assumption backed up by the fact that Locke spent hours in conversation with Bernier and owned a copy of the Abrégé.²² In the hands of Gassendi, Bernier and the members of the Royal Society in London, the vegetarian debate was shifted into this new empirical arena.

Bernier’s observations in India and his trials on his patients provided a new set of empirical data that appeared to substantiate Gassendi’s anatomical argument. Decades later, when John Wallis read about Tyson’s recent meticulous dissection of animals, he remembered Gassendi’s vegetarian treatise, and realised that here was yet another set of data that might shed light on the question. While Gassendi had focused on the morphology of the teeth, Tyson and Wallis extended the enquiry to the shape and function of animals’ guts. Wallis pointed out that herbivores tended to have intestines designed for slow digestion with a large colon and ‘caecum’ (a pouch between the small and large intestine). Carnivores, on the other hand, had little or no colon and the caecum was reduced to a small appendix or was completely absent, indicating a rapid digestion of food.

Wallis agreed that the human caecum was small and shrivelled but this was not necessarily natural, since the human foetus had a much larger, healthy caecum. Overall, the human intestines, Wallis and Tyson agreed, fell in line with the herbivores. So did those of the monkeys, baboons, apes and, as Tyson had shown, the Homo sylvestris whose guts were proportionally exactly the same dimensions as man’s.²³ On the basis of the evidence, Tyson grudgingly – but decisively – agreed with Gassendi, ‘that Nature never designed [Man] to live on Flesh; but, that the Wantonness of his Appetite, and a depraved Custom, has inured him to it.’ This was exactly the claim of the radical vegetarians. If Thomas Tryon had been in the habit of reading scientific papers he might have been enthralled to find his religious and moral theories so clearly backed up by the latest scientific research. But Tyson and Wallis were not ready to part with their ‘depraved’ meat dinners. Despite their recognition of the very strong evidence, they refused to endorse a return to the natural diet. ‘I am not fond of advancing a New Hypothesis, contrary to the common sense of mankind,’ said Wallis. ‘And I should not have ventured so far, if Gassendus had not first broken the ice.’²⁴ Wallis couldn’t face relinquishing meat, and instead he claimed that because meat-eating was universally practised it must be natural after all. Rather than accept the unpalatable conclusion that God intended he should be herbivorous, Tyson scuppered the entire basis of comparative anatomy and pointed out exceptions to the rule, such as the hedgehog and the opossum, the latter of which he had recently shown to have the gut of a herbivore but was carnivorous.²⁵

Paradoxically, the papers published by Wallis and Tyson presented evidence in favour of the herbivorous nature of man, but argued for the opposite. It was therefore used by both vegetarians and anti-vegetarians to support both sides of the debate for decades to come. John Evelyn read and marked up his copy of these papers, finding it most surprising, for example, that both Wallis and Tyson made the blunder of asserting that there were no vegetarian people on earth.²⁶ The eighteenth-century medical lecturers Boerhaave and Haller cited the articles to support their view that man was naturally omnivorous;²⁷ John Arbuthnot claimed that they proved man was ‘a carnivorous Animal’;²⁸ while the Italian vegetarian Antonio Cocchi, on the other hand, used the evidence to argue that the human gut showed we were supposed to be herbivores.²⁹

When naturalists started to divide all creatures on earth into a taxonomical system, Gassendi’s anatomical arguments remained profoundly influential.³⁰ In his seminal Historia Plantarum (1686–1704), the eminent botanist John Ray (1627–1705) asserted conclusively that ‘Certainly man by nature was never made to be a carnivorous animal, nor is he armed at all for prey and rapine, with jagged and pointed teeth and crooked claws sharpened to render and tear, but with gentle hands to gather fruit and vegetables, and with teeth to chew and eat them.’ The scientific evidence had obvious moral implications and he exclaimed against the unnatural consumption of ‘the reeking flesh of butchered and slaughtered animals’.³¹

