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

histories of the fourth-century BC Egyptian priest Manetho and the first-century BC Sicilian Diodorus, who had said that the primitive Egyptians ‘fed upon Herbs, and the natural Fruit of the Trees’. Newton manipulated this evidence to make it sound as if the Egyptians lived in a state of Golden-Age innocence and that this led seamlessly into their (much later) religious abhorrence of killing animals.⁶⁰ Eliding various sources and stories into one pithy conclusion, Newton declared that ‘The Egyptians originally lived on the fruits of the earth, and fared hardly, and abstained from animals.’⁶¹

      When a band of French scholars sneakily laid their hands on a manuscript copy of Newton’s work, they triggered a massive cross-Channel controversy by retorting that the real reason why the Egyptians abstained from eating meat was because they were abominable animal-worshippers. This, they argued, was obvious from the fact that when the Israelites went to live in Egypt, the Bible testifies that the Jewish custom of sacrificing bulls, sheep and goats was an affront to Egyptian zoolatry.⁶² Newton explained this away and insisted that at that time the Egyptian religion was not idolatrous paganism but a slightly corrupted version of the original religion inherited from Noah; indeed, the Egyptian King Ammon, he sometimes thought, was no other than Ham, Noah’s grandson.⁶³

      Why was Newton so eager to prove this? His most controversial argument was that Judaism was based on Egyptian religion. Moses had excised the errors that had crept into the original religion among the Egyptians but essentially, said Newton, ‘Moses retained all ye religion of ye Egyptians concerning ye worship of ye true God.’ Judaism, Newton concluded, was Moses’ resuscitation of the Noachic religion as it had been propagated in an imperfect form by the Egyptians.⁶⁴ Nudging aside the Mosaic revelation in this way was an unspeakably radical move and turned the entire basis of the Judaeo-Christian belief system on its head.⁶⁵

      Though Newton did not specifically say it, he clearly thought that Egyptian vegetarianism was the counterpart – perhaps even the source – of Moses’ law of mercy to beasts. This put pagan vegetarianism into the limelight. Rather than seeing it as a sign of satanic zoolatry, Newton regarded it as evidence that the Egyptians were following the original laws of God. Moving to still more exotic pastures, the vegetarians in India, he set about studying all the ancient sources and several travel narratives including Manucci, Chardin, Tavernier, Purchas and the best of all Indological studies, Abraham Rogerius.⁶⁶ He gleaned further information from Gerard Vossius, and from Eusebius who convinced him that the ancient Brahmins ‘abstained from y^e worship of Idols & lived virtuously’.⁶⁷ In his personal library, which survives in Trinity College, Cambridge, Newton folded the corner of the pages where Strabo, Philostratus and various humanist scholars described the similarity between Indian and Pythagorean vegetarianism.⁶⁸

      How did the ancient Brahmins manage to preserve the original religion in such a pure non-idolatrous state? Newton propounded the fantastic theory that the ‘Brahmans’ were descended from ‘the Abrahamans, or sons of Abraham, born of his second wife Keturah, instructed by their father in the worship of ONE GOD without images, and sent into the east’. Genesis said that after Isaac was born Abraham packed off his children by Keturah and other concubines ‘eastward, unto the east country’, and so it seemed plausible that they were the original Brahmins. This enthusiastic dot-joining had been indulged in by many others, including the sixteenth-century savant Guillaume Postel (1510–81), who tried to recover a pristine Noachic religion like Newton’s.⁶⁹ In addition, the alchemist Michael Maier connected this genealogy of the Brahmins with the theory, posited by Agrippa and Newton’s favourite Jewish medieval astrological theologian Abraham ibn Ezra (1092–1167) (who had himself read genuine Hindu texts), that Enoch, Abraham’s grandson by Keturah, was in fact the same person as the great Egyptian magus, Hermes Trismegistus.⁷⁰ The door was open to seeing Hinduism as a relic of the original religion.

      According to Newton, one of the greatest religious reformations in world history occurred in 521 BC when Hystaspes, father of King Darius of Persia, returned from a crash-course in pure religion with the Brahmins, joined forces with Zoroaster and led the Reformation of the Persian magi. Between them, they abolished idolatry and instituted monotheism by importing the Egyptian wisdom preserved in Babylon and fusing it with ‘the institutions of the ancient Brachmans’.⁷¹ In a pincer movement with the Egyptians carrying the original religion eastwards,⁷² and the Brahmins exporting it west, the whole of the ancient world enjoyed a restitution of some of the pristine elements of Noah’s original religion.

      Finally Europe enjoyed the fruits of the reform, because, as Apuleius and others said, Pythagoras travelled through Egypt to the Eastern philosophers, and brought their philosophy back to Greece.⁷³ Newton explained the ramifications of this in his sensational endorsement of pagan vegetarianism in the opening paragraph of his frequently redrafted manuscript essay, ‘Irenicum, or Ecclesiastical Polyty tending to Peace’:

      All Nations were originally of the Religion comprehended in the Precepts of the sons of Noah, the chief of w^ch were to have one God, & not to alienate his worship, nor prophane his name; to abstain from murder, theft, fornication, & all injuries; not to feed on the flesh or drink the blood of a living animal, but to be mercifull even to bruit beasts … Pythagoras one of the oldest Philosophers in Europe, after he had travelled among the Eastern nations for the sake of knowledge & conversed with their Priests & Judges & seen their manners, taught his scholars that all men should be friends to all men & even to bruit Beasts … This was the religion of the sons of Noah established by Moses & Christ & is still in force.⁷⁴

      One of Isaac Newton’s manuscript versions of the essay Irenicum

      Newton clearly regarded Eastern and Pythagorean vegetarianism as a remnant of God’s original law, and he made it a central pillar in the bridge between pagan religions and Judaeo-Christianity. It may look as if Newton just slipped his ideas into the old mould of the prisci theologi, but in fact he had gone much further. Unlike most contemporaries, Newton did not think that Pythagorean vegetarianism was based on the abhorrent belief in metempsychosis.⁷⁵ On the contrary, he suggested that the vegetarianism of Pythagoras and of ‘the Eastern nations’ was an extension to animals of the law ‘love thy neighbour’ which they inherited from Noah. When Pythagoras returned to Europe from his travels, what he brought with him was a secularised version of Noah’s original religion, as well as all the heliocentric astronomic and mathematical knowledge the Eastern sages had preserved. Newton said that his own scientific work, like his religious research, was not so much discovery as recovery, for Pythagoras and the ancient inheritors of the original solar religion had known nearly everything that he had revealed in his magnum opus, the Principia of 1687.⁷⁶ In terms of religious and scientific reform, this put Pythagoras, Newton’s fellow mathematician, scientist and moralist, in line with Moses, Christ and Newton himself.⁷⁷

      Interpreting pagan religions as corruptions of Judaeo-Christian theology was standard practice. The widely influential ‘universal histories’ of Newton’s