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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