Ray’s taxonomical research provided the foundations for the definitive work of Carl Linnaeus, whose ‘binomial system’ of classification is still in use today. In the first edition of the Systema naturae (1735), Linnaeus placed humans and apes in the same order, Anthropomorpha (Ray’s term which Linnaeus later changed to ‘Primates’), partly on the basis that man shared the four (distinctly herbivorous) incisors of apes, monkeys and sloths.³² Even this shocking decision – which still cordoned humans off into a genus (Homo) and even a whole family of their own – was nothing like as radical as what Linnaeus privately entertained; he wrote to a zoological colleague with the challenge: ‘I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character … by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none. I wish somebody would indicate one to me. But, if I had called man an ape, or vice-versa, I would have fallen under the ban of all ecclesiastics. It may be that as a naturalist I ought to have done so.’³³ This epoch-making recognition of human proximity to animals had a lesser-known corollary: in the same year Linnaeus – a physician by training – wrote his doctoral dissertation in which he argued that a comparison of the structure of the mouth, stomach and hands of the Homo sylvestris and other mammals demonstrated that fruit was the natural food for mankind and should therefore always be prescribed to patients whose bodies had been weakened by fever.³⁴ As royal physician and medical professor, Linnaeus kept Gassendi’s scientific vegetarian tradition alive in the Swedish university of Uppsala by encouraging his students to combine medical dietetics with anatomical analysis. For example, in 1757 the young Isaac Svensson submitted to Linnaeus a doctoral dissertation in which he argued that the most natural food for man was fruit, as was exhibited by children’s natural inclinations, the structure of the teeth, the Persians who fed on nothing but the fruit of palm trees and by the fruitarian ‘Gymnosophists, the wise men of India’.³⁵ By this time in European universities, the Indian vegetarians had taken on the mantle of the greatest adherers to the laws of human nature. While the Western world had long ago abandoned the vegetarian laws of nature, the Indians remained a constant reminder of what they had left behind.³⁶ These three sets of data – human anatomy, the Indian vegetarians, and the effects of the vegetable diet on ailing patients – were repeated time and time again by medical practitioners throughout the eighteenth century and beyond.

Enlightenment scientists were fixated on the concept of natural origins; in a divinely designed world, the narrative of ‘in the beginning’ held enormous sway. Even in the nineteenth century the radical Darwinist, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), noted that the human appendix was a ‘relic of an organ that was much larger and was of great service in our vegetarian ancestors.’³⁷ Still today scientists employ calipers to determine whether human teeth betray a herbivorous or carnivorous evolutionary origin and archaeologists examine prehistoric remains to discover when Homo sapiens first started hunting. Despite the recognition that ‘nature’ consists in continual flux, there still remains in Western culture a paradigm of the ‘natural’ which is supposed to define the fixed essence of our being.

At the same moment as Wallis and Tyson’s announcements in London, a similar gesture of turning to empirical evidence to shed light on the old vegetarian debate was made in the French academy by Louis Lémery (1677–1743) in his university textbook, the Traité des Aliments (1702), translated into English as A Treatise of Foods (1704). Lémery opened his entire discussion of food by addressing the formidable school of Gassendist vegetarians in the French academies who argued that because human anatomy was designed to be herbivorous, meat causes excessive fermentations and tends to ‘corrupt our Humours, and occasion divers Diseases’.³⁸ Rather than contradicting them in theory, Lémery acknowledged that man had lost touch with nature: ‘it looks as if the Food which the God of Nature designed for us, and what best agreed with us should be Plants, seeing that Mankind were never so hail and vigorous as in those first Ages, wherein they made use of them.’ But after a detailed discussion of all the issues, Lémery’s final conclusion, like that of Wallis and Tyson, was pragmatic:

it may be, if [meat] had never been used, and that Men had been content to feed upon a certain number of Plants only, it would have been never the worse for them: But it’s no longer a question to be disputed, and if it be an abuse, it has so long obtained by Custom in the World, that it is become necessary.³⁹

Though in practice few could imagine a world without chicken fricassée, on the theoretical front the vegetarians were making serious headway. So astonishingly widespread were views like these that one might reasonably see a coalescing intellectual orthodoxy. Scientists had ‘proved’ the old claim that man was originally a herbivore and meat-eating was an unnatural deviation from his intended diet. Academics across the board assented to Gassendi’s arguments – even those affiliated to rival schools of thought, including Cartesians such as Antoine le Grand and Hobbesians such as Pufendorf. That man was originally designed as a herbivore became a controversial medical fact accepted by scientists from all parts of Europe. But one question remained – was it feasible or desirable to bring man back from the path of corruption and return him to his natural diet? In the wake of the scientific case, a wave of practising doctors dedicated their careers to achieving just this. In the course of promoting vegetables as nutritious and meat as potentially damaging, this growing school of vegetarian medics laid the foundations for the modern understanding of diet and lifestyle.

TWELVE The Mitre and the Microscope: Philippe Hecquet’s Catholic Fast Food

At the beginning of the eighteenth century vegetarianism emerged as a powerful voice in France and other Catholic countries, by knitting scientific discoveries to the Church’s traditional teaching on abstinence. Many of the early Church fathers had been penitent ascetics, believing that luxury corrupted and abstinence was the key to purification. St Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian and St John Cassian concurred that meat was a lust-inducing luxury.¹ Good Christians did not have ‘unpleasing smells of meat amongst them’, said St John Chrysostom: ‘The increase of luxury is but the multiplication of dung!’² St Peter, St Matthew and St James were said to have lived entirely upon vegetables, and even the anti-vegetarian St Augustine maintained that Christ ‘allowed no animal food to his own disciples’.³

