The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

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).

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.

He cast doubt over the vegetarianism of the early patriarchs by pointing out that God gave Adam and Eve animal skins to wear when he ejected them from Eden’s balmy realm, and that ever since the time of Cain and Abel people had sacrificed animals. But even if they didn’t eat the animals they sacrificed, he stressed, the important point was that God did eventually give ‘to man the free use of flesh, so that we might not eat it with a doubtful and trembling conscience’. Anyone who thought mankind should be vegetarian was being blasphemously ungrateful for God’s generosity. He had one message for such hyper-scrupulous quibblers: shut up and eat up

In 1632, just before Bushell’s masque, the travelling poet George Sandys had published his extremely influential translation and commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Sandys portrayed the Golden Age menu of wild blackberries, strawberries, acorns and ‘all sorts of fruit’ 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.

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.

Bacon too was aware of how suspicious his predilection for vegetables could seem. Regardless of being called a Catholic, Bacon was afraid he would be accused of sympathising with the medieval vegetarian heretics, the Manicheans and Cathars, whom the Inquisition had genocidally suppressed with fire and sword. Anxious to avoid such a fate, Bacon issued repeated disclaimers: ‘Neither would we be thought to favour the Manichees, or their diet, though wee commend the frequent use of all kindes of seedes, and kernels, and roots … neither let any Man reckon us amongst those Hereticks, which were called Cathari.’ Bacon was trying to shift discussions of diet away from its old heretical connotations into the new idiom of enlightened philosophy. His opinions, he insisted, were based on empirical facts and not on religious dietary taboos

If people wanted to undo the curse of the Fall, they would have to start by abstaining from flesh: ‘by fasting we can return to paradise, whence, through fullness, we have been expelled.’ ‘At the beginning of the human race we neither ate flesh, nor gave bills of divorce, nor suffered circumcision,’ said Jerome. These were concessions granted after the Flood, ‘But once Christ has come in the end of time,’ he said, ‘we are no longer allowed divorce, nor are we circumcised, nor do we eat flesh’.10 This provided a theological rationale for relinquishing meat which lasted for centuries. As Sir John Pettus suggested in 1674, we ‘multiply Adams transgression by our continued eating of other creatures, which were not then allowed to us’.11

When studying ideas that people formulated hundreds of years ago, it is important to understand them on their own terms, irrespective of whether they are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ according to present-day understanding, because to do so allows them to provide insight into assumptions that still prevail in modern society – of which, in their nature, we are commonly unaware. The remarkable and long under-appreciated lives of early vegetarians are inroads into uncharted areas of history; they simultaneously shed light on why you think about nature the way you do, why you are told to eat fresh vegetables and avoid too much meat, and how Indian philosophy has crucially shaped those thoughts over the past 400 years

Bacon’s escapade with the frozen chicken was not an isolated whim. He had been studying the properties of food for years and in 1623 published in Latin The Great Instauration’s third part: The History Naturall and Experimentall, Of Life and Death. Or the Prolongation of Life. The quest to discover the secret to long life had been an obsession since ancient times, and Bacon himself considered it the ‘most noble’ part of medicine.3 For Bacon, no less than people today, diet took centre-stage. Though ironically his investigations into the ‘preservation of flesh’ actually caused his own flesh to perish, Bacon hoped that discovering the ideal food would help lead men back to their original perfection

Bacon noticed that there was substantial statistical evidence that vegetarianism was one of the extremes that could aid longevity: Pythagoras, the sixth-century BC Greek philosopher renowned for his theorem on right-angled triangles, also taught his disciples to abstain from meat, and Pythagoreans such as Apollonius of Tyana ‘exceeded an hundred yeares; His Face bewraying no such Age’. Indeed, Bacon catalogued numerous vegetarians recorded in history who had lived unusually long lives: the desert-dwelling Jewish sect of vegetarian Essenes, the Spartans, the Indians and plenty of Christian ascetics. ‘A Pythagoricall, or Monasticall Diet, according to strict rules,’ concluded Bacon, ‘seemeth to be very effectual for long life.’