The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

Using the behaviour of the Hindus as a permanent backdrop to his enthused writings, Tryon extended his critique of man’s treatment of animals into a wholesale attack on European degradation of the natural world. He observed that man was the only species so unclean that it irreparably defiled and polluted its own living quarters: ‘even the very Swine, will keep their Styes and Kennels sweet and clean,’ he exclaimed.78 Like several of his contemporaries, he was disgusted by urban pollution. In ‘The abundance of Smoke that the multitude of Chimnies send forth’, he detected ‘a keen sharp sulpherous Quality’, which he blamed for increasing humidity in the air and causing ‘Diseases of the Breast’. He deplored the peer pressure that had fuelled the spread of tobacco-smoking, correctly recognising the symptoms of addiction, some of the health impacts, and that children of smokers were more likely to pick up the habit. He even complained against passive smoking as it did ‘so defile the common Air’.79

In a cycle that anticipates ecological thought, Tryon observed pollution escaping into ‘Rivers which receive the Excrements of Cities or Towns’, enveloping the habitat of other species such as fish, and then returning – in the form of caught fish – to humans as polluted food.80 In Tryon’s ‘The Complaints of the Birds’, American birds protest against the destruction of forests by encroaching Europeans: ‘thou takest liberty to cut them down … we are thereby disseized of our antient Freeholds and Habitations,’ they cry.81 The problem with this world, declaimed Tryon, was ‘this proud and troublesome Thing, called Man, that fills the Earth with Blood, and the Air with mutherous Minerals and Sulphur’.82

Tryon warned that the excessive demand for animal products like wool was over-stretching natural resources, especially since intensive farming had turned animals into ‘a grand Commodity, and (as it were) a Manufacture’.83 He deplored the phenomenon of consumerism which ‘causes great seeming Wants to be where there is not real or natural cause for it’.84 People wouldn’t pay a farthing for pointless luxuries like civet and coffee if they were available on Hampstead Heath, ‘and if Hogs Dung were as scarce, its probable it might be as much in esteem’. He called on Europeans to stop ‘ransack[ing] the furthest corners of the Earth for Dainties’, encouraging them instead to be satisfied with the produce of their own soil.85 Meanwhile, Tryon imagined, the Hindus lived in total harmony with creation. Fruit and vegetables required less labour-intensive methods of production. By restricting themselves to the vegetable diet, the Hindus subsisted without needing to rape and pillage the planet as Westerners did.86

Even though his universe was essentially theocentric,87 by putting man in the balance with the animals Tryon anticipated the shift from anthropocentrism to the biocentrism of modern ecological thought. While orthodox Christians tended to insist that all creatures had been made solely for man’s use, Hinduism helped Tryon to develop a system that resembles, and would later be developed into, environmentalism. Surprising though it may seem, given modern history’s usual emphasis on the West’s overbearing influence on its colonies, the encounter with India in the seventeenth century opened the door to a different moral premise and this in turn stimulated a revision of European thought and practice.

Tryon, however, did not place all his eggs in one altruistic basket. He emphasised that vegetarianism was also in the interests of people themselves. Far more efficiently than alchemy, he said, vegetarianism profited mankind by giving them the secret to lifelong health and making them rich by saving money on food. But some of his ‘self-interest’ arguments were the most unconventional of all his ideas. So before leaving the image of Tryon as a prophet of modern environmentalism, we should delve a bit deeper into his philosophy.

It all goes back to the 1650s when Tryon’s attention was first drawn to the Brahmins. Tryon’s favourite book was the Three Books of Occult Philosophy by the sixteenth-century arch-magician from Cologne, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa.88 Tryon probably acquired the 1651 English translation when, as a hatter’s apprentice in London, he was trying to train as a magician. This manual of demonic magic was Tryon’s Bible and although he never once named Agrippa (no doubt wishing to avoid censure for having devoted himself to the work of a notorious heretic), he nevertheless built his ideas around Agrippa and frequently copied out whole gobbets from the Occult Philosophy into his own works.89 In Agrippa’s chapter ‘Of abstinence … and ascent of the mind’, Tryon came across the magician’s recommendation that aspiring wizards and those who wished to communicate with God should pursue the vegetarian diet of Pythagoras and the Brahmins:

