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

in a much more appetising light than translators hitherto, and added enthusiastically that ‘this happy estate abounding with all felicities, assuredly represented that which man injoyed in his innocency: under the raigne of Saturne, more truly of Adam.’¹⁴ Eating meat, he added, was ‘a priviledge granted after to Noah; because [‘hearbes and fruits’] then had lost much of their nourishing vertue’. Meat-eating, according to this reasoning, was an unfortunate consequence of the Flood. In the climactic finale of Metamorphoses, Pythagoras comes forward and delivers a lengthy diatribe against eating animals – ‘How horrible a Sin, / That entrailes bleeding entrailes should intomb! / That greedie flesh, by flesh should fat become!’ Sandys noted that Pythagoras’ vegetarianism was an attempt to reinstate the peacefulness of the Golden Age because killing animals proceeded ‘from injustice, cruelty, and corruption of manners; not knowne in that innocent age’.¹⁵ Pythagoras’ example was an inspiration to early vegetarians like Bushell.

      Giving up meat altogether may have been rather quirky in early seventeenth-century England, and Bushell was well aware that his notions could be mistaken for ‘the Chymera of a phanatick brain’.¹⁶ He further risked his reputation by successfully lobbying the government to release from prison several members of religious groups who were also trying to reinstate the conditions and even the diet of Eden, such as the Rosicrucians, the Family of Love and the Adamites (who took the Adamic lifestyle to its extreme by shedding their clothes and living in the naked purity of Eden before the figleaves).¹⁷

      It may seem as if Bushell had by this time descended into a religious dream world, but his extreme diet was endorsed by scientific rigour. Bushell’s immersion into vegetarianism was an act of religious fervour, but it was simultaneously the realisation of a Baconian project: he presented himself as a human guinea-pig in Bacon’s ‘perfect experiment’ for lengthening human life on a vegetarian diet. As Bushell said, his dietary attempt to gain a long and healthy life was based on that of ‘our long liv’d fathers before the flood’. It was statistically evident that the average age of the ‘antediluvian’ patriarchs was in excess of 900 years, topped by Adam’s descendant, Methuselah, who lived to 969 (Genesis 5). What – everyone wanted to know – was the secret of their longevity?¹⁸ Once permission to eat meat was granted after the Flood, human life expectancy plummeted from 900 to the current average of around 70. It seemed at least plausible to the enquiring mind that it was eating meat that had curtailed human life so dramatically;¹⁹ perhaps by relinquishing it one could regain some of those lost years. This may sound like it competes in crankiness with today’s diet-doctors, but few then dared doubt the basic facts set out in the Bible. Even the philosopher René Descartes seems to have believed it. It may seem surprising that religious extremes and experimental philosophy coincided in such a spectacular way, but it was a trend that would continue for at least two centuries. Bacon and Bushell raised many of the questions about vegetarianism that dominated the ensuing debate.

      Far from being the exclusive territory of extremists, undoing certain effects of the Fall was also the basis of Bacon’s intellectual endeavour. Bacon’s idea of the reclamation of Adamic knowledge became the manifesto for the seventeenth-century advancement of learning. The utopian reformers of the Civil War period Jan Amos Comenius and Samuel Hartlib hoped that their new system for universal education, or pansophism, would restore ‘Light, Peace, Health … and that golden age which has ever been longed for’. Their contemporary, the radical doctor Nicholas Culpeper, promised that his brand of the regulated temperate diet could mitigate malign celestial influences and make life on earth ‘a terrestiall Paradise to him that useth it’.²⁰ The kabbalists Knorr von Rosenroth and Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont believed that reclaiming knowledge would reinstate the harmony ‘which so many thousands of Christians have wished and groaned for, for such a long time’.²¹ Even members of the Royal Society – the pinnacle of British scientific exploration chartered by Charles II in 1662 – thought that they were gradually working mankind back to the universal knowledge enjoyed in Paradise.²²

      Bushell’s idealistic vegetarianism fitted hand in glove with the intellectual project inaugurated by his master Francis Bacon. Bacon’s experimental philosophy would restore mankind to the universal knowledge lost in Adam’s Fall and discover the secret to longevity. Vegetarians would join forces by testing the dietary hypotheses and simultaneously restoring mankind to lost innocence and perfection. The dietary means to returning to antediluvian health was also a route to spiritual restoration. In Bushell’s ‘perfect experiment’, the spiritual and the ‘scientific’ marched side by side.

      Bacon did not challenge the universally accepted doctrine that man had rightful dominion over nature; indeed, he held this as his philosophical paradigm. But Bacon did argue that man’s power over creation carried an important caveat: ‘There is implanted in man by nature,’ he wrote in The Advancement and Proficience of Learning (1605), ‘a noble and excellent Affection of Piety [pity] and compassion, which extends it selfe even to bruit creatures’. God had given man dominion, but He had also encoded him with a sentiment of compassion which moderated his behaviour to animals. Only ‘contracted & degenerate minds’, said Bacon, failed to heed the edict encapsulated in the biblical book of Proverbs, ‘A Just man is mercifull to the life of his Beast’ (Proverbs 12:10).

      Bacon’s translation of this Proverb took the compassionate treatment of animals further than most Christians were comfortable with. The 1611 King James version rendered it ambiguously, ‘A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast’, and the Latin Vulgate simply says novit (‘recognises’), while in the original Hebrew the righteous man’s concern for his domestic animals may well be purely self-interested. Bacon was partaking in the pervasive, though often frowned-upon, tradition of seeking in the Bible laws that endorsed kindness to animals.

      His motive for doing so was partly fuelled by the desire to find an equivalent in Judaeo-Christianity of the laws of humanity that he identified in other cultures. In doing this, he pushed forward one final major philosophical development which was to transform thinking in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: that Western and Eastern cultures shared close moral affinities regardless of their religious differences. This had roots in the medieval and Renaissance idea of the ‘virtuous gentile’, but it took on greater prominence and complexity as travellers had increasing opportunities to observe foreign cultures first hand. Bacon dubiously claimed that the Mosaic law against eating blood, found in Genesis, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, was Moses’ counterpart of laws found all over the world that enforced mercy to animals: ‘even in the sect of the Esseans and Pythagoreans, they altogither abstain’d from eating Flesh; which to this day is observed by an inviolate superstition, by many of the Easterne people under the Mogol.’ The law of pity, Bacon concluded, was not just a Jewish law, it was embedded in human nature, so it was little surprise to find that diverse religions enforced it. When other cultures could provide such useful comparisons that helped to prove his views on the properties of human nature, no wonder Bacon regarded the voyages of discovery as an important aspect of restoring man’s universal understanding. The Indians and the Pythagoreans took their opinions to superstitious extremes, but their vegetarianism, Bacon said, was the realisation of a true and noble principle. Misguided as they perhaps were, they nevertheless exemplified natural human mercy more than the ‘contracted & degenerate minds’ of his own society. This was a daring valorisation of a foreign ethical code, and Bacon later moderated it by comparing their superstitions with the Muslim taboos on pork and bacon.²³ This idea of instinctive sympathy added still more force to the scientific dietary reasons for becoming vegetarian. Richard Baxter (1615–91), one of the chief Puritan ministers in the Civil War, clearly exemplified how the medical and the moral motives propelled each other. When he