Читать книгу The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India - Tristram Stuart - Страница 13

Thomas Tryon gazed out over the sugar plantations of Barbados. What he saw chilled his heart. With horror he watched lines of slaves labouring under the inhuman whip of their European masters. The cruelty of men claiming to be Christians surpassed all belief: the expatriated Africans were starved until they would eat putrefying horse meat; their limbs were crushed in the sugar mills; they died by thousands in the open fields. While Restoration England grew fat on their sweat and blood, Tryon complained, Barbados was perishing. The forests of the Americas were being depleted at a shocking rate; even the soil was suffering under the insatiable greed of the white man. After years of forcing the ground to produce the same cash crop, Barbados had gone from being ‘the most Fertil’st Spot of all America’, to ‘become a kind of Rock’ which grew nothing without dung fertiliser.¹ All this destruction was committed only to supply luxury goods back in London – that stinking heap of human corruption Tryon had left behind. Everything had gone horribly awry: America was supposed to be a New World in which laws of justice between man and beast would bring about a Golden Age of peace and harmony, not the ransacked sewerage of the Old World.² This was the opposite of what Tryon, in his youthful dreams, had imagined.

Born on 6 September 1634 in the Gloucestershire village of Bibury, Tryon had been sent out to spin wool at the age of six without an education. Working as a shepherd in his spare time he had accumulated enough capital by the age of thirteen to buy himself two sheep, and he swapped one of them for English lessons. Tryon loved his innocent flock and the contemplative life sleeping under the stars, but by the age of eighteen he ‘began to grow weary of Shepherdizing, and had an earnest desire to travel’. Without telling his parents, he packed up his belongings, his life savings and his ideals, waved goodbye to his sheep, said good riddance to his father’s plastering trade and set out for London.³

It was 1653 and the religious radicalism of Cromwell’s interregnum was at fever pitch. Having paid all of his £3 apprenticing himself to a hat-maker near Fleet Street, Tryon soon joined his master’s congregation of Anabaptists, attracted by their austerity, silence and periodic fasting from flesh.⁴ Up in his apprentice’s lodgings, he spent all his spare time and money delving into books on alchemy, herbal medicine and natural magic. In 1657, at the age of twenty-three, he had what he was waiting for – a divine visitation of his own: ‘the Voice of Wisdom continually and most powerfully called upon me,’ he wrote years later in his Memoirs; it told him to relinquish all luxuries and turn to vegetarianism: ‘for then I took my self to Water only for Drink, and forbore eating any kind of Flesh or Fish, and confining my self to an abstemious self-denying Life.’⁵

This was the very year that Roger Crab started calling for followers, and Tryon’s description of his conversion sounds so similar to Crab’s that it could have been lifted straight out of The English Hermite.⁶ So many of their interests are the same – Behmenist mysticism, astrological dietary medicine, vegan diet and even hat-making – that it is tempting to imagine Crab was Tryon’s vegetarian guru.⁷ Tryon called the Sabbath Mammon-worship, and the clergy ‘Jockies in the Art of Wiving’; he railed against upper-class exploitation and warned that private lands were ‘the effects of Violence’.⁸ Like Crab, he mastered the art of twisting the Bible into a vegetarian manifesto – enlisting Moses, Daniel, John the Baptist and Jesus as fellow vegetarians – and revealing that God’s permission to eat meat after the Flood was really an act of ‘Spite and Vengeance’ tempting people into the spirit of wrath.⁹ Humans were supposed to be ‘faithful Stewards’ of God’s creatures, insisted Tryon, not murderous meat-eating tyrants.¹⁰

He joined a group of vegetarians whose doctrines sound similar to those of Crab’s ‘Rationals’, Pordage’s followers or even Winstanley’s Diggers, for they ‘would not eat Flesh, because it could not be procured without breaking the Harmony and Unity of Nature, and doing what one would not be done unto’.¹¹ When Tryon heard the rumours of Indians living in harmony with the animals he was transfixed with joy: vegetarianism was no longer relegated to the backwaters of English religious dissidence – it was the creed followed by entire nations of brother herb-eaters like himself.

