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 In
habitants 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’.
The Bloodless Revolution Page 10
