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

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 O NEG ODwithout 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 w chwere 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