We must therefore in taking of meats be pure, and abstinent, as the Pythagorian Philosophers, who keeping a holy and sober table, did protract their life in all temperance … So the Bragmani did admit none to their colledge, but those that were abstinent from wine, from flesh, and vices …90

Tryon was overawed by Agrippa’s instruction and made it his favourite maxim, repeating it time and time again and adapting it to his own purposes. Shrewdly, he spliced these pagan practices into the mainstream of Western beliefs by claiming that this diet was pursued by all the ‘Wise Ancients’ including the biblical patriarchs.91

Agrippa’s recipe of abstinence was famous among the mystics and magicians of the 1650s, and it may have been the inspiration behind the fasting techniques employed by Thomas Tany, John Pordage and even Roger Crab, who believed, like Agrippa, that ascetic purity was the path to making contact with the ‘aerial spirits’.92 Justice Durand Hotham, in his widely read Life of Jacob Behmen (1654) noted that many had tried Agrippa’s dietary short cut to spiritual illumination.93

The ancient philosophers of Egypt, Babylon, Persia and Ethiopia held a legendary status as the most proficient adepts in magic, astrology and abstruse spiritual philosophy.94 As one of Tryon’s contemporaries wrote: ‘all those who apply themselves to the Study of these Ænigma’s, go into the Indies, to improve by their Skill, and to discover there the Secrets of Natural Magick’.95 Even John Locke asked a friend in India to find out if the Indians really managed to work magic. Vegetarianism was seen as the key to the Brahmins’ spiritual enlightenment and magical powers.96

It was from Agrippa that Tryon picked up the idea that the Brahmins were great wise men, and since they were the only surviving strain of the prisci theologi after the demise of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, it was logical for anyone looking for vestiges to turn to them. It was also from Agrippa that Tryon absorbed the notion that man was a microcosm, or compact image, of the universe. Like the Renaissance Neoplatonist Pico della Mirandola, Tryon believed that both Pythagoras and Moses held this doctrine. But Tryon transformed this archaic idea by arguing that it was their fundamental rationale for vegetarianism.97

Since man and the universe were both created in the image of God it followed that everything in the universe had a corresponding miniature equivalent in man, and between these corresponding parts Tryon believed there was a hidden sympathetic affinity.98 Agrippa taught that man could exert magical powers by exploiting these ‘sympathetic’ forces; but Tryon became much more worried about the influence they had on man.99 If you ate an animal, he warned, the part of your nature that corresponded with its nature would be stirred up and you would become like the beast you had eaten. ‘For all things have a sympathetical Operation,’ he explained, and ‘every thing does secretly awaken its like property’.100

Still worse, when an animal was killed, in its flesh welled up all the spirits of fury, hatred and revenge, ‘for when any Creature perceives its Life in danger, there is such struggling and horror within, as none can imagine.’101 The result of eating a plate of spiritual turmoil was obvious: ‘those fierce, revengeful Spirits that proceed from the Creature, when the painful Agonies of Death are upon it … fail not to accompany the Flesh, and especially the Blood, and have their internal operation, and have their impression on those that eat it, by a secret, hidden way of Simile’.102 The furious spirits in dead animal flesh stirred up violent passions in the consumer, and by occult communication they could even bring down malign astrological influences causing famine, war and pestilence.103 Herbs and seeds, on the other hand, did not lose their lively seminal virtues when harvested.104 ‘Vegetives,’ he explained (punning on the Latin vegeto – to live), are ‘filled with Powerful Lively brisk Spirit and Vertue.’105 Eating them made the eater so.

It may seem like a paradox that Tryon forbade eating animals out of both reverence for their life and disgust at the pollution they bring, but this was a dual ethic shared by Christian ascetics such as John Chrysostom and Hindu scriptures such as the Laws of Manu which regulated meat-eating because of both ‘the disgusting origin of flesh and the cruelty of fettering and slaying corporeal beings’.106 Tryon united them in his critique of meat-eating.