Horoscope of the nativity of Thomas Tryon’s daughter (1661/1662)

Like many sectaries of the time, Tryon initially avoided persecution by keeping his head down and refraining from the provocative medium of print. Besides, he had a family to support: after marrying a childhood sweetheart who refused to give up eating meat, and fathering five children,¹² Tryon travelled to Holland and then Barbados where religious toleration was greater and commercial opportunities in the hat trade were lucrative. But after returning to London in 1669 he experienced his second epiphany. In 1682 his inner voice told him ‘to Write and Publish something … recommending to the World Temperance, Cleanness, and Innocency of Living; and admonishing Mankind against Violence, Oppression, and Cruelty, either to their own Kind, or any inferior Creatures’.¹³ Tryon fell to his new allotted task with ardour and over the next twenty years, until his death in 1703, he poured a total of twenty-seven works through the press. Many of them were popular enough to go into multiple editions, his magnum opus, The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness, being reprinted five times in fifteen years. On average over the entirety of his writing career, Tryon went to press once every four months. Some of his works were circulated by the Quaker printer Andrew Sowle and his daughter Tace, and others were distributed by a dozen of England’s most successful commercial booksellers including Elizabeth Harris, Thomas Bennet and Dorman Newman, and were advertised in works as popular as Daniel Defoe’s.¹⁴

By now political radicalism had been stifled by its own failures and, with the accession of Charles II in 1660, Cromwell’s interregnum had given way to the polite culture of Restoration England. In 1688 the Glorious Revolution (also called the Bloodless Revolution) saw an end to James II’s whimsical reign and Parliament gave the crown to his daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange, ushering in a new era of constitutional democracy and relative social tolerance.¹⁵ Tryon accordingly tempered his vegetarian philosophy with an element of compromise. His homely books with titles like The Way to Make All People Rich, The Good Housewife made a Doctor and Healths Grand Preservative were aimed at frugal householders. He encouraged people to forage for wild plants such as watercress, sorrel and dandelion, and lauded local, naturally produced vegetables from the ‘brave noble’ potato to the ‘lively’ leek. He helpfully furnished his readers with step-by-step guides on how best to cook cabbages, as well as his favourite meat-free recipes like ‘Bonniclabber’ which, he explained, ‘is nothing else but Milk that has stood till it is sower, and become of a thick slippery substance’ (try this at your own risk).¹⁶

He also cautioned against over-indulgence, especially in fatty meat, cream and fried foods, which, combined with lack of exercise, he repeatedly warned, cause obesity, obstruct the circulation of the blood and ‘fur the Passages’.¹⁷ But recognising that despite his warnings ‘People will still gorge themselves with the Flesh of their Fellow-Animals’, he deigned to supply his readers with instructions on how to prepare it (boiling rather than frying) so as to avoid the worst of its harmful qualities.¹⁸

In his lifetime Tryon was appreciated by a wide range of people, from recondite astrologers to the famous proto-feminist playwright, poet and novelist Aphra Behn. It is possible that Tryon met Behn in Barbados where his liberal attitudes appear to have influenced her slave-novel Oronooko. Behn described herself as Tryon’s follower, claiming to have tried his vegetarian regime, and in 1685 wrote a laudatory poem about him which is so hyperbolic that it is hard to believe it was not penned with a hint of irony:¹⁹

Hail Learned Bard! who dost thy power dispence

And show’st us the first State of Innocence …

Not he that bore th’Almighty Wand^* cou’d give Diviner Dictates, how to eat, and live. And so essential was this cleanly Food, For Man’s eternal health, eternal good, That God did for his first-lov’d Race provide, What thou, by God’s example, hast prescrib’d:²⁰

But any exaggeration would have been less evident then: by the end of his life, Tryon had accumulated such wealth from trading and writing that he purchased some land, bought the title of ‘Gentleman’ (as Roger Crab had done), and even took to wearing a long curly wig.²¹ To some, this seemed like sheer hypocrisy – even the hats he sold were made from beaver-pelts (a fact he later came to regret) – but Tryon no doubt felt he had adapted his politics to fit in with the changing times.²²

Tryon’s works – forerunners of the modern self-help genre – continued to be anthologised for decades. He may not compare in intellectual rigour with his contemporaries John Locke and Isaac Newton, but he sold far more books than Newton did, appealing to a wide lay audience. Tryon’s vegetarian philosophy – an eclectic concoction of notions culled from all over the world – was still being admired years after his death by the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He was thus an important conduit, and the most powerful catalyst for Tryon’s revamping of vegetarianism in the late seventeenth century, when radical vegetarians had dwindled, was the discovery of the Indian Brahmins. Having witnessed the challenge to man’s rights over nature made by the radical pantheism of Winstanley and the Ranters, Tryon noticed the common ground with Hindu vegetarianism, and he embraced it with open arms. Above all, the Indians inspired Tryon with new conviction that a Golden Age of vegetarianism could still be achieved.

