The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

For most of his life at least, Evelyn relished good dishes of flesh; about a third of the recipes in a manuscript cookbook he wrote for his wife contain meat products, and even some recipes in Acetaria acknowledge that the salad is to serve as an accompaniment to mutton broth or minced beef. His diary entries – recording his delectation of oysters and especially home-caught game – reveal that he did not worry too much about what he actually ate; indeed he insisted that there was ‘no positive prohibition’ on eating flesh.26 Perhaps he considered himself vegetarian – indeed a vegetable! – even when he ate meat, for he observed that meat and men were made out of digested vegetation, so man ‘becoming an Incarnate Herb, and Innocent Cannibal, may truly be said to devour himself’.27 Only when he was staving off death in old age did Evelyn subject himself to a strict diet (which made his wife deeply anxious); this was apparently for the sake of his health, but perhaps the experience of writing Acetaria finally determined him to purify himself for the world that was to come.28

Beneath Evelyn’s polite compromising surface, however, lay a true passion. With a literal-mindedness that it is difficult to comprehend today, Evelyn, like many of his contemporaries, fervently believed that Christ’s second coming was on its way. His desire to reform the world to the conditions of Paradise was bound up with his preparation for Judgement Day. The idea of an establishment figure such as Evelyn espousing a religious theme usually associated with the radical mid-century may appear surprising, but many of his colleagues at the Royal Society were following Bacon’s lead, trying to recover the universal knowledge enjoyed by Adam in preparation for the millennium.29 Evelyn strove to differentiate himself from the radical Fifth Monarchy Men and other millenarian groups,30 but his impulses have much in common with Tryon’s yearning to recreate Paradise. Like Tryon, he quoted Isaiah’s prophecy of the millennium and claimed that Christ’s kingdom would be vegetarian: ‘the Hortulan Provision of the Golden Age,’ he said, ‘fitted all Places, Times and Persons; and when Man is restor’d to that State again, it will be as it was in the Beginning.’31

Like Tryon also, though the other way round, Evelyn transformed into a truth of immediate relevance the old legend that religious knowledge had been passed down from Adam to the nephews of Noah, through the British Druids, to the Brahmins and thence to Pythagoras and Plato. The pagans, he said, retained ‘some opinions, agreeable to the primitive truth’. Evelyn did not regard the Brahmins as a superior authority to Christian priests, as Tryon did, but the genealogy he gave them illuminated them with a spark of divinity: ‘it was from the people of God that they received their antient Traditions.’32 Along with the Brahmins and Pythagoreans, Evelyn noted that the ancient Chaldaeans, Assyrians and Egyptians were vegetable-eaters, and that this had made them ‘more Acute, Subtil, and of deeper Penetration’.33 Such beliefs, then, were not confined to marginal eccentrics like Tryon; they appear to have been widespread. Evelyn’s mentor John Beale joined with their friend and fellow fruit-enthusiast Samuel Hartlib in believing that the return of the Golden Age was about to be fulfilled, and added that the ancient knowledge recovered by the modern Europeans, Paracelsus and Robert Fludd had been passed down to them from the Eastern gymnosophists via the Druids.34

Given his belief in their common roots, Evelyn was particularly interested in the similarities between Christianity and Hinduism. In his own copy of John Marshall’s account of ‘the Heathen Priests commonly called Bramines’ (published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society) he excitedly pencilled marginalia on the features of Hinduism that appeared to agree with Christianity. He was intrigued to discover that the Hindus believed in a supreme immaterial God, heaven, hell and eternal life, that they practised ascetic fasting, and had a story about the original man in a garden being tempted by a woman, and of a flood destroying the earth until it was repopulated by a small band of survivors.35 Evelyn regarded the Hindus as distant relics of divine tradition, and this can only have spurred his interest in them. He was also an avid reader of the Indian travelogues; as well as the ancient Greek records on India and Bysshe’s Palladius, Evelyn had pored over the modern descriptions of India by Garcia d’Orta, Jacob Bondt, Johann Albrecht von Mandelslo, Duarte Barbosa, Pietro della Valle and others.36 Although he did not share Tryon’s enthusiasm, the Indians nevertheless played a crucial role in his vegetarian argument.