Tryon carried Agrippa’s theories of sympathy into his ideas of the afterlife, and fused them with the belief in reincarnation that he read about in the Indian travelogues. In a complete reversal of orthodox priorities, Tryon gave greater weight to Pythagorean-Hindu doctrines than to Judaeo-Christian revelation and created his own hybrid metaphysical Neoplatonic-Christian-Hinduism. The idea of Christians converting to pagan beliefs was probably the most abhorrent scenario anyone could imagine. And yet Tryon did so with delight. Like Agrippa, he believed that after death badly behaved souls sympathetically attracted to themselves the form of the animal they had behaved most like during life. Agrippa himself had moulded this system by fusing ideas from Plato, Plotinus, the Kabbala, Hermeticism and the heretical Church father Origen. But Tryon added the vegetarian idea that it was flesh-eating that constituted the cardinal sin that made one take on the form of a vicious beast: ‘such as have by continual Violence Oppressed and Killed the Unrevengeful Animals, their Souls and Spirits shall be precipitated and revolved into the most Savage and Brutish Bodies.’107

This was similar to the received wisdom about Hindu reincarnation – that immoral behaviour causes the soul to be reincarnated in an animal – but Tryon insisted that neither he nor the Hindus believed that animals had immortal souls.108 Instead of reincarnating into animal bodies on earth, Tryon explained that the afterlife was more like an everlasting nightmare, which did not have material existence: ‘These strange phansies,’ he explained, ‘put the captivated Soul into unexpressible fears & agonies … continuing forevermore in this doleful torture & perplexity, yea the predominating quality gives the form to the new Body, viz. of a Dog, Cat, Bear, Lion, Fox, Tyger, Bull, Goat, or other savage Beasts’.109

Tryon tried to reconcile this with the Christian belief in resurrection, pointing out that in the Bible it said that outside the gates of heaven ‘are Dogs, Bears, Lyons and the like Beasts of Prey’; these, Tryon claimed, were the souls of wicked men.110 He deftly used the powers of microcosmic sympathy to explain both the Christian and Hindu system, thus suggesting that they were branches of the same true religion. Needless to say, he did not fool his adversaries. John Field – ever on the lookout for chances to discredit Tryon – was appalled, demanding ‘where doth the Scripture so say, or speak of being Cloathed with Hellish shapes in the next World?’111

By stepping outside the usual bounds prescribed by the religious authorities in Europe, Tryon developed a metaphysical rationale for vegetarianism which went hand in hand with his physical and ethical arguments. The breadth of his appeal must have been rooted in the diversity of his ideas, there being something in his philosophy for everyone, from the mundane methods of penny-pinching to the grander ideals of prelapsarianism. With remarkable cogency, Tryon treated the Hindus as his guide at every step of the way, reaching from hopeless utopianism down to serious suggestions for social and political reform. His principal accomplishment was welding the novel vegetarian philosophy attributed to the Brahmins with the familiar Neoplatonist and biblical traditions he had grown up with. He reduced this combination into a lifestyle philosophy, which would, he hoped, prevent the hellish degradation of man and nature that he had witnessed in Barbados.

*Moses.

SIX John Evelyn: Salvation in a Salad

Theophilus: There’s a superanuated Custom kept up among the Antients; that to gratify the Appetite violates the Creation …

Arnoldus: Was this the Primitive Practice of our former Ancestors?

Theophilus: I don’t say it was, I discourse the Brachmans that offer this Argument. No Man has a Commission to create Life, no Man therefore by any Law or Custom ought to take Life away; which if he do, he makes himself an Instrument of unnatural Cruelty, and his Body a Sepulchre to bury dead Carcasses in … Were this Argument approv’d of, it would, I suspect, overthrow our design of Angling.

Richard Franck, Northern Memoirs … The Contemplative and Practical Angler (1694)1

In the first comprehensive account of salmon- and trout-fishing in Scotland, Richard Franck set out the opposition between the Brahmins’ and the Christians’ value of animal life. Franck originally penned his miscellaneous work in 1658 as a republican riposte to The Compleat Angler (1653), in which the Royalist Izaak Walton had tactfully submerged his attack on Cromwellian politics in scaly similes. As an ex-Cromwellian soldier fusing Hinduism in the 1690s with his outdated political Puritanism and mysticism, Franck had much in common with (and may have been directing his dialogue at) Thomas Tryon. Franck’s character Theophilus, who takes the part of the Hindus, transposes the elements of Tryon’s nom de plume Philotheos.