But while they agreed that abstinence was a virtue, the Church fathers equally insisted that it was not a sin to eat flesh.⁴ One of the principal purposes of religion was to show that the world had been made for man’s use. Even abstinence-endorsing texts like the Clementine Homilies assented to the orthodoxy that God made animals for man ‘to make fishes, birds, and beasts his prey’.⁵ Claiming otherwise was dangerously subversive and was indelibly associated with the pagan Pythagoreans and the heretic Manicheans and Cathars.⁶ ‘[Pythagoreans] abstain on account of the fable about the transmigration of souls,’ insisted Origen. ‘We, however, when we do abstain, do so because ‘‘we keep under our body, and bring it into subjection’’.’⁷ Animals had no rational soul, insisted St Augustine, and were a matter of indifference to humans. Hurling the Gadarene swine off a cliff, he said, twisting the meaning of the Gospels, was Christ’s way of showing ‘that to refrain from the killing of animals and the destroying of plants is the height of superstition’.⁸

Keeping heretical vegetarianism at bay, the Catholic Church instituted its own laws on periodical fasting that emphasised the virtues of abstinence. Eating flesh inflamed fleshly passions and was a luxury, so it was forbidden on fast days. The medieval Church banned flesh and even dairy products on half the days of the year; even in the comparatively lax seventeenth century, flesh was forbidden for the forty days of Lent as well as every Friday and other holy days. Fish, a cold sexless animal, did not contain the sanguine humours that stirred desires, so it was a permitted accompaniment to Lenten bread and vegetables (an interesting source of modern ‘piscatarian vegetarianism’). For most people, who could not afford fish or substitutes such as almond milk, the Lent diet was a meagre affair. For members of the strictest monastic orders such as the Carthusians and Capuchins, the same restrictions applied all the year round.⁹

It was partly this very institutionalisation of abstinence from flesh which meant that ‘vegetarianism’ as a separate religious position did not take hold as much in Catholic countries as it did in Protestant regions after the Reformation. Any Catholic who did branch out and make abstinence from flesh a doctrinal issue would be liable to immediate condemnation as a heretic. Contrariwise, during the Reformation, Protestants rejected Catholic fast laws, claiming that outlawing flesh constituted a blasphemous rejection of God’s gifts to man and was thus indistinguishable from heretical vegetarianism. John Calvin called the Catholic proscription of flesh a ‘sacrilegious opinion’.¹⁰ The humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, in his Epystell concerning the forbedynge of eatynge of fleshe (1534), suggested that Catholic fast police were unwise for punishing peasants who dared nibble on a dry bacon rind while the rich supped on sturgeon and hot spicy rocket ‘and such other thynges which kyndleth the genitales’.¹¹ It was missing the point of the fast to focus so particularly on the issue of meat-eating.

In England, Henry Holland, vicar of St Bride’s in London, proclaimed the Catholic fast a ‘doctrine of devils’ passed down to them from the Satanically inspired vegetarian Egyptian priests, the Persian magi and the ‘wizards of India’.¹² In Lenten Stuffe (1599), the satirist Thomas Nashe dismissed the ichthyic diet as useless ‘flegmatique’ food and depicted abstinent monks as ‘Rhomish rotten Pithagoreans or Carthusian friers, that mumpe on nothing but fishe’. He even implied that the continental temperance writers Luigi Cornaro and Leonard Lessius were part of a counter-Reformation conspiracy attempting to infiltrate Protestant countries with superstitious abstinence.¹³ Even John Donne snidely equated salad-eating with madness and Papism, ‘Like Nebuchadnezar perchance with grass and flowers,/ A sallet worse than Spanish dieting’.¹⁴ In the political arena, Queen Elizabeth trod the knife-edge of compromise. Though it remained illegal to eat flesh on fast days, the Acts of Parliament insisted that this was in order to alleviate the pressure on livestock, boost the fish trade, stimulate shipbuilding and thus support the navy – and ‘not for any superstition’.¹⁵ Some Protestants thought that watering down the Lenten fast was a bad idea. Sir William Vaughan, the American colonist, felt that the Elizabethan Acts failed to bridle the appetites of libertines, and suggested that a healthy dose of vegetarianism would do them good. But like Bacon and Bushell, he was at pains to insist that his dietary convictions were not a sign of Catholic superstition.¹⁶

While in England critics of meat-eating had to demarcate themselves from Catholicism, in France vegetarianism was often absorbed into the religious establishment. Whereas Bushell and Crab withdrew from society in order to pursue their vegetarian beliefs, across the Channel Armand-Jean de Rancé (1626–1700) used the monastic system as a means of publicly championing abstinence from flesh.

Rancé lived a worldly existence as a youth at the Parisian court until 1657 when the lady of scandalous reputation whom he adored and with whom he probably had a passionate affair, Marie, Duchess of Montbazon, died of scarlet fever. Renouncing his former life, Rancé turned to the revival of severe asceticism, bringing the Cistercian monastic order back to the rule of St Benedict which had forbidden ‘the eating of the flesh of quadrupeds’.¹⁷

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