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

– 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 aspired to the spiritual purity of Adam before the Fall. He wasn’t explicit about any dietary regulations for achieving that goal (which might have been difficult since he believed that before the Fall Adam didn’t even have a material body and so ate no food at all). But vegetarians might have been encouraged by Böhme’s comment that God ‘created so many kindes and sorts of beasts for his Food and Rayment’ only because he had foreknowledge of man’s Fall. If man was to ‘come againe into his first estate’, as Böhme fervently wished, it could follow that he would have to give up eating animals.⁶⁴ Crab also shared Böhme’s theory that ‘Seven Grand Properties’, corresponding to the seven planets, governed the seven spirits of the human body. Crab, whose seven properties were actually more akin to conventional astrology, held that it was the Martian spirit that stirred up flesh-eating and murder.⁶⁵

      Most of the radicals of the mid-century period died in anonymity. After the Restoration in 1660 their politics became unpopular and dangerous to espouse. Roger Crab, exceptionally, sustained his local fame until he died in 1680. Secondary sources report a large concourse of people attending his funeral on 14 September at St Dunstan’s Church in the parish of Stepney. In the churchyard a large monument was erected in his memory with a versified tribute to his vegetarianism:

      Tread gently, Reader, near the Dust,

      Cometh to this Tomb-stone’s Trust. For while ‘twas Flesh, it held a Guest, With universal Love possest. A soul that stemm’d Opinion’s Tyde, Did over Sects in Triumph ride. Yet separate from the giddy Crowd, And Paths Tradition had allow’d. Through good and ill Reports he past; Oft censur’d, yet approv’d at last. Wouldest thou his Religion know? In brief ‘twas this: To all to do Just as he would be done unto. So in kind Nature’s Law he stood, A Temple undefil’d with Blood: A Friend to ev’ry Thing that’s good. The rest, Angels alone fitly can tell: Haste, then, to Them and Him; and so farewel.⁶⁶

      The lines – written by a more proficient poet than Crab himself – represent vegetarianism as perfectly compatible with orthodox Christianity. To a large degree this agenda seems to have been achieved: he had been married in 1663 to a widow, Amy Markham, in St Bride’s church; he was buried in the yard of another Anglican church, and according to the parish register was considered a ‘Gentleman’.⁶⁷ This elevated status betrays his former radical rejection of personal property and social distinction, but it shows that he kept his vegetarian message alive in the wholly altered political environment of the Restoration.

      Vegetarianism was a familiar expression of political and religious dissent in seventeenth-century England. It is unclear to what extent the Robins sect, the Diggers, the Family of Love, George Foster, Thomas Tany, Robert Norwood and Roger Crab were actively conspiring with each other. But diet was an integral part of a broadly cohesive radical agenda which they shared. Vegetarianism, for some, was an inherent part of the revolution. After their gory experience in the Civil War, veterans developed an aversion to blood so strong that they extended it to shedding animal blood. The rejection of violence, oppression and inequality went hand in hand with vegetarianism in a movement that aimed to achieve a bloodless revolution. Later, in the revolutionary 1780s and 1790s, vegetarianism re-emerged as part of a radical ideology. In the period between, vegetarianism survived by adapting to different cultural contexts, though often carrying with it traces of the old agenda. Roger Crab was the pioneer: lifting vegetarianism out of its Civil War context and refashioning it to new tastes laid the foundations for its continuation in Restoration England.

       FOUR Pythagoras and the Sages of India

      Clown: What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?

      Malvolio: That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.

      Clown: What think’st thou of his opinion?

      Malvolio: I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.

      Clown: Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness: thou shalt hold th’ opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits; and fear to kill a woodcock, lest thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam. Fare thee well.

      William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, IV. ii

      While meat-eating Christians fended off the vegetarian schism at home, another force was gathering strength that would assail them with even greater intensity. Having accustomed themselves to thinking of Europe as the pinnacle of humanity, travellers were shocked to find in India a thriving religion which had been sustained in