Tristram Stuart - The Bloodless Revolution - Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

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.

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