The biggest obstacle to Evelyn’s proselytisation of the ‘herby-diet’ was that most people thought it was not just ordinary to eat animals, but necessary for survival. While it may originally have been possible to live on vegetables, they thought that Noah’s Flood had sapped the earth of all its goodness, leaving the vegetables less nutritious than they had been; and that the human constitution had been slowly degraded and was now so feeble it needed the stronger nourishment of animal flesh.

To combat this, Evelyn trawled through ancient, medieval, Renaissance and modern texts ‘to shew how possible it is by so many Instances and Examples, to live on wholsome Vegetables, both long and happily’.37 Unfortunately for Evelyn, nearly all the vegetarians he found existed only in ancient records. Pythagoras, Adam and Eve, the inhabitants of the Golden Age were all long gone, shrouded in aeons of dust and beyond the reach of empirical observation.

But the Brahmins saved the day. In a triumphant declaration (and trying to conceal that the Brahmins were the only living example he could name), Evelyn cited ‘the Indian Bramins, Relicts of the ancient Gymnosophists to this Day, observing the Institutions of their Founder’ ‘who eat no Flesh at all’. These foreign vegetarians were not the unverifiable products of hearsay, but the extant people whose habits had frequently been recorded, as Evelyn proudly put it, in ‘the Reports of such as are often conversant among many Nations and People’, and ‘who to this Day, living on Herbs and Roots, arrive to incredible Age, in constant Health and Vigour’.38 He thought of India as a living Eden, a place ‘the most pleasant & smiling of the World’ where plants grew in their paradisiacal perfection, and he credited the travellers’ reports that the Garden of Eden had been situated on ‘Adam’s hill’ in Sri Lanka.39 The Golden Age itself might not be achievable, but vegetarianism was the closest mankind could get.

The fact that the Hindus were still alive provided one of the few pieces of concrete empirical evidence that the vegetable diet was really viable. It was empirical evidence that his colleagues at the Royal Society demanded, rather than the heap of classical authorities he had accumulated. Evelyn envisaged a wholesale experimental investigation into this vegetarian people designed to determine what exactly made them capable of living solely on vegetables ‘whether attributable to the Air and Climate, Custom, Constitution, &c.’ It was his opinion that such an enquiry would prove that living on vegetables was something all humans could do.

Evelyn has been hailed as a forebear of modern environmentalism for his campaign against urban degradation and for encouraging forest conservation and replanting. He revered trees as sacred, especially ancient natural ones, ‘such as were never prophaned by the inhumanity of edge tooles’. Evelyn harked back to the Druidic sacred groves and noticed that sylvan rites were scattered across the world – from Abraham’s Quercetum to the Indians’ holy Banian Tree.40 His famous treatise Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest Trees (1664) successfully encouraged English landowners to plant much-needed timber trees, which had been consumed by the greedy furnaces of the iron industry and ravaged by desperate commoners during the interregnum. Forests provided shelter for game, and the trees themselves produced food such as chestnuts (‘a lusty, and masculine food for Rustics’), beech-mast and acorns (‘heretofore the Food of Men … till their luxurious Palats were debauched’). Careful planting could provide country people with most of their food and drink ‘even out of the Hedges and Mounds’, making England more self-sufficient. Not only an act of political restoration, tree-planting, he concluded, was akin to God’s foresting of Paradise.41 Evelyn even lobbied Parliament to introduce laws to curb air pollution, revolted, like Tryon, by the ‘horrid stinks, uiderous and unwholsome smells’ emitted by the meat manufacturers, and the ‘rotten Dung, loathsome and common Lay Stalls; whose noisome Steams, wafted by the Wind, poison and infect the ambient Air and vital Spirits, with those pernicious Exhalations’.42

But although many of these themes seem similar to Tryon, Evelyn’s universe was fundamentally different. The existence of Hindus did help Evelyn to propose a more harmonious relationship with nature, and to reverse the artificial habits of urban society. But Hinduism did not make Evelyn step outside the confines of his religious orthodoxy. Nature did not have a value independent from mankind in the way it did for Tryon; nature, for Evelyn, was just part of God’s man-centred Providence. For Evelyn, creating harmony in and with nature was just a part of the human spiritual quest and a prerequisite for the millennium.

