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

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