Eager to dispossess Western Europe of its monopoly over truth, Tryon argued that the Indian wise men had devised their own ‘natural religion’ by studying nature and receiving divine revelations.²³ In addition, following the speculations of the travel writers (and some erroneous Renaissance translations of Philostratus), Tryon held that Pythagoras had travelled to India and taught the Brahmins his vegetarian philosophy. This contact with Pythagoras plugged the Brahmins into the network of ancient pagan philosophers, known to the Renaissance Neoplatonists as the prisci theologi, who were believed to have passed a pristine sacred theology between themselves and even, some thought, inherited doctrines from Moses.²⁴ Tryon intimated that Pythagoras had inherited his vegetarian philosophy from the antediluvians, so the Brahmins, who had inherited it from him, were the purest remnants of the paradisal tradition left on earth.²⁵

Thomas Tryon by Robert White (1703)

He thought that the Brahmins and Moses essentially followed the one ‘true Religion’, which is ‘the same in all places, and at all times’.²⁶ But whereas the Jews and Christians had corrupted their creed with schisms and wrathful appetites, the Brahmin priesthood – which stretched back millennia in a pure uninterrupted tradition – had preserved their sacred knowledge in its original form. Unenamoured of the malevolent Christian clergy of his own country, Tryon turned to the Brahmins and bowed down to them as the pre-eminent guardians of divine law.

Among the very first works Tryon published was the extraordinary pamphlet, A Dialogue Between An East-Indian Brackmanny or Heathen-Philosopher, and a French Gentleman (1683).²⁷ Reversing the stereotype of civilised Europeans and barbaric Indians, Tryon’s Brahmin greets the Frenchman with ironic allusions to his acquisitive motives for venturing into India and questions him on the tenets and practices of Christians. The Brahmin’s enlightened philosophy, his virtuous temperance, and his unassailable respect for animal life win a moral victory over the depraved and murderous European.²⁸

Merging his voice entirely with the Brahmin’s, Tryon rebuffs the arguments that had hitherto been used by others to denigrate Hinduism. He even defends the Indian practice of saving lice, for, as the Brahmin explains, if people were allowed to kill some animals they would soon believe they could go on to kill others ‘and so by degrees come to kill men’.²⁹ The ‘East-Indian Brackmanny’ was Tryon’s alter ego.³⁰ Although Tryon was trying to reconcile Indian vegetarianism to Judaeo-Christian beliefs, his ranking of Hindus above Christians was shocking and his anti-vegetarian enemy the Quaker controversialist John Field attacked him for having ‘at once Unchristianed (as much as he can) all Christendom’.³¹

Abandoning some of the basic precepts of Christianity, Tryon espoused what he imagined to be the way of the Brahmins. Fusing the vegetarianism of his radical forebears with the Brahmins’ concrete example, he announced with excitement that they have for ‘many Ages … led peaceable and harmless Lives, in Unity and Amity with the whole Creation; shewing all kind of Friendship and Equality, not only to those of their own Species, but to all other Creatures’.³² They had achieved the very state that Robins, Crab, Winstanley and all the prelapsarians had dreamed of.