Nevertheless, whether it was his original intention or not, Evelyn did formulate a new position for the status of man’s relations with animals. Having empirically demonstrated that the vegetable diet was viable, Evelyn shifted the ground on which stood the usual justification for killing and eating animals. While most regarded meat-eating as a necessary cruelty – determined by the order of nature and the constitution of man – Evelyn had shown it to be nutritionally unnecessary. If meat-eating was unnecessary, the cruelty it entailed could be considered morally reprehensible. Evelyn did make emotional and moral appeals against ‘the cruel Butcheries of so many harmless Creatures; some of which we put to merciless and needless Torment’. Now that he had shown that it was possible to live by the innocent sport of gardening without shedding a drop of blood, he could judge that meat-eating was cruelty and intemperance.43

A similar idea is suggested in Book XV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses where Pythagoras points out that ‘The prodigall Earth abounds with gentle food;/ Affording banquets without death or blood.’44 But Evelyn made it relevant by transforming it from an ancient poetic ideal into a scientific observation. In that the Brahmins were a keystone in Evelyn’s rational, empirically substantiated argument, Hinduism had a role in developing a new position with regard to animals.

The case for or against Brahmin vegetarianism became the subject of a much wider controversy at the end of the seventeenth century. The disagreement escalated into a pitched battle between the so-called ‘Moderns’ (who believed that modern science had advanced humanity to its highest pinnacle ever) and the ‘Ancients’ (who held that antique civilisations were superior). Evelyn, who had always tight-roped between the two, found that the Brahmins suited his compromise perfectly: they had the hallowed stamp of antiquity and stood up to modern empirical scrutiny. But others thought that simplistic conjectures about ancient vegetarians were outweighed by the statistical evidence on modern ascetic monks at home. ‘There are many Monastical persons now that live abstemiously all their lives,’ wrote Thomas Burnet, chaplain to William of Orange, in The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684–91), ‘and yet they think an hundred years a very great age amongst them.’ Burnet concluded that vegetarianism ‘might have some effect, but not possibly to that degree and measure that we speak of.’45

The ambassador to the Dutch, Sir William Temple (1628–99), picked up the gauntlet as principal protagonist of the Ancients and was later defended by his secretary Jonathan Swift in A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books (1704).46 Temple argued, like Evelyn (who admired Temple’s garden estate), that conclusions based on modern Catholic monks were nugatory because people would have to be vegetarian for generations before purging themselves of the malignant effects of meat-eating. It was necessary instead to find examples who had sustained vegetarianism for many ages. The Brahmins, observed Temple, were the most ancient of all philosophers and he made them the heroes of his ‘Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning’ (1690). The Moderns were dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants and could see a long way, he conceded; but the Greek and Roman ancients had been standing on the shoulders of even greater giants – the Brahmins. These Indian philosophers were the originators of Greek ideas from vegetarianism to the eternity of matter and the four cardinal virtues, which, he said, ‘seem all to be wholly Indian’. Their modern descendants, ‘the present Banians’, had preserved their secret to long life which had long since been lost in the West. They were the only people to have carried into a state of advanced civilisation the original laws of nature which were elsewhere only visible in primitive tribes. ‘Their Justice, was exact and exemplary,’ said Temple of the Brahmins, ‘their Temperance so great, that they lived upon Rice or Herbs, and upon nothing, that had sensitive Life.’ ‘It may look like a Paradox to deduce Learning, from Regions accounted commonly, so barbarous and rude,’ he declared, but it was only the bigoted Eurocentrism of the Moderns that had erased the fact that the West’s greatest qualities were derived from the ancient East.47 Temple’s dressing up of the Brahmins in the garb of the Enlightenment was such a powerful spin that when the Modern chaplain William Wotton refuted Temple, he did so by going for Pythagoras’ jugular and lambasting the Brahmins. Their vegetarianism, he argued, was based on nothing but the doctrine of transmigration – ‘a precarious idle Notion, which these besotted Indians do so blindly believe, that they are afraid of killing a Flea or a Louse’. The Brahmins’ chief employment for the last three thousand years, concluded Wotton derisively, has been depriving themselves of the lawful conveniences of life.48

Freed from its superstitious husk and recommended as a rational pursuit of nature’s laws, Indian vegetarianism was championed by some of the most admired thinkers of the day. At exactly the same time that Tryon was flooding the popular market with his spiritual polemics, Evelyn and Temple were enshrining the Indian vegetarians in the mainstream of intellectual debate. The Brahmins were held up as torches lighting the way to a true understanding of health, nutrition and an ethical responsibility towards nature.

