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

Чтение книги онлайн.

      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

      Charles Gildon, a shady figure in the literary world, used the oriental perspective to attack orthodoxy in his Golden Spy (1709).⁶⁶ In The Oracles of Reason (1693), which he compiled with Charles Blount, he used the antiquity of Chinese and Indian culture, just as the Turkish Spy had done, to undermine faith in the absurdly dwarfish history in the Bible.⁶⁷

      Gildon’s anonymously published The Post-boy rob’d of his Mail (1692), as the title suggests, is a miscellany of letters like the Turkish Spy, and one of the letters contains a rare account of Thomas Tryon’s followers. Gildon co-opted Tryon’s vegetarianism into an anti-Christian political statement by emphasising that Tryon derived his beliefs from the Hindus, not from Christian Scripture, and that he thought eating ‘our Brethren and Fellow-Creatures’ was ‘Opression’ and ‘qualifies Men to be sordid, surly, and Soldiers, Hunters, Pirates, Tories, and such as wou’d have the bestial Nature fortify’d; that they might act like Lions, and Devils, over their own kind as well as over all other Creatures’.⁶⁸ So it seems that Gildon, Blount, and possibly the authors of the Turkish Spy, recognised some common ground between their own views and Tryon’s vegetarianism. Gildon may have been encouraged to do this by their mutual friend Aphra Behn. Perhaps the vegetarian ideas in the Turkish Spy were inspired by or even supposed to be a mockery of Tryon.⁶⁹

      Although Tryon subscribed to all sorts of mystical inventions, he shared with the radical sceptics a desire to erode traditional orthodoxies. His ‘East-Indian Brackmanny’ is a precursor of Mahmut as an Oriental vegetarian critic of Western society, and his Letters From Averroes (1695) combines this Oriental critique with the letter format which slyly uses a Muslim character to challenge Christian dogmatism.⁷⁰

      At the end of the seventeenth century the vegetarian question was as prominent as it ever has been in Western intellectual debate. The parameters of culture were shifting radically. The exclusive powers of the Church were giving way to unorthodoxy, empiricism and relativism. Political turmoil and monarchy in Britain were replaced, in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, by constitutional democracy which fostered open-minded debate. Enlightened intellectual movements combined with new access to information on foreign cultures to challenge traditional values. Fundamental assumptions were under constant review, and the right to eat meat was one of them. With the flood of information on the vegetarian Indians, more and more people were questioning their long-held belief that eating animals was a natural, necessary part of human life. There were so many prominent thinkers from widely different intellectual backgrounds who were challenging the practice of killing animals that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the late seventeenth century harboured a vegetarian renaissance. In many minds at least, there had been a bloodless revolution.