The travel literature about India emphasised that the Hindu diet was based on an ethical treatment of animals (indeed, the establishment of fearless harmony between man and the animals through the practice of non-violence was an ideal lauded in Sanskrit scriptures).³³ As George Sandys had commented in his translation of Pythagoras’ speech in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1632), which Tryon read and quoted, the Indians had earned the trust of the animals by treating them with respect. Living in a social order reminiscent of the Golden Age, Sandys wrote excitedly, the Indians ‘are so farre from eating of what ever had life, that they will not kill so much as a flea; so that the birds of the aire, and beasts of the Forrest, without feare frequent their habitations, as their fellow Cittisens’.³⁴ Tryon came to see the fair treatment of animals as the key to the restoration of Paradise. Tryon’s Brahmin affirms that ‘we hurt not any thing, therefore nothing hurts us, but live in perfect Unity and Amity with all the numberless Inhabitants of the four Worlds.’³⁵ By relinquishing flesh the vegetarian Hindus had attained physical and mental vigour and undone the Fall: ‘We all drink Water, and the fragrant Herbs, wholsom Seeds, Fruits and Grains suffice us abundantly for Food,’ declares Tryon’s Brahmin, ‘so we in the midst of a tempestuous troublesom World live Calm, and as it were in Paradise.’³⁶

Inspired by Pythagoras’ vegetarian conversion mission to India, Tryon began to imagine the state of ‘perfect Love, Concord, and Harmony’ he could institute in England – if only its citizens would convert to vegetarianism. Thinking of himself as a new Moses, or, even better, Pythagoras, Tryon told the English people that if they gave up eating meat like the Brahmins, they would achieve spiritual enlightenment, health and longevity, and their relationship with animals would transform from a state of perpetual war to one of Edenic peace.³⁷

Tryon even looked to the Brahmins for a solution to the government’s religious intolerance, by which he and his dissenting compatriots were routinely persecuted. Since the introduction of the Clarendon Code (1661–5) unlicensed religious meetings had been forcibly broken up, 2,000 Puritan ministers had been dismissed, 500 Quakers had been killed and 15,000 others suffered a variety of other punishments. Even after the Toleration Act of 1689 the problem persisted; Tryon’s own publisher Andrew Sowle regularly had his printing shop smashed up and had even been threatened with death.³⁸ In arguments later echoed in John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) Tryon called for universal religious tolerance. He recommended that England introduce the Indian Mughal’s jezia system by which – as the Brahmin explains – anyone not adhering to the Islamic religion of the state simply paid an extra tax in return for ‘unquestioned Liberty for the Exercise of our Religion’.³⁹ Dissenters meanwhile should emulate the Brahmins, he added, for as vegetarian pacifists they would avoid persecution because ‘Governours would fear their Rising or Tumulting, no more than they do the Rebellion of Sheep, or Lambs, or an Insurrection of Robin Red-Brests’.⁴⁰ This was the pacifist philosophy of the Quakers and the Robins sect united with the vegetarian ahimsa of the Hindus and Jains.

Tryon fantasised that the Brahmins in India were the counterparts of the Puritans, Dissenters and religious radicals at home; this comparison had been made before, though often on less favourable terms. Pantheism, nudism, communism, sexual deviance, frugality and even the belief in reincarnation were all characteristics which contemporaries associated with both the Indian holy men and the home-grown religious dissidents.⁴¹ In 1641 the Italian humanist Paganino Gaudenzio compared the vegetarian communist Pythagoreans and Brahmins with the Anabaptists.⁴² Strabo’s ancient Brahmins were pantheist apocalyptists and Alexander’s Dandamis declared that anyone who followed nature ‘would not be ashamed to go naked like himself, and live on frugal fare’.⁴³ Tryon himself was not inclined to nudism, but he did recommend the more socially acceptable practice of wearing as few clothes as possible.⁴⁴ But the resemblance to prelapsarian nudists was inescapable: ‘their Nakedness’, went one comparison of the Christian Adamite sect and the Indian fakirs in 1704, was their way of ‘restoring themselves to the State of Innocence’;⁴⁵ others, like Samuel Purchas, disbelieving their chastity, claimed that the Indian yogis were secretly just like the nudist orgiast ‘Illuminate Elders of the Familists, polluting themselves in all filthinesse’.⁴⁶ As early as the sixteenth century, the Fardle of Facions assumed that puritanical Indian women still enjoyed going ‘buttoke banquetyng abrode’ (shagging other men).⁴⁷ This accusation of hypocritical debauchery was a common slur made against suspect religious cults in Europe.

