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

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