SEVEN The Kabbala Stripped Naked

Baron Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont (1618–98) had never been comfortable with the settled life of a manorial lord. He had been persecuted by the Inquisition in his Catholic homeland of Louvain, near Brussels, and had, at an early age, escaped to become a ‘wandering hermit’ in more liberal countries. Filled with philosophical ardour, in 1670 he set out on a quest to England, determined to propagate a great theological discovery: that reincarnation was a true doctrine, compatible with the fundaments of Christianity. He hoped to find support in England because there had been a resurgence of interest in reincarnation there. Although widely criticised, his controversial arguments won the ear of some leading philosophers. John Locke, though deeply sceptical, spent many hours in conversation with Helmont and carefully studied his many books.1 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), the leading natural philosopher in Hanover, adapted his notions into the influential theory of Preformation according to which organisms grew from pre-existent microscopic life-forms. Helmont carved another inroad through which exotic sources influenced European ideas about the moral status of animals.

One of Helmont’s first ports of call in England was Henry More (1614–87), the leading figure among the Cambridge Platonists. This band of academics had for decades sought to introduce into Christianity ideas drawn from the philosophies of Plato and Pythagoras, such as the existence of a world-soul which infused all of creation. Like his contemporary Gerrard Winstanley, More abhorred cruelty to animals and he thought that their souls – effluxes of the world soul – might be immortal, though he did not believe that they reincarnated into humans or vice versa.2 However, he did argue that human souls had existed in a former state and incarnated on earth to live a life or two of atonement for a sin they had committed in a pre-existent state.3 This doctrine of ‘pre-existence’ was similar enough to Helmont’s beliefs for Helmont to hope that he could convert More to his cause.

Helmont had adopted the belief in reincarnation after studying the Kabbala – mystical Jewish texts written down from the twelfth century AD onwards. In early kabbalist writings reincarnation (called gilgul in Hebrew) only applied to humans,4 but by the fourteenth century kabbalist texts such as the Zohar were claiming that human souls could descend into animals and even into inanimate objects for punishment and expiation until they were ready to return to God. In 1677 with the help of a team of Rabbis, Helmont and the Christian Hebrew scholar Knorr von Rosenroth published the first Latin translations of kabbalist texts. The title of their groundbreaking book was the Kabbala Denudata, or ‘The Kabbala Stripped Naked’ and it aimed to unite Christians, Jews and pagans into the one true faith. In it they included two texts on reincarnation by the sixteenth-century kabbalist cult-leader from the holy city of Zefat, Rabbi Isaac ben Solomon Luria (1534–72) and his follower Chaim Vital (1543–1620). Luria had taught that the earth was animated by sparks which had fallen from the primordial spiritual body of Adam and that in order to return from their fallen state these sparks, or souls, had to pass through an ascending cycle of reincarnations.5 As Henry More explained in an essay which was printed in the Kabbala Denudata: ‘Every spirit found in a bit of gravel is liable to be transformed into a plant, and from the plant into an animal, from the animal to a human being, and from the human being to an angel, and from the angel to God himself.’6

The belief that lower beings had souls did not necessarily mean it was wrong to kill animals. On the contrary, when an animal was ritually sacrificed its soul, or spark, was released from its bestial prison. But it did encourage the compassionate treatment of animals.7 The cult of compassion that grew up among the kabbalists led to legends that Isaac Luria was a vegetarian and considered unkindness to animals (tzaar baalei chaim) a sin and a hindrance to the achievement of perfection. Vital apparently claimed that the ascetic Luria loved God’s creatures so much that he never killed an insect, even an annoying one like a mosquito or fly.8