Like Tryon, Franck was tempted by the dreamy similarity between Indian vegetarianism and Edenic harmony, but ultimately he overrode this by evoking the rival idea of Eden according to which animals offered themselves up willingly to man – a notion backed up by the Gospel’s eradication of food taboos. But this was a bait to hook the unwary – for the vice Franck was trying to reel in was gluttony. Franck’s most potent net was woven from the common threads of ‘Hinduism’ and Puritanism: their voices united in condemning unnecessary slaughter for the riotous gratification of excessive appetite. Under the influence of Hinduism – and particularly the account by Edward Terry – Franck shifted the Puritanical detestation of wasting God’s gifts into his specific attack on wasting beings to whom God had given the inherently valuable property of life.2 It was this absorption of Hindu vegetarianism that came to occupy the centre ground in social critiques of the late seventeenth century, espoused not just by political outsiders like Tryon and Franck, but by the most prominent thinkers of the intellectual world.

John Evelyn (1620–1706) is most famous for his diary, which, like that of his friend Samuel Pepys, records the quotidian minutiae of seventeenth-century society. A shining torch of the Enlightenment, Evelyn was one of the first members and secretary of the Royal Society, the internationally admired institution of empirical learning. He was a great friend of the eminent scientist Robert Boyle, and, as one of the trustees of the Boyle lectures, a bastion of the new orthodoxy of latitudinarian Anglicanism and Newtonian science. Though a Royalist sympathiser, Evelyn avoided active service during the Civil War by absenting himself on a Grand Tour of Europe. He made friends with the exiled royal family in Paris, and after the Restoration served in various philanthropic political posts until, dismayed by debauchery and intemperance at court,3 he retired to Sayes Court in Deptford, the private estate of his father-in-law.

During his abdication from public service in Cromwell’s era, Evelyn took up gardening, developing Sayes Court into a masterpiece of edible design. Thirty-eight beds of vegetables and a vast orchard of 300 fruit trees led into ‘the apple-tree walk’ which terminated in a moated island covered in waving swards of asparagus, raspberries, a mulberry tree and a blossoming enclosure of fruit bushes.4 Later he moved on to the garden at his own home at Wotton in Surrey, where he supplied his wife and household with freshly grown produce, and his nation with advice on everything from tree-planting to city-planning.

As old age cast shadows over the garden of his soul, Evelyn drew together a lifetime’s experience in horticulture to compose his magnum opus, the Elysium Britannicum or Paradisium Revisitum. He never completed this compendious work, and it has only recently been edited from his surviving array of manuscripts. He did publish one chapter, however, as it blossomed into the full-length book, Acetaria. A Discourse of Sallets (1699). This was filled with instructions on how to grow, pick, prepare and eat salad, from the sight-enhancing, anti-flatulent fennel to the eighteen types of pain-quelling, lust-calming lettuce. In the seventeenth century eating a dish of raw leafy vegetables was something of a novelty, out of line with the predominant valorisation of red meat. But with the increasing interest in botany and the rise of gentlemanly vegetable gardening, to which Evelyn himself contributed, salads were to enjoy a vogue. Sowing seeds no longer needed be the sole prerogative of peasants – the most noble foot could grace a spade. On the face of it, Acetaria was designed, as other commentators have pointed out, to encourage the use of salads in the English diet.5

A drawing by John Evelyn of the Evelyn family house at Wotton, Surrey, from the terrace above the gardens, 1653

But, like Thomas Tryon, Evelyn also had a theological agenda. His Preface declared that he wished to ‘recall the World, if not altogether to their Pristine Diet, yet to a much more wholsome and temperate than is now in Fashion’.6 ‘Adam, and his yet innocent Spouse,’ mused Evelyn, ‘fed on Vegetables and other Hortulan Productions before the fatal Lapse,’ and even until the Flood God did not ‘suffer them to slay the more innocent Animal’.7 In the course of his work, Evelyn was carried away by the force of his own arguments and ended up writing one of the most scholarly panegyrics of vegetarianism.8