Tryon was not the first to try to turn the identification of Brahmins with puritanical Dissenters to advantage; others before him had seen the Brahmins as brothers-in-arms against a corrupt world. In 1671 the controversial Quaker George Keith and his co-author Benjamin Furly announced that the Brahmins were so virtuous that they ‘rise up in judgment against the Christians of this age, and fill their faces with shame and confusion’.⁴⁸ They borrowed illustrative stories from Sir Edward Bysshe’s version of Palladius,⁴⁹ and the Rotterdam Calvinist preacher Franciscus Ridderus whose writings anticipated Tryon’s by giving his Brahmin character ‘Barthrou Herri’ lengthy ‘Christlike’ sermons which he copied out of Rogerius’ Open Door.⁵⁰ In 1683 Andrew Sowle presented the Brahmins as ideal vegetarian pacifists in The Upright Lives of the Heathen, an English selection of Bysshe’s anthology of ancient writings, which Tryon may have helped produce (it ends by telling the reader to find out more in Tryon’s Brackmanny, on sale in Sowle’s shop for the bargain price of one penny).⁵¹ And in 1687 one anonymous author, having read the travelogues of Henry Lord and Edward Terry, went nearly as far as Tryon by lamenting that the Hindus set a great example by ‘extending their good Nature, Humanity and Pity, even to the very bruit Creatures’ while shameful Christians were ‘cruel and merciless towards our Beasts’.⁵²

Naked Adamites from Bernard Picart, Ceremonies et Coutumes Religieuses de Tous Les Peuples du Monde

Hindu vegetarianism, as it was presented in the travelogues, had started to exert serious moral pressure on the conscience of Western Christians and Tryon rode this wave as far as it would go. His enthusiasm for the Brahmins peaked in his astonishing Transcript Of Several Letters From Averroes … Also Several Letters from Pythagoras to the King of India (1695), in which he had the nerve to fake an archival discovery of correspondence by Pythagoras and Averröes, the twelfth-century Spanish Islamic philosopher. Tryon appears to have seriously intended to convince the world that Pythagoras, Averröes and the Indian Brahmins were all believers in the same divinely ordained vegetarian philosophy. So amusingly successful was his sham that the Sowle family reprinted it in the eighteenth century alongside The Upright Lives of the Heathen, but the work has more recently lain unidentified in library vaults.⁵³

The Transcript climaxes in a dramatic reconstruction of Pythagoras’ visit to the court of the Indian King, where he is ordered to defend his vegetarian philosophy against the cavils of the (as yet unconverted) Brahmins. The King has summonsed Pythagoras for illicitly spreading this new-fangled unorthodox doctrine of vegetarianism.⁵⁴ The King and the Brahmins throw at Pythagoras the same anti-vegetarian arguments that Tryon’s contemporaries used against him, such as the God-given dominion over the animals and the heroic valour of hunting. But Pythagoras eventually wins the day, and thus India is converted to his doctrines.⁵⁵

By making Pythagoras the original founder of Hinduism it may seem as if Tryon was imposing Western philosophy onto the East. But as it was to Hinduism that he turned to reconstruct Pythagoreanism – with the help of the Indian travelogues – Tryon was actually imposing what he knew of Eastern philosophy onto the West.

The travelogues, of course, are full of Orientalist projections – all European accounts of Hinduism were informed by the writers’ Neoplatonist and Christian preconceptions – but they did also represent some genuine elements of Indian culture. At the very least, their report that there were people in India who taught and practised the principle of non-violence to all creatures was true. Were it not for the material existence of vegetarians in India, Thomas Tryon would never have developed his opinions and he certainly would not have been able to convey them with such clarity.

The vegetarian institutions Tryon’s Pythagoras establishes in India come straight out of the Indian travelogues: animal hospitals,⁵⁶ the practice of saving animals destined for slaughter,⁵⁷ and special reverence for the cow on account of its usefulness.⁵⁸ Like the travel writers, Tryon’s Pythagoras links pacifism and vegetarianism; he endorses the protection of vermin to clarify the total ban on violence and even institutes the taboo over sharing eating vessels with non-vegetarians.⁵⁹ He also recommends dubious practices such as the caste system⁶⁰ and the prohibition of widow remarriage.⁶¹ These doctrines formed the backbone of Tryon’s own edicts, some of which he set forth as commandments for his followers, including the veiling of women after the age of seven.⁶² He seems to have gathered some adherents around him, and may have been responsible for converting Robert Cook, the landowning ‘Pythagorean philosopher’ associated with the Quakers who ‘neither eat fish, flesh, milk, butter, &c. nor drank any kind of fermented liquor, nor wore woollen clothes, or any other produce of animal, but linen’, because, as he explained in 1691, his conscience told him ‘I ought not to kill.’⁶³ In other words, as far as he was able, Tryon established a Brahminic vegetarian community in London.

