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

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