The belief that the prelapsarian diet was healthy and virtuous appears to have become almost an established norm by the end of the seventeenth century. In common with many of his gardening contemporaries – such as Ralph Austen and John Parkinson – Evelyn’s botanical interests and lifelong practical and theoretical work on gardens aimed to recreate a garden like Eden.9 The famous gardening expert in the generation before Evelyn, William Coles, displayed this artfully in his Adam in Eden (1657) and he too regarded the vegetable diet as a path to health and long life.10 The garden, according to Evelyn, was ‘A place of all terrestrial enjoyments the most resembling Heaven, and the best representation of our lost felicitie.’11 Gardens were also like encyclopaedias. Knowing all about plants – and Evelyn’s contemporaries did try to make their botanical knowledge as comprehensive as possible – was like knowing God’s creation as Adam had known it in Paradise. Gardening was Adam’s occupation before the Fall; therefore to garden was to relive the life of Adam. Gardening, said Evelyn, was ‘the most innocent, laudable, and purest of earthly felicities, and such as does certainly make the neerest approaches to that Blessed state’,12 and he extended this common project into the realm of diet. Adam lived on raw vegetables and fruit in Eden, so if one wanted to live like Adam in Paradise, there was only one diet for it. Many herbs grew wild (‘every hedge affords a Sallet’), and were therefore obtainable without labour, just like food before the Fall.13 Composing salad was the original culinary art form: it was ‘clean, innocent, sweet, and Natural … compar’d with the Shambles Filth and Nidor, Blood and Cruelty’.14

Evelyn complemented this dietary idealism by trying to establish a more harmonious relationship with animals. Just like collecting all plants together in one place, gathering animals to live in harmony was a potent symbol of primeval harmony. Like Pepys he condemned bear-, bull- and badger-baiting as ‘butcherly sports or rather barbarous cruelties’,15 and he even tried to recreate Eden by setting up a zoo. Evelyn had been inspired by the big-cat menageries of the Turks, but he settled for a more modest collection of tortoises, squirrels and birds.16 In an emblematic representation of his desire to live in harmony with nature, he personally commissioned an elaborate ebony cabinet, now held the Victoria and Albert Museum, decorated with hard stone and gilt-bronze plaques depicting the mythical Greek vegetarian, Orpheus, taming the animals with his music.17

As a Royalist, Evelyn was a long way from the republican vegetarians who retreated into hermetic solitude, but his retreat into gardening was no less political. He visited Thomas Bushell in his vegetarian cave, and wrote in 1658 – 9 to Sir Thomas Browne and Sir Robert Boyle (who had also written a paper on salads18) that he thought gardening was an ideal around which the defeated Royalists could rally.19 There in their little Edens, Englishmen could recreate the monarchy Adam enjoyed over the creation, living as ‘a society of the paradisi cultores, persons of antient simplicity, Paradisean and Hortulan saints’.20 As a collective community, Evelyn imagined they would live like the abstinent Carthusian friars, sheltered from the malign political world, but spearheading scientific investigation and progress. Although a naïve ideal, it was just such ideas, in line with Francis Bacon’s Solomon’s House, that led to the formation of the Royal Society.21

Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82), the famous Royalist physician and historian of gardens, was a particularly appropriate person for Evelyn to write to. In 1650, when vegetarianism was all the rage among the radicals, Browne reflected on its theological and medical implications in his famously witty collection of essays, Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors. He hinted that God might have sent the Flood to punish people for eating flesh (a view he extrapolated from the natural-rights philosopher, Hugo Grotius) and suggested that God permitted flesh because the Flood ‘had destroyed or infirmed the nature of vegetables’. The virtuous continued to abstain, however, and the Pythagoreans and the ‘Bannyans’ still did. All this showed that ‘there is no absolute necessity to feed on any [animals]’; returning to the vegetarian diet, he concluded, might even ‘prolong our days’.22

Evelyn was a respected gentleman and a family man; his position in the Royal Society ensured his adherence to social norms; even in his diary – in stark contrast to Pepys’ frank confessions of fondling women’s breasts and committing all sorts of peccadilloes – he maintained perpetual decorum, and ‘never used its pages to reveal the secrets of the heart’, as Virginia Woolf once complained.23 So he avoided anything unseemly in his advocacy of vegetarianism, keeping his distance from mystic counterparts like Thomas Tryon by air-brushing them out of his anthology of herbivores. (Tryon requited this with mutual silence, either ignorant of Evelyn, or too much of an egotist to acknowledge his rival, except perhaps once in a miscellaneous work he might have edited.)24 Evelyn’s vegetarian idealism was a nostalgic grasp at human perfection, but it was always laced with stern-faced pragmatism. His lasting influence was inspiring a country-wide delight in gardening, and encouraging unrepentant carnivores, such as Pepys, to experiment more extensively with the bounty of fruit and vegetables.25