It was with the help of Indian culture that Tryon freed himself from Christianity’s anthropocentric value system and made a leap into another moral dimension. In the Transcript he did this with the figure of the Indian King. Dismissing the welfare of humans, the Indian King turns to the issue of animal rights, summarising it in starker terms than anyone in seventeenth-century England. Any argument against maltreating animals, he said, ‘must proceed, either because they have a natural Right of being exempted from our Power, or from some mutual Contract and Stipulation agreed betwixt Man and them … if … the former, we must acknowledge our present Practise to be an Invasion; if the latter, Injustice’.⁶⁴ The idea that humans could make social contracts with animals had usually been discussed – by Thomas Hobbes among others – with derision.⁶⁵ The idea that animals had any right to be exempted from human power was an unorthodoxy of incomparable audacity. Animals were there for man’s use; the most they could expect, according to Christian religious and philosophical legislators, as John Locke put it, was an exemption from cruel abuse. Tryon’s Pythagoras, by contrast, argues that even without considering animal rights, it is vain to think that man ‘has Right, because he has Power to Oppress’.⁶⁶ In this Tryon was answering Hobbes who had argued in 1651 that humans had rights over animals solely because they had the power to exert it (or ‘might makes right’).⁶⁷

In complete contrast to the norms of his society, Tryon came firmly down on the side of attributing to animals a right to their lives regardless of human interests. He lobbied Parliament to defend the ‘Rights and Properties of the helpless innocent creatures, who have no Advocates in this World’.⁶⁸ Where was the justification for killing animals, he demanded, when they were, in Tryon’s radical deployment of political language, ‘Fellow-Citizens of the World’?⁶⁹ They were God’s children, created to live on earth and therefore ‘have a Title by Nature’s Charter to their Lives as well as you’, he declaimed.⁷⁰ The ‘True Intent and Meaning’ of Christ’s law to do unto others as we would be done by was, according to Tryon, ‘to make all the Sensible Beings of the whole Creation easy, and that they might fully enjoy all the Rights and Priveleges granted them by the Grand Charter of the Creator’.⁷¹ This spectacular piece of moral renegotiation was a radical step away from the orthodox Christian anthropocentric universe, and one that anticipates modern ecologists’ value-laden claim for non-humans that ‘they got here first’.

Tryon went even a step further. It was the animals’ lack of language – according to Descartes among others – that signified their lack of reason. But Tryon artfully responded to this calumny by writing a series of striking ventriloquistic literary set-pieces, in which animals lament their plight in their own voice.⁷² The animals, Tryon explained, never had a Tower of Babel so they all communicated perfectly even without articulate speech.⁷³ Cattle complain that ‘we suffer many, and great Miseries, Oppression and Tyranny,’⁷⁴ while the birds protest that humans ‘violate our part, and natural Rights’.⁷⁵ The animals point out that the reciprocal favours that pass between a domestic beast and its owner – food and shelter for milk, wool and labour – constitute a tacit contract, the breach of which is gross ingratitude and treachery. Once again, the ideal alternative is represented by the Hindus who allow animals ‘all those Privileges and Freedoms that the Creator had given’;⁷⁶ ‘the People called Bannians,’ said Tryon, ‘are some of the strictest Observers of Gods Law, (viz.) doing unto those of their own kind, and to all inferior Animals and Creatures as they would be done unto.’⁷⁷

Using the behaviour of the Hindus as a permanent backdrop to his enthused writings, Tryon extended his critique of man’s treatment of animals into a wholesale attack on European degradation of the natural world. He observed that man was the only species so unclean that it irreparably defiled and polluted its own living quarters: ‘even the very Swine, will keep their Styes and Kennels sweet and clean,’ he exclaimed.⁷⁸ Like several of his contemporaries, he was disgusted by urban pollution. In ‘The abundance of Smoke that the multitude of Chimnies send forth’, he detected ‘a keen sharp sulpherous Quality’, which he blamed for increasing humidity in the air and causing ‘Diseases of the Breast’. He deplored the peer pressure that had fuelled the spread of tobacco-smoking, correctly recognising the symptoms of addiction, some of the health impacts, and that children of smokers were more likely to pick up the habit. He even complained against passive smoking as it did ‘so defile the common Air’.⁷⁹

