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

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.

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