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

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      The Golden Age, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses

      Bushell was indulging in the common feeling that the biblical story of original harmony was analogous to the classical Greek and Roman myth of the Golden Age, when justice reigned, iron was yet to be invented and no animals were slaughtered. In 1632, just before Bushell’s masque, the travelling poet George Sandys had published his extremely influential translation and commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Sandys portrayed the Golden Age menu of wild blackberries, strawberries, acorns and ‘all sorts of fruit’ in a much more appetising light than translators hitherto, and added enthusiastically that ‘this happy estate abounding with all felicities, assuredly represented that which man injoyed in his innocency: under the raigne of Saturne, more truly of Adam.’¹⁴ Eating meat, he added, was ‘a priviledge granted after to Noah; because [‘hearbes and fruits’] then had lost much of their nourishing vertue’. Meat-eating, according to this reasoning, was an unfortunate consequence of the Flood. In the climactic finale of Metamorphoses, Pythagoras comes forward and delivers a lengthy diatribe against eating animals – ‘How horrible a Sin, / That entrailes bleeding entrailes should intomb! / That greedie flesh, by flesh should fat become!’ Sandys noted that Pythagoras’ vegetarianism was an attempt to reinstate the peacefulness of the Golden Age because killing animals proceeded ‘from injustice, cruelty, and corruption of manners; not knowne in that innocent age’.¹⁵ Pythagoras’ example was an inspiration to early vegetarians like Bushell.

      Giving up meat altogether may have been rather quirky in early seventeenth-century England, and Bushell was well aware that his notions could be mistaken for ‘the Chymera of a phanatick brain’.¹⁶ He further risked his reputation by successfully lobbying the government to release from prison several members of religious groups who were also trying to reinstate the conditions and even the diet of Eden, such as the Rosicrucians, the Family of Love and the Adamites (who took the Adamic lifestyle to its extreme by shedding their clothes and living in the naked purity of Eden before the figleaves).¹⁷

      It may seem as if Bushell had by this time descended into a religious dream world, but his extreme diet was endorsed by scientific rigour. Bushell’s immersion into vegetarianism was an act of religious fervour, but it was simultaneously the realisation of a Baconian project: he presented himself as a human guinea-pig in Bacon’s ‘perfect experiment’ for lengthening human life on a vegetarian diet. As Bushell said, his dietary attempt to gain a long and healthy life was based on that of ‘our long liv’d fathers before the flood’. It was statistically evident that the average age of the ‘antediluvian’ patriarchs was in excess of 900 years, topped by Adam’s descendant, Methuselah, who lived to 969 (Genesis 5). What – everyone wanted to know – was the secret of their longevity?¹⁸ Once permission to eat meat was granted after the Flood, human life expectancy plummeted from 900 to the current average of around 70. It seemed at least plausible to the enquiring mind that it was eating meat that had curtailed human life so dramatically;¹⁹ perhaps by relinquishing it one could regain some of those lost years. This may sound like it competes in crankiness with today’s diet-doctors, but few then dared doubt the basic facts set out in the Bible. Even the philosopher René Descartes seems to have believed it. It may seem surprising that religious extremes and experimental philosophy coincided in such a spectacular way, but it was a trend that would continue for at least two centuries. Bacon and Bushell raised many of the questions about vegetarianism that dominated the ensuing debate.

      Far from being the exclusive territory of extremists, undoing certain effects of the Fall was also the basis of Bacon’s intellectual endeavour. Bacon’s idea of the reclamation of Adamic knowledge became the manifesto for the seventeenth-century advancement of learning. The utopian reformers of the Civil War period Jan Amos Comenius and Samuel Hartlib hoped that their new system for universal education, or pansophism, would restore ‘Light, Peace, Health … and that golden age which has ever been longed for’. Their contemporary, the radical doctor Nicholas Culpeper, promised that his brand of the regulated temperate diet could mitigate malign celestial influences and make life on earth ‘a terrestiall Paradise to him that useth it’.²⁰ The kabbalists Knorr von Rosenroth and Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont believed that reclaiming knowledge would reinstate the harmony ‘which so many thousands of Christians have wished and groaned for, for such a long time’.²¹ Even members of the Royal Society – the pinnacle of British scientific exploration chartered by Charles II in 1662 – thought that they were gradually working mankind back to the universal knowledge enjoyed in Paradise.²²

      Bushell’s idealistic vegetarianism fitted hand in glove with the intellectual project inaugurated by his master Francis Bacon. Bacon’s experimental philosophy would restore mankind to the universal knowledge lost in Adam’s Fall and discover the secret to longevity. СКАЧАТЬ