In a cycle that anticipates ecological thought, Tryon observed pollution escaping into ‘Rivers which receive the Excrements of Cities or Towns’, enveloping the habitat of other species such as fish, and then returning – in the form of caught fish – to humans as polluted food.⁸⁰ In Tryon’s ‘The Complaints of the Birds’, American birds protest against the destruction of forests by encroaching Europeans: ‘thou takest liberty to cut them down … we are thereby disseized of our antient Freeholds and Habitations,’ they cry.⁸¹ The problem with this world, declaimed Tryon, was ‘this proud and troublesome Thing, called Man, that fills the Earth with Blood, and the Air with mutherous Minerals and Sulphur’.⁸²

Tryon warned that the excessive demand for animal products like wool was over-stretching natural resources, especially since intensive farming had turned animals into ‘a grand Commodity, and (as it were) a Manufacture’.⁸³ He deplored the phenomenon of consumerism which ‘causes great seeming Wants to be where there is not real or natural cause for it’.⁸⁴ People wouldn’t pay a farthing for pointless luxuries like civet and coffee if they were available on Hampstead Heath, ‘and if Hogs Dung were as scarce, its probable it might be as much in esteem’. He called on Europeans to stop ‘ransack[ing] the furthest corners of the Earth for Dainties’, encouraging them instead to be satisfied with the produce of their own soil.⁸⁵ Meanwhile, Tryon imagined, the Hindus lived in total harmony with creation. Fruit and vegetables required less labour-intensive methods of production. By restricting themselves to the vegetable diet, the Hindus subsisted without needing to rape and pillage the planet as Westerners did.⁸⁶

Even though his universe was essentially theocentric,⁸⁷ by putting man in the balance with the animals Tryon anticipated the shift from anthropocentrism to the biocentrism of modern ecological thought. While orthodox Christians tended to insist that all creatures had been made solely for man’s use, Hinduism helped Tryon to develop a system that resembles, and would later be developed into, environmentalism. Surprising though it may seem, given modern history’s usual emphasis on the West’s overbearing influence on its colonies, the encounter with India in the seventeenth century opened the door to a different moral premise and this in turn stimulated a revision of European thought and practice.

Tryon, however, did not place all his eggs in one altruistic basket. He emphasised that vegetarianism was also in the interests of people themselves. Far more efficiently than alchemy, he said, vegetarianism profited mankind by giving them the secret to lifelong health and making them rich by saving money on food. But some of his ‘self-interest’ arguments were the most unconventional of all his ideas. So before leaving the image of Tryon as a prophet of modern environmentalism, we should delve a bit deeper into his philosophy.

It all goes back to the 1650s when Tryon’s attention was first drawn to the Brahmins. Tryon’s favourite book was the Three Books of Occult Philosophy by the sixteenth-century arch-magician from Cologne, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa.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 to explain both the Christian and Hindu system, thus suggesting that they were branches of the same true religion. Needless to say, he did not fool his adversaries. John Field – ever on the lookout for chances to discredit Tryon – was appalled, demanding ‘where doth the Scripture so say, or speak of being Cloathed with Hellish shapes in the next World?’¹¹¹

By stepping outside the usual bounds prescribed by the religious authorities in Europe, Tryon developed a metaphysical rationale for vegetarianism which went hand in hand with his physical and ethical arguments. The breadth of his appeal must have been rooted in the diversity of his ideas, there being something in his philosophy for everyone, from the mundane methods of penny-pinching to the grander ideals of prelapsarianism. With remarkable cogency, Tryon treated the Hindus as his guide at every step of the way, reaching from hopeless utopianism down to serious suggestions for social and political reform. His principal accomplishment was welding the novel vegetarian philosophy attributed to the Brahmins with the familiar Neoplatonist and biblical traditions he had grown up with. He reduced this combination into a lifestyle philosophy, which would, he hoped, prevent the hellish degradation of man and nature that he had witnessed in Barbados.

^*Moses.