Helmont adapted Luria’s system of reincarnation to accord with Christian doctrines like the resurrection, and in several of his own works he tried to convince others to follow his lead.9 It may seem mystical and slightly mad, but this optimistic theodicy was dangerously seductive for liberal Christians who were tired of fire and brimstone. Fitting reincarnation into the Christian world view justified God by giving sinners another stab at salvation.10 According to orthodox Christian belief, souls born into tribes of cannibalistic savages had no chance of becoming Christian and no chance of getting to heaven. Instead of believing that such souls were plunged directly – and eternally – into hell, Helmont suggested that they would be progressively reincarnated until they were reborn as Christians.11 Like Luria, Helmont believed that this held for all members of the creation, so that even the souls of wild animals, by ‘an advance and melioration’, would eventually incarnate in a Christian and be saved.12 He even developed the kabbalists’ notion that God carefully balanced the birth and death rates of animals and humans in order to ensure a steady flow up the chain of being.13 Helmont was ashamed that Christians – who should have been the enlightened ones – were labouring under the mental tyranny of hell, while Jews (and even pagans!) were guided in their actions by the ‘wise and solid Notion’ of reincarnation.14

Kabbalæ Denudatæ (1684)

For most of Helmont’s contemporaries it seemed obvious that the kabbalists’ gilgul was just a rehashed version of the Pythagorean and Indian doctrine of metempsychosis.15 This very accusation had always been levelled – perhaps correctly – at kabbalists within the Jewish community. Indeed, similar anxieties about importing pagan doctrines into Christianity can be traced back to the beginning of the Renaissance when the Byzantine theologian George Gemistos Pletho (1355–1450/ 52) first introduced Plato and Strabo’s account of India to the Italian humanists. It was from these texts, as well as some recent accounts of India (perhaps by Marco Polo), that Pletho discovered that all wise men, from Zoroaster to the Brahmins, believed in reincarnation. In favour of these venerable authorities, Pletho abandoned Christianity’s comparatively recent innovations, and converted to the ancient doctrine of metempsychosis.16 In the ensuing uproar, Pletho’s books were burned by the Patriarch of Constantinople and the chapters in which he addressed the issue of meat-eating are lost. But his works on metempsychosis survived and were reprinted in 1689 and 1718, just when there was a renewed interest in reincarnation in Europe.17

Helmont insisted, like More and many of their Jewish predecessors, that in fact it was Pythagoras and the Hindus who had learnt the doctrine from the Jews, not vice versa.18 His aim, he explained, was to reinstate reincarnation ‘corrected, reformed, and stripped of that disguised and deformed shape … purged of those Mistakes, and reduced to the Primitive streightness and simplicity’, ‘and so accommodated to the Principles of Christian Religion’.19 Initially, Helmont met with considerable success. A splinter group of Helmontians emerged, defending his claim that gilgul was a scriptural doctrine not a Platonic incursion. In the 1690s Reincarnationists were identified by one Anglican critic as being among the worst three dissenting movements of the age. Christians warned that the belief in reincarnation dissolved the fundamental difference between animals and humans.20

Surprisingly, Helmont converted the prominent Quaker George Keith, noted for his enthusiasm about the virtue of the Brahmins. Keith realised that Helmont’s doctrines could reconcile the orthodox tenet that one had to believe in Christ, with his passionate feeling that people who had never heard of Christ could still get to heaven (by being reincarnated as Christians).21 The entire Quaker community on both sides of the Atlantic was polarised by Keith’s controversial kabbalistic reforms. When he gave a sermon in Philadelphia the crowd rioted and the magistrates smashed down his podium with axes. Keith’s followers destroyed the podium of his opponents and he was eventually ejected from the Society of Friends because of his equivocation about transmigration.22

Christian believers in reincarnation were predisposed to be sympathetic to the suffering of animals. But they kept a strong arm between themselves and heretical vegetarianism. This was articulated in 1661 when an anonymous author from More’s set (probably George Rust) championed the Platonic doctrines of the heretic Church father Origen in A Letter of Resolution concerning Origen and the Chief of his Opinions.23 Origen was famous for being vegetarian, but Rust reiterated Origen’s categorical denial (against the accusations of St Jerome) that this had anything to do with Pythagorean superstition. Origen did believe that animals’ souls would be resurrected on the Day of Judgement, but Rust insisted that Origen never believed that humans could reincarnate into animals.24 This ancient debate was resuscitated in a European-wide spate of Origenist works by several theologians, including the extraordinary Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721). Huet later went on to argue that Pythagoras and the Brahmins had taken their doctrines from the Jews,25 and apparently commissioned the Jesuit missionary in India, Father Bouchet, to compose a detailed essay distinguishing Origen’s doctrines from Hindu and Pythagorean metempsychosis and vegetarianism.26